Search

Multivariate data analysis was applied to confocal Raman measurements on stents coated with the polymers and drug used in the CYPHER Sirolimus-eluting Coronary Stents. Partial least-squares (PLS) regression was used to establish three independent calibration curves for the coating constituents: sirolimus, poly(n-butyl methacrylate) [PBMA], and poly(ethylene-co-vinyl acetate) [PEVA]. The PLS calibrations were based on average spectra generated from each spatial location profiled. The PLS models were tested on six unknown stent samples to assess accuracy and precision. The wt % difference between PLS predictions and laboratory assay values for sirolimus was less than 1 wt % for the composite of the six unknowns, while the polymer models were estimated to be less than 0.5 wt % difference for the combined samples. The linearity and specificity of the three PLS models were also demonstrated with the three PLS models. In contrast to earlier univariate models, the PLS models achieved mass balance with better accuracy. This analysis was extended to evaluate the spatial distribution of the three constituents. Quantitative bitmap images of drug-eluting stent coatings are presented for the first time to assess the local distribution of components.

A novel multigrid algorithm is presented for the fast evolution of level-set-based geometric active contours and is compared it with other established numerical schemes. The combined algorithm has allowed the rapid evolution of the contour and convergence to its final configuration after very little iteration and the image segmentation experiments have demonstrated the efficiency and accuracy of the method.

Amidine, amidrazone and amidoxime derivatives were prepared for the powerful glycosidase inhibitors, D-gluco, D-mannono, and D-galactonolactams. All derivatives of the D-gluco series powerfully inhibit sweet almond beta-glucosidase and react with mannose- and galactose-processing enzymes. The latter two derivatives of the D-manno series powerfully inhibit jackbean alpha-mannosidase, mung bean alpha-mannosidase and fungal beta-mannosidase.

The Registry Assessment of Peripheral Devices (RAPID) convened a multidisciplinary group of stakeholders including clinicians, academicians, regulators and industry representatives to conduct an in-depth review of limitations associated with the data available to assess the paclitaxel mortality signal. Available studies were evaluated to identify strengths and limitations in the study design and data quality, which were translated to lessons learned to help guide the design, execution, and analyses of future studies. We suggest numerous actionable responses, such as the development and use of harmonized data points and outcomes in a consensus lean case report form. We advocate for reduction in missing data and efficient means for accrual of larger sample sizes in Peripheral arterial disease studies or use of supplemental datasets. Efforts to share lessons learned and working collaboratively to address such issues may improve future data in this device area and ultimately benefit patients. Condensed Abstract: Data sources evaluating paclitaxel-coated devices were evaluated to identify strengths and limitations in the study design and data quality, which were translated to lessons learned to help guide the design, execution, and analyses of future studies. We suggest numerous actionable responses, which we believe may improve future data in this device area and ultimately benefit patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of people infected with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) in the European Union (EU) remain undiagnosed and untreated. During recent years, immigration to EU has further increased HCV prevalence. It has been estimated that, out of the 4.2 million adults affected by HCV infection in the 31 EU/ European Economic Area (EEA) countries, as many as 580 000 are migrants. Additionally, HCV is highly prevalent and under addressed in Eastern Europe. In 2013, the introduction of highly effective treatments for HCV with direct‐acting antivirals created an unprecedented opportunity to cure almost all patients, reduce HCV transmission and eliminate the disease. However, in many settings, HCV elimination poses a serious challenge for countries' health spending. On 6 June 2018, the Hepatitis B and C Public Policy Association held the 2nd EU HCV Policy summit. It was emphasized that key stakeholders should work collaboratively since only a few countries in the EU are on track to achieve HCV elimination by 2030. In particular, more effort is needed for universal screening. The micro‐elimination approach in specific populations is less complex and less costly than country‐wide elimination programmes and is an important first step in many settings. Preliminary data suggest that implementation of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Health Sector Strategy on Viral Hepatitis can be cost saving. However, innovative financing mechanisms are needed to raise funds upfront for scaling up screening, treatment and harm reduction interventions that can lead to HCV elimination by 2030, the stated goal of the WHO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a combined experimental and theoretical study of adhesion between hard and soft layers that are relevant to medical devices such as drug-eluting stents and semiconductor applications. Brazil disk specimens were used to measure the interfacial fracture energies between model parylene C and 316L stainless steel over a wide range of mode mixities. The trends in the overall fracture energies are predicted using a combination of adhesion theories and fracture mechanics concepts. The measured interfacial fracture energies are shown to be in good agreement with the predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on semantic image segmentation with deep learning. According to author, atrous convolution enables one to directly control the resolution at which feature responses are calculated in case of deep convolutional neural networks. One-dimensional as well as two-dimensional illustrations of arouse convolutions are also presented.

The future of the European Union has never been more in doubt than at the very moment it has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its historical accomplishments. When the heads of Europe's weakest institutions-the Commission, the Council and the Parliament-collected the prize in Oslo on December 10, 2012 they spotlighted the nub of the problem. Unless these institutions can garner the legitimacy of European citizens and transform into a real federal union with common fiscal and economic policies to complement the single currency, Europe will remain at the mercy of global financial markets and the fiscally authoritarian dictates of its strongest state, Germany. Moving beyond this state of affairs was the focus of a recent 'town hall' gathering in Berlin sponsored by the Berggruen Institute on Governance. The meeting brought together current power brokers-such as the contending voices of German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble and French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, who rarely appear in public together-as well as Europe's top former leaders, key thinkers and young people who will govern in the future. The peace-building project of the European Union was born out of the ashes of World War II and the anguish of the Cold War. Yet, as George Soros points out, its current inability to resolve the eurocrisis by forging greater union is dividing Europe once again, this time between creditors and debtors. Former Greek premier George Papandreou has warned that this division is fomenting a new politics of fear that is giving rise to the same kind of xenophobic movements that fueled the extreme politics of the Nazi era. To avoid a repeat of the last calamitous century, Europe first of all needs a growth strategy both to escape the 'debt trap' it is in-and which austerity alone will only deepen-and to create breathing space for the tough structural reforms that can make Europe as a whole competitive again in a globalized world. To sustain reform, it needs a clear path to legitimacy for the institutions that must govern a federal Europe. The proof that Europe can escape its crisis through a combination of growth, fiscal discipline and structural reform comes from the one country so many want to keep out of the union: Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan rightfully boasts of Turkey's accomplishments that resulted from the difficult changes carried out after its crisis in 2001-ranging from quickly cleaning up the banks to liberalizing markets to trimming social benefits to make them more affordable in the long run. As a result, Turkey today is the fastest growing economy in the world alongside China with diminished deficit and debt levels that meet the eurozone criteria that many members states themselves cannot today meet. Turkey has even offered a 5 billion euro credit through the IMF for financial aid to Europe. Germany itself also provides some lessons for the rest of Europe. The obvious reason Germany rules today is because it is the most globally competitive country in the European Union. That is the result of a series of reforms that were implemented starting in 2003 under the leadership of then-chancellor Gerhard Schröder. Aimed a bolstering Germany's industrial base and its collateral small and medium enterprises which are the foundation of its middle class society, those reforms introduced more labor flexibility and trimmed benefits to make them sustainably affordable while investing in training, maintaining skills and research and development. Even if Europe's individual nation states can shrink imbalances by following Turkey and Germany in getting their act together, the only ultimate way to save the euro, and thus Europe itself, is to build the complementary governing institutions at the European level. For those institutions to become effective, they must be empowered and legitimated by European citizens themselves. To this end, Tony Blair has suggested a bold move: the direct election of a European president. Symbolically, the Oslo ceremonies were a historical turning point for Europe. By recognizing the European Union's peace-making past, the Nobel Prize challenged Europe to escape once and for all the destructive pull of narrow national interests and passions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Selectins play a key role in the inflammatory cascade. The interaction with their physiological ligands containing the tetrasaccharide sialyl Lewisx (sLex) leads to the recruitment of leukocytes from the vascular system to the site of injury. To facilitate the interaction under the shear stress conditions present in the blood vessel, the conformation of sLex is stabilized via lipophilic inter-residual contacts. sLex and two analogs were synthesized and evaluated for selectin binding, average conformation, and conformational dynamics. We could show that the methyl group in L-fucose is optimally suited to stabilize the sLex core through an interaction with the β-face of D-galactose and thus enables binding to the selectins under shear stress conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay based on a speech by George Papandreou, prime minister of Greece and president of Socialist International, delivered to the Council of the Socialist International in New York in June 2010 is presented. It discusses the fragility of the European and global recovery, the crisis in Greece, and the building of a new development model in which profit is not pursued at all costs.

The author conveys his thoughts about his meeting with Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in the 1980s, the last generation of refugees in Sweden during the time, and the inflow of Syrian refugees in Europe as of May 2016. Topics mentioned include Palme's political campaign in 1982 to become prime minister, international political figures who sought refuge and found support in the Nordic countries, and investment in the Syrian families coming to Europe.

We present an improved statistical model for analyzing Poisson processes, with applications to photon-limited imaging. We build on previous work, adopting a multiscale representation of the Poisson process in which the ratios of the underlying Poisson intensities (rates) in adjacent scales are modeled as mixtures of conjugate parametric distributions. Our main contributions include: 1) a rigorous and robust regularized expectation- maximization (EM) algorithm for maximum-likelihood estimation of the rate-ratio density parameters directly from the noisy observed Poisson data (counts); 2) extension of the method to work under a multiscale hidden Markov tree model (HMT) which couples the mixture label assignments in consecutive scales, thus modeling interscale coefficient dependencies in the vicinity of image edges; 3) exploration of a 2-D recursive quad-tree image representation, involving Dirichlet-mixture rate-ratio densities, instead of the conventional separable binary-tree image representation involving beta-mixture rate-ratio densities; and 4) a novel multiscale image representation, which we term Poisson-Haar decomposition, that better models the image edge structure, thus yielding improved performance. Experimental results on standard images with artificially simulated Poisson noise and on real photon-limited images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the accuracy of feature measurements heavily depends on changing environmental conditions, studying the consequences of this fact in pattern recognition tasks has received relatively little attention to date. In this paper, we explicitly take feature measurement uncertainty into account and show how multimodal classification and learning rules should be adjusted to compensate for its effects. Our approach is particularly fruitful in multimodal fusion scenarios, such as audiovisual speech recognition, where multiple streams of complementary time-evolving features are integrated. For such applications, provided that the measurement noise uncertainty for each feature stream can be estimated, the proposed framework leads to highly adaptive multimodal fusion rules which are easy and efficient to implement. Our technique is widely applicable and can be transparently integrated with either synchronous or asynchronous multimodal sequence integration architectures. We further show that multimodal fusion methods relying on stream weights can naturally emerge from our scheme under certain assumptions; this connection provides valuable insights into the adaptivity properties of our multimodal uncertainty compensation approach. We show how these ideas can be practically applied for audiovisual speech recognition. In this context, we propose improved techniques for person-independent visual feature extraction and uncertainty estimation with active appearance models, and also discuss how enhanced audio features along with their uncertainty estimates can be effectively computed. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in audiovisual speech recognition experiments on the CUAVE database using either synchronous or asynchronous multimodal integration models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are interested in recovering aspects of vocal tract's geometry and dynamics from speech, a problem referred to as speech inversion. Traditional audio-only speech inversion techniques are inherently ill-posed since the same speech acoustics can be produced by multiple articulatory configurations. To alleviate the ill-posedness of the audio-only inversion process, we propose an inversion scheme which also exploits visual information from the speaker's face. The complex audiovisual-to-articulatory mapping is approximated by an adaptive piecewise linear model. Model switching is governed by a Markovian discrete process which captures articulatory dynamic information. Each constituent linear mapping is effectively estimated via canonical correlation analysis. In the described multimodal context, we investigate alternative fusion schemes which allow interaction between the audio and visual modalities at various synchronization levels. For facial analysis, we employ active appearance models (AAMs) and demonstrate fully automatic face tracking and visual feature extraction. Using the AAM features in conjunction with audio features such as Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) or line spectral frequencies (LSFs) leads to effective estimation of the trajectories followed by certain points of interest in the speech production system. We report experiments on the QSMT and MOCHA databases which contain audio, video, and electromagnetic articulography data recorded in parallel. The results show that exploiting both audio and visual modalities in a multistream hidden Markov model based scheme clearly improves performance relative to either audio or visual-only estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) of the European Union. Progress in CFSP; Developments in European Union Defense Policy; Involvement of the EU in a process of institutional reform.

Examines the principles behind the foreign policy of Greece in the post-Cold War era. Significance of the United Nations Millenium Assemby and the Olympic Games in September 2000 to the country; Discussion on the possible negative ramifications of globalization; Characteristics of a stable society.

The article comments on the integrationist vision of Mexican President Vicente Fox in 2001. Fox believes that a common market with the U.S., democracy and the rule of law will create space that is free and wealthy enough to accommodate all Americans' aspirations. Fox's integrationist vision has been welcomed by most of Latin America.

The article discusses the wary form of globalization in the new era that emerged from the end of the post-Cold War years and the end of "naive globalization." It includes an in-depth analysis of the new vulnerabilities and opportunities carried by this new form of globalization, which is marked by U.S. efforts to spread democratization and modernization in the Arab Middle East as part of the fight against terrorism.

The article presents a case for Turkey as a member of the European Union (EU). The European Union-- whose 25 members represent around 456 million citizens--is the biggest and boldest experiment in multilateral governance ever undertaken. Built from the ashes of war the Union is a force for peace and cooperation in a world of growing insecurity and polarity. Now the European Commission has embraced the boldest test yet, by judging Turkey to be ready to start EU accession negotiations. European integration can serve as a model for resolving the underlying crises of the Middle East and addressing the roots of violence in the wider region.

Selectins play a key role in the inflammatory cascade. The interaction with their physiological ligands containing the tetrasaccharide sialyl Lewisx (sLex) leads to the recruitment of leukocytes from the vascular system to the site of injury. To facilitate the interaction under the shear stress conditions present in the blood vessel, the conformation of sLex is stabilized via lipophilic inter-residual contacts. sLex and two analogs were synthesized and evaluated for selectin binding, average conformation, and conformational dynamics. We could show that the methyl group in L-fucose is optimally suited to stabilize the sLex core through an interaction with the β-face of D-galactose and thus enables binding to the selectins under shear stress conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to question the necessity of features like SIFT in categorical visual recognition tasks. As an alternative, we develop a generative model for the raw intensity of image patches and show that it can support image classification performance on par with optimized SIFT-based techniques in a bag-of-visual-words setting. Key ingredient of the proposed model is a compact dictionary of mini-epitomes, learned in an unsupervised fashion on a large collection of images. The use of epitomes allows us to explicitly account for photometric and position variability in image appearance. We show that this flexibility considerably increases the capacity of the dictionary to accurately approximate the appearance of image patches and support recognition tasks. For image classification, we develop histogram-based image encoding methods tailored to the epitomic representation, as well as an "epitomic footprint" encoding which is easy to visualize and highlights the generative nature of our model. We discuss in detail computational aspects and develop efficient algorithms to make the model scalable to large tasks. The proposed techniques are evaluated with experiments on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2007 image classification benchmark.

The first main contribution of this paper is a novel method for representing images based on a dictionary of shape epitomes. These shape epitomes represent the local edge structure of the image and include hidden variables to encode shift and rotations. They are learnt in an unsupervised manner from groundtruth edges. This dictionary is compact but is also able to capture the typical shapes of edges in natural images. In this paper, we illustrate the shape epitomes by applying them to the image labeling task. In other work, described in the supplementary material, we apply them to edge detection and image modeling. We apply shape epitomes to image labeling by using Conditional Random Field (CRF) Models. They are alternatives to the superpixel or pixel representations used in most CRFs. In our approach, the shape of an image patch is encoded by a shape epitome from the dictionary. Unlike the superpixel representation, our method avoids making early decisions which cannot be reversed. Our resulting hierarchical CRFs efficiently capture both local and global class co-occurrence properties. We demonstrate its quantitative and qualitative properties of our approach with image labeling experiments on two standard datasets: MSRC-21 and Stanford Background.

An atomic force microscopy (AFM) method was developed to quantify the adhesion forces between and cohesive forces within the layers of a drug-eluting stent (DES). Surface pairs representing both the individual components and the complete chemistry of each layer within the DES were prepared. As a model, the CYPHER Sirolimus-eluting Coronary Stent was studied. This DES consists of a stainless steel stent substrate, a parylene C primer layer, and a drug-eluting layer that contains poly(ethylene-co-vinyl acetate), poly(n-butyl methacrylate), and sirolimus (rapamycin). Coated AFM tips and two-dimensional substrates or coupons, which act as surrogates to the CYPHER Stent, were prepared and characterized. The force-displacement measurements were conducted to evaluate the adhesion between the middle parylene C layer and the 316L stainless steel substrate, the adhesion between the parylene C layer and the outer drug-eluting layer, and the cohesion between the three constituents of the drug-eluting layer. The average adhesion forces between the parylene C to drug layer varied from 88 to 167 nN, and the drug layer-to-drug layer interactions were between 194 and 486 nN within the model CYPHER Stent coating. All the adhesion forces measured were larger than those observed for gold-gold interactions, which yielded a pull of force of 19 nN (Zong et al., J Appl Phys 2006;100:104313-104323).

Background: In-stent restenosis is caused by neointimal hyperplasia. Sirolimus (rapamycin; Wyeth Research, Radnor, Pennsylvania, USA) inhibits vascular smooth muscle cell proliferation and we evaluated the efficacy of sirolimus in reducing neointimal formation in a rabbit iliac model and in-vivo pharmacokinetics in the porcine coronary model., Design: Randomized, blinded, prospective animal study., Methods: Bilateral rabbit iliac artery stent implantation was performed using crossflex stents (Cordis Corporation, Warren, New Jersey, USA) coated with sirolimus incorporated in a nonerodable polymer. Arteries were randomized to one of four stent groups: uncoated stents (n = 8); polymer control stents (n = 10); low-dose sirolimus-eluting stents (n = 9); and high-dose sirolimus-eluting stents (n = 10). Histomorphometry was performed at 28 days. Arterial tissue and stents were retrieved at 8, 14 and 28 days and blood samples were obtained daily during the first week., Results: Treatment with low-dose sirolimus was associated with a 23% (P = NS) reduction in neointimal area and treatment with high-dose sirolimus with a 45% (P < 0.05) reduction. Sustained drug release from the stent and prolonged intramural arterial deposition were confirmed for up to 28 days. No detectable sirolimus was found in the blood after 2 days., Conclusion: Controlled-release local delivery of a cell-cycle inhibitor from a nonerodable polymer-coated stent reduced neointimal formation in rabbit iliac arteries in a dose-dependent manner and represents a promising strategy for preventing restenosis.