Effects of ranibizumab on human corneal endothelial cells

AbstractPurposeThis study aims to evaluate corneal endothelial changes occurring over a 3-month period after intravitreal injections of ranibizumab in patients with wet age-related macular degeneration.MethodsThis is a prospective case series. A total of 29 patients (29 eyes) received a 0.5-mg intravitreal injection of ranibizumab. Specular microscopy, including measurement of central corneal thickness and endothelial cell count, was performed on each patient prior to and after completing three intravitreal injections.ResultsAll patients received three intravitreal injections and were followed up for a mean of 3 months. There was no significant change in corneal thickness (p = 0.32) or endothelial cell density (p = 0.38) after ranibizumab injections.ConclusionIntravitreal ranibizumab injections (0.5 mg) have no harmful effects on corneal endothelial cells

Dysregulated Apoptosis Through the Intrinsic Pathway in the Internal Spermatic Vein of Patients With Varicocele

Background/PurposeApoptosis plays a critical role in various physiological processes. Varicocele is the most common cause of male infertility in adults. The dilated and thickened wall of the internal spermatic vein (ISV) in varicocele is considered similar to that in varicose veins. We investigated apoptotic protein expression in the ISV of varicocele, including Bcl-2, Fas, caspase-8 and caspase-9, to determine the intrinsic or extrinsic pathway.MethodsThe study group consisted of 10 patients with grade 3 left varicocele. The control group consisted of 10 patients with left indirect inguinal hernia. A 1-cm section of ISV was resected, using left inguinal incision, from each patient in both groups. The ISV sections were used to detect the mediators that regulate the intrinsic (Bcl-2 and caspase-9) and extrinsic (Fas and caspase-8) apoptotic pathways, by immunoblotting and immunohistochemical staining. Results were analyzed using Student's t tests.ResultsBcl-2, Fas, caspase-8 and caspase-9 immunoblots from both groups revealed a single band. The relative intensities of the Bcl-2 and caspase-9 protein bands differed significantly between the varicocele and control groups. Thickening of the smooth muscle layer of the ISV was found in patients with varicocele compared with the control group. Bcl-2 overexpression and downregulation of caspase-9 expression were noted in the varicocele group. There was no significant difference in Fas or caspase-8 expression in either group.ConclusionWe showed overexpression of Bcl-2 and downregulation of caspase-9 expression in the ISV under hypoxic stress. This indicated dysregulated apoptosis through the intrinsic pathway in the ISV of patients with varicocele. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of the apoptotic pathway in the human ISV. Additional studies are needed to establish whether adjunctive hyperbaric oxygen therapy reduces the recurrence rate after varicocelectomy

3DFeat-Net: Weakly Supervised Local 3D Features for Point Cloud Registration

In this paper, we propose the 3DFeat-Net which learns both 3D feature detector and descriptor for point cloud matching using weak supervision. Unlike many existing works, we do not require manual annotation of matching point clusters. Instead, we leverage on alignment and attention mechanisms to learn feature correspondences from GPS/INS tagged 3D point clouds without explicitly specifying them. We create training and benchmark outdoor Lidar datasets, and experiments show that 3DFeat-Net obtains state-of-the-art performance on these gravity-aligned datasets.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures. Accepted in ECCV 201

NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social Norms

We present NormBank, a knowledge bank of 155k situational norms. This resource is designed to ground flexible normative reasoning for interactive, assistive, and collaborative AI systems. Unlike prior commonsense resources, NormBank grounds each inference within a multivalent sociocultural frame, which includes the setting (e.g., restaurant), the agents' contingent roles (waiter, customer), their attributes (age, gender), and other physical, social, and cultural constraints (e.g., the temperature or the country of operation). In total, NormBank contains 63k unique constraints from a taxonomy that we introduce and iteratively refine here. Constraints then apply in different combinations to frame social norms. Under these manipulations, norms are non-monotonic - one can cancel an inference by updating its frame even slightly. Still, we find evidence that neural models can help reliably extend the scope and coverage of NormBank. We further demonstrate the utility of this resource with a series of transfer experiments

Evolution of the DAZ gene and the AZFc region on primate Y chromosomes

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The <it>Azoospermia Factor c </it>(<it>AZFc</it>) region of the human Y chromosome is a unique product of segmental duplication. It consists almost entirely of very long amplicons, represented by different colors, and is frequently deleted in subfertile men. Most of the <it>AZFc </it>amplicons have high sequence similarity with autosomal segments, indicating recent duplication and transposition to the Y chromosome. The <it>Deleted in Azoospermia </it>(<it>DAZ</it>) gene within the red-amplicon arose from an ancestral autosomal <it>DAZ-like </it>(<it>DAZL</it>) gene. It varies significantly between different men regarding to its copy number and the numbers of RNA recognition motif and DAZ repeat it encodes. We used Southern analyses to study the evolution of <it>DAZ </it>and <it>AZFc </it>amplicons on the Y chromosomes of primates.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The Old World monkey rhesus macaque has only one <it>DAZ </it>gene. In contrast, the great apes have multiple copies of <it>DAZ</it>, ranging from 2 copies in bonobos and gorillas to at least 6 copies in orangutans, and these <it>DAZ </it>genes have polymorphic structures similar to those of their human counterparts. Sequences homologous to the various <it>AZFc </it>amplicons are present on the Y chromosomes of some but not all primates, indicating that they arrived on the Y chromosome at different times during primate evolution.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The duplication and transposition of <it>AZFc </it>amplicons to the human Y chromosome occurred in three waves, i.e., after the branching of the New World monkey, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee/bonobo lineages, respectively. The red-amplicon, one of the first to arrive on the Y chromosome, amplified by inverted duplication followed by direct duplication after the separation of the Old World monkey and the great ape lineages. Subsequent duplication/deletion in the various lineages gave rise to a spectrum of <it>DAZ </it>gene structure and copy number found in today's great apes.</p