Publications by authors named "Alan Blair"

Article Synopsis
  • The study focuses on a new automated HBV RNA assay for monitoring antiviral treatment in hepatitis B patients.
  • The cobas® HBV RNA assay showed strong sensitivity and reproducibility, effectively quantifying HBV RNA levels in different clinical samples.
  • Results indicate that this assay is capable of detecting HBV RNA in both HBeAg-positive and negative patients, demonstrating its potential as a useful clinical tool for evaluating hepatitis B infection.
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Computer aided diagnostics often requires analysis of a region of interest (ROI) within a radiology scan, and the ROI may be an organ or a suborgan. Although deep learning algorithms have the ability to outperform other methods, they rely on the availability of a large amount of annotated data. Motivated by the need to address this limitation, an approach to localisation and detection of multiple organs based on supervised and semi-supervised learning is presented here.

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Context.—: KRAS Mutation Test v2 is used for the qualitative detection and identification of 28 mutations in exons 2, 3, and 4 of the human KRAS gene.

Objective.

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Article Synopsis
  • Pre-clinical models indicate that viral infections, like hPIV-3, can worsen allergen-induced pulmonary inflammation, making glucocorticoids less effective in treating airway issues in guinea pigs.
  • In guinea pigs sensitized to ovalbumin, an allergen challenge leads to two phases of airway obstruction, but when combined with hPIV-3, this response becomes a prolonged single phase that lasts up to 12 hours.
  • While glucocorticoids can reduce inflammation and hyper-responsiveness to allergens and viruses individually, their effectiveness is diminished when both factors are present together, highlighting challenges in treating asthma during viral infections.
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Article Synopsis
  • The TEDDY study aims to identify environmental factors influencing the development of type 1 diabetes (T1D) by closely monitoring children with elevated genetic risk.
  • The study used newborn screening based on human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class II genes to determine eligibility, achieving over 98% accuracy with various genotyping methods across six international centers.
  • A total of 414,714 infants were screened, revealing only 4.8% of the general population (GP) and 22.2% of first-degree relatives (FDRs) were eligible based on specific HLA haplogenotype criteria, demonstrating significant variation in eligibility rates among different groups and centers.
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Inhaled bradykinin causes bronchoconstriction in asthmatic subjects but not nonasthmatics. To date, animal studies with inhaled bradykinin have been performed only in anesthetized guinea pigs and rats, where it causes bronchoconstriction through sensory nerve pathways. In the present study, airway function was recorded in conscious guinea pigs by whole-body plethysmography.

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Objective: Specific alleles of non-HLA genes INS, CTLA-4, and PTPN22 have been associated with type 1 diabetes. We examined whether some of these alleles influence development of islet autoimmunity or progression from persistent islet autoimmunity to type 1 diabetes in children with high-risk HLA-DR,DQ genotypes.

Research Design And Methods: Since 1993, the Diabetes Autoimmunity Study in the Young (DAISY) has followed 2,449 young children carrying HLA-DR,DQ genotypes associated with type 1 diabetes.

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The processes through which people learn to live with CFS/ME are poorly understood and have not been rigorously explored within the literature. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight women and analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Participants initially described being 'overwhelmed' by CFS/ME.

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Approximately 50% of the genetic risk for type 1 diabetes is attributable to the HLA region. We evaluated associations between candidate genes outside the HLA region-INS, cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated antigen (CTLA)-4, interleukin (IL)-4, IL-4R, and IL-13 and islet autoimmunity among children participating in the Diabetes Autoimmunity Study in the Young (DAISY). Children with persistent islet autoantibody positivity (n = 102, 38 of whom have already developed diabetes) and control subjects (n = 198) were genotyped for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the candidate genes.

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In recent years it has been shown that first order recurrent neural networks trained by gradient-descent can learn not only regular but also simple context-free and context-sensitive languages. However, the success rate was generally low and severe instability issues were encountered. The present study examines the hypothesis that a combination of evolutionary hill climbing with incremental learning and a well-balanced training set enables first order recurrent networks to reliably learn context-free and mildly context-sensitive languages.

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Sequences of the three integral membrane subunits (subunits a, b and c) of the F0 sector of the proton-translocating F-type (F0F1-) ATPases of bacteria, chloroplasts and mitochondria have been analysed. All homologous-sequenced proteins of these subunits, comprising three distinct families, have been identified by database searches, and the homologous protein sequences have been aligned and analysed for phylogenetic relatedness. The results serve to define the relationships of the members of each of these three families of proteins, to identify regions of relative conservation, and to define relative rates of evolutionary divergence.

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