Photodynamic Therapy in the Treatment of Choroidal Neovascularization Complicating Central Serous Chorioretinopathy

We report the favorable anatomic and functional outcome of photodynamic therapy with verteporfin in a case of chronic central serous chorioretinopathy complicated with choroidal neovascularization (CNV). This 37-year-old Chinese male with bilateral chronic central serous chorioretinopathy presented with central scotoma, reduced vision and metamorphopsia in his right eye. Fluorescein angiography (FA) disclosed macular hemorrhage, exudate and subfoveal classic CNV. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) with verteporfin was applied to the CNV according to standard protocol with 2.2-mm spot size. Best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) improved from 6/20 to 6/10 1 month after PDT. BCVA recovered to 6/7.5 without leakage on FA 3 months after PDT. Neither recurrent CNV lesion nor new hemorrhage was noted over 12 months of follow-up. Short-term results suggest that PDT with verteporfin for CNV secondary to central serous chorioretinopathy is a safe and effective treatment modality

The Mediating Effects of Organizational Justice in Determining the Relationship between Performance-Based Pay and Employees’ Turnover Intention

This is a study on employees’ perception of justice towards performance-based pay and the effect of these perceptions on their turnover intention. This study aims to examine the mediating role played by distributive and procedural justice in linking pay distribution and pay procedure of performance-based pay to employees’ turnover intention. A review of past literature in this particular area has prompted the researchers to narrow the gaps in previous studies. Towards that, this study utilized questionnaires which were administered among 50 non-managerial employees currently working in a private company located in Kuching, Sarawak, East Malaysia. Data analysis was done using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), Version 20.0. Pearson Correlation and Stepwise Regression were used to examine the relationship between the variables. The outcomes of Stepwise Regression revealed that distributive justice fully mediated the relationship between pay distribution and employees’ turnover intention in contrast to procedural justice which did not have a significant impact in the relationship. The findings of this study are useful references for organisation management of the pay system to improve employees’ performance. Keywords: employees’ turnover intention; organizational justice; performance-based pa

Economic Evaluation of Treating Herpes Zoster with Various Methods of Acupuncture and Moxibustion

AbstractObjectiveTo analyze the cost effect of surrounding acupuncture plus electric acupuncture, cotton-sheet moxibustion, puncturing with red-hot needles, tapping plus cupping on herpes zoster.MethodsFive hundred patients with herpes zoster were randomly divided into group A (surrounding acupuncture plus electric acupuncture), group B (cotton-sheet moxibustion), group C (puncturing with red-hot needles), group D (tapping plus cupping), and group E (Western medicine). The treatment was carried out twice a day in group E and once a day in the other four groups. The curative effect was observed on the 10th day of treatment; the cost was calculated for the five therapies, and the cost-effect ratio (C/E) and increment ratio (ΔC/ΔE) were analyzed.ResultsAfter the 10-day treatment, there was no statistical difference (P>0.05) in the curative effect among the five groups. Pain being alleviated one day faster than in group E amounted to a saving of RMB 21.90 yuan in group A, a saving of RMB 21.87 yuan in group B, a saving of RMB 26.00 yuan in group C, and a saving of RMB 20.23 yuan in group D. Compared with group C, the values of ΔC/ΔE were RMB 1.55, 2.81, and 0.21 yuan in groups A, B, and D, respectively.ConclusionsThe curative effect in groups A, B, C, and D was similar to that in group E, but the C/E was better than in group E

Age and sex differences in the association between APOE genotype and Alzheimer’s disease in a Taiwan Chinese population

IntroductionThe Apolipoprotein E (APOE) epsilon (ε) 4 allele is a well-established risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Reports on white ancestry populations have showed that age, sex, and ethnicity have different effects on the association between APOE genotype and AD. However, studies on Asian populations such as Taiwan Chinese populations are limited. This study aimed to evaluate the association between APOE genotype and AD in a Taiwan Chinese population, and to explore if the association varies by age and sex.MethodsWe conducted a case-control study in 725 patients with AD and 1,067 age- and sex- matched controls without dementia from a Taiwan Chinese population. Logistic regression models were used to test the association between AD and APOE genotypes. Secondary analyses considered age (<75 or ≥75 years old), and sex stratified models.ResultsThe risk of AD was significantly increased for people with at least one copy of APOE ε4 (OR = 2.52, 95% CI = 2.01–3.17, p < 0.001) and in a dose-dependent manner. Our results did not show an statistically significance different in AD risk when women and men carrying APOEε4 were compared. Despite not reaching statistical significance, the risk of APOE ε4 for AD was higher among younger participants (OR = 3.21, 95% CI = 2.26–4.56, p < 0.001) compared to older ones (OR = 2.13, 95% CI = 1.53–2.97, p < 0.001). When considering both sex and age, the risk of AD was higher among older men carrying APOE ε4 (OR = 2.64, 95% CI = 1.51–4.60 in men; OR = 1.90, 95% CI = 1.26–2.86 in women), while women carrying APOE ε4 appeared to have an increased risk at a younger age (OR = 3.29, 95% CI = 2.20–4.93 in women; OR = 2.91, 95% CI = 1.40–6.05 in men).DiscussionThe APOE ε4 allele represents a major risk factor for AD in the Taiwanese population. The effect of APOE ε4 allele on AD risk appeared to be stronger among men aged 75 years or more and among younger women

Synthesizing Speech Test Cases with Text-to-Speech? An Empirical Study on the False Alarms in Automated Speech Recognition Testing

Recent studies have proposed the use of Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems to automatically synthesise speech test cases on a scale and uncover a large number of failures in ASR systems. However, the failures uncovered by synthetic test cases may not reflect the actual performance of an ASR system when it transcribes human audio, which we refer to as false alarms. Given a failed test case synthesised from TTS systems, which consists of TTS-generated audio and the corresponding ground truth text, we feed the human audio stating the same text to an ASR system. If human audio can be correctly transcribed, an instance of a false alarm is detected. In this study, we investigate false alarm occurrences in five popular ASR systems using synthetic audio generated from four TTS systems and human audio obtained from two commonly used datasets. Our results show that the least number of false alarms is identified when testing Deepspeech, and the number of false alarms is the highest when testing Wav2vec2. On average, false alarm rates range from 21% to 34% in all five ASR systems. Among the TTS systems used, Google TTS produces the least number of false alarms (17%), and Espeak TTS produces the highest number of false alarms (32%) among the four TTS systems. Additionally, we build a false alarm estimator that flags potential false alarms, which achieves promising results: a precision of 98.3%, a recall of 96.4%, an accuracy of 98.5%, and an F1 score of 97.3%. Our study provides insight into the appropriate selection of TTS systems to generate high-quality speech to test ASR systems. Additionally, a false alarm estimator can be a way to minimise the impact of false alarms and help developers choose suitable test inputs when evaluating ASR systems. The source code used in this paper is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/julianyonghao/FAinASRtest.Comment: 12 pages, Accepted at ISSTA202

Arabidopsis thaliana VDAC2 involvement in salt stress response pathway

Soil salinity seriously affects plants distribution and yield, while salt stress induces SOS genes, and voltage-dependent anion channels (VDAC) and a mitochondrial porin, are induced too. In this paper, phenotypes of AtVDAC2 transgenic lines and wild type (RLD) were analyzed. It was found that AtVDAC2 over-expressing transgenic plants were more sensitive to NaCl, and produced more H 2 O 2 in the NaCl treatment. Also, to find the inner reason, the salt overly sensitive gene 3 (SOS3) expression level was changed with the expression of AtVDAC2. So, it was conjectured that the signal of salt stress response was first sent to AtVDAC2, then AtVDAC2 expression improved, leading to the down-stream signals changes, such as accumulation of H 2 O 2 and improved expression of SOS3. So, it was found that in the over-expression of transgenic lines with AtVDAC2 up-regulation, SOS3 expression increased significantly, and in the inhibited-expressing lines, it was vice versa. In summary, AtVDAC2 was involved in salt stress signaling pathway, and it regulated SOS3 gene expression

Transcriptomic analyses of regenerating adult feathers in chicken

Transcriptome Expression Data. Table of mapped reads to Galgal4 transcripts for all 15 data sets. FPKM (Fragments per kilobase of exon per million fragments mapped): normalized transcript abundance values for each gene in the indicated tissues. (CSV 1314 kb

Functional characterization of cellulases identified from the cow rumen fungus Neocallimastix patriciarum W5 by transcriptomic and secretomic analyses

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Neocallimastix patriciarum</it> is one of the common anaerobic fungi in the digestive tracts of ruminants that can actively digest cellulosic materials, and its cellulases have great potential for hydrolyzing cellulosic feedstocks. Due to the difficulty in culture and lack of a genome database, it is not easy to gain a global understanding of the glycosyl hydrolases (<it>GHs</it>) produced by this anaerobic fungus.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have developed an efficient platform that uses a combination of transcriptomic and proteomic approaches to <it>N. patriciarum </it>to accelerate gene identification, enzyme classification and application in rice straw degradation. By conducting complementary studies of transcriptome (Roche 454 GS and Illumina GA IIx) and secretome (ESI-Trap LC-MS/MS), we identified 219 putative <it>GH </it>contigs and classified them into 25 <it>GH</it> families. The secretome analysis identified four major enzymes involved in rice straw degradation: β-glucosidase, endo-1,4-β-xylanase, xylanase B and Cel48A exoglucanase. From the sequences of assembled contigs, we cloned 19 putative cellulase genes, including the <it>GH1</it>, <it>GH3</it>, <it>GH5</it>, <it>GH6</it>, <it>GH9</it>, <it>GH18</it>, <it>GH43 </it>and <it>GH48 </it>gene families, which were highly expressed in <it>N. patriciarum </it>cultures grown on different feedstocks.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These <it>GH </it>genes were expressed in Pichia pastoris and/or Saccharomyces cerevisiae for functional characterization. At least five novel cellulases displayed cellulytic activity for glucose production. One β-glucosidase (W5-16143) and one exocellulase (W5-CAT26) showed strong activities and could potentially be developed into commercial enzymes.</p

Elevated expression of TDP-43 in the forebrain of mice is sufficient to cause neurological and pathological phenotypes mimicking FTLD-U

TDP-43 is a multifunctional DNA/RNA-binding factor that has been implicated in the regulation of neuronal plasticity. TDP-43 has also been identified as the major constituent of the neuronal cytoplasmic inclusions (NCIs) that are characteristic of a range of neurodegenerative diseases, including the frontotemporal lobar degeneration with ubiquitin+ inclusions (FTLD-U) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We have generated a FTLD-U mouse model (CaMKII-TDP-43 Tg) in which TDP-43 is transgenically overexpressed in the forebrain resulting in phenotypic characteristics mimicking those of FTLD-U. In particular, the transgenic (Tg) mice exhibit impaired learning/memory, progressive motor dysfunction, and hippocampal atrophy. The cognitive and motor impairments are accompanied by reduced levels of the neuronal regulators phospho–extracellular signal-regulated kinase and phosphorylated cAMP response element-binding protein and increased levels of gliosis in the brains of the Tg mice. Moreover, cells with TDP-43+, ubiquitin+ NCIs and TDP-43–deleted nuclei appear in the Tg mouse brains in an age-dependent manner. Our data provide direct evidence that increased levels of TDP-43 protein in the forebrain is sufficient to lead to the formation of TDP-43+, ubiquitin+ NCIs and neurodegeneration. This FTLD-U mouse model should be valuable for the mechanistic analysis of the role of TDP-43 in the pathogenesis of FTLD-U and for the design of effective therapeutic approaches of the disease

The 2nd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2024

The 2nd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2024 addresses maritime computer vision for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV). Three challenges categories are considered: (i) UAV-based Maritime Object Tracking with Re-identification, (ii) USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and Detection, (iii) USV-based Maritime Boat Tracking. The USV-based Maritime Obstacle Segmentation and Detection features three sub-challenges, including a new embedded challenge addressing efficicent inference on real-world embedded devices. This report offers a comprehensive overview of the findings from the challenges. We provide both statistical and qualitative analyses, evaluating trends from over 195 submissions. All datasets, evaluation code, and the leaderboard are available to the public at https://macvi.org/workshop/macvi24.Comment: Part of 2nd Workshop on Maritime Computer Vision (MaCVi) 2024 IEEE Xplore submission as part of WACV 202