Silence by the LAMS : Primary lumen-apposing metal stent for a colorectal anastomotic stricture (with video)

Lumen-opposing metal stents (LAMS) are evolving as novel treatment options in postsurgical strictues. Data on lower GI tract applications, however, are still limited, and technical procedural details need to be refined. This singular clinical report adds to the emerging experience in colorectal stricture treatment by LAMS

A frequent variant in the human bile salt export pump gene ABCB11 is associated with hepatitis C virus infection, but not liver stiffness in a German population

Background: The human ATP-binding cassette, subfamily B, member 11 (ABCB11) gene encodes the bile salt export pump, which is exclusively expressed at the canalicular membrane of hepatocytes. A frequent variant in the coding region, c.1331 T > C, leading to the amino acid exchange p.V444A, has been associated with altered serum bile salt levels in healthy individuals and predisposes homozygous carriers of the [C] allele for obstetric cholestasis. Recently, elevated bile salt levels were shown to be significantly associated with rates and risk of cirrhosis in patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection treated with pegylated interferon-alpha2 and ribavirin, suggesting a potential role for bile salt levels in HCV treatment outcomes and in the fibrogenic evolution of HCV-related liver disease. The aim of this study was to investigate a possible association of ABCB11 c.1331 T > C with hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection and fibrosis stages as assessed by non-invasive transient elastography in a German cohort of patients. Methods: ABCB11 c.1331 T > C genotype was determined by allelic discrimination assay in 649 HCV infected cases and 413 controls. Overall, 444 cases were staged for fibrotic progression by measurement of liver stiffness. Results: Homo- or heterozygous presence of the frequent [C] allele was associated with HCV positivity (OR = 1.41, CI = 1.02 - 1.95, p = 0.037). No association was detectable between the ABCB11 c.1331 T > C genotype and increased liver stiffness. Conclusions: Our data confirm that homozygous presence of the major [C] allele of ABCB11 c.1331 T > C is a genetic susceptibility factor for HCV infection, but not for liver fibrosis

Embedded Firmware Solutions

Computer scienc

Embedded Firmware Solutions: Development Best Practices for the Internet of Things

Embedded Firmware Solutions is the perfect introduction and daily-use field guide--for the thousands of firmware designers, hardware engineers, architects, managers, and developers--to Intel’s new firmware direction (including Quark coverage), showing how to integrate Intel® Architecture designs into their plans. Featuring hands-on examples and exercises using Open Source codebases, like Coreboot and EFI Development Kit (tianocore) and Chromebook, this is the first book that combines a timely and thorough overview of firmware solutions for the rapidly evolving embedded ecosystem with in-depth coverage of requirements and optimization

Emergent Communities in Socio-Cognitive Networks

International audienceWe investigate a recent network model [13] which combines social and cognitive features. Each node in the social network holds a (possibly different) cognitive network that represent its beliefs. In this internal cognitive network a node denotes a concept and a link indicates whether the two linked concepts are taken to be of a similar or opposite nature. We show how these networks naturally organise into communities and use this to develop a method that detects communities in social networks. How they organise depends on the social structure and the ratio between the cognitive and social forces driving the propagation of beliefs

Emergent Communities in Socio-cognitive Networks

International audienceWe investigate a recent network model [13] which combines social and cognitive features. Each node in the social network holds a (possibly different) cognitive network that represent its beliefs. In this internal cognitive network a node denotes a concept and a link indicates whether the two linked concepts are taken to be of a similar or opposite nature. We show how these networks naturally organise into communities and use this to develop a method that detects communities in social networks. How they organise depends on the social structure and the ratio between the cognitive and social forces driving the propagation of beliefs

DIRAC framework evaluation for the Fermi\boldsymbol{Fermi}-LAT and CTA experiments

DIRAC (Distributed Infrastructure with Remote Agent Control) is a general framework for the management of tasks over distributed heterogeneous computing environments. It has been originally developed to support the production activities of the LHCb (Large Hadron Collider Beauty) experiment and today is extensively used by several particle physics and biology communities. Current ($Fermi$ Large Area Telescope -- LAT) and planned (Cherenkov Telescope Array -- CTA) new generation astrophysical/cosmological experiments, with very large processing and storage needs, are currently investigating the usability of DIRAC in this context. Each of these use cases has some peculiarities: $Fermi$-LAT will interface DIRAC to its own workflow system to allow the access to the grid resources, while CTA is using DIRAC as workflow management system for Monte Carlo production and analysis on the grid. We describe the prototype effort that we lead toward deploying a DIRAC solution for some aspects of $Fermi$-LAT and CTA needs.Comment: proceedings to CHEP 2013 conference : http://www.chep2013.org