Thrombolysis in Myocardial Infarction Frame Count in Single-Vessel Disease After Angioplasty

SUMMARYBackgroundWe compared the thrombolysis in myocardial infarction (TIMI) frame count and examined the impact of angioplasty on the count between patients with normal coronary angiograms and those with single-vessel disease (SVD).MethodsIn 780 consecutive patients referred for coronary angiography, TIMI frame count was measured for 149 patients who had SVD and 32 patients with normal angiograms who underwent the procedure for electro-physiologic study or valvular heart disease survey.ResultsComparison of each of the three vessels in the normal vessel group with the corresponding non-stenotic vessels in the SVD group showed similar counts in each of the left anterior descending artery (LAD), left circumflex artery (LCX), and right coronary artery (RCA). For the stenotic vessels, after successful angioplasty, the counts were all reduced (LAD, 54.5 ±28.8 vs. 34.0 ±19.3; LCX, 67.3 ±31.1 vs. 34.1 ±19.0; RCA, 33.2 ±28.1 vs. 19.3 ±7.9; all p <0.05). In addition, the count in the RCA after angioplasty was lower, compared with the RCA of the normal group (19.3 ±7.9 vs. 29.1 ±14.6, p = 0.001). Multivariate analysis showed that the use of oral calcium channel blockers was the only independent predictor for the reduction in RCA after angioplasty.ConclusionIn patients with SVD, the data of TIMI frame count in the nonstenotic vessels were similar to those without the disease, suggesting that the count in the normal artery is not affected by the adjacent stenotic artery. For the stenotic vessels, angioplasty had differential effects on each of the three arteries, indicating the existence of distinct properties, which is affected by calcium channel blockers, for individual coronary arteries in response to atherosclerosis and/or angioplasty

Metrology Camera System of Prime Focus Spectrograph for Subaru Telescope

The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is a new optical/near-infrared multi-fiber spectrograph designed for the prime focus of the 8.2m Subaru telescope. PFS will cover a 1.3 degree diameter field with 2394 fibers to complement the imaging capabilities of Hyper SuprimeCam. To retain high throughput, the final positioning accuracy between the fibers and observing targets of PFS is required to be less than 10um. The metrology camera system (MCS) serves as the optical encoder of the fiber motors for the configuring of fibers. MCS provides the fiber positions within a 5um error over the 45 cm focal plane. The information from MCS will be fed into the fiber positioner control system for the closed loop control. MCS will be located at the Cassegrain focus of Subaru telescope in order to to cover the whole focal plane with one 50M pixel Canon CMOS camera. It is a 380mm Schmidt type telescope which generates a uniform spot size with a 10 micron FWHM across the field for reasonable sampling of PSF. Carbon fiber tubes are used to provide a stable structure over the operating conditions without focus adjustments. The CMOS sensor can be read in 0.8s to reduce the overhead for the fiber configuration. The positions of all fibers can be obtained within 0.5s after the readout of the frame. This enables the overall fiber configuration to be less than 2 minutes. MCS will be installed inside a standard Subaru Cassgrain Box. All components that generate heat are located inside a glycol cooled cabinet to reduce the possible image motion due to heat. The optics and camera for MCS have been delivered and tested. The mechanical parts and supporting structure are ready as of spring 2016. The integration of MCS will start in the summer of 2016.Comment: 11 pages, 15 figures. SPIE proceeding. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1408.287

Role of autophagy-related proteins ATG8f and ATG8h in the maintenance of autophagic activity in Arabidopsis roots under phosphate starvation

Nutrient starvation-induced autophagy is a conserved process in eukaryotes. Plants defective in autophagy show hypersensitivity to carbon and nitrogen limitation. However, the role of autophagy in plant phosphate (Pi) starvation response is relatively less explored. Among the core autophagy-related (ATG) genes, ATG8 encodes a ubiquitin-like protein involved in autophagosome formation and selective cargo recruitment. The Arabidopsis thaliana ATG8 genes, AtATG8f and AtATG8h, are notably induced in roots under low Pi. In this study, we show that such upregulation correlates with their promoter activities and can be suppressed in the phosphate response 1 (phr1) mutant. Yeast one-hybrid analysis failed to attest the binding of the AtPHR1 transcription factor to the promoter regions of AtATG8f and AtATG8h. Dual luciferase reporter assays in Arabidopsis mesophyll protoplasts also indicated that AtPHR1 could not transactivate the expression of both genes. Loss of AtATG8f and AtATG8h leads to decreased root microsomal-enriched ATG8 but increased ATG8 lipidation. Moreover, atg8f/atg8h mutants exhibit reduced autophagic flux estimated by the vacuolar degradation of ATG8 in the Pi-limited root but maintain normal cellular Pi homeostasis with reduced number of lateral roots. While the expression patterns of AtATG8f and AtATG8h overlap in the root stele, AtATG8f is more strongly expressed in the root apex and root hair and remarkably at sites where lateral root primordia develop. We hypothesize that Pi starvation-induction of AtATG8f and AtATG8h may not directly contribute to Pi recycling but rely on a second wave of transcriptional activation triggered by PHR1 that fine-tunes cell type-specific autophagic activity

Metrology Camera System of Prime Focus Spectrograph for Subaru Telescope

The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is a new optical/near-infrared multi-fiber spectrograph designed for the prime focus of the 8.2m Subaru telescope. The metrology camera system of PFS serves as the optical encoder of the COBRA fiber motors for the configuring of fibers. The 380mm diameter aperture metrology camera will locate at the Cassegrain focus of Subaru telescope to cover the whole focal plane with one 50M pixel Canon CMOS sensor. The metrology camera is designed to provide the fiber position information within 5{\mu}m error over the 45cm focal plane. The positions of all fibers can be obtained within 1s after the exposure is finished. This enables the overall fiber configuration to be less than 2 minutes.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 201

Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS): the metrology camera system

The Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) is a new optical/near-infrared multi-fiber spectrograph designed for the prime focus of the 8.2m Subaru telescope. PFS will cover a 1.3 degree diameter field with 2394 fibers to complement the imaging capabilities of Hyper SuprimeCam. To retain high throughput, the final positioning accuracy between the fibers and observing targets of PFS is required to be less than 10 µ m. The metrology camera system (MCS) serves as the optical encoder of the fiber positioners for configuring of fibers. The MCS locates at the Cassegrain focus of the Subaru telescope to cover the whole focal plane with one 50M pixel CMOS sensor. The information from MCS will be fed into the fiber positioner control system for closed loop control. The MCS was delivered to Subaru Observatory in Apr. 2018 and it had two engineering runs in Oct. 2018 and Aug. 2019. The 1st engineering run concluded that the original mirror supports need to be improved to provide better image quality. The newly designed mirror supports were installed before the 2nd engineering run. The 2nd engineering run result shows that the MCS overall position accuracy is better than 4μm and the image processing time is less than 4 seconds. The MCS is ready for the system integration with other PFS components

Detection of Dental Apical Lesions Using CNNs on Periapical Radiograph

Apical lesions, the general term for chronic infectious diseases, are very common dental diseases in modern life, and are caused by various factors. The current prevailing endodontic treatment makes use of X-ray photography taken from patients where the lesion area is marked manually, which is therefore time consuming. Additionally, for some images the significant details might not be recognizable due to the different shooting angles or doses. To make the diagnosis process shorter and efficient, repetitive tasks should be performed automatically to allow the dentists to focus more on the technical and medical diagnosis, such as treatment, tooth cleaning, or medical communication. To realize the automatic diagnosis, this article proposes and establishes a lesion area analysis model based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). For establishing a standardized database for clinical application, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) with application number 202002030B0 has been approved with the database established by dentists who provided the practical clinical data. In this study, the image data is preprocessed by a Gaussian high-pass filter. Then, an iterative thresholding is applied to slice the X-ray image into several individual tooth sample images. The collection of individual tooth images that comprises the image database are used as input into the CNN migration learning model for training. Seventy percent (70%) of the image database is used for training and validating the model while the remaining 30% is used for testing and estimating the accuracy of the model. The practical diagnosis accuracy of the proposed CNN model is 92.5%. The proposed model successfully facilitated the automatic diagnosis of the apical lesion

Tooth Position Determination by Automatic Cutting and Marking of Dental Panoramic X-ray Film in Medical Image Processing

This paper presents a novel method for automatic segmentation of dental X-ray images into single tooth sections and for placing every segmented tooth onto a precise corresponding position table. Moreover, the proposed method automatically determines the tooth’s position in a panoramic X-ray film. The image-processing step incorporates a variety of image-enhancement techniques, including sharpening, histogram equalization, and flat-field correction. Moreover, image processing was implemented iteratively to achieve higher pixel value contrast between the teeth and cavity. The next image-enhancement step is aimed at detecting the teeth cavity and involves determining the segment and points separating the upper and lower jaw, using the difference in pixel values to cut the image into several equal sections and then connecting each cavity feature point to extend a curve that completes the description of the separated jaw. The curve is shifted up and down to look for the gap between the teeth, to identify and address missing teeth and overlapping. Under FDI World Dental Federation notation, the left and right sides receive eight-code sequences to mark each tooth, which provides improved convenience in clinical use. According to the literature, X-ray film cannot be marked correctly when a tooth is missing. This paper utilizes artificial center positioning and sets the teeth gap feature points to have the same count. Then, the gap feature points are connected as a curve with the curve of the jaw to illustrate the dental segmentation. In addition, we incorporate different image-processing methods to sequentially strengthen the X-ray film. The proposed procedure had an 89.95% accuracy rate for tooth positioning. As for the tooth cutting, where the edge of the cutting box is used to determine the position of each tooth number, the accuracy of the tooth positioning method in this proposed study is 92.78%