Promising practice in school-related gender-based violence(SRGBV) prevention and response programming globally

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Knowledge Based Measurement Of Enhancing Brain Tissue In Anisotropic Mr Imagery

Medical Image Analysis has emerged as an important field in the computer vision community. In this thesis, two important issues in medical imaging are addressed and a solution for each is derived and synergistically combined as one coherent system. Firstly, a novel approach is proposed for High Resolution Volume (HRV) construction by combining different frequency components at multiple levels, which are separated by using a multi-resolution pyramid structure. Current clinical imaging protocols make use of multiple orthogonal low resolution scans to measure the size of the tumor. The highly anisotropic data result in difficulty and even errors in tumor assessment. In previous approaches, simple interpolation has been used to construct HRVs from multiple low resolution volumes (LRVs), which fail when large inter-plane spacing is present. In our approach, Laplacian pyramids containing band-pass contents are first computed from registered LRVs. The Laplacian images are expanded in their low resolution axes separately and then fused at each level. A Gaussian pyramid is recovered from the fused Laplacian pyramid, where a volume at the bottom level of the Gaussian pyramid is the constructed HRV. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated by using simulated images. The method has also been applied to real clinical data and promising experimental results are demonstrated. Secondly, a new knowledge-based framework to automatically quantify the volume of enhancing tissue in brain MR images is proposed. Our approach provides an objective and consistent way to evaluate disease progression and assess the treatment plan. In our approach, enhanced regions are first located by comparing the difference between the aligned set of pre- and post-contrast T1 MR images. Since some normal tissues may also become enhanced by the administration of Gd-DTPA, using the intensity difference alone may not be able to distinguish normal tissue from the tumor. Thus, we propose a new knowledge-based method employing knowledge of anatomical structures from a probabilistic brain atlas and the prior distribution of brain tumor to identify the real enhancing tissue. Our approach has two main advantages. i) The results are invariant to the image contrast change due to the usage of the probabilistic knowledge-based framework. ii) Using the segmented regions instead of independent pixels facilitates an approach that is much less sensitive to small registration errors and image noise. The obtained results are compared to the ground truth for validation and it is shown that the proposed method can achieve accurate and consistent measurements

Comment on "Measuring the Orbital Angular Momentum of a Single Photon"

Optical modes with different orbital angular momentums (OAMs) per photon may be sorted by Mach-Zehnder interferometers incorporated with beam rotators, without resorting to OAM mode converters.Comment: 1 page, 1 figur

Tissue-specific expression and post-translational modifications of plant- and bacterial-type phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase isozymes of the castor oil plant, Ricinus communis L.

This study employs transcript profiling together with immunoblotting and co-immunopurification to assess the tissue-specific expression, protein:protein interactions, and post-translational modifications (PTMs) of plant- and bacterial-type phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase (PEPC) isozymes (PTPC and BTPC, respectively) in the castor plant, Ricinus communis. Previous studies established that the Class-1 PEPC (PTPC homotetramer) of castor oil seeds (COS) is activated by phosphorylation at Ser-11 and inhibited by monoubiquitination at Lys-628 during endosperm development and germination, respectively. Elimination of photosynthate supply to developing COS by depodding caused the PTPC of the endosperm and cotyledon to be dephosphorylated, and then subsequently monoubiquitinated in vivo. PTPC monoubiquitination rather than phosphorylation is widespread throughout the castor plant and appears to be the predominant PTM of Class-1 PEPC that occurs in planta. The distinctive developmental patterns of PTPC phosphorylation versus monoubiquitination indicates that these two PTMs are mutually exclusive. By contrast, the BTPC: (i) is abundant in the inner integument, cotyledon, and endosperm of developing COS, but occurs at low levels in roots and cotyledons of germinated COS, (ii) shows a unique developmental pattern in leaves such that it is present in leaf buds and young expanding leaves, but undetectable in fully expanded leaves, and (iii) tightly interacts with co-expressed PTPC to form the novel and allosterically-desensitized Class-2 PEPC heteromeric complex. BTPC and thus Class-2 PEPC up-regulation appears to be a distinctive feature of rapidly growing and/or biosynthetically active tissues that require a large anaplerotic flux from phosphoenolpyruvate to replenish tricarboxylic acid cycle C-skeletons being withdrawn for anabolism

Minimally Invasive Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic Technologies in Hypothesis-Testing Clinical Trials of Innovative Therapies

Clinical trials of new cancer drugs should ideally include measurements of parameters such as molecular target expression, pharmacokinetic (PK) behavior, and pharmacodynamic (PD) endpoints that can be linked to measures of clinical effect. Appropriate PK/PD biomarkers facilitate proof-of-concept demonstrations for target modulation; enhance the rational selection of an optimal drug dose and schedule; aid decision-making, such as whether to continue or close a drug development project; and may explain or predict clinical outcomes. In addition, measurement of PK/PD biomarkers can minimize uncertainty associated with predicting drug safety and efficacy, reduce the high levels of drug attrition during development, accelerate drug approval, and decrease the overall costs of drug development. However, there are many challenges in the development and implementation of biomarkers that probably explain their disappointingly low implementation in phase I trials. The Pharmacodynamic/Pharmacokinetic Technologies Advisory committee of Cancer Research UK has found that submissions for phase I trials of new cancer drugs in the United Kingdom often lack detailed information about PK and/or PD endpoints, which leads to suboptimal information being obtained in those trials or to delays in starting the trials while PK/PD methods are developed and validated. Minimally invasive PK/PD technologies have logistic and ethical advantages over more invasive technologies. Here we review these technologies, emphasizing magnetic resonance spectroscopy and positron emission tomography, which provide detailed functional and metabolic information. Assays that measure effects of drugs on important biologic pathways and processes are likely to be more cost-effective than those that measure specific molecular targets. Development, validation, and implementation of minimally invasive PK/PD methods are encourage

MR448: Bees and Their Habitats in Four New England States

Bees are crucial to pollination in unmanaged ecosystems and some crops, and their roles are increasingly understood in four states in the Northeastern U.S., abbreviated “NNE” in this paper: Maine (ME), Massachusetts (MA), New Hampshire (NH), and Vermont (VT). The four states have in common many native bee and plant species, forest types, and natural communities. They share drought events and risk of wildfire (Irland 2013). They are exposed to many of the same major storms (e.g., hurricanes, Foster 1988), pollution events (Hand et al. 2014), and effects ascribed to climate change (Hayhoe et al. 2008). Beekeeping enterprises (the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, an introduced species) of various sizes exist in each of the states. By including the four states in this review, we hope to better understand wild bee distributions, inspire the expansion of floral resources to support bee populations in a strategic manner, reduce use of pesticides, create pollinator corridors, and protect subtle habitat features such as ground nest sites for solitary bees and patches of native vegetation that are free of invasive plants. Our objective in this review is to synthesize from a conservation standpoint the state of knowledge regarding bees in NNE, including their diversity, and biology especially as it relates to climate change. We review foraging and nutrition, nest ecology, parasites and parasitoids, native vs. managed bees, and interactions with plants. We then turn our focus to bee habitats, and identify 15 habitat types we find useful for recognizing essential bee resources. We discuss habitat aspects including forest succession, invasive plants, land use alterations, and agriculture including impacts of pesticides, and cover economic aspects of crop-related pollination reservoirs in NNE that demonstrate cost-effectiveness at various scales. We present habitat improvement strategies including passive and active approaches, based on the literature and our experiences in NNE, and we suggest plants for pollinator plantings. Wherever pertinent throughout the text, we highlight threats to bees in our region such as pests and pathogens, pesticides, and habitat loss. Finally, we identify gaps in knowledge that could help in prioritizing directions for future research. We hope this review will be useful to anyone seeking to protect bees and their habitats.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/aes_miscreports/1029/thumbnail.jp

HANDS: a tool for genome-wide discovery of subgenome-specific base-identity in polyploids

BACKGROUND: The analysis of polyploid genomes is problematic because homeologous subgenome sequences are closely related. This relatedness makes it difficult to assign individual sequences to the specific subgenome from which they are derived, and hinders the development of polyploid whole genome assemblies. RESULTS: We here present a next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based approach for assignment of subgenome-specific base-identity at sites containing homeolog-specific polymorphisms (HSPs): ‘HSP base Assignment using NGS data through Diploid Similarity’ (HANDS). We show that HANDS correctly predicts subgenome-specific base-identity at >90% of assayed HSPs in the hexaploid bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) transcriptome, thus providing a substantial increase in accuracy versus previous methods for homeolog-specific base assignment. CONCLUSION: We conclude that HANDS enables rapid and accurate genome-wide discovery of homeolog-specific base-identity, a capability having multiple applications in polyploid genomics