Burns often leads to infection, due to damage to the skin's protective barrier. Burn injury has been repeatedly shown to induce considerable inflammatory and immune dysfunction. The innate immune system is a universal and ancient form of host defense against infection. Activation of innate immunity constitutes the first line of host defense against infection. Neutrophils are white blood cells and part of the immune system. They are the most common PMN (polymorphonuclear neutrophils) and accounted for 70% of all leukocytes. Neutrophils provided the first line of defense of the innate immune system by phagocytosing, killing, and digesting bacteria and fungi. Priming means a process whereby the response of neutrophils to an activating stimulus is potentiated, sometimes greatly, by prior to exposure to priming agents such as tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF-alpha), platelet-activating factor (PAF). Neutrophil priming causes a dramatic increase in the response of these cells to an activating agent; this process has been shown to be critical for neutrophil-mediated tissue injury both in vitro and in vivo. However, the intracellular signaling pathways used by neutrophil in response to pro-inflammatory stimuli have not been elucidated. The discovery of TLRs has made us understanding of the mechanisms of innate immune recognition. The innate immune system detectes the invasion of microorganism through TLRs, which recognize microbial components and trigger inflammatory responses. Severe burn injury produces shock and induces acute gastrointestinal derangement that may disrupt gastrointestinal mucosa integrity and facilitate the bacterial translocation (BT) to Mesenteric lymph node (MLN), liver, and spleen. Hypertonic saline (HTS) has been advocated in thermal injury resuscitation because of the possibility of giving less total volume of resuscitation fluid, with a resulting decrease in edema and the need for escharotomy. In this study, I found that priming effect of BM neutrophils is TNF-alpha and p38 dependent and TLRs play a critical role to the innate immunity by recognizing bacteria and HTS enhance host response to bacterial challenge by increasing TLRs of inflammatory cells.

Inflammatory response in the airway may lead to asthma. Asthma may develop during the childhood in some asthmatic patients. Both environmental and genetic factors may influence the onset and progress of asthma. It is well-known that there may be complex neural innervation and reflex mechanisms between trachea and esophagus. Intraesophgeal infusion of 1N HCl could lead to tracheal inflammation by activating neural reflex pathway and cause tachykinin-like substance to release. In this study, we first sensitized rats with 1ml of OVA-Al［OH］3 mixture containing 200£gg OVA via intraperitoneal injection on days 1, 2, 3 and 11, then perform intraesophageal infusion of ovalbumin to see whether stimulation of esophagus in sensitized rat model could involve inflammatory response in the lower airways. Animals were perfused with saline and fixative at various time points and the esophagus and airway tissues were processed for the subsequent analysis. We observed the extent of plasma leakage and migration of leukocytes in the lower airway. India ink was used to label the leaky blood vessels.The magnitude of plasma leakage was expressed by the area density of India ink-labeled blood vessels. The results showed that the intraesophageal infusion of ovalbumin 75 mg/kg caused an increase in plasma leakage in the lower airways. The plasma leakage peaked at 30 min, the area density of plasma leakage in trachea was 22.43 ¡Ó 3.34¢H; and 20.57 ¡Ó 4.91¢H in right bronchus; 18.47 ¡Ó 5.03¢H in left bronchus and 27.85 ¡Ó 2.71¢H in epiglottis. The extent of leakage gradually diminished 3 hours after ovalbumin infusion. However, a second increased plasma leakage peaked at about 4 hours of ovalbumin infusion. Tissue sections clearly showed degranulation of mast cells in OVA infusion group. Experimental data showed that pretreatment with either bilateral vagotomy, or mepyramine, the histamine H1 receptor antagonist, significantly inhibited the inflammatory response in the lower airways induced by intraesophageal infusion of OVA. In conclusion, there were clearly two phases, early and late phase responses, in inflammatory response in OVA-sensitized rats receiving intra-esophageal OVA challenge. The underlying mechanisms may involve vagal C-fibers and histamine H1 receptors.

Computerized adaptive testing attempts to provide the most suitable question for an examinee depending on the examinee¡¦s ability to achieve the best result. Although Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) and Bayesian Likelihood Estimation (BLE) have been provided to solve ability estimation and have good results in the literature, little attention has been paid to the situation when the answer of an item does not conform with the examinee¡¦s ability as expected nor standard derivation changes of the ability estimation. We hypothesized that the Adaptive-Network-Based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) can be used to infer flexible examinee¡¦s ability estimation automically by analyzing the relevant data of the examinee in a test. Consequently, the study presents a novel learning ability model based on ANFIS, which can adaptively choose questions by Item Response Theory. Taking the item discrimination, difficulty, guessing, and the examinee¡¦s ability before he/she answers a question as parameters, the proposed method can infer the adjustment of the examinee¡¦s ability to update its value after he/she answers the question. The ANFIS model of the experiments were developed using MATLAB. The examinees were simulated and the training data were collected under three different situations. Through different combination of ANFIS fuzzy rules, the adjustment of ability is inferred to improve the accuracy of the estimated ability. The error between the true ability and the estimated ability obtained by the proposed model is compared with MLE and BLE. The simulation results show that the estimated ability error of ANFIS is smaller than MLE and BLE when the value of the test information is larger. The proposed method could provide better accuracy of the examinee¡¦s ability and offer more appropriate questions for examinees. Keywords: ANFIS, Item Response Theory, Computerized Adaptive Testing

Time-resolved electroluminescence has been primarily and widely applied in the field of optoelectronic devices and phosphor materials. Here we use the method to measure the response time and phase difference of green light-emitting diode. In our experiment, which is essentially dominated by pulsed signal from function generator¡Bhigh spatial resolution from laser scanning microscopic and phase-lock characteristic from lock-in amplifier to complete our experimental result. We are capable to detect relative carrier information within any point or any surface region from epi-layer of green light-emitting diode. Otherwise, the carrier transport of the sample is able to be observed through time-resolved characteristic measurement. Laser cutting would be beneficial for obvious phase-difference observation and mobility acquirement.

No description available.

No description available.

none

none

In isolated skeletal muscle arterioles, increasing transmural pressure causes an increase in constriction. This active myogenic response varies with age and fiber type. Increased transmural pressure activates both Ca2+-activated (KCa) potassium channels and voltage-dependent (Kv) potassium channels; these channels have a role in the negativefeedback pathways that modulate depolarization and myogenic constriction. We tested the hypothesis that increased KCa channel and Kv channel activity contribute to reduced myogenic responsiveness in skeletal muscle arterioles of aged rats. 1A arterioles were isolated from soleus, an oxidative muscle, and superficial gastrocnemius, a glycolytic muscle, of young (4 mos) and aged (24 mos) Fischer 344 rats. Myogenic responses were assessed by increasing intraluminal pressure (0-140 cm H2O) in increments of 20cm H2O. Vasoconstrictor response were determined in response to increasing concentrations of the KCa channel blocker, charybdotoxin (CTX; 10-10 to 10-7 M) and the Kv channel blocker, 4-Aminopyridine (4-AP; 10-5 to 10-2 M). To determine the role of potassium channels in modulating the myogenic response, cannulated arterioles from soleus and gastrocnemius were incubated with CTX (50 nM) and 4-AP (5mM) for 15 minutes prior to evaluation of the myogenic response. Increased Kv channel activity contributes to reduced myogenic constriction in soleus and gastrocnemius muscle arterioles from aged rats. In soleus muscle arterioles, KCa channel activity opposes myogenic tone in young but not old rats. In gastrocnemius muscle arterioles, treatment with CTX did not eliminate age-related differences in the myogenic response, and the KCa channel contribution to myogenic tone was, in fact, greater arterioles from young as compared to old rats. Kv channels contribute to greater myogenic constriction in soleus arterioles, KCa channels appear to be more active in gastrocnemius muscle arterioles as compared to soleus muscle arterioles. Therefore Kv and KCa channels are tonically active in skeletal muscle arterioles, contributing to a hyperpolarizing force that opposes myogenic constriction. Furthermore, increased Kv channel activity contributes to the age-related reduction of myogenic constriction in soleus and gastrocnemius muscle arterioles.

Efficiency and power conservation are critical issues in the design of cluster systems because these two parameters have direct implications on the user experience and the global need to conserve power. Widely adopted, distributor-based systems forward client requests to a balanced set of waiting servers in complete transparency to the clients. The policy employed in forwarding requests from the front-end distributor to the backend servers plays an important role in the overall system performance. Existing research separately addresses server performance and power conservation. The locality-aware request distribution (LARD) scheme improves the system response time by having the requests served by web servers which have the data in their cache. The power-aware request distribution aims at reducing the power consumption by turning the web servers OFF and ON according to the load. This research tries to achieve power conservation while preserving the performance of the system. First, we prove that using both power-aware and locality-aware request distribution together provides optimum power conservation, while still maintaining the required QoS of the system. We apply the usage of pinned memory in the backend servers to boost performance along with a request distributor design based on power and locality considerations. Secondly, we employ an intelligent-proactive-distribution policy at the front-end to improve the distribution scheme and complementary pre-fetching at the backend server nodes. The proactive distribution depends on both online and offline analysis of the website log files, which capture user navigation patterns on the website. The prefetching scheme pre-fetches the web pages into the memory based on a confidence value of the web page predicted by backend using the log file analysis. Designed to work with the prevailing web technologies, such as HTTP 1.1, our scheme provides reduced response time to the clients and improved power conservation at the backend server cluster. Simulations carried out with traces derived from the log files of real web servers witness performance boost of 15-45% and 10-40% power conservation in comparison to the existing distribution policies.