The expanding small heat-shock protein family, and structure predictions of the conserved "alpha-crystallin domain"

The ever-increasing number of proteins identified as belonging to the family of small heat-shock proteins (shsps) and alpha-crystallins enables us to reassess the phylogeny of this ubiquitous protein family. While the prokaryotic and fungal representatives are not properly resolved, most of the plant and animal shsps and related proteins are clearly grouped in distinct clades, reflecting a history of repeated gene duplications. The members of the shsp family are characterized by the presence of a conserved homologous "alpha-crystallin domain," which sometimes is present in duplicate. Predictions are made of secondary structure and solvent accessibility of this domain, which together with hydropathy profiles and intron positions support the presence of two similar hydrophobic beta-sheet-rich motifs, connected by a hydrophilic alpha-helical region. Together with an overview of the newly characterized members of the shsp family, these data help to define this family as being involved as stable structural proteins and as molecular chaperones during normal development and induced under pathological and stressful conditions.     

Optimum detection of multiple vapor materials with frequency-agile lidar

Differential absorption lidar (DIAL) is a well-established technology for estimating the concentration and its path integral CL of vapor materials using two closely spaced wavelengths. The recent development of frequency-agile lasers (FAL's) with as many as 60 wavelengths that can be rapidly scanned motivates the need for detection and estimation algorithms that are optimal for lidar employing these new sources. I derive detection and multimaterial CL estimation algorithms for FAL applications using the likelihood ratio test methodology of multivariate statistical inference theory. Three model sets of assumptions are considered with regard to the spectral properties of the backscatter from either topographic or aerosol targets. The calculations are illustrated through both simulated and actual lidar data.     

St. Francis Hospice: Medicare and health care reform

The St. Francis Hospice Program is symbolic of more than 100 years of Franciscan dedication to the people of Hawaii. Since Mother Marianne's arrival in November of 1883, the Sisters of the Third Franciscan Order Syracuse, New York have responded to the calling; "the charity of Christ impels us." It is through this calling that care and comfort for the terminally ill is a part of the mission of St. Francis Healthcare System. The magnificent spirit through which Hospice services have been made possible, is a reflection of God's great generosity to us throughout the years.     

Flap prefabrication: effectiveness of different vascular carriers

A new experimental model of a vascular carrier to prefabricate a "secondary" island flap, the popliteal musculovascular pedicle, was developed in the rat. Using quantitative skin-surface fluorometry 30 minutes after sodium fluorescein injection and a flap survival area in the prefabricated 8 x 2.5-cm abdominal composite island flap, we compared the revascularization ability of our muscular carrier to nonrevascularized controls: the skeletonized arteriovenous pedicle and the fasciovascular pedicle. The free composite graft with no vascular carrier exhibited near-total necrosis. The skeletonized vascular pedicle demonstrated 15.2% +/- 7.8% perfusion of normal skin on dye fluorescence index measurements and 50% flap survival. The fasciovascular pedicle exhibited better revascularization, with a dye fluorescence index of 36.2 +/- 15.5 (p < 0.01) and 90% +/- 10% flap survival (p < 0.001). India ink injection study and histological examination of our model provided visual evidence of revascularization from the musculovascular pedicle, along with preservation of the carrier's muscular architecture. The musculovascular pedicle is a reliable carrier for making new, vascularized composite flaps.     

A review of stochastic algorithms with continuous value function approximation and some new approximate policy iteration algorithms for multidimensional continuous applications

We review the literature on approximate dynamic programming, with the goal of better understanding the theory behind practical algorithms for solving dynamic programs with continuous and vector-valued states and actions and complex information processes. We build on the literature that has addressed the well-known problem of multidimensional (and possibly continuous) states, and the extensive literature on model-free dynamic programming, which also assumes that the expectation in Bellman’s equation cannot be computed. However, we point out complications that arise when the actions/controls are vector-valued and possibly continuous. We then describe some recent research by the authors on approximate policy iteration algorithms that offer convergence guarantees (with technical assumptions) for both parametric and nonparametric architectures for the value function.     

C-PSA: Constrained Pareto simulated annealing for constrained multi-objective optimization

In recent years, evolutionary algorithms (EAs) have been extensively developed and utilized to solve multi-objective optimization problems. However, some previous studies have shown that for certain problems, an approach which allows for non-greedy or uphill moves (unlike EAs), can be more beneficial. One such approach is simulated annealing (SA). SA is a proven heuristic for solving numerical optimization problems. But owing to its point-to-point nature of search, limited efforts has been made to explore its potential for solving multi-objective problems. The focus of the presented work is to develop a simulated annealing algorithm for constrained multi-objective problems. The performance of the proposed algorithm is reported on a number of difficult constrained benchmark problems. A comparison with other established multi-objective optimization algorithms, such as infeasibility driven evolutionary algorithm (IDEA), Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) and multi-objective Scatter search II (MOSS-II) has been included to highlight the benefits of the proposed approach.     

Issues in the Reconstruction of Gene Order Evolution

As genomes evolve over hundreds of millions years, the chromosomes become rearranged, with segments of some chromosomes inverted, while other chromosomes reciprocally exchange chunks from their ends. These rearrangements lead to the scrambling of the elements of one genome with respect to another descended from a common ancestor. Multidisciplinary work undertakes to mathematically model these processes and to develop statistical analyses and mathematical algorithms to understand the scrambling in the chromo...     

Free-living inferential modeling of blood glucose level using only noninvasive inputs

The goal of this work is to present a causation modeling methodology with the ability to accurately infer blood glucose levels using a large set of highly correlated noninvasive input variables over an extended period of time. These models can provide insight to improve glucose monitoring, and glucose regulation through advanced model-based control technologies. The efficacy of this approach is demonstrated using real data from a type 2 diabetic (T2D) subject collected under free-living conditions over a period of 25 consecutive days. The model was identified and tested using eleven variables that included three food variables as well as several activity and stress variables. The model was trained using 20 days of data and validated using 5 days of data. This gave a fitted correlation coefficient of 0.70 and an average absolute error (AAE) (i.e., the average of the absolute values for the measured glucose concentration minus modeled glucose concentration) of 13.3 mg/dL for the validation data. This AAE result was significantly better than the subject’s personal glucose meter AAE of 15.3 mg/dL for replicated measurements.