Deviation from Murray's law is associated with a higher degree of calcification in coronary bifurcations

Murray's law describes the optimal branching anatomy of vascular bifurcations. If Murray's law is obeyed, shear stress is constant over the bifurcation. Associations between Murray's law and intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) assessed plaque composition near coronary bifurcations have not been investigated previously.

Immune response deviation and enhanced expression of chemokine receptor CCR4 in TBI patients due to unknown serum factors

BACKGROUND: Severe brain trauma leads to an activation of the immune system. To this date, neither the exact perturbation of the specific immune reaction induced by the traumatic brain injury (TBI), nor the interactions leading to the infiltration of peripheral immune cells into the brain are fully understood. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Serum was collected from 17 patients with TBI and a long bone fracture, 24 patients with an isolated long bone fracture and from healthy individuals. The effect of the serum on normal human monocytes and T-lymphocytes was tested in vitro by assessing proliferation and expression of surface markers, chemokine receptors and cytokines. RESULTS: Serum collected from patients with a TBI and a long bone fracture increased the expression of the chemokine receptor CCR4 in monocytes when compared to patients with an isolated long bone fracture. Extending this comparison to T-lymphocytes, the serum from TBI patients induced lower proliferation rates and decreased expression of the pro-inflammatory cytokine TNF-alpha, while simultaneously increasing the secretion of immune-modulatory cytokines (IL-4, IL-10 and TGF-beta) (p<0.05). CONCLUSION: Patients with a TBI release currently unknown soluble factors into the circulating blood that up regulate expression of chemokine receptor CCR4 in peripheral blood monocytes whilst concurrently inducing expression of immunosuppressive cytokines by activated T-lymphocytes.

Estimating and quantifying uncertainties on level sets using the Vorob'ev expectation and deviation with Gaussian process models

Several methods based on Kriging have recently been proposed for calculating a probability of failure involving costly-to-evaluate functions. A closely related problem is to estimate the set of inputs leading to a response exceeding a given threshold. Now, estimating such a level set—and not solely its volume—and quantifying uncertainties on it are not straightforward. Here we use notions from random set theory to obtain an estimate of the level set, together with a quantification of estimation uncertainty. We give explicit formulae in the Gaussian process set-up and provide a consistency result. We then illustrate how space-filling versus adaptive design strategies may sequentially reduce level set estimation uncertainty.

Teaching video neuroimages: Beevor sign: when the umbilicus is pointing to neurologic disease

A 57-year-old man with genetically proven facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHMD 1A) demonstrated Beevor sign (video on the Neurology Web site at www.neurology.org). The upward movement of the umbilicus in a supine patient flexing the neck or sitting up is named after the British neurologist Charles Edward Beevor (1854-1908). He described a "marked elevation of the umbilicus in the act of sitting up" due to a paralyzed infraumbilical part of the rectus abdominis muscle, indicating a lesion of the spinal cord between the segments T10 and T12 or its nerve roots.(1) Beevor sign may also be present, as in our patient, in myopathies affecting the abdominal muscles, particularly in FSHMD, in which predominant involvement of the lower part of the rectus abdominis muscle is typical.(2).

Search for non-pointing photons in the diphoton and ETmiss final state in sqrt(s) = 7 TeV proton-proton collisions using the ATLAS detector

A search has been performed for photons originating in the decay of a neutral long-lived particle, exploiting the capabilities of the ATLAS electromagnetic calorimeter to make precise measurements of the flight direction of photons, as well as the calorimeter's excellent time resolution. The search has been made in the diphoton plus missing transverse energy final state, using the full data sample of 4.8 fb(-1) of 7 TeV proton-proton collisions collected in 2011 with the ATLAS detector at the LHC. No excess is observed above the background expected from Standard Model processes. The results are used to set exclusion limits in the context of gauge mediated supersymmetry breaking models, with the lightest neutralino being the next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle and decaying with a lifetime in excess of 0.25 ns into a photon and a gravitino.

Optical Tolerance Analysis of the Multi-Beam Limb Viewing Instrument STEAMR

In this paper, we report on an optical tolerance analysis of the submillimeter atmospheric multi-beam limb sounder, STEAMR. Physical optics and ray-tracing methods were used to quantify and separate errors in beam pointing and distortion due to reflector misalignment and primary reflector surface deformations. Simulations were performed concurrently with the manufacturing of a multi-beam demonstrator of the relay optical system which shapes and images the beams to their corresponding receiver feed horns. Results from Monte Carlo simulations show that the inserts used for reflector mounting should be positioned with an overall accuracy better than 100 μm (~ 1/10 wavelength). Analyses of primary reflector surface deformations show that a deviation of magnitude 100 μm can be tolerable before deployment, whereas the corresponding variations should be less than 30 μm during operation. The most sensitive optical elements in terms of misalignments are found near the focal plane. This localized sensitivity is attributed to the off-axis nature of the beams at this location. Post-assembly mechanical measurements of the reflectors in the demonstrator show that alignment better than 50 μm could be obtained.

Measurement and stability of the pointing of the BepiColombo Laser Altimeter under thermal load

The BepiColombo Laser Altimeter (BELA) has been selected to fly on ESA׳s BepiColombo mission to Mercury. The instrument will be the first European laser altimeter designed for interplanetary flight. This paper describes the setup used to characterize the angular movements of BELA under the simulated environmental conditions that the instrument will encounter when orbiting Mercury. The system comprises a laser transmitter and a receiving telescope, which can move with respect to each other under thermal load. Tests performed using the Engineering Qualification Model show that the setup is accurate enough to characterize angular movements of the instrument components to an accuracy of ≈10 μrad. The qualification instrument is thermally stable to operate during all mission phases around Mercury proving that the transmitter and receiver sections will remain within the alignment requirements during its mission.

Revisiting the ISN Flow Parameters, using a variable IBEX pointing strategy

The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has observed the interstellar neutral (ISN) gas flow over the past 6 yr during winter/spring when the Earth's motion opposes the ISN flow. Since IBEX observes the interstellar atom trajectories near their perihelion, we can use an analytical model based upon orbital mechanics to determine the interstellar parameters. Interstellar flow latitude, velocity, and temperature are coupled to the flow longitude and are restricted by the IBEX observations to a narrow tube in this parameter space. In our original analysis we found that pointing the spacecraft spin axis slightly out of the ecliptic plane significantly influences the ISN flow vector determination. Introducing the spacecraft spin axis tilt into the analytical model has shown that IBEX observations with various spin axis tilt orientations can substantially reduce the range of acceptable solutions to the ISN flow parameters as a function of flow longitude. The IBEX operations team pointed the IBEX spin axis almost exactly within the ecliptic plane during the 2012-2014 seasons, and about 5° below the ecliptic for half of the 2014 season. In its current implementation the analytical model describes the ISN flow most precisely for the spin axis orientation exactly in the ecliptic. This analysis refines the derived ISN flow parameters with a possible reconciliation between velocity vectors found with IBEX and Ulysses, resulting in a flow longitude lambda∞ = 74.°5 ± 1.°7 and latitude beta∞ = -5.°2 ± 0.°3, but at a substantially higher ISN temperature than previously reported.

DEVCON: Stata module to apply the deviation contrast transform to estimation results

devcon transforms the coefficients of 0/1 dummy variables so that they reflect deviations from the "grand mean" rather than deviations from the reference category (the transformed coefficients are equivalent to those obtained by the so called "effects coding") and adds the coefficient for the reference category. The variance-covariance matrix of the estimates is transformed accordingly. The transformed estimated can be used with post estimation procedures. In particular, devcon can be used to solve the identification problem for dummy variable effects in the so-called Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition (see the oaxaca package).