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Cancer initiating cells (CICs) represent a subpopulation of cancer cells, which are responsible for tumor growth and resistance to chemotherapy. Herein, we first used a cell-based aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) activity assay to identify that YMGKI-2 (also named as Ergone), an active component purified from Antrodia cinnamomea Mycelia extract (ACME), effectively abrogated the ALDH activity and abolished the CICs in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma cells (HNSCCs). Consequently, YMGKI-2 treatment suppressed self-renewal ability and expression of stemness signature genes (Oct-4 and Nanog) of sphere cells with enriched CICs. Moreover, YMGKI-2 treated sphere cells displayed reduction of CICs properties and promotion of cell differentiation, but not significant cytotoxicity. YMGKI-2 treatment also attenuated the tumorigenicity of HNSCC cells in vivo. Mechanistically, treatment of YMGKI-2 resulted in inactivation of STAT3 and Src. Lastly, combinatorial treatments with YMGKI-2 and standard chemotherapeutic drugs (cisplatin or Fluorouracil) restored the chemosensivity on sphere cells and cisplatin-resistant HNSCC cells. Together, we demonstrate that YMGKI-2 treatment effectively induces differentiation and reduces tumorigenicity of CICs. Further, combined treatment of YMGKI-2 and conventional chemotherapy can overcome chemoresistance. These results suggest that YMGKI-2 treatment may be used to improve future clinical responses in head and neck cancer treatment through targeting CICs.

Cerebrovascular events are a common complication among patients with cancer, increasing morbidity and mortality. However, the association between multiple myeloma and cerebrovascular events remains unclear. We therefore investigated multiple myeloma patients' risk factors for stroke to devise a better stroke-prevention strategy. This study includes consecutive patients 20 years and older who were newly diagnosed with symptomatic multiple myeloma at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, a tertiary medical center, between January 1, 2002 and December 31, 2014. The primary outcome was stroke development. Patients with head injuries, brain tumors, brain parenchymal invasions, or antecedent malignancies were excluded. Hazard ratios (HRs) of stroke risk factors for multiple myeloma patients were estimated by Cox proportional regression analysis. Overall, 395 patients with a median age of 70 years were investigated. In the median follow-up period of 18 months, cerebrovascular events occurred in 16 patients, including 10 ischemic strokes and 6 hemorrhagic strokes. The 5-year estimated cumulative incidence rate was 7.45%. In the multivariate analysis, the κ light chain isotype (adjusted HR, 8.37; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.91-39.8), previous cerebrovascular accidents (adjusted HR, 5.16; 95% CI, 1.48-17.9), and serum creatinine > 2 mg/dL (adjusted HR, 4.21; 95% CI, 1.10-16.0) were identified as independent risk factors for stroke. Subgroup analysis showed that atrial fibrillation (adjusted HR, 8.07) and previous cerebrovascular accident (adjusted HR, 4.89) are significant risk factors for ischemic stroke. Serum creatinine > 2 mg/dL (adjusted HR, 30.6) and previous cerebrovascular accident (adjusted HR, 13.9) are significant for hemorrhagic stroke. Moreover, therapeutic strategies for multiple myeloma were not associated with stroke in our study. This study demonstrates that risk of stroke increases in myeloma patients with a κ light chain isotype, previous cerebrovascular events, and renal impairment. Further prospective clinical studies to clarify the relationship between multiple myeloma and stroke are warranted.

The trifluoroacetic acid adduct of tetranuclear zinc cluster Zn4(OCOCF3)6O catalysis in per-O-acetylation and de-O-acetylation of carbohydrates at 70 °C can be tuned by adjusting the reaction medium. Per-O-acetylation of hexopyranoses with a near stoichiometric amount of acetic anhydride in toluene resulted in the exclusive formation of pyranosyl products as an anomeric mixture, whereas de-O-acetylation of acetates occurred in methanol in high yields. In the latter, methanol acts as both nucleophile and solvent, and the reaction conditions were compatible to acid- and base-sensitive groups and amino acid derivatives.

Background Colorectal cancer screening by fecal occult blood testing has been an important public health test and shown to reduce colorectal cancer–related mortality. However, the low participation rate in colorectal cancer screening by the general public remains a problematic public health issue. This fact could be attributed to the complex and unpleasant operation of the screening tool. Objective This study aimed to validate a novel toilet paper–based point-of-care test (ie, JustWipe) as a public health instrument to detect fecal occult blood and provide detailed results from the evaluation of the analytic characteristics in the clinical validation. Methods The mechanism of fecal specimen collection by the toilet-paper device was verified with repeatability and reproducibility tests. We also evaluated the analytical characteristics of the test reagents. For clinical validation, we conducted comparisons between JustWipe and other fecal occult blood tests. The first comparison was between JustWipe and typical fecal occult blood testing in a central laboratory setting with 70 fecal specimens from the hospital. For the second comparison, a total of 58 volunteers were recruited, and JustWipe was compared with the commercially available Hemoccult SENSA in a point-of-care setting. Results Adequate amounts of fecal specimens were collected using the toilet-paper device with small day-to-day and person-to-person variations. The limit of detection of the test reagent was evaluated to be 3.75 µg of hemoglobin per milliliter of reagent. Moreover, the test reagent also showed high repeatability (100%) on different days and high reproducibility (>96%) among different users. The overall agreement between JustWipe and a typical fecal occult blood test in a central laboratory setting was 82.9%. In the setting of point-of-care tests, the overall agreement between JustWipe and Hemoccult SENSA was 89.7%. Moreover, the usability questionnaire showed that the novel test tool had high scores in operation friendliness (87.3/100), ease of reading results (97.4/100), and information usefulness (96.1/100). Conclusions We developed and validated a toilet paper–based fecal occult blood test for use as a point-of-care test for the rapid (in 60 seconds) and easy testing of fecal occult blood. These favorable characteristics render it a promising tool for colorectal cancer screening as a public health instrument.

Although cerebral hyperperfusion syndrome is rarely encountered, this condition can be serious after procedures that increase cerebral blood flow; most reports are related to carotid revascularization. Sharp cerebral hemodynamic changes, along with impaired cerebrovascular autoregulation, are the main mechanisms contributing to this syndrome. We report a patient who underwent surgical correction for congenital supravalvular aortic stenosis and presented with postoperative hypertension, headache, impairment of consciousness, and cerebral edema 2 days after operation. He recovered well when the blood pressure declined and the brain edema subsided. Cerebral hyperperfusion syndrome was considered, and this uncommon neurologic complication of cardiac operations is discussed.

Clinical introduction A 26-year-old man with an unremarkable medical history sensed a momentary retrosternal ‘pop’ followed by overwhelming dyspnoea, without reporting any prodromal symptoms. At the emergency department, he had a significant tachycardia (170 bpm) and an extreme low diastolic blood pressure ( Supplementary file 3Supplementary file 4 Question What congenital cardiac anomaly did the patient have? Congenital bicuspid aortic valve Doubly committed subarterial ventricular septal defect (VSD) Congenital sinus of Valsalva aneurysm Coronary arteriovenous fistula

Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) is an attractive technology because it can supply power to IoT devices where battery replacement is difficult or the maintenance cost is high. Polarization Switching WPT antenna (PS-WPT antenna) is proposed in this paper. The polarization switching characteristic makes this design a good candidate for 5G-IoT sensors powered by using wireless power transfer. The 3GPP had standardized 5G-IoT [1]-[3] in June 2016. It provides deep indoor and wide area coverage extension of 20dB over GSM. The 5G-IoT network can support 50,000 users per cell and a battery life of more than ten years. The key problems of the 5G-IoT network protocol are the coordination and communication between large number of IoT devices and the base station. Using the PS-WPT antenna technology, the cell coverage could be separated into several partitions to wake up IoT devices within one partition of the cell to avoid the collision. The PS-WPT antenna has been designed and analyzed in this paper for the polling protocol to solve the problem of communication and collision between 50,000 IoT devices per cell within the base station.

Vertebral fractures affect approximately 30% of myeloma patients and lead to a poor impact on survival and life quality. In general, age and body mass index (BMI) are reported to have an important role in vertebral fractures. However, the triangle relationship among age, BMI, and vertebral fractures is still unclear in newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (NDMM) patients. This study recruited consecutive 394 patients with NDMM at Taipei Veterans General Hospital between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2015. Risk factors for vertebral fractures in NDMM patients were collected and analyzed. The survival curves were demonstrated using Kaplan-Meier estimate. In total, 301 (76.4%) NDMM patients were enrolled in the cohort. In the median follow-up period of 18.0 months, the median survival duration in those with vertebral fractures ≥ 2 was shorter than those with vertebral fracture 75 years and BMI < 18.5 kg/m2 (adjusted RR, 12.22; 95% CI, 3.02-49.40). This is the first study that demonstrated that age had a significant impact on vertebral fractures in NDMM patients with low BMI. Elder patients with low BMI should consider to routinely receive spinal radiographic examinations and regular follow-up.

Scale of data and scale of computation infrastructures together enable the current deep learning renaissance. However, training large-scale deep architectures demands both algorithmic improvement and careful system configuration. In this paper, we focus on employing the system approach to speed up large-scale training. Taking both the algorithmic and system aspects into consideration, we develop a procedure for setting mini-batch size and choosing computation algorithms. We also derive lemmas for determining the quantity of key components such as the number of GPUs and parameter servers. Experiments and examples show that these guidelines help effectively speed up large-scale deep learning training.

Laminated sediments in the Taipei Basin which are tentatively assigned to the antepenultimate glacial period were studied to discern the paleoclimatic significance. Analyses of multi proxies including pollen, mineralogy, grain size, and loss on ignition (LOI) were carried out on three 50 cm thick intervals of a 23.7 m thick laminated section of the Hsinchuan Core, western Taipei. The couplets are commonly composed of 2–7 mm light grey layers and 2–3 mm dark grey layers. Major components in the light grey layer are quartz (>70%) associated with clay minerals (illite). Clay minerals increase in the dark grey layer and can dominate. A pollen study indicates that the light grey layers are characterized by more abundant warm elements such as Cyclobalanopsis and Castanopsis , while the dark grey layers have more abundant cool elements including Pinaceae ( Pinus , Picea , Tsuga ), Alnus and significant amounts of Poaceae. Study of the present pollen calendar of the Taipei Basin indicates that Pinus appears during winter–spring and Cyclobalanopsis and Castanopsis appear during early summer. The studied couplets are thus very possibly seasonal deposits of the ancient lake. Spectrum analysis for the thickness variation of the light grey laminae, believed to represent most of the annual precipitation changes in summer–autumn, shows prominent El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) peaks of 3–4 and 6–7 year periods. This may indicate that ENSO events occurred during the middle Pleistocene glaciation.

This study proposes a behavioural intention model that integrates information quality, response time, and system accessibility into the original technology acceptance model (TAM) to investigate whether system characteristics affect the adoption of Web-based advanced traveller information systems (ATIS). This study empirically tests the proposed model using data collected from an online survey of Web-based advanced traveller information system users. Con­firmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to examine the reliability and validity of the measurement model, and structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to evaluate the structural model. The results indicate that three system characteristics had indirect effects on the intention to use through perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and attitude toward using. Information quality was the most im­portant system characteristic factor, followed by response time and system accessibility. This study presents implica­tions for practitioners and researchers, and suggests direc­tions for future research.

This paper investigates design and implementation of a predictive controller for dual-PMSM drive systems to improve output torque and dynamic responses. Experimental results show the dual-PMSM drive system has satisfactory performance, including good transient responses, load responses, and tracking responses. In addition, when one PMSM drive fails, the other PMSM drive still can provide output torque. The digital signal processor, TMS320-F2808, is used to execute the entire algorithm. The proposed method can be applied for electric vehicles or electric ships.

This paper proposes a sensorless IPMSM position control system based on a high frequency injection method. The proposed method uses 12-bit low resolution A/D converters to covert the stator currents of the IPMSM. In addition, a 0.67kHz injection voltage, which has a 30 V amplitude, is used. By measuring the stator currents, the injection current components related to the injection voltage can be obtained. Then an estimation method is proposed to obtain the estimated rotor position. After that, a compensation algorithm related to the saturation of the mutual inductance is implemented to reduce the rotor position estimation margin of error. Finally, a closed-loop system based on the high frequency injection method is implemented. Measured results show the proposed method can achieve satisfactory performance with a margin of error of only ±4 degree.

In this paper, we present two new algorithms in residue number systems for scaling and error correction. The first algorithm is the Cyclic Property of Residue-Digit Difference (CPRDD). It is used to speed up the residue multiple error correction due to its parallel processes. The second is called the Target Race Distance (TRD). It is used to speed up residue scaling. Both of these two algorithms are used without the need for Mixed Radix Conversion (MRC) or Chinese Residue Theorem (CRT) techniques, which are time consuming and require hardware complexity. Furthermore, the residue scaling can be performed in parallel for any combination of moduli set members without using lookup tables.

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) is a highly lethal cancer. Previously, we identify head and neck cancer initiating cells (HN-CICs), which are highly tumorigenic and resistant to conventional therapy. Therefore, development of drug candidates that effectively target HN-CICs would benefit future head and neck cancer therapy. In this study, we first successfully screened for an active component, named YMGKI-1, from natural products ofAntrodia cinnamomeaMycelia (ACM), which can target the stemness properties of HNSCC. Treatment of YMGKI-1 significantly downregulated the aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) activity, one of the characteristics of CIC in HNSCC cells. Additionally, the tumorigenic properties of HNSCC cells were attenuated by YMGKI-1 treatmentin vivo. Further, the stemness properties of HN-CICs, which are responsible for the malignancy of HNSCC, were also diminished by YMGKI-1 treatment. Strikingly, YMGKI-1 also effectively suppressed the cell viability of HN-CICs but not normal stem cells. Finally, YMGKI-1 induces the cell death of HN-CICs by dysregulating the exaggerated autophagic signaling pathways. Together, our results indicate that YMGKI-1 successfully lessens stemness properties and tumorigenicity of HN-CICs. These findings provide a new drug candidate from purified components of ACM as an alternative therapy for head and neck cancer in the future.

The interactions between soluble carbohydrates and/or surface displayed glycans and protein receptors are essential to many biological processes and cellular recognition events. Carbohydrate microarrays provide opportunities for high-throughput quantitative analysis of carbohydrate-protein interactions. Over the past decade, various techniques have been implemented for immobilizing glycans on solid surfaces in a microarray format. Herein, we describe a detailed protocol for fabricating carbohydrate microarrays that capitalizes on the intrinsic reactivity of boronic acid toward carbohydrates to form stable boronate diesters. A large variety of unprotected carbohydrates ranging in structure from simple disaccharides and trisaccharides to considerably more complex human milk and blood group (oligo)saccharides have been covalently immobilized in a single step on glass slides, which were derivatized with high-affinity boronic acid ligands. The immobilized ligands in these microarrays maintain the receptor-binding activities including those of lectins and antibodies according to the structures of their pendant carbohydrates for rapid analysis of a number of carbohydrate-recognition events within 30 h. This method facilitates the direct construction of otherwise difficult to obtain carbohydrate microarrays from underivatized glycans.

The interactions between soluble carbohydrates and/or surface displayed glycans and protein receptors are essential to many biological processes and cellular recognition events. Carbohydrate microarrays provide opportunities for high-throughput quantitative analysis of carbohydrate-protein interactions. Over the past decade, various techniques have been implemented for immobilizing glycans on solid surfaces in a microarray format. Herein, we describe a detailed protocol for fabricating carbohydrate microarrays that capitalizes on the intrinsic reactivity of boronic acid toward carbohydrates to form stable boronate diesters. A large variety of unprotected carbohydrates ranging in structure from simple disaccharides and trisaccharides to considerably more complex human milk and blood group (oligo)saccharides have been covalently immobilized in a single step on glass slides, which were derivatized with high-affinity boronic acid ligands. The immobilized ligands in these microarrays maintain the receptor-binding activities including those of lectins and antibodies according to the structures of their pendant carbohydrates for rapid analysis of a number of carbohydrate-recognition events within 30 h. This method facilitates the direct construction of otherwise difficult to obtain carbohydrate microarrays from underivatized glycans.

With the development of wearable devices, people must go to the medical center to spend a whole day for sleep diagnosis in the past day, but now they have opportunity achieve a simple sleep quality measurement by using wearable devices. This paper proposes a use of wearable devices with accelerometer for measuring PPG to detecting sleep.

Modern life is more busy than previous, after a busy day of work, sleep quality at night has become an important part of the next day that can working smoothly. With the development of wearable devices, people must go to the medical center to spend a whole day for sleep diagnosis in the past day, but now they have opportunity achieve a simple sleep quality measurement by using wearable devices.

Cerebrovascular events are a common complication among patients with cancer, increasing morbidity and mortality. However, the association between multiple myeloma and cerebrovascular events remains unclear. We therefore investigated multiple myeloma patients' risk factors for stroke to devise a better stroke-prevention strategy. This study includes consecutive patients 20 years and older who were newly diagnosed with symptomatic multiple myeloma at Taipei Veterans General Hospital, a tertiary medical center, between January 1, 2002 and December 31, 2014. The primary outcome was stroke development. Patients with head injuries, brain tumors, brain parenchymal invasions, or antecedent malignancies were excluded. Hazard ratios (HRs) of stroke risk factors for multiple myeloma patients were estimated by Cox proportional regression analysis. Overall, 395 patients with a median age of 70 years were investigated. In the median follow-up period of 18 months, cerebrovascular events occurred in 16 patients, including 10 ischemic strokes and 6 hemorrhagic strokes. The 5-year estimated cumulative incidence rate was 7.45%. In the multivariate analysis, the κ light chain isotype (adjusted HR, 8.37; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.91-39.8), previous cerebrovascular accidents (adjusted HR, 5.16; 95% CI, 1.48-17.9), and serum creatinine 2 mg/dL (adjusted HR, 4.21; 95% CI, 1.10-16.0) were identified as independent risk factors for stroke. Subgroup analysis showed that atrial fibrillation (adjusted HR, 8.07) and previous cerebrovascular accident (adjusted HR, 4.89) are significant risk factors for ischemic stroke. Serum creatinine 2 mg/dL (adjusted HR, 30.6) and previous cerebrovascular accident (adjusted HR, 13.9) are significant for hemorrhagic stroke. Moreover, therapeutic strategies for multiple myeloma were not associated with stroke in our study. This study demonstrates that risk of stroke increases in myeloma patients with a κ light chain isotype, previous cerebrovascular events, and renal impairment. Further prospective clinical studies to clarify the relationship between multiple myeloma and stroke are warranted.

Distortion is a major problem when using charge-coupled device cameras. This study developed a novel adaptive calibration method for minimizing camera distortion. The proposed method improves the calibration of the camera when solving the problems of radial distortion, decentering distortion and prism distortion. Tracking results are also enhanced. Additionally, the proposed method does not require complex mathematical equations to calibrate the camera, so the camera can be calibrated in real-time. Simulation and experimental comparisons with conventional methods confirm the good performance of the proposed method.

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text, The overall survival of patients with multiple myeloma (MM) has been improved greatly over the last 2 decades with the broader use of novel drugs and autologous tandem transplantation. However, more than one tenth of myeloma patients still die shortly after diagnosis. We therefore aim to investigate the risk factors of early mortality (death within 60 days after diagnosis) in patients with MM. We included in this study 451 consecutive patients with MM, newly diagnosed at an Asian tertiary medical center between January 1, 2002 and April 30, 2015. A total of 57 subjects who experienced early mortality were identified. Risk factors for early mortality in myeloma patients were collected and analyzed. Early mortality occurred in 57 (12.6%) of the myeloma patients. In the multivariate analysis, being male (adjusted OR 2.93, 95% CI 1.17–7.31), serum albumin

This paper proposed a multi-people simile and frown detection with a novel method to detect frown expression. The proposed grayscale analysis is more suitable for implementing in handheld devices which are capable torecognize multi-people in real time. The OPENCV is applied in the proposed method for face detection, and whole system is realized on both computer and android devices, respectively. Comparing with the previous SOBEL algorithm, the processing speed is greatly improved that also remains the recognition accuracy. The database design is downloaded from Facebook to fit the real application. In theexperimentof ten people real-timetest, the smile and frown recognition can reach 80% and 90%, respectively. And for the database test, the smile and frown recognitionof multi-people can reach 72.7% and 78.8%, respectively either.

This paper characterizes the mass transfer and replenishment of glucose and oxygen in tissue engineered cartilage constructs by a numerical approach. Cell population growth modulated by glucose and oxygen is incorporated in the mathematic model. The distribution of synthesized type II collagen and its influence on mediating the chondrocyte growth over scaffold are also investigated. Results from simulation are compared with the experiments in literature to verify the formulation and predictions. It is found that, under static culture, the oftentimes observed phenomenon that the overall cell number densities in thick scaffolds are smaller than in thin scaffolds is mainly due to depletion of glucose rather than oxygen. Cell growth is found to be more sensitive to the change in glucose concentration for thick scaffolds, whereas to be more sensitive to the change in oxygen concentration for thin scaffolds. Results also demonstrate the modulation of chondrocyte growth by type II collagen, presenting the biphasic impact of type II collagen which promotes chondrocyte growth in the initial phase of cultivation, while inhibits cell growth in the long term. The numerical model provides a useful reference for developing cartilaginous constructs in tissue engineering.

Antrodia cinnamomea is a Taiwanese medicinal mushroom with high antioxidant and polysaccharide content. The objective of this study is to investigate developmental toxicity of A. cinnamomea in pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats. Animals were daily gavaged with A. cinnamomea mycelium at dosage levels of 0 (reverse osmosis water), 50, 150, and 500 mg/kg from gestation day (GD) 6 to 15. All dams were sacrificed on GD 20 and were subjected to cesarean section. Fetuses were examined for external, visceral, and skeletal abnormalities. All copulated females survived until the end of the study. No significant differences were recorded in body weight change, food consumption, and maternal gestational parameters. Only two fetal malformations were noted in 970 fetuses from the treatment groups. Some variations, such as enlarged fontanel, split sternebrae, absent sacral, absent caudal vertebral centra, absent thoracic centra, absent 13th-14th ribs, and fused ribs, were found during the skeletal examination, but no treatment-induced abnormalities occurred. No dose dependency was observed in any of the developmental variations. Overall observation of foetal malformations from rats given A. cinnamomea mycelium during pregnancy demonstrates that this material is not teratogenic at doses up to 500 mg/kg. It is concluded that A. cinnamomea BCRC 35398 mycelium has no teratogenic effects in female rats and is safe to be used as a functional food ingredient.

Using bicalutamide-androgen receptor (AR) DNA binding domain-ligand binding domain as bait, we observed enrichment of FxxFY motif-containing peptides. Protein database searches revealed the presence of receptor-interacting protein kinase 1 (RIPK1) harboring one FxxFY motif. RIPK1 interacted directly with AR and suppressed AR transactivation in a dose-dependent manner. Domain mapping experiments showed that the FxxFY motif in RIPK1 is critical for interactions with AR and the death domain of RIPK1 plays a crucial role in its inhibitory effect on transactivation. In terms of tissue expression, RIPK1 levels were markedly higher in benign prostate hyperplasia and non-cancerous tissue regions relative to the tumor area. With the aid of computer modeling for screening of chemicals targeting activation function 2 (AF-2) of AR, we identified oxadiazole derivatives as good candidates and subsequently generated a small library of these compounds. A number of candidates could effectively suppress AR transactivation and AR-related functions in vitro and in vivo with tolerable toxicity via inhibiting AR-peptide, AR-coregulator and AR N-C interactions. Combination of these chemicals with antiandrogen had an additive suppressive effect on AR transcriptional activity. Our collective findings may pave the way in creating new strategies for the development and design of anti-AR drugs. Citation Format: Cheng-Lung Hsu, Jai-Shin Liu, Ting-Wei Lin, Chun-Cheng Lin, Wen-Guey Wu. Characterization of a novel androgen receptor coregulator RIPK1 [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2018; 2018 Apr 14-18; Chicago, IL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2018;78(13 Suppl):Abstract nr 1797.

Cordyceps cicadae is a parasitic fungus that hibernates inside a host (Cicada flammata Dist.) and then grows its fruiting body on the surface of the insect. The complete insect/fungus combination of C. cicadae has been widely applied in Chinese traditional medicine. Recent studies have demonstrated that the medicinal benefits of cultured mycelia are as effective as those found in the wild. However, toxicological information regarding the chronic consumption of C. cicadae mycelia culture is not available. This study was conducted to evaluate the possible toxicity arising from repeated exposure to freeze-dried submerged mycelial culture of C. cicadae for 90 days. A total of eighty 8-week-old Sprague-Dawley rats were divided into 4 groups (10 males and 10 females in each group). C. cicadae was administered daily to animals by gavage at doses of 0, 500, 1000, and 2000 mg/kg body weight for 90 days. No animal deaths occurred and no treatment-related clinical signs were observed during the study period. No statistical differences in body weight gain, relative organ weight, hematology, serum chemistry, and urinalysis were observed. Gross necropsy and histopathological findings indicated that there was no treatment-related abnormality. Based on the results, the no observed adverse effect level of C. cicadae whole broth is determined to be > 2000 mg/kg for male and female Sprague-Dawley rats. The results of this study provides support for the use of C. cicadae fermentation product as a safe agent in functional food.

Enzyme extracts from Lactobacillus acidophilus (CCRC14079) and Propionibacterium freudenreichii ssp. shermanii (CCRC11076) were reacted with linoleic acid at 50 °C for 10 min at pH 5, 6, 7, and 8, and the levels of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) formation were determined by high performance liquid chromatography. CLA formations were observed in all the reactions catalyzed by the retentates using ultrafiltration membranes with 100 kDa nominal molecular weight cutoff, indicating the presence of the activity of linoleic acid isomerase with nominal molecular weight higher than 100 kDa in the retentates from two cultures. More CLA was formed at pH 5 of L. acidophilus treatment and t10c12, c11t13, and c9t11 CLA were 3 major CLA isomers produced. Results demonstrate a potential for CLA production through linoleic acid isomerase.

Head and neck cancer (HNC) is one of the most common forms of cancer in Taiwan. In addition, head and neck cancer cells (HNCs) are highly tumorigenic and resistant to conventional therapy. Therefore, development of new therapeutic regimens that are adjuvant to conventional treatments would benefit future head and neck cancer therapy. In this study, we found that the lyophilized particles and ethanolic extracts of Antrodia cinnamomea mycelia inhibited the tumor growth of HNCs by xenograft assay in vivo. Moreover, administration of lyophilized particles or ethanolic extracts to nude mice did not cause significant side effects. Our study revealed that the Antrodia cinnamomea mycelia extract (ACME) efficiently inhibited the tumorigenicity of HNCs without causing organ failure. Furthermore, it showed that ACME may work as a novel drug candidate for alternative treatments for head and neck cancer.

Primary vascular tumour of the heart is rare, especially in neonates and infants. We report a male premature newborn with a right atrial tumour associated with a large amount of pericardial effusion detected by screening foetal echography. Diagnosis of capillary haemangioma was confirmed by histopathological examination after complete surgical resection. Other vascular tumours in the neonates and infants reported in the English literatures are reviewed, and one algorithm for both prenatal and postnatal management is proposed.

With the growth of recipe sharing services, online cooking recipes associated with ingredients and cooking procedures are available. Many recipe sharing sites have devoted to the development of recipe recommendation mechanism. While most food related research has been on recipe recommendation, little effort has been done on analyzing the correlation between recipe cuisines and ingredients. In this paper, we aim to investigate the underlying cuisine-ingredient connections by exploiting the classification techniques, including associative classification and support vector machine. Our study conducted on food.com data provides insights about which cuisines are the most similar and what are the essential ingredients for a cuisine, with an application to automatic cuisine labeling for recipes.

This paper proposes a novel method to improve happiness status by detection negative emotional status based on frowning lines on face and a new term called facial expression factor (FEF). The FEF correlates the frowning and with emotional status. The frowning lines are detected using SOBEL filter and FEF factors are calculated from selected frowning lines to know the actual emotional status. Thus the negative emotional state are detected which could help to promote the happiness further. The experiment is conducted on 10 participants. In total 40 images (including 20 neutral and 20 frowning expression) are considered for experiment. The results show that the emotional status of 8 persons out of 10 participants is recognized correctly. Further, the wrong recognition results are corrected by tuning the threshold. Hence, the results depict the recognition accuracy up to 80%. The proposed work is based on simple training which also reduces the training time cost effectively. Furthermore, the proposed method is able to detect more complex facial expression (e.g., forced smile) using FEF. The tuning of threshold makes the method more effective. Therefore, such results show its effectiveness by detecting negative emotional state to promote the happiness.

Antibody microarrays have important applications for the sensitive detection of biologically important target molecules and as biosensors for clinical applications. Microarrays produced by oriented immobilization of antibodies generally have higher antigen-binding capacities than those in which antibodies are immobilized with random orientations. Here, we present a UV photo-cross-linking approach that utilizes boronic acid to achieve oriented immobilization of an antibody on a surface while retaining the antigen-binding activity of the immobilized antibody. A photoactive boronic acid probe was designed and synthesized in which boronic acid provided good affinity and specificity for the recognition of glycan chains on the Fc region of the antibody, enabling covalent tethering to the antibody upon exposure to UV light. Once irradiated with optimal UV exposure (16 mW/cm(2)), significant antibody immobilization on a boronic acid-presenting surface with maximal antigen detection sensitivity in a single step was achieved, thus obviating the necessity of prior antibody modifications. The developed approach is highly modular, as demonstrated by its implementation in sensitive sandwich immunoassays for the protein analytes Ricinus communis agglutinin 120, human prostate-specific antigen, and interleukin-6 with limits of detection of 7.4, 29, and 16 pM, respectively. Furthermore, the present system enabled the detection of multiple analytes in samples without any noticeable cross-reactivities. Antibody coupling via the use of boronic acid and UV light represents a practical, oriented immobilization method with significant implications for the construction of a large array of immunosensors for diagnostic applications.

Today’s enviornmetnal problems cannot be solved solely with technical and economic measures, a better understanding of human attitudes and behaviors is also required. This study examines air travelers’ environmetnal knowledge, environmental attitudes, environmental behaviors, and pro-environmental air travel behavior in Taiwan. The relationships between environmental consciousness components with the socio-demographic variables are also tested. A field survey was administered to collect data from airline customers. The results show that Taiwanese passengers have moderate to high levels of environmetnal knowledge and overall possess a favorable environmetnal attitude. While they engage in general environmentally friendly behavior quite often, their pro-enivornmental air travel behavior is low. In addition, some differences concerning environmetnal knowledge, attitudes and behaviors exist across gender, age, and education factors. The contribution of this research is to broaden the udnerstanding of airline customers by examining their environmental consciousness and provide insights for airlines’ selective marketing to enviornmentally concerned customers.

In this paper, we first introduce the traffic status estimation service, a location-based continuous range query application provided by the CarWeb system. The service provides users nearby realtime traffic estimation according to their locations and moving behaviors. This paper focuses on how to provide users with the most relevant information efficiently and accurately. We propose the Continuous Query with Dynamic Fan-Shape framework (CQ-DFS) which dynamically changes parameters of fan shape range query to efficiently acquire more useful query results without compromising the performance of the system. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of CQ-DFS framework by using real world vehicle trajectories.

The existence of surfactants in proteomics samples can severely reduce enzymatic digestion efficiency, liquid chromatography (LC) separation efficiency, column lifetime, and mass spectrometry (MS) sensitivity. Although various techniques are able to remove surfactants, surfactants may occasionally be retained in samples due to variations in sample preparation method or personal skill. Evaluation of surfactant residue in a sample, however, usually requires an additional instrument and is time-consuming. In this study, a simple and rapid visual indicator for surfactant abundance (VISA) was developed. With the detection of a visible surfactant pellet in the solution, this assay was able to detect surfactant residue in aqueous solutions within 5 min. Without the need of additional equipment such as a mass spectrometer, every user can perform a quick test on their bench before sending the sample to the MS facility. The detection limit for the commonly used surfactants, Triton X-114 and SDS, was about 0.0005% and 0.0002%, respectively. The VISA was successfully applied to evaluate the efficiency of removal of surfactants in Triton X-114 extracted membrane proteins using tube-gel. With the combination of Triton X-114 extraction and tube-gel protocol, a study of spermatozoa membrane proteome identified about 252 proteins of which about 67.5% were classified as membrane proteins. The coexistence of protein and surfactant did not affect the VISA sensitivity, suggesting that this indicator is suitable for proteomics applications. The VISA also has potential for the detection of other surfactants and can be applied to other surfactant removing protocols.

In this paper, we develop a framework of trajectory search called pattern-aware trajectory search abbreviated as PATS). Given a set of trajectories, potential regions are extracted first and potential regions are viewed as popular regions interested by users. Furthermore, potential regions are organized as a region transition graph where each vertex is a potential region and edges capture sequential travels of potential regions from a set of trajectories given. By exploring the concept of random walk, the attractiveness of a potential region is derived. In light of attractiveness of potential regions the attractiveness of a trajectory is formulated and PATS will return top-K trajectories according to their attractiveness. We evaluated our framework by a real GPS dataset. Experimental results show that PATS is able to retrieve trajectories interested by users.

A problem nowadays tissue engineers encounter in developing sizable tissue implants is the nonuniform spread of cells and/or extracellular matrices. Research shows such a nutrients transport restriction may be improved by employing hydrodynamic culture systems. We propose a compact model for the simulation of cell growth in a porous construct under direct perfusion. Unlike the previous model proposed in the literature, which composes a cellular scaffold sandwiched between two culture media layers, the current model includes only the scaffold layer to simplify the mathematical and computational complex. Results show the present single-layer model can predict cell spreads and the nutrient and metabolic waste distribution as accurately as does the three-layer model. Only if the hydrodynamic aspects such as the pressure and viscous stress are prominent to know, should the more sophisticated analyses with the three-layer model be employed. The compact model provides comparable investigations for the tissue-engineering construct developments.

From the roots of Sophora flavescens collected in Taiwan, four new prenylflavonoids, sophoraflavanone K (1), sophoraflavanone L (2), 8-lavandulylkaempferol (3), and cyclokuraridin (4), a new arylbenzofuran, 2-(2,4-dihydroxy-5-prenylphenyl)-5,6-methylenedioxybenzofuran (5), and a new prenyldibenzoyl derivative, sophoradione (6), were isolated. The structures of 1-6 were determined by spectroscopic data analysis. Compounds 2-6 were evaluated for cytotoxic activity against the KB epidermoid carcinoma cell line.

This paper presented a low power ALU cluster design for media streaming processor, which combines the low-power circuitry design methodology and media streaming architecture. The experimental result shows the power and energy consumption of selected benchmark for multi-media and base-band communication systems can be reduced for 62% and 33% as well. In the mean time, both power dissipation and energy consumption become scalable by dynamic selecting the number of utilized ALU clusters. Thus the instant performance and energy consumption of an entire work can be optimized for mobile systems. The proposed design has provides a breakthrough in the power dissipation and operating time in limited battery life for similar architectures.