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In this study, we developed a microfluidic device for a dual work of protein preconcentration and subsequent capture by an immunoassay system. The fabrication of nano-interstices (nanochannels) to generate ion concentration polarization effect (ICP) for the preconcentration was simply performed by exploiting the loose association of glass-on-modified AuNPs to the polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) channel pads as well as spaces between the substrate and the PDMS pad caused by these AuNPs. As a result, 65-fold concentration enhancement was achieved when performed on a sample of fluorescein isothiocyanate-labeled bovine serum albumin (FITC-BSA). Furthermore, a modification procedure of antibodies responsible for capturing target proteins was performed on gold electrodes integrated into the proposed chip. After preconcentration, the immunoassay system was worked, and showed a good performance in capturing targets. Through this study, we demonstrated that the device can work efficiently for the dual purpose, has the potential to apply widely for the analysis and capture of various targets.

We consider the problem of estimating occurrence rates of rare events for extremely sparse data using pre-existing hierarchies and selected features to perform inference along multiple dimensions. In particular, we focus on the problem of estimating click rates for {Advertiser, Publisher, and User} tuples where both the Advertisers and the Publishers are organized as hierarchies that capture broad contextual information at different levels of granularities. Typically, the click rates are low, and the coverage of the hierarchies and dimensions is sparse. To overcome these difficulties, we decompose the joint prior of the three-dimensional click-through rate using tensor decomposition and propose a multidimensional hierarchical Bayesian framework abbreviated as MadHab. We set up a specific framework of each dimension to model dimension-specific characteristics. More specifically, we consider the hierarchical beta process prior for the Advertiser dimension and for the Publisher dimension respectively and a feature-dependent mixture model for the User dimension. Besides the centralized implementation, we propose two distributed algorithms through MapReduce and Spark for inferences, which make the model highly scalable and suited for large scale data mining applications. We demonstrate that on a real world ads campaign platform, our framework can effectively discriminate extremely rare events in terms of their click propensity. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Urine and hair are used for assessing human exposure to toxicants. Urine tests can show acute toxicant exposure. Hair analysis can be used to determine chronic toxicant exposure after months to years; however, compared to urine, hair analysis in exposure assessments is much less frequently investigated. Urine and hair are different matrices, and their mechanisms of toxicant metabolite incorporation are different. The toxicant metabolites present in urine and hair may also be different. To clarify this issue, a procedure was developed to identify toxicant metabolites in rat samples using a mass spectrometry-based metabolomic data processing method. Di-(2-propylheptyl) phthalate (DPHP), an industrial plasticizer, was used as the model toxicant. The developed procedure identified not only known DPHP metabolites (mono-(propyl-6-oxo-heptyl) phthalate, mono-(propyl-6-hydroxyheptyl) phthalate, and mono-(propyl-6-carboxyhexyl) phthalate) but also novel metabolites that were structurally related to DPHP in the rat samples, indicating that the developed procedure successfully identified toxicant metabolites in in vivo samples. Among the 62 tentative metabolites identified from the 7th-day urine and the 28th-day hair samples, 33 were detected in only the urine samples, 19 were detected in only the hair samples, and 10 were identified in both the urine and hair samples. A total of 15 out of the 62 metabolites were confirmed as DPHP structure-related metabolites based on MS/MS analysis. Among the 15 DPHP structure-related metabolites, only 2 metabolites were present in both the urine and hair samples. These results suggested that the metabolites identified in urine could not be applied to exposure assessments based on hair analysis.

Objective Significant heterogeneity was observed in previous trials that assessed the efficacies of sequential therapy for 10 days (S10) versus triple therapy for 14 days (T14) in the first-line treatment of Helicobacter pylori. We aimed to compare the efficacy of S10 and T14 and assess the factors affecting their efficacies. Design We conducted this open-label randomised multicentre trial in eight hospitals and one community in Taiwan. 1300 adult subjects with H pylori infection naive to treatment were randomised (1:1) to receive S10 (lansoprazole and amoxicillin for the first 5 days, followed by lansoprazole, clarithromycin and metronidazole for another 5 days) or T14 (lansoprazole, amoxicillin and clarithromycin for 14 days). All drugs were given twice daily. Successful eradication was defined as negative 13C-urea breath test at least 6 weeks after treatment. Our primary outcome was the eradication rate by intention-to-treat (ITT) and per-protocol (PP) analyses. Antibiotic resistance was determined by agar dilution test. Results The eradication rates of S10 and T14 were 87.2% (567/650, 95% CI 84.4% to 89.6%) and 85.7% (557/650, 95% CI 82.8% to 88.2%) in the ITT analysis, respectively, and were 91.6% (556/607, 95% CI 89.1% to 93.4%) and 91.0% (548/602, 95% CI 88.5% to 93.1%) in the PP analysis, respectively. There were no differences in compliance or adverse effects. The eradication rates in strains susceptible and resistant to clarithromycin were 90.7% and 62.2%, respectively, for S10, and were 91.5% and 44.4%, respectively, for T14. The efficacy of T14, but not S10, was affected by CYP2C19 polymorphism. Conclusions S10 was not superior to T14 in areas with low clarithromycin resistance. Trial registration number NCT01607918.

The present study integrated computer technologies into regular English classes to examine whether using the online TOEIC simulated-test system could promote the TOEIC listening and reading test performance of a group of Taiwanese EFL learners. The participants involved in the one-academic-year study were 52 second-year Taiwanese technological college students who were required to attend classroom instruction sessions about TOEIC test preparation and online learning sessions during which they had to self-accomplish eight designated practice units of TOEIC simulated tests. Data were collected by two TOEIC simulated-test units serving as the pre-and post-tests to assess participants’ TOEIC test performance in listening and reading comprehension before and after using the online TOEIC simulated-test system. The study results revealed that participants improved with a significant increase in both listening and reading post-test scores, suggesting that learning through the online TOEIC simulated-test system had a facilitating effect on the test performance of the target learners in their listening and reading comprehension.

SURF is a robust and useful feature detector to various vision-based applications but lacks of the ability to detect symmetric objects. This paper proposes a new symmetrical SURF descriptor to detect all possible symmetric pairs via a mirroring transformation. With this symmetrical descriptor, a novel feature named “symmelet” is introduced and used in scene representation and effective mobile visual location search. A symmelet is a symmetrical pair formed by a SURF point and its symmetrical one. Three advantages can be gained from this symmelet-absed representation. Firstly, because the set of symmelets is small, a scene can be represented more compactly and searched more efficiently. Secondly, its symmetrical property can compare image/scene contents more accurately. Thirdly, the geometric structure of a scene can be easily constructed and verified and thus filter out many false matches. Then, given a query image captured by a mobile phone, the descried location can be very efficiently and accurately retrieved even though this phone is with quite limited computational power.

For the traditional ion-metal affinity chromatography, the nickel is used to capture the histidines(His)-tagged protein to make up a rapid purification system from the organism lysate. In this paper, a nickel-coated substrate was fabricated by electroplating technology in order to design a planar protein microarray chip. The Taguchi method was adopted to determine the optimal process of the nickel-coated chip using L18 orthogonal array for eight electroplating parameters, such as electroplating buffer, four kinds of electroplating additives, current density, and temperature of electroplating buffer, with three levels for each factor. Then, we utilized the immunoassay to investigate the properties of the protein chip, and the signal was detected by confocal scanner. The result shows the Ni-coated slide has better specific binding ability than nitrocellulose coated slide and the S/N ratio of the immune assay can be improved from 34.12 to 83.42 after optimizing eight electroplating parameters.

A biochemical assay based on fluorescence imaging analysis by confocal laser scanning as a detection technique is specified. The method involved a glass plate coated with nitrocellulose (NC), where α-human-IgE-biotin at various concentrations was immobilized on an NC plate. Luminescent core-shell CdSe/ZnS QD–SA conjugates were then used as a fluorescent labeling agent to be captured specifically by biotinated α-human-IgE immobilized in a micro-array by affinity binding between SA and biotin in a plate-based biochemical assay. A confocal laser scanner was used to detect the fluorescence signals from the α-human-IgE-biotin–SA–QD complex. Experimental findings reveal that fluorescence intensity of QD–SA saturated at QD concentrations above 0.4 mg/ml. Moreover, a calibration curve between the fluorescence intensity and the concentration of α-human-IgE-biotin is plotted. The range of detectable concentrations of biotinlated α-human IgE was found to be between 3.3 and 100 μg/ml in the α-human-IgE-biotin–SA–QD complex. Therefore, the results were consistent with the binding specificity in a plate-based biochemical assay, as determined using luminescent QDs as a labeling agent.

Memecylon pendulum Chih C. Wang, Y. H. Tseng, Y. T. Chen & Kun C. Chang, a new species of Melastomataceae from Taiwan, is described and illustrated. This new species is allied to M. lanceolatum Blanco but is clearly distinguished by its pendulous branchlets, smaller leaves to 7 cm long, shallowly 4-lobed calyx, obtuse or rounded apices of flower buds, and yellowish green fruit at maturity.

In online advertising market it is crucial to provide advertisers with a reliable measurement of advertising effectiveness to make better marketing campaign planning. The basic idea for ad effectiveness measurement is to compare the performance (e.g., success rate) among users who were and who were not exposed to a certain treatment of ads. When a randomized experiment is not available, a naive comparison can be biased because exposed and unexposed populations typically have different features. One solid methodology for a fair comparison is to apply inverse propensity weighting with doubly robust estimation to the observational data. However the existing methods were not designed for the online advertising campaign, which usually suffers from huge volume of users, high dimensionality, high sparsity and imbalance. We propose an efficient framework to address these challenges in a real campaign circumstance. We utilize gradient boosting stumps for feature selection and gradient boosting trees for model fitting, and propose a subsampling-and-backscaling procedure that enables analysis on extremely sparse conversion data. The choice of features, models and feature selection scheme are validated with irrelevant conversion test. We further propose a parallel computing strategy, combined with the subsampling-and-backscaling procedure to reach computational efficiency. Our framework is applied to an online campaign involving millions of unique users, which shows substantially better model fitting and efficiency. Our framework can be further generalized to comparison of multiple treatments and more general treatment regimes, as sketched in the paper. Our framework is not limited to online advertising, but also applicable to other circumstances (e.g., social science) where a 'fair' comparison is needed with observational data.

A newly naturalized plant, Rivina humilis L., was found recently in the central part of Taiwan. This plant represents a new record of this genus and species for Taiwan. This Neotropical plant, native to the southern USA, Mexico, the Caribbean islands, and Central and South America, is described and illustrated in this report.

End-stage renal disease (ESRD) is a serious public health and medical problem in the world. The incidence and prevalence rates grow up in many countries (Figure 1). According to the recent United States Renal Data System (USRDS) report, the incidence of ESRD increases from 346 per million people in 2004 to 371 per million people in 2009 in the United States.(1) ESRD also has financial impacts on the health care delivery and insurance systems. For instance, in Taiwan, 68,000 chronic renal failure patients constitute 0.3% of national population, but they cost nearly 10% of health insurance resource in 2010.(2) In United States, total Medicare spending with ESRD cost 29 billion dollars in 2009.(3) Some developing countries and theirs patients with ESRD are unable to afford the tremendous cost of dialysis and kidney transplant. This leads to extremely public health and medical problem due to no substitute therapy can be provided owing to economic reason.(4)

Urine is a human specimen that is easily obtained non-invasively for clinical diagnosis. We attempted to enhance the resolution of current human urine proteomes and construct a comprehensive reference database for advanced studies, such as the discovery of biomarkers for renal diseases. Multi-dimensional LC-MS/MS was coupled with de novo sequencing and database matching. The proposed approach improved the identification of not only the proteins, but also the post-translational sites of urinary proteins. We identified 165, 200 and 259 unique gene products in the urine proteomes from males, females and pregnant women, respectively. When all of the results were combined and the redundancies removed, a total of 1095 distinct peptides were identified. Of these, 1016 peptides were associated with 334 unique gene products. In this study, over 100 gene products, including some disease-related proteins, were detected in urine for the first time by proteomic approaches. Various proteins with novel post-translational hydroxylation were identified using the MASCOT program and de novo sequencing. All proteins with peptide information were summarized into a comprehensive urine protein database. We believe that this comprehensive urine proteome database will assist in the identification of urinary proteins/polypeptides whose spectra are difficult to interpret in the discovery of urinary biomarkers.

Background: Only a small proportion of patients with end-stage renal disease can receive kidney transplants because of insufficiency of kidney donors in Taiwan. Hospitals compete with each other for kidney transplant surgeries. This study examined the association between hospital surgical volume of kidney transplants and patients’ outcomes and utilizations. Methods: Claims data of all kidney transplants between 1996 and 2003 were retrieved from the National Health Insurance Research Database for analysis. Every kidney recipient was followed up for 3 years until the end of 2006. Hospitals were classified as high-surgical-volume hospitals (HSVHs) if their total number of kidney transplants was 72 or more between 1996 and 2003; otherwise, they were grouped into the low-surgical-volume hospitals (LSVHs). The differences in quality (infection rate, graft rejection rate, readmission rate, mortality, and survival rates of patients and transplanted grafts at 1, 2, and 3 years after surgery) and cost (length of stay, total transplant cost, and annual medical cost for 3 years) of kidney transplants were examined between the two groups. Results: Totally, 1,060 kidney transplants were analyzed, 77% of which were conducted at 6 of 29 qualified hospitals. Compared with those performed at LSVHs, transplant surgeries at HSVHs were associated with lower bacteria (35.1% vs. 48.8%, p