New Approach of Anti-VEGF Agents for Age-Related Macular Degeneration

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of visual loss in older population. Angiogenesis is an important factor associated with the development of CNV due to AMD. Treatment of CNV with intravitreal anti-VEGF monotherapy is currently the standard of care. However, not all patients respond to monotherapy, and modified anti-VEGF treatment regimen and combination therapy may target reducing treatment frequency or improving visual outcome. This paper reviews the many clinical trials that have been performed utilizing several treatment regimens. While many trials have shown that this variable therapy is justifiable, further study is required to determine correct regimens and dosage

BIM-Based Construction Information Management Framework for Site Information Management

Projects in the construction industry are becoming increasingly large and complex, with construction technologies, methods, and the like developing rapidly. Various different types of information are generated by construction projects. Especially, a construction phase requires the input of many resources and generates a diverse set of information. While a variety of IT techniques are being deployed for information management during the construction phase, measures to create databases of such information and to link these various different types of information together are still insufficient. As such, this study aims to suggest a construction information database system based on BIM technology to enable the comprehensive management of site information generated during the construction phase. This study analyzed the information generated from construction sites and proposed a categorization system for structuring the generated information, along with a database model for storing such structured information. Through such efforts, it was confirmed that such a database system can be used for accumulating and using construction information; it is believed that, in the future, the continual accumulation and management of construction information will allow for corporate-level accumulation of knowledge as opposed to the individual accumulation of know-how

Impaired hydrogen sulfide protein expression in patients with peripheral artery disease

INTRODUCTION: Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a gaseous signaling molecule that serves various roles in the vasculature, such as upregulating angiogenesis, vascular smooth muscle relaxation, protecting endothelial function, and regulating redox balance. Despite H2S’s positive impacts on vascular homeostasis, it is important to note that its actions depend on its concentrations. At high concentrations, H2S has been reported to increase oxidative stress damage, such as oxidation of cysteine residues and lipid peroxidation. This may indicate that H2S may act as a ‘double-edged sword’ in the field of vascular physiology. Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is an atherosclerotic disease which manifested by claudication (leg pain during walking). Growing evidence suggests that abnormal H2S level may present with vascular diseases, however, only a few animal studies investigated the H2S and H2S -mediated oxidative stress damage in vascular disease models, and there are currently no available studies for human vascular disease patients, such as patients with PAD. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the H2S and oxidative stress damage in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and skeletal muscle tissues from patients with PAD. METHODS: Western blot was performed using skeletal muscle tissues and PBMCs to examine protein expression of cystathionase (CTH), which catalyzes production of H2S, and glutathione peroxidase-4 (GPx-4) and catalase (CAT), which are antioxidant markers, from healthy adults (CON) and patients with PAD (PAD). RESULTS: Patients with PAD show a lower expression of CTH compared to CON (P \u3c 0.01, PAD: 1.61 ± 0.44, CON: 8.53 ± 0.46). However, CAT expression was not different between groups (P = 0.429, PAD: 0.03 ± 0.02, CON: 0.01 ± 0.01). In addition, CAT and GPx-4 expression was assessed in CON PBMCs (CAT: 5.07 ± 1.14, GPx-4: 0.63 ± 0.3). CONCLUSION: CTH protein expression in the skeletal muscle is attenuated in PAD compared to CON. However, CAT protein expression in the skeletal muscle is not different between groups. These data suggest an impairment is present in the H2S signaling system in the skeletal muscle of patients with PAD

Recommending the Meanings of Newly Coined Words

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate how to recommend the meanings of newly coined words, such as newly coined named entities and Internet jargon. Our approach automatically chooses a document explaining a given newly coined word among candidate documents from multiple web references using Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis [1]. Briefly, it involves finding the topic of a document containing the newly coined word and computing the conditional probability of the topic given each candidate document. We validate our methodology with two real datasets from MySpace forums and Twitter by referencing three web services, Google, Urbandictionary, and Wikipedia, and we show that we properly recommend the meanings of a set of given newly coined words with 69.5% and 80.5% accuracies based on our three recommendations, respectively. Moreover, we compare our approach against three baselines where one references the result from each web service and our approach outperforms them