INTRODUCTION Diagnosis of axial spondyloarthritis (SpA) can be delayed for several years mainly because of low awareness of axial SpA among non-rheumatologists who are the first interlocutors of potential SpA patients. One strategy to decrease the delay between appearance of first symptoms and diagnosis of axial SpA and to allow early management of the disease is to provide the non-rheumatologi...

The seronegative spondyloarthropathies (SpAs) are associated both with clinical and subclinical colitis. Recently biological blockade with the tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFalpha) antagonists infliximab and etanercept has been shown to be effective in the treatment of SpA. However, only infliximab is efficacious in the treatment of colitis in patients with Crohn's SpA. We report on two patie...

BACKGROUND Various virulence factors and superantigens are encoded by mobile genetic elements. The relationship between clonal background and virulence factors differs in different geographic regions. We compared the distribution and relationship of spa types and virulence genes among methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) strains isolated from a tertiary hospital in 2000-01 and 200...

A. Neustein and J.A. Markowitz (eds.), Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-6018-3_5, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013 Abstract Paradoxically, in an era when cyber-postings proliferate on the Web, much of the valuable information that can be mined from user-generated content (UGC) still eludes most mining programs. One reason this massive ...

Phytochromes function as red/far-red photoreceptors in plants and are essential for light-regulated growth and development. Photomorphogenesis, the developmental program in light, is the default program in seed plants. In dark-grown seedlings, photomorphogenic growth is suppressed by the action of the CONSTITUTIVELY PHOTOMORPHOGENIC1 (COP1)/SUPPRESSOR OF phyA-105 (SPA) complex, which targets po...

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has become a widely used tool for additive parts-based analysis in a wide range of applications. As NMF is a non-convex problem, the quality of the solution will depend on the initialization of the factor matrices. In this study, the successive projection algorithm (SPA) is proposed as an initialization method for NMF. SPA builds on convex geometry and al...

Sipholenol A is a natural sipholane triterpenoid isolated from the Red Sea sponge, Callyspongia siphonella. Previous studies showed the antimigratory and antiproliferative activities of the semisynthetic sipholenol A esters against breast cancer cell lines. This study investigated the effects of sipholenol A-4-O-3',4'-dichlorobenzoate (SPA) on the growth, migration and invasion of diverse human...

Tumour necrosis factor-alpha inhibitors (TNF-blockers) are recommended for the treatment of predominantly axial spondyloarthritis (SpA), after failure of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). TNF-blockers are very effective drugs and also show a sustained and stable long-term response in axial SpA. A few trials indicated that withdrawal of TNF-blockers in longstanding ankylosing spond...

TwoTowers is a software tool for the functional verification and performance evaluation of computer, communication and software systems represented through stochastic process algebra (SPA). In this paper we describe a novel version (3.0), in which the modeling language is no longer a pure SPA, but a SPA-based architectural description language called Æmilia. We show that TwoTowers 3.0 improves ...

We investigate bidders’ and seller’s responses to ambiguity about the number of bidders in the first price auction (FPA) and the second price auction (SPA) with independent private valuations. We model ambiguity aversion using the maxmin expected utility model. We find that bidders prefer the number of bidders to be revealed in the FPA, are indifferent between revealing and concealing in the SP...