Three-dimensional ultrasonography measurement of fetal nasal bone length during the midtrimester in Taiwanese women

AbstractObjectiveTo evaluate the normal range of the fetal nasal bone length (NBL) in Taiwanese women using three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound, and compare the NBL of normal fetuses with Down syndrome to determine its significance in screening for trisomy 21.Materials and MethodsA total of 102 consecutive fetuses and another 7 fetuses with trisomy 21, determined by karyotyping at 15–22 weeks' gestation, were evaluated with 3D ultrasound before amniocentesis at Changhua Christian Hospital between November 2003 and April 2004.ResultsThe normal range for NBL in the second trimester in the Taiwanese population was investigated, and a linear relationship with gestational age was noted. The NBL increased with advancing gestational age (NBL in cm=0.0264×gestational age in weeks –0.042 (R2=0.2416). The median of the biparietal diameter/nasal bone length ratio had a stable value which tended to change minimally between 15 and 22 weeks of gestation. Chromosomally normal fetuses had statistically longer nasal bones than fetuses with Down syndrome (p=0.014).ConclusionWe present a reference range for 3D ultrasound measurement of the fetal NBL. A short nasal bone at 15 to 22 weeks is associated with a high risk of trisomy 21

The nucleolar protein NIFK promotes cancer progression via CK1α/β-catenin in metastasis and Ki-67-dependent cell proliferation.

Nucleolar protein interacting with the FHA domain of pKi-67 (NIFK) is a Ki-67-interacting protein. However, its precise function in cancer remains largely uninvestigated. Here we show the clinical significance and metastatic mechanism of NIFK in lung cancer. NIFK expression is clinically associated with poor prognosis and metastasis. Furthermore, NIFK enhances Ki-67-dependent proliferation, and promotes migration, invasion in vitro and metastasis in vivo via downregulation of casein kinase 1α (CK1α), a suppressor of pro-metastatic TCF4/β-catenin signaling. Inversely, CK1α is upregulated upon NIFK knockdown. The silencing of CK1α expression in NIFK-silenced cells restores TCF4/β-catenin transcriptional activity, cell migration, and metastasis. Furthermore, RUNX1 is identified as a transcription factor of CSNK1A1 (CK1α) that is negatively regulated by NIFK. Our results demonstrate the prognostic value of NIFK, and suggest that NIFK is required for lung cancer progression via the RUNX1-dependent CK1α repression, which activates TCF4/β-catenin signaling in metastasis and the Ki-67-dependent regulation in cell proliferation

Pyogenic Liver Abscess as Endemic Disease, Taiwan

Increasing incidence and microbiologic shift might have changed the manifestation of this condition

Multi-Label Image Classification via Knowledge Distillation from Weakly-Supervised Detection

Multi-label image classification is a fundamental but challenging task towards general visual understanding. Existing methods found the region-level cues (e.g., features from RoIs) can facilitate multi-label classification. Nevertheless, such methods usually require laborious object-level annotations (i.e., object labels and bounding boxes) for effective learning of the object-level visual features. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient deep framework to boost multi-label classification by distilling knowledge from weakly-supervised detection task without bounding box annotations. Specifically, given the image-level annotations, (1) we first develop a weakly-supervised detection (WSD) model, and then (2) construct an end-to-end multi-label image classification framework augmented by a knowledge distillation module that guides the classification model by the WSD model according to the class-level predictions for the whole image and the object-level visual features for object RoIs. The WSD model is the teacher model and the classification model is the student model. After this cross-task knowledge distillation, the performance of the classification model is significantly improved and the efficiency is maintained since the WSD model can be safely discarded in the test phase. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets (MS-COCO and NUS-WIDE) show that our framework achieves superior performances over the state-of-the-art methods on both performance and efficiency.Comment: accepted by ACM Multimedia 2018, 9 pages, 4 figures, 5 table

A CMOS dynamic random access architecture for radio-frequency readout of quantum devices

As quantum processors become more complex, they will require efficient interfaces to deliver signals for control and readout while keeping the number of inputs manageable. Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) electronics offers established solutions to signal routing and dynamic access, and the use of a CMOS platform for the qubits themselves offers the attractive proposition of integrating classical and quantum devices on-chip. Here, we report a CMOS dynamic random access architecture for readout of multiple quantum devices operating at millikelvin temperatures. Our circuit is divided into cells, each containing a control field-effect transistor and a quantum dot device, formed in the channel of a nanowire transistor. This set-up allows selective readout of the quantum dot and charge storage on the quantum dot gate, similar to one-transistor–one-capacitor (1T-1C) dynamic random access technology. We demonstrate dynamic readout of two cells by interfacing them with a single radio-frequency resonator. Our approach provides a path to reduce the number of input lines per qubit and allow large-scale device arrays to be addressed