EMR2 receptor ligation modulates cytokine secretion profiles and cell survival of lipopolysaccharide-treated neutrophils.

Background: Epidermal growth factor (EGF)-like module-containing mucin-like hormone receptor-like 2 (EMR2) is an adhesion G protein-coupled receptor previously shown to potentiate neutrophil responses to a number of inflammatory stimuli. EMR2 activation promotes neutrophil adhesion and migration, and augments production of reactive oxygen species and degranulation. In this study, we examined the effect of EMR2 ligation by its specific antibody on the cytokine expression profile and cell survival of lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-treated neutrophils.

MELD score can predict early mortality in patients with rebleeding after band ligation for variceal bleeding.

Aim: To investigate the outcomes, as well as risk factors for 6-wk mortality, in patients with early rebleeding after endoscopic variceal band ligation (EVL) for esophageal variceal hemorrhage (EVH).

Methods: Among 817 EVL procedures performed for EVH between January 2007 and December 2008, 128 patients with early rebleeding, defined as rebleeding within 6 wk after EVL, were enrolled for analysis.

Result: The rate of early rebleeding after EVL for acute EVH was 15.

IL28B SNP rs12979860 is a critical predictor for on-treatment and sustained virologic response in patients with hepatitis C virus genotype-1 infection.

Background: Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of interleukin-28B (IL28B) have received considerable interest for their association with sustained virological response (SVR) when treating patients of genotype-1 hepatitis C virus (GT1-HCV) chronic infection with pegylated interferon and ribavirin (PegIFN/RBV). This study was to investigate the predictive power of IL28B SNPs for on-treatment responses and SVR in treatment-naïve patients with GT1-HCV chronic infection.

Methodology/principal Findings: We analyzed ten SNPs of IL28B in 191 treatment-naïve patients with GT1-HCV chronic infection who received PegIFN/RBV.

Recurrence of spontaneous bacterial peritonitis in cirrhotic patients non-prophylactically treated with norfloxacin: serum albumin as an easy but reliable predictive factor.

Background: Several large studies revealed that selective intestinal decontamination (SID) prevented recurrence of spontaneous bacterial peritonitis (SBP) in cirrhotic patients. Nonetheless, there are no definitive patient selection parameters identifying who would benefit from SID.

Aims: To investigate long-term outcomes in cirrhosis patients with recurrence of SBP and to identify predictive factors for SBP recurrence.

Tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-10 contribute to immunoparalysis in patients with acute pancreatitis.

Immunoparalysis, defined as downregulation of human leukocyte antigen-DR (HLA-DR) expression on monocytes, is strongly associated with septic complications of acute pancreatitis. However, the possible causes of this immunoparalysis have been largely unknown. A prospective case control study was performed in 54 patients with acute pancreatitis and 24 normal volunteers.

Combined use of capsule endoscopy and double-balloon enteroscopy in patients with obscure gastrointestinal bleeding.

Background: Most of the sources of bleeding in patients with obscure gastrointestinal bleeding are located in the small bowel. Capsule endoscopy (CE) and double-balloon enteroscopy (DBE) are innovative modalities to examine the small intestine. This study evaluated the combined use of CE and DBE in patients with obscure gastrointestinal bleeding.

Indoor location system based on discriminant-adaptive neural network in IEEE 802.11 environments.

This brief paper presents a novel localization algorithm, named discriminant-adaptive neural network (DANN), which takes the received signal strength (RSS) from the access points (APs) as inputs to infer the client position in the wireless local area network (LAN) environment. We extract the useful information into discriminative components (DCs) for network learning. The nonlinear relationship between RSS and the position is then accurately constructed by incrementally inserting the DCs and recursively updating the weightings in the network until no further improvement is required.

A cross-layer adaptation scheme for improving IEEE 802.11e QoS by learning.

In this letter, we propose a cross-layer adaptation scheme which improves IEEE 802.11e quality of service (QoS) by online adapting multidimensional medium access control (MAC)-layer parameters depending on the application-layer QoS requirements and physical layer (PHY) channel conditions. Our solution is based on an optimization approach which utilizes neural networks (NNs) to learn the cross-layer function.

How embedded memory in recurrent neural network architectures helps learning long-term temporal dependencies.

Learning long-term temporal dependencies with recurrent neural networks can be a difficult problem. It has recently been shown that a class of recurrent neural networks called NARX networks perform much better than conventional recurrent neural networks for learning certain simple long-term dependency problems. The intuitive explanation for this behavior is that the output memories of a NARX network can be manifested as jump-ahead connections in the time-unfolded network.