1,584 research outputs found
Rhomboid family member 2 regulates cytoskeletal stress-associated Keratin 16.
Keratin 16 (K16) is a cytoskeletal scaffolding protein highly expressed at pressure-bearing sites of the mammalian footpad. It can be induced in hyperproliferative states such as wound healing, inflammation and cancer. Here we show that the inactive rhomboid protease RHBDF2 (iRHOM2) regulates thickening of the footpad epidermis through its interaction with K16. K16 expression is absent in the thinned footpads of irhom2-/- mice compared with irhom2+/+mice, due to reduced keratinocyte proliferation. Gain-of-function mutations in iRHOM2 underlie Tylosis with oesophageal cancer (TOC), characterized by palmoplantar thickening, upregulate K16 with robust downregulation of its type II keratin binding partner, K6. By orchestrating the remodelling and turnover of K16, and uncoupling it from K6, iRHOM2 regulates the epithelial response to physical stress. These findings contribute to our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying hyperproliferation of the palmoplantar epidermis in both physiological and disease states, and how this 'stress' keratin is regulated
hypersaline infusion protocol through the portal vein may focus electroporation on tumor tissue, but is it really safe? Ppreliminary results
Introduction: irreversible Electroporation (IRE) is highly dependent on the electrical conductivity of the tissue and the high conductivity of tumor tissue, which leads to a lower field than that in the surrounding healthy tissue. Hypersaline Infusion (HI) through the portal vein focuses IRE on scattered liver tumors, by creating a differential conductivity between the different types of tissue. The aim of this study is to determine the effects of the HI protocol on the hepatic and histological biochemical results. Methods: Ten male Sprague Dawley rats were used for HI protocol. Blood samples were collected at pre-, immediately post-, 24-hrs, 72-hrs, 1- week and 3-weeks post-HI. All the animals were sacrificed after a one-month follow-up in order to collect histological samples. Results: The mortality rate in this procedure reached 30% (3/10). Only the pH and transaminases at 24-hrs were significantly and directly linked to mortality (p=0.036 and p=0.004, respectively). The three non-surviving animals had a four-time higher AST level at 24-hrs. Natremianormalized at 24-hrs post-HI. Statistically significant differences were found in hepatic necrosis between the non-surviving (n=3) and surviving rats (n=7) (30.67 ± 10.97 vs. 2.86 ± 7.56% respectively, p=0.01). Discussion: HI through the portal system involves a significant risk of possibly lethal cytolysis and acidosis. Therefore, compensatory measures and a reduced saline overload are warranted to improve the survival rates
Keep it SMPL: Automatic Estimation of 3D Human Pose and Shape from a Single Image
We describe the first method to automatically estimate the 3D pose of the
human body as well as its 3D shape from a single unconstrained image. We
estimate a full 3D mesh and show that 2D joints alone carry a surprising amount
of information about body shape. The problem is challenging because of the
complexity of the human body, articulation, occlusion, clothing, lighting, and
the inherent ambiguity in inferring 3D from 2D. To solve this, we first use a
recently published CNN-based method, DeepCut, to predict (bottom-up) the 2D
body joint locations. We then fit (top-down) a recently published statistical
body shape model, called SMPL, to the 2D joints. We do so by minimizing an
objective function that penalizes the error between the projected 3D model
joints and detected 2D joints. Because SMPL captures correlations in human
shape across the population, we are able to robustly fit it to very little
data. We further leverage the 3D model to prevent solutions that cause
interpenetration. We evaluate our method, SMPLify, on the Leeds Sports,
HumanEva, and Human3.6M datasets, showing superior pose accuracy with respect
to the state of the art.Comment: To appear in ECCV 201
Equilibrium shapes and energies of coherent strained InP islands
The equilibrium shapes and energies of coherent strained InP islands grown on
GaP have been investigated with a hybrid approach that has been previously
applied to InAs islands on GaAs. This combines calculations of the surface
energies by density functional theory and the bulk deformation energies by
continuum elasticity theory. The calculated equilibrium shapes for different
chemical environments exhibit the {101}, {111}, {\=1\=1\=1} facets and a (001)
top surface. They compare quite well with recent atomic-force microscopy data.
Thus in the InP/GaInP-system a considerable equilibration of the individual
islands with respect to their shapes can be achieved. We discuss the
implications of our results for the Ostwald ripening of the coherent InP
islands. In addition we compare strain fields in uncapped and capped islands.Comment: 10 pages including 6 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev. B. Related
publications can be found at http://www.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/th/paper.htm
Do Not Mask What You Do Not Need to Mask: a Parser-Free Virtual Try-On
The 2D virtual try-on task has recently attracted a great interest from the
research community, for its direct potential applications in online shopping as
well as for its inherent and non-addressed scientific challenges. This task
requires fitting an in-shop cloth image on the image of a person, which is
highly challenging because it involves cloth warping, image compositing, and
synthesizing. Casting virtual try-on into a supervised task faces a difficulty:
available datasets are composed of pairs of pictures (cloth, person wearing the
cloth). Thus, we have no access to ground-truth when the cloth on the person
changes. State-of-the-art models solve this by masking the cloth information on
the person with both a human parser and a pose estimator. Then, image synthesis
modules are trained to reconstruct the person image from the masked person
image and the cloth image. This procedure has several caveats: firstly, human
parsers are prone to errors; secondly, it is a costly pre-processing step,
which also has to be applied at inference time; finally, it makes the task
harder than it is since the mask covers information that should be kept such as
hands or accessories. In this paper, we propose a novel student-teacher
paradigm where the teacher is trained in the standard way (reconstruction)
before guiding the student to focus on the initial task (changing the cloth).
The student additionally learns from an adversarial loss, which pushes it to
follow the distribution of the real images. Consequently, the student exploits
information that is masked to the teacher. A student trained without the
adversarial loss would not use this information. Also, getting rid of both
human parser and pose estimator at inference time allows obtaining a real-time
virtual try-on.Comment: Accepted at ECCV 2020. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1906.0134
A 1.16-{\mu}m-radius disk cavity in a sunflower-type circular photonic crystal with ultrahigh quality factor
We present a 1.16-\mum-radius disk cavity with ultrahigh quality (Q) factor
by embedding the disk into a sunflower-type circular photonic crystal (CPC).
The band gap of the CPC reduces the bending loss of the whispering-gallery mode
of the disk, leading to a simulated Q of 10^7, at least one order of magnitude
higher than a bare disk of the same size. The design is experimentally verified
with a record high loaded Q of 7.4 \times 10^5 measured from an optimized
device fabricated on a silicon-on-insulator substrate
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