UNLABELLED The increased cardiovascular risk in type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM2) is the result of disorders of the immune system, including the enhanced reactivity of monocytes and impaired secretion of inflammatory cytokines. The aim of this study was to analyze the expression of calcium-sensing receptor (CaR) in peripheral blood monocytes of individuals with DM2 and peripheral artery disease (P...

Due to the nonlinear deformation of the nonrigid and nonuniform biological tissues, it is difficult whereas important to correctly match a number of feature points distributed somewhat uniform in the tissues from MR images for deformation measurement. In this paper, the authors present TPS-SURF-SAC matching method and mismatching elimination method based on TPS clustering. Firstly the matching ...

Many sandy beach surf-zones support characteristic accumulations of diatom cells appearing as dark brown patches at the water surface. These diatoms become buoyant during the day, adhering to air bubbles generated by wave action. This, together with water circulation patterns generated by rip currents results in the accumulation of diatoms. By late afternoon the cells lose buoyancy and the accu...

Field studies were conducted to assess the coastal water quality impact of stormwater runoff from the Santa Ana River, which drains a large urban watershed located in southern California. Stormwater runoff from the river leads to very poor surf zone water quality, with fecal indicator bacteria concentrations exceeding California ocean bathing water standards by up to 500%. However, cross-shore ...

The SURF method (Speeded Up Robust Features) is a fast and robust algorithm for local, similarity invariant representation and comparison of images. Similarly to many other local descriptor-based approaches, interest points of a given image are defined as salient features from a scale-invariant representation. Such a multiple-scale analysis is provided by the convolution of the initial image wi...

The aim of this study was to obtain some evidence of a protective role for pulmonary surfactant in the pathogenesis of emphysema. Firstly, we developed a quick and easy method to treat mice with a series of intratracheal instillations. Subsequently, three groups of mice were treated as follows: two groups received intratracheal instillations with pancreatic elastase (1.8 mg.kg-1 BW) followed af...

Identifying important foraging sites for highly mobile marine predators has relied mainly on relating their distributions to broadly defined habitat data. However, understanding functional dependencies on foraging sites also requires knowledge of the relative contributions of foods to predator condition. We coupled predator distributions with measures of their diet and condition to assess the i...