PURPOSE. Increasing drusen volume was proposed to be a predictor of disease progression in age-related macular degeneration (AMD). In patients with late AMD in one eye, the fellow eyes without neovascularization are known to be at higher risk of developing exudative AMD. We evaluated the relationship between drusen volume in these fellow eyes and their progression to late AMD. METHODS.A retrospective analysis included fellow eyes with drusen associated with nonexudative AMD. All eyes with neovascular AMD were treated with intravitreal ranibizumab, aflibercept, and/or bevacizumab and followed for 2 years. All eyes were scanned with the Cirrus HD-OCT using a 512 3 128 scan pattern. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) data at baseline, month 12, and month 24 were collected using the advanced RPE analysis tool to quantify drusen volume within 3-and 5-mm-diameter circles centered on the fovea. Optical coherence tomography scans were also evaluated for the development of geographic atrophy (GA) or macular neovascularization (MNV). RESULTS.Eighty-nine patients who had neovascular AMD in only one eye were studied. Optical coherence tomography drusen volume in the absence of MNV could be measured in 61 participants (68.5%). After 12 months, 4 eyes (4.5%) developed MNV and 15 eyes (16.9%) developed GA. By 24 months of follow-up, an additional 5 eyes (7.1%) developed MNV and an additional 10 eyes (14.3%) developed GA. At month 24, the eyes that developed GA or MNV had baseline drusen volumes that were significantly larger than in eyes that did not develop late AMD. Patients with a drusen volume over 0.03 mm 3 had a greater than 4-fold increased risk for developing late AMD compared with those with lower drusen volumes. CONCLUSIONS.Baseline drusen volume appears to be an important predictor for the development of late AMD within 2 years in eyes that have fellow eyes being actively treated for MNV. This suggests that OCT-derived drusen volume measurements may be a useful biomarker to identify eyes at the highest risk for progression to late AMD.Keywords: macular degeneration, geographic atrophy, wet macular degeneration, retinal drusen, choroidal neovascularization, optical coherence tomography, drusen volume D espite the availability of highly effective antiangiogenic therapies, age-related macular degeneration (AMD) remains a leading cause of blindness in developed nations. 1,2Multiple epidemiologic studies and clinical trials have evaluated phenotypic risk factors for the development of late AMD, defined as the development of macular neovascularization (MNV) or central geographic atrophy (GA; Refs. 3-7 and Abdelfattah NS, et al. IOVS 2015;56:ARVO E-Abstract 892). These major risk factors include the presence of large drusen, larger drusen areas, and pigmentary alterations, and these features have been incorporated into various scales used to predict the risk of developing late AMD over time. [7][8][9][10] However, these features that predicted the risk of disease progression were restricted by the types of analyses that we...

properly cited.Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been quite a hot research area in the last few years. Due to their unique characteristics such as high dynamic topology and predictable mobility, VANETs attract so much attention of both academia and industry. In this paper, we provide an overview of the main aspects of VANETs from a research perspective. This paper starts with the basic architecture of networks, then discusses three popular research issues and general research methods, and ends up with the analysis on challenges and future trends of VANETs.

Robust PCA (RPCA) via decomposition into lowrank plus sparse matrices offers a powerful framework for a large variety of applications such as image processing, video processing and 3D computer vision. Indeed, most of the time these applications require to detect sparse outliers from the observed imagery data that can be approximated by a lowrank matrix. Moreover, most of the time experiments show that RPCA with additional spatial and/or temporal constraints often outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in these applications. Thus, the aim of this paper is to survey the applications of RPCA in computer vision. In the first part of this paper, we review representative image processing applications as follows: (1) lowlevel imaging such as image recovery and denoising, image composition, image colorization, image alignment and rectification, multi-focus image and face recognition, (2) medical imaging like dynamic Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) for acceleration of data acquisition, background suppression and learning of inter-frame motion fields, and (3) imaging for 3D computer vision with additional depth information like in Structure from Motion (SfM) and 3D motion recovery. In the second part, we present the applications of RPCA in video processing which utilize additional spatial and temporal information compared to image processing. Specifically, we investigate video denoising and restoration, hyperspectral video and background/foreground separation. Finally, we provide perspectives on possible future research directions and algorithmic frameworks that are suitable for these applications.

No author has a financial or proprietary interest in any material or method mentioned.

A UPLC/TOF-MS-based metabonomic study was conducted to assess the holistic efficacy of Traditional Chinese Medicine Shuanglong Formula (SLF) for myocardial infarction in rats. Thirty male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into five groups after surgery. The Panax ginseng group, Salvia miltiorrhiza group, and SLF group were treated with water extractions of Panax ginseng (PG), Salvia miltiorrhiza (SM), and SLF (the ratio of SM to PG was 3:7) at a dose of 5 g/kg·w·d for 21 consecutive days, respectively; the model group and sham surgery group were both treated with 0.9% saline solution. Urinary samples for metabonomic study, serum samples for biochemical measurement, and heart samples for histopathology were collected. As a result, metabonomics-based findings such as the PCA and PLS-DA plotting of metabolic state and analysis of potential biomarkers in urine correlated well to the assessment of serum biochemistry and histopathological assay, confirming that SLF exerted synergistic therapeutic efficacies to exhibit better effect on MI compared to PG or SM. The shifts in urinary TCA cycle as well as pentose phosphate pathway suggested that SLF may diminish cardiac injury of MI with its potential pharmacological effect in the regulation of myocardial energy metabolism.

The emerging field of sphingolipidomics calls for accurate quantitative analyses of sphingolipidome. Existing analytical methods for sphingolipid (SPL) profiling often suffer from isotopic/isomeric interference, leading to the low-abundance, but biologically important SPLs being undetected. In the current study, we have developed an improved sphingolipidomic approach for reliable and sensitive quantification of up to 10 subclasses of cellular SPLs. By integratively utilizing high efficiency chromatographic separation, quadrupole time-of-flight (Q-TOF) and triple quadrupole (QQQ) mass spectrometry (MS), our approach facilitated unambiguous identification of several groups of potentially important but low-abundance SPLs that are usually masked by isotopic/isomeric species and hence largely overlooked in many published methods. The methodology, which featured a modified sample preparation and optimized MS parameters, permitted the measurement of 86 individual SPLs in PC12 cells in a single run, demonstrating great potential for high throughput analysis. The improved characterization, along with increased sensitivity for low-abundance SPL species, resulted in the highest number of SPLs being quantified in a single run in PC12 cells. The improved method was fully validated and applied to a lipidomic study of PC12 cell samples with or without amyloid β peptide (Aβ) treatment, which presents a most precise and genuine sphingolipidomic profile of the PC12 cell line. The adoption of the metabolomics protocol, as described in this study, could avoid misidentification and bias in the measurement of the analytically challenging low-abundance endogenous SPLs, hence achieving informative and reliable sphingolipidomics data relevant to discovery of potential SPL biomarkers for Aβ-induced neurotoxicity and neurodegenerative disease.

We propose and analyze two algorithms for maintaining approximate Personalized PageRank (PPR) vectors on a dynamic graph, where edges are added or deleted. Our algorithms are natural dynamic versions of two known local variations of power iteration. One, Forward Push, propagates probability mass forwards along edges from a source node, while the other, Reverse Push, propagates local changes backwards along edges from a target. In both variations, we maintain an invariant between two vectors, and when an edge is updated, our algorithm first modifies the vectors to restore the invariant, then performs any needed local push operations to restore accuracy.For Reverse Push, we prove that for an arbitrary directed graph in a random edge model, or for an arbitrary undirected graph, given a uniformly random target node t, the cost to maintain a PPR vector to t of additive error ε as k edges are updated is O(k + d/ε), where d is the average degree of the graph. This is O(1) work per update, plus the cost of computing a reverse vector once on a static graph. For Forward Push, we show that on an arbitrary undirected graph, given a uniformly random start node s, the cost to maintain a PPR vector from s of degree-normalized error ε as k edges are updated is O(k + 1/ε), which is again O(1) per update plus the cost of computing a PPR vector once on a static graph.

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