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ABSTRACT: Numerous secreted virulence factors have been proposed to account for the fulminating and destructive nature of Vibrio vulnificus infections. A mutant of V. vulnificus that exhibited less cytotoxicity to INT-407 human intestinal epithelial cells was screened from a library of mutants constructed by random transposon mutagenesis. A transposon-tagging method was used to identify and clone an open reading frame encoding an RTX toxin secretion ATP binding protein, RtxE, from V. vulnificus. The deduced amino acid sequence of RtxE from V. vulnificus was 91% identical to that reported from Vibrio cholerae. Functions of the rtxE gene in virulence were assessed by constructing an isogenic mutant whose rtxE gene was inactivated by allelic exchanges and by evaluating the differences between its virulence phenotype and that of the wild type in vitro and in mice. The disruption of rtxE blocked secretion of RtxA to the cell exterior and resulted in a significant reduction in cytotoxic activity against epithelial cells in vitro. Also, the intraperitoneal 50% lethal dose of the rtxE mutant was 10(4) to 10(5) times higher than that of the parental wild type, indicating that RtxE is essential for the virulence of V. vulnificus. Furthermore, the present study demonstrated that the rtxBDE genes are transcribed as one transcriptional unit under the control of a single promoter, P(rtxBDE). The activity of V. vulnificus P(rtxBDE) is induced by exposure to INT-407 cells, and the induction requires direct contact of the bacteria with the host cells.
Infection and immunity 05/2008; 76(4):1509-17. · 4.21 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: In this paper, we propose a neural network based model of robust speech recognition by integrating audio, visual, and contextual information. bimodal neural network(BMNN) is a multi-layer perceptron of 4 layers, which combines audio and visual features of speech to compensate loss of audio information caused by noise. In order to improve the accuracy of speech recognition in noisy environments, we also propose a post-processing based on contextual information which are sequential patterns of words spoken by a user. Our experimental results show that our model outperforms any single mode models. Particularly, when we use the contextual information, we can obtain over 90% recognition accuracy even in noisy environments, which is a significant improvement compared with the state of art in speech recognition.
Natural Computation, 2007. ICNC 2007. Third International Conference on; 09/2007
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ABSTRACT: A coevolutionary algorithm is an extention of the conventional genetic algorithm that incorporates the strategy of divide and conquer in developing a complex solution in the form of interacting co-adapted subcomponents. In this paper we propose an efficient coevolutionary algorithm dynamically controlling species splitting and merging. Our algorithm conducts efficient local search in the reduced search space by splitting species for independent variables while it conducts global search by merging species for interdependent variables. We have experimented the proposed algorithm with some benchmarking function optimization problems and the inventory control problem, and have shown that the algorithm outperforms the existing coevolutionary algorithms.
Natural Computation, 2007. ICNC 2007. Third International Conference on; 09/2007
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ABSTRACT: A mutant exhibiting decreased cytotoxic activity toward INT-407 intestinal epithelial cells and carrying a mutation in the rtx gene cluster that consists of rtxCA and rtxBDE operons was screened from a library of V. vulnificus mutants. The functions of the rtxA gene, assessed by constructing an isogenic mutant and evaluating its phenotypic changes, demonstrated that RtxA is essential for the virulence of V. vulnificus in mice as well as in tissue cultures.
The Journal of Microbiology 05/2007; 45(2):146-52. · 1.10 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: Fuzzy rules are suitable for describing uncertain phenomena and natural for human understanding and they are, in general, efficient for classification. In this paper, we propose an optimized fuzzy rule generation method for classification both in accuracy and comprehensibility (or rule complexity). We investigate the use of genetic algorithm to determine an optimal set of membership functions for quantitative data. In our method, for a given set of membership functions a fuzzy decision tree is constructed and its accuracy and rule complexity are evaluated, which are combined into the fitness function to be optimized. We have experimented our algorithm with several benchmark data sets. The experiment results show that our method is more efficient in performance and compactness of rules compared with the existing methods
Integrating AI and Data Mining, 2006. AIDM '06. International Workshop on; 01/2007
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ABSTRACT: A wbpP gene encoding a putative UDP-N-acetyl-D-glucosamine C(4) epimerase was identified and cloned from Vibrio vulnificus. The functions of the wbpP gene, assessed by the construction of an isogenic mutant and by evaluating its phenotype changes, demonstrated that WbpP is essential in both the pathogenesis and the capsular polysaccharide biosynthesis of V. vulnificus.
Infection and Immunity 02/2006; 74(1):721-8. · 4.16 Impact Factor
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Neural Information Processing, 13th International Conference, ICONIP 2006, Hong Kong, China, October 3-6, 2006, Proceedings, Part II; 01/2006
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Neural Information Processing, 13th International Conference, ICONIP 2006, Hong Kong, China, October 3-6, 2006, Proceedings, Part III; 01/2006
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Neural Information Processing, 13th International Conference, ICONIP 2006, Hong Kong, China, October 3-6, 2006, Proceedings, Part III; 01/2006
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Advances in Natural Computation, First International Conference, ICNC 2005, Changsha, China, August 27-29, 2005, Proceedings, Part II; 01/2005
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Advances in Neural Networks - ISNN 2005, Second International Symposium on Neural Networks, Chongqing, China, May 30 - June 1, 2005, Proceedings, Part III; 01/2005
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Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, 9th International Conference, KES 2005, Melbourne, Australia, September 14-16, 2005, Proceedings, Part IV; 01/2005
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Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery, Second International Conference, FSKD 2005, Changsha, China, August 27-29, 2005, Proceedings, Part I; 01/2005
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Computational Science and Its Applications - ICCSA 2005, International Conference, Singapore, May 9-12, 2005, Proceedings, Part I; 01/2005
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Database Systems for Advances Applications, 9th International Conference, DASFAA 2004, Jeju Island, Korea, March 17-19, 2004, Proceedings; 01/2004
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PRICAI 2004: Trends in Artificial Intelligence, 8th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Auckland, New Zealand, August 9-13, 2004, Proceedings; 01/2004
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Database Systems for Advances Applications, 9th International Conference, DASFAA 2004, Jeju Island, Korea, March 17-19, 2004, Proceedings; 01/2004
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Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 7th Pacific-Asia Conference, PAKDD 2003, Seoul, Korea, April 30 - May 2, 2003, Proceedings; 01/2003
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ABSTRACT: To evaluate the effect of head position as a method to facilitate the superior vena caval placement of catheters during right subclavian catheterization in children.
Prospective, randomized, clinical trial.
Department of anesthesiology, university hospital.
One hundred sixty-eight pediatric patients, aged <8 yrs, undergoing simple cardiac surgery or pediatric general surgery.
At operation, the patients were assigned by the stratified randomization for age to one of the four groups (n = 42 each): when the patients turned their heads away from the puncture side, this was away-turning group; when turned toward the puncture side, toward-turning group; when lateral-flexed (tilted) away from the puncture side, away-lateral-flexion group; and when lateral-flexed toward the puncture side, toward-lateral-flexion group. Each group was divided into two subgroups depending on the age: infant (n = 24 each) and young children (>12 months; n = 18 each).
Right infraclavicular subclavian catheterization, using the Seldinger technique, was attempted. After catheterization, a simple chest radiograph was used to identify the location of catheter tip. There was no difference in age and body weight between the groups. Only in infants was the successful placement rate of toward-lateral-flexion group (92%) higher than that of the other three groups (54% [away-lateral-flexion], 63% [away-turning], or 54% [toward-turning]), and there was no difference among the others.
In infants, tilting the head toward the catheterization side can reduce the incidence of catheter malposition during the right subclavian approach.
Critical Care Medicine 02/2002; 30(2):297-9. · 6.33 Impact Factor
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ABSTRACT: In this paper, we propose an efficient fuzzy rule generation
algorithm based on fuzzy decision tree for data mining. We combine the
comprehensibility of rules generated based on decision tree such as ID3
and C4.5 and the expressive power of fuzzy sets. Particularly, fuzzy
rules allow us to effectively classify patterns of nonaxis-parallel
decision boundaries, which are difficult to do using attribute-based
classification methods. In our algorithm we first determine an
appropriate set of membership functions for each attribute of data using
histogram analysis. Given a set of membership functions then we
construct a fuzzy decision tree in a similar way to that of ID3 and
C4.5. We also apply the genetic algorithm to tune the initial set of
membership functions. We have experimented our algorithm with several
benchmark data sets. The experiment results show that our method is more
efficient in performance and comprehensibility of rules compared with
other methods including C4.5
Fuzzy Systems Conference Proceedings, 1999. FUZZ-IEEE '99. 1999 IEEE International; 02/1999
