A new method of generating wedge-shaped dose distributions through dynamic multileaf collimator dose delivery rather than computer-controlled jaw motion is presented. The method starts with the calculation of a wedge-shaped beam profile for the desired wedge angle. The resultant wedge beam profile is then passed to the intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) leaf sequence generation algori...

Our previous study of homozygous mutants of the ventricular specific isoform of myosin light chain 2 (mlc-2v) demonstrated that mlc-2v plays an essential role in murine heart development (Chen, J., Kubalak, S. W., Minamisawa, S., Price, R. L., Becker, K. D., Hickey, R., Ross, J., Jr., and Chien, K. R. (1998) J. Biol. Chem. 273, 1252-1256). As gene dosage of some myofibrillar proteins can affect...

PURPOSE Scattered radiation from multi-leaf collimators (MLCs) is no longer negligible for calculating in-air output ratio, Sc for small and irregular fields often used in intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). An extra-focal source model for scattered radiation from MLCs, namely MLC scatter source, has been developed to improve the accuracy of the Sc calculation. METHODS A conventiona...

The endocannabinoid 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG) can be considered a true agonist as it is able to activate human platelets stimulating arachidonic acid release, thromboxane B2 formation and calcium intracellular elevation. Recently we have shown that 2-AG induces a rapid myosin light chain (MLC) phosphorylation/activation, early mediated by RhoA kinase (ROCK) signalling pathway and later by m...

Direct protein kinase C (PKC) activation with phorbol myristate acetate (PMA) results in the loss of endothelial monolayer integrity in bovine lung endothelial cells (EC) but produces barrier enhancement in human lung endothelium. To extend these findings, we studied EC contractile events and observed a 40% increase in myosin light chain (MLC) phosphorylation in bovine endothelium following PMA...

Monoclonal antibodies to adult chicken myosin light chains were generated and used to quantitate the types of myosin light-chain (MLC) isoforms expressed during development of the pectoralis major (PM), anterior latissimus dorsi (ALD), and medial adductor (MA) muscles of the chicken. These are muscles which, in the adult, are composed predominantly of fast, slow, and a mixture of fiber types, r...

OBJECTIVE We recently demonstrated in our swine model of coronary artery spasm that enhanced myosin light chain (MLC) phosphorylations (both MLC mono- and diphosphorylations) play a central role in the pathogenesis of the spasm. However, the molecular mechanism for and the phosphorylation sites for the enhanced MLC phosphorylations were unknown. In the present study, we addressed these points u...

To test the hypothesis that some subtypes of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1), especially subtype E, are more likely to infect mature Langerhans cells (mLC), we titrated a panel of 26 primary HIV-1 isolates of subtypes A through F on peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) and mLC. The majority of HIV-1 isolates from heterosexually infected patients did not show a preferred tropism...

Driven by the multi-level structure of human intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) recordings of epileptic seizures, we introduce a new variant of a hierarchical Dirichlet Process—the multi-level clustering hierarchical Dirichlet Process (MLC-HDP)—that simultaneously clusters datasets on multiple levels. Our seizure dataset contains brain activity recorded in typically more than a hundred in...

A novel space–time block-coding-assisted and sphere-packed multilevel-coded (STBC-SP-MLC) modulation arrangement is proposed, which combines an MLC-based scheme with a twin-antenna-aided STBC for the sake of providing a transmit diversity gain. The SP modulation invokes a 4-D D4 constellation space. A new bit-to-SP symbol mapper is designed for the sake of improving the system’s performance. Th...