Abstract Effects of Con A-induced human mononuclear cells on the proliferative response of peripheral T cells were examined by using TNP-modified autologous lymphocytes as stimulator cells. Cells induced by incubation with Con A contained both suppressor cells and amplifier cells. The former were induced from nylon woolnonadherent T cells and these precursor cells were sensitive to mitomycin treatment. On the other hand, amplifier precursor cells were nylon wool-nonadherent T cells and were resistant to mitomycin treatment. Cell proliferation was required for the induction of suppressor cells but not for the induction of amplifier cells. Con A-induced suppressor effector cells were both nylon wool-adherent and nonadherent cells, on the contrary, Con A-induced amplifier effector cells were nonadherent cells. A small number of macrophages enhanced the suppressive activity of nonadherent T cells when added at the induction phase of suppressor T cells.
Imbalances of IL-4 and IFN-gamma production are widely known to increase IgE synthesis in allergic individuals, and IL-5 is known to play a critical role in the pathogenesis of various allergic diseases. However, little is known about how Th cells specific to house dust mite (HDM) develop the capacity to produce these cytokines in children with atopic dermatitis (AD).This study aims to clarify when HDM-specific Th cells develop the capacity to produce IL-4, IL-5 and IFN-gamma in children with AD.The production of IL-4, IL-5 and IFN-gamma by peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) upon stimulation with HDM was measured in 91 children with AD and 37 control subjects. The changes in the cytokine production with age were analyzed transectionally and longitudinally.IL-4 production by HDM-stimulated PBMCs in children with AD was already increased before age 1. Thereafter, it continuously rose until reaching a near-maximum level at age 2. Growth-related changes in the production of IL-5 resembled those in the production of IL-4 and peaked at age 1. The production of these cytokines was very low in control subjects up to age 2 and then gradually increased, albeit never above the levels measured in AD children. The production of IFN-gamma in children with AD reached a near-maximum level during the first year of life and diminished after age 3. Although IFN-gamma production in controls was lower than that in AD children during infancy, it continuously rose even after age 3 and surpassed the levels measured in AD children. The level of serum HDM-specific IgE antibody began to increase after age 1 following the rise of IL-4 production. Essentially the same relationship among IL-4, IFN-gamma and IgE synthesis was seen in a longitudinal study of 6 AD infants, in whom HDM-specific IgE was initially negative but later turned positive.These findings suggest that the capacity of HDM-specific Th cells to produce IL-4, IL-5 and IFN-gamma develops and effectively matures during the first 3 years of life in children with AD.
This paper addresses an active audio-visual integration framework which integrates audio and visual information with a robot's active motion for noise-robust Voice Activity Detection (VAD). VAD is crucial for noise robust Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) because speech captured by a robot's microphones is usually contaminated with other noise sources. To realize such noise-robust VAD, we propose Active Audio-Visual (AAV) integration framework which integrates auditory, visual and motion information using a Causal Bayesian Network (CBN). CBN is a subclass of Bayesian networks, which is able to estimate the effect on VAD performance caused by active motions. Since CBN is a general framework for information integration, we can naturally introduce various types of information such as the location of a speaker and a noise source which affect VAD performance to CBN, and CBN selects the optimal active motion for better perception of the robot using "intervention" mechanism in CBN. We implemented a prototype system based on the proposed framework on a humanoid robot called Hearbo. The proposed AAV-VAD is compared with three types of AV-VAD; simple AAV-VAD, multi-regression-based AAV-VAD, and stationary (not active) AV-VAD. A preliminary experiment using the prototype system showed that the VAD performance of the proposed AV-VAD was 14.4, 26.0, and 30.3 points higher than that of the simple active, multi-regression-based active, and stationary AV-VAD, respectively.
In the previous paper, we described a report of successful fetal liver transplantation in a 20-month-old boy with severe combined immunodeficiency. In Japan, he is the first case of severe combined immunodeficiency, whose immunity was successfully reconstituted after the transplantation.In this paper, we reported his clinical course and alteration of the immunity after the transplantation.Though the serum immunoglobulin remained very low until his death, the immunological examinations in vitro and in vivo indicated that the cellular immunity was well reconstituted. He discharged 14 months after the transplantation and lived almost uneventfully for a year, while he has been suffered from recurrent bronchopneumonia since 27 months after the transplantation. At the same time, the peripheral lymphocytes showed decreased responses to Con A and PHA. Fifty months after the transplantation, he died of bronchopneumonia. The autopsy revealed generalized cytomegalovirus infection in most of the organs.The transplanted fetal cells were still found in the peripheral blood comfirmed by chromosomal analysis just before his death. The thymus histologically showed marked involution, associated with conspicuous decrease of Hassall's bodies or thymic lymphocytes. The spleen and lymph nodes revealed the normal architecture on light microscope, associated with rare follicular formation.
Recently, discriminative models using recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown good performance for dialog state tracking (DST). However, the models have difficulty in handling new dialog states unseen in model training. This paper proposes a fully data-driven approach to DST that can deal with unseen dialog states. The approach is based on an RNN with an attention mechanism. The model integrates two variants of RNNs: a decoder that detects an unseen value from a user’s utterance using cosine similarity between word vectors of the user’s utterance and that of the unseen value; and a sentinel mixture architecture that merges estimated dialog states of the previous turn and the current turn. We evaluated the proposed method using the second and the third dialog state tracking challenge (DSTC 2 and DSTC 3) datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved DST accuracy of 80.0% for all datasets and 61.2% for only unseen dataset without hand-crafted rules and re-training. For the unseen dataset, the use of the cosine similarity-based decoder leads to a 26.0-point improvement from conventional neural network-based DST. Moreover, the integration of the cosine similarity-based decoder and the sentinel mixture architecture leads to a further 2.1-point improvement.
Although Candida albicans (CA) is known to induce Th1 clones that suppress IgE synthesis, serum IgE antibody against CA is often increased in atopic patients. This study aims to elucidate the mechanism of IgE synthesis against CA in atopic patients.We measured the production of IL-4 and IFN-gamma by peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from atopic patients upon stimulation with CA and examined the correlation with the level of serum IgE antibody against CA.The level of serum CA-specific IgE antibody (CA-IgE) was significantly higher in patients with atopic dermatitis (AD) than in patients with bronchial asthma (BA) (geometric mean = 3.6 vs. 0.27 U(A)/ml, p < 0.02) (U(A) = unit allergen), while there was no difference in the level of house dust mite-specific IgE antibody between them (67.6 vs. 87.1 U(A)/ml). Although IL-4 production by PBMCs upon stimulation with CA in patients with AD was not significantly different from that in patients with BA (mean = 359.1 vs. 515.3 fg/ml), IFN-gamma production was significantly lower in the former than in the latter group (8.1 vs. 56.2 pg/ml, p < 0.001). Consequently, the ratio of IL-4/IFN-gamma production was apparently higher in patients with AD than in those with BA, which corresponds to the difference between them in the level of serum CA-IgE. A significant negative correlation was seen in patients with AD between IFN-gamma production by CA-stimulated PBMCs and the level of serum CA-IgE (p < 0.05).IgE synthesis against CA in atopic patients may be precipitated not by enhancing IL-4 production, but by reducing IFN-gamma secretion.
