BACKGROUND & AIMS: Few data are available concerning the long-term prognosis of chronic liver disease associated with hepatitis C virus infection. This study examined the morbidity and survival of ...patients with compensated cirrhosis type C.
METHODS: A cohort of 384 European cirrhotic patients was enrolled at seven tertiary referral hospitals and followed up for a mean period of 5 years. Inclusion criteria were biopsy-proven cirrhosis, abnormal serum aminotransferase levels, absence of complications of cirrhosis, and exclusion of hepatitis A and B viruses and of metabolic, toxic, or autoimmune liver diseases.
RESULTS: Antibodies against hepatitis C virus were positive in 98% of 361 patients tested. The 5-year risk of hepatocellular carcinoma was 7% and that of decompensation was 18%. Death occurred in 51 patients (13%), with 70% dying of liver disease. Survival probability was 91% and 79% at 5 and 10 years, respectively. Two hundred five patients (53%) were treated with interferon alfa. After adjustment for clinical and serological differences at baseline between patients treated or not treated with interferon, the 5-year estimated survival probability was 96% and 95% for treated and untreated patients, respectively.
CONCLUSIONS: In this cohort of patients, life expectancy is relatively long, in agreement with the morbidity data showing a slowly progressive disease.
(Gastroenterology 1997 Feb;112(2):463-72)
A dashboard devoted to the computing in the Italian sites for the ALICE experiment at the LHC has been deployed. A combination of different complementary monitoring tools is typically used in most of ...the Tier-2 sites: this makes somewhat difficult to figure out at a glance the status of the site and to compare information extracted from different sources for debugging purposes. To overcome these limitations a dedicated ALICE dashboard has been designed and implemented in each of the ALICE Tier-2 sites in Italy: in particular, it provides a single, interactive and easily customizable graphical interface where heterogeneous data are presented. The dashboard is based on two main ingredients: an open source time-series database and a dashboard builder tool for visualizing time-series metrics. Various sensors, able to collect data from the multiple data sources, have been also written. A first version of a national computing dashboard has been implemented using a specific instance of the builder to gather data from all the local databases.
The present work aims at optimizing the use of computing resources available at the grid Italian Tier-2 sites of the ALICE experiment at CERN LHC by making them accessible to interactive distributed ...analysis, thanks to modern solutions based on cloud computing. The scalability and elasticity of the computing resources via dynamic ("on-demand") provisioning is essentially limited by the size of the computing site, reaching the theoretical optimum only in the asymptotic case of infinite resources. The main challenge of the project is to overcome this limitation by federating different sites through a distributed cloud facility. Storage capacities of the participating sites are seen as a single federated storage area, preventing the need of mirroring data across them: high data access efficiency is guaranteed by location-aware analysis software and storage interfaces, in a transparent way from an end-user perspective. Moreover, the interactive analysis on the federated cloud reduces the execution time with respect to grid batch jobs. The tests of the investigated solutions for both cloud computing and distributed storage on wide area network will be presented.
•The combined duration of meiotic and spermiogenic phases is approximately 7 days.•Selected stem cell genes were partially sequenced and characterized in Jundiá testis.•The plzf and pou5f3 are ...potential markers for Jundiá spermatogonial stem cells.
Spermatogenesis is a process driven by stem cell, where germ cell cycle is under the control of a specific genotype species. Considering that Jundiá (Rhamdia quelen) is a Neotropical catfish with great economical importance and useful experimental model, little information is available on basic aspects of its reproductive biology, especially on spermatogenesis. As a result, this study aimed to characterize the male germ cells, estimate the duration of spermatogenesis and evaluate the expression of selected stem cell genes in Jundiá testis. Similar to other fish species, our results showed a remarkable decrease of germ cell nuclear volume during Jundiá spermatogenesis, particularly from type A undifferentiated to late type B spermatogonia and from diplotene to late spermatids. Using a S-phase marker, bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU), the combined duration of meiotic and spermiogenic phases in this species was estimated in approximately 7 days. This is considered very short when compared to mammals, where spermatogenesis last from 30 to 74 days. Selected stem cell genes were partially sequenced and characterized in Jundiá testis. Expression analysis showed higher plzf and pou5f3 mRNA levels in the cell fractions enriched by type A undifferentiated spermatogonia. These results were further confirmed by in situ hybridization that showed strong signal of plzf and pou5f3 mRNA in type A undifferentiated spermatogonia. Altogether, these information will expand our knowledge of the reproductive biology of this species, contributing to improve its production and management, and also for biotechnological applications, such as germ cell transplantation.
In 2012, 14 Italian institutions participating in LHC Experiments won a grant from the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR), with the aim of optimising analysis activities, and in general the Tier2 ...Tier3 infrastructure. We report on the activities being researched upon, on the considerable improvement in the ease of access to resources by physicists, also those with no specific computing interests. We focused on items like distributed storage federations, access to batch-like facilities, provisioning of user interfaces on demand and cloud systems. R&D on next-generation databases, distributed analysis interfaces, and new computing architectures was also carried on. The project, ending in the first months of 2016, will produce a white paper with recommendations on best practices for data-analysis support by computing centers.
Morphological and attribute profiles have been proven to be effective tools to fuse spectral and spatial information for classification of remote sensing data. A wide range of filters (i.e., number ...of levels in the profiles) is usually necessary in order to properly model the spatial information in a remote sensing scene. A dense sampling of the values of the parameters of the filters generates profiles that have both a very large dimensionality (leading to the Hughes phenomenon in classification) and a high redundancy. In this paper, a novel iterative technique based on genetic algorithms (GAs) is proposed to automatically optimize the selection of the optimal features from the profiles. The selection of the filtered images that compose the profile is performed by dividing them into three classes corresponding to high, medium, and low importance. We propose to measure the importance (modeled in terms of discriminative power in the classification task) using a random forest classifier, which provides a rank for each feature with its model. Only the set of images associated with the highest importance is selected, i.e., preserved for classification. The proposed technique is applied to the features labeled with medium importance, whereas the images with the lowest importance are removed from the profile. This method is employed to classify three hyperspectral data sets achieving significantly high classification accuracy values. A parallel computing implementation has been developed in order to significantly reduce the time required for the run of the GAs.
A new approach to change detection in very high resolution remote sensing images based on morphological attribute profiles (APs) is presented. A multiresolution contextual transformation performed by ...APs allows the extraction of geometrical features related to the structures within the scene at different scales. The temporal changes are detected by comparing the geometrical features extracted from the image of each date. The experiments performed on panchromatic QuickBird images related to an urban area show the effectiveness of the proposed technique in detecting changes on the basis of the spatial morphology by preserving geometrical detail.
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