Select a suitable treatment strategy for Crohn's disease

Crohn’s Disease (CD) is a chronic immune-mediated disorder with progressive and destructive course. Current guidelines on the treatment strategy still recommend a step-up approach with sequential prescription of corticosteroids and immunosuppressives. However, mounting evidences manifested that top-down therapy with early administration of anti-TNF or combination of immunosuppressives can achieve more rapid and higher rate of mucosal healing and has the potential of modifying the natural course of disease. Therefore, who is suitable to accept and when to start anti-TNF therapy have attracted the attention of astroenterologists. And what benefit/risk can be expected from the two strategies should be carefully taken into account by clinicians. Age stratification, special patients, disease location and extension, genetic and serologic testing are predictors of disease progression and complication and thus guide a personalized treatment approach in CD. A definition of early CD has been proposed to select an algorithm for treatment of moderate-to-severe CD with a suitable strategy. To date mucosal healing has been widely used, the Lémann score, which assesses the extent and severity of bowel damage at a specific time-point and over time, and is a new disability index for patients with CD, will be considered as a new endpoint for future studies of treatment strategies. Besides medicines of the two strategies, surgery, vaccine, Leukocytapheresis and stem cell therapy are all effective therapeutic approaches which lead to another thinking about what should they be putted in the conditional pyramid. However, we are trying to answer these questions

Reducing Round Complexity of Byzantine Broadcast

Byzantine Broadcast is an important topic in distributed systems and improving its round complexity has long been a focused challenge. Under honest majority, the state of the art for Byzantine Broadcast is 10 rounds for a static adversary and 16 rounds for an adaptive adversary. In this paper, we present a Byzantine Broadcast protocol with expected 8 rounds under a static adversary and expected 10 rounds under an adaptive adversary. We also generalize our idea to the dishonest majority setting and achieve an improvement over existing protocols

Methods of MicroRNA Promoter Prediction and Transcription Factor Mediated Regulatory Network

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are short (~22 nucleotides) noncoding RNAs and disseminated throughout the genome, either in the intergenic regions or in the intronic sequences of protein-coding genes. MiRNAs have been proved to play important roles in regulating gene expression. Hence, understanding the transcriptional mechanism of miRNA genes is a very critical step to uncover the whole regulatory network. A number of miRNA promoter prediction models have been proposed in the past decade. This review summarized several most popular miRNA promoter prediction models which used genome sequence features, or other features, for example, histone markers, RNA Pol II binding sites, and nucleosome-free regions, achieved by high-throughput sequencing data. Some databases were described as resources for miRNA promoter information. We then performed comprehensive discussion on prediction and identification of transcription factor mediated microRNA regulatory networks