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Malassezia folliculitis (MalF) mimics acne vulgaris and bacterial folliculitis in clinical presentations. The role of Gram staining in rapid diagnosis of MalF has not been well studied. In our study, 32 patients were included to investigate the utility of Gram staining for MalF diagnosis. The final diagnoses of MalF were determined according to clinical presentation, pathological result and treatment response to antifungal agents. Our results show that the sensitivity and specificity of Gram staining are 84.6% and 100%, respectively. In conclusion, Gram staining is a rapid, non-invasive, sensitive and specific method for MalF diagnosis.

Background Dermatofibrosarcoma protuberans (DFSP) is a rare and locally aggressive tumour, with a high recurrence rate, even after complete surgical excision. Adjuvant radiotherapy (RT) has been suggested to reduce the risk of local recurrence after inadequate surgical resection in patients with narrow or positive surgical margins. However, the overall efficacy of adjuvant RT has not been well studied because of the rarity of DFSP and lack of an appropriate comparison group. Objective We sought to evaluate the efficacy of adjuvant RT for DFSP by conducting a systemic review and meta-analysis to provide a more evidence-based measure of its effectiveness. Methods We conducted a systemic review of articles published before 31 June 2015. Due to the rarity of the disease, we included all studies that reported DFSP patients who received adjuvant RT (postoperatively). The pooled recurrence rates were analysed from these extracted data. Results Twelve studies met the inclusion criteria. The pooled estimate of the recurrence rate for all adjuvant radiotherapy was 11.74% (95% CI 7.4-17.38; n = 167). Patients with positive/close had a pooled recurrence rate of 14.23% (95% CI 8.13-22.49; n = 92), whereas there was no recurrence in patients with negative margins. The pooled estimate of the recurrence rate between surgery alone and surgery combined with adjuvant radiotherapy showed no significant difference (odds ratio 0.31, P = 0.07), although there was a trend that adjuvant RT had a lower recurrence rate than surgery alone. Conclusion Adjuvant RT might be considered for all patients undergoing surgical excision, even if a negative surgical margin has been achieved. Furthermore, for patients with large or recurrent tumours, especially when wide excision with negative margin would result in a significant functional or cosmetic deficit, postoperative radiotherapy is highly recommended in order to achieve a lower recurrence rate.

Low dose of d -cycloserine (DCS), a partial agonist of glycine binding site on N -methyl- d -aspartate (NMDA) receptors, can facilitate extracellular signal-regulated kinase1/2 (ERK1/2) activity in the amygdala and modulate emotional behavior. However, the relationship between ERK1/2 activation, individual anxiety levels, and DCS is unknown. Therefore, based on open arm time in the elevated plus-maze, male Wistar rats were divided into subgroups with either low (LOA) or high open arm (HOA) time. Open arm time is usually accepted as a critical index of unconditioned anxiety-like/avoidance behavior. On the following day, DCS (30 mg/kg, i.p.) was administered 30 min before the second elevated plus-maze test. On day 8 and 9, the rats were subjected to a 2-day session of the forced swim test, receiving the DCS treatment again 30 min before the 2nd day. On the 16th day, 30 min after the administration of DCS, the rats were sacrificed in order to detect the phosphorylation of ERK1/2 (p-ERK1/2) in the amygdala by Western blots. The results showed that: (1) DCS decreased the open arm time in HOA but not LOA rats. (2) DCS suppressed the immobility in the day-2 trial of the forced swim test and increased the p-ERK1/2 level in the amygdala in LOA but not HOA rats. This is the first instance data has been found indicating different sensitivities of p-ERK1/2 and behavioral responses to the treatment of DCS between HOA and LOA rats. The results suggest that the activity of NMDA receptor-mediated ERK1/2 signaling is mediated by individual behavioral differences which are related to the antidepressant-like activity of DCS. This study provides first insight into the pathophysiological role of ERK signaling with regard to individual differences in emotional behavior.

The electrostatic discharge (ESD) problem has become a challenging reliability issue in nanometer circuit design. High voltages resulted from ESD might cause high current densities in a small device and burn it out, so on-chip protection circuits for IC pads are required. To reduce the design cost, the protection circuit should be added only for the IC pads with an ESD current path, which arises the ESD current path analysis problem. In this paper, we first introduce the analysis problem for ESD protection in circuit design. We then model the circuit as a constrained graph, decompose ESD connected components linked with the pads, and apply the breadth-first search (BFS) to identify the ESD connected components in each constrained graph and thus the current paths. Experimental results show that our algorithm can detect all ESD paths very efficiently and economically. To our best knowledge, our algorithm is the first point tool available to the public for the ESD analysis.

Address: 1School of Psychology, Chung Shan Medical University, College of Medicine, Taiwan, China, 2Institute of Biochemistry and Biotechnology, Chung Shan Medical University, China, 3Department of Biomedical Sciences, Chung Shan Medical University, China, 4Institute of Immunology, Chung Shan Medical University, China and 5Department of Food and Nutrition, Providence University, China * Corresponding author

A simulation-based temporal assertion verification engine for PSL (property specification language), called Tempral Wizard, is proposed in this paper. It is very efficient because its time and space complexity are both O(n). A new concept, tag, is introduced in Tempral Wizard and it handles the forall operator elegantly.

As the complexity of circuit design increases, verification through simulation has become a bottleneck of the IC design process. Distributed parallel simulation is one way to solving the problem. In order to distribute the simulation workload to multiple processors, the design must be carefully partitioned first. While most previous work focus on gate level partitioning, our work extends a previously implemented Verilog gate-level partitioner to support RTL and behavior level partitioning. Techniques to partition special constructs specific to these levels, such as global access, function calls and memory access, are described in this paper. The experimental results show that our techniques are capable of finding partitions which can accelerate simulation.

Due to the discovery of Shor’s algorithm1, many classical crypto-systems based on the hardness of solving discrete log and factoring problem are theoretically broken in the presence of quantum computers. This means that some of the classical secret communication protocols are no longer secure and hence motivate us to find other secure crypto-systems. In this paper, we present a new quantum communication protocol which allows two parties, Alice and Bob, to exchange classical messages securely. Eavesdroppers are not able to decrypt the secret messages and will be detected if they do exist. Unlike classical crypto-systems, the security of this protocol is not based on the hardness of any unproven mathematic or algorithmic problem. Instead, it is based on the laws of nature.

Similar phase formation and crystallization behaviors have been observed in the a-Ge/Cu bilayer under thermal annealing and pulsed laser irradiation. The Cu3Ge phase would form prior to the crystallization of a-Ge. The crystallization temperature and activation energy for crystallization of a-Ge were reduced to 310 °C and 2.75 eV, respectively, due to the fast Ge diffusion in the already formed germanide phases. The reaction exponent m of ∼2.0 for the a-Ge/Cu bilayer corresponds to a crystallization process in which grain growth occurs with nucleation, and the nucleation rate decreases with the progress of the grain growth process. Under pulsed laser irradiation, the maximum data-transfer-rates of 44, 56, 74, and 112 Mbit/s can be achieved in the write-once blue-ray disk at the recording powers of 3, 4, 5, and 6 mW, respectively. The a-Ge/Cu bilayer also demonstrated sufficient optical contrast and adequate absorptance for low power and high speed write-once blue-ray recording.

The crystallization kinetics of a-Ge thin film induced by a thin Ni layer under thermal annealing and pulsed laser irradiation has been studied. Under thermal annealing, the crystallization temperature and activation energy for crystallization of a-Ge in the a-Ge/Ni bilayer recording film were significantly reduced to 385 °C and 2.4 eV, respectively, due to the fast Ge diffusion in the already formed germanide phases. The reaction exponent m of ∼1.7 for the a-Ge/Ni bilayer corresponds to a crystallization process in which grain growth occurs with nucleation and the nucleation rate decreases with the progress of the grain growth process. Under pulsed laser irradiation, the maximum data-transfer rates of 22, 56, 74, and 112 Mbits/s can be achieved in the write-once blue-ray disk at the recording powers of 3, 4, 5, and 6 mW, respectively.