BACKGROUND A meta-analysis was conducted to summarize the evidence from prospective cohort and case-control studies regarding the association between coffee intake and biliary tract cancer (BTC) and liver cancer risk. METHODS Eligible studies were identified by searches of PubMed and EMBASE databases from the earliest available online indexing year to March 2017. The dose-response relationshi...

This paper investigates the performance of an image compression algorithm tailored to compress gray-scale facial photographs. The proposed technique treats blocks in the head region differently and adapts itself to the local nature of the face region. The proposed technique first locates the head-shoulder region and then locally processes block in the head region and encode active blocks contai...

The present study was conducted to establish a method to induce differentiation of bone marrow (MB)-derived mesenchymal cells into insulin-producing cells. When mouse BM-derived mesenchymal cells were cultured for 60 days in medium containing 10% fetal calf serum and 25 mM glucose, they expressed insulin. Addition of activin A and betacellulin (BTC) accelerated differentiation, and immunoreacti...

A Metal-Organic Framework (MOF), iron-benzenetricarboxylate (Fe(BTC)), has been studied for the adsorptive removal of azo-dye Orange II from aqueous solutions, where the effect of various parameters was tested and isotherm and kinetic models were suggested. The adsorption capacities of Fe(BTC) were much higher than those of an activated carbon. The experimental data can be best described by the...

BMI1 is a core component of the polycomb repressive complex 1 (PRC1) and is up-regulated in biliary tract cancer (BTC), contributing to aggressive clinical features. In this study we investigated the cytotoxic effects of PTC-209, a recently developed inhibitor of BMI1, in BTC cells. PTC-209 reduced overall viability in BTC cell lines in a dose-dependent fashion (0.04 - 20 µM). Treatment with PT...

Gemcitabine and cisplatin combination therapy (GC) is accepted as a standard treatment for advanced biliary tract cancer (BTC). However, little information is available regarding such treatment in the clinical practice setting in Japan. We retrospectively examined the clinical data of patients with unresectable or recurrent BTC who received GC as first-line treatment. The regimen consisted of c...

Initial reports surfaced in 2009 that a state-sponsored cyber actor had successfully intruded upon servers essential to the BTC pipeline operations and caused a temporary disruption in pipeline transfers. It was further reported that a team of western experts were able to assist the pipeline operator in restoring the system enabling a return to normal operations. Few details were provided other...

In this contribution the performance of Reed-Solomon (RS) Block Turbo Coding (BTC) is studied in a 16-QAM modulated OFDM system when operating on a Rayleigh fading channel. BER and PER performances are shown and compared to the performance of Convolutional Turbo Coding (CTC). BTC proves to mitigate the irreducible error floor that limits the performance of CTC at high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR).

We show that we can break SIDH in (classical) polynomial time, even with a random starting curve $$E_0$$ .

Although surgical resection is the only way to cure biliary tract cancer (BTC), most BTCs are unresectable by the time they are diagnosed. Chemotherapy is usually used to treat unresectable BTC, but its impact on survival is small. Here, we report the case of a 70-year-old woman with a locally advanced intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma that was initially diagnosed as an unresectable liver metasta...