Background: Acanthosis nigricans (AN) is a cutaneous sign of internal malignancy in adults, usually an adenocarcinoma. The typical skin changes include: thickening and hyperpigmentation in typical localization with mucocutaneous involvement. \nCase presentation: A 54-year-old woman with hyperpigmentation, velvety cutaneous thickening and verrucous excrescences involving the axillary, inframammar, and inguinal regions with a history of 1 years is presented. Hyperpigmentation and thickening existed also on the nape, umbilicus, and periorbital regions. The dermatologist clinically diagnosed the condition as AN. The image data of the abdomen revealed a mass in the right hepatic lobe sized about 5.1×3.0×6.0 cm. The tumor was resected surgically and the diagnosis of well differentiated hepatocholangiocarcinoma was established. Although AN is mostly reported in the course of abdominal malignancies, this is a very rare case report of AN associated with bile duct carcinoma of the liver.\nConclusion: Paraneoplastic type of acanthosis nigricans in patient with concomitant hepatocholangiocarcinoma is rare reported in the literature. In the aspect of clinical occurrence of skin lesions suggesting acanthosis nigricans the diagnostics should be focused on internal malignancies. Although relatively rare, they need to be recognized by dermatologists to make an early diagnosis and improve the prognosis related to the neoplasia.

COPD is a preventable and treatable disease with some significant extra-pulmonary effects that may contribute to the severity in individual patients. Its pulmonary component is characterized by airflow limitation that is not fully reversible. The airflow limitation is usually progressive and associated with an abnormal inflammatory response of the lung to noxious particles or gases. COPD is also a complex inflammatory disease and particularly sensitive to immune response for the exotic stimulator. While TLRs are a kind of pattern recognition receptors, which are important in the recognition of various pathogens. From the relationship between TLRs and COPD, we can conclude that TLRs are the novel potential therapeutic targets for COPD treatment.

In this paper, the parallel transport frames over non-lightlike curves in Minkowski 3-space are introduced. Evolution equations of these frames with respect to arc length and time are calculated over the space of these curves. Then the equivalence of the non-linear Schrödinger equation and non-linear heat system to the vortex filament equation for the binormal motion of non-lightlike curves is shown by use of the parallel frames and their evolution equations.

Objective ?To study the expressions of iNOS?CD105?VEGF in the HBV related HCC tissue specimens and the relationships between them, the expression of the iNOS and early recurrence of the HCC after R0 resection . Methods ?The expressions of iNOS?CD105?VEGF in the 248 HBV related HCC tissues were examined by tissue microarray and two-step methods of PV-6000 of immunohistochemistry and the expressions of iNOS in 20 frozen HCC specimens were examined by the RT-PCR and the correlations between them, and the expression of iNOS and the tumor early recurrence were analyzed. Results?The positive expression of iNOS in the HCC tissues was found in both immunohistochemistry and RT-PCR methods. The positive expression of iNOS was correlated with tumor early recurrence (P=0.000?, the expression of iNOS was one of the independent factors for the early recurrence by the cox regression analysis? P<0.05?. In the iNOS positive expression group, the positive expression rate of CD105 and VEGF was significantly higher than in iNOS negative expression group (P=0.020, 0.032). Conclusions?The expression of iNOS is related with the tumor angiopoiesis, and the positive expression iNOS in HCC tissues implys the higher outside liver metastases rate, the early recurrence after R0 radical hepatectomy in the HBV related HCC patients .

Huge number of advances has been made in developing intelligent systems. Some of them inspired by biological neural networks. Researchers from various disciplines are designing the Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to solve a variety of problems. The problems are such as prediction, pattern recognition, optimization, control and associative memory. There are many conventional approaches have been developed to solve these problems. Even though successful applications can be found in certain well-constrained environments, no one is flexible enough to perform well. Exciting alternatives provided by ANNs, and that is beneficial for many applications. Hepatitis B virus (HBV) chronically infects approximately 200,000 Indians and 300 million people worldwide. Approximately 15% to 40% of chronically infected individuals will eventually develop cirrhosis without intervention. Cirrhosis is the end-stage liver disease also called hepatocellular carcinoma. The diagnostic process is streamlined by employing artificial intelligence methods especially computer aided diagnosis and artificial neural networks. Diverse types of medical data can be handled by these adaptive learning algorithms. These adaptive learning algorithms are integrated them into categorized outputs. Many uses in medical diagnosis are found in Artificial neural networks. In this paper an intelligent system based on generalized regression neural network has been proposed for the diagnosis of the hepatitis B virus disease

This research was designed to investigate the mediating role of Leader Member Exchange between change-oriented behaviors of managers and employees’ job satisfaction. Participants of this survey were consisted of 155 employees from Malaysian organizations regardless of the type of industry or size of organizations that they worked for. The employees were asked to rate their managers’ behaviors through the Managerial Practice Survey. LMX was measured through the 12 items of LMX-MDM and Job satisfaction was evaluated via 3 items of Michigan Organizational Assessment Questionnaire. Partial Least Square was applied for the purpose of data analysis. The statistical results showed the significant mediating role of LMX between two dimensions of leaders’ change-oriented behaviors and job satisfaction. Thus, this study has contributed theoretically to the leadership-associated literature by investigating the mediating role of LMX in relationship between managers’ behaviors and employees’ job satisfaction. In addition, this study has offered practical contributions to Malaysian managers who consider change-oriented behaviors as a way to increase employees’ job satisfaction through their exchange relationship.

Objectives: Sedentary life style is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and a strong predictor of morbidity and mortality. Inflammatory processes play an important role in the pathogenesis of several chronic diseases such as CVDs. The present study was designed to determine the combined effect of aerobic training and garlic supplementation on some inflammatory markers in sedentary individuals. \nMethods: Thirty-six young, healthy and inactive men (20-30yr) were randomly assigned to one of the following interventions: garlic (G), aerobic training and garlic(TG), placebo(P), or aerobic training and placebo(TP). Subjects consumed two capsules per day which contained 500 milligrams of garlic powder(500 milligram allicin) or starch (placebo). The training groups performed aerobic training including 30-45 minutes running at 60 to 75% of maximum heart rate. At the beginning of the study and after four weeks of interventions blood samples were taken in order to assess serum levels of hs-CRP, IL-6 and TNF-α. One-way ANOVA and Bonferroni post hoc test were used to analyze the data. \nResults: We observed no significant differences among groups in hs-CRP, IL-6 and TNF-α levels after the experimental period (p>0.05). Yet, IL-6 and hs-CRP levels significantly decreased in TG group compared to pre-test (week 0) levels. \nConclusion: Our data demonstrated that garlic consumption along with aerobic training had no significant effect on these variables in a four-week period. Although we observed no significant difference among experimental groups, this combined intervention may be effective in a longer period and therefore further studies are warranted.

Reliable assessment of airport visibility is essential for air traffic safety. In order to overcome the drawbacks of the currently used multiple linear regression in predicting airport visibility, we present an artificial neural network approach for forecasting airport visibility using weather data. Data used in the study was collected from an airport weather division located south of Taiwan and is from 1984 to 2004. To accomplish the objective, correlation coefficient and F test are used for determining the possible influence factors to airport visibility. The determined influence factors are then applied to multiple linear regression and back-propagation artificial neural network for modelling airport visibility. The influence factors in the studied airport were found to be humidity, visual hazard, temperature, and atmospheric condition. In modelling airport visibility under 1800 m, the coefficient of determination for artificial neural network and multiple linear regressions, respectively, are 92.6 % and 69.3 %. Further, in airport visibility between 1800 m and 3600 m, artificial neural network outperformed multiple linear regressions having a coefficient of determination 93.4 % compared to 76 %. Based on the coefficients of determination, we can conclude that back-propagation artificial neural network approach is superior to the conventional regression method.