Clinical and Cellular Evidence of and for Vocal Fold Nodules Complementary Treatment.

Vocal fold nodules (VFNs) are the most frequent cause of hoarseness. The management comprised medical, surgical and physical therapy but the effectiveness is not always satisfactory. In this study, we try to figure out an alternative treatment from our clinical experience summary.

Multiple Fano resonances excitation on all-dielectric nanohole arrays metasurfaces.

Both toroidal dipoles, electric dipoles and magnetic dipoles belong to one type of electromagnetic excitation. In this paper, we present an all-dielectric metasurface composed of an array of square nanoholes. It can simultaneously generate four resonance responses excited by TD, EQ and MD in the continuous near-infrared band.

Flow versus permeability weighting in estimating the forward volumetric transfer constant (K) obtained by DCE-MRI with contrast agents of differing molecular sizes.

Purpose: To quantify the differential plasma flow- (F-) and permeability surface area product per unit mass of tissue- (PS-) weighting in forward volumetric transfer constant (K) estimates by using a low molecular (Gd-DTPA) versus high molecular (Gadomer) weight contrast agent in dynamic contrast enhanced (DCE) MRI.

Materials And Methods: DCE MRI was performed using a 7T animal scanner in 14 C57BL/6J mice syngeneic for TRAMP tumors, by administering Gd-DTPA (0.9kD) in eight mice and Gadomer (35kD) in the remainder.

[Epidemiological characteristics of imported malaria cases in Neijiang City, 2013].

Objective: To understand the epidemiological characteristics of imported malaria cases in Neijiang City in 2013, so as to provide the references for malaria elimination in the city.

Methods: The epidemiological data of malaria cases were collected from the Parasitic Diseases Information Management System of Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the data were analyzed with the descriptive epidemiological method.

Results: Totally 19 cases of imported malaria cases were reported in Neijiang City in 2013, which was increased by 375% comparing to that in 2012 (4 cases) , and all the cases were confirmed by the laboratory.

Assessment of vessel permeability by combining dynamic contrast-enhanced and arterial spin labeling MRI.

The forward volumetric transfer constant (K(trans)), a physiological parameter extracted from dynamic contrast-enhanced (DCE) MRI, is weighted by vessel permeability and tissue blood flow. The permeability × surface area product per unit mass of tissue (PS) in brain tumors was estimated in this study by combining the blood flow obtained through pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling (PCASL) and K(trans) obtained through DCE MRI. An analytical analysis and a numerical simulation were conducted to understand how errors in the flow and K(trans) estimates would propagate to the resulting PS.

Fluorescence modulation in tribranched switchable [4]rotaxanes.

Two novel tribranched [4]rotaxanes with a 1,3,5-triphenylene core and three rotaxane arms have been designed, synthesized, and characterized by (1)H and (13)C NMR spectroscopies and HR-ESI mass spectrometry. [4]Rotaxanes 1 and 2 each possess the same three-armed skeleton. Each arm incorporates two distinguishable binding sites for a dibenzo[24]crown-8 ring, namely a dibenzylammonium site and an N-methyltriazolium site, and is terminated by a 4-morpholino-naphthalimide fluorophore as a stopper.

Reversible blood-brain barrier disruption by repeated transcranial focused ultrasound allows enhanced extravasation.

The permeability of blood-brain barrier (BBB) for albumin can be enhanced by focused ultrasound (FUS) in a targeted region when this is applied in the presence of ultrasound contrast agent (UCA). In this study, we demonstrate that, using this noninvasive treatment, Evans Blue (EB) extravasation can be enhanced by repeated sonication. Sonications were applied at an ultrasound frequency of 1 MHz with a 5% duty cycle, and a repetition frequency of 1 Hz.

Association between contrast-enhanced MR images and blood-brain barrier disruption following transcranial focused ultrasound.

Purpose: To investigate the correlation between the contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) signal and the duration of blood-brain barrier (BBB) disruption induced by focused ultrasound (FUS).

Materials And Methods: FUS was applied to 45 rat brains in the presence of microbubbles, and these rats were scanned on a 3T MRI system at several timepoints. The rat brains were then studied using contrast-enhanced spin echo T1-weighted images.

A spectral graph theoretic approach to quantification and calibration of collective morphological differences in cell images.

Motivation: High-throughput image-based assay technologies can rapidly produce a large number of cell images for drug screening, but data analysis is still a major bottleneck that limits their utility. Quantifying a wide variety of morphological differences observed in cell images under different drug influences is still a challenging task because the result can be highly sensitive to sampling and noise.

Results: We propose a graph-based approach to cell image analysis.

[Substances transport in an underground river of typical karst watershed during storm events].

Hydrologic process, turbidity, suspended particles matters (SPM), major cations and TOC concentrations during two storm events in late April 2008 were monitored at Jiangjia Spring which is the outlet of Qingmu Guan underground river system. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy disperse spectroscopy (EDS) analyses of SPM were also performed in order to investigate the transport characteristics of substances, such as SPM, turbidity and major cations in the underground river of typical karst watershed. The results show that at a single and well-developed karst conduit of Jiangjia Spring, discharge, turbidity, and concentrations of SPM, major cations and TOC respond promptly to the rainfall.

Overview of BioCreative II gene mention recognition.

Nineteen teams presented results for the Gene Mention Task at the BioCreative II Workshop. In this task participants designed systems to identify substrings in sentences corresponding to gene name mentions. A variety of different methods were used and the results varied with a highest achieved F1 score of 0.

Integrating high dimensional bi-directional parsing models for gene mention tagging.

Motivation: Tagging gene and gene product mentions in scientific text is an important initial step of literature mining. In this article, we describe in detail our gene mention tagger participated in BioCreative 2 challenge and analyze what contributes to its good performance. Our tagger is based on the conditional random fields model (CRF), the most prevailing method for the gene mention tagging task in BioCreative 2.

Boosting multiclass learning with repeating codes and weak detectors for protein subcellular localization.

Motivation: Determining locations of protein expression is essential to understand protein function. Advances in green fluorescence protein (GFP) fusion proteins and automated fluorescence microscopy allow for rapid acquisition of large collections of protein localization images. Recognition of these cell images requires an automated image analysis system.