Effect of Hot-Air Room Treatment on Peripheral Leucocytes in Guinea Pigs 1. Effect of Single 30 Min. Hot-Air Room Treatment on Leucocytes Count

Effect of hot-air room treatment on peripheral leucocytes was examined in guinea pigs by observing the numerical changes after the treatment. The results were as follows. 1. Number of totalleucocytes was decreased immediately after hot-air room treatment with a room temperature of 43℃, humidity of 75-87% and rapidly increased from 30 to 120 min after the treatment. Numerical changes of neutrophils showed a same tendency as that of total leucocytes. 2. Lymphocyte count was not changed or slightly decreased after the hot-air room treatment. 3. Number of basophils was decreased 30 min after the treatment and then increased, differing from that of eosinophils which showed a decreased tendency 120 min after the treatment. 4. Numbers of monocytes and Kurloff cells were slightly increased after the treatment

RAP: Risk-Aware Prediction for Robust Planning

Robust planning in interactive scenarios requires predicting the uncertain future to make risk-aware decisions. Unfortunately, due to long-tail safety-critical events, the risk is often under-estimated by finite-sampling approximations of probabilistic motion forecasts. This can lead to overconfident and unsafe robot behavior, even with robust planners. Instead of assuming full prediction coverage that robust planners require, we propose to make prediction itself risk-aware. We introduce a new prediction objective to learn a risk-biased distribution over trajectories, so that risk evaluation simplifies to an expected cost estimation under this biased distribution. This reduces the sample complexity of the risk estimation during online planning, which is needed for safe real-time performance. Evaluation results in a didactic simulation environment and on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: 23 pages, 14 figures, 3 tables. First two authors contributed equally. Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2022 (oral

Residual Q-Learning: Offline and Online Policy Customization without Value

Imitation Learning (IL) is a widely used framework for learning imitative behavior from demonstrations. It is especially appealing for solving complex real-world tasks where handcrafting reward function is difficult, or when the goal is to mimic human expert behavior. However, the learned imitative policy can only follow the behavior in the demonstration. When applying the imitative policy, we may need to customize the policy behavior to meet different requirements coming from diverse downstream tasks. Meanwhile, we still want the customized policy to maintain its imitative nature. To this end, we formulate a new problem setting called policy customization. It defines the learning task as training a policy that inherits the characteristics of the prior policy while satisfying some additional requirements imposed by a target downstream task. We propose a novel and principled approach to interpret and determine the trade-off between the two task objectives. Specifically, we formulate the customization problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) with a reward function that combines 1) the inherent reward of the demonstration; and 2) the add-on reward specified by the downstream task. We propose a novel framework, Residual Q-learning, which can solve the formulated MDP by leveraging the prior policy without knowing the inherent reward or value function of the prior policy. We derive a family of residual Q-learning algorithms that can realize offline and online policy customization, and show that the proposed algorithms can effectively accomplish policy customization tasks in various environments. Demo videos and code are available on our website: https://sites.google.com/view/residualq-learning.Comment: Accepted by 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2023). The first two authors contributed equall

Identification of a potent immunostimulatory oligodeoxynucleotide from Streptococcus thermophilus lacZ

Immunostimulatory sequences of oligodeoxynucleotides (ODNs), such as CpG ODNs, are potent stimulators of innate immunity. Here, we identified a strong immunostimulatory CpG ODN, which we named MsST, from the lac Z gene of Streptococcus (S.) thermophilus ATCC19258, and we evaluated its immune functions. In in vitro studies, MsST had a similar ability as the murine prototype CpG ODN 1555 to induce inflammatory cytokine production and cell proliferation. In mouse splenocytes, MsST increased the number of CD80+CD11c+and CD86+CD11c+ dendritic cells and CD4+CD25+ regulatory T cells. We also analyzed the effects of MsST on the expression of regulatory cytokines by real-time quantitative PCR. MsST was more potent at inducing interleukin-10 expression than the ODN control 1612, indicating that MsST can augment the regulatory T cell response via Toll-like receptor 9, which plays an important role in suppressing T helper type 2 responses. These results suggest that S. thermophilus, whose genes include a strong Immunostimulatory sequence-ODN, is a good candidate for a starter culture to develop new physiologically functional foods and feeds.ArticleANIMAL SCIENCE JOURNAL. 80(5):597-604 (2009)journal articl

Prevalence of Viral Frequency-Dependent Infection in Coastal Marine Prokaryotes Revealed Using Monthly Time Series Virome Analysis

海洋微生物も”密”ならウイルスに感染する --頻度依存的なウイルス感染を大阪湾で実証--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2023-02-24.Viruses infecting marine prokaryotes have a large impact on the diversity and dynamics of their hosts. Model systems suggest that viral infection is frequency dependent and constrained by the virus-host encounter rate. However, it is unclear whether frequency-dependent infection is pervasive among the abundant prokaryotic populations with different temporal dynamics. To address this question, we performed a comparison of prokaryotic and viral communities using 16S rRNA amplicon and virome sequencing based on samples collected monthly for 2 years at a Japanese coastal site, Osaka Bay. Concurrent seasonal shifts observed in prokaryotic and viral community dynamics indicated that the abundance of viruses correlated with that of their predicted host phyla (or classes). Cooccurrence network analysis between abundant prokaryotes and viruses revealed 6, 423 cooccurring pairs, suggesting a tight coupling of host and viral abundances and their “one-to-many” correspondence. Although stable dominant species, such as SAR11, showed few cooccurring viruses, a fast succession of their viruses suggests that viruses infecting these populations changed continuously. Our results suggest that frequency-dependent viral infection prevails in coastal marine prokaryotes regardless of host taxa and temporal dynamics

Idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease with positive antiphospholipid antibody: atypical and undiagnosed autoimmune disease?

Idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease (iMCD) is a systemic disorder characterized by systemic inflammation and organ dysfunction associated with an increase in pro-inflammatory cytokines. Some patients with iMCD are positive for autoantibodies, although their significance and relationship with specific associated autoimmune diseases are unclear. This study retrospectively analyzed the clinicopathological features of iMCD patients focusing on autoantibodies. Among 63 iMCD patients in our database, 19 were positive for at least one autoantibody. Among the 19, we identified five with plasma cell type (PC)-iMCD lymph node histopathology and positive anti-phospholipid antibodies. These patients were likely to have thrombocytopenia, anasarca, fever, reticulin fibrosis or renal insufficiency, organomegaly (TAFRO) symptoms, and thrombotic events. The present study suggests that patients with undiagnosed or atypical autoimmune diseases, including anti-phospholipid syndrome (APS), were treated for iMCD. APS may present with thrombocytopenia or even multi-organ failure, which overlap with clinical presentations of iMCD. Due to differences in the treatment regimen and follow-up, recognition of the undiagnosed autoimmune disease process in those suspected of iMCD is essential. Our study highlights the importance of complete exclusion of differential diagnoses in patients with iMCD in their diagnostic workup

Effect of Hot-Air Room Treatment on Peripheral Leucocytes in Guinea Pigs 2. Effect of 30 Min. Hot-Air Room Treatment for 22 Days on Leucocytes Count

Numerical changes of peripheral leucocytes after a hot-air room treatment was observed in guinea pigs during the 22 days' successive treatment. The results were as follows. 1. Number of various leucocytes was generally decreased after the hot-air room treatment, followed by recovery to the value before treatments during 22 days' observations. 2. Numbers of total leucocytes, lymphocytes and eosinophils, which were decreased after the treatment, gradually recovered to the value before treatments during the daily hot-air room treatment. On the other hand, the recovery of neutrophils or monocytes to the count before treatment was more rapidly. The value in numerical changes of neutrophils became smaller as the hot-air room treatments were performed for many days. 3. Numerical changes of basophils and Kurloff cells did not show any definite tendency after the hot-air room treatment. 4. Numbers of total leucocytes, neutrophils, lymphocytes and eosinophils were increased and monocyte count was slightly decreased after the 22days hot-air room treatment. No change was observed in the counts of basophils and Kurloff cells

Video-Assisted Thoracic Surgery (VATS) for Stabbing Thoracic Injury

The patient was a 30-year-old male who was found after he had stabbed himself in the left side of the chest and collapsed. He was brought to our hospital to undergo immediate drainage of the thoracic cavity. The chest X-ray and chest computed tomography findings showed that the knife was situated from the left cardiac border toward the proximity of the diaphragm, thus resulting in hemopneumothorax. The patient’s vital signs were stable, and we believed that it was important to avoid secondary injury when removing the knife from the thoracic cavity. Therefore, we performed video-assisted thoracic surgery (VATS). We resected the considerably crushed lung and sutured the lacerated myocardium by VATS. The postoperative course was good. We believe that VATS for thoracic injury can be an effective surgical option if a patient’s vital signs are stable