Results of kidney transplantation from controlled donors after cardio-circulatory death: a single center experience.

in Transplant International (2012), 25

The aim of this study was to determine results of kidney transplantation (KT) from controlled donation after cardio-circulatory death (DCD). Primary end-points were graft and patient survival, and post ... [more ▼]

The aim of this study was to determine results of kidney transplantation (KT) from controlled donation after cardio-circulatory death (DCD). Primary end-points were graft and patient survival, and post-transplant complications. The influence of delayed graft function (DGF) on graft survival and DGF risk factors were analyzed as secondary end-points. This is a retrospective mono-center review of a consecutive series of 59 DCD-KT performed between 2005 and 2010. Overall graft survival was 96.6%, 94.6%, and 90.7% at 3 months, 1 and 3 years, respectively. Main cause of graft loss was patient's death with a functioning graft. No primary nonfunction grafts. Renal graft function was suboptimal at hospital discharge, but nearly normalized at 3 months. DGF was observed in 45.6% of all DCD-KT. DGF significantly increased postoperative length of hospitalization, but had no deleterious impact on graft function or survival. Donor body mass index >/=30 was the only donor factor that was found to significantly increase the risk of DGF (P < 0.05). Despite a higher rate of DGF, controlled DCD-KT offers a valuable contribution to the pool of deceased donor kidney grafts, with comparable mid-term results to those procured after brain death. [less ▲]

Does pupil constriction under blue and green monochromatic light exposure change with age?

Poster (2012, February)

Differential proteomic analysis of a human breast tumor and its matched bone metastasis identifies cell membrane and extracellular proteins associated with bone metastasis

in Journal of Proteome Research (2012)

The classical fate of metastasizing breast cancer cells is to seed and form secondary colonies in bones. The molecules closely associated with these processes are predominantly present at the cell surface ... [more ▼]

The classical fate of metastasizing breast cancer cells is to seed and form secondary colonies in bones. The molecules closely associated with these processes are predominantly present at the cell surface and in the extracellular space, establishing the first contacts with the target tissue. In this study, we had the rare opportunity to analyze a bone metastatic lesion and its corresponding breast primary tumor obtained simultaneously from the same patient. Using mass spectrometry, we undertook a proteomic study on cell surface and extracellular protein-enriched material. We provide a repertoire of significantly modulated proteins, some with yet unknown roles in the bone metastatic process as well as proteins notably involved in cancer cell invasiveness and in bone metabolism. The comparison of these clinical data with those previously obtained using a human osteotropic breast cancer cell line highlighted an overlapping group of proteins. Certain differentially expressed proteins are validated in the present study using immunohistochemistry on a retrospective collection of breast tumors and matched bone metastases. Our exclusive set of selected proteins supports the set-up of further investigations on both clinical samples and experimental bone metastasis models that will help to reveal the finely coordinated expression of proteins that favor the development of metastases in the bone microenvironment. [less ▲]

Dossier Texas - Alan Govenar

Article for general public (2012)

What have the last outbreaks of atypical myopathy in Europe told us: new treatment plans

in Verwilghen, Denis; Van Galen, Gaby; Busoni, Valeria (Eds.) Belgian International Congress: Hippos 2012 (2012, February)

Management and treatment of atypical myopathy cases

Méthodes d'action pédagogique et d'évaluation en grands groupes - Partie 2: L'évaluation

Learning material (2012)

Het janushoofd van Julia (1885)

in Nederlandse Letterkunde (2012), 17(1), 10-31

In 1884 Willem Kloos and Albert Verwey started work on Julia, a collection of forty poems written in the manner of the successful author Fiore della Neve (M.G.L. van Loghem). In their pamphlet The ... [more ▼]

In 1884 Willem Kloos and Albert Verwey started work on Julia, a collection of forty poems written in the manner of the successful author Fiore della Neve (M.G.L. van Loghem). In their pamphlet The Incompetence of the Dutch Literary Critics (1886), in which Julia’s true authorship was revealed, Kloos and Verwey made plain that the poems had been conceived as deliberate nonsense, something the Dutch literary establishment had failed to recognize. Nevertheless, a close reading of the collection brings to light a number of textual similarities with Kloos’s and Verwey’s serious poetry written in the period 1883-1885. This article reveals Julia as a fascinating hybrid in which an older aesthetic coexists with a new poetical language associated with the Eighties Movement. [less ▲]

Le paradigme d’amorçage : un outil efficace pour examiner les procédures de lecture chez les jeunes lecteurs avec et sans dyslexie du développement

Scientific conference (2012, February)

Learning to play K-armed bandit problems

in Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2012) (2012, February)

We propose a learning approach to pre-compute K-armed bandit playing policies by exploiting prior information describing the class of problems targeted by the player. Our algorithm first samples a set of K ... [more ▼]

We propose a learning approach to pre-compute K-armed bandit playing policies by exploiting prior information describing the class of problems targeted by the player. Our algorithm first samples a set of K-armed bandit problems from the given prior, and then chooses in a space of candidate policies one that gives the best average performances over these problems. The candidate policies use an index for ranking the arms and pick at each play the arm with the highest index; the index for each arm is computed in the form of a linear combination of features describing the history of plays (e.g., number of draws, average reward, variance of rewards and higher order moments), and an estimation of distribution algorithm is used to determine its optimal parameters in the form of feature weights. We carry out simulations in the case where the prior assumes a fixed number of Bernoulli arms, a fixed horizon, and uniformly distributed parameters of the Bernoulli arms. These simulations show that learned strategies perform very well with respect to several other strategies previously proposed in the literature (UCB1, UCB2, UCB-V, KL-UCB and $\epsilon_n$-GREEDY); they also highlight the robustness of these strategies with respect to wrong prior information. [less ▲]

Le portail de Mont-devant-Sassey : aspects iconographiques

in Conroy, Jean-François (Ed.) Actes du 11ème colloque international étudiant du Département d'histoire de l'Université Laval (2012, February)

Le portail sculpté méridional de Mont-devant-Sassey est intéressant à plus d’un titre. Premièrement, il est le portail gothique lorrain le mieux conservé qui soit, comme la critique d’authenticité le ... [more ▼]

Le portail sculpté méridional de Mont-devant-Sassey est intéressant à plus d’un titre. Premièrement, il est le portail gothique lorrain le mieux conservé qui soit, comme la critique d’authenticité le confirme. Ensuite, certains des choix iconographiques effectués par le « commanditaire » sont surprenants, inusités, voire inédits. Enfin, en raison de sa situation géographique char- nière entre le domaine français et l’Empire germanique, les sculpteurs ont pu profiter des innovations sculpturales introduites tant à l’ouest qu’à l’est et les combiner de manière originale. Le présent article est l’occasion de renouveler l’identification iconographique de certaines figures, de proposer une datation de l’ensemble et de suggérer les transferts artistiques attestés par le portail (réception de formules iconographiques et stylistiques mises en place dans des grands centres). [less ▲]