Nevus-Like Appearance of Primary Malignant Melanoma of the Esophagus

The primary malignant melanoma of the esophagus (PMME) is a rare malignant disease, accounting for only 0.1–0.2% of all esophageal neoplasms, and the majority of the patients are diagnosed at advanced stages with poor prognosis. We present here a case of 56-year-old woman with epigastric pain and her endoscopic finding revealed several flat and black pigmented mucosal lesions within the distal portion of the esophagus which looked like flat nevus. The histopathology and immunohistochemical profile of the tissue specimens were diagnostic of malignant melanoma

Multiple Sluicing in English

PACLIC 21 / Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea / November 1-3, 200

DialogBERT: Discourse-Aware Response Generation via Learning to Recover and Rank Utterances

Recent advances in pre-trained language models have significantly improved neural response generation. However, existing methods usually view the dialogue context as a linear sequence of tokens and learn to generate the next word through token-level self-attention. Such token-level encoding hinders the exploration of discourse-level coherence among utterances. This paper presents DialogBERT, a novel conversational response generation model that enhances previous PLM-based dialogue models. DialogBERT employs a hierarchical Transformer architecture. To efficiently capture the discourse-level coherence among utterances, we propose two training objectives, including masked utterance regression and distributed utterance order ranking in analogy to the original BERT training. Experiments on three multi-turn conversation datasets show that our approach remarkably outperforms the baselines, such as BART and DialoGPT, in terms of quantitative evaluation. The human evaluation suggests that DialogBERT generates more coherent, informative, and human-like responses than the baselines with significant margins.Comment: Published as a conference paper at AAAI 202

Determinants Of Enforcement Action By The Financial Supervisory Service Of Korea From The Perspective Of Audit Firms

In this study, we examine the determinants of enforcement action by the Financial Supervisory Service of Korea from the perspective of audit firms. Enforcement action is an indication of audit failure. Both client- and audit firm-specific factors are involved in its occurrence. Most published studies of enforcement after audit failure focus on client characteristics because details about audit firms from financial statements and information about organizational structure are not publicly available. However, examining the issues surrounding enforcement from the perspective of audit firms may also be valuable in elucidating the potential determinants of audit failure resulting in enforcement action. Utilizing publicly available data from audit firms in South Korea, we identify several audit firm characteristics as determinants of enforcement action. The results of our empirical analysis reveal that the likelihood of audit failure is positively associated with the ratio of accounts receivable to total assets, the ratio of audit fees to total revenue, the ratio of partners to the total number of CPAs, CEO ownership, and age of audit firms. In addition, the likelihood of audit failure is negatively associated with ownership concentration and profitability. These associations are more pronounced in non-affiliated audit firms than affiliated audit firms. Several useful implications for regulators are described for improving audit quality by means of enforcement action

Postnatal β-catenin deletion from Dmp1-expressing osteocytes/osteoblasts reduces structural adaptation to loading, but not periosteal load-induced bone formation

Mechanical signal transduction in bone tissue begins with load-induced activation of several cellular pathways in the osteocyte population. A key pathway that participates in mechanotransduction is Wnt/Lrp5 signaling. A putative downstream mediator of activated Lrp5 is the nucleocytoplasmic shuttling protein β-catenin (βcat), which migrates to the nucleus where it functions as a transcriptional co-activator. We investigated whether osteocytic βcat participates in Wnt/Lrp5-mediated mechanotransduction by conducting ulnar loading experiments in mice with or without chemically induced βcat deletion in osteocytes. Mice harboring βcat floxed loss-of-function alleles (βcat(f/f)) were bred to the inducible osteocyte Cre transgenic (10)(kb)Dmp1-CreERt2. Adult male mice were induced to recombine the βcat alleles using tamoxifen, and intermittent ulnar loading sessions were applied over the following week. Although adult-onset deletion of βcat from Dmp1-expressing cells reduced skeletal mass, the bone tissue was responsive to mechanical stimulation as indicated by increased relative periosteal bone formation rates in recombined mice. However, load-induced improvements in cross sectional geometric properties were compromised in recombined mice. The collective results indicate that the osteoanabolic response to loading can occur on the periosteal surface when β-cat levels are significantly reduced in Dmp1-expressing cells, suggesting that either (i) only low levels of β-cat are required for mechanically induced bone formation on the periosteal surface, or (ii) other additional downstream mediators of Lrp5 might participate in transducing load-induced Wnt signaling

Evaluation of a specific diagnostic marker for rheumatoid arthritis based on cyclic citrullinated peptide

AbstractA specific peptide marker for diagnosing rheumatoid arthritis (RA) was found based on cyclic citrullinated peptide (CCP) using the following three steps: (1) analysis of the binding epitope of autoimmune antibodies using ϵ-aminocaproic acid-modified peptides; (2) RA diagnosis using sequence-modified peptides; and (3) evaluation of the peptides’ diagnostic performance for RA diagnosis. Ninety-five serum samples were analyzed by ELISA and compared using MedCalc (version 15.2.1). Microplate binding ϵ-aminocaproic acid was added to the N- or C-terminal of the CCP sequence. The N-terminal anchoring peptide assay showed 15% higher specificity compared with the C-terminal anchoring peptide assay. Based on this result, the hydrophilic C-terminal sequence of CCP was substituted with a hydrophobic amino acid. Among the sequence-modified peptides, CCP11A (in which alanine was substituted for the 11th amino acid of CCP) assay showed the highest sensitivity (87%) and specificity (100%) for RA diagnosis. Thus, CCP11A was selected as a possible specific marker peptide for RA diagnosis and further analyzed. The results of this analysis indicated that CCP11A showed better specificity than the CCP assay in both healthy individuals (11% better) and OA cohort (20% better). From these results, CCP11A was evaluated as a specific marker for diagnosing RA with higher diagnostic performance