s of papers 37 158 Effect of intra-abdominal injection of lipopolysaccharide or muramyl dipeptide on the acute phase response in Japanese quail (Coturnix coturnix japonica). E.A. Koutsos* and K.C. Klasing, University of California, Davis, California. Experiments were conducted in Japanese quail to determine the effect of repeated injections of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) from the cell wall of the ...

BACKGROUND Epicutaneous (EC) immunization offers a new method of a needle-free and self-administrable immunization by using a topically applied patch to deliver vaccine. We have previously shown that EC immunization with hapten-conjugated protein antigen TNP-Ig prior to hapten sensitization inhibits Th1-mediated contact hypersensitivity (CHS) in mice. Our further work showed that EC immunizatio...

In this paper, we introduce the notion of a bounded parameter Markov decision process as a generalization of the traditional exact MDP. A bounded parameter MDP is a set of exact MDPs speciied by giving upper and lower bounds on transition probabilities and rewards (all the MDPs in the set share the same state and action space). Bounded parameter MDPs can be used to represent variation or uncert...

OBJECTIVE Grape seed procyanidins (PC) are flavan-3-ol oligomers and polymers known for their biological activity in the gut. Grape seed extract (GSE) have been reported to reduce intestinal injury in a rat model of mucositis. We sought to investigate effects of purified PC fractions differing in mean degree of polymerization (mDP) combined with 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU) chemotherapy on the viabili...

BACKGROUND Several methodological issues with non-randomized comparative clinical studies have been raised, one of which is whether the methods used can adequately identify uncertainties that evolve dynamically with time in real-world systems. The objective of this study is to compare the effectiveness of different combinations of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) treatments and combinations o...

This paper addresses a control problem for probabilistic models in the setting of Markov decision processes (MDP). We are interested in the steady-state control problem which asks, given an ergodic MDPM and a distribution δgoal, whether there exists a (history-dependent randomized) policy π ensuring that the steady-state distribution ofM under π is exactly δgoal. We first show that stationary r...

To develop a new surface treatment agent which improves the bond strength of adhesive resin to both non-precious and precious metals, experimental treatment agents containing both an adhesive bonding promoter for precious metals and one for non-precious metals were prepared by dissolving epithioalkyl methacrylate (EP3MA or EP8MA) and 10-methacryloyloxydecyl dihydrogen phosphate (MDP) in acetone...

A popular approach to solving a decision process with non-Markovian rewards (NMRDP) is to exploit a compact representation of the reward function to automatically translate the NMRDP into an equivalent Markov decision process (MDP) amenable to our favorite MDP solution method. The contribution of this paper is a representation of non-Markovian reward functions and a translation into MDP aimed a...

Two cDNA clones corresponding to human microsomal dipeptidase (MDP, formerly referred to as dehydropeptidase-I or renal dipeptidase (EC 3.4.13.11] were isolated from human placental and renal cDNA libraries employing rapid amplification of cDNA ends strategy. The complete amino acid sequence deduced from the cDNAs contains 411 residues, beginning with a signal peptide of 16 residues. A highly h...

This paper presents a novel concept of multi-drop path-based multidestination message passing on switch-based irregular networks. First, the multi-drop mechanism is deened with an associated header encoding scheme, and this mechanism is used to develop path-based multidestination worms. Next, a method is proposed to identify valid multidestination paths on arbitrary irregular networks with a ty...