In the recent decade, embryonic stem cells (ESC) have emerged as an attractive cell source of smooth muscle cells (SMC) for vascular tissue engineering owing to their unlimited self-renewal and differentiation capacities. Despite their promise in therapy, their efficacy is still hampered by the lack of definitive SMC differentiation mechanisms and difficulties in successful trafficking of the E...

To clarify the role of interferon-γ (IFN-γ) in reproduction, we have examined its effects on cytokine production by human endometrial stromal cells (ESC). Concentrations of interleukin (IL)-6, IL-8, monocyte chemoattractant protein1 (MCP-1), and macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF) in the culture media of normal ESC and an endometrial stromal sarcoma cell line, MaMi, were measured using...

It has been demonstrated that human endometrial epithelial cells (EEC) and stromal cells (ESC) produce a variety of chemokines in vivo and in vitro. To evaluate the expression of macrophage inflammatory protein (MIP)-3alpha in endometrial cells, the production of MIP-3alpha by an EEC line, HHUA, and cultured ESC stimulated with various inflammatory mediators was evaluated by ELISA. Unstimulated...

Diajrnostic measurement of electric skin conductivity (ESC) called the Ryodoraku system was introduced in mid 1950s by Nakatani. As has been shown by Ziobro et al. in case of infantile cerebral palsy, changes of ESC may provide a valuable electrophysiological parameter for monitoring a therapy. In this study ESC was measured in asthmatic children treated with a bioelectronic unit VEGASELECT. An...

We propose a new approach for Extreme States Classification (ESC) on feature spaces of facial cues in sign language (SL) videos. The method is built upon Active Appearance Model (AAM) face tracking and feature extraction of global and local AAMs. ESC is applied on various facial cues as, for instance, pose rotations, head movements and eye blinking leading to the detection of extreme states suc...

In this paper an analysis of the classical highorder Extremum Seeking Control (ESC) scheme is presented in comparison with an improved ESC variant proposed here. The proposed ESC scheme is based on a band-pass filter instead of the series combination of highpass and low-pass filters used in the classical ESC scheme. The relation between the search speed and the derivatives of the unknown input-...

The ESC/Java tool was a lauded advance in effective static checking of realistic Java programs, but has become out-of-date with respect to Java and the Java Modeling Language (JML). The ESC/Java2 project, whose progress is described in this paper, builds on the final release of ESC/Java from DEC/SRC in several ways. It parses all of JML, thus can be used with the growing body of JML-annotated J...

This overview of 10 years of stem cell controversy reviews the moral conflict that has made ESCs so controversial and how this conflict plays itself out in the legal realm, focusing on the constitutional status of efforts to ban ESC research or ESC-derived therapies. It provides a history of the federal funding debate from the Carter to the Obama administrations, and the importance of the Raab ...

Implantable cardiodefibrillators (ICDs) have proven benefit in preventing sudden cardiac death (SCD) in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HC), making risk stratification essential. Data on the predictive accuracy on the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) risk scoring system have been conflicting. We independently evaluated the ESC risk scoring system in our cohort of patients with HC from a large ...

The product of the extra sex combs+ (esc+) gene is required during embryogenesis for the correct determination of segments in Drosophila. If this product is absent, most segments develop like the normal eighth abdominal segment. Here, I extend previous results (Struhl, 1981a) showing that this phenotype results in large part from indiscriminate expression of the bithorax-complex genes which are...