1,138 research outputs found
Long time motion of NLS solitary waves in a confining potential
We study the motion of solitary-wave solutions of a family of focusing
generalized nonlinear Schroedinger equations with a confining, slowly varying
external potential, . A Lyapunov-Schmidt decomposition of the solution
combined with energy estimates allows us to control the motion of the solitary
wave over a long, but finite, time interval. We show that the center of mass of
the solitary wave follows a trajectory close to that of a Newtonian point
particle in the external potential over a long time interval.Comment: 42 pages, 2 figure
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Application of multiplexed ion mobility spectrometry towards the identification of host protein signatures of treatment effect in pulmonary tuberculosis.
RationaleThe monitoring of TB treatments in clinical practice and clinical trials relies on traditional sputum-based culture status indicators at specific time points. Accurate, predictive, blood-based protein markers would provide a simpler and more informative view of patient health and response to treatment.ObjectiveWe utilized sensitive, high throughput multiplexed ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS) to characterize the serum proteome of TB patients at the start of and at 8 weeks of rifamycin-based treatment. We sought to identify treatment specific signatures within patients as well as correlate the proteome signatures to various clinical markers of treatment efficacy.MethodsSerum samples were collected from 289 subjects enrolled in CDC TB Trials Consortium Study 29 at time of enrollment and at the end of the intensive phase (after 40 doses of TB treatment). Serum proteins were immunoaffinity-depleted of high abundant components, digested to peptides and analyzed for data acquisition utilizing a unique liquid chromatography IM-MS platform (LC-IM-MS). Linear mixed models were utilized to identify serum protein changes in the host response to antibiotic treatment as well as correlations with culture status end points.ResultsA total of 10,137 peptides corresponding to 872 proteins were identified, quantified, and used for statistical analysis across the longitudinal patient cohort. In response to TB treatment, 244 proteins were significantly altered. Pathway/network comparisons helped visualize the interconnected proteins, identifying up regulated (lipid transport, coagulation cascade, endopeptidase activity) and down regulated (acute phase) processes and pathways in addition to other cross regulated networks (inflammation, cell adhesion, extracellular matrix). Detection of possible lung injury serum proteins such as HPSE, significantly downregulated upon treatment. Analyses of microbiologic data over time identified a core set of serum proteins (TTHY, AFAM, CRP, RET4, SAA1, PGRP2) which change in response to treatment and also strongly correlate with culture status. A similar set of proteins at baseline were found to be predictive of week 6 and 8 culture status.ConclusionA comprehensive host serum protein dataset reflective of TB treatment effect is defined. A repeating set of serum proteins (TTHY, AFAM, CRP, RET4, SAA1, PGRP2, among others) were found to change significantly in response to treatment, to strongly correlate with culture status, and at baseline to be predictive of future culture conversion. If validated in cohorts with long term follow-up to capture failure and relapse of TB, these protein markers could be developed for monitoring of treatment in clinical trials and in patient care
Gold nanorods as a contrast agent for Doppler optical coherence tomography
Purpose: To investigate gold nanorods (GNRs) as a contrast agent to enhance Doppler optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging of the intrascleral aqueous humor outflow. Methods: A serial dilution of GNRs was scanned with a spectral-domain OCT device (Bioptigen, Durham, NC) to visualize Doppler signal. Doppler measurements using GNRs were validated using a controlled flow system. To demonstrate an application of GNR enhanced Doppler, porcine eyes were perfused at constant pressure with mock aqueous alone or 1.0×10 12 GNR/mL mixed with mock aqueous. Twelve Doppler and volumetric SD-OCT scans were obtained from the limbus in a radial fashion incremented by 30°, forming a circular scan pattern. Volumetric flow was computed by integrating flow inside non-connected vessels throughout all 12 scans around the limbus. Results: At the GNR concentration of 0.7×1012 GNRs/mL, Doppler signal was present through the entire depth of the testing tube without substantial attenuation. A well-defined laminar flow profile was observed for Doppler images of GNRs flowing through the glass capillary tube. The Doppler OCT measured flow profile was not statistically different from the expected flow profile based upon an autoregressive moving average model, with an error of -0.025 to 0.037 mm/s (p = 0.6435). Cross-sectional slices demonstrated the ability to view anterior chamber outflow ex-vivo using GNR-enhanced Doppler OCT. Doppler volumetric flow measurements were comparable to flow recorded by the perfusion system. Conclusions: GNRs created a measureable Doppler signal within otherwise silent flow fields in OCT Doppler scans. Practical application of this technique was confirmed in a constant pressure ex-vivo aqueous humor outflow model in porcine eyes. © 2014 Wang et al
High-Dimensional Feature Selection by Feature-Wise Kernelized Lasso
The goal of supervised feature selection is to find a subset of input
features that are responsible for predicting output values. The least absolute
shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) allows computationally efficient
feature selection based on linear dependency between input features and output
values. In this paper, we consider a feature-wise kernelized Lasso for
capturing non-linear input-output dependency. We first show that, with
particular choices of kernel functions, non-redundant features with strong
statistical dependence on output values can be found in terms of kernel-based
independence measures. We then show that the globally optimal solution can be
efficiently computed; this makes the approach scalable to high-dimensional
problems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through
feature selection experiments with thousands of features.Comment: 18 page
Hydrostatic pressure does not cause detectable changes to survival of human retinal ganglion
Purpose: Elevated intraocular pressure (IOP) is a major risk factor for glaucoma. One consequence of raised IOP is that ocular tissues are subjected to increased hydrostatic pressure (HP). The effect of raised HP on stress pathway signaling and retinal ganglion cell (RGC) survival in the human retina was investigated. Methods: A chamber was designed to expose cells to increased HP (constant and fluctuating). Accurate pressure control (10-100mmHg) was achieved using mass flow controllers. Human organotypic retinal cultures (HORCs) from donor eyes (<24h post mortem) were cultured in serum-free DMEM/HamF12. Increased HP was compared to simulated ischemia (oxygen glucose deprivation, OGD). Cell death and apoptosis were measured by LDH and TUNEL assays, RGC marker expression by qRT-PCR (THY-1) and RGC number by immunohistochemistry (NeuN). Activated p38 and JNK were detected by Western blot. Results: Exposure of HORCs to constant (60mmHg) or fluctuating (10-100mmHg; 1 cycle/min) pressure for 24 or 48h caused no loss of structural integrity, LDH release, decrease in RGC marker expression (THY-1) or loss of RGCs compared with controls. In addition, there was no increase in TUNEL-positive NeuN-labelled cells at either time-point indicating no increase in apoptosis of RGCs. OGD increased apoptosis, reduced RGC marker expression and RGC number and caused elevated LDH release at 24h. p38 and JNK phosphorylation remained unchanged in HORCs exposed to fluctuating pressure (10-100mmHg; 1 cycle/min) for 15, 30, 60 and 90min durations, whereas OGD (3h) increased activation of p38 and JNK, remaining elevated for 90min post-OGD. Conclusions: Directly applied HP had no detectable impact on RGC survival and stress-signalling in HORCs. Simulated ischemia, however, activated stress pathways and caused RGC death. These results show that direct HP does not cause degeneration of RGCs in the ex vivo human retina
Chirality in Bare and Passivated Gold Nanoclusters
Chiral structures have been found as the lowest-energy isomers of bare
(Au and Au_{28}(SCH_{16}_{38}(SCH_{3})_{24}) gold nanoclusters. The degree of chirality existing in
the chiral clusters was calculated using the Hausdorff chirality measure. We
found that the index of chirality is higher in the passivated clusters and
decreases with the cluster size. These results are consistent with the observed
chiroptical activity recently reported for glutahione-passivated gold
nanoclusters, and provide theoretical support for the existence of chirality in
these novel compounds.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Submitted to PR
Ginzburg-Landau model with small pinning domains
We consider a Ginzburg-Landau type energy with a piecewise constant pinning
term in the potential . The function is different from
1 only on finitely many disjoint domains, called the {\it pinning domains}.
These pinning domains model small impurities in a homogeneous superconductor
and shrink to single points in the limit ; here, \v is the inverse of
the Ginzburg-Landau parameter. We study the energy minimization in a smooth
simply connected domain with Dirichlet boundary
condition on \d \O, with topological degree {\rm deg}_{\d \O} (g) = d
>0. Our main result is that, for small \v, minimizers have distinct
zeros (vortices) which are inside the pinning domains and they have a degree
equal to 1. The question of finding the locations of the pinning domains with
vortices is reduced to a discrete minimization problem for a finite-dimensional
functional of renormalized energy. We also find the position of the vortices
inside the pinning domains and show that, asymptotically, this position is
determined by {\it local renormalized energy} which does not depend on the
external boundary conditions.Comment: 39 page
Survey propagation at finite temperature: application to a Sourlas code as a toy model
In this paper we investigate a finite temperature generalization of survey
propagation, by applying it to the problem of finite temperature decoding of a
biased finite connectivity Sourlas code for temperatures lower than the
Nishimori temperature. We observe that the result is a shift of the location of
the dynamical critical channel noise to larger values than the corresponding
dynamical transition for belief propagation, as suggested recently by
Migliorini and Saad for LDPC codes. We show how the finite temperature 1-RSB SP
gives accurate results in the regime where competing approaches fail to
converge or fail to recover the retrieval state
Monocular Expressive Body Regression through Body-Driven Attention
To understand how people look, interact, or perform tasks, we need to quickly
and accurately capture their 3D body, face, and hands together from an RGB
image. Most existing methods focus only on parts of the body. A few recent
approaches reconstruct full expressive 3D humans from images using 3D body
models that include the face and hands. These methods are optimization-based
and thus slow, prone to local optima, and require 2D keypoints as input. We
address these limitations by introducing ExPose (EXpressive POse and Shape
rEgression), which directly regresses the body, face, and hands, in SMPL-X
format, from an RGB image. This is a hard problem due to the high
dimensionality of the body and the lack of expressive training data.
Additionally, hands and faces are much smaller than the body, occupying very
few image pixels. This makes hand and face estimation hard when body images are
downscaled for neural networks. We make three main contributions. First, we
account for the lack of training data by curating a dataset of SMPL-X fits on
in-the-wild images. Second, we observe that body estimation localizes the face
and hands reasonably well. We introduce body-driven attention for face and hand
regions in the original image to extract higher-resolution crops that are fed
to dedicated refinement modules. Third, these modules exploit part-specific
knowledge from existing face- and hand-only datasets. ExPose estimates
expressive 3D humans more accurately than existing optimization methods at a
small fraction of the computational cost. Our data, model and code are
available for research at https://expose.is.tue.mpg.de .Comment: Accepted in ECCV'20. Project page: http://expose.is.tue.mpg.d
Comparing international coverage of 9/11 : towards an interdisciplinary explanation of the construction of news
This article presents an interdisciplinary model attempting to explain how news is constructed by relying on the contributions of different fields of study: News Sociology, Political Communications, International Communications, International Relations. It is a first step towards developing a holistic theoretical approach to what shapes the news, which bridges current micro to macro approaches. More precisely the model explains news variation across different media organization and countries by focusing on the different way the sense of newsworthiness of journalists is affected by three main variables: national interest, national journalistic culture, and editorial policy of each media organization. The model is developed on the basis of an investigation into what shaped the media coverage of 9/11 in eight elite newspapers across the US, France, Italy and Pakistan
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