Search results for "5-7"
showing 10 items of 428 documents
The JAK2 pathway is activated in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis
2018
Background: Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is the most rapidly progressive and fatal fibrotic disorder, with no curative therapies. The signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3) protein is activated in lung fibroblasts and alveolar type II cells (ATII), thereby contributing to lung fibrosis in IPF. Although activation of Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) has been implicated in proliferative disorders, its role in IPF is unknown. The aim of this study was to analyze JAK2 activation in IPF, and to determine whether JAK2/STAT3 inhibition is a potential therapeutic strategy for this disease. Methods and results: JAK2/p-JAK2 and STAT3/pSTAT3 expression was evaluated using quantitative …
The Active Inference Approach to Ecological Perception: General Information Dynamics for Natural and Artificial Embodied Cognition
2018
The emerging neurocomputational vision of humans as embodied, ecologically embedded, social agents – who shape and are shaped by their environment – offers a golden opportunity to revisit and revise ideas about the physical and information-theoretic underpinnings of life, mind, and consciousness itself. In particular, the active inference framework (AIF) makes it possible to bridge connections from computational neuroscience and robotics/AI to ecological psychology and phenomenology, revealing common underpinnings and overcoming key limitations. AIF opposes the mechanistic to the reductive, while staying fully grounded in a naturalistic and information theoretic foundation, using the princi…
In Situ Representations and Access Consciousness in Neural Blackboard or Workspace Architectures
2018
Phenomenal theories of consciousness assert that consciousness is based on specific neural correlates in the brain, which can be separated from all cognitive functions we can perform. If so, the search for robot consciousness seems to be doomed. By contrast, theories of functional or access consciousness assert that consciousness can be studied only with forms of cognitive access, given by cognitive processes. Consequently, consciousness and cognitive access cannot be fully dissociated. Here, the global features of cognitive access of consciousness are discussed based on neural blackboard or (global) workspace architectures, combined with content addressable or "in situ" representations as …
MUC1 deficiency mediates corticosteroid resistance in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
2018
Background Lung inflammation in COPD is poorly controlled by inhaled corticosteroids (ICS). Strategies to improve ICS efficacy or the search of biomarkers who may select those patients candidates to receive ICS in COPD are needed. Recent data indicate that MUC1 cytoplasmic tail (CT) membrane mucin can mediate corticosteroid efficacy in chronic rhinosinusitis. The objective of this work was to analyze the previously unexplored role of MUC1 on corticosteroid efficacy in COPD in vitro and in vivo models. Methods MUC1-CT expression was measured by real time PCR, western blot, immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence. The inflammatory mediators IL-8, MMP9, GM-CSF and MIP3α were measured by EL…
A Dirichlet Autoregressive Model for the Analysis of Microbiota Time-Series Data
2021
Growing interest in understanding microbiota dynamics has motivated the development of different strategies to model microbiota time series data. However, all of them must tackle the fact that the available data are high-dimensional, posing strong statistical and computational challenges. In order to address this challenge, we propose a Dirichlet autoregressive model with time-varying parameters, which can be directly adapted to explain the effect of groups of taxa, thus reducing the number of parameters estimated by maximum likelihood. A strategy has been implemented which speeds up this estimation. The usefulness of the proposed model is illustrated by application to a case study.
Bacterial-viral load and the immune response in stable and exacerbated COPD: significance and therapeutic prospects.
2016
Silvestro Ennio D’Anna,1 Bruno Balbi,2 Francesco Cappello,3,4 Mauro Carone,2 Antonino Di Stefano21Department of Rehabilitation, Cardiorespiratory Unit, Fondazione Istituto G. Giglio di Cefalù, 2Pneumology Unit and Laboratory of Cytoimmunopathology of Heart and Lung, Fondazione Salvatore Maugeri, IRCCS, Veruno (NO) and Cassano delle Murge (BA), 3Human Anatomy Section, Department of Experimental Biomedicine and Clinical Neuroscience, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy; 4Euro-Mediterranean Institute of Science and Technology, Palermo, ItalyAbstract: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is characterized by persistent airflow limitation and an abnormal inflammatory respon…
A Basic Architecture of an Autonomous Adaptive System With Conscious-Like Function for a Humanoid Robot.
2018
In developing a humanoid robot, there are two major objectives. One is developing a physical robot having body, hands, and feet resembling those of human beings and being able to similarly control them. The other is to develop a control system that works similarly to our brain, to feel, think, act, and learn like ours. In this article, an architecture of a control system with a brain-oriented logical structure for the second objective is proposed. The proposed system autonomously adapts to the environment and implements a clearly defined “consciousness” function, through which both habitual behavior and goal-directed behavior are realized. Consciousness is regarded as a function for effecti…
How to deal with Haplotype data: An Extension to the Conceptual Schema of the Human Genome
2016
[EN] The goal of this work is to describe the advantages of the application of Conceptual Modeling (CM) in complex domains, such as genomics. Nowadays, the study and comprehension of the human genome is a major challenge due to its high level of complexity. The constant evolution in the genomic domain contributes to the generation of ever larger amounts of new data, which means that if we do not manage it correctly data quality could be compromised (i.e., problems related with heterogeneity and inconsistent data). In this paper, we propose the use of a Conceptual Schema of the Human Genome (CSHG), designed to understand and improve our ontological commitment to the domain and also extend (e…
Machine learning–XGBoost analysis of language networks to classify patients with epilepsy
2017
Our goal was to apply a statistical approach to allow the identification of atypical language patterns and to differentiate patients with epilepsy from healthy subjects, based on their cerebral activity, as assessed by functional MRI (fMRI). Patients with focal epilepsy show reorganization or plasticity of brain networks involved in cognitive functions, inducing ‘atypical’ (compared to ‘typical’ in healthy people) brain profiles. Moreover, some of these patients suffer from drug-resistant epilepsy, and they undergo surgery to stop seizures. The neurosurgeon should only remove the zone generating seizures and must preserve cognitive functions to avoid deficits. To preserve functions, one sho…
La inclusión laboral de las personas con discapacidad desde la administración pública responsable en la Comunidad Valenciana
2020
En la presente coyuntura socioeconómica, la posibilidad de inclusión a través del empleo de las personas con discapacidad es importante no solo por las posibilidades de autonomía económica, sino también por las oportunidades de socialización. Sobre esta base, y considerando que las empresas socialmente responsables asumen la inclusión de estas personas en sus plantillas como una posibilidad de crecimiento y de diferenciación, en el texto se analiza, de manera descriptiva, el papel que las administraciones públicas (AA. PP.) autonómicas, con competencias en la materia, pueden, deben y están haciendo para fomentar la responsabilidad social corporativa (RSC) y la gestión de la inclusión labora…