This study concentrated on the effects of Biogenic Volatile Organic Compounds (BVOC) emissions on ozone (O sub(3)) in an area of the Eastern Spain on June 12, 1997, a day characterised by sea breeze. ...Simulation of meteorology was performed with the three-dimensional model ADREA-I. Comparisons of the model results with observations have revealed overall a good agreement in temperature and wind velocity. Two runs were performed with UAM-IV for the photochemical calculations. The first simulated the effects of the anthropogenic emissions only (run A) and the second the combined effects of anthropogenic and biogenic emissions, (run B). Comparisons of the model O sub(3) concentrations with measurements showed a general agreement with the experimental data. Discrepancies between the calculated results and the observations during the early morning hours could be attributed to inaccuracies in nitrogen oxides (NO sub(x)) from the anthropogenic emissions inventory. Comparisons between runs A and B yielded differences up to 30% in the morning, over inland areas. It was deduced that the inclusion of BVOC in total emissions could result in an increase or decrease of tropospheric O sub(3), depending on the available amounts of anthropogenic emissions.
A computational simulation of a typical sea-breeze situation and the transport and evolution of photochemical pollutants on the Spanish east coast is performed, and the influence of biogenic volatile ...organic compound (BVOC) emissions on the ozone concentrations formed is studied. The detailed land cover patterns and the topography of the area have been taken into account with the aid of a geographical information system. A meteorological prognostic simulation is performed as a first step, reproducing successfully the sea-breeze formation and comparing favorably with the observations. A BVOC emissions inventory is constructed for the area, which, in combination with the available anthropogenic emissions, indicates that the study area is more VOC than NOₓ sensitive with respect to the ozone concentrations formed. Based on the meteorological simulation and emissions inventories, a photochemical dispersion simulation is performed for two cases, with and without the BVOC emissions. The ozone evolution patterns are simulated successfully as compared with the available data. The inclusion of BVOC emissions has a minor effect on the calculated ozone concentrations, except in one case for which the morning peak ozone concentration is captured by the model only if the BVOC emissions are taken into account. This result leads to the conclusion that, under certain circumstances, BVOC can play an important role in ozone formation. The discrepancies in the modeled NOₓ concentrations are attributed to inaccuracies in the anthropogenic emissions inventory and suggest that the study area may be influenced by external factors that were not taken into account and require further investigation. This study was performed in the framework of the European Commission Biogenic Emissions in the Mediterranean Area (BEMA) project.
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Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The addition of ribociclib to hormone therapy showed a greater benefit with regard to overall survival than hormone therapy alone in women with hormone-receptor–positive, human epidermal growth ...factor receptor 2–negative advanced breast cancer.
Over the last few decades, there has been an ongoing debate over both the optimal feeding mode for very premature neonates (VPN) as well as what their optimal growth should be. Despite the American ...Academy of Pediatric declaring since 1997 that the growth of VPN should follow the trajectory of intrauterine fetal growth, differences of opinion persist, feeding policies keep changing, and the growth and development of VPN remains extremely variable not only between countries, but even between neighboring neonatal units. Even the appropriate terminology to express poor postnatal growth (extrauterine growth restriction (EGR) and postnatal growth failure (PGF)) remains a subject of ongoing discussion. A number of recent publications have shown that by implementing breast milk fortification and closely following growth and adjusting nutrition accordingly, as per the consensus guidelines of the major Neonatal Societies, we could achieve growth that closely follows birth centiles. A recent position paper from EPSGAN recommending targeted nutritional support to cover the energy and protein deficits sustained by VPN during periods of critical illness further strengthens the above findings. Conclusion: We can promote better growth of VPN by ensuring a stable administration of sufficient calories and protein, especially in the first 2 weeks of life, implementing breast milk fortification, covering energy and protein deficits due to critical illness, and increasing feeding volumes as per the latest guidelines. The adoption of universal protocol for nutrition and growth of VPN is essential and will enable better monitoring of long-term outcomes for this population.
Discovering communities in networks constitutes an active and significant research field, especially in real-world networks, where communities usually represent functional units of these networks. In ...the introduced work, we study the community discovery problem in real-world networks from a different perspective. Our motivation stems from inquiries related to the cause of a node’s participation in a community. Therefore, we incorporate the concepts of causality and responsibility into a novel framework. Our goal is to set up a framework to discover explainable causal relations between nodes and communities, which is a topic that has not been investigated before. We evaluate the proposed framework by experimenting on real-world networks. Moreover, the introduced framework is flexible to be used to other network-related analysis tasks, beyond community detection, such as link prediction, anomaly detection, influence maximization.
Existing methods to improve detection of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) have focused on genomic alterations but have rarely considered the biological properties of plasma cell-free DNA (cfDNA). We ...hypothesized that differences in fragment lengths of circulating DNA could be exploited to enhance sensitivity for detecting the presence of ctDNA and for noninvasive genomic analysis of cancer. We surveyed ctDNA fragment sizes in 344 plasma samples from 200 patients with cancer using low-pass whole-genome sequencing (0.4×). To establish the size distribution of mutant ctDNA, tumor-guided personalized deep sequencing was performed in 19 patients. We detected enrichment of ctDNA in fragment sizes between 90 and 150 bp and developed methods for in vitro and in silico size selection of these fragments. Selecting fragments between 90 and 150 bp improved detection of tumor DNA, with more than twofold median enrichment in >95% of cases and more than fourfold enrichment in >10% of cases. Analysis of size-selected cfDNA identified clinically actionable mutations and copy number alterations that were otherwise not detected. Identification of plasma samples from patients with advanced cancer was improved by predictive models integrating fragment length and copy number analysis of cfDNA, with area under the curve (AUC) >0.99 compared to AUC <0.80 without fragmentation features. Increased identification of cfDNA from patients with glioma, renal, and pancreatic cancer was achieved with AUC > 0.91 compared to AUC < 0.5 without fragmentation features. Fragment size analysis and selective sequencing of specific fragment sizes can boost ctDNA detection and could complement or provide an alternative to deeper sequencing of cfDNA.
Anomaly detection is considered an important data mining task, aiming at the discovery of elements (known as outliers) that show significant diversion from the expected case. More specifically, given ...a set of objects the problem is to return the suspicious objects that deviate significantly from the typical behavior. As in the case of clustering, the application of different criteria leads to different definitions for an outlier. In this work, we focus on distance-based outliers: an object x is an outlier if there are less than k objects lying at distance at most R from x. The problem offers significant challenges when a stream-based environment is considered, where data arrive continuously and outliers must be detected on-the-fly. There are a few research works studying the problem of continuous outlier detection. However, none of these proposals meets the requirements of modern stream-based applications for the following reasons: (i) they demand a significant storage overhead, (ii) their efficiency is limited and (iii) they lack flexibility in the sense that they assume a single configuration of the k and R parameters. In this work, we propose new algorithms for continuous outlier monitoring in data streams, based on sliding windows. Our techniques are able to reduce the required storage overhead, are more efficient than previously proposed techniques and offer significant flexibility with regard to the input parameters. Experiments performed on real-life and synthetic data sets verify our theoretical study.
•We prove a linear space lower bound.•A novel continuous algorithm is presented, which has two versions (COD).•To support different views of outliers, we propose an extension (ACOD).•We also propose algorithms based on micro-clusters (MCOD/AMCOD).•Performance evaluation results based on both real-life and synthetic data.
We have read the article entitled "Applying Methods for Postnatal Growth Assessment in the Clinical Setting: Evaluation in a Longitudinal Cohort of Very Preterm infants" by Montserrat Izquierdo Renau ...et al ....
Summary
Differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC) is the most common malignancy of the endocrine system. There has been a significant increase in its incidence over the past two decades attributable mainly ...to the use of more sensitive diagnostic modalities. Ultrasound‐guided fine needle aspiration cytology is the mainstay of diagnosis of benign disorders and malignancy. However, approximately 20% of lesions cannot be adequately categorized as benign or malignant. In the postoperative setting, monitoring of thyroglobulin (Tg) levels has been employed for the detection of disease recurrence. Unfortunately, Tg antibodies are common and interfere with Tg measurement in this subset of patients. Despite this limitation, Tg remains the sole widely used thyroid cancer biomarker in the clinical setting. In an attempt to bypass antibody interference, research has focused mainly on mRNA targets thought to be exclusively expressed in thyroid cells. Tg and thyroid stimulating hormone receptor (TSHR) mRNA have been extensively studied both for discerning between benign disease and malignancy and in postoperative disease surveillance. However, results among reports have been inconsistent probably reflecting considerable differences in methodology. Recently, microRNA (miRNA) targets are being investigated as potential biomarkers in DTC. MiRNAs are more stable molecules and theoretically are not as vulnerable as mRNA during manipulation. Initial results have been encouraging but large‐scale studies are warranted to verify and elucidate their potential application in diagnosis and postoperative surveillance of thyroid cancer. Several other novel targets, primarily mutations and circulating cells, are currently emerging as promising thyroid cancer circulating biomarkers. Although interesting and intriguing, data are limited and derive from small‐scale studies in specific patient cohorts. Further research findings demonstrating their value are awaited with anticipation.
It is generally agreed that most colon cancers develop from adenomatous polyps, and it is this fact on which screening strategies are based. Although there is overwhelming evidence to link intrinsic ...genetic lesions with the formation of these preneoplastic lesions, recent data suggest that the tumor stromal environment also plays an essential role in this disease. In particular, it has been suggested that CD34⁺ immature myeloid precursor cells are required for tumor development and invasion. Here we have used mice conditional for the stabilization of β-catenin or defective for the adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) gene to reinvestigated the identity and importance of tumor-infiltrating hematopoietic cells in polyposis. We show that, from the onset, polyps are infiltrated with proinflammatory mast cells (MC) and their precursors. Depletion of MC either pharmacologically or through the generation of chimeric mice with genetic lesions in MC development leads to a profound remission of existing polyps. Our data suggest that MC are an essential hematopoietic component for preneoplastic polyp development and are a novel target for therapeutic intervention.
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