In biology, organization at multiple scales potentiates biological function. Current advances in staining and imaging of biological tissues provide a wealth of data, but there are few metrics to quantitatively describe these findings. In particular there is a need for a metric that would characterize the correlation and consistency of orientation of different biological constructs within a tiss...

objective: the aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of protein and dna components of toxoplasma gondii on maturation of dendritic cells and their efficiency in il-12 production and proliferation of t cells. materials and methods: for dc generation, bone marrow cells were cultured in the presence of gm-csf and il-4 for 5 days. tumor lysate and protein or dna components of toxo...

In this paper we propose a method for implementing a high-level interface for the synthesis and animation of animated virtual faces that is in full compliance with MPEG-4 specifications. This method allows us to implement the Simple Facial Object profile and part of the Calibration Facial Object Profile. In fact, starting from a facial wire-frame and from a set of configuration files, the devel...

A g-element for a graded R-module is a one-form with properties similar to a Lefschetz class in the cohomology ring of a compact complex projective manifold, except that the induced multiplication maps are injections instead of bijections. We show that if k(∆) is the face ring of the independence complex of a matroid and the characteristic of k is zero, then there is a non-empty Zariski open su...

Using the “glueball dominance” picture of the mixing between qq̄ mesons of different hidden flavors, we establish new glueball-meson mass relations which serve as a basis for glueball spectral systematics. For the tensor glueball mass 2.3 ± 0.1 GeV used as an input parameter, these relations predict the following glueball masses: M(0) ≃ 1.65 ± 0.05 GeV, M(1) ≃ 3.2 ± 0.2 GeV, M(2) ≃ 2.95 ± 0.15 G...

This paper presents an automatic FDP (Facial Definition Parameters) and FAP (Facial Animation Parameters) generation method from an image sequence that captures a frontal face. The proposed method is based on facial feature tracking without markers on a face. We present an efficient method to extract 2D facial features and to generate the FDP by applying 2D features to a generic face model. We ...

A secret sharing scheme permits a secret to be shared among participants in such a way that only qualiied subsets of participants can recover the secret. If any non qualiied subset has absolutely no information about the secret, then the scheme is called perfect. Unfortunately, in this case the size of the shares cannot be less than the size of the secret. Krawczyk 9] showed how to improve this...

background: dendritic cells (dc) induce tumor or pathogen-specific t cell responses in humans. several laboratories have developed culture systems, including maturation factors for human dc from peripheral blood monocytes. we comprehensively compared standard maturation stimulus, an autologous monocyte-conditioned medium (mcm), with heparin for their ability to promote uniformly mature dc that ...

background: ammonium is produced in culture medium due to amino acids degradation and has adverse effect on in vitro culture of embryo. in the current study, the purpose was to evaluate the effects of ammuniom chloride (ac) on in vitro oocyte maturation rate and early embryo development in the sheep and its effect on the expression of bcl-2. methods: in vitro maturation (ivm) was performed in t...

dendritic cells (dcs) induce pathogen-specific t cell responses. we comprehensively studied the effects of addition of maturation stimulus, fibroblasts (fibroblast conditioned medium), pha activated t cells (t cell conditioned medium), and mixture of fibroblast & pha activated t cells (fcm-tccm) conditioned media on maturation of dcs. monocytes were cultured with gm-csf and il-4 for five da...