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Abstract Background Angiosarcoma is an extremely rare malignant tumor. So far, only about 42 cases of angiosarcoma involving the eyelids have been reported. Eyelid angiosarcoma occurs more frequently in elderly Caucasian males and is prone to misdiagnosis. We present a case report in a young Asian male patient with eyelid angiosarcoma that was misdiagnosed as a chalazion. Case presentation A 46-year-old South Korean male with no underlying disease had a right lower lid mass. The lesion was initially misdiagnosed as a chalazion at a local clinic, but a diagnosis of eyelid angiosarcoma was made after the first biopsy trial. PET-CT was performed to ensure that there was no metastasis in the whole body. Surgical excision with enough surgical margin was used alone for treatment and reconstruction was performed with a tarsoconjunctival advancement flap (modified Hughes procedure), which helped ensure good cosmesis. No recurrence was observed 4 years and 5 months after the surgery. Conclusions The current study presents the first case of chalazion-mimicked eyelid angiosarcoma in a young Asian male aged under 50 years. This case shows that even if a benign eyelid disease is suspected in a young patient, an incisional biopsy must be performed to confirm whether the lesion is malignant. Since the prognosis is good for the case of eyelid angiosarcoma, if there is no clear evidence of distal metastasis, surgical resection should be performed with an enough safety margin.

A simple bone cyst is a tumor-like lesion that is not a true neoplasm. It usually presents as a solitary lesion within the proximal humerus and proximal femur. The etiology of simple bone cysts is still to be elucidated. We describe our experience in the successful surgical management of a rare case of two, large-sized, simple bone cysts involving the entire left humerus and right femoral head, respectively, in a 34-year-old male patient with Wilson’s disease and concomitant hepatic cirrhosis. We theorized that Wilson’s disease could be the cause of the delay or blockage of the natural healing process of the simple long-bone cysts, leading to their abnormal growth and development. To our knowledge, such a combined occurrence of multiple, simple long-bone cysts and Wilson’s disease has not been reported in the literature to date.

This study aimed to clarify the genetic difference between Korean triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) and other breast cancer (BC) subtypes. TNBC was defined as the absence of hormonal receptors and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) amplification. DNA panel of the Ion Torrent Oncomine Comprehensive Assay (OCA) v3 was performed to identify somatic alteration in 48 specimens. In a total of 102 alterations (37 nonsense, 35 missense, 8 frameshift and 22 amplifications), 30 nucleotide alterations (24 nonsense, 1 missense, and 5 frameshift) were newly identified. The eight most commonly altered genes were PIK3CA, TP53, ERBB2, BRCA2, FANCD2, AKT1, BRCA1, and FANCA. TNBC had significantly lower mutation frequency in PIK3CA (TNBC vs. hormone receptor-positive and HER2-negative BC [HRPBC], p = 0.009), but higher mutation frequency in TP53 (TNBC vs. HRPBC, p = 0.036; TNBC vs. hormone receptor-positive and HER2- positive BC [HHPBC], p = 0.004). TNBC showed frequently higher Ki-67 expression than any positive BC (p = 0.004) due to HRPBC (p < 0.001). TNBC with high Ki-67/unmutated PIK3CA/mutated TP53 appears at a younger age (52.2 ± 7.6 years), compared to other subtypes (63.7 ± 11.0 years). TNBC with high Ki-67/unmutated PIK3CA/mutated TP53 may be related to relatively early onset BC. These findings demonstrate the genomic heterogeneity between TNBC and other BC subtypes and could present a new approach for molecular targeted therapy in TNBC patients.

Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common high-grade B-cell lymphoma found in Korea; it manifests with a variety of cellular morphologies and a high proliferation index. It is difficult to differentiate between DLBCL and Burkitt lymphoma (BL) based on immunohistochemistry, histology, and Epstein-Barr virus infection status owing to the overlap in findings. In this study, we performed comparative morphometric analysis to understand the proportional difference in Ki-67 staining between DLBCL and BL. We analyzed Ki-67-stained slides of 103 DLBCLs and 29 BLs that were pathologically confirmed using a three-tier classification system (negative, 1+, 2+, and 3+) to compare Ki-67 expression between BL and activated B-cell and germinal center B-cell subtypes of DLBCL and DLBCL with high proliferation indices (>90% of 2+ and 3+ cells). Patients with DLBCL were older than those with BL (62.1 versus 51.0 years). The number and proportion of negative cells (passenger and true negative cells) were significantly lower in BLs than those in DLBCLs (337.4, 5.9% versus 690.3, 12.4%). The number and proportion of 3+ cells were significantly higher in BLs than those in DLBCLs (5213.6, 96.3% versus 3132.4, 62.0%). BLs and DLBCLs with a high proliferation index showed similar results as those between BLs and overall DLBCLs. We were able to differentiate BLs and DLBCLs with 98.1% sensitivity and 100.0% specificity using an optimal cut-off of 97.9% of 2+/3+ Ki-67-positive cells. Thus, the Ki-67 labeling index may be a good differential biomarker for DLBCLs and BLs.

Visibility of the overlaid virtual image is highly sensitive to surrounding illumination in optical seethrough (OST) displays. Ambient light can especially deteriorate the visibility of low gray-levels of comparable luminance. Therefore, we first derive a luminance model based on actual measurements under varied ambient light and use it to extract low gray-level regions (LGR), which suffer from severe contrast loss. It was experimentally found that gamma tone mapping is the most appropriate method for LGR contrast enhancement of OST displays. Luminance boosting before gamma tone mapping allows better expression of very low value gray levels in the output AR image. The gamma values and luminance boosting parameter are optimally determined by cost minimization. Visibility enhancement is verified experimentally on a practical setup using a variety of ambient light levels and images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RBFOX3, a nuclear RNA-binding protein, is well known as a regulator of alternative pre-mRNA splicing during neuronal development. However, other functions of RBFOX3 are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the function of RBFOX3 in the cytoplasm with respect to regulation of Claudin-1 expression. In human lung tissue, Claudin-1 is higher in RBFOX3-positive cells than in RBFOX3-negative cells. Immunostaining and mRNA quantification revealed that protein levels, but not mRNA levels, of Claudin-1 are increased by RBFOX3. In addition, cycloheximide treatment of human lung cancer cells revealed that RBFOX3 increases the stability of Claudin-1 through attenuation of its ubiquitination. Our study provides insights into the molecular mechanisms by which RBFOX3 regulates Claudin-1 expression in human lung tissue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fairly recent standard of equipping mobile devices with advanced imaging sensors has opened the possibility of conveniently diagnosing skin conditions, anywhere, anytime. For this application, we attempted to estimate skin conditions from a skin image taken by a mobile handheld camera. To estimate the skin conditions, we specifically identified three skin features (pigmentation, pores, and roughness) that can be measured quantitatively from a skin image. The experimental data indicate that the existing thresholding methods are inappropriate for extracting the pigmentation and pore skin features. Thus, we propose a new line-fitting based thresholding method for skin feature detection. We thoroughly evaluated our proposed skin condition estimation method using our skin image database. The experimental results show that our proposed thresholding method can better determine the threshold leading to the most visually plausible detection, when compared to existing methods. We also confirmed that skin conditions can be feasibly estimated using a common mobile handheld camera (for example, a smartphone). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The RNA-binding protein Rbfox3 is a well-known splicing regulator that is used as a marker for post-mitotic neurons in various vertebrate species. Although recent studies indicate a variable expression of Rbfox3 in non-neuronal tissues, including lung tissue, its cellular function in lung cancer remains largely unknown. Here, we report that the number of RBFOX3-positive cells in tumorous lung tissue is lower than that in normal lung tissue. As the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) signaling pathway is important in cancer progression, we investigated its role in RBFOX3 expression in A549 lung adenocarcinoma cells. TGF-β1 treatment inhibited RBFOX3 expression at the transcriptional level. Further, RBFOX3 depletion led to a change in the expression levels of a subset of proteins related to epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), such as Ecadherin and Claudin-1, during TGF-β1-induced EMT. In immunofluorescence microscopic analysis, mesenchymal morphology was more prominent in RBFOX3-depleted cells than in control cells. These findings show that TGF-β- induced RBFOX3 inhibition plays an important role in EMT and propose a novel role for RBFOX3 in cancer progression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose an image adaptive backlight dimming method that quantitatively measures the perceived image quality degradation in terms of brightness and contrast. Unlike conventional methods, the proposed adaptive dimming considers the spatial distribution characteristics of the clipped pixels via a new measure, clusterization, to effectively estimate the perceived contrast loss and prevent the clipping artifact (light saturation). The proposed adaptive dimming achieves an average 17.71% power reduction while keeping the image quality difference to a tolerably low amount, as shown by the subjective mean opinion score test results. Comparing the optimal backlight levels estimated by the proposed method with results from other methods, the proposed backlight dimming is closer to the ground truth backlight levels that are favored by human subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Extrapulmonary small cell carcinomas have been reported in a variety of organs, and their incidence in the genitourinary tract is second only to that in the gastrointestinal tract. To date, however, only a few cases of small cell carcinoma of the ureter have been reported. Because the extreme rarity of this type of carcinoma, its clinical behaviour, diagnostic methods, and effective treatment modalities have not yet been determined. Case presentation: A 59-year-old man presented with a 1-month history of painless gross haematuria. Urine cytopathology revealed a urothelial carcinoma and computed tomography revealed left hydronephroureterosis with a distal ureteral stone and a mildly enhanced fungating mass just below the stone-impacted site. The preoperative TNM stage was T2N0M0. The patient underwent simultaneous diagnostic ureterorenoscopy and left laparoscopic nephroureterectomy with bladder cuff resection. Gross examination showed a 3.5 × 3.0 × 0.8 cm white, partly yellow mass in the left distal ureter. Light microscopy showed a small cell carcinoma, overlaid on a urothelial carcinoma in situ, invading the ureter and external lateral resection margins. The small cell carcinoma was diffusely positive for neuron-specific enolase, and exhibited focal positivity for CD 56, synaptophysin, chromogranin and cytokeratin 20. The patient was treated with adjuvant chemotherapy, consisting of cisplatin and etoposide, and radiation therapy, and has been well, without evidence of tumour recurrence or metastasis in the 10 months after surgery. Conclusion: Small cell carcinoma of the ureter is rare. Although its clinical behaviour and diagnostic modalities have not been determined and it has yet to be diagnosed immunohistopathologically, multimodality treatment including surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy may improve patient survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes the streaming radio frequency identification (RFID) protocol to support robust data streaming in a passive communication, which is extended from the ISO18000-6 Type C RFID standard. By observing and modeling the unique bit error behavior through detailed analysis in this paper, we found that performance is significantly limited by inaccurate and unstable link frequencies as well as low SNR which are inevitable for passive devices. Based on the analysis, we propose a simple and efficient protocol to adaptively insert extra error control sequences in a packet for tolerating tough link condition while maximizing the throughput and preserving the minimal implementation cost. To evaluate effectiveness of our proposal in real-time streaming applications, we experimented on real-time H.264 video streaming and prototyped the system on FPGA. To our best knowledge, our paper is the first work to take analytical approach for maximizing the throughput and demonstrate the possibility of the realtime multimedia streaming transmission in the passive RFID system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is significantly challenging to playback H.264 compressed video in real time on mobile devices with limited computing power. In this paper, we propose a complexity scalable H.264/AVC decoding algorithm with a downsizing capability, which can offer the complexity scalability by directly decoding the compressed video at a downsized resolution. In the proposed method, the predicted and residual signal can be generated in a downsized resolution by modifying the motion compensation (MC) and the inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT). As a result, the computational decoding load can be significantly reduced. Moreover, the proposed H.264 decoder can achieve the complexity scalability by adaptively discarding (or simplifying) redundant computations which have larger complexity but less effect on the video quality. Experimental results show that the decoding complexity can be reduced up to 43%, as compared to the conventional H.264/AVC decoder, while maintaining the acceptable video quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on cellulase genes from endophytic Paenibacillus polymyxa GS01. It states that endophytic bacteria are acknowledged as a new source of genes, proteins and other biochemical compounds, which are often used in biochemical processes. Paenibacillus polymyxa GS01 was isolated from the interior of the roots of Korean cultivars of ginseng, and two cellulase genes such as Cel5A and Cel5B were cloned from GS01. The Cel5A and Cel5B contains a glycosyl hydrolase family 5 (GH5) catalytic domain, and when purified from Escherichia coli, they both displayed cellulase activity with pH optima of 7.0 and 6.0. However, Cel5A and Cel5B exhibited higher specific cellulase activity than Ce44C-Man26A.

It is expected that multiple radio access technologies coexist within a single terminal. In those networks, we focus on the problem of how to distribute IP traffic into multiple underlying links in order to enhance the overall aggregated throughput. As an effective aggregation mechanism, traffic is equivalently assigned to each link, in proportion to its available capacity. To this end, the capacity of each link is commonly measured for easy comparison between radio links, and then, the relative split ratio is accordingly determined. We identify LTT (link transmission time) as a common link resource measure. We specifically consider that each terminal is equipped with IEEE 802.11a and 802.11b devices, and have implemented a practical test-bed network system. In IEEE 802.11 networks, LTT is considerably variable due to random back-off process, depending on neighboring contending terminals and radio signal quality variations. It is actually captured at a radio device driver instead of theoretical calculation. Based on measurements, we determine traffic split ratios to both links. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method could reduce the packet reorder delay at the receiver by achieving equal load-balance, rapidly adapting to varying link qualities (i.e., channel access contention and radio signal attenuation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paenibacillus polymyxa GS01 secretes Cel44C-Man26A as a multifunctional enzyme with cellulase, xylanase, lichenase, and mannanase activities. Cel44C-Man26A consists of 1,352 amino acids in which present a catalytic domain (CD) of the glycosyl hydrolase family 44 (GH44), fibronectin domain type 3 (Fn3), catalytic domain of glycosyl hydrolase family 26 (GH26), and a cellulose-binding module type 3 (CBM3). A truncated Cel44C-Man26A protein, consisting of 549 amino acid residues, reacted as a multifunctional mature enzyme despite the absence of the 10 amino acids containing GH44, Fn3, GH26, and CBM3. However, the multifunctional activity was not found in the mature Cel44C-Man26A protein truncated to less than 548 amino acids. The truncated Cel44C-Man26A proteins showed the optimum pH for the lichenase activity was pH 7.0, pH 6.0 for the xylanase and mannanase, and pH 5.0 for the cellulase. The truncated Cel44C-Man26A proteins exhibited enzymatic activity 40–120% higher than the full-length Cel44C. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The combination of VoIP and WLAN technologies has created a new attractive service, wireless VoIP, and its interest has been increasingly growing in a variety of environments such as offices and public areas. However, mixing voice with data traffic introduces QoS issues because 802.11 DCF does not provide any QoS mechanism. In this paper, an enhanced version of the legacy DCF is proposed in order to support friendly coexistence of voice and data. Every downlink transmission of data packets in an AP, voice packets pending in its queue are simultaneously sent together. It can be easily implemented with packet bursting technique. Thus, voice traffic is hardly interfered by dynamic data load, and its QoS can be consistently protected within an acceptable level. Additionally, the proposed MAC scheme is fully backward compatible with DCF, and requires only partial modifications of the AP MAC protocol. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a high level of voice QoS with data load dynamics. In other words, our solution enables voice and data traffic to coexist harmoniously, greatly reducing interference of data with voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study which focused on the cloning and sequencing of cel5Z gene from Erwinua chrysanthemi PY35. Materials and methods; Results; Discussion.

Low-light images often lack visibility and information, and traditional methods of adjusting camera sensitivity and exposure time can result in visual quality degradation. In this paper, we propose a low-light enhancement method that utilizes two novel approaches to address these issues. The first approach involves using multi-band NIR (Near Infra-red) to preserve structural components, while a transformer-based cross-attention module efficiently calculates the correlation between NIR and RGB for effective fusion. The second approach involves implementing dual-teacher knowledge distillation, where normal- and mid-light teacher networks transfer low-light enhancement knowledge to the student. Our proposed method produces better color and detail restoration results than existing methods, particularly in ultra low-light environments. We also provide our own datasets for two different low-light conditions, enabling wide evaluations and ablation studies.

This paper proposes to utilize deep spatio-spectral features for color constancy, while most conventional methods focus on only spatial information of RGB images. We propose a novel color constancy method that exploits multi-band near-infrared (NIR). The proposed illuminant estimation network comprises two subnetworks, each tasked with learning different aspects: one focuses on capturing the local illuminant based on the input RGB and NIR images, while the other is dedicated to estimating confidence levels using both RGB and NIR inputs. We leverage a cross-attention mechanism to effectively capture the correlation between RGB and NIR modalities. Additionally, our method capitalizes on the relationship between RGB and NIR by incorporating a NIR colorization network into the primary illuminant estimation framework. Due to the absence of a public dataset for color constancy with multi-band NIR, we constructed a dataset comprising 604 images using a hyperspectral camera. The experimental results demonstrate superior performance in illuminant estimation when utilizing multi-band NIR compared to conventional RGB and single-band NIR approaches. Furthermore, employing a cross-attention mechanism to consider the correlation between RGB and NIR reveals the estimation of a sophisticated confidence map that aids in illuminant estimation, surpassing other existing fusion methods. The feature transfer from an additional task network can further enhance the performance of illuminant estimation.

We aim to contribute to deep learning based smart agriculture through semantic segmentation on crop images from real field environment. The key objective is the precise detection of diseases to facilitate the automation of agricultural management. The most significant issue is that the disease regions, serving as Regions of Interest (RoI), are small, making accurate prediction challenging. To address this issue, we propose a new framework of RoI-Attention Network (RA-Net) which additionally utilizes an RoI-attentive image that includes only regions predicted as disease and their surroundings from the input image. Using the RoI-attentive image, RA-Net enhances the representation power for disease regions by guiding the network to re-focus on RoI-associated context based on the initial prediction from the input. Using the proposed RoI-Attention stage, the coarse predictions of disease regions in crop images can be enhanced by incorporating additional sequential RoI-Attention and fusion stages. We have experimentally demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed RA-Net in predicting small disease regions.

Abstract Background Light control technology has been developed and studied for decades in controlled environment agriculture (CEA) for successful crop production. The effects of the light spectrum on plant growth can vary because plants have spectral specific responses, and mixed light elicits interactive combination effects. Response surface methodology (RSM) can be utilized with the design of experiments to optimize a response influenced by multiple inputs with limited data. In this study, we aimed to identify the optimal photon ratio in combination of red (R), green (G), and blue (B) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for growing lettuce seedlings using RSM and a seedling-indicating parameter by performing a similarity analysis of response surfaces that elucidated the response tendency of different factors, such as light quality. Results The highest shoot fresh weight was obtained from the R treatment (red LED 100%) at the end of the seedling stage. However, the RGB141 (photon ratio of R:G:B = 1:4:1) treatment during the seedling stage resulted in the highest shoot fresh weight at the final harvest. The value of the leaf area multiplied by the leaf chlorophyll concentration (SPAD) was selected as the seedling-indicating parameter. The optimal RGB photon ratio that maximized this parameter was R:G:B = 30.6:44.0:25.4, and this ratio was verified by conducting identical cultivation experiments. During the first 6 days after transplanting, SPAD gradually increased in R-treated seedlings, while the optimal treatment maintained the value at a higher constant level, which supported our result of shoot fresh weight at harvest. Conclusions Thus, we confirmed that the mixture design method allowed us to optimize the combined RGB photon ratios for the seedling stage in order to maximize the growth index of mature lettuce plants and to select an appropriate seedling-indicating parameter that represents the final harvest results to benefit crop production in CEA.