Refine
Has Fulltext
- yes (5)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (5)
Document Type
- Journal article (4)
- Report (1)
Keywords
Institute
- Institut für Informatik (2)
- Institut für Geographie und Geologie (1)
- Institut für Philosophie (1)
- Institut für Virologie und Immunbiologie (1)
- Julius-von-Sachs-Institut für Biowissenschaften (1)
- Medizinische Klinik und Poliklinik II (1)
- Neurologische Klinik und Poliklinik (1)
- Theodor-Boveri-Institut für Biowissenschaften (1)
Sonstige beteiligte Institutionen
Introduction:
Evidence from a number of open-label, uncontrolled studies has suggested that rituximab may benefit patients with autoimmune diseases who are refractory to standard-of-care. The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety and clinical outcomes of rituximab in several standard-of-care-refractory autoimmune diseases (within rheumatology, nephrology, dermatology and neurology) other than rheumatoid arthritis or non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in a real-life clinical setting.
Methods:
Patients who received rituximab having shown an inadequate response to standard-of-care had their safety and clinical outcomes data retrospectively analysed as part of the German Registry of Autoimmune Diseases. The main outcome measures were safety and clinical response, as judged at the discretion of the investigators.
Results:
A total of 370 patients (299 patient-years) with various autoimmune diseases (23.0% with systemic lupus erythematosus, 15.7% antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody-associated granulomatous vasculitides, 15.1% multiple sclerosis and 10.0% pemphigus) from 42 centres received a mean dose of 2,440 mg of rituximab over a median (range) of 194 (180 to 1,407) days. The overall rate of serious infections was 5.3 per 100 patient-years during rituximab therapy. Opportunistic infections were infrequent across the whole study population, and mostly occurred in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. There were 11 deaths (3.0% of patients) after rituximab treatment (mean 11.6 months after first infusion, range 0.8 to 31.3 months), with most of the deaths caused by infections. Overall (n = 293), 13.3% of patients showed no response, 45.1% showed a partial response and 41.6% showed a complete response. Responses were also reflected by reduced use of glucocorticoids and various immunosuppressives during rituximab therapy and follow-up compared with before rituximab. Rituximab generally had a positive effect on patient well-being (physician’s visual analogue scale; mean improvement from baseline of 12.1 mm)
Die Erkennung handschriftlicher Artefakte wie Unterstreichungen in Buchdrucken ermöglicht Rückschlüsse auf das Rezeptionsverhalten und die Provenienzgeschichte und wird auch für eine OCR benötigt. Dabei soll zwischen handschriftlichen Unterstreichungen und waagerechten Linien im Druck (z. B. Trennlinien usw.) unterschieden werden, da letztere nicht ausgezeichnet werden sollen. Im Beitrag wird ein Ansatz basierend auf einem auf Unterstreichungen trainierten Neuronalen Netz gemäß der U-Net Architektur vorgestellt, dessen Ergebnisse in einem zweiten Schritt mit heuristischen Regeln nachbearbeitet werden. Die Evaluationen zeigen, dass Unterstreichungen sehr gut erkannt werden, wenn bei der Binarisierung der Scans nicht zu viele Pixel der Unterstreichung wegen geringem Kontrast verloren gehen. Zukünftig sollen die Worte oberhalb der Unterstreichung mit OCR transkribiert werden und auch andere Artefakte wie handschriftliche Notizen in alten Drucken erkannt werden.
The recently observed consistent loss of β-diversity across ecosystems indicates increasingly homogeneous communities in patches of landscapes, mainly caused by increasing land-use intensity. Biodiversity is related to numerous ecosystem functions and stability. Therefore, decreasing β-diversity is also expected to reduce multifunctionality. To assess the impact of homogenization and to develop guidelines to reverse its potentially negative effects, we combine expertise from forest science, ecology, remote sensing, chemical ecology and statistics in a collaborative and experimental β-diversity approach. Specifically, we will address the question whether the Enhancement of Structural Beta Complexity (ESBC) in forests by silviculture or natural disturbances will increase biodiversity and multifunctionality in formerly homogeneously structured production forests. Our approach will identify potential mechanisms behind observed homogenization-diversity-relationships and show how these translate into effects on multifunctionality. At eleven forest sites throughout Germany, we selected two districts as two types of small ‘forest landscapes’. In one of these two districts, we established ESBC treatments (nine differently treated 50x50 m patches with a focus on canopy cover and deadwood features). In the second, the control district, we will establish nine patches without ESBC. By a comprehensive sampling, we will monitor 18 taxonomic groups and measure 21 ecosystem functions, including key functions in temperate forests, on all patches. The statistical framework will allow a comprehensive biodiversity assessment by quantifying the different aspects of multitrophic biodiversity (taxonomical, functional and phylogenetic diversity) on different levels of biodiversity (α-, β-, γ-diversity). To combine overall diversity, we will apply the concept of multidiversity across the 18 taxa. We will use and develop new approaches for quantification and partitioning of multifunctionality at α- and β- scales. Overall, our study will herald a new research avenue, namely by experimentally describing the link between β-diversity and multifunctionality. Furthermore, we will help to develop guidelines for improved silvicultural concepts and concepts for management of natural disturbances in temperate forests reversing past homogenization effects.
OCR4all—An open-source tool providing a (semi-)automatic OCR workflow for historical printings
(2019)
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on historical printings is a challenging task mainly due to the complexity of the layout and the highly variant typography. Nevertheless, in the last few years, great progress has been made in the area of historical OCR, resulting in several powerful open-source tools for preprocessing, layout analysis and segmentation, character recognition, and post-processing. The drawback of these tools often is their limited applicability by non-technical users like humanist scholars and in particular the combined use of several tools in a workflow. In this paper, we present an open-source OCR software called OCR4all, which combines state-of-the-art OCR components and continuous model training into a comprehensive workflow. While a variety of materials can already be processed fully automatically, books with more complex layouts require manual intervention by the users. This is mostly due to the fact that the required ground truth for training stronger mixed models (for segmentation, as well as text recognition) is not available, yet, neither in the desired quantity nor quality. To deal with this issue in the short run, OCR4all offers a comfortable GUI that allows error corrections not only in the final output, but already in early stages to minimize error propagations. In the long run, this constant manual correction produces large quantities of valuable, high quality training material, which can be used to improve fully automatic approaches. Further on, extensive configuration capabilities are provided to set the degree of automation of the workflow and to make adaptations to the carefully selected default parameters for specific printings, if necessary. During experiments, the fully automated application on 19th Century novels showed that OCR4all can considerably outperform the commercial state-of-the-art tool ABBYY Finereader on moderate layouts if suitably pretrained mixed OCR models are available. Furthermore, on very complex early printed books, even users with minimal or no experience were able to capture the text with manageable effort and great quality, achieving excellent Character Error Rates (CERs) below 0.5%. The architecture of OCR4all allows the easy integration (or substitution) of newly developed tools for its main components by standardized interfaces like PageXML, thus aiming at continual higher automation for historical printings.
Thymus-derived natural Foxp3\(^{+}\) CD4\(^{+}\) regulatory T cells (nTregs) play a key role in maintaining immune tolerance and preventing autoimmune disease. Several studies indicate that dendritic cells (DCs) are critically involved in the maintenance and proliferation of nTregs. However, the mechanisms how DCs manage to keep the peripheral pool at constant levels remain poorly understood. Here, we describe that the NF-κB/Rel family transcription factor RelB controls the frequencies of steady-state migratory DCs (ssmDCs) in peripheral lymph nodes and their numbers control peripheral nTreg homeostasis. DC-specific RelB depletion was investigated in CD11c-Cre × RelB\(^{fl/fl}\) mice (RelB\(^{DCko}\)), which showed normal frequencies of resident DCs in lymph nodes and spleen while the subsets of CD103\(^{-}\) Langerin\(^{-}\) dermal DCs (dDCs) and Langerhans cells but not CD103\(^{+}\) Langerin\(^{+}\) dDC of the ssmDCs in skin-draining lymph nodes were increased. Enhanced frequencies and proliferation rates were also observed for nTregs and a small population of CD4\(^{+}\) CD44\(^{high}\) CD25\(^{low}\) memory-like T cells (Tml). Interestingly, only the Tml but not DCs showed an increase in IL-2-producing capacity in lymph nodes of RelB\(^{DCko}\) mice. Blocking of IL-2 in vivo reduced the frequency of nTregs but increased the Tml frequencies, followed by a recovery of nTregs. Taken together, by employing RelB\(^{DCko}\) mice with increased frequencies of ssmDCs our data indicate a critical role for specific ssmDC subsets for the peripheral nTreg and IL-2\(^{+}\) Tml frequencies during homeostasis.