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Fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21) has pharmaceutical potential against obesity-related metabolic disorders, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Since thermal stability is a desirable factor for therapeutic proteins, we investigated the thermal behavior of human FGF21. FGF21 remained soluble after heating; thus, we examined its temperature-induced structural changes using circular dichroism (CD). FGF21 showed inter-convertible temperature-specific CD spectra. The CD spectrum at 100 °C returned to that at 20 °C when the heated FGF21 solution was cooled. Through loop swapping, the connecting loop between β10 and β12 in FGF21 was revealed to be associated with the unique thermal behavior of FGF21. According to surface plasmon resonance (SPR) experiments, in vitro cell-based assays, and model high-fat diet (HFD)-induced obesity studies, heated FGF21 maintained biological activities that were comparable to those of non-heated and commercial FGF21s. Based on sequence comparison and structural analysis, five point-mutations were introduced into FGF21. Compared with the wild type, the heated FGF21 variant displayed improved therapeutic potential in terms of body weight loss, the levels of hepatic triglycerides and lipids, and the degree of vacuolization of liver in HFD-fed mice.

Crude unit overhead corrosion is a major issue in the refinery field. However, the corrosion models in the literature are difficult to apply to real refinery processes due to the characteristics of corrosion. We propose a Kriging model, an advanced statistical tool for geostatistics, to forecast the corrosion rate in a real refinery plant. Instead of spatial coordinates, the proposed model employs the non-spatial coordinates of six key corrosion variables: H2S, Cl−, Fe2+, NH3, pH, and flowrate. The Kriging model is compared with two well-known forecasting models, multiple linear regression and an artificial neural network. To overcome the insufficiency of the number of data sets measured in the plant to use the six non-spatial coordinates, the significance probability is applied to reduce the dimensions from six to four. Among all the developed models in this paper, the Kriging model with four corrosion variables showed the best forecasting performance.

One of the most important research topics in Information Retrieval is term weighting for document ranking and retrieval, such as TFIDF, BM25, etc. We propose a term weighting method that utilizes past retrieval results consisting of the queries that contain a particular term, retrieval documents, and their relevance judgments. A term's Discrimination Power(DP) is based on the difference degree of the term's average weights obtained from between relevant and non-relevant retrieved document sets. The difference based DP performs better compared to ratio based DP introduced in the previous research. Our experimental result shows that a term weighting scheme based on the discrimination power method outperforms a TF*IDF based scheme.

This study focused on a novel approach for classifying hazardous chemicals to be used for chemical terrorism. We developed a novel algorithm to classify nationally customized chemicals of interest (COI) out of 325 COI in USA. The proposed COI classification algorithm aims to identify a key set of factors that reflect nation-wide uniqueness: intentional use, objectives, toxicity, related laws (CWC, ITF-25, CAA, etc.) and responsive counter-actions to terrorism. Although the U.S. has managed 325 COI to prevent terrorism, there are some nations in which the management and control of all the hazardous chemicals are beyond their capability. Based upon the outcome of this study the Ministry of the Environment of Korea has made appropriate revisions on relevant law. As a result, the Korean government has officially added a new set of 13 chemical species to the list of existing hazardous chemicals. This work is worthwhile to contribute to protecting the people’s lives and property from possible chemical accidents including terror by chemicals.

Activation of many multidomain signaling proteins requires rearrangement of autoinhibitory interdomain interactions that occlude activator binding sites. In one model for activation, the major inactive conformation exists in equilibrium with activated-like conformations that can be stabilized by ligand binding or post-translational modifications. We established the molecular basis for this model for the archetypal signaling adaptor protein Crk-II by measuring the thermodynamics and kinetics of the equilibrium between autoinhibited and activated-like states. We used fluorescence and NMR spectroscopies together with segmental isotopic labeling by means of expressed protein ligation. The results demonstrate that intramolecular domain-domain interactions both stabilize the autoinhibited state and induce the activated-like conformation. A combination of favorable interdomain interactions and unfavorable intradomain structural changes fine-tunes the population of the activated-like conformation and allows facile response to activators. This mechanism suggests a general strategy for optimization of autoinhibitory interactions of multidomain proteins.

To evaluate the altered findings of hepatic arteriography after radiofrequency (RF) ablation of hepatocellular carcinoma which can potentially influence subsequent transcatheter arterial chemoembolization.Hepatic arteriograms of 26 index hepatocellular carcinomas in 24 patients treated only by RF ablation (M:F = 22:2, mean age 55 years), in which hepatic arteriography was performed before and after RF ablation, were retrospectively compared for the altered findings.The altered findings of hepatic arteriography after RF ablation of the hepatocellular carcinoma were arterio-portal shunt (n = 3), periablational enhancement (n = 5), varied caliber of the feeding artery to the index tumor (n = 12) among which eight decreased, and occlusion of an adjacent arterial branch (n = 8). Residual unablated or locally progressed tumor was not detected in post-RF ablation arteriography (n = 5) due to the arterio-portal shunt (n = 2) or the periablational enhancement (n = 3). The possibility of not detecting the residual unablated or locally progressed tumor was higher within 24 weeks after RF ablation (Mann-Whitney test, P = 0.041).The findings of hepatic arteriography are altered after RF ablation, and the altered findings may increase the difficulty in performing super-selective transcatheter arterial chemoembolization due to undetected tumor staining, decreased caliber, or occlusion of the feeding artery.

The automatic recognition of transport containers using image processing is very hard because of the irregular size and position of identifiers, diverse colors of background and identifiers, and the impaired shapes of identifiers caused by container damages and the bent surface of container, etc. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a novel recognition algorithm for container identifiers that effectively overcomes these difficulties and recognizes identifiers from container images captured in various environments. The proposed algorithm, first, extracts the area containing only the identifiers from a container image by using CANNY masking and bi-directional histogram method. The extracted identifier area is binarized by the fuzzy binarization method newly proposed in this paper. Then a contour tracking method is applied to the binarized area in order to extract the container identifiers which are the target for recognition. This paper also proposes an enhanced fuzzy RBF network that adapts the enhanced fuzzy ART network for the middle layer. This network is applied to the recognition of extracted identifiers. The results of experiment for performance evaluation on the real container images showed that the proposed algorithm works better on the extraction and recognition of container identifiers compared to conventional algorithms.

To document the imaging characteristics of subcutaneous and musculoskeletal sparganosis.Ten patients with musculoskeletal sparganosis were examined, with a variety of imaging modalities including MRI (n=6), ultrasonography (n=8), plain radiography (n=7) and CT (n=1). Pathologic correlation was carried out in all cases.Nine lesions involved soft tissues, of which seven were in the thigh, two in the trunk and one involved a vertebral body. The majority of the lesions in soft tissue were confined to the subcutaneous layer but two extended deep into underlying muscles. Sonography revealed low-echoic serpiginous tubular tracts (8/8), and an intraluminal echogenic structure (4/8). MRI revealed multiple serpiginous tubular tracts and peripheral rim enhancement. Two patients showed perilesional soft tissue edema. Pathologically, the lesion consisted of a larva surrounded by three layers of inflammation: an inner epithelioid granulomatous cell layer, middle chronic inflammatory cell layers, and an outer fibrous layer.The study suggests that if serpiginous tubular tracts are seen at imaging studies, musculoskeletal sparganosis should be included in the differential diagnosis.

Purpose To demonstrate variations in the meniscofemoral ligaments (ligaments of Wrisberg and Humphrey) at anatomical study and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Design Twenty-eight cadaveric knees were partially dissected for the examination of the meniscofemoral ligaments. One hundred knee MR examinations were reviewed by two experienced musculoskeletal radiologists. Proximal variations in the meniscofemoral ligaments at MR imaging were classified into three types according to the attachment site: type I, medial femoral condyle; type II, proximal half of the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL); type III, distal half of the PCL. Distal variations were classified into vertical or oblique types according to the orientation of the intermediate signal at the interface of the ligament and lateral meniscus. Results At anatomical study, six cases showed variations in the proximal insertion site of the meniscofemoral ligaments. At MR imaging 93 cases had one or more meniscofemoral ligaments, giving a total of 107 ligaments: 90 ligaments of Wrisberg and 17 ligaments of Humphrey. Forty-one ligaments of Wrisberg were type I, 28 type II, 19 type III, and with two indeterminate type, while 6 ligaments of Humphrey were type I and the remaining 11 were indeterminate. Seven cases showed no meniscofemoral ligament. Of the 107 meniscofemoral ligaments, the distal insertion orientation was of vertical type in 10 ligaments, oblique type in 70 and unidentified in 27. Conclusion An understanding of the high incidence of meniscofemoral ligament variations may help in the interpretation of knee MR studies.