The stem cell factor (SCF)/c-KIT axis plays an important role in the hematopoietic differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), but its regulatory mechanisms involving microRNAs (miRs) ...are not fully elucidated. Here, we demonstrated that supplementation with SCF increases the hematopoietic differentiation of hPSCs via the interaction with its receptor tyrosine kinase c-KIT, which is modulated by miR-221 and miR-222. c-KIT is comparably expressed in undifferentiated human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells. The inhibition of SCF signaling via treatment with a c-KIT antagonist (imatinib) during hPSC-derived hematopoiesis resulted in reductions in the yield and multi-lineage potential of hematopoietic progenitors. We found that the transcript levels of miR-221 and miR-222 targeting c-KIT were significantly lower in the pluripotent state than they were in terminally differentiated somatic cells. Furthermore, suppression of miR-221 and miR-222 in undifferentiated hPSC cultures induced more hematopoiesis by increasing c-KIT expression. Collectively, our data implied that the modulation of c-KIT by miRs may provide further potential strategies to expedite the generation of functional blood cells for therapeutic approaches and the study of the cellular machinery related to hematologic malignant diseases such as leukemia.
The stem cell factor (SCF)/c-KIT axis plays an important role in the hematopoietic differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs), but its regulatory mechanisms involving microRNAs (miRs) ...are not fully elucidated. Here, we demonstrated that supplementation with SCF increases the hematopoietic differentiation of hPSCs via the interaction with its receptor tyrosine kinase c-KIT, which is modulated by miR-221 and miR-222. c-KIT is comparably expressed in undifferentiated human embryonic and induced pluripotent stem cells. The inhibition of SCF signaling via treatment with a c-KIT antagonist (imatinib) during hPSC-derived hematopoiesis resulted in reductions in the yield and multi-lineage potential of hematopoietic progenitors. We found that the transcript levels of miR-221 and miR-222 targeting c-KIT were significantly lower in the pluripotent state than they were in terminally differentiated somatic cells. Furthermore, suppression of miR-221 and miR-222 in undifferentiated hPSC cultures induced more hematopoiesis by increasing c-KIT expression. Collectively, our data implied that the modulation of c-KIT by miRs may provide further potential strategies to expedite the generation of functional blood cells for therapeutic approaches and the study of the cellular machinery related to hematologic malignant diseases such as leukemia.
This study is aimed to evaluate service-learning program's impact on senior dental students' attitude to community service at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Dentistry. Experience ...gained through service-learning in dental school may positively impact dental students' attitude to community service that will eventually lead into providing care to the underserved. Two surveys were administered to 105 senior dental students. For the first survey (post-test), students reported their attitude to community service after the service-learning program completion. For the second survey (pre-test), students reported their attitude prior to the program retrospectively. Seventy six students responded to the post-test and fifty six students responded to the pre-test. A repeated-measure mixed-model analysis indicated that overall there was a change between pre-test and post-test. Scales of connectedness, normative helping behavior, benefits, career benefits, and intention showed a significant pre-test and post-test difference. A relationship between attitude to community service and student characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, and volunteer activity was also examined. Only ethnicity showed a significant difference. In conclusion, service-learning program at VCU School of Dentistry has positively impacted senior dental students' attitude to community service.
This study is aimed to better understand how and why people choose dental school faculty as their oral healthcare provider. Increasing financial constrains in the U.S. dental schools has led dental ...schools to find an alternative funding sources and revenues from dental school faculty practice can be one of them. To effectively promote faculty practice, it is necessary to understand how and why people choose dental school faculty as their oral care provider. In addition, it is important to differentiate characteristics of comprehensive care patients and limited care patients since dental school faculty practices have a higher proportion of specialists. A survey of 1150 dental school faculty practice patients who recently chose their dentist was conducted and 221 responded. Information sources highly used and rated included other dentist, friends, family, clinic website, the Internet, and the insurance directory. Dentist related attributes that were perceived important included quality of care, professional competence of dentist, and explanation of treatment/you participate in the treatment decision. Dental practice related attributes that were perceived important included ability to get appointments at convenient times, reasonable waiting time to get appointments, and attitude/helpfulness of staff. Among the respondents, 121 pursued a comprehensive care and 93 pursued a limited care. The two groups differed in terms of demographics, other characteristics, and dentist selection. The comprehensive care patients were younger, highly educated, related to healthcare related profession, and to have private dental insurance (p<0.001). The comprehensive care patients were more likely to use and highly rate information sources such as clinic website, the Internet, and the insurance directory (p<0.001). They put more value on attributes such as the dentist is in my insurance network and convenient physical location (p<0.001). This study has shown that traditionally popular (family, friends) and newly emerging information sources (the Internet, clinic website, and insurance directory) were used and perceived important by dental school faculty practice patients. A dental school or dentist can use this study's findings to promote their practice to select appropriate communication channels and focus on attributes that dental consumers value the most. It is also important to apply different strategies to different consumer groups.
This study is aimed to better understand how and why people choose dental school faculty as their oral healthcare provider. Increasing financial constrains in the U.S. dental schools has led dental ...schools to find an alternative funding sources and revenues from dental school faculty practice can be one of them. To effectively promote faculty practice, it is necessary to understand how and why people choose dental school faculty as their oral care provider. In addition, it is important to differentiate characteristics of comprehensive care patients and limited care patients since dental school faculty practices have a higher proportion of specialists. A survey of 1150 dental school faculty practice patients who recently chose their dentist was conducted and 221 responded. Information sources highly used and rated included other dentist, friends, family, clinic website, the Internet, and the insurance directory. Dentist related attributes that were perceived important included quality of care, professional competence of dentist, and explanation of treatment/you participate in the treatment decision. Dental practice related attributes that were perceived important included ability to get appointments at convenient times, reasonable waiting time to get appointments, and attitude/helpfulness of staff. Among the respondents, 121 pursued a comprehensive care and 93 pursued a limited care. The two groups differed in terms of demographics, other characteristics, and dentist selection. The comprehensive care patients were younger, highly educated, related to healthcare related profession, and to have private dental insurance (p<0.001). The comprehensive care patients were more likely to use and highly rate information sources such as clinic website, the Internet, and the insurance directory (p<0.001). They put more value on attributes such as the dentist is in my insurance network and convenient physical location (p<0.001). This study has shown that traditionally popular (family, friends) and newly emerging information sources (the Internet, clinic website, and insurance directory) were used and perceived important by dental school faculty practice patients. A dental school or dentist can use this study's findings to promote their practice to select appropriate communication channels and focus on attributes that dental consumers value the most. It is also important to apply different strategies to different consumer groups.
This study is aimed to evaluate service-learning program's impact on senior dental students' attitude to community service at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) School of Dentistry. Experience ...gained through service-learning in dental school may positively impact dental students' attitude to community service that will eventually lead into providing care to the underserved. Two surveys were administered to 105 senior dental students. For the first survey (post-test), students reported their attitude to community service after the service-learning program completion. For the second survey (pre-test), students reported their attitude prior to the program retrospectively. Seventy six students responded to the post-test and fifty six students responded to the pre-test. A repeated-measure mixed-model analysis indicated that overall there was a change between pre-test and post-test. Scales of connectedness, normative helping behavior, benefits, career benefits, and intention showed a significant pre-test and post-test difference. A relationship between attitude to community service and student characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, and volunteer activity was also examined. Only ethnicity showed a significant difference. In conclusion, service-learning program at VCU School of Dentistry has positively impacted senior dental students' attitude to community service.
Recently, several types of neural operators have been developed, including deep operator networks, graph neural operators, and Multiwavelet-based operators. Compared with these models, the Fourier ...neural operator (FNO), a physics-inspired machine learning method, is computationally efficient and can learn nonlinear operators between function spaces independent of a certain finite basis. This study investigated the bounding of the Rademacher complexity of the FNO based on specific group norms. Using capacity based on these norms, we bound the generalization error of the model. In addition, we investigate the correlation between the empirical generalization error and the proposed capacity of FNO. We infer that the type of group norm determines the information about the weights and architecture of the FNO model stored in capacity. The experimental results offer insight into the impact of the number of modes used in the FNO model on the generalization error. The results confirm that our capacity is an effective index for estimating generalization errors.
Recently, weighted nuclear norm minimization (WNNM), which regularizes singular values of an input matrix with different strengths according to given weights, has demonstrated impressive results in ...low-level vision tasks such as additive Gaussian noise removal, deblurring and image inpainting
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. In this study, we apply WNNM to remove additive Cauchy noise in images. A variational model is adopted based on maximum a posteriori estimate, which contains a data fidelity term that is appropriate for noise following the Cauchy distribution. Weighted nuclear norm is used as a regularizer in the proposed algorithm, and we utilized similar patches in the image by nonlocal similarity. We adopted the nonconvex alternating direction method of multiplier to solve the problem iteratively. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the superior denoising performance of our algorithm compared with other existing methods in terms of quantitative measure and visual quality.
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