Today, people collect their personal multimedia content on home media servers. In addition to consuming their content on TV sets, people are using mobile multimedia players, PCs and even mobile phones. Since those terminals have various capabilities, it is necessary to adapt the content to a more device specific version. For audio, video, and graphics scalable codecs exist which realize this go...

To investigate the development of motion integration in infants, we used an eye movement technique to measure subjects' ability to track leftward versus rightward pattern motion in a stimulus consisting of a field of spatially segregated moving gratings. Each grating moved in one of two oblique directions, with the two directions interleaved across the display. When spatially integrated, patter...

Two initially presumed Yqh translocations, one to Xp and another to 21p, were assessed by conventional banding procedures, 5-azacytidine treatment, electron microscopy, and fluorescence in situ hybridisation. While the Yqh nature of the heterochromatic block from Xp was confirmed, this was not the case with the 21ph+ variant. In conclusion, conventional banding techniques are insufficient to di...

The chromatic properties of an image yield strong cues for object boundaries and thus hold the potential to facilitate the detection of object motion. The extent to which cortical motion detectors exploit chromatic information, however, remains a matter of debate. To address this further, we quantified the strength of chromatic input to directionally selective neurons in the middle temporal are...

Interleukin-21 (IL-21) plays an important role in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The aim of our study was to assess serum levels of IL-21 in patients with recent-onset RA in relation to disease activity and response to treatment. We analyzed serum levels of IL-21 in 51 RA patients, both before and 12 weeks after the initiation of treatment and in 36 healthy individuals. Disease ...

We previously detected mRNAs in a number of human T cell lines with a probe from within the Ig VH gene locus. We now show these mRNAs consist of Ig VH genes expressed in T cells. In one human T cell line, two RNA species have been studied and found to come from transcripts of unrearranged VH segments in which the leader exon, normally associated with VH transcripts in B cells, is replaced by a ...

The MELISA system is a distributed platform for multi-platform sports content broadcasting, providing end users with a wide range of real-time interactive services during the sport event, such as statistics, visual aids or enhancements, betting, and userand context-specific advertisements. In this paper, we present the revamped design of the complete system and the implementation of a middlewar...

The ability to accurately perceive the direction and speed of moving objects declines during normal aging. This is likely due to functional degradation of cortical neurons. Most neurons in the primate middle temporal area (MT) are direction-selective and their activity is closely linked to the perception of coherent motion. We investigated the mechanisms that underlie this age-related decline b...

Future mobile communications will bring a terminal diversity that until today has never happened. This paper describes a universal access system able to deliver multimedia content that is tailored for each type of terminal. The system is composed by three applications: a content analyzer application, a content customization engine and a multi-characteristics terminal simulator. The system uses ...

Segmentation of the visual scene into relevant object components is a fundamental process for successfully interacting with our surroundings. Many visual cues, including motion and binocular disparity, support segmentation, yet the mechanisms using these cues are unclear. We used a psychophysical motion discrimination task in which noise dots were displaced in depth to investigate the role of s...