Portal fibroblasts (PF) are fibrogenic liver cells distinct from hepatic stellate cells (HSC). Recent evidence suggests that PF may be important mediators of biliary fibrosis and cirrhosis. The cytokine monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1)/CCL2 is upregulated in biliary fibrosis by bile duct epithelia (BDE) and induces functional responses in HSC. Thus we hypothesized that release of MCP-...

This paper deals with the problem of nonlinear uncertainties when tracking an infrared dim small target fast maneuvers. The particle filter (PF)-based methods are mostly considered. existing improvement for PF can handle conventional maneuver, motion state which changes slowly and in most cases is assumed to be linear. However, maneuvers appear on target, PF-based method will soon suffer from d...

 Four terminal-pair coaxial capacitance standards with nominal values of 1 pF and 10 pF have been realized and, using a uniform transmission line model, their frequency dependences have been evaluated. 1:1 comparisons against reference capacitors with known frequency dependence (Agilent 16381A and Agilent 16382A) have shown that the values of the 1 pF and the 10 pF standard change by 0,04 % an...

Psoriasis is a common chronic immune-mediated inflammatory disease. It is well known that macrophages, neutrophils and T-helper 1 (Th1)/T-helper 17 (Th17) cells play important roles in skin lesions by provoking inflammation. Paeoniflorin (PF) is the major effective component extracted from the root of Paeonia lactiflora, which has been widely used in China to treat inflammatory and autoimmune d...

Pancreatic fistula continues to be a common complication following PD. This study seeks to identify clinical factors which may predict pancreatic fistula (PF) and evaluate the effect of PF on outcomes following pancreaticoduodenectomy (PD). We performed a retrospective analysis of a clinical database at an academic tertiary care hospital with a high volume of pancreatic surgery. Five hundred te...

Platelet factor 4 (PF-4), a member of the alpha-chemokine subfamily of cytokines, activates human neutrophils independently of intracellular free calcium mobilization or binding to IL-8R. In the present study, we have identified and partially characterized a receptor for PF-4 on human neutrophils, which displays weak cross-reactivity with the IFN-gamma-inducible protein 10, but not with other a...

In this paper we show that multi-class BCMP queueing networks can be represented by means of Product Form Solution Stochastic Petri Nets (PF-SPNs). Since the first time PF-SPNs were proposed, one of their main drawbacks concerned the fact that there was no clear relation between PFSPNs and PF-QNs, in particular the well-knownmulti-class BCMP-QNs. It is important to note that the existence of th...

Various authors (1,2) have tried to ascertain whether CA 125 concentrations in PF samples were significantly higher in patients with endometriosis than in control subjects. So far, these studies have not shown any significant difference in CA 125 values obtained from undiluted PF samples. In our study, using diluted samples in one-step assay, we found that CA 125 concentrations differed between...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether changes in serum KL-6 levels reflect the activity of pulmonary fibrosis (PF) in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc). METHODS KL-6 levels were determined by ELISA in 39 SSc patients. In a retrospective longitudinal study, 250 serum samples were analyzed during a follow-up period of 0.3-6.1 years. RESULTS KL-6 levels at the first visit were higher in patients...

Previously, we identified the failure-induced receive buffer (rbuf) blocking problem in Concurrent Multipath Transfer using SCTP multihoming (CMT), and proposed CMT with a Potentially-failed destination state (CMT-PF) to alleviate rbuf blocking. In this paper we complete our evaluation of CMT vs. CMT-PF. Using NS-2 simulations we first show that CMT-PF performs on par or better than CMT during ...