This article reviews diagnostic criteria for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), current grading and staging methodology, and diagnostic challenges and pitfalls in routine practice. Current practice guidelines and prognostic and treatment considerations are discussed. The clinical diagnosis of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease may represent stable disease without progressive liver damage, in th...

In this paper we study the complexity of finding approximate Nash equilibria in multi-player normal-form games. First, for any constant number n, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for computing a relative ( 1− 1 1+(n−1)n ) -Nash equilibrium in arbitrary nplayer games and a relative ( 1− 1 1+(n−1)n−1 ) -Nash equilibrium in symmetric n-player games. Next, we show that there is an additive ε-...

BACKGROUND The relationship between resistin and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is not clear, some studies claimed that serum resistin levels were associated with neither the presence of NASH nor its severity, others declared that serum resistin was related with inflammation and fibrosis in NASH. Our animal study verified that the distribution of resistin in the liver is correlated with i...

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is increasing in prevalence. It can be subdivided into nonalcoholic fatty liver (NAFL) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). Five to twenty percent of cases progress from NAFL to NASH. Increased hepatic Th17 cells and IL-17 expression were observed in NASH mice and patients, respectively. We analyzed CD4(+) effector T cells and regulatory T cells (Tregs) from...

We pose the problem of computing approximate Nash equilibria in bimatrix games with two simultaneous criteria of optimization: minimization of the incentives to deviate from a strategy profile and maximization of a measure of quality of the strategy profile. We consider two natural measures of quality: the maximum and the minimum of the payoffs of the two players. Maximizing the former yields p...

We formally incorporate the option to gather information into a game and thus endogenize the information structure. We ask whether models with exogenous information structures are robust with respect to this endogenization. Any Nash equilibrium of the game with information acquisition induces a Nash equilibrium in the corresponding game with an exogenous structure. We provide sufficient conditi...

Nash equilibria have been widely used in cognitive radio systems, sensor networks, defense networks and gene regulatory networks. Although solving Nash equilibria has been proved difficult in general, it is still desired to have algorithms for solving the Nash equilibria in various special cases. In this paper, we propose a compressed sensing based algorithm to solve Nash equilibria. Such compr...

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a major form of chronic liver disease in adults and children. It is one of the consequences of the current obesity epidemic, and can progress to nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), characterized by steatosis, inflammation, and progressive fibrosis, ultimately leading to cirrhosis and end-stage liver disease. The factors implicated in this progression...

This paper introduces a bottleneck game with finite sets of commuters and departing time slots as an extension of congestion games by Milchtaich (1996). After characterizing Nash equilibrium of the game, we provide sufficient conditions for which the equivalence between Nash and strong equilibria holds. Somewhat surprisingly, unlike in congestion games, a Nash equilibrium in pure strategies may...

Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is the most common liver disease in industrialized countries. NASH is a progressive disease that can lead to cirrhosis, cancer, and death, and there are currently no approved therapies. The development of NASH in animal models requires intact TLR9, but how the TLR9 pathway is activated in NASH is not clear. Our objectives in this study were to identify NASH-a...