A novel content-based active contour model for brain tumor segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation is a crucial step in surgical and treatment planning. Intensity-based active contour models such as gradient vector flow (GVF), magneto static active contour (MAC) and fluid vector flow (FVF) have been proposed to segment homogeneous objects/tumors in medical images. In this study, extensive experiments are done to analyze the performance of intensity-based techniques for homogeneous tumors on brain magnetic resonance (MR) images. The analysis shows that the state-of-art methods fail to segment homogeneous tumors against similar background or when these tumors show partial diversity toward the background. They also have preconvergence problem in case of false edges/saddle points. However, the presence of weak edges and diffused edges (due to edema around the tumor) leads to oversegmentation by intensity-based techniques. Therefore, the proposed method content-based active contour (CBAC) uses both intensity and texture information present within the active contour to overcome above-stated problems capturing large range in an image. It also proposes a novel use of Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix to define texture space for tumor segmentation. The effectiveness of this method is tested on two different real data sets (55 patients - more than 600 images) containing five different types of homogeneous, heterogeneous, diffused tumors and synthetic images (non-MR benchmark images). Remarkable results are obtained in segmenting homogeneous tumors of uniform intensity, complex content heterogeneous, diffused tumors on MR images (T1-weighted, postcontrast T1-weighted and T2-weighted) and synthetic images (non-MR benchmark images of varying intensity, texture, noise content and false edges). Further, tumor volume is efficiently extracted from 2-dimensional slices and is named as 2.5-dimensional segmentation.     

Synthesis of chiral nonracemic polyimine macrocycles from cyclocondensation reactions of biaryl and terphenyl aromatic dicarboxaldehydes and 1R,2R-diaminocyclohexane

The synthesis of biaryl and terphenyl dicarboxaldehydes using Suzuki coupling methodology and their macrocyclisation reactions with 1R,2R-diaminocyclohexane yielding novel polyimine macrocycles derived from the [2+2] and [3+3] cyclocondensation reactions is presented. The ratio of products was found to depend on the overall geometry of the dicarboxaldehydes.     

A phylogenomic reconstruction of the protein world based on a genomic census of protein fold architecture

The protein world has a hierarchical and redundant organization that can be specified in terms of evolutionary units of molecular structure, the protein domains. The Structural Classification of Proteins (SCOP) has unified domains into a comparatively small set of folding architectures, the protein fold families and superfamilies, and these have been further grouped into protein folds. In this study, we reconstruct the evolution of the protein world using information embedded in a structural genomic census of fold architectures defined by a phylogenomic analysis of 185 completely sequenced genomes using advanced hidden Markov models and 776 folds described in SCOP release 1.67. Our study confirms the existence of defined evolutionary patterns of architectural diversification and explores how phylogenomic trees generated from folds relate to those reconstructed from fold superfamilies. Evolutionary patterns help us propose a general conceptual model that describes the growth of architectures in the protein world. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 12: 27–40, 2006     

New molecular insights into dual inhibitors of tankyrase as Wnt signaling antagonists: 3D-QSAR studies on 4H-1,2,4-triazole derivatives for the design of novel anticancer agents

Structural Chemistry - Genetic mutations in APC or CNTBB1 gene with aberrant canonical Wnt/β-catenin pathway are responsible for more than 90% of colorectal carcinogenesis. Tankyrases (TNKS)...     

Incompressibility and normal minimal surfaces

In this paper we describe a procedure for refining the given triangulation of a 3-manifold that scales the PL-metric according to a given weight function while creating no new normal surfaces. Let F be a closed orientable incompressible surface in an irreducible 3-manifold M. Then in every triangulation τ of M, F is isotopic to a τ-normal surface F(τ) that is of minimal PL-area (in the isotopy class of F). Using the above scaling refinement we prove the converse. If for every triangulation τ of M, F is isotopic to a τ-normal surface F(τ) that is of minimal PL-area, then we shall show that F is incompressible. Hence we get a characterisation of incompressibility of a surface in terms of existence of a minimal PL-area normal surface.     

First symmetry tests in polarized Z0 decays to bbg

We have made the first direct symmetry tests in the decays of polarized Z0 bosons into fully identified bbg states, collected in the SLD experiment at SLAC. We searched for evidence of parity violation at the bbg vertex by studying the asymmetries in the b-quark polar- and azimuthal-angle distributions, and for evidence of T-odd, CP-even or CP-odd, final-state interactions by measuring angular correlations between the three-jet plane and the Z0 polarization. We found results consistent with standard model expectations and set 95% C. limits on anomalous contributions.