Quantification of apoptotic phenomenon on endometrial biopsies in postmenopausal patients under hormonal replacement therapy (HRT).

AIM: To quantify the apoptotic phenomenon on endometrial biopsies in postmenopausal patients under hormonal replacement therapy (HRT). MATERIAL AND METHODS: The study lot consisted of 30 endometrial biopsies on which we studied the apoptotic phenomenon through morphological and molecular biology techniques (TUNEL reaction). Examination of endometrial biopsies before and post-therapeutically has been made. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS: From morphological point of view, pre-therapeutically, endometrial biopsies presented apoptotic changes in about 1-3% of cells and under TSH there have been observed apoptotic changes in about 1-2% of cells. In female reproductive system, we found out a raised rate of cellular proliferation and concurrently a raised rate of apoptosis. Apoptotic phenomenon can be observed in endometrium at every menstrual cycle. In proliferative endometrium apoptosis rate is low, but in endometrial carcinoma apoptosis rate grow up. Bcl2 and Bax are expressing in normal and hyperplastic endometrium, but in endometrial carcinoma Bcl2/Bax ratio decline. CONCLUSIONS: Quantification of apoptosis, using morphological and TUNEL reaction methods, on endometrial biopsies in postmenopausal patients before and after therapy indicate a low rate of apoptotic phenomenon.

A visual tool for DNA repeats screening.

DNA sequence analysis has been developing to reveal some hidden structure, to distinguish coding from noncoding regions in DNA sequence, and to explore structural similarity among DNA sequences. DNA repeats are associated with human disease, seems to play a role in genome organization and evolution and are important in regulatory processes. A lot of the methods for finding repeated sequences use signal processing techniques which implies distances, similarities and consensus sequences to generate candidate sequences. This paper presents results obtained using a mapping algorithm and a custom dot-plot analysis combined with image processing techniques, to isolate the position of DNA patterns with different lengths.

Information-transmission rates in manual control of unstable systems with time delays.

In analyzing the human-machine interaction (HMI), a human-centered approach is needed to address the potential and limitation of human control, especially in the control of high-order or unstable systems. However, there is no quantitative measure of the human performance or cognitive workload in these difficult HMI tasks. We propose to characterize the HMI as information flows quantified by the information-transmission rate in bits per second (b/s). Using information- and control-theoretic approaches, we derive the minimum rates of information transmission in manual control required by any deterministic controller to stabilize the feedback system. Furthermore, we suggest a method adopted from time-series analysis to estimate the information-transmission rate from human experiments. We show that the relationship between the empirically estimated information rates and the minimum bounds allows for the quantitative indication of the potential and limitation of human manual control. We illustrate our method in the control of an inverted pendulum with time delays.