Regular Objects Research Articles

Therapeutic drug monitoring and objective symptom rating for optimization of antipsychotic drug therapy

Therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) and objective symptom rating are considered to be useful to optimize antipsychotic drug therapy. The aim of this prospective study was to analyze if serum concentrations and/or improvement according to Clinical Global Impressions (CGI-I) or Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) on week two of treatment have predictive validity for clinical improvement on week 5. The study included 80 schizophrenic patients treated under naturalistic conditions with the atypical antipsychotic drugs amisulpride, aripiprazole, clozapine, olanzapine, quetiapine, risperidone or ziprasidone. Of the 48 patients who exhibited at least moderate improvement on week 2, only 2 patients were impaired on week 5. Of the 42 patients with only slight improvement or less on week two, 51% changed to at least moderately improved on week 5. For these patients improvement was not significantly different between patients with serum concentrations within the therapeutic range and patients with too low or too high serum levels of the antipsychotic drug. The results indicate that improvement according to the CGI-I and even better to BPRS is predictive for later improvement. It is concluded that TDM guided antipsychotic treatment should be accompanied by regular objective symptom rating for optimization of clinical outcome.

A Duality in Proof Systems for Recursive Type Equality and for Bisimulation Equivalence on Cyclic Term Graphs

This paper is concerned with a proof-theoretic observation about two kinds of proof systems for regular cyclic objects. It is presented for the case of two formal systems that are complete with respect to the notion of “recursive type equality” on a restricted class of recursive types in μ-term notation. Here we show the existence of an immediate duality with a geometrical visualization between proofs in a variant of the coinductive axiom system due to Brandt and Henglein and “consistency-unfoldings” in a variant of a 'syntactic-matching' proof system for testing equations between recursive types due to Ariola and Klop.Finally we sketch an analogous result of a duality between a similar pair of proof systems for bisimulation equivalence on equational specifications of cyclic term graphs.

Concurrent games with tail objectives

We study infinite stochastic games played by two players over a finite state space, with objectives specified by sets of infinite traces. The games are concurrent (players make moves simultaneously and independently), stochastic (the next state is determined by a probability distribution that depends on the current state and chosen moves of the players) and infinite (proceed for an infinite number of rounds). The analysis of concurrent stochastic games can be classified into: quantitative analysis, analyzing the optimum value of the game and ε -optimal strategies that ensure values within ε of the optimum value; and qualitative analysis, analyzing the set of states with optimum value 1 and ε -optimal strategies for the states with optimum value 1. We consider concurrent games with tail objectives, i.e., objectives that are independent of the finite-prefix of traces, and show that the class of tail objectives is strictly richer than that of the ω -regular objectives. We develop new proof techniques to extend several properties of concurrent games with ω -regular objectives to concurrent games with tail objectives. We prove the positive limit-one property for tail objectives. The positive limit-one property states that for all concurrent games if the optimum value for a player is positive for a tail objective Φ at some state, then there is a state where the optimum value is 1 for the player for the objective Φ . We also show that the optimum values of zero-sum (strictly conflicting objectives) games with tail objectives can be related to equilibrium values of nonzero-sum (not strictly conflicting objectives) games with simpler reachability objectives. A consequence of our analysis presents a polynomial time reduction of the quantitative analysis of tail objectives to the qualitative analysis for the subclass of one-player stochastic games (Markov decision processes).

HOLOGRAPHIC SPHERICALLY SYMMETRIC METRICS

The holographic principle (HP) conjectures, that the maximum number of degrees of freedom of any realistic physical system is proportional to the system's boundary area. The HP has its roots in the study of black holes. It has recently been applied to cosmological solutions. In this article we apply the HP to spherically symmetric static space-times. We find that any regular spherically symmetric object saturating the HP is subject to tight constraints on the (interior) metric, energy-density, temperature and entropy-density. Whenever gravity can be described by a metric theory, gravity is macroscopically scale invariant and the laws of thermodynamics hold locally and globally, the (interior) metric of a regular holographic object is uniquely determined up to a constant factor and the interior matter-state must follow well defined scaling relations. When the metric theory of gravity is general relativity, the interior matter has an overall string equation of state (EOS) and a unique total energy-density. Thus the holographic metric derived in this article can serve as simple interior 4D realization of Mathur's string fuzzball proposal. Some properties of the holographic metric and its possible experimental verification are discussed. The geodesics of the holographic metric describe an isotropically expanding (or contracting) universe with a nearly homogeneous matter-distribution within the local Hubble volume. Due to the overall string EOS the active gravitational mass-density is zero, resulting in a coasting expansion with Ht = 1, which is compatible with the recent GRB-data.

Wealth of nations is health of nations

We are inundated almost daily with reports about the rising prevalence of obesity. The pandemic is forecasted to greatly increase the incidence of diabetes and its complications, as well as a whole host of other conditions. If you believe the media, Armageddon will come either in the form of obesity-related disease or climate change. Not to make light of serious matters, the problem with these reports is that they are rather long on the devastating complications of obesity but rather short on the viable solutions. The recently published Canadian guidelines on the management of obesity are a laudable attempt at providing solutions (1). Arguably, however, they do not go far enough. Regular objective assessments of obesity by physicians followed by individualized, largely lifestyle, therapy guided by multidisciplinary teams as advocated in the report will clearly call attention to this problem, but this is not enough. The recommendations are of little comfort to the large segments of the population who do not regularly see or even have access to a primary care physician. Global problems require global solutions, and the only tool with any real teeth is legislation. Antiobesity educational campaigns, while necessary, are much too passive and are drowned out by the myriad of advertising campaigns of nutritionally poor foods. Such commercial speech is still free speech and is constitutionally protected. But how do we use this awkward, blunt instrument to fashion tangible change in behaviour and health status? The application of public health law, health policy and litigation to address the problem of obesity was reviewed by Mello et al (2) in the New England Journal of Medicine. The report is a frank, in-depth discussion of historical failures and future proposals. It does not minimize the challenges faced by legislators. Combating constitutionally protected forms of commercial expression is only one adversary, but public attitudes are an even bigger problem. Nonetheless, while some previous health policy measures have failed, there has been a greater public recognition of the dangers of obesity, which may promote the change that would have been unacceptable just a decade ago. In this sense, I will admit that perhaps the media scare campaigns have been worthwhile. The report is at once a review on the specifics of health policy for obesity and a paradigm for health policy on a more general level. Analogies between successes in curtailing smoking in western countries and similarly targeting obesity are drawn. There is a limit to these similarities. There is no ‘second-hand’ effect of nutritionally poor foods. Furthermore, such foods are more frequently consumed by those with lower socioeconomic status, for whom policies such as increased taxation would be extremely unwelcome. However, the lesson learned from antismoking policies seems to be that they are most socially acceptable when targeted toward children and adolescents. These same policies become infringements on adults’ freedom of choice, and the same may well be true for antiobesity policies. Governments are listening. The recent ban of transfats in New York is also in effect in Philadelphia and Denmark. It seems as if it was overnight that the idea of transfats entered the lexicon of the average Canadian. However, despite calls for an outright ban in Canada, current guidelines only call for the voluntary labelling of food. It is encouraging to see that at least in the United States longstanding food preparation methods have changed with relatively little resistance. Health policy as a means of changing population health status has had many successes in the past, which makes it an attractive tool for contemporary problems. Vaccinations, folate fortification of cereal for the prevention of neural tube defects and fluoridation of drinking water are some notable examples. However, the law cannot be expected to completely change behaviour. It must follow, and indeed, its success depends on changing cultural ideologies. As such, change cannot be measured in years, but rather in generations. Selected sites Canadian Medical Association Journal CBC Ontario Health Promotion E-Bulletin Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation Health Canada

In vivo imaging of atherosclerotic plaques in apolipoprotein E deficient mice using nonlinear microscopy

Structural proteins such as elastin and collagen can be readily imaged by using two-photon excitation and second-harmonic generation microscopic techniques, respectively, without physical or biochemical processing of the tissues. This time- and effort-saving advantage makes these imaging techniques convenient for determining the structural characteristics of blood vessels in vivo. Fibrillar collagen is a well-known element involved in the formation of atherosclerotic lesions. It is also an important component of the fibrous cap responsible for structural stability of atherosclerotic plaques. High resolution in vivo microscopic imaging and characterization of atherosclerotic lesions in animal models can be particularly useful for drug discovery. However, it is hindered by the limitations of regular microscope objectives to gain access of the tissues of interest and motional artifacts. We report a technique that facilitates in vivo microscopic imaging of carotid arteries of rodents using conventional microscope objectives, and at the same time avoids motional artifacts. As a result, collagen, elastin, leukocytes, cell nuclei, and neutral lipids can be visualized in three dimensions in live animals. We present and discuss in vivo imaging results using a flow cessation mouse model of accelerated atherosclerosis.

Relative Regular Objects in Categories

We define the concept of a regular object with respect to another object in an arbitrary category. We present basic properties of regular objects and we study this concept in the special cases of abelian categories and locally finitely generated Grothendieck categories. Applications are given for categories of comodules over a coalgebra and for categories of graded modules, and a link to the theory of generalized inverses of matrices is presented. Some of the techniques we use are new, since dealing with arbitrary categories allows us to pass to the dual category.

Natural Architecture and Constructed Forms: Structure and Surfaces from Idea to Drawing

This work grew out of didactic experience in architecture classes at the universities of Florence and Parma. The comprehension of geometric schemes in regular organic objects formed the basis of teaching drawing and scientific representation, such as formal architectural synthesis. This exercise may offer also a valid starting point to help students approach mathematics, and help them to imagine and plan the increasingly complex surfaces of late contemporary architecture.

Algorithms with performance guarantees for flow shops with regular objective functions

We consider flow-shop scheduling problems with regular (nondecreasing) objective functions such as the minimization of makespan in the presence of arbitrary precedence constraints, the weighted sum of job completion times in the presence of series-parallel precedence constraints, the discounted total weighted completion time, and the sum of the quadratic job completion times. We present algorithms with tight worst-case performance bounds for all of these problems by utilizing the optimal permutations for the corresponding single-machine problems. We also investigate the asymptotic optimality of our algorithms.

Parameter estimation under ambiguity and contamination with the spurious model

Recently, we proposed variants as a statistical model for treating ambiguity. If data are extracted from an object with a machine then it might not be able to give a unique safe answer due to ambiguity about the correct interpretation of the object. On the other hand, the machine is often able to produce a finite number of alternative feature sets (of the same object) that contain the desired one. We call these feature sets variants of the object. Data sets that contain variants may be analyzed by means of statistical methods and all chapters of multivariate analysis can be seen in the light of variants. In this communication, we focus on point estimation in the presence of variants and outliers. Besides robust parameter estimation, this task requires also selecting the regular objects and their valid feature sets ( regular variants). We determine the mixed MAP–ML estimator for a model with spurious variants and outliers as well as estimators based on the integrated likelihood. We also prove asymptotic results which show that the estimators are nearly consistent. The problem of variant selection turns out to be computationally hard; therefore, we also design algorithms for efficient approximation. We finally demonstrate their efficacy with a simulated data set and a real data set from genetics.

Successful Coupling of Community Attachment of Health Science Students with Relief Work for Drought Victims

Recurrent drought is a major disaster affecting many countries. As a result of poor rain fall a major drought was forecast for Ethiopia in 2003. The country appealed for support to avert drought-related health problems. University of Gondar decided to respond to the appeal by sending students and staff to selected drought-affected areas. To illustrate how an institution has turned the response to a natural disaster into a service-learning educational opportunity while maintaining equilibrium between the two. The drought relief response of the institute was twined with the regular team-training programme and academic schedule of senior health science students and 190 of them were transferred to deployment sites. Students provided support for the national effort of reducing drought-related morbidity and mortality by participating in multifaceted public health and relief activities, and fulfilled their regular learning objectives at the same time. This project demonstrated the use of a natural disaster as a learning method to expose students to a more realistic array of health problems and human conditions. It also demonstrated the feasibility of addressing social responsibility, while fulfilling academic responsibility through community-based approach. Service-learning is a valuable learning method. Balancing the service and teaching objectives and maintaining the quality of both can be attained through careful twining of the objectives of both components.

Interactive manipulation of regular objects with FAdo

FAdo 1 is an ongoing project which aims the development of an interactive environment for symbolic manipulation of formal languages. In this paper we focus in the description of interactive tools for teaching and assisting research on regular languages, and in particular finite automata and regular expressions. Those tools implement most standard automata operations, conversion between automata and regular expressions, and word recognition. We illustrate their use in training and automatic assessment. Finally we present a graphical environment for editing and interactive visualisation.

Single view metrology from scene constraints

The problem of how to retrieve Euclidean entities of a 3D scene from a single uncalibrated image is studied in this paper. We first present two methods to compute the camera projection matrix through the homography of a reference space plane and its vertical vanishing point. Then, we show how to use the projection matrix and some available scene constraints to retrieve geometrical entities of the scene, such as height of an object on the reference plane, measurements on a vertical or arbitrary plane with respect to the reference plane, distance from a point to a line, etc. In particular, the method is further employed to compute the volume and surface area of some regular and symmetric objects from a single image, the undertaking seems no similar report in the literature to our knowledge. In addition, all the algorithms are formulated in an explicit and linear geometric framework, and the involved computation is linear. Finally, extensive experiments on simulated data and real images as well as a comparative test with a closely related method in the literature validate our proposed methods.

Image Analysis for Quantifying Marquisette Damage in Home Laundering

The fabric damage in home laundering is often measured to evaluate the performance of a washing machine. Currently, the standard methods of measuring the fabric damage are manual based. We developed an image-analysis method in an effort to create an automatic and objective way of evaluating on the fabric damage caused by a washing machine. The images of washed marquisette swatches were processed with Gabor filters to extract distorted yarns from the regular weave and unwanted objects in the output image were removed by judging their shape factors. The parameters of Gabor filters were estimated based on an unwashed marquisette sample, and are applicable to the samples with the same weave structure. A preliminary experiment on evaluating the marquisette damage incurred in washing shows that the image analysis evaluations have a strong correlation with the subjective assessment based on the standard of the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM).

Scheduling a single machine to minimize a regular objective function under setup constraints

Motivated by industrial applications, we study the scheduling situation in which a set of jobs subjected to release dates and deadlines are to be performed on a single machine. The objective is to minimize a regular sum objective function ∑ i f i where f i ( C i ) corresponds to the cost of the completion of job J i at time C i . On top of this, we also take into account setup times and setup costs between families of jobs as well as the fact that some jobs can be “unperformed” to reduce the load of the machine. We introduce lower bounds and dominance properties for this problem and we describe a Branch and Bound procedure with constraint propagation. Experimental results are reported.

Quantitative evaluation and modeling of two-dimensional neovascular network complexity: the surface fractal dimension

BackgroundModeling the complex development and growth of tumor angiogenesis using mathematics and biological data is a burgeoning area of cancer research. Architectural complexity is the main feature of every anatomical system, including organs, tissues, cells and sub-cellular entities. The vascular system is a complex network whose geometrical characteristics cannot be properly defined using the principles of Euclidean geometry, which is only capable of interpreting regular and smooth objects that are almost impossible to find in Nature. However, fractal geometry is a more powerful means of quantifying the spatial complexity of real objects.MethodsThis paper introduces the surface fractal dimension (Ds) as a numerical index of the two-dimensional (2-D) geometrical complexity of tumor vascular networks, and their behavior during computer-simulated changes in vessel density and distribution.ResultsWe show that Ds significantly depends on the number of vessels and their pattern of distribution. This demonstrates that the quantitative evaluation of the 2-D geometrical complexity of tumor vascular systems can be useful not only to measure its complex architecture, but also to model its development and growth.ConclusionsStudying the fractal properties of neovascularity induces reflections upon the real significance of the complex form of branched anatomical structures, in an attempt to define more appropriate methods of describing them quantitatively. This knowledge can be used to predict the aggressiveness of malignant tumors and design compounds that can halt the process of angiogenesis and influence tumor growth.

Controllable smoke animation with guiding objects

This article addresses the problem of controlling the density and dynamics of smoke (a gas phenomenon) so that the synthetic appearance of the smoke (gas) resembles a still or moving object. Both the smoke region and the target object are represented as implicit functions. As a part of the target implicit function, a shape transformation is generated between an initial smoke region and the target object. In order to match the smoke surface with the target surface, we impose carefully designed velocity constraints on the smoke boundary during a dynamic fluid simulation. The velocity constraints are derived from an iterative functional minimization procedure for shape matching. The dynamics of the smoke is formulated using a novel compressible fluid model which can effectively absorb the discontinuities in the velocity field caused by imposed velocity constraints while reproducing realistic smoke appearances. As a result, a smoke region can evolve into a regular object and follow the motion of the object, while maintaining its smoke appearance.

Asteroidal I, J, K magnitudes recovered in the DENIS survey: Second release

The DENIS programme (Deep European Near-Infrared southern sky Survey) is carrying out a ground- based survey of the southern sky with the aim of providing an extensive I, J, K photometric catalog of point and extended sources. The limiting magnitudes of the three bands I, J, K centered at 0.8, 1.25 and 2.15 ma re respectively 18.5, 16.5 and 13.5. With respect to the exposure time of the observations, asteroids are included in the point source catalog as any other regular point-like object. Up to now, we have identied 1233 asteroids, numbered between 1 and 8000, on the basis of their predicted positions following a recognition procedure described here. Their I, J, K magnitudes are being compiled in electronic tables available at the CDS via anonymous ftp 130.79.128.5.

Maximization Problems in Single Machine Scheduling

Problems of scheduling n jobs on a single machine to maximize regular objective functions are studied. Precedence constraints may be given on the set of jobs and the jobs may have different release times. Schedules of interest are only those for which the jobs cannot be shifted to start earlier without changing job sequence or violating release times or precedence constraints. Solutions to the maximization problems provide an information about how poorly such schedules can perform. The most general problem of maximizing maximum cost is shown to be reducible to n similar problems of scheduling n−1 jobs available at the same time. It is solved in O(mn+n2) time, where m is the number of arcs in the precedence graph. When all release times are equal to zero, the problem of maximizing the total weighted completion time or the weighted number of late jobs is equivalent to its minimization counterpart with precedence constraints reversed with respect to the original ones. If there are no precedence constraints, the problem of maximizing arbitrary regular function reduces to n similar problems of scheduling n−1 jobs available at the same time.

Consultation with the Specialist

Consultation with the Specialist