Study of ProtoPorphyrin IX Elimination by Body Excreta: A new Noninvasive Cancer Diagnostic Method?

This paper describes the elimination of porphyrins by feces. It was demonstrated that porphyrin accumulates substantially more in tumors than in normal tissues, and consequently more PPIX reaches the blood of patients and animals with tumors, and then, it needs to be eliminated. The fluorescence of feces revealed that there are large amounts of PPIX in the excreta of animals with cancer comparing with healthy animals. The autofluorescence of feces porphyrin extracted with acetone was analyzed using fluorescence spectroscopy of animals inoculated with DU145 cells into the prostate and healthy animals to monitor the PPIX concentration. Emission spectra were obtained by exciting the samples at 405 nm. Significant differences were observed in autofluorescence intensities measured in the 575–725 nm spectral regions for the studied groups. The results showed a noninvasive, simple, rapid and sensitive method to detect cancer by feces analysis.     

The Hardy–Littlewood–Pólya inequality of majorization in the context of $$\mathbf {\omega }$$ – $$\textbf{m}$$ –star-convex functions

Aequationes mathematicae - The Hardy–Littlewood–Pólya inequality of majorization is extended for $$\mathbf {\omega }$$ – $$\textbf{m}$$ –star-convex functions to the...     

A real-time monitoring approach for bivariate event data

Early detection of changes in the frequency of events is an important task in many fields, such as disease surveillance, monitoring of high-quality processes, reliability monitoring, and public health. This article focuses on detecting changes in multivariate event data by monitoring the time-between-events (TBE). Existing multivariate TBE charts are limited because they only signal after an event occurred for each of the individual processes. This results in delays (i.e., long time-to-signal), especially when we are interested in detecting a change in one or a few processes with different rates. We propose a bivariate TBE chart, which can signal in real-time. We derive analytical expressions for the control limits and average time-to-signal performance, conduct a performance evaluation and compare our chart to an existing method. Our findings showed that our method is an effective approach for monitoring bivariate TBE data and has better detection ability than the existing method under transient shifts and is more generally applicable. A significant benefit of our method is that it signals in real-time and that the control limits are based on analytical expressions. The proposed method is implemented on two real-life datasets from reliability and health surveillance.     

Third-order optical susceptibility of small metallic particles

Summary We present a tight-binding model for the linear and non-linear optical properties of small metal particles, which takes into account both size and matrix effects. We show that the surface states and the dielectric medium embedding the particles determine the properties of the microcrystals; in particular, we prove that the shallow-lyingd-band plays a crucial role in noble-metal particles. As an example, we calculate the third-order susceptibility and the phase-conjugated signalfor gold clusters made of several hundred atoms. A good agreement with experimental results is obtained.     

Reduction of Vaisman structures in complex and quaternionic geometry

We consider locally conformal Kähler geometry as an equivariant (homothetic) Kähler geometry: a locally conformal Kähler manifold is, up to equivalence, a pair $(K,\Gamma )$, where $K$ is a Kähler manifold and $\Gamma$ is a discrete Lie group of biholomorphic homotheties acting freely and properly discontinuously. We define a new invariant of a locally conformal Kähler manifold $(K,\Gamma )$ as the rank of a natural quotient of $\Gamma$, and prove its invariance under reduction. This equivariant point of view leads to a proof that locally conformal Kähler reduction of compact Vaisman manifolds produces Vaisman manifolds and is equivalent to a Sasakian reduction. Moreover, we define locally conformal hyperKähler reduction as an equivariant version of hyperKähler reduction and in the compact case we show its equivalence with 3-Sasakian reduction. Finally, we show that locally conformal hyperKähler reduction induces hyperKähler with torsion (HKT) reduction of the associated HKT structure and the two reductions are compatible, even though not every HKT reduction comes from a locally conformal hyperKähler reduction.     

Dysregulation of chemo-cytokine production in schizophrenic patients versus healthy controls

Background  

The exact cause of schizophrenia is not known, although several aetiological theories have been proposed for the disease, including developmental or neurodegenerative processes, neurotransmitter abnormalities, viral infection and immune dysfunction or autoimmune mechanisms. Growing evidence suggests that specific cytokines and chemokines play a role in signalling the brain to produce neurochemical, neuroendocrine, neuroimmune and behavioural changes. A relationship between inflammation and schizophrenia was supported by abnormal cytokines production, abnormal concentrations of cytokines and cytokine receptors in the blood and cerebrospinal fluid in schizophrenia. Since the neuropathology of schizophrenia has recently been reported to be closely associated with microglial activation we aimed to determined whether spontaneous or LPS-induced peripheral blood mononuclear cell chemokines and cytokines production is dysregulated in schizophrenic patients compared to healthy subjects. We enrolled 51 untreated first-episode schizophrenics (SC) and 40 healthy subjects (HC) and the levels of MCP-1, MIP-1α, IL-8, IL-18, IFN-γ and RANTES were determined by Elisa method in cell-free supernatants of PBMC cultures.     

Inhomogeneity-free heteronuclear iMQC

Intermolecular dipolar interactions between proton and carbon spins can be used to indirectly detect carbon spectra with high sensitivity. In this communication, we present a modified sequence that, in addition to the high sensitivity of heteronuclear intermolecular multiple quantum coherence (iMQC) experiments, retains the line narrowing capability characteristic of homonuclear zero-quantum coherences. We demonstrate that this sequence can be used to obtain high resolution (13)C spectra in the presence of magnetic field inhomogeneities, both for thermal and hyperpolarized samples, and discuss applications to water-hyperpolarized carbon imaging.