Beyond the well-known role of proteolytic machinery in protein degradation and turnover, many specialized proteases play a key role in various regulatory processes. Thousands of highly specific proteolytic events are associated with normal and pathological conditions, including bacterial and viral infections. However, the information about individual proteolytic events is dispersed over multipl...

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is an active sensor that can effectively acquire a large number of three-dimensional (3-D) points. LiDAR systems can be equipped on different platforms for different applications, but to integrate the data, point cloud registration is needed to improve geometric consistency. The registration of airborne and terrestrial mobile LiDAR is a challenging task becau...

Purpose Longitudinal imaging is becoming more commonplace for studies of disease progression, response to treatment, and healthy maturation. Accurate and reproducible quantification methods are desirable to fully mine the wealth of data in such datasets. However, most current retinal OCT segmentation methods are cross-sectional and fail to leverage the inherent context present in longitudinal s...

OBJECTIVE Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) indicate that statin therapy has cardiovascular benefit among patients with type 2 diabetes. Recently, statins were reported to increase risk of diabetes by 9%. The aim was to investigate by a meta-analysis whether statins deteriorate glycaemic control in type 2 diabetes. METHODS Medline, EMBASE and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials f...

We have cloned the human chromosomal gene coding for the a subunit of G, (G,a), a heterotrimeric signaltransducing GTP-binding protein (G protein) that is insensitive to pertussis toxin. G,a cDNA has been cloned both from rat brain (Matsuoka, M., Itoh, H., Kozasa, T., and Kaziro, Y. (1988) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 85, 5384-5388) and from human retina (referred to as G.a, Fong, H. K. W., ...

Non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi)-associated ear and respiratory diseases (including pneumonia) represent a major health burden in many parts of the world. NTHi strains retrieved from the upper airways commonly reflect those found in the lower airways. Despite growing genomic and genotyping data on NTHi, there remains a limited understanding of global and regional NTHi population struc...

Spaceborne SAR images acquired over the ocean in conjunction with weather radar images are well suited to study atmospheric fronts in coastal areas. In this paper we confine ourselves to study quasi-stationary atmospheric fronts off the east coast of Taiwan which are located typically 3070 km offshore. These quasistationary atmospheric fronts were first detected on ERS SAR images [5]. In [5] we...

Background. Although an increasing burden of endocrine disorders is recorded worldwide, the greatest increase is occurring in developing countries. However, the spectrum of these disorders is not well described in most developing countries. Objective. The objective of this study was to profile the frequency of endocrine disorders and their basic demographic characteristics in an endocrine outpa...

BACKGROUND Whether there is heterogeneity in the development of BMI from middle-age onward is still unknown. The primary aim of this study is to analyze long-term obesity and how BMI trajectories are associated with health outcomes in midlife. METHODS Latent Class Growth Modelling was used to capture the changes in BMI over time. In this study, 3070 individuals from the National Population He...