Comparison of Cell Proliferation, Protein, and Glucose Metabolism in Musculoskeletal Tumors in a PET Study

11C-choline and 18F-FAMT are known to correlate with tumor cell proliferation and amino acid metabolism. We investigated the ability of 11C-Choline and 18F-FAMT PET in diagnosis of musculoskeletal tumors in thirty-six patients in comparison of 18F-FDG PET. 11C-Choline and 18F-FDG PET were positive in all the malignant tumors (n = 13), whereas 18F-FAMT was positive in 11 tumors. The mean SUVs for malignant tumors were significantly higher than those for benign lesions in all three tracers imaging. A moderate correlation was found between 11C-Choline and 18F-FDG (r = 0.540, P < .05), or 18F-FAMT and FDG (r = 0.596, P < .05). The diagnostic sensitivity and specificity for malignancy were 91.7% and 71.4%, respectively, using 11C-choline with a SUV cut-off of 2.69. The sensitivity and specificity of 18F-FAMT for malignancy were 66.7% and 85.7%, respectively, using a SUV cut-off of 1.26. For 18F-FDG, using a SUV cut-off of 2.77, the sensitivity and specificity were 83.3% and 71.4%, respectively. According to ROC analysis, the ROC curves for 11C-Choline, 18F-FAMT, and 18F-FDG were 0.855, 0.734, and 0.847, respectively. 11C-Choline PET is superior in the visualization of musculoskeletal tumors with high contrast imaging, whereas the combination of 18F-FAMT and 18F-FDG PET provides valuable information for the preoperative planning in patients with musculoskeletal tumors

Molecular Imaging in Therapeutic Efficacy Assessment of Targeted Therapy for Nonsmall Cell Lung Cancer

Membrane distillation is a thermally driven membrane process for seawater desalination and purification at moderate temperatures and pressures. A hydrophobic micro-porous membrane is used in this process, which separates hot and cold water, allowing water vapor to pass through; while restricting the movement of liquid water, due to its hydrophobic nature. This paper provides an experimental investigation of heat and mass transfer in tubular membrane module for water desalination. Different operating parameters have been examined to determine the mass transport mechanism of water vapor. Based on the experimental results, the effects of operating parameters on permeate flux and the heat transfer analysis have been presented and discussed in details

Chiral selection and frequency response of spiral waves in reaction-diffusion systems under a chiral electric field

Chirality is one of the most fundamental properties of many physical, chemical and biological systems. However, the mechanisms underlying the onset and control of chiral symmetry are largely understudied. We investigate possibility of chirality control in a chemical excitable system (the BZ reaction) by application of a chiral (rotating) electric field using the Oregonator model. We find that unlike previous findings, we can achieve the chirality control not only in the field rotation direction, but also opposite to it, depending on the field rotation frequency. To unravel the mechanism, we further develop a comprehensive theory of frequency synchronization based on the response function approach. We find that this problem can be described by the Adler equation and show phase-locking phenomena, known as the Arnold tongue. Our theoretical predictions are in good quantitative agreement with the numerical simulations and provide a solid basis for chirality control in excitable media.Comment: 21 pages with 9 figures; update references; to appear in J. Chem. Phy

Moderate lifelong overexpression of tuberous sclerosis complex 1 (TSC1) improves health and survival in mice

The tuberous sclerosis complex 1/2 (TSC1/2) is an endogenous regulator of the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR). While mTOR has been shown to play an important role in health and aging, the role of TSC1/2 in aging has not been fully investigated. In the current study, a constitutive TSC1 transgenic (Tsc1tg) mouse model was generated and characterized. mTORC1 signaling was reduced in majority of the tissues, except the brain. In contrast, mTORC2 signaling was enhanced in Tsc1tg mice. Tsc1tg mice are more tolerant to exhaustive exercises and less susceptible to isoproterenol-induced cardiac hypertrophy at both young and advanced ages. Tsc1tg mice have less fibrosis and inflammation in aged as well as isoproterenol-challenged heart than age-matched wild type mice. The female Tsc1tg mice exhibit a higher fat to lean mass ratio at advanced ages than age-matched wild type mice. More importantly, the lifespan increased significantly in female Tsc1tg mice, but not in male Tsc1tg mice. Collectively, our data demonstrated that moderate increase of TSC1 expression can enhance overall health, particularly cardiovascular health, and improve survival in a gender-specific manner.ISSN:2045-232

Tuning adaptive computations for the performance improvement of applications in JEE server

With the increasing use of autonomic computing technologies, a Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) application server is implemented with more and more adaptive computations for self-managing the Middleware as well as its hosted applications. However, these adaptive computations consume resources such as CPU and memory, and can interfere with the normal business processing of applications at runtime due to resource competition, especially when the whole system is under heavy load. Tuning these adaptive computations from the perspective of resource management becomes necessary. In this article, we propose a tuning model for adaptive computations. Based on the model, tuning is carried out dynamically by upgrading or degrading the autonomic level of an adaptive computation so as to control its resource consumption. We implement the RSpring tuner and use it to optimize autonomic JEE servers such as PkuAS and JOnAS. RSpring is evaluated on ECperf and RUBiS benchmark applications. The results show that it can effectively improve the application performance by 13.6 % in PkuAS and 19.2 % in JOnAS with the same amount of resources. ? 2012 The Brazilian Computer Society.EI02143-158

Bearing fault diagnosis based on Shannon entropy and wavelet package decomposition

A new feature extraction method based on WPD and Entropy is proposed in this paper. Firstly, WPD is utilized to decompose the signal into different frequency bands to obtain different frequency sub-signal. Secondly, root-mean-squire (RMS) value, kurtosis (K) and peak factor (PF) parameters are extracted from each sub-signal to obtain the fault feature vector. Thirdly the Entropy of each feature vector is calculated to realize the bearing fault diagnosis. Finally, experimental results indicate that the bearing fault diagnosis method proposed in this paper is effective