Denoising is critical for improving visual quality and reliability of associative quantitative analysis when magnetic resonance (MR) images are acquired with low signal-to-noise ratios. The classical non-local means (NLM) filter, which averages pixels weighted by the similarity of their neighborhoods, is adapted and demonstrated to effectively reduce Rician noise without affecting edge details ...

Spirolactones are potent antagonists of the mineralocorticoid receptor (MR), a ligand-induced transcription factor belonging to the nuclear receptor superfamily. Spirolactones are synthetic molecules characterized by the presence of a C17 gamma-lactone, which is responsible for their antagonist character. They harbor various substituents at several positions of the steroid skeleton that modulat...

An MR element that maps to a specific locus in chromosome 3 of Drosophila melanogaster has the unusual feature of producing complete P (a mobile element) sequence mutations at several X chromosome loci. This MR also increases the frequency of mitotic recombination. Evidence is given for the transposition of MR. The complete P insertion mutations are autonomously unstable and are capable of caus...

changed and modernised practice in recent years. But this has wider implications. When you submit research for publication your contribution to the study and to the manuscript and that of each author must be outlined. Rather than just stating that the study has been by a Local Ethics Committee you need to provide proof. Institutional Research & Development departments have also come under scrut...

Abstract Split thickness skin grafts are widely used in treating burn injuries. To date, with limited availability of donor and minimal expansions offered by conventional grafting, it is challenging to cover large severe burns. In this study, novel synthetic alternating slit (AS) shaped cut patterns were developed tested evaluate the expansion potentials auxetic or negative Poisson’s ratio stru...

We have demonstrated previously that a planar conformation of the molecular frame is required for steroids to acquire optimal sodium-retaining activity and binding properties to the mineralocorticoid receptor (MR). One of the most active sodium-retaining compounds tested in those studies was 11, 19-oxidoprogesterone. Despite its biological potency, the relative affinity of 11,19-oxidoprogestero...

Naturally occurring cationic proteins secreted by human granulocytes have pro-inflammatory effects including induction of increased vascular permeability and oedema, which are likely to be mediated by damage to vascular endothelium. Synthetic cationic polyamino acids have been shown to exert similar inflammatory effects in vivo. We have therefore used a range of synthetic polycationic amino aci...

Extraction of the mid-sagittal plane (MSP) is an important step for brain image registration and asymmetry analysis. We present a fast MSP extraction method for 3D MR images, which is based on automatic segmentation of the brain and on heuristic maximization of cerebro-spinal fluid within the MSP. The method is shown to be robust to severe anatomical asymmetries between the hemispheres, caused ...

Tractography allows us to explore white matter connectivity in diffusion MR images of the brain. However, noise, artifacts and limited resolution introduce uncertainty into the results. We propose a statistical model that allows us to quantify and visualize the uncertainty of a neuronal pathway between any two fixed anatomical regions. Given a sample set of tract curves obtained via tractograph...