Association between diverticulosis and colonic neoplastic lesions in individuals with a positive faecal immunochemical test

Background The association between diverticulosis and colonic neoplastic lesions has been suggested, but data in literature are conflicting. This study aimed to investigate such a relationship in patients participating in a colorectal cancer screening program who underwent high-quality colonoscopy.Methods Data from consecutive individuals 50-75 years of age with a positive faecal immunological test were considered. Diverticulosis was categorised as present or absent. The prevalence of neoplastic lesions (adenoma, advanced adenoma, and cancer) between individuals with and those without diverticula was compared. A multivariate analysis was performed.Results Overall, data from 970 consecutive individuals were evaluated, and diverticulosis was detected in 354 (36.5%) cases. At least one adenoma was detected in 490 (50.5%) people, at least one advanced adenoma in 264 (27.2%), multiple adenoma in 71 (7.3%), whilst a cancer was diagnosed in 48 (4.9%) cases. At univariate analysis, the adenoma detection rate in patients with diverticula was significantly higher than in controls (55.9% vs 47.4%; p=0.011). At multivariate analysis, presence of diverticulosis was an independent risk factor for both adenoma detection rate (OR=1.58; 95% CI=1.14-2.18; p=0.006) and advanced adenoma (OR=1.57; 95% CI=1.10-2.24; p=0.013), but not for colorectal cancer.Conclusions In a colorectal screening setting, the adenoma detection rate was significantly higher in individuals with diverticulosis than in controls

Intelligent methods for information access in context: The role of topic descriptors and discriminators

Successful access to information sources on the Web depends on effective methods for identifying the needs of a user and making relevant information resources available when needed. This paper formulates a theoretical framework for the study of context-drivenWeb search and proposes new methods for learning query terms based on the user task. These methods use an incrementally-retrieved, topic-dependent selection of Web documents for term-weight reinforcement reflecting the aptness of the terms in describing and discriminating the topic of the user context. Based on this framework, we propose an incremental search algorithm for information retrieval agents that has the potential to improve significantly over the traditional IR techniques. The new algorithm learns new descriptors by searching for terms that tend to occur often in relevant documents, and learns good discriminators by identifying terms that tend to occur only in the context of the given topic. We discuss the technical challenges posed by this new framework, outline our agent system architecture, and present an evaluation of the proposed techniques.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Spitzer-MIPS survey of the young stellar content in the Vela Molecular Cloud-D

A new, unbiased Spitzer-MIPS imaging survey (~1.8 square degs) of the young stellar content of the Vela Molecular Cloud-D is presented. The survey is complete down to 5mJy and 250mJy at 24micron (mu) and 70mu, respectively. 849 sources are detected at 24mu and 52 of them also have a 70mu counterpart. The VMR-D region is one that we have already partially mapped in dust and gas millimeter emission, and we discuss the correlation between the Spitzer compact sources and the mm contours. About half of the 24mu sources are located inside the region delimited by the 12CO(1-0) contours (corresponding to only one third of the full area mapped with MIPS) with a consequent density increase of about 100% of the 24mu sources [four times for 70mu ones] moving from outside to inside the CO contours. About 400 sources have a 2MASS counterpart. So we have constructed a Ks vs. Ks-[24] diagram and identified the protostellar population. We find an excess of Class I sources in VMR-D in comparison with other star forming regions. This result is reasonably biased by the sensitivity limits, or, alternatively, may reflect a very short lifetime (<=10^6yr) of the protostellar content in this cloud. The MIPS images have identified embedded cool objects in most of the previously identified starless cores; in addition, there are 6 very young, possibly Class 0 objects identified. Finally we report finding of the driving sources for a set of five out of six very compact protostellar jets previously discovered in near-infrared images.Comment: 29 pages, 14 figures. To appear in Ap.

Evidence for T Tauri-like emission in the EXor V1118 Ori from near-IR and X-ray data

We present a near-IR study of the EXor variable V1118 Ori, performed by following a slightly declining phase after a recent outburst. In particular, the near-IR (0.8 - 2.3 micron) spectrum, obtained for the first time, shows a large variety of emission features of the HI and HeI recombination and CO overtone. By comparing the observed spectrum with a wind model, a mass loss rate value is derived along with other parameters whose values are typical of an accreting T Tauri star. In addition, we have used X-ray data from the XMM archive, taken in two different epochs during the declining phase monitored in IR. X-ray emission (in the range 0.5 - 10 keV) permits to derive several parameters which confirm the T Tauri nature of the source. In the near-IR the object maintains a low visual extinction during all the activity phases, confirming that variable extinction does not contribute to brightness variations. The lack of both a significant amount of circumstellar material and any evidence of IR cooling from collimated jet/outflow driven by the source, indicates that, at least this member of the EXor class, is in a late stage of the Pre-Main Sequence evolution. In the X-ray regime, an evident fading is present, detected in the post-outburst phase, that cannot be reconciled with the presence of any absorbing material. This circumstance, combined with the persistence (in the pre- and post-outburst phases) of a temperature component at about 10 MK, suggests that accretion has some influence in regulating the coronal activity

An Entropy-Based Approach for Preserving Diversity in Evolutionary Topical Search

Topic-based information retrieval is the process of matching a topic of interest against the resources that are indexed. An approach for retrieving topicrelevant resources is to generate queries that are able to reflect the topic of interest. Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms have demonstrated great potential to deal with the problem of topical query generation. In an evolutionary approach to topic-based information retrieval the topic of interest is used to generate an initial population of queries, which is evolved towards successively better candidate queries. A common problem with such an approach is poor recall due to loss of genetic diversity. This work proposes a novel strategy inspired on the information theoretic notion of entropy to favor population diversity with the aim of attaining good global recall. Preliminary experiments conducted on a large dataset of labeled documents show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

An Entropy-Based Approach for Preserving Diversity in Evolutionary Topical Search

Topic-based information retrieval is the process of matching a topic of interest against the resources that are indexed. An approach for retrieving topicrelevant resources is to generate queries that are able to reflect the topic of interest. Multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithms have demonstrated great potential to deal with the problem of topical query generation. In an evolutionary approach to topic-based information retrieval the topic of interest is used to generate an initial population of queries, which is evolved towards successively better candidate queries. A common problem with such an approach is poor recall due to loss of genetic diversity. This work proposes a novel strategy inspired on the information theoretic notion of entropy to favor population diversity with the aim of attaining good global recall. Preliminary experiments conducted on a large dataset of labeled documents show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor association with amygdala response in major depressive disorder

Background: Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) has an essential role in synaptic plasticity and neurogenesis. BDNF mediates amygdala-dependent learning for both aversive and appetitive emotional memories. The expression of BDNF in limbic regions is posited to contribute the development of depression, and amygdala responsivity is a potential marker of depressive state. Methods: The present study examined the relationship between platelet BDNF levels and amygdala volume and function in major depressive disorder (MDD). Participants were 23 MDD (mean age 38.9 years) and 23 healthy controls (mean age 38.8 years). All participants were recruited from the community. MDD participants were in a current depressive episode of moderate severity and medication-free. Amygdala responses were acquired during a functional MRI task of implicit emotional processing with sad facial expressions. Results: Significant correlation was observed between platelet BDNF levels and left amygdala responses, but no significant correlations were found with right amygdala responses or with amygdala volumes. Limitations: Interactions with neuroprotective as well as neurotoxic metabolites in the kyneurenine pathway were not examined. Conclusions: Relationship between BDNF levels and amygdala responsivity to emotionally salient stimuli in MDD could reflect the importance of BDNF in amygdala-dependent learning with clinical implications for potential pathways for treatment

Genetic algorithms for topical web search: A study of different mutation rates

Harvesting topical content is a process that can be done by formulating topic-relevant queries and submitting them to a search engine. The quality of the material collected through this process is highly dependant on the vocabulary used to generate the search queries. In this scenario, selecting good query terms can be seen as an optimization problem where the objective function to be optimized is based on the effectiveness of a query to retrieve relevant material. Three characteristics of this optimization problem are (1) the high-dimensionality of the search space, where candidate solutions are queries and each term corresponds to a different dimension, (2) the existence of acceptable suboptimal solutions, and (3) the possibility of finding multiple solutions. This paper describes optimization techniques based on Genetic Algorithms to evolve “good query terms” in the context of a given topic. We discuss the use of a mutation pool to allow the generation of queries with novel terms, and study the effect of different mutation rates on the exploration of query-space.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Strong H₂O and high-<i>J</i> CO emission towards the Class 0 protostar L1448-mm

The spectrum of the Class 0 source L1448-mm has been measured over the wavelength range extending from 6 to 190 μm with the Long Wavelength Spectrometer (LWS) and the Short Wavelength Spectrometer (SWS) on the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO). The far infrared spectrum is dominated by strong emission from gaseous H2O and from CO transitions with rotational quantum numbers J ≥ 14; in addition, the H2 pure rotational lines S(3), S(4) and S(5), the OH fundamental line at 119 μm, as well as emission from [O I]63 μm and [C II] 158 μm are also observed. The strong CO and water emission can be consistently explained as originating in a warm gas component at T ~ 700-1400 K and nH2~(3-50) 104cm-3 , which fills about 0.2-2% of the ~ 75" LWS field of view (corresponding, assuming a single emitting region, to a physical size of about (3-12)" or (0.5-2) 10-2 pc at d = 300 pc). We derive an H2O/CO abundance ratio ~ 5, which, assuming a standard CO/H2 abundance of 10-4, corresponds to H2O/H2 ~ 5 10-4. This value implies that water is enhanced by about a factor ~ 103 with respect to its expected abundance in the ambient gas. This is consistent with models of warm shocked regions which predict that most of the free atomic oxygen will be rapidly converted into water once the temperature of the post-shocked gas exceeds ~ 300 K. The relatively high density and compact size inferred for this emission may suggest an origin in the shocked region along the molecular jet traced by SiO and EHV CO millimeter line emission. Further support is given by the fact that the observed enhancement in H2O can be explained by shock conditions similar to those expected to produce the abundant SiO observed in the region. L1448-mm shows the largest water abundance so far observed by ISO amongst young sources displaying outflow activity; we argue that the occurrence of multiple shocks over a relatively short interval of time, like that evidenced in the surroundings of L1448-mm, could have contributed to enrich the molecular jet with a high H2O column density