A New Sandwich ELISA for Quantification of Thymidine Kinase 1 Protein Levels in Sera from Dogs with Different Malignancies Can Aid in Disease Management

Thymidine kinase 1 (TK1) is a DNA precursor enzyme whose expression is closely correlated with cell proliferation and cell turnover. Sensitive serum TK1 activity assays have been used for monitoring and prognosis of hematological malignancies in both humans and dogs. Here we describe the development of a specific sandwich TK1-ELISA for the quantification of TK1 protein levels in sera from dogs with different malignancies. A combination of rabbit polyclonal anti-dog TK1 antibody and a mouse monoclonal anti-human TK1 antibody was used. Different concentrations of recombinant canine TK1 was used as standard. Clinical evaluation of the ELISA was done by using sera from 42 healthy dogs, 43 dogs with hematological tumors and 55 with solid tumors. An established [3H]-dThd phosphorylation assay was used to determine the TK1 activity levels in the same sera. The mean TK1 activities in dogs with hematological tumors were significantly higher than those found in healthy dogs. In agreement with earlier studies, no significant difference was observed in serum TK1 activities between healthy dogs and dogs with solid tumors. However, the mean TK1 protein levels determined by new TK1-ELISA were significantly higher not only in hematological tumors but also in solid tumors compared to healthy dogs (mean ± SD = 1.30 ± 1.16, 0.67 ± 0.55 and 0.27± 0.10 ng/mL, respectively). Moreover, TK1-ELISA had significantly higher ability to distinguish lymphoma cases from healthy based on receiver operating characteristic analyses (area under the curve, AUC, of 0.96) to that of the activity assay (AUC, 0.84). Furthermore, fluctuations in TK1 protein levels during the course of chemotherapy in dogs with lymphoma closely associated with clinical outcome. Overall, the TK1-ELISA showed significant linear correlation with the TK1 activity assay (rs= 0.6, p<0.0001). Thus, the new TK1-ELISA has sufficient sensitivity and specificity for routine clinical use in veterinary oncology

FAILURE RATE STUDIES AND DESIGN ALTERNATIVES FOR STANDUP FORKLIFT TRUCKS

Standup forklift trucks are extensively used primarily for material handling in high density warehouses. These forklifts over the years have been involved in severe accidents causing injuries and taking lives of the operator and that of people on the floor. The major accidents involving these trucks are tip-over, off the dock accidents, compartment intrusions and under the rack injuries. The objective of the work is to analyze the accident data and to provide a conceptual design to ensure safety of the operator riding the standup forklift trucks. The operator is assumed to be safe when retained within the compartment similar to that of the safe space environment of a sit down forklift truck or tractors. Thus a door on the standup forklift would provide a safer compartment. This design would help in preventing severe injuries to the operator in case of any accidents. The important criterion of this design is to provide a door with latch and slide mechanism to ensure easy egress and ingress of the operator. The compartment is designed ergonomically for 95th percentile industrial male population. The accident data is studied by performing statistical and failure analysis. Weibull plots are fitted for life time distribution data and are found to be of increasing rate. This suggests that present safety precautions are increasingly ineffective

Web Application for Deploying COMPS Collaborative Problem-Solving Exercises

This project builds out the computer infrastructure of the COMPS project, turning it from purely a research tool to a facility that could have practical application. COMPS (Computer-Mediated Problem Solving) studies collaborative learning through problem solving dialogues. The web-hosted typed-chat collaboration tool has special features for student collaborations with involvement of teaching assistants. This project adds a web application to support deploying COMPS exercises in college classes. Instructors can register their classes and upload class rosters. They can upload problems for the students to work on, assign students to collaboration groups, and manage lab times. The web application has been built as a three-tier architecture which consists of web front end, back-end application, and database. The front end has been built on the Angular framework and backend has been built on the Java Spring Boot framework. We have used Postgres DB as a database for this application.This App/Site will be accessible to both students and professors. We have deployed it in the cloud during development and also on VU servers. Using freely available software running on industry-standard platforms, the application should be cost-effective, scalable, and easy to use

A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TWO CONVENTIONAL SYSTEMIC THERAPEUTIC REGIMEN ON PSORIASIS TREATMENT OUTCOMES

ABSTRACT Introduction: Psoriasis is a dynamic, genetic, immunological, systemic disorder manifesting on the body surface as well as in the joints in a significant proportion of patients. Psoriasis affects both sexes equally and can occur at any age. The pathogenesis involves a complex system of mixture of many factors like environmental, chemical, genetic and immunological factors. Many treatment options were available and our objective is to find out which of the two oral therapies are better from therapeutic outcomes point of view i.e. 75% improvement in PASI score. Materials and methods: PASI score sheets, patients with moderate to severe forms of psoriasis were included in the study and were assigned to either methotrexate or acitretin treatment group. The study was randomized controlled study and was conducted for a period of 8 months. Results: A total of 30 patients were inducted into the study (N=30), males were 15 and females were 15. For psoriasis vulgaris, acitretin took 6.07 weeks to achieve 75% improvement in PASI score whereas Methotrexate took 7.9 weeks. For Plantar psoriasis, acitretin took 5.95 weeks whereas methotrexate took 9.47 weeks. For palmoplantar psoriasis, acitretin took 8.32 weeks and for palmar psoriasis, acitretin took 3.4 weeks. For plaque psoriasis, acitretin took 5 weeks, whereas methotrexate took 8.5 weeks to achieve 75% improvement in PASI score. Conclusion: Although Acitretin appears to be more efficient than MTX in terms of number of days required to achieve 75% improvement in PASI score and ADRs, actually MTX is more effective than Acitretin if the frequency of dose or number of doses is compared. KEYWORDS: Acitretin, Methotrexate, PASI, Psoriasis, Therapeutic outcomes

Traffic Congestion Alert System in Work Zone

Road work zones cause more than ten percent of congestion and are the main reason for nonrecurring congestion on freeways. The existing notification system at Iowa work zones was less efficient with handling the fluctuating and short duration messages. In this report, we explain the software developed to send reliable congestion alerts using the real-time traffic data. The system is implemented to consume the Wavetronix sensor data for every twenty seconds and identifies the traffic congestion state in three predefined formats, such as ”Stop traffic ahead, ”Slow traffic ahead” and ”No congestion.” Whenever severe traffic congestion persists more than the threshold time, we immediately notify the district traffic engineers with multimedia text alerts. The text alert content along with the live camera snapshot would help the traffic engineers to analyze the situation and make better and quick responses. In addition to the text alerts, we also provide a data API that gives the real-time work zone bottlenecks. The software was developed to completely platform agnostic and tested and deployed on Microsoft Azure

Summarization Approaches Based on Document Probability Distributions

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

AGERATUM CONYZOIDES LINN., AND WOUND HEALING PROPERTIES

It is unimaginable to even think of the existence of human race on the Earth without vegetation on it. Right from the beginning of the human race, humans depended on plants for their survival. Medicinal plants were the only source of medicine for any ailment. Ayurveda, Unani, and Chinese Ordinary medicine contain statements of medicinal plant description and their use which are the evidences to medicinal plant use. During economic crisis and in less affluent rural areas, the population depends mainly on medicinal plants or traditional medicine and even in urban areas, the population frequently uses this alternative medicine for routine health care and as self-medication against minor and chronic ailments. This traditional/local medicine evolved out from a holistic perspective of human well-being. In the developed countries and more affluent regions, phyto-pharmaceutical therapy is being used as an alternative to biomedicine and also for the treatment of mild and chronic health problems. Wounds are ultimate result of physical disruption of the skin – which is the major hurdle for the infection to establish itself by microbial pathogens in visceral tissues. Infection results when the microbes breach this skin barrier. An intrinsic feature of inflammation is the removal of polluting microbes and fortunately this inflammation also happens to be a routine part of injury recovery process. If for any reason the contaminating microbes are not removed completely, which usually results from ineffective decontamination, there will be a long standing inflammation.5%w/w simple ointments were prepared from the extracts of Ageratum conyzoides and evaluated for wound healing properties and it was found that these ointments significantly reduced the number of days required for wound contraction and for epithelialization when compared to placebo in excisional wound models of rats. Keywords: plants, ageratum conyzoides, excisional wound model, rate of wound contractio

EVALUATION OF PHYTOCHEMICAL CONSTITUENTS AND ANTIBACTERIAL PROPERTIES OF AGERATUM CONYZOIDES LINN., AGAINST THE MOST COMMON SKIN INFECTION CAUSING AGENTS

Phytochemical constituenys in plants have a variety of uses and may even serve as anti-microbials. Our study is  aimed at evaluating the phytochemical constituents of A.conyzoides by qualitative analysis and also to evaluate the antibacterial properties of the extracts of A.conyzoides by disc diffusion method. The extracts of the plants contain all the phytochemicals that were tested for and the extracts of the plant possessed significant antibacterial properties at concentrations of 50mg/ml and more. The ethyl acetate extract of the plant has the highest zone of inhibition activity among all the forms of extracts of A.conyzoides. Keywords: Ageratum conyzoides, antibacterial property, ethyl acetate extract, Phytochemicals, Disc diffusion method

Topic Modeling as a Strategy of Inquiry in Organizational Research: A Tutorial With an Application Example on Organizational Culture

Research has emphasized the limitations of qualitative and quantitative approaches to studying organizational phenomena. For example, in-depth interviews are resource-intensive, while questionnaires with closed-ended questions can only measure predefined constructs. With the recent availability of large textual data sets and increased computational power, text mining has become an attractive method that has the potential to mitigate some of these limitations. Thus, we suggest applying topic modeling, a specific text mining technique, as a new and complementary strategy of inquiry to study organizational phenomena. In particular, we outline the potentials of structural topic modeling for organizational research and provide a step-by-step tutorial on how to apply it. Our application example builds on 428,492 reviews of Fortune 500 companies from the online platform Glassdoor on which employees can evaluate organizations. We demonstrate how structural topic models allow to inductively identify topics that matter to employees and to quantify their relationship with employees' perception of organizational culture. We discuss the advantages and limitations of topic modeling as a research method and outline how future research can apply the technique to study organizational phenomena