Background/Aims: Neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (NLR) and platelet to lymphocyte ratio (PLR) can serve as biomarkers for diagnosing and assessing disease activity in ulcerative colitis (UC). We investigated their clinical significance in UC.Methods: We analyzed 48 patients with UC who underwent measurement of fecal calprotectin (FC) and endoscopy and 96 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. NLR and PLR were compared between the patients and healthy controls. The endoscopic activity was divided into 2 groups: group 1 (mild to moderate inflammation) and group 2 (severe inflammation) according to the Mayo endoscopic subscore in UC.Results: To diagnose UC, the optimal cutoff of NLR and PLR was 2.26 (sensitivity 54.2%; specificity 90.6%; positive likelihood ratio 5.778, 95% confidence interval [CI] 2.944–11.339; area under the curve [AUC] 0.774, 95% CI, 0.690–0.859) and 179.8 (sensitivity 35.4%; specificity 90.6%; positive likelihood ratio 3.778, 95% CI 1.821–7.838; AUC 0.654, 95% CI 0.556–0.753), respectively. The optimal cutoff to differentiate group 1 and group 2 was 3.44, 175.9, and 453 µg/g for NLR, PLR, and FC, respectively (sensitivity, 63.6% vs. 90.9% vs. 81.8%; specificity, 81.1% vs. 78.4% vs. 73.0%; positive likelihood ratio, 3.364 vs. 4.205 vs. 3.027; AUC, 0.714 vs. 0.897 vs. 0.813). PLR had the highest AUC and positive likelihood ratio.Conclusions: NLR and PLR help differentiate patients with UC from healthy controls. NLR, PLR, and FC indicate endoscopic activity and may reflect intestinal mucosal conditions.
Marine algal flora and community structure of medicinal seaweeds were examined at Kkotji of Taean Peninsula, Korea from May 2005 to January 2006. Seventy-nine seaweeds including 42 medicinal algae and one marine plant were identified. Sargassum thunbergii was the representative alga occurred at all seasons and shore levels. The dominant medicinal seaweeds were perennial S. thunbergii, Neorhodomela aculeata, and Corallina pilulifera, and ephemeral Monostroma grevillei, Porphyra yezoensis, and Ulva pertusa. Their vertical distribution were N. aculeata-P. yezoensis, M. grevillei, and U. pertusa-C. pilulifera from high to low intertidal zone. The average biomass of medicinal seaweeds varied from 34.17 g m-2 in spring to 56.41 g m-2 in summer. At Kkotji shore, the opportunistic species (Enteromorpha, Ulva, and Cladophora) and turf-forming algae (Caulacanthus okamurae and Gelidium divaricatum) were easily observed. Such fast growing ESG II (ecological state group) was 87.50% and slow growing perennial algae, ESG I was only 12.15%. Also, diversity index (H') and dominance index (DI) indicate that the seaweed community of Kkotji is unstable. Therefore, Kkotji rocky shore should be more protected from human activities such as turbulence and eutrophication in order to maintain species diversity and abundance of medicinal seaweeds.
We investigate the uplink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, where each IoT device (station: STA) equipped with a single antenna exploits the constellation-rotated space-time line code (CR-STLC) to send signals to an access point (AP) equipped with two receive antennas. The AP decodes the signals transmitted from the STAs with the optimal joint maximum-likelihood (JML) detector. As a main result, we mathematically analyze both the bit-error-rate (BER) performance and the spatial diversity order of each STA in the two-user uplink CR-STLC NOMA system. In particular, it is shown that the two-user uplink CR-STLC NOMA system achieves the optimal diversity order regardless of the constellation rotation angle in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. We also consider two different rotation angle optimization techniques (dynamic rotation & fixed rotation) to improve the BER performance in the practical SNR regime, and found that the fixed rotation approach is simple but yields almost the same performance as the dynamic approach. Finally, we show that the uplink CR-STLC NOMA system achieves the spatial diversity order of 1 even when more than two STAs send packets simultaneously. It is worth noting that all STAs obtain an improved spatial diversity gain compared to that without constellation rotation.
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