Salient collinear grouping diminishes local salience in visual search: An eye movement study

SCI Impact Factor(2011)=2.417[[abstract]]Our eyes and attention are easily attracted to salient items in search displays. When a target is spatially overlapped with a salient distractor (overlapping target), it is usually detected more easily than when it is not (nonoverlapping target). Jingling and Tseng (2013), however, found that a salient distractor impaired visual search when the distractor was comprised of more than nine bars collinearly aligned to each other. In this study, we examined whether this search impairment is due to reduction of salience on overlapping targets. We used the short-latency saccades as an index for perceptual salience. Results showed that a long collinear distractor decreases perceptual salience of local overlapping targets in comparison to nonoverlapping targets, reflected by a smaller proportion of the short-latency saccades. Meanwhile, a salient noncollinear distractor increases salience of overlapping targets. Our results led us to conclude that a long collinear distractor diminishes the perceptual salience of the target, a factor which poses a counter-intuitive condition in which a target on a salient region becomes less salient. We discuss the possible causes for our findings, including crowding, the global precedence effect, and the filling-in of a collinear contour.[[notice]]補正完畢[[incitationindex]]SCI[[ispeerreviewed]]Y[[booktype]]電子版[[countrycodes]]US

Energy Wall for Exascale Supercomputing

"Sustainable development" is one of the major issues in the 21st century. Thus the notions of green computing, green development and so on show up one after another. As the large-scale parallel computing systems develop rapidly, energy consumption of such systems is becoming very huge, especially system performance reaches Petascale (10^15 Flops) or even Exascale (10^18 Flops). The huge energy consumption increases the system temperature, which seriously undermines the stability and reliability, and limits the growth of system size. The effects of energy consumption on scalability become a growing concern. Against the background, this paper proposes the concept of "Energy Wall" to highlight the significance of achieving scalable performance in peta/exascale supercomputing by taking energy consumption into account. We quantify the effect of energy consumption on scalability by building the energy-efficiency speedup model, which integrates computing performance and system energy. We define the energy wall quantitatively, and provide the theorem on the existence of the energy wall, and categorize the large-scale parallel computers according to the energy consumption. In the context of several representative types of HPC applications, we analyze and extrapolate the existence of the energy wall considering three kinds of topologies, 3D-Torus, binary n-cube and Fat tree which provides insights on how to mitigate the energy wall effect in system design and through hardware/software optimization in peta/exascale supercomputing

Novel murine tumour models depend on strain and route of inoculation

This study describes variations in tumour growth patterns which occur when changes in the routes of inoculation and mouse strain are used to introduce tumours into established murine model systems that are known to vary in location and aggression. Intraperitoneal, subcutaneous, intravenous and hydrodynamic inoculations of B16F10 cells were compared among CD-1, C57BL/6 and Balb/c mice. Most surprisingly, allogeneic tumour growth in Balb/c mice after intravenous and hydrodynamic inoculation of B16F10 cells was faster than tumour growth in the syngeneic C57BL/6 mice. These and other variations in the tumour growth patterns described here can help provide the researcher with more experimental control when planning to use the optimal tumour model for any particular study

Vitamin E reverses multidrug resistance in vitro and in vivo

Multidrug resistance (MDR) is a major obstacle to successful and effective chemotherapeutic treatments of cancers. This study explored the reversal effects of vitamin E on MDR tumor cells in vitro and in vivo, elucidating the potential mechanism of this reversal. VE at a concentration of 50 μM exhibited a significant reversal of the MDR effect (compared to only PTX in DMSO, p < 0.05) in two human MDR cell lines (H460/taxR and KB-8-5). The MDR cell xenograft model was established to investigate the effect of VE on reversing MDR in vivo. Mice intravenously injected with Taxol (10 mg/kg) with VE (500 mg/kg, IP) showed an ability to overcome the MDR. VE and its derivatives can significantly increase intracellular accumulation of rhodamine 123 and doxorubicin (P-gp substrate), but not alter the levels of P-gp expression. These treatments also did not decrease the levels of intracellular ATP, but were still able to inhibit the verapamil-induced ATPase activity of P-gp. The new application of VE as an MDR sensitizer will be attractive due to the safety of this treatment

Molecular-matched materials for anticancer drug delivery and imaging

In this study, we aim to construct nanoformulation with high-cargo loading and controlled serum kinetics

Multifunctional Nanoparticles Based on a Single-Molecule Modification for the Treatment of Drug-Resistant Cancer

Multidrug resistance (MDR) is a major cause of failure in cancer chemotherapy. Tocopheryl polyethylene glycol 1000 succinate (TPGS) has been extensively explored for the treatment of MDR in cancer because of its ability to inhibit P-glycoprotein. Here, we have established multifunctional nanoparticles (MFNPs) using a single-molecule modification of TPGS, which can deliver a hydrophobic drug, paclitaxel (PTX), and a hydrophilic drug, fluorouracil (5-FU), and overcome MDR in cancer. Our data indicated that, when delivered into a PTX-resistant cell line using MFNPs, the combination of PTX and 5-FU was more cytotoxic than each agent individually

Key Structure of Brij for Overcoming Multidrug Resistance in Cancer

Multidrug resistance (MDR) is a major barrier to the chemotherapy treatment of many cancers. However, some non-ionic surfactants, for example Brij, have been shown to restore the sensitivity of MDR cells to such drugs. The aim of this study was to explore the reversal effect of Brij on MDR tumor cells and elucidate its potential mechanism. Our data indicate that the structure of Brij surfactants plays an important role in overcoming MDR in cancer, i.e. modified hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (MHLB, the ratio of the number (n) of hydrophilic repeating units of ethylene oxide (EO) to the number (m) of carbons in the hydrophobic tail (CH2).). Cell viability of cells treated with paclitaxel (PTX) nanocrystals (NCs) formulated with Brij showed positive correlations with MHLB (R2 = 0.8195); the higher the ratio of Brij to PTX in NCs, the higher cytotoxicity induced by the PTX NCs. Significant increases in intracellular accumulation of 3H-PTX (P-gp substrate) were observed in an MDR cell line (H460/taxR cells) treated with Brij 78 (MHLB=1.11) and Brij 97 (MHLB=0.6). After treatments with Brij 78 and Brij 97, the levels of intracellular ATP were decreased and verapamil induced ATPase activities of P-gp were inhibited in multidrug resistant cells. The responses of the cells to Brij 78 and Brij 97 in ATP depletion studies correlated with the cell viability induced by PTX/Brij NCs and intracellular accumulation of 3H-PTX. Brij 78 and Brij 97 could not alter the levels of P-gp expression detected by western blotting. These findings may provide some insight into the likelihood of further development of more potent P-gp inhibitors for the treatment of MDR in cancer

Job Size for Internet Parallel Computing

In this paper, we present a performance model and the experimental results of parallel execution of Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI). The Java RMI is used for remote execution of parallel jobs on the Internet. The main use of the model is to determine the job size of the distributed objects that are suitable for the meta-computing on the Internet. 1 Introduction The advent of mobile programming languages [1] such as Java [2] opens the entire Internet for the parallel computing. While the parallel computing on clusters of workstations also uses general network protocols such as TCP/IP for interprocessor communication, there is a fundamental difference: the processors of a cluster of workstations share the same (networked) file system, but the computers on the Internet don&apos;t. The parallel computing on the Internet is also known as the meta-computing. The idea of the meta-computing is to explore the huge aggregate computing power of millions of computers connected to the Internet for ..