476 research outputs found
Inhibition of lymphocyte proliferation mediated by Helicobacter suis Îł-glutamyl transpeptidase
Helicobacter suis affects the health and function of porcine gastric parietal cells
The stomach of pigs at slaughter age is often colonized by Helicobacter (H.) suis, which is also the most prevalent gastric non-H. pylori Helicobacter (NHPH) species in humans. It is associated with chronic gastritis, gastric ulceration and other gastric pathological changes in both hosts. Parietal cells are highly specialized, terminally differentiated epithelial cells responsible for gastric acid secretion and regulation. Dysfunction of these cells is closely associated with gastric pathology and disease. Here we describe a method for isolation and culture of viable and responsive parietal cells from slaughterhouse pigs. In addition, we investigated the interactions between H. suis and gastric parietal cells both in H. suis-infected six-month-old slaughter pigs, as well as in our in vitro parietal cell model. A close interaction of H. suis and parietal cells was observed in the fundic region of stomachs from H. suis positive pigs. The bacterium was shown to be able to directly interfere with cultured porcine parietal cells, causing a significant impairment of cell viability. Transcriptional levels of Atp4a, essential for gastric acid secretion, showed a trend towards an up-regulation in H. suis positive pigs compared to H. suis-negative pigs. In addition, sonic hedgehog, an important factor involved in gastric epithelial differentiation, gastric mucosal repair, and stomach homeostasis, was also significantly up-regulated in H. suis positive pigs. In conclusion, this study describes a successful approach for the isolation and culture of porcine gastric parietal cells. The results indicate that H. suis affects the viability and function of this cell type
Developing Business Intelligence Competency In Health It: Perspectives From Health It Professionals
Business intelligence (BI) is a set of methods and technologies that can provide analytical power to help the healthcare industry to tackle the challenges brought by ever-growing and complex health data. To develop a successful Health Information Technology (HIT) or Health Informatics (HI) curriculum with the component of BI or health data analytics, it is critical to first identify the sets of important skills that a HIT student should possess upon graduation, especially from HIT professionals’ perspective. In this paper, we reported findings from a pilot study in which we surveyed a group of HIT practitioners. The implications of the pilot study are discussed
Promoting Information Systems Major to Undergraduate Students - A Comprehensive Investigation
Weak enrollment growth has been a concern for many Information Systems (IS) programs in recent years although the IT/IS job market remains strong. Stimulating undergraduate students’ interest to IS programs have been a challenge. In this paper, the researchers took a comprehensive approach to study how to effectively promote a Management Information Systems (MIS) program to undergraduate students at a medium-size public university in the southeastern US. Using a survey-based method, the researchers first investigated the factors that impact students’ selection of majors and identified students’ perceptions on an MIS program. In this paper, an MIS program promotion strategy was then developed and empirically validated. The research results showed that the promotion strategy can successfully stimulate participants’ positive perceptions on the MIS program. The approach presented in this study could serve as an exemplar to other IS programs or other major fields to tackle enrollment challenges
Graph Neural Networks for Contextual ASR with the Tree-Constrained Pointer Generator
The incorporation of biasing words obtained through contextual knowledge is
of paramount importance in automatic speech recognition (ASR) applications.
This paper proposes an innovative method for achieving end-to-end contextual
ASR using graph neural network (GNN) encodings based on the tree-constrained
pointer generator method. GNN node encodings facilitate lookahead for future
word pieces in the process of ASR decoding at each tree node by incorporating
information about all word pieces on the tree branches rooted from it. This
results in a more precise prediction of the generation probability of the
biasing words. The study explores three GNN encoding techniques, namely tree
recursive neural networks, graph convolutional network (GCN), and GraphSAGE,
along with different combinations of the complementary GCN and GraphSAGE
structures. The performance of the systems was evaluated using the Librispeech
and AMI corpus, following the visual-grounded contextual ASR pipeline. The
findings indicate that using GNN encodings achieved consistent and significant
reductions in word error rate (WER), particularly for words that are rare or
have not been seen during the training process. Notably, the most effective
combination of GNN encodings obtained more than 60% WER reduction for rare and
unseen words compared to standard end-to-end systems.Comment: Submitted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language
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Efficient Task Offloading Algorithm for Digital Twin in Edge/Cloud Computing Environment
In the era of Internet of Things (IoT), Digital Twin (DT) is envisioned to
empower various areas as a bridge between physical objects and the digital
world. Through virtualization and simulation techniques, multiple functions can
be achieved by leveraging computing resources. In this process, Mobile Cloud
Computing (MCC) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) have become two of the key
factors to achieve real-time feedback. However, current works only considered
edge servers or cloud servers in the DT system models. Besides, The models
ignore the DT with not only one data resource. In this paper, we propose a new
DT system model considering a heterogeneous MEC/MCC environment. Each DT in the
model is maintained in one of the servers via multiple data collection devices.
The offloading decision-making problem is also considered and a new offloading
scheme is proposed based on Distributed Deep Learning (DDL). Simulation results
demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can effectively and efficiently
decrease the system's average latency and energy consumption. Significant
improvement is achieved compared with the baselines under the dynamic
environment of DTs
Role of Îł-glutamyltranspeptidase in the pathogenesis of Helicobacter suis and Helicobacter pylori infections
Helicobacter (H.) suis can colonize the stomach of pigs as well as humans, causing chronic gastritis and other gastric pathological changes including gastric ulceration and mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma. Recently, a virulence factor of H. suis, gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase (GGT), has been demonstrated to play an important role in the induction of human gastric epithelial cell death and modulation of lymphocyte proliferation depending on glutamine and glutathione catabolism. In the present study, the relevance of GGT in the pathogenesis of H. suis infection was studied in mouse and Mongolian gerbil models. In addition, the relative importance of H. suis GGT was compared with that of the H. pylori GGT. A significant and different contribution of the GGT of H. suis and H. pylori was seen in terms of bacterial colonization, inflammation and the evoked immune response. In contrast to H. pylori Delta ggt strains, H. suis Delta ggt strains were capable of colonizing the stomach at levels comparable to WT strains, although they induced significantly less overall gastric inflammation in mice. This was characterized by lower numbers of T and B cells, and a lower level of epithelial cell proliferation. In general, compared to WT strain infection, ggt mutant strains of H. suis triggered lower levels of Th1 and Th17 signature cytokine expression. A pronounced upregulation of B-lymphocyte chemoattractant CXCL13 was observed, both in animals infected with WT and ggt mutant strains of H. suis. Interestingly, H. suis GGT was shown to affect the glutamine metabolism of gastric epithelium through downregulation of the glutamine transporter ASCT2
Can Contextual Biasing Remain Effective with Whisper and GPT-2?
End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) and large language models, such
as Whisper and GPT-2, have recently been scaled to use vast amounts of training
data. Despite the large amount of training data, infrequent content words that
occur in a particular task may still exhibit poor ASR performance, with
contextual biasing a possible remedy. This paper investigates the effectiveness
of neural contextual biasing for Whisper combined with GPT-2. Specifically,
this paper proposes integrating an adapted tree-constrained pointer generator
(TCPGen) component for Whisper and a dedicated training scheme to dynamically
adjust the final output without modifying any Whisper model parameters.
Experiments across three datasets show a considerable reduction in errors on
biasing words with a biasing list of 1000 words. Contextual biasing was more
effective when applied to domain-specific data and can boost the performance of
Whisper and GPT-2 without losing their generality.Comment: To appear in Interspeech 202
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