Background Urothelial carcinoma (UC) is prevalent worldwide. Dysregulation of cell growth is a critical event of tumorigenesis and has not been assessed systemically in UC. We thus assessed the ...published transcriptome of urinary bladder urothelial carcinoma (UBUC) and identified insulin-like growth factor-binding protein-5 (IGFBP-5) as the most significantly upregulated gene associated with the regulation of cell growth. Moreover, validated by using public domain data set, IGFBP-5 expression also significantly predicted worse outcome. IGFBP-5 is one of the binding proteins that regulate insulin-like growth factors (IGFs) and its significance has not been comprehensively evaluated in UCs. Methods Using immunohistochemistry, we evaluated the IGFBP-5 expression status and its associations with clinicopathological features and survival in 340 cases of upper urinary tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) and 295 cases of UBUC. Western blot analysis was used to evaluate IGFBP-5 protein expression in human urothelial cell (HUC) lines. Results IGFBP-5 overexpression was significantly associated with advanced pT stage (p<0.001), high histological grade (UTUC, p<0.001; UBUC, p=0.035), lymph node metastasis (UTUC, p=0.006; UBUC, p=0.004), vascular invasion (UTUC, p<0.001; UBUC, p=0.003), perineural invasion (UTUC, p=0.034; UBUC, p=0.021) and frequent mitosis (UTUC, p<0.001; UBUC, p=0.023). IGFBP-5 overexpression also independently predicted poor disease-specific survival and metastasis-free survival in both groups of patients. Western blot analysis showed IGFBP-5 protein as overexpressed in human urothelial cancer cell lines and not in normal urothelial cancer cells. Conclusions IGFBP-5 plays an important role in tumour progression in UC. Its overexpression is associated with advanced tumour stage and conferred poorer clinical outcome.
Natural killer (NK) cells promote dendritic cell (DC) maturation and influence T cell differentiation in vitro. To better understand the nature of the putative interactions among these cells in vivo ...during the early phases of an adaptive immune response, we have used immunohistochemical analysis and dynamic intravital imaging to study NK cell localization and behavior in lymph nodes (LNs) in the steady state and shortly after infection with Leishmania major. In the LNs of naive mice, NK cells reside in the medulla and the paracortex, where they closely associate with DCs. In contrast to T cells, intravital microscopy revealed that NK cells in the superficial regions of LNs were slowly motile and maintained their interactions with DCs over extended times in the presence or absence of immune-activating signals. L. major induced NK cells to secrete interferon-gamma and to be recruited to the paracortex, where concomitant CD4 T cell activation occurred. Therefore, NK cells form a reactive but low mobile network in a strategic area of the LN where they can receive inflammatory signals, interact with DCs, and regulate colocalized T cell responses.
Various alumina/tungsten carbide based nanocomposites have been fabricated by spark plasma sintering and their wear properties have been investigated by performing ball-on-disk type wear test at room ...temperature under ambient environment. Our results reveal that the main facture behavior of the Al2O3/tungsten carbide composites sliding against Al2O3 balls is the plastic deformation. Crack formation and grain pull-out in the wear processes are responsible for lowering the wear rate. The Vickers hardness and toughness values are directly related to wear behavior of the composites that grounds Al2O3/WC to show lower wear rate on smoothly worn surface.
•Various alumina/tungsten carbide based nanocomposites have been fabricated by spark plasma sintering.•Crack formation and grain pull-out in the wear processes are responsible for lowering the wear rate.•This study demonstrates a pathway to prepared anti-wear Al2O3/WC composite materials.
A Low Complexity Interest Point Detector Jie Chen; Ling-Yu Duan; Feng Gao ...
IEEE signal processing letters,
2015-Feb., 2015-2-00, 20150201, Volume:
22, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Interest point detection is a fundamental approach to feature extraction in computer vision tasks. To handle the scale invariance, interest points usually work on the scale-space representation of an ...image. In this letter, we propose a novel block-wise scale-space representation to significantly reduce the computational complexity of an interest point detector. Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) filtering is applied to implement the block-wise scale-space representation. Extensive comparison experiments have shown the block-wise scale-space representation enables the efficient and effective implementation of an interest point detector in terms of memory and time complexity reduction, as well as promising performance in visual search.
We report the enhanced mechanical properties of WC-reinforced Al2O3 nano composites fabricated by spark plasma sintering (SPS). The addition of WC accelerates the sintering process and helps in ...improving the mechanical properties of Al2O3 matrix by hindering its grain growth. The resulting microstructure shows uniformity with a grain size of 300–500nm. Due to the refined microstructure of composites, the hardness and fracture toughness values are found to increase with the decrease of the Al2O3 grain size. In addition, toughening mechanism of this composite also has been discussed in this study.
A central characteristic of the immune system is the constantly changing location of most of its constituent cells. Lymphoid and myeloid cells circulate in the blood, and subsets of these cells ...enter, move, and interact within, then leave organized lymphoid tissues. When inflammation is present, various hematopoietic cells also exit the vasculature and migrate within non-lymphoid tissues, where they carry out effector functions that support host defense or result in autoimmune pathology. Effective innate and adaptive immune responses involve not only the action of these individual cells but also productive communication among them, often requiring direct membrane contact between rare antigen-specific or antigen-bearing cells. Here, we describe our ongoing studies using two-photon intravital microscopy to probe the in situ behavior of the cells of the immune system and their interactions with non-hematopoietic stromal elements. We emphasize the importance of non-random cell migration within lymphoid tissues and detail newly established mechanisms of traffic control that operate at multiple organizational scales to facilitate critical cell contacts. We also describe how the methods we have developed for imaging within lymphoid sites are being applied to other tissues and organs, revealing dynamic details of host-pathogen interactions previously inaccessible to direct observation.
The effects of using an automated prescription-filling system, the ScriptPro SP-200, in an independent pharmacy were evaluated.
The study was conducted at Punches Pharmacy Plus, an independent ...pharmacy located in Clare, Michigan. The study design was a preinstallation and postinstallation assessment of the ScriptPro SP-200 automated prescription-filling system. Videotaping and work sampling techniques were used to collect the preinstallation and postinstallation data of the ScriptPro SP-200. The use of the pharmacy staff and the time spent in direct and indirect prescription- filling activities, such as receiving, order entry, filling, inspecting, packaging, dispensing, phone calls, and inventory management, were measured and compared preinstallation and postinstallation.
With the installation of automation, the percentage of time spent by the pharmacy staff significantly changed (p < 0.001). Meanwhile, there was a statistically significant difference in terms of the percentages of time spent on various activities between the preinstallation and postinstallation of automation (p < 0.001). Before installation of automation, the direct and indirect prescription-filling times used were 6.07 and 2.11 minutes, respectively, to fill one prescription. Analyses of the average time spent per prescription showed that the installation of automation could save nearly 0.22 minute per prescription, especially filling time per prescription-which was significantly decreased from 2.63 to 2.07 minutes with an average of 0.56 minute saved (p < 0.05).
An automated system reduced prescription-filling time but required staffing adjustments to optimize the efficiency gained.
Face forgery detection is essential in combating malicious digital face attacks. Previous methods mainly rely on prior expert knowledge to capture specific forgery clues, such as noise patterns, ...blending boundaries, and frequency artifacts. However, these methods tend to get trapped in local optima, resulting in limited robustness and generalization capability. To address these issues, we propose a novel Critical Forgery Mining (CFM) framework, which can be flexibly assembled with various backbones to boost their generalization and robustness performance. Specifically, we first build a fine-grained triplet and suppress specific forgery traces through prior knowledge-agnostic data augmentation. Subsequently, we propose a fine-grained relation learning prototype to mine critical information in forgeries through instance and local similarity-aware losses. Moreover, we design a novel progressive learning controller to guide the model to focus on principal feature components, enabling it to learn critical forgery features in a coarse-to-fine manner. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art forgery detection performance under various challenging evaluation settings. The source code is available at: https://github.com/LoveSiameseCat/CFM .
Many tumors express tumor-specific antigens capable of being presented to CD8$^+$ T cells by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules. Antigen presentation models predict that the ...tumor cell itself should present these antigens to T cells. However, when conditions for the priming of tumor-specific responses were examined in mice, no detectable presentation of MHC class I-restricted tumor antigens by the tumor itself was found. Rather, tumor antigens were exclusively presented by host bone marrow-derived cells. Thus, MHC class I-restricted antigens are efficiently transferred in vivo to bone marrow-derived antigen-presenting cells, which suggests that human leukocyte antigen matching may be less critical in the application of tumor vaccines than previously thought.
BackgroundsUrothelial carcinoma of the urinary bladder (UCUB) is prevalent in developed countries. It often shows genetic instability and is associated with amplification (or gain) of various ...oncogenic genes or suppressive genes. Rsf-1, a subunit of ATP-dependent chromatin-remodelling complexes that mediates ATPase-dependent chromatin remodelling, confers tumour aggressiveness in certain carcinomas. The authors evaluate the Rsf-1 gene and expression status and its associations with clinicopathological features and survival in their UCUB collection.MethodsImmunohistochemistry was used to assess the Rsf-1 expression profile in 295 UCUB specimens, and was found to correlate with clinicopathological data. Real-time RT-PCR and fluorescence in situ hybridisation were used to detect RSF-1 mRNA expression and gene dosage in 20 independent cases. Western blot analysis was used to evaluate Rsf-1 protein expression in human urothelial cell lines.ResultsRsf-1 overexpression was demonstrated in 101 cases (34.2%), and was significantly associated with advanced primary tumour (p<0.001), nodal metastasis (p=0.004), higher histological grades (p=0.001) and frequent mitoses (p<0.001). Moreover, it was predictive in disease-specific survival and metastasis-free survival in both univariate and multivariate analyses (p<0.0001 for both). Although RSF-1 gene amplification can be barely detected, its mRNA expression is significantly enhanced in tumours with higher primary tumour (p=0.041) and positive nodal statuses (p=0.010), respectively. Rsf-1 protein was abundant in invasive urothelial carcinoma cells but was not benign.ConclusionsOverexpression of Rsf-1 is associated with higher tumour stage and poorer clinical outcome. The current study by the authors suggests gene amplification-independent mechanisms driving Rsf-1 overexpression during UCUB tumour progression.
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