The control of lymphatic filariasis (LF) caused by Wuchereria bancrofti in the Central African Region has been hampered by the presence of Loa loa due to severe adverse events that arise in the ...treatment with ivermectin. The immunochromatographic test (ICT) cards used for mapping LF demonstrated cross-reactivity with L. loa and posed the problem of delineating the LF map. To verify LF endemicity in forest areas of Cameroon where mass drug administration (MDA) has not been ongoing, we used the recently developed strategy that combined serology, microscopy and molecular techniques.
This study was carried out in 124 communities in 31 health districts (HDs) where L. loa is present. At least 125 persons per site were screened. Diurnal blood samples were investigated for circulating filarial antigen (CFA) by FTS and for L. loa microfilariae (mf) using TBF. FTS positive individuals were further subjected to night blood collection for detecting W. bancrofti. qPCR was used to detect DNA of the parasites.
Overall, 14,446 individuals took part in this study, 233 participants tested positive with FTS in 29 HDs, with positivity rates ranging from 0.0 to 8.2%. No W. bancrofti mf was found in the night blood of any individuals but L. loa mf were found in both day and night blood of participants who were FTS positive. Also, qPCR revealed that no W. bancrofti but L.loa DNA was found with dry bloodspot. Positive FTS results were strongly associated with high L. loa mf load. Similarly, a strong positive association was observed between FTS positivity and L loa prevalence.
Using a combination of parasitological and molecular tools, we were unable to find evidence of W. bancrofti presence in the 31 HDs, but L. loa instead. Therefore, LF is not endemic and LF MDA is not required in these districts.
Abstract A hierarchy of cellular stemness exists in certain cancers, and any successful strategy to treat such cancers would have to eliminate the self-renewing tumor-initiating cells at the apex of ...the hierarchy. The cellular microenvironment, in particular the extracellular matrix (ECM), is believed to have a role in regulating stemness. In this work, U251 glioblastoma cells are cultured on electrospun polystyrene (ESPS) scaffolds coated with an array of 7 laminin isoforms to provide a 3D model for stem cell-related genes and proteins expression studies. We observed collaboration between 3D context and laminins in promoting glioma stemness. Depending on the laminin isoform presented, U251 cells cultured on ESPS scaffolds (3D) exhibited increased expression of stemness markers compared to those cultured on tissue culture polystyrene (2D). Our results indicate the influence of 3D (versus 2D) context on integrin expression, specifically, the upregulation of the laminin-binding integrins alpha 6 and beta 4. By a colony forming assay, we showed enhanced clonogenicity of cells grown on ESPS scaffolds in collaboration with laminins 411, 421, 511 and 521. Evaluation of patient glioma databases demonstrated significant enrichment of integrin and ECM pathway networks in tumors of worse prognosis, consistent with our observations. The present results demonstrate how 3D versus 2D context profoundly affects ECM signaling, leading to stemness.
The gut microbiota plays a key role in host metabolism. Toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5), a flagellin receptor, is required for gut microbiota homeostasis. Accordingly, TLR5-deficient (T5KO) mice are ...prone to develop microbiota-dependent metabolic syndrome. Here we observed that T5KO mice display elevated neutral lipids with a compositional increase of oleate C18:1 (n9) relative to wild-type littermates. Increased oleate contribution to hepatic lipids and liver SCD1 expression were both microbiota dependent. Analysis of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) and 13C-acetate label incorporation revealed elevated SCFA in ceca and hepatic portal blood and increased liver de novo lipogenesis in T5KO mice. Dietary SCFAs further aggravated metabolic syndrome in T5KO mice. Deletion of hepatic SCD1 not only prevented hepatic neutral lipid oleate enrichment but also ameliorated metabolic syndrome in T5KO mice. Collectively, these results underscore the key role of the gut microbiota-liver axis in the pathogenesis of metabolic diseases.
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•T5KO mice microbiota generates more cecal SCFA, substrates for hepatic lipogenesis•Dietary SCFA aggravate metabolic syndrome in T5KO mice•Hepatic SCD1 plays a key role in the development of metabolic syndrome in T5KO mice•Metabolic syndrome in T5KO mice is microbiota-liver axis dependent
Singh et al. identify a gut microbiota-liver axis responsible for the metabolic syndrome developed by TLR5-deficient mice and show that short-chain fatty acids generated by gut bacterial fermentation of dietary fiber fuel SCD1-mediated lipogenesis in the liver, which promotes insulin resistance and inflammation.
The constant Q transform (CQT) has been shown to be one of the most effective speech signal pre-transforms to facilitate synthetic speech detection, followed by either hand-crafted (subband) constant ...Q cepstral coefficient (CQCC) feature extraction and a back-end binary classifier, or a deep neural network (DNN) directly for further feature extraction and classification. Despite the rich literature on such a pipeline, we show in this paper that the pre-transform and hand-crafted features could simply be replaced by end-to-end DNNs. Specifically, we experimentally verify that by only using standard components, a light-weight neural network could outperform the state-of-the-art methods for the ASVspoof2019 challenge. The proposed model is termed Time-domain Synthetic Speech Detection Net (TSSDNet), having ResNet- or Inception-style structures. We further demonstrate that the proposed models also have attractive generalization capability. Trained on ASVspoof2019, they could achieve promising detection performance when tested on disjoint ASVspoof2015, significantly better than the existing cross-dataset results. This paper reveals the great potential of end-to-end DNNs for synthetic speech detection, without hand-crafted features.
Objectives This study sought to investigate the relationship between resting ventricular rate and mortality in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) and reduced left ventricular ejection fraction ...(LVEF) who were in sinus rhythm (SR) or atrial fibrillation (AF). Background Slower heart rates are associated with better survival in patients with CHF in SR, but it is not clear whether this is true for those in AF. Methods We assessed 2,039 outpatients with CHF and LVEF ≤50% undergoing baseline assessment, of whom 24% (n = 488) were in AF; and 841 outpatients reassessed after attempted treatment optimization at 1 year, of whom 22% (n = 184) were in AF. Cox proportional hazards models were used to assess the relationships between heart rate and survival in patients with CHF and AF or sinus rhythm. We analyzed heart rate and rhythm data recorded at the baseline review and after 1-year follow-up. Proportional hazards assumptions were checked by Schoenfeld and Martingale residuals. Results The median survival for those in AF was 6.1 years (interquartile range IQR: 5.3 to 6.9 years) and 7.3 years (IQR: 6.5 to 8.1 years) for those in SR. In univariable analysis, patients with AF had a worse survival (hazard ratio HR: 1.26, 95% confidence interval CI: 1.08 to 1.47; p = 0.003) but after covariate adjustment, survival rates were similar. After adjusting Cox regression models, there was no association between heart rate (per 10 beats/min increments) and survival in patients with AF before (HR: 0.94, 95% CI: 0.88 to 1.00, p = 0.07) or after (HR: 1.00, 95% CI: 0.99 to 1.00, p = 0.84) therapy optimization. For patients in SR, higher heart rates were associated with worse survival, both before (HR: 1.10, 95% CI: 1.05 to 1.15, p <0.0001) and after (HR: 1.13, 95% CI: 1.03 to 1.24, p = 0.008) therapy optimization. Conclusions In patients with CHF and a reduced LVEF, slower resting ventricular rate is associated with better survival for patients in SR but not for those with AF.
A Survey of Keystroke Dynamics Biometrics Teh, Pin Shen; Teoh, Andrew Beng Jin; Yue, Shigang
The scientific world journal/TheScientificWorldjournal,
01/2013, Letnik:
2013, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Research on keystroke dynamics biometrics has been increasing, especially in the last decade. The main motivation behind this effort is due to the fact that keystroke dynamics biometrics is ...economical and can be easily integrated into the existing computer security systems with minimal alteration and user intervention. Numerous studies have been conducted in terms of data acquisition devices, feature representations, classification methods, experimental protocols, and evaluations. However, an up-to-date extensive survey and evaluation is not yet available. The objective of this paper is to provide an insightful survey and comparison on keystroke dynamics biometrics research performed throughout the last three decades, as well as offering suggestions and possible future research directions.
Open set recognition (OSR) models need not only discriminate between known classes but also detect unknown class samples unavailable during training. One promising approach is to learn discriminative ...representations over known classes with strong intra-class similarity and inter-class discrepancy. Then, the powerful class discrimination learned from the known classes can be extended to known and unknown classes. Without appropriate regularization, however, the model may learn representations trivially, collapsing unknown class representations to the known class ones. To resolve this problem, we propose Divergent Angular Representation (DivAR) based on two approaches. Firstly, DivAR maximizes its representational discrimination between known classes via a highly discriminative loss. Secondly, to ensure separation between known and unknown classes in the representation space, DivAR boosts the directional variation of representations over global samples. In addition, self-supervision is leveraged to improve the representation's robustness and extend DivAR to one-class classification. Moreover, unlike other OSR methods that require an extra machinery for inference, DivAR learns and infers in a single module. Extensive experiments on generic image datasets demonstrate the plausibility and effectiveness of DivAR for both OSR and One-Class Classification (OCC) problems.
Dietary soluble fibers are fermented by gut bacteria into short-chain fatty acids (SCFA), which are considered broadly health-promoting. Accordingly, consumption of such fibers ameliorates metabolic ...syndrome. However, incorporating soluble fiber inulin, but not insoluble fiber, into a compositionally defined diet, induced icteric hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Such HCC was microbiota-dependent and observed in multiple strains of dysbiotic mice but not in germ-free nor antibiotics-treated mice. Furthermore, consumption of an inulin-enriched high-fat diet induced both dysbiosis and HCC in wild-type (WT) mice. Inulin-induced HCC progressed via early onset of cholestasis, hepatocyte death, followed by neutrophilic inflammation in liver. Pharmacologic inhibition of fermentation or depletion of fermenting bacteria markedly reduced intestinal SCFA and prevented HCC. Intervening with cholestyramine to prevent reabsorption of bile acids also conferred protection against such HCC. Thus, its benefits notwithstanding, enrichment of foods with fermentable fiber should be approached with great caution as it may increase risk of HCC.
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•Diet enriched with soluble, but not insoluble, fiber induced HCC in dysbiotic mice•Fiber-induced HCC displayed early onset of cholemia and hyperbilirubinemia•Soluble fiber-induced HCC was microbiota-dependent and transmissible to WT mice•Inhibition of gut fermentation and exclusion of dietary soluble fiber prevented HCC
Dysregulated fermentation of dietary soluble fibers by gut microbiota induces cholestasis, hepatic inflammation, and liver cancer in mice.
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