Kawasaki disease (KD) is the multisystem vasculitis which is a cause of secondary heart disease in children [1]. Coronary artery aneurysm could be a cause of death in some cases of KD, so it is important to diagnose coronary artery complication [2]. KD could be diagnosed by having the following criteria: prolonged fever longer than 5 days and four of the five following main clinical features: (...

BACKGROUND Branched actin assembly is critical for both cell motility and membrane trafficking. The branched actin regulator cortactin is generally considered to promote cell migration by controlling leading-edge lamellipodial dynamics. However, recent reports indicate that lamellipodia are not required for cell movement, suggesting an alternate mechanism. RESULTS Because cortactin also regul...

Background: Kawasaki disease (KD) is one of the most prevalent vasculitis diseases in children and can bring about serious cardiovascular complications. Early detection of cardiac involvement in KD can play an essential role in managing and preventing the cardiac sequels. We aimed to evaluate the applicability and diagnostic accuracy of cardiac biomarkers including car...

background kawasaki disease (kd) is an acute febrile vasculitis of early childhood and the leading cause of acquired heart disease in children. the most important complication of kd is coronary artery aneurysm that may lead to thrombosis and myocardial infarction, occurring in 25% of untreated cases. fortunately, timely treatment decreases it to 2 - 4%. there is no specific test for the diagnos...

We present an efficient “broad phase” algorithm for selecting candidate collision pairs in N-body simulation. As our technique is derived from kd-trees, we first introduce some background kdtree concepts and their geometrical interpretation. Then we cover the construction of a linear kd-tree and its use in N-body simulation. We finally study its time and memory complexity, and compare the perfo...

Construction of effective acceleration structure is an essential and challenging problem in ray tracing. The surface area heuristic (SAH), regarded as the standard cost function for construction, is based on the assumption that rays are uniformly distributed. This simplification ignoring actual ray distribution results in a reduction both on construction and rendering performance. Unlike previo...

The Continuous Distance Transformation (CDT) used in conjunction with a k-NN classifier has been shown to provide good results in the task of handwriting recognition [1]. Unfortunately, efficient techniques such as kd-tree search methods cannot be directly used in the case of certain dissimilarity measures like the CDT-based distance functions. In order to avoid exhaustive search, a simple meth...

We have previously shown that human interferon-y (HuIFNy) induces platelets to become efficient effector cells, capable of killing young larvae of the parasite Schistosoma mansoni. Recently, binding sites for IFN-y on platelets have been characterized. We show here the presence of highaffinity receptors for IFN-y on the surface of the human megakaryocytic Dami cell line. Scatchard analysis indi...

The ability of thrombospondin (TSP), an extracellular matrix glycoprotein, and two proteolytic fragments to support adhesion and neurite outgrowth from embryonic dorsal root ganglia, spinal cord neurons, and PC12 cells was examined. Anti-TSP antibodies or a synthetic peptide (GRGDS) containing an RGD cell-binding region was also added to cells plated on TSP. TSP and its 140 kd fragment were mor...