Controlling chaos

The spatiotemporal expression of genes in an organism is determined by regulatory systems that involve a large number of genes connected through a complex network of interactions. As an intuitive understanding of the behavior of these systems is hard to obtain, computer tools for the modeling and simulation of genetic regulatory networks will be indispensable. This report reviews formalisms that have been employed in mathematical biology and bioinformatics to describe genetic regulatory systems, in particular directed graphs, Bayesian networks, ordinary and partial differential equations, stochastic equations, Boolean networks and their generalizations, qualitative differential equations, and rule-based formalisms. In addition, the report discusses how these formalisms have been used in the modeling and simulation of regulatory systems.

/pdf/modeling-and-simulation-of-genetic-regulatory-systems-a-2pgggkutcb.pdf

Modeling and simulation of genetic regulatory systems: a literature review.

https://courses.washington.edu/pharm550/Week2/supp%20reading%20wk%202%20Pitt%201.pdf

Randomised trial of losartan versus captopril in patients over 65 with heart failure (Evaluation of Losartan in the Elderly Study, ELITE)

: This thesis applies neural network feature selection techniques to multivariate time series data to improve prediction of a target time series. Two approaches to feature selection are used. First, a subset enumeration method is used to determine which financial indicators are most useful for aiding in prediction of the S&P 500 futures daily price. The candidate indicators evaluated include RSI, Stochastics and several moving averages. Results indicate that the Stochastics and RSI indicators result in better prediction results than the moving averages. The second approach to feature selection is calculation of individual saliency metrics. A new decision boundary-based individual saliency metric, and a classifier independent saliency metric are developed and tested. Ruck's saliency metric, the decision boundary based saliency metric, and the classifier independent saliency metric are compared for a data set consisting of the RSI and Stochastics indicators as well as delayed closing price values. The decision based metric and the Ruck metric results are similar, but the classifier independent metric agrees with neither of the other metrics. The nine most salient features, determined by the decision boundary based metric, are used to train a neural network and the results are presented and compared to other published results. (AN)

/pdf/nonlinear-time-series-analysis-1j3a35n4y3.pdf

Nonlinear Time Series Analysis.

Task Force 1: The Changing Profile of Congenital Heart Disease in Adult Life

How to choose a cardiac surgeon

Modified Blalock-Taussig shunt. Use of subclavian artery orifice as flow regulator in prosthetic systemic-pulmonary artery shunts.

New in this edition are chapters on exercise testing, MRI, EP studies and catheter ablation of arrhythmias, extracorporeal circulatory support and paediatric lung transplantation.

https://www.internationaljournalofcardiology.com/article/0167-5273(84)90128-1/pdf

Surgery for Congenital Heart Defects

Human preimplantation embryos exhibit high levels of apoptotic cells and high rates of developmental arrest during the first week in vitro. The relation between the two is unclear and difficult to determine by conventional experimental approaches, partly because of limited numbers of embryos. We apply a mixture of experiment and mathematical modeling to show that observed levels of cell death can be reconciled with the high levels of embryo arrest seen in the human only if the developmental competence of embryos is already established at the zygote stage, and environmental factors merely modulate this. This suggests that research on improving in vitro fertilization success rates should move from its current concentration on optimizing culture media to focus more on the generation of a healthy zygote and on understanding the mechanisms that cause chromosomal and other abnormalities during early cleavage stages.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/98/4/1655.full.pdf

Jaroslav Stark

Papers

How to choose a cardiac surgeon

Modified Blalock-Taussig shunt. Use of subclavian artery orifice as flow regulator in prosthetic systemic-pulmonary artery shunts.

Surgery for Congenital Heart Defects

From cell death to embryo arrest: mathematical models of human preimplantation embryo development.

Fate Of Subpulmonary Homograft Conduits: Determinants Of Latehomograft Failure