The influence of kindergarten and first-grade literacy instruction on the 3rd- and 5th-grade students\u27 reading achievement : findings from the Early childhood longitudinal study, kindergarten class, 1998-1999

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Systematic assessment of HER2/neu in gynecologic neoplasms, an institutional experience.

BackgroundHER2/neu overexpression and/or amplification has been widely studied in a number of solid tumors, primarily in the breast. In gynecologic neoplasms, determination of HER2/neu status has not been well studied as a predictive biomarker in anti-HER2/neu treatment.MethodsWe systematically evaluated the HER2/neu reactions by immunohistochemistry and fluorescent in situ hybridization in malignant gynecologic neoplasms as experienced in our institution.ResultsThe HER2/neu overexpression or amplification occurred in 8 % of the cancers of the gynecological organs in our series. Majority of the HER2/neu overexpression and/or amplification occurred in clear cell (27 %) and serous (11 %) carcinomas. HER2/neu positivity was also seen in undifferentiated as well as in mixed clear cell and serous carcinomas. Discordant IHC and FISH results (positive by FISH but not IHC) was seen in 2 cases. Majority of the HER2/neu overexpression and/or amplification occurs in the endometrium rather than the ovary. Heterogeneity of the HER2/neu by IHC staining was in < 2 % of the tumors in our series.ConclusionsWe recommend the HER2/neu studies on Müllerian carcinomas of clear cell, serous, and undifferentiated types, particularly when they arise in the endometrium. Since there are some discordant IHC/FISH results, we also propose performing the HER2/neu testing by FISH when the IHC score is less than 3 + 

Angiogenesis and Its Role in the Tumour Microenvironment: A Target for Cancer Therapy

The process of angiogenesis refers to the growth of new blood vessels from existing ones. Tumours can produce factors in the micro-environment which act on blood vessels to promote angiogenesis. It is therefore considered to be fundamental in tumour progression and metastatic dissemination. This neovascularization can be regulated by numerous endogenous factors in the tumour micro-environment. As a result, anti-angiogenic therapies have been developed in the hope of targeting this process to reduce tumour growth and progression. However, only a proportion of patients respond to therapy, indicating the presence of treatment resistance in some. In this chapter, we aim to highlight the process of angiogenesis and to review pivotal evidence for the use of anti-angiogenic therapies thus far (alone and in combination with other agents). Finally, we will illustrate recent evidence for the discovery of biomarkers for anti-angiogenic therapies and potential mechanisms of resistance to such agents

Braking ground reaction force during 90deg sidestep cut and leg muscle strength.

Change of direction (COD) total time is influenced by linear sprint ability and technique. Therefore, COD performance should be isolated from COD total time by measuring only the time taken to perform the COD and COD technique should be controlled. Current COD studies focus on the plant and penultimate (PEN) braking steps (Dos’ Santos et al, 2017, Jones et al, 2017), however, deceleration during a COD extends beyond these two steps (Nedergaard et al, 2014), thus, more braking steps ground reaction forces (GRF) needs to be examined. Cross sectional COD studies have shown that athletes with faster COD performance were stronger during eccentric squat (Spiteri et al, 2015) and produced higher force during eccentric isokinetic knee extensor and flexor test than athletes who exhibit slower COD performance (Jones et al, 2017). Therefore, it seems that eccentric strength is associated with COD performance. It is necessary to examine braking steps before the PEN step to examine braking strategies of faster and slower performers. Additionally, eccentric strength, which is deemed advantageous for COD braking should be further examined using a multi-joint strength assessment to further determine eccentric capacity during COD performance.https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuposters/1027/thumbnail.jp

PseudoSegRT: efficient pseudo-labelling for intraoperative OCT segmentation

PURPOSE: Robotic ophthalmic microsurgery has significant potential to help improve the success of challenging procedures and overcome the physical limitations of the surgeon. Intraoperative optical coherence tomography (iOCT) has been reported for the visualisation of ophthalmic surgical manoeuvres, where deep learning methods can be used for real-time tissue segmentation and surgical tool tracking. However, many of these methods rely heavily on labelled datasets, where producing annotated segmentation datasets is a time-consuming and tedious task. METHODS: To address this challenge, we propose a robust and efficient semi-supervised method for boundary segmentation in retinal OCT to guide a robotic surgical system. The proposed method uses U-Net as the base model and implements a pseudo-labelling strategy which combines the labelled data with unlabelled OCT scans during training. After training, the model is optimised and accelerated with the use of TensorRT. RESULTS: Compared with fully supervised learning, the pseudo-labelling method can improve the generalisability of the model and show better performance for unseen data from a different distribution using only 2% of labelled training samples. The accelerated GPU inference takes less than 1 millisecond per frame with FP16 precision. CONCLUSION: Our approach demonstrates the potential of using pseudo-labelling strategies in real-time OCT segmentation tasks to guide robotic systems. Furthermore, the accelerated GPU inference of our network is highly promising for segmenting OCT images and guiding the position of a surgical tool (e.g. needle) for sub-retinal injections

A Chinese Chan-based lifestyle intervention improves memory of older adults

This study aims to explore the potential benefits of a Chinese Chan-based lifestyle intervention on enhancing memory in older people with lower memory function. Forty-four aged 60–83 adults with various level of memory ability participated in the study. Their memories (including verbal and visual components) were assessed before and after 3 months intervention. The intervention consisted of 12 sessions, with one 90 min session per week. The intervention involved components of adopting a special vegetarian diet, practicing a type of mind–body exercises, and learning self-realization. Elderly with lower memory function at the baseline (i.e., their performance on standardized memory tests was within 25th percentile) showed a significant memory improvement after the intervention. Their verbal and visual memory performance has showed 50 and 49% enhancement, respectively. In addition, their improvement can be considered as a reliable and clinically significant change as reflected by their significant pre–post differences and reliable change indices. Such robust treatment effect was found to be specific to memory functions, but less influencing on the other cognitive functions. These preliminary encouraging results have shed some light on the potential applicability of the Chinese Chan-based lifestyle intervention as a method for enhancing memory in the elderly population

A streamlined software environment for situated skills

This paper documents a powerful set of software tools used for developing situated skills. These situated skills form the reactive level of a three-tiered intelligent agent architecture. The architecture is designed to allow these skills to be manipulated by a task level engine which is monitoring the current situation and selecting skills necessary for the current task. The idea is to coordinate the dynamic activations and deactivations of these situated skills in order to configure the reactive layer for the task at hand. The heart of the skills environment is a data flow mechanism which pipelines the currently active skills for execution. A front end graphical interface serves as a debugging facility during skill development and testing. We are able to integrate skills developed in different languages into the skills environment. The power of the skills environment lies in the amount of time it saves for the programmer to develop code for the reactive layer of a robot

Large-scale event extraction from literature with multi-level gene normalization

Text mining for the life sciences aims to aid database curation, knowledge summarization and information retrieval through the automated processing of biomedical texts. To provide comprehensive coverage and enable full integration with existing biomolecular database records, it is crucial that text mining tools scale up to millions of articles and that their analyses can be unambiguously linked to information recorded in resources such as UniProt, KEGG, BioGRID and NCBI databases. In this study, we investigate how fully automated text mining of complex biomolecular events can be augmented with a normalization strategy that identifies biological concepts in text, mapping them to identifiers at varying levels of granularity, ranging from canonicalized symbols to unique gene and proteins and broad gene families. To this end, we have combined two state-of-the-art text mining components, previously evaluated on two community-wide challenges, and have extended and improved upon these methods by exploiting their complementary nature. Using these systems, we perform normalization and event extraction to create a large-scale resource that is publicly available, unique in semantic scope, and covers all 21.9 million PubMed abstracts and 460 thousand PubMed Central open access full-text articles. This dataset contains 40 million biomolecular events involving 76 million gene/protein mentions, linked to 122 thousand distinct genes from 5032 species across the full taxonomic tree. Detailed evaluations and analyses reveal promising results for application of this data in database and pathway curation efforts. The main software components used in this study are released under an open-source license. Further, the resulting dataset is freely accessible through a novel API, providing programmatic and customized access (http://www.evexdb.org/api/v001/). Finally, to allow for large-scale bioinformatic analyses, the entire resource is available for bulk download from http://evexdb.org/download/, under the Creative Commons -Attribution - Share Alike (CC BY-SA) license