7,725 research outputs found
Sintesi di nuovi agenti neuroprotettivi duali: i ligandi NO-NOS.
Sintesi di nuovi agenti neuroprotettivi duali: i ligandi NO-NOS
FSTL5 expression is a marker of Group C metastatic medulloblastomas
INTRODUCTION: Medulloblastoma (MB) is the most commonmalignant
brain tumor in children. Four different molecular subgroups are recognized,
which differ in gene expression, genomic aberrations, histology, demographics
and survival:WNT and SHH groups, having specific mutations in the homonymous
pathway, and groups C and D having several genetic alternations
not specific to a single pathway. The gene for follistatin-like protein 5, FSTL5,
is overexpressed in nonSHH/nonWNT MBs poorly characterized. Highexpression
of FSTL5 is significantly associated with reduced event-free and
overall survival in non-WNT/non-SHHMBs. The major aim of this project is
to study the FSTL5 expression level in pediatric MBs with metastasis at the
onset. METHOD: We investigated the protein expression of biomarkers involved
in metastatic pathways by IHC and FSTL5 expression level by
RT-PCR in 26 metastatic MBs samples and correlated these data with the outcomes
by Kaplan-Meier statistic analysis. RESULTS: 83% of Group C MBs
showed high level of FSTL5 while none of these presented down-expression.
Low-expression level of FSTL5 was find in 60% of SHH MBs and none
showed over-expression. Kaplan-Meier test revealed that, in our cohort, highexpression
ofFSTL5didnot correlatewithworse outcomewhile lowexpression
of FSTL5 was associated with good prognosis and the co-presence of FSTL5
with other biomarkers correlated with poorer prognosis. CONCLUSION:
FSTL5 is a marker of Group C in medulloblastomas with metastasis at the
onset and the results highlighted decreased FSTL5 expression as a marker of
good prognosis. Group C MBs have characteristic molecular features that
confirm the poorest outcome also inMBs with metastasis at the onset
Spherical clustering of users navigating 360{\deg} content
In Virtual Reality (VR) applications, understanding how users explore the
omnidirectional content is important to optimize content creation, to develop
user-centric services, or even to detect disorders in medical applications.
Clustering users based on their common navigation patterns is a first direction
to understand users behaviour. However, classical clustering techniques fail in
identifying these common paths, since they are usually focused on minimizing a
simple distance metric. In this paper, we argue that minimizing the distance
metric does not necessarily guarantee to identify users that experience similar
navigation path in the VR domain. Therefore, we propose a graph-based method to
identify clusters of users who are attending the same portion of the spherical
content over time. The proposed solution takes into account the spherical
geometry of the content and aims at clustering users based on the actual
overlap of displayed content among users. Our method is tested on real VR user
navigation patterns. Results show that our solution leads to clusters in which
at least 85% of the content displayed by one user is shared among the other
users belonging to the same cluster.Comment: 5 pages, conference (Published in: ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
Migration, remittances and poverty in Ecuador
Etudes & documentsWe analyse the influence of the recent wave of migration on the incidence of poverty among stayers in Ecuador. We draw our data from a survey that provides detailed information on migrants. The analysis reveals a significant negative effect of migration on poverty among migrant households. This effect is substantially smaller than the one that we find focusing on recipient households. We explore the factors that account for this divergence. Our analysis entails that the existing empirical evidence on the relationship between remittances and poverty needs not to be informative about the size of the direct poverty-reduction potential of migration
Discontinuous reduplication: a typological sketch
The paper investigates discontinuous reduplication (DR), a pattern where reduplicant and base are separated by other material, by annotating a 214-example dataset collected from a 99-language sample. Several items turned out to serve as interposing elements, although their nature does not seem to correlate with function, unlike the category of the base. DR’s functions are a subset of those associated with reduplication cross-linguistically. All languages displaying DR also present contiguous reduplication, suggesting a contiguous reduplication > discontinuous reduplication hierarchy. Finally, a corpus-based analysis of Italian (lacking DR according to grammars) unveiled a wealth of DR patterns, suggesting that corpora are essential for the typological enterprise
Measuring user Quality of Experience in social VR systems
Virtual Reality (VR) is a computer-generated experience that can simulate physical presence in real or imagined environments [7]. A social VR system is an application that allows multiple users to join a collaborative Virtual Environment (VE), such as a computer-generated 3D scene or a 360-degree natural scene captured by an omnidirectional camera, and communicate with each other, usually by means of visual and audio cues. Each user is represented in the VE as a computer-generated avatar [3] or, in recently proposed systems, with a virtual representation based on live captures [1]. Depending on the system, the user’ virtual representation can also interact with the virtual environment, for example by manipulating virtual objects, controlling the appearance of the VE, or controlling the playout of additional media in the VE. The interest for social Virtual Reality (VR) systems dates back to the late 90s [4, 8] but has recently increased [2, 5, 6] due to the availability of affordable head-mounted displays on the consumer market and to the appearance of new applications, such as Facebook Spaces, YouTube VR, Hulu VR, which explicitly aim at including social features in existing VR platforms for multimedia delivery. In this talk, we will address the problem of measuring user Quality of Experience (QoE) in social VR systems. We will review the studies that have analysed how different features of a social VR system design, such as avatar appearance and behavioural realism, can affect user’s experience, and propose a comparison of the objective and subjective measures used in the literature to quantify user QoE in social VR. Finally, we will discuss the use case of watching movies together in VR and present the results of one of our recent studies focusing on this scenario, designed and performed in the framework of the European project VRTogether (http://vrtogether.eu). Particularly, we show an analysis of correlation between the objective and subjective measurements collected during our study, to provide guidelines toward the design of a unified methodology to monitor and quantify users’ QoE in social VR systems. The open questions to be addressed in the future in order to achieve such goal are also discussed
Nanomanufacturing of titania interfaces with controlled structural and functional properties by supersonic cluster beam deposition
Great emphasis is placed on the development of integrated approaches for the
synthesis and the characterization of ad hoc nanostructured platforms, to be
used as templates with controlled morphology and chemical properties for the
investigation of specific phenomena of great relevance for technological
applications in interdisciplinary fields such as biotechnology, medicine and
advanced materials. Here we discuss the crucial role and the advantages of thin
film deposition strategies based on cluster-assembling from supersonic cluster
beams. We select cluster-assembled nanostructured titania (ns-TiO2) as a case
study to demonstrate that accurate control over morphological parameters can be
routinely achieved, and consequently over several relevant interfacial
properties and phenomena, like surface charging in a liquid electrolyte, and
proteins and nanoparticles adsorption
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