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Embryonic stem (ES) cells have great therapeutic potential because of their capacity to proliferate extensively and to form any fully differentiated cell of the body, including skeletal muscle cells. Successful generation of skeletal muscle in vivo, however, requires selective induction of the skeletal muscle lineage in cultures of ES cells and following transplantation, integration of appropriately differentiated skeletal muscle cells with recipient muscle. Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a severe progressive muscle wasting disease due to a mutation in the dystrophin gene and the mdx mouse, an animal model for DMD, are characterized by the absence of the muscle membrane associated protein, dystrophin. Here, we show that co-culturing mouse ES cells with a preparation from mouse muscle enriched for myogenic stem and precursor cells, followed by injection into mdx mice, results occasionally in the formation of normal, vascularized skeletal muscle derived from the transplanted ES cells. Study of this phenomenon should provide valuable insights into skeletal muscle development in vivo from transplanted ES cells.

Based on single factor experiments, NaCl concentration, adenosine 5'-monophosphate (AMP) concentration and temperature were selected as independent variables for a three-level Box-Behnken experimental design, and the shear force and cooking loss were response values for regression analysis. According to the statistical models, it showed that all independent variables had significant effects on shear force and cooking loss, and optimal values were at the NaCl concentration of 4.15%, AMP concentration of 22.27 mmol/L and temperature of 16.70°C, which was determined with three-dimensional response surface diagrams and contour plots. Under this condition, the observed shear force and cooking loss were 0.625 kg and 8.07%, respectively, exhibiting a good agreement with their predicted values, showing the good applicability and feasibility of response surface methodology (RSM) for improving pork tenderness. Compared with control pig muscles, AMP combined with NaCl treatment demonstrated significant effects on improvement of meat tenderness and reduction of cooking loss. Therefore, AMP could be regarded as an effective tenderization agent for pork.

Tyramine production by Enterococcus faecalis R612Z1 in water-boiled salted ducks was evaluated during storage at different temperatures. The results showed that E. faecalis R612Z1 could produce tyramine in meat samples when the storage temperature was no less than 4°C. The E. faecalis R612Z1 counts of the meat samples reached 10(8) CFU/g on day 7 at 4°C and on day 4 at 10°C. However, the tyramine content of the meat samples stored at 10°C increased to 23.73 μg/g (on day 10), which was greater than the level in the samples stored at 4°C (7.56 μg/g). Reverse transcription quantitative PCR detection of the expression level of the tyrDC gene in E. faecalis R612Z1 in the meat samples revealed no significant changes at different storage temperatures. Thus, the changes in tyramine production of E. faecalis R612Z1 may be due to the different enzymatic activities at different storage temperatures.

In order to persuade users of widely using cloud storage, one critical challenge that should be solved is finding way to determine whether data has been illegally modified on the cloud server or not. The topic has although been addressed in several works, there is lack of scheme to meet all the demand of supporting dynamic operations, public verification, less computation etc. This paper surveys the related results that has been done and proposes two alternative schemes, called DIV-I and DIV-II. Compared to S-PDP introduced by Ateniese et al., both DIV-I and DIV-II use less time to generate tags and verify. In addition, the proposed schemes fully support dynamic operations as well as public verification.

In order to study the performance of MIC-GPU-CPU hybrid computing platform, this paper conduct a whole heart simulation model on this platform. And to corroborate the advantages of this heterogeneous architecture environment, we parallelize the electrocardiograms simulation algorithm. Electrocardiograms simulation algorithm is a recommendable case to study the ability of MIC-GPU-CPU architecture for its great deal of computation. The paper addresses the heart modeling program performs in the MIC-GPU-CPU architecture, such architecture performs well in electrocardiograms simulation application, and the bottleneck in this platform with a set of parameter-various benchmarks. The heart simulation results on CPU, MIC, GPU, and MIC-GPU-CPU are exhibited at last.

Video transcoding is an important job in video processing and network service. With the improvement of devices and the Internet, the size of the video increases rapidly so that it takes a lot of resources to transcode. Low efficiency, high cost of upgrading hardware and low capacity of processing failure are problems of the traditional method of serial transcoding. Distributed transcoding can resolve these problems. To reduce the time of serial processing and be able to deal with the fault, this paper means to model a distributed video transcoding system which is based on MapReduce, an open source distribute computing model, and FFmpeg.

To explore the correlation between pathological findings and mammographic features of microcalcification in calcified breast carcinoma without a mass.The morphology and distribution of the microcalcification lesions displayed by mammography were retrospectively analyzed in 108 cases of the calcified breast carcinoma without a mass in comparison with the pathological findings of the lesions.The mammographic morphology or distribution of the microcalcification lesions did not differ significantly across different pathological types of calcified breast carcinoma without a mass (P0.05). The microcalcification lesions showed no significant morphological difference between invasive and noninvasive breast carcinomas (P0.05). Fine pleomorphic calcifications were frequently found in both invasive and noninvasive breast carcinomas, but fine linear and fine linear branching calcifications and mixed malignant calcifications were more common in invasive breast carcinoma. The distribution of the microcalcifications showed significantly different patterns between invasive and noninvasive breast carcinoma (P=0.006), characterized by segmental and cluttered distributions of the lesions, respectively.There is no specific mammographic features in correlation with the pathological types of microcalcification lesions in calcified breast carcinoma without a mass, but invasive and noninvasive calcified breast carcinomas have different mammographic features in the morphology and distribution of the microcalcifications to allow their preoperative differentiation.

IBio-PSE is an efficient and interactive Problem Solving Environment platform (PSE) for Biomolecular Networks Visualization based on website. For facilitating users to analyze various biomolecular networks and different networks comparison result with the web browser, a uniform PSE based on website is built. In this paper, IBio-PSE provides an extended, efficient and interactive platform for researchers to visualize and interact with their biomolecular networks and network comparison result based on website conveniently and efficiently. Two applications have been done in the end to indicate that this model is suitable for biomolecular networks visualization and different networks comparison result visualization.

Tyrosine decarboxylase (TDC) is responsible for tyramine production and can catalyze phenylalanine to produce β-phenylethylamine. Enterococcus strains are a group of bacteria predominantly producing tyramine and β-phenylethylamine in water-boiled salted duck. In this study, the heterologous expression and characterization of two TDCs from Enterococcus faecalis R612Z1 (612TDC) and Enterococcus faecium R615Z1 (615TDC) were studied. The recombinant putative proteins of 612TDC and 615TDC were heterologously expressed in Escherichia coli. 612TDC is a 620-amino-acid protein with a molecular mass of 70.0 kDa, whereas 615TDC is a 625-amino-acid protein with a molecular mass of 70.3 kDa. Both 612TDC and 615TDC showed an optimum temperature of 25 °C for the tyrosine and phenylalanine substrates. However, 612TDC revealed maximal activity at pH 5.5, whereas 615TDC revealed maximal activity at pH 6.0. Kinetic studies showed that 612TDC and 615TDC exhibited higher specificity for tyrosine than for phenylalanine. The catalysis abilities of both 612TDC and 615TDC for phenylalanine were restrained significantly with the increase in NaCl concentration, but this was not the case for tyrosine. This study revealed that the enzyme properties of the purified recombinant 612TDC and 615TDC were similar, although their amino acid sequences had 84% identity.

Association Link Network (ALN) is a kind of Semantic Link Network built by mining the association relations among multimedia Web resources for effectively supporting Web intelligent application such as Web-based learning, and semantic search. This paper explores the Small-World properties of ALN to provide theoretical support for association learning (i.e., a simple idea of "learning from Web resources"). First, a filtering algorithm of ALN is proposed to generate the filtered status of ALN, aiming to observe the Small-World properties of ALN at given network size and filtering parameter. Comparison of the Small-World properties between ALN and random graph shows that ALN reveals prominent Small-World characteristic. Then, we investigate the evolution of Small-World properties over time at several incremental network sizes. The average path length of ALN scales with the network size, while clustering coefficient of ALN is independent of the network size. And we find that ALN has smaller average path length and higher clustering coefficient than WWW at the same network size and network average degree. After that, based on the Small-World characteristic of ALN, we present an Association Learning Model (ALM), which can efficiently provide association learning of Web resources in breadth or depth for learners. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

The 90 kDa heat shock protein (HSP90) is a molecular chaperone that participates in various cellular processes, the role and significance of HSP90 in postmortem muscle though remains unclear. In the present study, pig Longissimus dorsi muscles, categorized into three pH groups, were tested for HSP90 levels and meat quality parameters (i.e. water holding capacity, colour, tenderness and lipid oxidation). The muscles with a high initial pH (pHi) group (pH>6.4) possessing the greatest water holding capacity and lightness, contained the highest HSP90 level, followed by intermediate (6.0-6.4) and low pHi groups (pH

Objective The controversy that iodized salt may increase the risk of thyroid disorders has been aroused in China during the past decade. Most of studies focused on adult rather than children. We aimed to explore whether iodized salt was associated with an increased risk of thyroid nodule in Chinese children. Methods The cross-sectional study was conducted in Hangzhou, China, in 2010. Iodized salt intake, urine iodine concentration (UIC) and thyroid nodule (by ultrasonography) were measured in 3026 children. The associations of iodized salt with thyroid nodule were evaluated using multiple logistic regression models. Results The prevalence of thyroid nodule was 10.59% among Chinese children. Girls (11.89%) had higher prevalence of thyroid nodule than boys (9.26%). No significant association was observed between type of salt and thyroid nodule in pooled samples, boys and girls, respectively. Similar associations were observed between UIC and thyroid nodule. There was no significant association between milk consumption and thyroid nodule as well. Conclusion The present study indicated that non-iodized salt may not increase the risk of thyroid nodules among Chinese children. Similar associations were observed between milk consumption, UIC and thyroid nodules.

Multi-core CPU and GPU technologies upgrades a PC to a personal supercomputer. Many algorithms have been proposed to achieve dynamic scheduling in CPU-GPU hybrid environments. Among them, only pure self-scheduling (PSS) can achieve perfect load balancing in this extremely heterogeneous environment. But PSS can not take full advantage of GPU performance, reduce the overhead of the tail problem, and reduce the dynamic scheduling overhead. In this paper, load-prediction scheduling (LPS) was introduced to solve the above problems. To demonstrate the efficiency of LPS in practical applications, it was implemented to parallelize computer simulation of electrocardiogram. Experimental results of LPS on the computer simulation of electrocardiogram (ECG) show that the LPS algorithm is more efficient than PSS.

Background —Catecholamine-induced apoptosis is mediated by activation of the β-adrenergic signaling pathway. We tested the hypothesis that β 1 - and β 2 -adrenergic receptor (AR) subtypes differentially affect apoptosis in adult rat ventricular myocytes in vitro. Methods and Results —Myocytes were first exposed to norepinephrine (NE) alone (10 μmol/L) or NE+atenolol (AT) (10 μmol/L) for 12 hours. AT, a β 1 -selective AR antagonist, abolished the NE-induced increase in nick end-labeling (TUNEL)–positive cells compared with control (NE, 33±3% versus control, 3±1%, P P =0.98). Annexin V staining, DNA laddering, and caspase activity determinations corroborated these results. Subsequent experiments under prazosin treatment established the apoptosis dose-response curves for the increasingly β 2 -selective AR agonists isoproterenol (ISO) (β 1 ≈β 2 ) and albuterol (ALB) (β 2 >β 1 ). ISO and ALB induced significantly less apoptosis than NE (β 1 >β 2 ) at equimolar concentrations as assessed by TUNEL staining [1 μmol/L: NE (8±2%)≈ISO (7±1%)>ALB (2±1%); 10 μmol/L: NE (35±2%)>ISO (23±1%)>ALB (3±1%); 100 μmol/L: NE (50±2%)>ISO (29±2%)>ALB (14±1%), P P =0.62]. ALB-induced apoptosis at 100 μmol/L was abolished by AT (10 μmol/L), indicating a β 1 AR-mediated effect. Importantly, ICI 118551 (0.1 μmol/L), a highly selective β 2 AR antagonist, did not decrease the percentage of NE-, ISO-, and ALB-induced apoptosis. Reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction studies revealed that AT completely reversed the β-adrenergic signaling–induced changes in the Bcl-2–to-Bax ratio. Conclusions —These observations provide evidence that βAR-mediated apoptotic death signaling is largely dissociated from β 2 ARs and selectively mediated by β 1 ARs in adult rat ventricular myocytes.

In this note, some conditions of composition operators on Dτ spaces to be bounded are given by means of Carleson measures and pointwise multipliers, for some ranges of τ. The authors prove that (i) Let 1 τ ≤ n + 2 and 2 k τ ≤ 2 k + 1 ( or 2 k - 1 τ ≤ 2 k ) for some positive integer k. Suppose φ = ( φ 1 , ⋯ , φ n ) be a univalent mapping from B into itself, denote d μ j l ( z ) = | R ( l ) φ j ( z ) | 2 ( k - 1 + 2 ) ( 1 - | z | 2 ) 2 k - τ + 1 d v ( z ) f o r l = 1 , 2 , ⋯ , k + 1 . If μ j ( l ) φ - 1 are ( τ - 2 k + 2 l - 4 ) -Carleson measures for all then the composition operator Cφ on Dτ is bounded; (ii) Let 1 τ ≤ n + 2 , φ = ( φ 1 ⋯ φ n ) be univalent and the Frechet derivative of φ-1 be bounded on φ(B). If R φ j ∈ M ( D τ - 2 ) for all j, then the composition operator Cφ on Dτ is bounded; (iii) Let τ > n + 2 and φ as in (ii). If φ j ∈ D τ for all j, then the composition operator Cφ on Dτ is bounded.

The retinoic acid (RA) isomers all-trans-RA, 9-cis-RA and 13-cis-RA as well as other retinoids were tested for their ability to reduce the yield of herpes simplex virus-1 (HSV-1). RA isomers reduced HSV-1 replication whereas the other retinoids, retinol, retinal, beta-carotene and amide derivatives of RA were not inhibitory. All-trans-RA reduced the yield of HSV-1 by 100-fold at 5 micrograms/ml but 9-cis-RA and 13-cis-RA reduced viral replication by 10-fold. At a concentration of 10 micrograms/ml all-trans-RA and 9-cis-RA reduced virus yield by 1000-fold while 13-cis-RA decreased HSV-1 production by 100-fold. RA isomers at a concentration of 10 micrograms/ml were not cytotoxic for the Vero cells used in these studies. Immunofluorescence studies showed that all-trans-RA treated cell cultures exhibited small foci of virus specific immunostaining while untreated cultures displayed intense HSV-1 immunoreactivity in virtually the entire cell population. RA-dependent inhibition of HSV-1 replication required the presence of RA with the virus. HSV-1 replication proceeded when RA was removed from infected cells. Treatment of cell cultures with RA did not induce gene expression for type-1 interferon (IFN) or for the type-1 IFN inducible genes studied suggesting that RA inhibition of HSV-1 replication is not mediated by IFN. These studies have established the ability of RA to reduce the replication of HSV-1 in vitro.

The nuclear matrix mediates the 3-dimensional organization of DNA and supports DNA replication and its transcription. We hypothesize that the osteoblast nuclear matrix contributes to the transcriptional control of type I collagen (COL1A1) expression. Cis-regulatory elements of the rat COL1A1 promoter that control osteoblast expression in vivo are between -2.3 and -1.67 kilobase pairs (kb) but lie within -3.5 and -2.3 kb in cultured bone cells. This may result from differences in cell architecture between osteoblasts in tissue and those in vitro. Our aim was to identify osteoblast nuclear matrix proteins (NMPs) that associated with sequence-specificity to the COL1A1 promoter. We used osteoblasts from the rat metaphyseal femur and the rat osteosarcoma cells, ROS 17/2.8. Nuclear matrix and soluble nuclear proteins were obtained as separate subfractions. Gel mobility shift analysis, using fragments of the COL1A1 promoter, was used to identify DNA-binding proteins in the nuclear subfractions. A NMP-DNA interaction, NMP3, was observed between -2149 and -2106 nucleotide in both osteoblasts and osteosarcoma cells. NMP4 was detected between -3518 to -3406 nucleotide. Therefore, osteoblast NMPs recognize sequences in regulatory regions of the COL1A1 promoter and may link cell structure and the transcriptional regulation of this protein.

We describe the formation of an ocean circulation model using the Arakawa C-grid. The C-grid has been shown to give more accurate results than the B-grid in the treatment of geostrophic adjustment and linear convection. The model is formulated with β-plane geometry, and temperature is the only state variable. We include in the model a semi-implicit formulation of the Coriolis terms and a small scale dissipative term which depends on the horizontal divergence. The latter reduces the noise in the vertical motion field at coarse horizontal resolution. The results are compared to those obtained with other forms of frictional parametrizations.

Nanocrystalline SnO2 powders have been prepared by solid–liquid reaction and solid-state thermal oxidizing techniques. The microstructures and phase compositions of the product were characterized by thermogravimetry analysis, X-ray diffraction, and the Raman spectrum. It is shown that at least two phases, SnO2 and SnOx, coexist at 450 °C. However, only the tetragonal rutile structure SnO2 phase is detected after the Sn powders were annealed at 550 °C. The Raman peaks of the nanocrystalline SnO2 powders reveal remarkable red shift and broadening, which could be attributed to the phonon confinement effect, oxygen vacancies, and the stress effect.

Background: The controversy that iodized salt may increase the risk of thyroid disorders has arisen in China during the past several years. Objective: This study aimed to explore whether iodized salt increased the risk of thyroid nodule among a Chinese population. Design: A cross-sectional study was conducted in Hangzhou, China, in 2010. Iodized salt intake, urinary iodine concentration (UIC), and thyroid nodule (by ultrasonography) were measured in 9412 adults. The associations of iodized salt with thyroid nodule were evaluated by using multiple mixed logistic regression models. Results: The prevalence of thyroid nodule among men and women was 24.1% and 34.7%, respectively. Adults consuming noniodized salt had an increased risk of thyroid nodule (OR: 1.36; 95% CI: 1.01, 1.83). Similarly, compared with moderate salt appetite, mild salt appetite was associated with an increased risk of thyroid nodule among all adults (OR: 1.19; 95% CI: 1.03, 1.37) and among women (OR: 1.23; 95% CI: 1.03, 1.46). Furthermore, those who consumed neither iodized salt nor milk had a higher risk of thyroid nodule (OR: 1.72; 95% CI: 1.21, 2.43) than did those who consumed both iodized salt and milk. In addition, an increased risk of thyroid nodule (OR: 1.25; 95% CI: 1.07, 1.45) was observed among both pooled samples and women with low UIC. Conclusions: These findings indicate that low iodine intake may increase the risk of thyroid nodule in a Chinese population, particularly in women. Hence, the Universal Salt Iodization program may be indispensable for a coastal Chinese population such as that living in Hangzhou. This trial was registered at clinicaltrials.gov as NCT01838629. Am J Clin Nutr doi: 10.3945/ajcn.112.054353.

This paper proposes a simple approach for client to verify whether his/her data have been modified on the cloud storage server without downloading the data. In our approach, a number of bytes of each data block is collected to compose its metadata and stored in the cloud server along with small extra data. The approach effectively supports dynamic data operations with light overheads, in case of both computation and bandwidth. Our experiment shows that the computation time consumed is much less than the traditional MD5 checksum depending on different variable.

Biological computations like Electrocardiological modeling and simulation usually require high-performance computing environments. This paper introduces an implementation of parallel computation for computer simulation of Electrocardiograms (ECGs). We realized the parallel computation for computer simulation of ECGs on a CPU-GPU cluster using a hybrid parallel algorithm with the parallel program development tools-MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA. Furthermore, we proposed a load-prediction static scheduling and load-prediction dynamic scheduling to achieve efficient process-level and thread-level scheduling, respectively. Compared with traditional static and dynamic scheduling, our scheduling schemes are more efficient. In our research, we achieved a speedup of 55.1 using four PCs for the computer simulation of ECGs. This study demonstrates that the cluster can provide a cheap and efficient environment for parallel computations in biological modeling and simulation studies.

The present study examined the efficacy of using multiple mechanisms as part of a topical microbicide to inactivate herpes simplex virus (HSV) by combining theaflavin-3,3′-digallate (TF-3) and lactic acid (LA) over the pH range of 4.0 to 5.7 to mimic conditions in the female reproductive tract. Six clinical isolates of HSV-2 and two clinical isolates of HSV-1 were almost completely inactivated when TF-3 (100 μM) was present with LA over the pH range of 4.5 to 5.7, whereas four additional HSV-1 clinical isolates required TF-3 concentrations of 250 to 500 μM for comparable virus titer reduction. LA (1%) alone at pH 4.0 reduced the titers of laboratory and clinical isolates of HSV-1 and HSV-2 by ≥5 log 10 , but most LA-dependent antiviral activity was lost at a pH of ≥4.5. When HSV-1 and HSV-2 were incubated at pH 4.0 without LA virus titers were not reduced. At pH 4.0, HSV-1 and HSV-2 titers were reduced 5 log 10 in 20 min by LA alone. TF-3 reduced HSV-2 titers by 5 log 10 in 20 to 30 min at pH 4.5, whereas HSV-1 required 60 min for comparable inactivation. Mixtures of TF-3 and LA stored at 37°C for 1 month at pH 4.0 to 5.7 maintained antiviral activity. Semen, but not cervical vaginal fluid, decreased LA-dependent antiviral activity at pH 4.0, but adding TF-3 to the mixture reduced HSV titers by 4 to 5 log 10 . These results indicate that a combination microbicide containing TF-3 and LA could reduce HSV transmission.

Phospholipid hydrolysis, as the main stage and cause of phopholipid degradation, is generally attributed to phospholipases. In this study, the changes of phospholipase A₂ (PLA₂) and C (PLC) activities, neutral lipid, free fatty acids and phospholipids in dry-cured duck leg muscles during processing, were examined. The composition of free fatty acids and neutral lipids increased significantly (P0.05) with extension of processing time while the phospholipids composition decreased. The PLA₂ and PLC activity decreased in the final product, but retained 83.70% and 86.78% of their initial activities, respectively. The relative activities of both PLA₂ and PLC highly correlated with the decline of phospholipids and the increase of free fatty acids. High correlations were also obtained between the relative activities of PLC and the increase of neutral lipid (P0.01). All these results suggest that PLA₂ and PLC contribute to the degradation of intramuscular phospholipids during the processing of dry-cured duck.

The subjective sensation of the patients and the treatment effect were compared prospectively between the no nasal packing group and the common nasal packing group.The patients were divided into no nasal packing group and nasal packing group matched for the type of chronic sinusitis. All patients received operation of functional endoscopic sinus surgery. The patients of no nasal packing group were given thoroughly bleeding control without nasal packing, while the patients of nasal packing group received nasal packing with sponge after hemostatic seaweed covering of wound. The nasal stents in nasal packing group were removed two days after operation, and the other treatments were all identical in the two groups. The clinical symptoms and treatment effect were compared between the two groups using visual analog scale. The levels of headache, rhinalgia, nasal obstruction, bleeding and nasal secretions volume at different time points, such as 1 day, 2 days and 3 days after operation, were evaluated and compared, as well as the recovering of operative region, such as crustal, secretion, reaction film, mucosal edema, vesicle and blockage of the sinus ostium.At the 1st day after operation, the degrees of headache, rhinalgia and nasal obstruction in the no nasal packing group were milder than the nasal packing group, and the differences have statistical significance. Two days after operation, the degrees of headache, rhinalgia and nasal obstruction, as well as the volume of bleeding and nasal secretions in the no nasal packing group were milder and lower than the nasal packing group, and the differences have statistical significance. Three days after operation, the differences of the indexes above were not statistically significant. The scores of total bleeding volume during the 3 days after operation showed no statistically significant difference between the two groups. Thirty-four patients were cured in no nasal packing group with the average epithelialization time of (10.7 +/- 2.6) weeks. Thirty-two patients were cured in nasal packing group with the average epithelialization time of (10.6 +/- 2.9) weeks. The difference of average epithelialization time between the two groups was not statistically significant.No nasal packing could relieve the discomfort caused by nasal packing and avoid the rebleeding and pain when removing the nasal stents. No nasal packing has obvious superiority than common nasal packing, and is effective in the treatment of depression. It is be appropriate for type I and type II chronic sinusitis patients without systemic disease with limited economic conditions.

The objectives of this study, were to examine the relationship between duck meat tenderness, actomyosin dissociation and endogenous enzyme activities when heating the duck breast muscle, to the internal temperature of 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90°C. The shear force increased in the temperature range of 30-50°C and 70-90°C and decreased from 50 to 70°C, which was negatively related with liberated actin (P0.05). The activity of cathepsin B and L was stable while heating the meat to a temperature below 50°C, then it decreased rapidly with temperature increase. The calpain activity kept decreasing with the temperature increase. There was no significant change in the cathepsin D activity below 70°C but it declined rapidly thereafter, and its activity was strongly correlated with actomyosin dissociation (P0.05). The results suggest that actomyosin dissociation and cathepsin D, could contribute to the tenderness of duck meat during the cooking process.

Processing and interpretation of magnetic data usually require information of total magnetization direction. However, under the effects of remanant magnetization, total magnetization direction is different from induced magnetization direction, which makes data processing and interpretation complexity. In this paper, we present a new method by cross-correlation of magnetic dipole source for determination of magnetization direction from relatively isolated and approximate equiaxial magnetic total field anomaly. This method calculates cross-correlation coefficient between observed magnetic total field anomaly and theoretical magnetic total field anomaly caused by a magnetic dipole source, by using a set of varying parameters of positions and total magnetization direction of dipole source for trial and error. The corresponding magnetization direction of maximum correlation coefficient is regarded as estimated total magnetization direction. Tests on both synthetic data and aeromagnetic data of a mineral exploration in northwestern China indicate this method reliably and effectively estimates the magnetization direction from relatively isolated and approximate equiaxial magnetic total field anomaly.

A microbicide combining the lipid-ether 1-0-octyl-sn-glycerol (OG; 3 mM) and peptide D2A21 (9 μM) reduced herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and HSV-2 titers by at least 1,000-fold, more than the sum of the inactivations produced by OG and D2A21 alone. OG plus D2A21 reduced HSV-1 and HSV-2 titers by ≥1,000-fold in ≤10 and ≤20 min, respectively, whereas OG and D2A21 used alone produced almost no virus inactivation during these times.

This paper introduces a parallel algorithm using GPU for computer simulation of Electrocardiogram (ECG) based on a 3-dimensional (3D) whole-heart model. The computer heart model includes approximately 50,000 discrete elements (cell models) inside a torso model represented by 344 nodal points with 684 triangular meshes. Since computational burden for computer simulation of ECGs is considerably heavy, we employ GPU to accelerate the speed of calculation. However, GPU is based on SIMD structure which is unsuited for branch structure, so that the computing capabilities of GPU are limited by the branch of program. In order to solve this problem, we present a GPU-based algorithm which concentrates on eliminating branches in computation and optimizing the calculation of electric potentials through the way of load-prediction. The new parallel algorithm accelerates the speed of calculation of ECGs to 6.18 times compared with the former algorithm. This study demonstrates an effective algorithm based on GPU for parallel computing in biomedical simulation study.

Cooking has a great influence on meat tenderness, and we assumed that changes of tenderness in this process resulted from the liberation of actin and associated structural changes. Therefore, in this study, we investigated changes in the microstructure and tenderness when duck breast muscle were cooked to different internal endpoint temperatures (70, 80, 90, 95 °C) by three cooking regimes (conventional cooking, two-stage cooking and three-stage cooking).When duck breast muscle was cooked to an internal endpoint temperature of 70 °C, the three-stage cooking significantly decreased the Meullenet-Owens razor shear force (MORSF) value (P0.05) and resulted in a longer sarcomere length (P0.05) compared with the conventional cooking. However, further improvement of the tenderness and an increase in sarcomere length did not occur at higher internal endpoint temperatures. The two-stage cooking regime, with a much longer cooking time below 55 °C, also resulted in a lower MORSF value (P0.05) and increased sarcomere length (P0.05) at an internal endpoint temperature of 70 °C compared with the conventional cooking. Significant liberation of actin was also observed in duck meat cooked between 50 and 60 °C.The two- and three-stage cooking regimes with initial temperatures of 50-60 °C and endpoint temperature of 70 °C could improve tenderness of duck breast meat, which might be related to the liberation of actin. Three-stage cooking had the great advantages of improving meat tenderness and reducing cooking loss; therefore, this is to be recommended for further application and research.

The aim of this work was to examine the relationship of skeletal muscle apoptosis and postmortem development of meat quality. Colour, cooking loss, myofibril fragmentation index (MFI) and shear force of duck breast and thigh meat postmortem were measured, and changes of positive nuclei were assessed with Terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase-mediated deoxyuridine triphosphophate nick end-labelling method (TUNEL). Correlation analysis revealed that apoptosis were positively correlated with colour (L(*), a(*) and b(*)), cooking loss and MFI (P

In recent years, a great number of applications have been implemented on the CMP and achieved good performance. The success of the parallelism of a great deal of applications on CMP shows a bright future of the development of the CMP. However, some other experiments exposed the shortcomings of the CMP which may significantly reduce the performance of the parallel program. In this paper, we devote the effort to reveal the effect of the memory wall on the performance on different types of CMP through a data-intensive application, the Jacobi iteration method. The memory wall is becoming a more and more crucial issue that dominates the performance of the whole application, especially data-intensive ones. High latency, low bandwidth and data contention compose the memory wall in the CMP. Limiting the problem scale within a certain range to avoid the insufficient bandwidth is a feasible way. Some advanced technologies such as data prefetching and thread switching can help reducing or even eliminating the effect of the latency.

Based on the principle of cognitive economy, the complexity and the information of textual context are proposed to measure subjective cognitive degree of textual context. Based on minimization of Boolean complexity in human concept learning, the complexity and the difficulty of textual context are defined in order to mimic human’s reading experience. Based on maximal relevance principle, the information and cognitive degree of textual context are defined in order to mimic human’s cognitive sense. Experiments verify that more contexts are added, more easily the text is understood by a machine, which is consistent with the linguistic viewpoint that context can help to understand a text; furthermore, experiments verify that the author-given sentence sequence includes the less complexity and the more information than other sentence combinations, that is to say, author-given sentence sequence is more easily understood by a machine. So the principles of simplicity and maximal relevance actually exist in text writing process, which is consistent with the cognitive science viewpoint. Therefore, this chapter’s measuring methods are validated from the linguistic and cognitive perspectives, and it could provide a theoretical foundation for machine-based text understanding.

An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a commonly used clinical tool to diagnose cardiac diseases. In most clinical practice, to improve ECG diagnosis accuracy, cardiologists not only determine the abnormal conditions of the current ECG, but also examine the serial changes in reference to the previous ECGs. Expert cardiologists strongly believe that ECG diagnosis is incomplete without a comparison to previous ECGs (Ariet et al., 2005). Obviously, a prerequisite for the clinical practice using serial ECG comparison is the availability of previous ECGs. For the reason above, it has been a growing interest in medical informatics to improve ease of access to ECG data using information technology. Initially, the computer systems, now referred to as ECG management systems (EMSs), were invented to serve a valuable function for ECG data management (Crevasse & Ariet, 1987). They consisted of a central minicomputer that collected the ECG signals from peripheral electrocardiographs over serial cables, telephone lines or local area network, and provided the power to store and retrieve the collected ECG data. Storage and retrieval of ECG data were organized in the perspective of their future use, particularly for serial comparison, but also for different managerial and research purposes, such as over-reading by physicians, re-analysis by different ECG programs, and statistics for management (Fayn & Rubel, 1991). The EMS solution allows a patient’s ECG data accessible throughout the hospital and anywhere outside the hospital through a Web interface. A major issue in the employment of EMS is the interoperability between electrocardiographs and EMSs, and the interoperability among EMSs. In a major hospital, there are usually a number of electrocardiographs that are from different vendors. These electrocardiographs may use different vendor-proprietary standards for ECG data storage and transmission, but an EMS is developed conformably to only a few vendor-proprietary standards. In order to facilitate the use of electrocardiographs from different vendor, several EMSs that are conformable to different vendor-proprietary standards may coexist in a hospital. As for the issue of the interoperability among the EMSs, some possible solutions have been reported.

In recent years, GPU is rapidly developing in performance and used in wide range of extensive scientific and computation-intensive computing. However, the high performance on GPU depends on the degree of parallelism of applications. So GPU computing is usually used to solve a single large-size problem to utilize its massively parallel capability. In this paper, we devote the efforts to solve a number of variable-size tasks with the same algorithm on GPU and focus on the study of the Single-Program MultipleTask (SPMT) model on GPU computing. In addition, a novel allocation algorithm is proposed to map multiple tasks into GPU execution resources on SPMT model. The experiments show that our solution increase the performance of processing multiple tasks and can achieve up to 86.7% efficiency of single large-size task and 4.1 times speedup over sequential multi-task on Geforce 9800GTX+ in our example application.

Objective Previous studies have found that overweight and obesity are related to numerous diseases, including thyroid cancer and thyroid volume. This study evaluates the relationship between body size and the presence of thyroid nodules in a Chinese population. Methods A total of 6793 adults and 2410 children who underwent thyroid ultrasonography were recruited in this cross-sectional study in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, from March to October, 2010. Sociodemographic characteristics and potential risk factors of thyroid nodules were collected by questionnaire. Height and weight were measured using standard protocols. Associations of height, weight, body mass index (BMI) and body surface area (BSA) with the presence of thyroid nodules were evaluated using multiple logistic regression models. Results After adjustment for potential risk factors, an increased risk of thyroid nodule incidence was associated with height (OR 1.15, 95% CI 1.02 to 1.30), weight (OR 1.40, 95% CI 1.24 to 1.58), BMI (OR 1.26, 95% CI 1.11 to 1.42) and BSA (OR 1.43, 95% CI 1.27 to 1.62) in all adults, but most obviously in women. In children, similar associations were observed between risk of thyroid nodule incidence and weight, BMI and BSA, but not height. BSA was the measurement most significantly associated with thyroid nodules in both adults and children. Conclusions This study identified that the presence of thyroid nodules was positively associated with weight, height, BMI and BSA in both women and girls. It suggests that tall, obese individuals have increased susceptibility to thyroid nodules. Trial registration number: NCT01838629.

Association Link Network (ALN) is a kind of Semantic Link Network built by mining the association relations among Web resources for effectively supporting Web intelligent application such as Web-based learning, and knowledge acquisition. This paper explores the Small-World properties of ALN to provide theoretical support for Web-based learning. First, a filtering algorithm of ALN is proposed to generate the filtered status of ALN by adjusting the filtering parameter. Secondly, the Small-World properties of ALN at the filtered status are calculated and analyzed by regression analysis to observe the changing trend of Small-World properties. After that, comparison of the Small-World properties between ALN and random graph shows that ALN reveals prominent Small-World characteristic. The discovery of Small-World characteristic of ALN can provide theoretical support for Web-based learning.

Tree search algorithm typically involves long latency for the main memory access due to irregular and unpredictable data access during the tree traversal. Data prefetching is one method to bridge the memory gap and improve cache performance. In this paper, we extend our previous work and propose a novel data prefetching approach for tree search, called Dynamic Block Prefetching. Dynamic block prefetching can be used in combination with other optimized methods, such as search branch unwinding. This approach can be used to improve the performance in general-purpose processors which own hardware cache and heterogeneous acceleration cores which not provide hardware supported memory coherence or have limited on-chip storage. The experiments show that dynamic block prefetching performs as high as 27% better than no prefetching search on Intel Core i7. Also, it is capable of improving performance over no prefetching search and static buffer scheme by 26% and 11% on Cell SPE.

The measurement of textual complexity is a fundamental issue on e-learning, online question-answering, web search and browsing, etc. But it is still a challenge because the measuring process includes a series of cognitive mechanisms. According to the properties of cognitive principles in human text reading process, the different derivatives of textual keywords are given. Based on the categorical invariance in human conception learning, textual invariance is defined, and then the measuring method of textual complexity is developed which is consistent with the view of categorical invariance in human concept learning. Experiments prove that there is a strong correlation between the text understanding difficulty given by human and the textual complexity measured by our method. That is to say, the proposed method can reflect human's reading experience to some extent.

A class of new container cranes with eight-link lifting mechanics which can reduce sway efficiently as a result of improved lifting structure have been put to use recently, and both modeling and swing control of such a crane system attracts a lot attention in the field of control technology development. In this paper, dynamics model of the new container crane is investigated, an anti-swing control scheme with fuzzy uncertainty compensation is proposed to ensure the positioning control as well as overall closed-loop system stability. None of the system parameters is required for the controller design in a priori. In the proposed control laws, the position error can be driven to a bounded area while the swing angle can also be rapidly damped so as to achieve minimal sway of the crane system. Stability analysis of the controller is also given. Finally, simulation results show the performance successfully.

Digital libraries have shouldered the mission of preserving and spreading human culture in the era of information. However, knowledge extraction for digital libraries is not well studied, and that holds back the role promotion of digital libraries from information collector to knowledge provider. This paper presents an ontology-based approach, which extracts detailed attributes of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) from digitized textbooks. According to the characters of digitized textbooks, we propose an extraction ontology that is compatible with both textbook extraction and TCM theory. To improve extraction tolerance for OCR errors, we extract features of different aspects. Finally, a structured pattern based extraction method is adopted to minimize extraction supervision. The result shows that our method is a practical and robust exploration to address the problem of information extraction for digitized textbooks of TCM.

A genetic algorithm based on small-world model (GA-SW) is developed for solving the scheduling and placement problem in FPGA. In this problem, a set of tasks with their own start times, execution times and deadlines is to be scheduled into the FPGA with the objective to minimize the total delay of tasks. The small-world network model possesses locality character, i.e., tightly local connections and loosely remote connections, which can be directly used in the design of the initial population and mutation operator of GA since the optimal solutions for scheduling also has locality character, i.e., close to the deadline-based sequence. Meanwhile, a gliding window method is proposed along with the small-world model so as to better take advantage of the locality of solutions. Additionally, a converging crossover operator is developed to prevent invalid solutions caused by combinatorial coding. The time complexity of GA-SW is O(n^2), where n is the number of tasks. Compared with traditional genetic algorithm, GA-SW can dramatically improve the efficiency of the algorithm and the quality of solutions.