Sputum acid-fast bacilli (AFB) smear microscopy has suboptimal sensitivity but remains the most commonly used laboratory test to diagnose pulmonary tuberculosis (TB). We prospectively evaluated the small membrane filtration (SMF) method that concentrates AFB in a smaller area to facilitate detection to improve the diagnostic performance of microscopy. We enrolled adults with suspicion of pulmon...

In the present study, a hybrid semi-supervised pixel-based classification algorithm is proposed for the automatic segmentation of intracranial aneurysms in Computed Tomography Angiography images. The algorithm was designed to discriminate image pixels as belonging to one of the two classes: blood vessel and brain parenchyma. Its accuracy in vessel and aneurysm detection was compared with two ot...

External application of static magnetic fields (SMF), used specifically for the treatment of inflammatory conditions such as soft tissue injuries, has recently become popular as a complementary and/or alternative therapy with minimal investigation into efficacy or mechanism. Localized inflammation was induced via injection of inflammatory agents lambda-carrageenan (CA) or histamine into rat hin...

A thorough assessment of the static magnetic field (SMF) inside a CO2 incubator allowed us to identify non-negligible inhomogeneities close to the floor, ceiling, walls and the door. Given that incubator's shelves are made of a non-magnetic stainless steel alloy, we did not expect any important effect of them on the SMF. Surprisingly, we did find relatively strong distortion of the SMF due to s...

The standard mammogram form (SMF) representation of an x-ray mammogram is a standardized, quantitative representation of the breast from which the volume of non-fat tissue and breast density can be easily estimated, both of which are of significant interest in determining breast cancer risk. Previous theoretical analysis of SMF had suggested that a complete and substantial set of calibration da...

To understand the loss limitations of a splice between a hollow-core fiber and a conventional fiber, we use a numerical model to calculate the expected coupling loss between the NKT Photonics' HC-1550-02 fiber and a single-mode fiber (SMF) of arbitrary step-index profile. When the SMF parameters are optimized, the splice loss is predicted to be as low as approximately 0.6 dB. This minimum is be...

The present work was undertaken in order to investigate the effects of static magnetic field (SMF) on hematopoiesis and iron metabolism in male rats. At thermoneutrality (25°C), the exposition of rats to SMF (128 mT, 1h/day for 5 consecutive days) induced an increase of hematocrit (+12%, p<0.05), hemoglobin (+6%, p<0.05) and mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (+9%, p<0.05). SMF exposure ...

Sm and Sm-like proteins are key components of small ribonucleoproteins involved in many RNA and DNA processing pathways. In eukaryotes, these complexes contain seven unique Sm or Sm-like (Lsm) proteins assembled as hetero-heptameric rings, whereas in Archaea and bacteria six or seven-membered rings are made from only a single polypeptide chain. Here we show that single Sm and Lsm proteins from ...

The present work was undertaken in order to investigate the effects of static magnetic field (SMF) on growth rates, hematopoiesis, plasmatic proteins levels, glucose concentration, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) and transaminases activities in male rats. Sub-acute exposure of rats during 5 consecutive days to SMF (1h/day at 128mT) induced an increase of plasma LDH activity (+38%, p<0.05), and gluc...

We propose a unified framework to speed up the existing stochastic matrix factorization (SMF) algorithms via variance reduction. Our framework is general and it subsumes several well-known SMF formulations in the literature. We perform a non-asymptotic convergence analysis of our framework and derive computational and sample complexities for our algorithm to converge to an -stationary point in ...