Master Map Research Articles

Authentic Assessment of Fungi for Vocational School Student: Concept Map, Self Assessment and Performance Test

The authentic assessment in biology teaching learning at vocational school of Bawen, SMK Negeri 1 Bawern, especially at the department of post harvest technology, has not been fully implemented yet. This study was aimed at developing and analyzing the validity, reliability, effectiveness, and practicality of authentic assessment tools such as concept map assessment (CMA), self assessment (SA), and performance assessment (PA) for vocational students. This research used Research and Development (R & D) approaches. Content and construction validities were verified by experts. Concruent and predictive validity of CMA was verified by score of correlation between CMA score and master map as well as final semester score. Concruent validity of SA was calculated from corelation scores of PA and basic competency 3.5. Concruent and predictive validations were calculated by pearson corelation product moment. Reliability of CMA and PA was analysed by reliability inter-rater reliability techniques. Reliability of SA was calculated by alpha cronbach’s methods. Effectiveness and praticability of instruments were calculated from teachers’s and students’ responses analysed with percentage description techniques. The results showed that the concept map has excellent content and construction validity, excellent concurrency validity, and good predictive validity. Self assessment had excellent content and construction validity and good concurrency validity. PA had excellent content and construction validity and good concurrency validity. CMA is very effective for measuring cognitive aspects, SA is very effective to measure scientific attitudes, and PA of biological process skills. The three types of assessment were claimed to have practicality in terms of time, ease of use, ease of correction, facility supports, and cost required

Evaluation of DoD Syndrome Mapping and Baseline for ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM Transition

ObjectiveThe transition from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM requires evaluationof syndrome mappings to obtain a baseline for syndromic surveillancepurposes. Two syndrome mappings are evaluated in this report.IntroductionThe Department of Defense conducts syndromic surveillanceof health encounter visits of Military Health System (MHS)beneficiaries. Providers within the MHS assign up to 10 diagnosiscodes to each health encounter visit. The diagnosis codes are groupedinto syndrome and sub-syndrome categories. On October 1, 2015,the Health and Human Services-mandated transition from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM required evaluation of the syndrome mappingsto establish a baseline of syndrome rates within the DoD. The DoDdata within the BioSense system currently utilizes DoD ESSENCEsyndrome mappings. The Master Mapping Reference Table (MMRT)was developed by the CDC to translate diagnostic codes across theICD-9-CM and ICD-10-CM encoding systems to prepare for thetransition. The DoD ESSENCE and MMRT syndrome definitions arepresented in this analysis for comparison.MethodsDoD data was pulled from the BioSense Platform through aRStudio server on October 11, 2016, querying data from October1, 2014 to September 30, 2016. This time period provides twelvemonths of ICD-9-CM data and twelve months of ICD-10-CM data.The ICD codes were binned to both DoD ESSENCE syndromes andMMRT macro syndromes for comparison. Although a patient visitmay contain up to 10 ICD codes, only the first four were includedfor this analysis. Providers are trained to prioritize diagnosis codesby position. Only 2.2% of visits had greater than 4 diagnostic codes.Each ICD code in a visit is binned to an applicable syndrome. Thetotal number of visits includes visits that binned and did not bin toa syndrome. Multiple syndromes may be assigned to one patient’shealth encounter visit if multiple ICD codes are binned. Additionally,more than one code per visit may bin to the same syndrome; however,only unique syndromes are counted in the total syndrome rate. Thetotal syndrome rate was calculated by total unique syndrome visitsas the numerator and total number of visits during the ICD-9-CM orICD-10-CM time period as the denominator. The rates per 1000 totalvisits were calculated.ResultsAmong the DoD ESSENCE syndromes, the ICD-9-CM ratefor ILI was 36.3 per 1,000 compared to the ICD-10-CM rate of38.6 per 1,000. The ICD-9-CM rate for neurological was 18.1 per1,000 compared to the ICD-10-CM rate of 0.2 per 1,000.Among the MMRT syndromes, the ICD-9-CM rate for ILI was16.7 per 1,000 compared to the ICD-10-CM rate of 38.4 per 1,000.The ICD-9-CM rate for mental disorders was 73.8 per 1,000 comparedto the ICD-10-CM rate of 73.2 per 1,000.ConclusionsThis analysis provides baseline rates of MMRT syndromes andsub-syndromes for syndromic surveillance during the ICD-9-CM toICD-10-CM transition. These data will serve for future comparisonand tracking of syndrome-specific trends for military-relevant healththreats.

RGBD Salient Object Detection via Deep Fusion.

Numerous efforts have been made to design various low-level saliency cues for RGBD saliency detection, such as color and depth contrast features as well as background and color compactness priors. However, how these low-level saliency cues interact with each other and how they can be effectively incorporated to generate a master saliency map remain challenging problems. In this paper, we design a new convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically learn the interaction mechanism for RGBD salient object detection. In contrast to existing works, in which raw image pixels are fed directly to the CNN, the proposed method takes advantage of the knowledge obtained in traditional saliency detection by adopting various flexible and interpretable saliency feature vectors as inputs. This guides the CNN to learn a combination of existing features to predict saliency more effectively, which presents a less complex problem than operating on the pixels directly. We then integrate a superpixel-based Laplacian propagation framework with the trained CNN to extract a spatially consistent saliency map by exploiting the intrinsic structure of the input image. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experimental evaluations on three data sets demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Unifying Representations and Large-Scale Whole-Body Motion Databases for Studying Human Motion

Large-scale human motion databases are key for research questions ranging from human motion analysis and synthesis, biomechanics of human motion, data-driven learning of motion primitives, and rehabilitation robotics to the design of humanoid robots and wearable robots such as exoskeletons. In this paper we present a large-scale database of whole-body human motion with methods and tools, which allows a unifying representation of captured human motion, and efficient search in the database, as well as the transfer of subject-specific motions to robots with different embodiments. To this end, captured subject-specific motion is normalized regarding the subject's height and weight by using a reference kinematics and dynamics model of the human body, the master motor map (MMM). In contrast with previous approaches and human motion databases, the motion data in our database consider not only the motions of the human subject but the position and motion of objects with which the subject is interacting as well. In addition to the description of the MMM reference model, we present procedures and techniques for the systematic recording, labeling, and organization of human motion capture data, object motions as well as the subject–object relations. To allow efficient search for certain motion types in the database, motion recordings are manually annotated with motion description tags organized in a tree structure. We demonstrate the transfer of human motion to humanoid robots and provide several examples of motion analysis using the database.

New Master Mapping Reference Table (MMRT) to Assist ICD-10 Transition for Syndromic Surveillance

The International Society for Disease Surveillance (ISDS), in consultation with the CDC and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE), conducted a project to develop consensus-driven syndrome definitions based on ICD-10-CM codes. The goal was to have the newly created ICD-9-CM-to-ICD-10-CM mappings and corresponding syndromic definitions fully reviewed and vetted by the syndromic surveillance community, which relies on these codes for routine surveillance as well as for research purposes. The resulting tool, the Master Mapping Reference Table, may be leveraged by other federal, state, and local public health entities to better prepare and improve their surveillance, analytics, and reporting activities impacted by the ICD-10-CM transition.

New light on the 1824 William Smith Northumberland County map: A joint work by Smith and Phillips

Smith's geological map of Northumberland probably was the most challenging of his 21 county maps to complete. It combined at least two earlier sets of data together with additional fieldwork in 1821 by his nephew John Phillips. This account focuses on two extant pre-publication maps and relates them to the published version. The earliest is a Smith field map drawn onto an Andrew Armstrong base map dated 1769 and the other is a pre-publication map drawn by an unknown hand onto a John Cary 1821 base map, possibly for use by Phillips as a reference map during his 1821 field work. There were significant gaps in the compilation of field data into a final master map caused by misfortunes ranging from Smith's wife's deteriorating mental state, his debt problems, brief incarceration, and a devastating fire at the Cary print works. Advancing old age also encouraged Smith to increasingly draw on the assistance of John Phillips for the final Northumberland field work. This was Phillips' first important piece of solo field mapping and was carried out late in 1821. His itinerary was designed in liaison with Smith who was concurrently working in Cumbria. Unfortunately, Phillips' field reference map misinterpreted Smith's inland Whin Sill outcrops drawn on the 1769 Armstrong base map. Consequently, Phillips in1821 did not recognise their significance and failed to include them in the 1824 published map. Nevertheless, Phillips did solve Smith's geological problems in the southwest of the county where the Hartley Burn (Midgeholme) coalfield appeared to be out of sequence along its unexposed southern margins. This was correctly interpreted as a major fault contact and was indicated by a dashed line on the 1824 published map. This is believed to be the first fault line to be drawn on any Smith map and fits closely to the northern master fault of the Alston Block now known as the Stublick Fault. Phillips also identified the northerly extension of the Burtreeford Disturbance into the area. This is also marked by a bold dashed north-south line along the valley of the River East Allen. A third (unnamed) fault-line with a northwest-southeast trend in the West Allen valley was identified on the basis of truncated mineralisation within deep mines in the High Chapel area.

Process modeling and bottleneck mining in online peer-review systems.

This paper is divided into three main parts. In the first part of the study, we captured, collected and formatted an event log describing the handling of reviews for proceedings of an international conference in Thailand. In the second part, we used several process mining techniques in order to discover process models, social, organizational, and hierarchical structures from the proceeding’s event log. In the third part, we detected the deviations and bottlenecks of the peer review process by comparing the observed events (i.e., authentic dataset) with a pre-defined model (i.e., master map). Finally, we investigated the performance information as well as the total waiting time in order to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the online submission and peer review system for the prospective conferences and seminars. Consequently, the main goals of the study were as follows: (1) to convert the collected event log into the appropriate format supported by process mining analysis tools, (2) to discover process models and to construct social networks based on the collected event log, and (3) to find deviations, discrepancies and bottlenecks between the collected event log and the master pre-defined model. The results showed that although each paper was initially sent to three different reviewers; it was not always possible to make a decision after the first round of reviewing; therefore, additional reviewers were invited. In total, all the accepted and rejected manuscripts were reviewed by an average of 3.9 and 3.2 expert reviewers, respectively. Moreover, obvious violations of the rules and regulations relating to careless or inappropriate peer review of a manuscript—committed by the editorial board and other staff—were identified. Nine blocks of activity in the authentic dataset were not completely compatible with the activities defined in the master model. Also, five of the activity traces were not correctly enabled, and seven activities were missed within the online submission system. On the other hand, dealing with the feedback (comments) received from the first and the third reviewers; the conference committee members and the organizers did not attend to those feedback/comments in a timely manner.

국가기본도용 Hybrid 공간정보 모델 개발

Abstract The main goal of this study is on developing a proper brand-new data of national base map and Data Based(DB) model for new information technology environments. To achieve this goal, we generated a brand-new Hybrid spatial information model which is specialized in the spatio-temporal map structure, the framework map for information integration, and the multiple-layered topology structure. The DB structure was designed to reflect the change of objections by adding a new dimension of 'time' in the spartial information, while the infrastructure was able to connect/converge with other information by giving the unique ID and multi-scale fusion map structure. Furthermore, the topology and multi visualization structure, including indoor and basement information, were designed to overcome limitations of expressing in 2 dimension map. The result from the performance test, which was based on the Hybrid spatial information model, confirms the possibility in advanced national base map and conducted DB model through implementing various information and spatio-temporal connections.Keywords : National Base Map, Spatio-temporal Map, Master Map, Multiple Layer Topology초 록새로운 정보기술 환경에 적합한 국가기본도용 데이터 및 DB 모델을 개발하고자 본 연구에서는 시공간지도구조, 정보연계용 프레임워크지도, 다중레이어 토폴로지구조 등을 주요 특징으로 하는 Hybrid 공간정보 모델을 개발하였다. 공간정보에 시간이라는 새로운 차원을 추가하여 공간객체의 시간에 따른 변화가 반영되는 DB 구조를 설계하였고, 다축척 융합지도 구조와 고유 ID 체계를 부여하여 타 정보와 연계·융합하여 활용할 수 있도록 하였다. 또한 기존 2차원 지도의 표현상 한계를 극복하고자 실내 및 지하정보를 포함하는 구조와 지형·지물에 대한 토폴로지 및 복합표현 구조를 설계하였다. 설계결과를 반영한 시범구축을 통해 개발된 모델의 성능을 평가한 결과 다양한 정보들과의 시공간 연계를 통해 활용도가 향상된 국가기본도용 데이터 및 DB 모델의 구현 가능성을 확인할 수 있었다.핵심어 : 국가기본도, 시공간 지도, 마스터 지도, 다중 레이어 토폴로지

Proteomic Investigation of the Sinulariolide-Treated Melanoma Cells A375: Effects on the Cell Apoptosis through Mitochondrial-Related Pathway and Activation of Caspase Cascade

Sinulariolide is an active compound isolated from the cultured soft coral Sinularia flexibilis. In this study, we investigated the effects of sinulariolide on A375 melanoma cell growth and protein expression. Sinulariolide suppressed the proliferation and migration of melanoma cells in a concentration-dependent manner and was found to induce both early and late apoptosis by flow cytometric analysis. Comparative proteomic analysis was conducted to investigate the effects of sinulariolide at the molecular level by comparison between the protein profiles of melanoma cells treated with sinulariolide and those without treatment. Two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DE) master maps of control and treated A375 cells were generated by analysis with PDQuest software. Comparison between these maps showed up- and downregulation of 21 proteins, seven of which were upregulated and 14 were downregulated. The proteomics studies described here identify some proteins that are involved in mitochondrial dysfunction and apoptosis-associated proteins, including heat shock protein 60, heat shock protein beta-1, ubiquinol cytochrome c reductase complex core protein 1, isocitrate dehydrogenase (NAD) subunit alpha (down-regulated), and prohibitin (up-regulated), in A375 melanoma cells exposed to sinulariolide. Sinulariolide-induced apoptosis is relevant to mitochondrial-mediated apoptosis via caspase-dependent pathways, elucidated by the loss of mitochondrial membrane potential, release of cytochrome c, and activation of Bax, Bad and caspase-3/-9, as well as suppression of p-Bad, Bcl-xL and Bcl-2. Taken together, our results show that sinulariolide-induced apoptosis might be related to activation of the caspase cascade and mitochondria dysfunction pathways. Our results suggest that sinulariolide merits further evaluation as a chemotherapeutic agent for human melanoma.

Visual saliency estimation by nonlinearly integrating features using region covariances

To detect visually salient elements of complex natural scenes, computational bottom-up saliency models commonly examine several feature channels such as color and orientation in parallel. They compute a separate feature map for each channel and then linearly combine these maps to produce a master saliency map. However, only a few studies have investigated how different feature dimensions contribute to the overall visual saliency. We address this integration issue and propose to use covariance matrices of simple image features (known as region covariance descriptors in the computer vision community; Tuzel, Porikli, & Meer, 2006) as meta-features for saliency estimation. As low-dimensional representations of image patches, region covariances capture local image structures better than standard linear filters, but more importantly, they naturally provide nonlinear integration of different features by modeling their correlations. We also show that first-order statistics of features could be easily incorporated to the proposed approach to improve the performance. Our experimental evaluation on several benchmark data sets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-art models on various tasks including prediction of human eye fixations, salient object detection, and image-retargeting.

Spatial competition on the master-saliency map

The saliency map model (Itti and Koch, 2000) is a hierarchically structured computational model, simulating visual saliency processing. Iso-feature processing on feature maps and conspicuity maps precedes cross-dimensional signal processing on the master map, where the most salient location of the visual field is selected. This texture segmentation study focuses on a possible spatial structure on the master map. In four experiments the spatial distance between a texture irregularity in the stimulus (“target”) and a cross-dimensional task irrelevant texture irregularity in the backward mask (“patch”) was varied. The results show that the target-patch distance modulates target detection, and that this modulation is limited to critical distances around the target. We conclude that the signals from different feature dimensions compete on a spatial master map. There is first evidence that the critical distances increase with target eccentricity.

An Improved Technique to Compute Visual Attention Map based upon Wavelet Domain

Visual system of human beings does not process the complete area of image rather focus upon limited area of visual image. But in which area does the visual attention focused is a topic of hot research nowadays. Research on psychological phenomenon indicates that attention is attracted to features that differ from its surroundings or the one that are unusual or unfamiliar to the human visual system. Detection of visually salient image regions is useful for applications like object segmentation, adaptive compression, and object recognition. Object or region based image processing can be performed more efficiently with information pertaining locations that are visually salient to human perception with the aid of a saliency map. The saliency map is a master topological map having the possible locations of objects or regions which a human perceived as important/salient. In this paper a method for computing the saliency map in wavelet transform domain has been proposed. Earlier works in this domain although calculated the saliency very efficiently but they just involve the approximation components of DWM, the detail components have not been taken care but in many applications these detailed components are of great importance to highlight the smaller but visually important components.

Proteomic profiling of the 11-dehydrosinulariolide-treated oral carcinoma cells Ca9–22: Effects on the cell apoptosis through mitochondrial-related and ER stress pathway

An oral squamous cell carcinoma Ca9-22 cell line was treated with 11-dehydrosinulariolide, an active compound isolated from the soft coral Sinularia leptoclados, in order to evaluate the effect of this compound on cell growth and protein expression. Cell proliferation was strongly inhibited by 11-dehydrosinulariolide treatment. The 2-DE master maps of control and treated Ca9-22 cells were generated by analysis with the PDQuest software. The comparison between such maps showed up- and down-regulation of 23 proteins, of which 14 were upregulated and 9 were downregulated. The proteomic studies described here have identified some proteins, which are involved in the mitochondrial dysfunction and ER-stress pathway and imply that 11-dehydrosinulariolide induces cell apoptosis through either mitochondrial dysfunction-related or ER stress pathway. Based on this observation, several proteins related to apoptosis pathway were explored for the potential roles involved in this drug-induced cytotoxicity. Furthermore, Salubrinal, an ER stress inhibitor, is able to protect the cell from 11-dehydrosinulariolide-induced apoptosis in a physiological dosage. The significance of these studies illustrates the potential development of anticancer drugs from the natural derivatives of soft coral.

Quality assessment of traditional water resources in Khamis Mushait City, Abha Metropolitan, Assir Province, Saudi Arabia

The physical and chemical quality within traditional water resources of Khamis Mushait City, Saudi Arabia, that are being used for various urban purposes were assessed to explore consistency. The network sampling and cross-sectional techniques were implemented. Google earth digital satellite map of the study area was used as a master map for sampling. A total of 66 water samples were collected randomly from surface and well water located at and around the city. All samples were subjected to standard analysis. The results have revealed the overall means of turbidity, conductivity, total dissolved solids, pH, chlorides, hardness as CaCO3, sulphate, ammonia, nitrate, copper, iron, manganese, and zinc in water samples taken from deep wells, shallow wells and surface water. These results showed that shallow wells had the highest values for conductivity, total dissolved solids, chloride, hardness, sulphate, nitrate, copper, manganese, and zinc. However, surface water had the highest levels for turbidity, pH, and ammonia. Iron contents of deep wells and surface water samples were nearly the same. Thus, samples taken from deep wells were superior to those from shallow wells and surface water sources. There were significant correlations with each other between physicochemical parameters except for manganese, which showed no significant correlation with any parameter. Iron showed only a significant correlation with zinc. Recommended hygienic measures are also discussed. Keywords: Physicochemical, traditional water resources quality, hygienic measures, Khamis Mushait, satellite map, Saudi Arabia.

Proteome analysis of Paenibacillus larvae reveals the existence of a putative S‐layer protein

Honey bee pathology has attracted much interest recently due to the problems with honey bee declines in many regions of the world. American Foulbrood (AFB) caused by Paenibacillus larvae is the most devastating bacterial brood disease of the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera) causing considerable economic losses to beekeepers worldwide. AFB outbreaks are mainly caused by two differentially virulent genotypes of P. larvae, P. larvae ERIC I and ERIC II. To better understand AFB pathogenesis and to complement already existing data from the genetic level we aimed at obtaining expression data from the protein level. We successfully developed a protocol for two-dimensional proteome analysis of P. larvae with subsequent mass-spectrometry based protein sequencing. Based on the obtained master protein maps of P. larvae genotypes ERIC I and II we identified the dominantly expressed cytosolic proteins of both genotypes, some of them presumably linked to pathogenesis and virulence. Comparing the master maps of both genotypes revealed differentially expressed proteins, i.e. a putative S-layer protein which is expressed by P. larvae ERIC II but absent from the proteome of P. larvae ERIC I. The implications of our findings for pathogenesis of AFB and virulence of P. larvae will be discussed.

Dynamics of unidirectionally coupled bistable Hénon maps

We study dynamics of two bistable Hénon maps coupled in a master-slave configuration. In the case of coexistence of two periodic orbits, the slave map evolves into the master map state after transients, which duration determines synchronization time and obeys a −1/2 power law with respect to the coupling strength. This scaling law is almost independent of the map parameter. In the case of coexistence of chaotic and periodic attractors, very complex dynamics is observed, including the emergence of new attractors as the coupling strength is increased. The attractor of the master map always exists in the slave map independently of the coupling strength. For a high coupling strength, complete synchronization can be achieved only for the attractor similar to that of the master map.

Popular music, mapping, and the characterization of Liverpool

Liverpool is widely recognized for its iconic ‘Three Graces’—a trio of grand buildings that stand along the city’s River Mersey waterfront. In this article we argue that there are a similar kind of iconic ‘three graces’ in Liverpool’s popular music and heritage landscapes: the Cavern Club, Eric’s Club, and Cream. These three venues have taken on broader symbolic meanings as representative of entire musical styles and eras. As such they dominate the histories of the city’s music-making cultures, producing (and reproduced through) a variety of representations, texts and mappings of the city’s musical past. This paper draws from ethnographic materials gathered through a two-year research project to decentre this ‘master page’ or ‘master map’ of the three graces with a series of mappings of Liverpool’s popular music heritage that calls attention to hidden or alternative histories of the city that are less often mapped.

Where-what networks for motor invariance without any internal master map

The adult brain appears to have a capability of location invariance: No matter where on the retina an object appears, the brain recognizes the object. Yet, this does not mean that the brain drops the location information, since it needs such information for arm reaching. Mishkin and coworkers 1983 [1] reported that the dorsal and ventral streams of the brain are correlated to space (“where”) and object (“what”) information, respectively, based largely on their brain lesion studies. Many later experimental studies verified and enriched this discovery, the working and learning of these two streams have been elusive (Deco & Rolls 2004 [2]). It has been known that feedback connections are widely present along these streams, but computational understanding and analysis are lacking. On the other hand, the sensory cortex alone seems to use distributed representations. Each feature neuron has a receptive field, corresponding to a patch in the retina. There are multiple nearby neurons whose receptive fields almost completely overlap and they detect different features of the overlapping patches (e.g., each for a different edge orientation). However, such distributed “patch representations” must be combined somehow to give rise to behaviors that demonstrate invariant object recognition. Ann Treisman [2] and David Van Essen et al. [4] proposed the existence of a mater feature map. Following neuro-anatomical data, our visuomotor model Where What Network (WWN) suggests that to understand the causality of the above phenomenon, it is beneficial to go beyond PP and IT to include the premotor and motor areas in the frontal cortex. We introduce two motor areas as the integral parts of cortical object representation: location motor (LM) and type motor (TM). The former correlates the frontal eye field (FEF) and the location-relevant control areas in the pre-motor and motor areas. The latter corresponds to the ventral frontal cortex (VFC) and the verbal control area in the pre-motor and motor areas. The dorsal stream plus LM learns type invariance and location specificity (for, e.g., arm reaching). The ventral stream plus TM learns location invariance and type specificity (for, e.g., pronounce the object type). Bottom-up and top-down connections from LM and TM dynamically wire connections and shape the corresponding streams, resulting in complementary representations: invariance with one is specificity with the other. WWNs were tested to deal with the tightly intertwined attention and recognition for vision in the presence of complex backgrounds. Each of attention and recognition has been modeled separately in previous work, e.g., visual saliency guides covert attention sifts. How the visual cortex deals with both attention and recognition from complex natural backgrounds conjunctively has been elusive. WWN gives the first biological plausible theory for this joint problem. With general object in complex new backgrounds, WWN reported 95% in classification rate and under 2-pixel location error, when about 75% images areas are from unknown complex backgrounds. Each WWN epigenetically generates and adapts emergent representations using Hebbian like neuronal learning mechanisms. WWN explains how top-down attention originates from LM for location-based and TM for type-based top-down attention. This model does not need an the appearance-kept internal master feature maps proposed earlier.

Immunoscreening of the extracellular proteome of colorectal cancer cells

BackgroundThe release of proteins from tumors can trigger an immune response in cancer patients involving T lymphocytes and B lymphocytes, which results in the generation of antibodies to tumor-derived proteins. Many studies aim to use humoral immune responses, namely autoantibody profiles, directly, as clinical biomarkers. Alternatively, the antibody immune response as an amplification system for tumor associated alterations may be used to indicate putative protein biomarkers with high sensitivity. Aiming at the latter approach we here have implemented an autoantibody profiling strategy which particularly focuses on proteins released by tumor cells in vitro: the so-called secretome.MethodsFor immunoscreening, the extracellular proteome of five colorectal cancer cell lines was resolved on 2D gels, immobilized on PVDF membranes and used for serological screening with individual sera from 21 colorectal cancer patients and 24 healthy controls. All of the signals from each blot were assigned to a master map, and autoantigen candidates were defined based of the pattern of immunoreactivities. The corresponding proteins were isolated from preparative gels, identified by MALDI-MS and/or by nano-HPLC/ESI-MS/MS and exemplarily confirmed by duplex Western blotting combining the human serum samples with antibodies directed against the protein(s) of interest.ResultsFrom 281 secretome proteins stained with autoantibodies in total we first defined the "background patterns" of frequently immunoreactive extracellular proteins in healthy and diseased people. An assignment of these proteins, among them many nominally intracellular proteins, to the subset of exosomal proteins within the secretomes revealed a large overlap. On this basis we defined and consequently confirmed novel biomarker candidates such as the extreme C-terminus of the extracellular matrix protein agrin within the set of cancer-enriched immunorectivities.ConclusionsOur findings suggest, first, that autoantibody responses may be due, in large part, to cross-presentation of antigens to the immune system via exosomes, membrane vesicles released by tumor cells and constituting a significant fraction of the secretome. In addition, this immunosecretomics approach has revealed novel biomarker candidates, some of them secretome-specific, and thus serves as a promising complementary tool to the frequently reported immunoproteomic studies for biomarker discovery.

Network-oriented road map generation for unknown roads using visual images and GPS-based location information

Car navigation systems (CNS) have become an interesting research and industrial topic due to their wide deployment. However, updating and distribution of the road map database is a complex and high cost process. In this paper, we propose a real-time map generation and updating algorithm, which fulfills or corrects the unknown road area of the conventional road map database by using global positioning system (GPS) information and wireless communication technologies. To generate the road map of unknown roads, the proposed algorithm uses road images, which can be obtained when a driver travels unknown roads. When a driver travels unknown roads, which do not appear on the map of the car navigation system, the car navigation system extracts GPS and image information of the unknown roads. Then, the car navigation system generates the road map for the unknown roads by extracting location and road information, and updates the road map database in the car. After updating the local road map database, the car navigation system updates the master road map database, which is located at the network and is distributed to other car navigation systems. Thus, the road map database provider can update the road map database of other car navigation systems, which share the same master road map database. The proposed algorithm provides an efficient updating process of the road map database with a simplified process and reduced time for unknown road areas.