One of the most challenging analysis problems in the data mining and information retrieval domains is organizing large amounts of information. In this paper, we present a fast agglomerative clustering technique used in the Virtual Information Processing Agent Research (VIPAR) project at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This approach extends the Vector Space Model (VSM) to provide near real-ti...

Personalized search engines must be able to cope with various user preferences, retrieving the best matches to a query. For SQL and XML applications new methods for such preference-based searches have been implemented recently. Here we adopt this approach to keyword search in full-text search engines. We propose to augment the vector space model (VSM) by preference constructors having an intuit...

Vascular smooth muscle (VSM) cell migration and proliferation play a major role in the development of atherosclerotic lesions, graft occlusion, and restenosis after angioplasty. Cell migration implies the digestion of the surrounding extracellular matrix. Cell-associated proteolysis has been extensively studied in neoplastic and inflammatory cells, but very little is known about the proteolytic...

We have studied rat vascular smooth muscle (VSM) cells in culture for the presence of key elements of the glandular kallikrein-kinin system. Direct radioimmunoassay (RIA) using antiserum against rat urinary kallikrein detected a glandular kallikrein-like enzyme (GKLE) in VSM cells and in media. VSM homogenates and culture media had kininogenase activity, generating kinins from dog kininogen. Ab...

alpha 1-Adrenergic receptors mediate vasoconstriction in the pulmonary and systemic vasculature. In sheep the in vivo vasoconstrictor response to alpha 1-adrenergic stimulation is less in the pulmonary circulation compared with the systemic circulation of the fetus, the response increases in both vascular beds with fetal and postnatal development, and it decreases in the systemic vasculature wi...

Arterial stiffness, a major cardiovascular risk factor, develops within 2 months in mice fed a high-fat, high-sucrose (HFHS) diet, serving as a model of human metabolic syndrome, and it is associated with activation of proinflammatory and oxidant pathways in vascular smooth muscle (VSM) cells. Sirtuin-1 (SirT1) is an NAD(+)-dependent deacetylase regulated by the cellular metabolic status. Our g...

The systemic vasculature exhibits attenuated vasoconstriction following chronic hypoxia (CH) that is associated with endothelium-dependent vascular smooth muscle (VSM) cell hyperpolarization. We hypothesized that increased production of arachidonic acid metabolites such as the cyclooxygenase product prostacyclin or cytochrome p-450 (CYP) epoxygenase-derived epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs) cont...

In fetal sheep, umbilical responsiveness to ANG II exceeds systemic vascular responsiveness. Fetal systemic vascular smooth muscle (VSM) exhibits an immature phenotype with decreased contractile protein contents, low 200-kDa myosin heavy chain (MHC) SM2, and significant nonmuscle MHC-B expression, whereas umbilical VSM phenotype is incompletely described. We tested the hypothesis that differenc...

OBJECTIVE Regulation of vascular smooth muscle (VSM) proliferation and contractile differentiation is an important factor in vascular development and subsequent cardiovascular diseases. Recently, microRNAs (miRNAs) have been shown to regulate fundamental cellular processes in a number of cell types, but the integrated role of miRNAs in VSM in blood vessels is unknown. Here, we investigated the ...

Text categorization based on pre-defined document categories is one of the most crucial tasks in text mining applications in recent decades. Successful text categorization highly relies on the text representations generated from documents. In this paper, an innovative text categorization model, VSM_WN_TM, is presented. VSM_WN_TM is a special Vector Space Model (VSM) that incorporates word frequ...