Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus are commonly associated with hospital-acquired infections and are known to form biofilms. Ciprofloxacin (CIP), which is normally used to treat these infections, is seldom effective in killing cells in a biofilm. This is mostly due to slow or weak penetration of CIP to the core of biofilms. The problem is accentuated by the release of CIP below MIC  levels following a rapid (burst) release. The aim of this study was to develop a drug carrier that would keep CIP above MIC levels for an extended period. Ciprofloxacin was suspended into poly (PDLLA) and poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO), and electrospun into nanofibers (CIP-F). All of the CIP was released from the nanofibers within 2 h, which is typical of a burst release. However, 99% of P. aeruginosa PA01 cells and 91% of S. aureus Xen 30 cells (a methicillin-resistant strain) in biofilms were killed when exposed to CIP-F. CIP levels remained above MIC for 5 days, as shown by growth inhibition of the cells in vitro. The nanofibers were smooth in texture with no bead formation, as revealed by scanning electron and atomic force microscopy. A single vibration peak at 1632 cm-1, recorded with Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, indicated that CIP remained in crystal form when incorporated into PDLLA: PEO. No abnormalities in the histology of MCF-12A breast epithelial cells were observed when exposed to CIP-F. This is the first report of the inhibition of biofilm formation by CIP released from PDLLA: PEO nanofibers. Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus are amongst the most dominant pathogens isolated from nosocomial infections  was used to perform one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). -1 against 1 x 106 CFU ml-1P. aeruginosa PA01 and 16 mg l-1 against 1 x 106 CFU ml-1S. aureus Xen 30.The MIC of CIP was 4 mg lNanofibers without CIP (CF) were slightly larger in diameter ester bonds, respectively. Vibration peaks recorded at 1277 cm−1 and 1185 cm−1  recorded within the first 24 h (P. aeruginosa PA01 recorded when incubated in the presence of CF and in the absence of nanofibers (control) were more-or-less similar for the first 6 h. Optical density increased rapidly thereafter in the control (from OD600 0.3 to 1.7) within the following 18 h, but increased less drastically in the presence of CF (from OD600 0.2 to 0.6) over the same period  was recorded in both these biofilms (10 3 CFU ml–1 to log 10 6 CFU ml–1) in biofilms exposed to CIP-F , but lower protein (5.8 μg ml–1) concentrations were recorded for biofilm not exposed to nanofibers (control). No EPS, nor proteins, were detected in biofilms exposed to CIP-F. Similar results were recorded for S. aureus Xen 30 biofilms. Protein concentrations decreased from 10.3 μg ml–1 for the control to 4.9 μg ml–1 when exposed to CF, and to no detectible levels when exposed to CIP-F. No EPS production was detected in any of the S. aureus Xen 30 biofilms.The EPS and protein concentrations in No significant difference in cell viability was observed when breast epithelial cells MCF-12A were exposed to CF, CIP-F and in the absence of nanofibers . Almost -1  and those containing CIP (CIP-F), shown in -1 , which it in CIP . Detectit in CIP . No difft in CIP , withoutt in CIP , suggestP. aeruginosa PA01 in a liquid culture  to control cell growth for 5 days longer  and proteinaceous molecules of microorganisms play an important role in biofilm formation , 30. In The fact that no significant differences were recorded in the viability of MCF-12A breast cells exposed to CF, CIP-F and in the absence of nanofibers  indicateP. aeruginosa and S. aureus and safety against mammalian cells suggests that dressings produced from CIP-impregnated nanofibers may be used to prevent biofilm formation in topical infections caused by these bacteria.Ciprofloxacin was successfully encapsulated into PDLLA: PEO nanofibers. The amorphous distribution of CIP in nanofibers without noticeable chemical interactions, its ability to prevent biofilm formation by


A qualitative method using focus group discussions (FGDs) was applied in this study to identify people’s perceptions on newspaper reporting pertaining to the Southern Separatist Movement (SSM) by different Yemeni newspapers. This paper also looked into the attitudes towards the movement and the popularity of the issue of Yemeni unification. Five FGD groups with a total of 30 participants discussed the subject and some other aspects related to it. The findings of the focu19 groups showed that the southern crisis and SSM had shaken the people’s trust on the current form of the unity. The discussion with the groups revealed that media in general and the selected four papers from various political persuasions have no credibility and objectivity, but these papers are trying to instill democratic values which is consistent with their ideology, which have a serious impact on the value of liberal democracy. The participants assured that reporting on the southern cause and the SSM indicated the absence of professional journalism in the media and the political discourse in general. The Yemeni Unity established on 22 May 1990 was based on an agreement and acceptance between the leadership of the two parts of Yemen, Yemen Arab Republic and People's Republic of Yemen to be united into “The Republic of Yemen” with the extension of sovereignty all over the new country. Three years later a conflict began to occur between the partners of the unity which led to the 1994 civil war when the leader of the Yemeni Socialist Party Ali Salem Al-bidh officially declared the first call for secession. The victory of the northern forces in the south had left the southerners with grievances and deteriorating situations.Al HarakAl-Janubbiy  that is known in Yemen as In late 2009 the SSM openly called for secession and reinstating the former independent south Yemeni state due to the irresponsible actions by the government in responding to the protests and the unexpected boost gained by some influential figures that used to be the allies of the former regime in Sana’a. The southern cause in Yemen is considered the key issue discussed at length in the National Dialogue Conference (NDC). NDC was held after the Yemeni uprising in 2011, which was attended by all social and political players backed by the Gulf Cooperation Council. This national event in Yemen resulted in dividing Yemen into multi-regions and formed the Federal Republic of Yemen.Al-Harak Al-Enfasli Al-Janubbiy (in Arabic) is a term given to a popular movement active in the South of Yemen since 2007. This movement started when former southern military officials and other civil employees forced into early retirement demanded for better pensions. The government responded with oppressive methods such as pursuing, arresting and bribing the leaders of the South. Due to the implementation of these methods, the movement accelerated to an armed struggle pushing for secession from the north. In 2010, the SSM was shown to have the support of 70 % of the southern population and it is expected to further increase .South of Yemen Movement, also known as the Southern Separatist Movement (SSM) or According to Horton  The SoutIn the beginning the media did not pay attention to the movement and the southern crisis due to two reasons. First the former regime denied it and promoted that these groups protest to increase their pensions. Second the absence of a single leadership for the Southern Movement weakened the stance of the movement inside and outside Yemen. When the tension escalated throughout the south sparking the fears of another civil war, the media outlets started to heavily cover the events in the south, which resulted in banning of some newspapers and the arrests of journalists in 2009.The primary point is that the public media have located the movement and the unification of the country at the core of their discourse. More spaces of media coverage were given in radio and TV channels as well as the print and Internet press. The narrative heavily promoted and emphasized on unity as the only source of strength, dignity and independence Abduh, . FurtherAbduh  examinedIn critical times such as during crises or conflicts, the media are expected to play key roles in portraying true events in order to reflect the reality of the narratives. In doing so, the main purpose is to influence people’s minds in terms of either shaping or changing the public opinion and attitudes toward certain issues. That is because the media are the main sources of information for the public to know what is happening, however the question of the efficiency and professionalism of the media on reporting keeps the door open for more debates.What perception do people have about the SSM and the popularity of the Yemeni Unification?What do people think of the coverage of the SSM by the different newspapers?This aim of this study is to identify people’s perceptions on media coverage of the SSM, as well as their perceptions on the movement and the popularity of the idea of Yemeni Unification. Using a thematic analysis, this study asked the following questions:The findings of this study were able to provide useful information about the SSM, the efficiency of the Yemeni media and other related aspects objectively from the Yemeni people’s point of view. There is a lack of public opinion studies on the efficiency of the media from different political parties, or how the media operate in Yemen. Therefore, this study is considered to be significant in providing recommendations on how the Yemeni media should operate during the time of crises particularly the partisan media in order to contribute to ethical media reporting and politics.In this paper, we believe that the thematic analysis offers an accessible and theoretically-flexible approach to analysing qualitative data. Braun and Clarke  discusseQualitative research in social sciences refers to textual data generated from in-depth interviews and focus groups which are often transcribed precisely from audio recordings and participant observation notes. And, in the vast majority of cases, thematic analyses, rather than word-based approaches, are used for that because it is still most useful in capturing the complexities of meaning within a textual data set and it is also the most commonly used method of analysis in qualitative research , two partisan newspapers that represented the two strongest opposition parties Islah Party (Al-Sahwah) and the Yemeni Socialist Party (Al-Thawri), and one independent newspaper (Akhbar Al-Youm). These newspapers were accessible in their archives and the researchers were also able to easily acquire hard copies for the purpose of this study.To examine people’s perceptions on the coverage of the SSM by the Yemeni newspapers, four different newspapers were selected purposively to serve the objectives of the study. The newspapers were: one official newspaper which represented the government . The ruling party was blamed in escalating the situation in the south, the former president Saleh was criticized in the way he addressed the southern leaders, his denial of the southern cause and the threats in his speeches in a news item entitled “Yemen is fine and what is happening in the south is just a storm in a teacup” .It was ascertained that the conflict and responsibility frames dominated most of the articles if not all by the four newspapers. The southern movement and their leaders were severely criticized in calling for secession and spreading violence and hatred among the Yemeni brothers. For example, the leaders of the southern movement were described as “traitors” and “seditious figures” that will never succeed in splitting Yemen . In regards to this, another writer of an opinion piece mentioned that the regime failed to recognize the demands and grievances, and the feelings of injustice felt by the southern people.Many articles also criticized the way the government chose methods that were utilized to silence the south either by violence or other means. For instance, a writer of an opinion piece described the regime as having dry mind when the regime announced that the capital city would be transferred to the south (Aden) in order to silence the southern movement .The partisan newspapers severely criticized the presidential speech, for example, a writer of an opinion piece article attacked Saleh by saying that he had used inappropriate words to describe the southern movement as actions by secessionists and traitors. The writer questioned Saleh by asking, “How can you accuse the south of being separatists while the fact is, there is no legitimacy of the unity after it had been violated by the regime in 1994?” He added that the persons who should be blamed are from the ruling party and its patronage system that regarded the south as valuable stolen goods or that a piece of land must be returned to its origin in the North  is applied in this research. This technique is used for raising views and opinions of respondents on certain issues, for example, political issues Kumar . The focFive groups were conducted in Yemen for this study; each group consisted of six participants, a total number of 30 respondents from Sana’a University. The rational of the focus group discussion method was explained to the respondents; more specifically the objectives of the study were clarified during the introduction sessions.The focus groups were conducted in Arabic and lasted approximately three hours .“The Southern issue reveals the marginalization, identity issue, violation of peoples’ rights, neglecting the legal partnership of the Southerners according to unity’s deal” (G2N10).“The fifteen participants from the south answered between “agree “and “strongly agree” while the responses of the other fifteen participants from the north are distributed among the categories. The participants were generally responsive when asked to provide a brief definition or description of the southern crisis or issue as an entry to the discussion, and to know their own personal frames about the topic under consideration before they were exposed to randomly selected articles from the four newspapers. Some of the participants had a consensus that the southern crisis is a matter of several issues such as rights, identity and justice, which were taken from the South after Yemeni civil war. These are some of the representative responses:Focus group participants were asked to determine the priority level of the southern cause since the country was facing other crises at the same time, Table You may see the consequences of this crisis on social fabric…it has produced hatred, discrimination and regionalism among the brothers to a degree that innocent people from the north were killed in the south due to the wrong priming either from the media or the leaders of the Southern Movement”.“Most of the focus group participants from both the south and the north positively responded that the southern crisis is a high priority issue when they were asked “Do you think the southern crisis is high priority among the other crises facing the country? For example, respondent G5N15 said in a sad tone:Houthi rebellion and the existence of al-Qaeda on Yemeni soil, besides the economic, health and education problems which should receive more attention.Generally, many participants from the south and the north in the focus groups believed that this crisis must be classified as the most important and of high priority since it threatened the unification of the country and affected the harmony of the Yemeni social fabric. However, there were three participants who stated that, the southern crisis is not considered a priority crisis since the country is facing other pressing crises such as the Al-Harak Al-Janubbiy. One of the northern participants G1N1 stated that he did not get his information from the above sources but from the YSP as he politically affiliates with that party. Other participants G2N9 and G2N12 said they did not know what the southern crisis was until the Yemeni uprising in 2011 erupted and interacted with the activists of the Southern Movement in change square in Sana’a where all anti-government protesters gathered. The respondent G1N5 said that the way the media presented the southern crisis; more specifically the official media led him to seek other trusted sources of information. While several participants G3S1, G3S2, G3S3, G4S11, G5S15, G3S6 and G3S5 from the south said that they received their information from the independent newspaper Al-Ayyam which was banned in 2009.The media as well as interactions with the southern people were the sources of information that most of the focus group participants attained their information about the southern crisis and “I think the media play some part in these causes. The misreporting and biased coverage of the media in the south have incited against anything north, while the official media did neglect the crisis when it first started. But when the pressure reached a higher level by the movement, they started describing the southern people as traitors and targeting the National Unity”.When the participants were asked, “What are the causes of the southern crisis?” many related their opinions with more details, such as stating the fact that the main cause was the political, economic and social marginalization of the south and the absence of equity between the north and the south. Specific answers claimed that the causes were the oppression over the south; the issues of the military officials who were forced into early retirement and the civil workers who were dismissed from their jobs without respecting their rights. In addition, other causes include exploiting the economic resources of the south and looting the lands by some elites of the previous regime after the civil war in 1994. The respondent G1N4 affirmed by saying:All of the focus group participants from the south and some from the north responded positively when asked “Do you believe in the legitimacy of the southern issue and the Southern Movement” Table .Table 6LThe legitimacy of social movements has been debated in several researches. How the movements gain their legitimacy is argued to be based on the sources of the legitimacy. Lis  concludeBased on the aforementioned presentation, the focus group participants were asked to express their opinions about the legitimacy of the SSM based on the goals and the outcomes of the movement. The participants were also asked about the legitimacy of the characteristics of the Southern Movement’s leaders.“Since the southern issue and Al- Harak Al-Janubbyi demand separation after a long time of being patient…waiting and addressing the grievances and condemning the wrong policies over the partner of the unity’s agreement… as everyone in the south believes that we have rights… we asked for equality at the first stage by using civilized means… but no one had listened, so we tried other means to mobilize and to make our voices heard …either we have been heard or not … the southerners represent legitimate independent country…therefore from this point I can tell you that both the issue and the movement are legitimate as long as they represent us ‘southern people”.G4S11 said:Responses to the question “What is your attitude towards the southern issue?” are listed in the Table Al-Harak Al-Janubbiy?” are listed in the Table Answers to the question on “What is your attitude towards the SSM/ Half of the focus group participants chose ‘Favor’ when asked about their attitude towards the southern issue. The participants were more likely to have consensus that the southern issue is all about the unjust treatment to the south after the 1994 Yemeni civil war, and the grievances which could have been solved fairly without cracking down the peaceful movement. When the participants were asked about their attitudes towards the Southern Movement, 46.7 % were neutral, 30 % favored and 20 % unfavorable.Al-Harak Al-Janubbiy when they were asked, “who brought the southern crisis/ issue to the surface and what is actually the Southern Movement?”, some participants stated that the Southern Movement/Al-Harak Al-Janubbiy brought the southern issue after the civil war; therefore it is the mouthpiece of the southerners.During the discussion some of the participants provided more information about the Southern Movement /“The Harak Al-Janubbiy consists of the southern people… injecting the Southern Movement with some of the armed people does not mean that the whole Harak is bad… Al-Harak Al-Janubbiy is a component of the southern people who have the right to express and restore our land and identity… The unity has destroyed and marginalized the leadership of the south that resulted in the disagreement among the leaders of the Southern Movement… we are not going to lose hope that the south is able to generate new leadership and rebuild civil institutions in case we restore our country”.The respondent G3S2 said“I do not support either the southern issue or the Southern Movement…the problems that the southerners argue about are also here in the north…oppression, lands are taken and grievances… if every group in Yemen follows what the Southern Movement has done, we can say “goodbye” to our country… besides some of the southern politicians intentionally incite against everything northern… the killing crimes committed in cold blood on innocent northern people living in the South proved the reality”In the focus groups there were some participants who were totally against the southern issue and the Southern Movement, for example the respondent G1N6 confidently said:About 53.3 % of the participants agreed that the southern issue has affected negatively on the popularity of the Yemeni national unity when they were asked, “Do you think the SSM has affected the popularity of the Yemeni Unification? Table .Table 9IWhen the participants were asked “Do you think the SSM has affected the popularity of the Yemeni Unification, about 53.3 % participants agreed that the southern issue has affected negatively the popularity of the Yemeni national unity while 30 % “strongly agree”.“What could be worse than killing citizens by their identity…? How do you expect a unity to last in this atmosphere? The southern issue affected negatively on the way the new generation think about the unity which is associated with regional discrimination, spreading hatred between the southerners and northerners…definitely if there is voting on the unity now, it is not likely to reach 30 %”.A few participants agreed with what respondent G4S7 said, when he stated:The southern issue is the light for us ‘southerners’ …Yes; we should thank the Southern Movement in revealing the truth about the unity to the southerners … Since the 80s “we” the South had fought and struggled for the unity and now we are fighting to restore our independent country… we have taught our children that their rights have been taken by the north and that they should fight for it…the civil war in 1994 had murdered the Yemeni national unity and I can predict that more than 86 % of the unity is declining in the south…besides the northerners now are not welcomed in the South”.“In more challenging and aggressive manner, the respondent G3S1 said:When the participants were asked if they believe in the importance of the Yemeni unity, 76.7 % reported that it is important while 20 % think that the unity is not important and 3.3 % could not decide. Table Surprisingly, 76.7 % of the focus group participants agreed on the importance of the Yemeni unity when asked “Do you think the Yemeni unity is important?”, while 20 % said it is not important. Those undecided or neutral is 3.3 %. It is known that the northern society is more religious and tribal and the unity has gained its value from these thoughts. The unexpected notion was that out of six who said the unity is not important, three participants were from the north. G1N1, G2N10 and G2N11 argued that unity is not a religious obligation or among the pillars of Islam”. For example G1N1 said “There is no need for the unity after the 1994 civil war”.“I do believe in the unity as a concept but I do not believe in the importance of Yemeni unity …in fact the Yemeni people before the unity were one nation in two different countries, but now two nations in one country…the Yemeni unity has changed the valuable meaning of the concept unity to “unity is a red line” and “unity or death”Another respondent G2N10 assured by saying:Table Most of the focus group participants strongly agree that the southern crisis is considered a real threat to the security and stability of Yemen in particular and the region in general. Here are some of the common responses,The issue is a threat to the stability of the country …it is obvious from what we can see in the daily events in the South…you cannot even walk in the street in peace especially in the governorates where the government’s control is weak… some groups have utilized the conflict between the government and the Southern Movement to implement their agendas, especially the various gangs, al-Qaeda militants or other groups”.“G5S14 said:“The crimes of Mala’ah and Habeel Jaber were targeted in cold blood, the northerners have brought sadness and terrifying memories to what happened in 1986 when people were murdered by their ID, what could be more of a threat than this!!”A few participants mentioned that the crimes that were committed by the Southern Movement are proof that the issue threatens public peace. G1N6 said:Al-Thawrah scored (16.7 %), none of the above (13.3 %), Al-Thawri (6.7 %), and Akhbar Al-Youm (3.3 %).Table “We “southerners” dislike Al-Sahwah newspaper and Islah Party… we do not read the Islamic newspaper due to its attitudes towards the southerners. G5S14 mentioned “Al-Zandani a member of Islah Party issued a fatwa- a ruling on a point of Islamic law given by a recognized authority-during the civil war in 1994 to destroy and kill the southerners because they are “infidels” …we were treated like chickens!”G4S9 The unity was rejected from the north especially from the Islamists wing such as Al-Zandani who issued fatwa to reject the unity with “communists” … we have been labeled as “disbelievers”. I live in Sana’a but am still this ‘Adeni’ girl with no Adabb –immoral-… I do not need to read that in their newspapers either”.G4S9 claimed and supported by G4S11 when she said, “To meet one of the objectives of this study which is identifying people’s perceptions on the coverage of the SSM and whether the participants do read these newspapers on daily basis or not, the researchers make sure that the participants give their opinion based on actual reading. Therefore during the applicable sessions the participants were asked to randomly select articles from the four newspapers and read for about 30 min followed by discussion. Some of the participants’ opinions are mentioned as follows:Al-Harak?Table Al-Harak. Here are some of the responses, G1N2 said:“None of these newspapers have affected my personal frames about the issue or Al- Harak…all we know that these papers are the mouthpieces of the owners, either opposition parties or the regime… that means they have to disseminate their political agenda and ideologies towards the issues based on their interests”.Surprisingly, all participants of the focus groups expressed that there is no credibility and objectivity in reporting the southern crisis and “None of these newspapers framed the southern issue or the Southern Movement neutrally; these papers have no transparency, credibility and objectivity… I think that is impossible”.Almost all the participants pointed at the credibility and objectivity of reporting the southern issue and movement by the newspapers. For instance, G5N11 said: ”.Other participants said that these newspapers are the representatives of their owners and ideologies, G2N8 said “I have read the articles from the four papers and I think these papers have reported the issue from the microscope of the owners. We all know that these papers are the mouthpieces of the regime and opposition parties, so when they report any issue, that would be based on their ideologies and political interests“Al-Thawrah the official paper never reported the southern issue and the daily events in the South … instead by using improper language described the Southern Movement /Al-Harak as traitors, mercenaries and outlaw groups … devoted more articles about the national unity as a holy figure, its achievements… and the red line should not be crossed… besides sending warning messages or threats to use force upon whoever tried to abuse the unity…Yemen will be another Somalia… it is like enforcing the unity”.The participants expressed more by giving examples. G2N8 further explained:“Al-Sahwah is the voice of the biggest opposition party Islah … before 2009 used to report the issue in a way to provoke the regime because it was their conflict season with the ruling party… and after 2009 their political attitude towards the southern issue changed because of its disagreement with YSP… And I do not think these papers have any influence on the public perceptions… simply because they are not trusted ones, no accuracy or balance in reporting”G3S6 stated:“Unfortunately, these newspapers have proved that there is professional journalism in Yemen”.G5N13 agreed with G5S13 when the latter said Responses to the question “What do you think of the acceptance of the slogans “Unity or death” “Secession or deaths” are listed in Table “The use of the slogan “the unity or death” appears many times in the newspapers. It is like “Do not ever think of separation otherwise death would be your fate… It is sort of reminder for what happened in 1994”.About 86.7 % of the focus groups responded “unacceptable” when asked “Do you accept the slogans “unity or death, separation or death?”. G4S10 said “Wa Allah” -I Swear to God”- even if we would lose every single drop of our blood for unity…no separation will take place”. Another respondent from the South said “Well, if the northerners insist in using this slogan “Unity or death”, we “southerners” do not mind dying for separation” (G5S15).For those who accepted the use of the slogans, the respondent G1N6 challenged by saying Table About 73.3 % of the focus groups participants chose ‘oppose’ in solving the southern issue when asked, “What is your attitude towards separation?”Many participants mentioned that the unification is not the problem. Here are some of what have been stated.“What I have seen in the south …the majority of the south does not support the separation especially these days in Aden… and I am sure even if there is self-determination the unity will last”.G1N3 emphasized that “The southerners have the right to secede, because we had given up our independent county, sovereignty and flag… since the unity did not work out as we hoped, so we have the right to secede according to the unity’s conditions which were changed after the civil war”.About 28.7 % of the focus group participants ‘favored’ the separation. For instance, the respondent G3S2 said:Table “It is the time for Yemenis to decide their future by themselves neither the GPC nor the YSP or other groups… we are not going to repeat the same mistake in 1990 for not voting for the unity project … but since the southern issue is strongly disputable… giving the right to the Yemeni people for self-determination will be the right solution and everyone should be responsible for their choice”. G2N12 said: “I think of self-determination as either we go for the unity or separation, but it will be the right decision because it is all about the peoples’ acceptance”.Most of the participants ‘favored’ the right for self-determination when asked “What do you think of the right for self-determination?” For example, G1N4 said:Al-Harak. The movement was formed in 2007 and threatens the Yemeni unity by openly calling for secession. Although these groups were not representative of all segments of the Yemeni society, opinions obtained provide information on what people think of reporting the Southern Separatist Movement crisis and the Yemeni unity by different Yemeni print media. In addition, for more understanding these groups highlighted other related aspects to the topic in hand during the discussion. The information obtained from the focus groups has shown that the SSM crisis represents the key issue, and real threat for Yemenis to address since the pro-independent sentiment is on the rise. According to the participants the newspapers did not reflect what was happening on the ground. Day (The focus groups that were conducted presented an opportunity to know people’s perceptions and feelings on the southern crisis “which is mostly addressed as the southern cause” and generated the so called und. Day  stated tAl-Harak. The other factor that makes Al-Harak inconceivable is the use of regionalism and hatred as weapons, which were translated in the actions of some of the Harak’s elements in killing and attacking the northerners living in the South.Dahmas  stated tAl-Ayyam. They mentioned that somehow they read them to see how the political parties tend to get their political message across the public on issues more specifically toward the southern crisis. The participants provided identical reasons for not trusting these newspapers in regards to the southern crisis and the way of reporting the Southern Movement/Al-Harak Al-Janubbiy. Participants stated that these newspapers have no credibility and objectivity. They further said that there is an obvious lack of professionalism in the treatment of the content of the newspapers. According to them, the newspapers did not provide news analysis or investigative reports. Instead, they only reflected the opinions of the leadership of the political parties.Participants in focus groups have stated that they do read the four newspapers but not as trusted sources compared with the trusted papers such as Overall, these focus groups expressed that there is a cultural gap between the southerners and northerners; unfortunately, the media increase it by their biasness in presenting the southerners and their cause. One of the participants in full rage mentioned that the “These newspapers that I have read during the applicable session have shown their hideousness and lack of journalistic professionalism… and no wonder there is no future for journalism in Yemen”. In this respect, Al-Danani  found inAl-Thawrah newspaper as the mouthpiece of the regime. They said on the one hand; the newspaper denied the existence of the southern issue although the violent events reached its peak in the South. In this regard, a number of news items were repeating the statements of the former president, “Yemen is fine and there is no fear on the unification” and “What is happening in the South is just a storm in a teacup”. Besides, news items addressed the Southern Movement with offensive words such as “bunch of mercenaries, traitors, evil people, terrorists etc.” On the other hand, the regime directed a presidential committee to investigate the issue of lands in the South as well as forming popular committees for protecting the national unity since the attitudes of political powers started to favor the Southern Movement due to the disagreement with the regime.The findings of the focus groups indicate that the partisanship and the ownership of the media shape the news on the southern crisis without objectivity in searching for the facts of this political conflict. Participants proved during the session by analyzing some news items that different newspapers wrote the story about the southern crisis based on the political orientation of the paper, which derived from its ideology. For instance, some pointed at the contradiction in Al-Thawri, the mouthpiece of the YSP and the expected promoter of the southern cause sounded very weak in their coverage. According to the participants, Al-Thawri reported the issue like any other ordinary daily events. They opined that the newspaper toned down reporting due to the internal fragmentation among the members of the YSP as most of them joined the Southern Movement and formed the radical wing, which demands secession.The participants mentioned, surprisingly, that the coverage of the southern issue by Al-Harak or criticized the national unity, and the same situation was found among the southerners for anyone who criticized Al-Harak or did not support the southern issue. That certain behavior during the northerners’ sessions can be explained from a religious aspect since calling for separation and contempt for the unity is against what Allah orders. The behavior of the southerners to each other can be understood as some of the participants were strong supporters or in other words affiliated to Al-Harak Al-Janubbiy and they were from the cities which started the eruption, and they also come from different fractions of Al-Harak which obviously could not reach any single agreement.The study unexpectedly found disagreement among the northerners themselves and the southerners in regards to the southern crisis and the national unity. During the sessions with the northerners there were even some who were aggressive toward anyone who favors or supports In conclusion, the discussion with the groups revealed that media in general and the selected papers from various political persuasions are trying to instill democratic values which is consistent with their ideology, and which presents a serious impact on the value of liberal democracy. Another point worthy of mention is the absence of professional journalism in the media political discourse in general and the Yemeni partisan press in particular. That is manifested through the altercations among these newspapers, which in a way created feelings of hatred for the party and its press and cadres among the members of the society. The lack of objectivity and credibility has led the public to distrust and avoid these newspapers, and shift to information either from the trusted independent, Arab or international presses.Therefore, this study suggests that for the future of Yemeni journalism, it is necessary to free the press from partisanship and ownership restrictions that limit its freedom, which guarantee practicing journalism without the influence of political parties or powers in order to show the progress of democracy in media messages. In addition, there is further need to conduct research that pay more attention to the areas of conflict and resolve issues for the good of all the Yemenis of all political affiliations.


A common belief is that alkali ingestion causes severe esophageal damage and limited gastric injury due to the buffering action of acid. Gastric injury has been observed in patients who ingested alkali. Gastric outlet obstruction (GOO) secondary to caustic ingestion occurs due to fibrosis after resolution of the acute injury and inflammation, most commonly 6 to 12 weeks after initial ingestion. The traditional treatment for GOO related to ingestion of corrosive agents is surgery. Experience with endoscopic balloon dilation of corrosive-induced GOO is limited in children. This is the first report of endoscopic pyloroplasty in a child with GOO due to caustic alkalis ingestion that was treated with balloon dilation  in Iran. Four dilation sessions were required for symptomatic relief of dysphagia. After one year of follow up, weight gain was normal.  Caustic ingestion is seen most often in young children . A commo3, hemoglobin of 11.7 g/dL, and platelets of 383000/mm3. Renal function and serum electrolytes were in normal range. Intravenous (IV) fluids and IV pantoprazole 10 mg twice per day, as well as IV antibiotics were initiated.A 1.5-year-old girl was admitted to the emergency department following accidental ingestion of caustic material. The caustic liquid in an unlabeled container was mistaken for water. Past medical history was normal. Immediately after ingestion she was given a cup of water by her mother and then developed a cough and vomiting. A small amount of coffee ground was noted in vomiting contents. On arrival to the pediatric emergency department, she was febrile and irritable, but hemodynamically stable without respiratory distress. Drooling was noted during inspection. Oral cavity was erythematous with some aphthus ulcers. Abdomen was soft with no tenderness or distension, and had normal bowel sounds. Other physical examination was unremarkable. On laboratory examinations the complete blood count was normal with white blood cells of 12800/mmUpper gastrointestinal endoscopy with general anesthesia was done to assess the severity of the caustic injury. This revealed an erythematous oral cavity with some aphthous ulcers, and grade 2B of caustic burn in esophagus .The stomach revealed grade 2 diffuse caustic mucosal injury of the antrum and pylorus characterized by superficial erosions with exudates and edema . The duoShe kept NPO for 48 hours and then surgical diet was started without any problems. Her diet was subsequently advanced to liquid and soft, and diet was well tolerated. After 4 weeks of follow up, she developed repeated vomiting after feeding. Upper gastrointestinal endoscopy was performed again and revealed a normal oral cavity and esophagus, but deformed antrum with severe stricture in pylorus where a 6mm scope could not pass through it . After aCaustic ingestion is seen most often in children between one and three years of age with elevated rates in boys , 8. EsopGastrojejunostomy was used as an effective method for treatment in some centers in isolated corrosive pyloric stenosis . There aSurgical bypass may be necessary, but endoscopic balloon dilatation has also been used successfully in patients with pyloric stenosis due to caustic ingestion . Temiz eIn conclusion, endoscopic balloon dilation is a less invasive and interesting method of treatment in children with pyloric stricture due to caustic ingestion. However, more experiences will be required in endoscopic balloon dilation among children with pyloric stricture to avoid more invasive procedures.


By fully adopting capabilities of modern web browsers, such as WebGL, for molecular graphics, the viewer can interactively display large molecular complexes and is also unaffected by the retirement of third-party plug-ins like Flash and Java Applets. Generally, the web application offers comprehensive molecular visualization through a graphical user interface so that life scientists can easily access and profit from available structural data. It supports common structural file-formats  and a variety of molecular representations . Moreover, the viewer can be embedded in other web sites to provide specialized visualizations of entries in structural databases or results of structure-related calculations.The NGL Viewer ( Visualizing 3D molecular structures of biopolymers has become a common task in the life sciences ,2. The dUntil recently web browsers could not display 3D content without additional plug-ins. Therefore, programs like ‘Jmol’  or the ‘Another feature modern web browsers have is access to dedicated graphics hardware through the WebGL application programming interface (API). For desktop programs, shifting calculations to the graphics processor unit (GPU) has greatly improved rendering performance and quality . So by uNote that while WebGL is widely adopted by web browsers, there are still installations in which WebGL is not available, either due to missing software updates or older, unsupported hardware. To enable molecular graphics for these, ‘JSmol’ is an option, as it neither relies on WebGL for rendering nor requires a plug-in.Here we introduce the ‘NGL Viewer’, which provides a rich graphical user interface (GUI) for customization of molecular scenes in addition to a developer API for embedding and controlling the viewer. Leveraging the features of modern web browsers, the ‘NGL Viewer’ can supply fast, hardware-accelerated molecular graphics and brings a familiar GUI to the web. The web application offers general-purpose molecular visualization and as it does not require the installation of specialized software it can simplify access 3D structural data for life scientists.The ‘NGL Viewer’ web application is written mostly in JavaScript, with some code in HTML and CSS to create the GUI. Fast 3D graphics are enabled by GPU acceleration available through WebGL, a standard based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API and built directly into the browser without the need for any plug-ins. All major web browsers support WebGL in their current versions through a 3D context for the HTML5 canvas element. Bindings to JavaScript in turn provide a flexible and low-level API to the GPU for web-based applications.stage class. It supplies an instance of the viewer class for rendering and hosts component instances that contain, for example, the molecular structures for visualization. The component instances in turn host representation instances containing the geometry to be rendered. The GUI is decoupled from the stage class and reacts only to signals. For example, a stage instance emits a ‘component loaded’ signal to which the GUI reacts with the creation of an interface element for the loaded component. By that, no GUI-specific code is needed within the non-GUI parts. Generally, this architecture simplifies creation of custom GUIs and facilitates embedding the viewer into other web applications.The source code is organized into task-specific modules: parsing and processing of molecular structures; transforming molecular structures into display representations such as spheres for atoms, sticks for bonds or tubes tracing a protein backbone; rendering of display representations on the GPU with WebGL; and, finally, creating an interactive GUI. A goal of this organization is a layered architecture with a clear separation of modules to facilitate re-use and refactoring in development. At the center of the implementation is the Molecular structures are parsed and converted into an internal format based on the common structure-model-chain-residue-atom hierarchy of biomolecules. Parsers are currently implemented for the PDB, GRO and mmCIF file-formats. For large structures, each type of atomic data such as the coordinates or the element name is stored in a single JavaScript typed array. This saves memory compared to storing the data in properties of JavaScript objects for each atom individually.To minimize time-consuming data exchange between CPU and GPU, the geometries of molecular representations are sent to the GPU in few but large arrays. The geometries in each of the arrays can then be rendered by a single draw call to the WebGL API.EXT_frag_depth WebGL extension, spheres and cylinders are rendered as meshes of triangles forming the geometric primitives. Ray-casting is also used to provide an implementation of the ‘HyperBalls’ representation  is used to create and render the scene containing the geometries of molecular representations. The library also provides the camera implementations and mouse controls.The ‘three.js’ library  by their ID. Moreover, compressed files in ‘gz’ or ‘zip’ format are automatically unpacked upon loading.The ‘NGL Viewer’ web application enables interactive display of large macromolecules and allows complex manipulations of the visualization through a GUI. Structures in PDB, mmCIF or GRO format can be loaded into the application from local and remote sources. For instance, local files can be loaded via drag'n’drop and PDB entries are retrieved from the RCSB archive . For convenience, the shorthand sidechainAttached is available. A detailed description of the selection language can be found in the online documentation.Display of representations is easily limited to specific atoms, residues or chains via a concise selection language. This allows detailed control of which parts of a biomolecule are shown to highlight important aspects or are not shown for clarity Figure  and C. FLarge systems of biomolecules are often available as coarse-grained structures where only the backbone atoms are resolved. Here, visualization of coarse-grained structures is supported by special treatment when calculating backbone and side-chain bonds as well as by automatic alpha-helix detection. Thus, representations such as ‘cartoon or ribbon’ are available for coarse-grained structures despite their missing atoms. Also provided is a ‘rope’-like protein fold abstraction especially suitable for coarse-grained structures. In this representation a tube follows a local axis similar to what is done in ‘Bendix’ .Structure files from the PDB include data on biologically relevant assemblies and provide information about crystallographic symmetries. Display of the corresponding assemblies can be controlled via the parameter menu of structures and representations Figure .The molecular views created can be exported as anti-aliased high-resolution images for use elsewhere.stage instance that allows loading and subsequent manipulation of molecular structures. Instructions and examples for embedding and controlling the viewer are available in the online documentation along with a description of the API methods.The viewer can be embedded into other websites by including a single JavaScript file and then calling API methods to create a By leveraging modern web technologies such as WebGL, the ‘NGL Viewer’ provides scalable molecular graphics allowing the display of large macromolecular assemblies including ribosomes and virus capsids Figure . It is ahttps://github.com/arose/ngl/ under an open-source license. Extensive documentation can be found at http://proteinformatics.charite.de/ngl/doc.The web application is free and open to all users and there is no log-in requirement. Moreover, the full source code is available at


Klinefelter syndrome (KS) is the most common chromosomal aneuploidy in male population, which demonstrates an unusual association with acromegaly. We herein present a rare case involving the confirmation of KS 2 years after surgical treatment for acromegaly.A 27-year-old man presented with an acromegalic appearance. Endocrinological examination revealed a high growth hormone (GH) concentration, low testosterone concentration, and high follicle-stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone concentration. Brain imaging revealed a 9 × 6 × 7− mm sellar low-density nodule suggestive of a microadenoma. Trans-sphenoidal surgery was undertaken, and immunohistochemistry revealed GH positivity. Two years after surgery, the patient underwent examination for infertility. He presented with diminished pubic hair, and small and firm testes. Hormonal assay revealed hypergonadotrophic hypogonadism on the basis of decreased serum total testosterone (<0.2 ng/mL), and elevated luteinizing hormone (14.71 mIU/mL) and follicle-stimulating hormone (21.8 mIU/mL). A chromosomal karyotype examination showed 47,XXY, confirming the diagnosis of KS. Replacement therapy with oral testosterone undecanoate was begun. Brain imaging showed no delayed enhancement in the saddle region of the pituitary gland, but the concentration of plasma insulin-like growth factor maintained a high level. The patient's GH concentration was not significantly suppressed by the GH glucose suppression test. In this consideration, he was referred for postoperative somatostatin analogue treatment to control GH hypersecretion.The misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis of KS is mainly because of substantial variations in clinical presentation and insufficient professional awareness of the syndrome itself. As the simultaneous occurrence of KS and acromegaly is rare, and the association between them remains unclear, we suggest that complete pituitary hormonal screening and conventional pituitary MRI should be essential for patients with KS to screen for pituitary tumor. We herein report a rare case of a double syndrome involving both KS  and acromegaly and describe the clinical features, treatment, and final outcome.Acromegaly is a disorder characterized by growth hormone (GH) hypersecretion, multisystem-associated morbidities, and increased mortality. Most cases of acromegaly are because of a pituitary adenoma, which results in hypersecretion of GH and an elevated concentration of insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1).2. Endocrinological examination revealed hypersecretion of GH, elevated luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) concentrations, and a low testosterone (T) concentration. His plasma adrenocorticotropic hormone, prolactin, and thyroid hormone concentrations were normal , and hyperhidrosis. He reported no headache, visual field defects, or eye movement disorders. He had small, firm testes and impaired sex drive, but without other characteristic appearance of KS . The patient was 172-cm tall, weighed 94 kg, and had a body mass index of 31.8 kg/mThe patient underwent trans-sphenoidal surgery, and the mass was totally resected Figure C, D. ImmSHOX); however, no definite pathogenic mutations were found. Three sequential semen tests showed no sperm in his semen. Chromosome analysis revealed 47,XXY , the patient came to our department for evaluation of infertility, after he had been married for 4 years. He exhibited acromegalic facies, was beardless and had scarce armpit hair growth, but was Tanner stage 3 for pubic hair development. His upper bust was 85 cm, under bust was 87 cm, and he had finger spacing of 172 cm. His penile length and circumference were 4 cm and 3 cm, respectively, and his testicular volume was small at about 2 mL each with solid quality. The patient reported a nearly normal erection and ejaculation, but was dissatisfied with the sexual desire and quality of the sexual life. The patient's hormone examination results are summarized in Table 6 The GH nadir was >1 ng/mL during a 75 g oral glucose tolerance test and the elevated IGF-1 level for the patient's age and sex, which indicates incomplete remission , as well as chemotherapy, radiation treatment or alcohol abuse.8 KS is the most common genetic form of hypergonadotropic hypogonadism. According to patient's history and clinical examination, KS was given higher priority. For our patient, a low T concentration with elevated FSH and LH concentrations in this case provided a clue to KS diagnosis, and the confirmed diagnosis based on chromosome analysis.In male individuals, hypogonadism can be divided into 2 types: hypogonadotropic hypogonadism owing to a lesion in the hypothalamic or pituitary region and hypergonadotropic hypogonadism from defects in the testes or in the androgen target tissues.10 defined pituitary gonadotropin-secreting adenomas as those with an FSH and/or LH expression level of >10%. In our patient, immunohistochemical staining was negative for FSH and weakly positive for LH. Gonadotropinoma or acromegaly combined gonadotropinoma should be excluded.The patient had typical features of acromegaly, and laboratory examination reveals a notable increase in the GH concentration. Furthermore, the imaging detected a pituitary adenoma and postoperative immunohistochemical findings confirmed the diagnosis of a pituitary GH-secreting microadenoma. Kontogeorgos et al11 Treatment options include surgery, medical therapy, and radiotherapy. Trans-sphenoidal surgery is recommended as a priority treatment for many patients with acromegaly, particularly those with microadenomas.12 However, 40% to 60% of patients with acromegaly will experience persistent or recurrent disease following surgery, necessitating additional therapy.13 Somatostatin analogues are the first-line medical treatment for patients with acromegaly. Moreover, better prognosis of acromegaly depends upon early recognition, diagnosis, and management.5 A multidisciplinary management approach and close follow-up are thus necessary for acromegaly therapy.14Acromegaly is a rare disease with unrestricted GH-induced secretion of IGF-1, leading to an increased prevalence of comorbidities.The patient's skin was black and rough, and his height was normal, which led to diagnostic confusion and resulted in misdiagnosis during his first treatment. His parents were normal in appearance, intelligence, and height . The patient's mother stated that the development of the patient's language and motor ability was delayed and that his height growth was slow. As he reached maturity, the patient's language and motor ability became almost normal. At the age of 22 years, he was 160-cm tall and continued growing until he reached 172 cm. He had been a manual worker in an industrial company after his graduation from junior high school. He had a mild temperament with no violent behavior. He got married at the age of 25, and because of low sexual desire, he had received testosterone treatment for half a year.SHOX gene on chromosome X influences the phenotype of KS; the gene is situated in the pseudoautosomal region 1 on Xp. SHOX hapo insufficiency has been implicated in growth retardation and bone changes in Turner syndrome15 and Leri–Weill16 dyschondrosteosis and is also implicated in the slightly accelerated growth in KS, 47,XXX and 47,XYY syndrome.17 Overexpression of the SHOX gene is likely to be responsible for the normal stature seen in patients with KS.19 No definite pathogenic mutation was found in the patient's SHOX sequence.The 21 In fact, many men show no abnormalities at all. Some uncommon KS variants are associated with short stature .22 There are a few reported cases of KS and short stature secondary to GH deficiency.31 Complementary studies showed partial GH deficiency, but the reason for such an association is not clearly known.A characteristic of KS is tall stature, but not all men with XXY actually develop this syndrome or its symptoms. Many autosomal genes are differentially expressed in patients with KS, which explains the diversity in clinical phenotype diversity among patients with KS.32 On this basis, we hypothesized that the T treatment for low libido that the patient received after marriage might account for the closure of the epiphyses.We believe that the patient's height increase was a result of his GH-secreting pituitary adenoma, and the possibility that this patient with KS had short stature because of partial GH deficiency cannot be entirely ruled out. KS can stimulate tallness because of failure of the epiphyses to close. The gonadal steroids  cause closure of the epiphyseal growth plates.33 Samaan et al34 have reported that reactive pituitary changes may accompany the gonadal failure present in these dysgenetic syndromes. It is reasonable to assume that because of the loss of negative feedback, chronic stimulation of adenohypophysial cells type results in hyperplasia.35 Whether hyperplastic gonadotroph cells can transform to adenoma and the underlying mechanism is still not clear.Prolonged target gland failure causes pituitary hyperplasia; several cases of gonadotrope cell hyperplasia were reported in patients with KS.36 Acromegaly is an acquired disorder related to excessive production of GH and characterized by progressive somatic disfigurement and systemic manifestations.37 The gsp gene mutation is the major intrinsic defect in the pathogenesis of acromegaly.38 In addition, acromegaly in the setting of germline AIP mutations has been reported in clinical studies worldwide.40 So we believe that the KS occurred before the acromegaly, and whether the formation of GH-secreting pituitary adenoma is because of a genetic abnormality linked to KS remains to be elucidated.KS is characterized by at least 1 supernumerary X chromosome in addition to the genes on the extra X chromosome, which may be inherited from either parent.Timely diagnosis of KS is challenging itself, and the presence of a GH-secreting pituitary adenoma in this case suggests a rare combination. Further reports would be needed to confirm a possible association between KS and acromegaly. Better understanding of the classic endocrine negative feedback system is important for early diagnosis in KS. Our report also highlights the importance of complete pituitary hormonal screening and conventional pituitary MRI might be essential for the patients with KS to screen for the presence of pituitary adenoma.


Microblogging as a kind of social network has become more and more important in our daily lives. Enormous amounts of information are produced and shared on a daily basis. Detecting hot topics in the mountains of information can help people get to the essential information more quickly. However, due to short and sparse features, a large number of meaningless tweets and other characteristics of microblogs, traditional topic detection methods are often ineffective in detecting hot topics. In this paper, we propose a new topic model named multi-attribute latent dirichlet allocation (MA-LDA), in which the time and hashtag attributes of microblogs are incorporated into LDA model. By introducing time attribute, MA-LDA model can decide whether a word should appear in hot topics or not. Meanwhile, compared with the traditional LDA model, applying hashtag attribute in MA-LDA model gives the core words an artificially high ranking in results meaning the expressiveness of outcomes can be improved. Empirical evaluations on real data sets demonstrate that our method is able to detect hot topics more accurately and efficiently compared with several baselines. Our method provides strong evidence of the importance of the temporal factor in extracting hot topics. Microblogging, has quickly emerged as a popular and common form of social media in recent years because of its ease of use and convenience. With more and more people using this platform, it is increasingly important to extract hot topics from these short texts so that users can grasp interesting hot topics conveniently and quickly. However, detecting hot topics from these short texts poses new challenges. Unlike normal documents, these messages are usually noisier, less topic-focused and much shorter. Processing these texts efficiently is also a problem since large number of messages are posted by every minute. Moreover, fewer messages on microblogs are valuable for hot topic detection because massive messages range from coverage of serious political events and daily life such as weather, foods, emotions, and so on. Therefore, traditional topic analysis methods usually fail to achieve the desired accuracy.Several studies attempted to solve the issues mentioned above. External knowledge, such as Wikipedia or news articles, is employed to expand and enrich the context of the short messages 2]3]. T[3]. T2][. T[3]. TTopic models can express texts as a special distribution of hidden topics. So we can fully use the latent semantic of texts to reduce the limit caused by sparse data feature of the short text. However, traditional topic models can not model microblogs data very well without considering its inner affiliated information. It would be interesting to align the temporal dimension to the corresponding information . In this paper, we formalize the problem of hot topic extraction into a generative model, and propose a novel probabilistic generative model based on LDA , called In MA-LDA, topics are extracted from the messages only with a high predefined comment count and retweet count because hot topics related messages are always retweeted and commented with high frequencies.The main contributions of this paper can be summarized as follows:We formally present a novel framework to extract hot topics. Firstly, we filter out messages with a predefined comment and retweet count. Then we use MA-LDA to extract hot topics.We propose an innovative topic model which can exploit time information of messages. Furthermore, an effective time distribution computing method is proposed.Experimental results show that our proposed framework can effectively address the challenging issues in the hot topics extraction problems in microblogs, significantly outperforming the two baselines mentioned in this paper.Hot topic extraction is an important task for analyzing social media. In order to achieve satisfactory results, many classic models are utilized, such as single-pass clustering , latent Because of the shortness and informality in microblogs, directly applying conventional topic models (e.g. LDA and PLSA) often fails to achieve expected results. Many studies have shown that the model based on LDA can deal well with sparse and short data by discovering underlying topic structures in microblogs dataset such as 23]. To . To 23].In this section, we present the framework that aims at identifying hot topics on microblogs more efficiently and accurately. The framework is depicted in Firstly, we filter out the messages from the raw dataset with a predefined retweet and comment count. Only the messages whose number of retweet and comment is larger than the predefined number are kept for hotspots detection. Generally, the number of retweet and comment for a certain message is a measure of the messages popularity. Moreover, hot topic related messages usually get a high retweet and comment count, but the daily life related messages can not get a high retweet and comment count in general. As a large number of messages is about users’ daily lives, filtering out these relatively useless information before doing topic analysis can greatly improve the efficiency of the process. Now the question is how to choose the potential retweet and comment count (which may affect the precision of hot topic detection) to contribute to the final results. Here we conduct an empirical study analysis. This study analyzes statistics on the number of messages according to the different number of retweet and comment. The data used in this study contains 11,285,538 messages. The statistics of the result are shown in Though messages which contain hot topics are always retweeted and commented in a large number, the messages with high retweet and comment count are not always hot topic related. The next stage is performing topic analysis for these messages by MA-LDA. As Finally, we incorporate a list of hashtags into LDA model. The hashtags extracted from messages will be analyzed by MA-LDA. The topics produced by topic model consist of the n top-ranked words, rather than expressive sentences. Hashtags in microblogs may improve the expressiveness of outcomes, and also could be an indication of a topic that the message should stand for. Ramage et al.  introducTopic models such as PLSA, LDA and their variants have been successfully applied in categorization , documenMA-LDA is a probabilistic graphical model based on standard LDA model. It describes a process for generating a time and hashtag based document collection. Likewise, MA-LDA models each document as a mixture of underlying topics and generates each word from one topic. Unlike LDA, there are two types of topics generated by MA-LDA. One is hot topics, and the other is general topics. The time related variable is computed to decide whether the generated word is from hot topics or general topics. Additionally, hashtags related parameters will affect the generation of both a certain topic and a certain word respectively from hot topic distribution over document and words distribution over hot topic. φk for each topic k from a Dirichlet prior β remains the same as for traditional LDA. But when sampling topic distribution for each document, we use x to indicate whether the current word inherits topic from general topics ϑg (x = 0) or hot topics ϑg (x = 1). The value of x is affected by two binary variables xw and xd. xw is about the time distribution of a word. The process of estimating the value of xw for wi in vocabulary can be described as: Firstly, we random choose a set of messages from microblogs. Secondly, the time of the dataset is divided with T time slices, and we then count the value of ft which is the frequency of occurrence of word w in (t + 1)th time interval. Generally, a slice is defined as one day but can have other values. So time distribution for w is depicted as . Finally, the eigenvalue of time distribution for w is obtained as follows:The generative process for MA-LDA is formally described in Algorithm 1. Getting favg is the average value of fw, t. The value of Sw for a hot term is likely larger than a general one. That is to say, we can extract hot terms from datasets by limiting the value of xw. With the experiments on real data, we observed that most hot terms can be identified when Sw > 0.5. So we define the value of xw like this: xw = 1 when Sw > 0.5, and xw = 0 when Sw < = 0.5. Based on the value of xw, xd can be decided as: If there are one or more words having xw = 1 in document m, let xd = 1. Otherwise, xd = 0. This is dependent on the thought that words in document with hot terms are more likely hot words. Finally, we use logical operation “or” to combine xw and xd, that is x = xw∣∣xd.In λm is either 0 or the occurrence count of the hashtag (which occurs in document m) on the overall dataset. The other is the vector λw in this vector is either 0 (when the current word w is not related to a hashtag) or a constant indicating the average number of occurrence count of all hashtags. Finally, all values in this two vectors will be drawn to control the hot topic sampling and word sampling together with the vector of The hashtags in our model are associated with the sample of a certain hot topic and a certain hashtag related word. In this paper, we define two hashtag related vectors. One is the vector Algorithm 1 Generative process for MA-LDAInitialization: time distribution value of Sw, vector for each topic k ∈ 1, K: do   sample mixture componentss end for for each document m: do   sample mixture proportion   sample mixture proportion Nm ∼ Poiss(ξ);  sample document length for each word n ∈ : do  x = xw∣∣xd according to Sw;   compute ifx = 0 then       sample topic index     sample term for word end if   ifx = 1 then       sample topic index     sample term for word end if   end for  end for xd = 1), we can write the joint distribution of all known and hidden variables given the Dirichlet parameters as follows.As depicted in Then the likelihood of the document xd = 0) is defined same as in LDA, which is defined asMoreover, the joint probability of the document w conditioned on the topic assignments of all other words. Here, we only show the most important formula that is used for topic sampling with regard to a word. Specifically, for the word t in document m (when x = 1), the conditional probability of zt = h is given by:h; h; h; m; For the words in document m (when x = 0), the probability of h in h which maximize the m. For our topic model or standard LDA, we usually use the n top-ranked words of a topic distribution for words to represent the final topic. So the usage of hashtag related parameter in The objective of training MA-LDA is to learn the proper latent variables In this section, we conduct several experiments to show that our MA-LDA model performs better than the two baselines on real-world datasets. One is proposed in  which wehttp://blog.qq.com/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/) are used in our experiments. The Tencent Microblogs are crawled from several different “micro-channels” (http://t.qq.com/) on Tencent microblogs platform. It contains 11,285,538 messages which were posted by users from July 2 to July 14 in 2013. The second dataset is a subset of Twitter corpus in [Two datasets Tencent microblogs (orpus in  which cohttp://www.ictclas.org/) is used for this paper. After extracting hashtags, namely the vocabulary between two “#” marks (Tencent microblogs) or following with one “#” mark (Twitter), other terms like the punctuation marks, stop words, links and other non-words in the original microblog datasets are removed in data preparation. The hashtag words are part of contents of the original messages in our method.In order to effectively detect hot topics from microblogs, we first draw messages from the raw data with a pre-defined threshold of retweet and comment count. In total, 400,000 messages are chosen randomly to compute time distribution of words. Specifically, for the process of word segmentation needed in Chinese microblogs, the ICTCLAS  = ∑kp = ∑kp(k)p(w∣k).Where In our experiments, we held out one third of messages for test purposes and trained the models on the remaining two thirds of messages for all datasets. Because of different data size between two datasets, it is not proper to assume that they contain the same number of topics. Therefore, we test all three models on Tencent with topic number K = 10,15,20,25,30. For the other dataset, we test all three models with topic number K = 40,50,60,70,80.ϑm = {ϑm,1, ϑm,2,…, ϑm, K} and the original document wm = {wm,1, wm,2,…, wm, Nm}, and train the MaxEnt classifier on the integrated data  by using JMaxEnt4 (http://jtextpro.sourceforge.net). MaxEnt was run five times using different 60–40% partitions of train-test sets. Five MaxEnt classifiers were trained using the same parameter setting and built on the training data according to different number of topics. The setting of topic number is same as in document modeling. In this experiment, there is another baseline which uses MaxEnt classifier trained on Tencent data without hidden topics. All of methods with hidden topics as well as the baseline classifier were evaluated on the test data.Except estimating the probability of unseen held-out document given some training documents, topic models are also typically evaluated by measuring performance on some secondary task, such as document classification or information retrieval . BesidesK is set to 20 or 25, respectively. We realize that the number of topic K, when set to 15 or 20, is the better setting for MA-LDA. The average F1 with different topic numbers for all models are given in The objective of this set of experiment is to test the ability of our method to detect hot topics at the time of their arrival. We use one criterion to evaluate the performance of hot topic detection. This metric is Coverage Rate (CR)  which inTo assess the CR, we first manually extract genuine hot topics and their related keywords from the datasets according to the statistics of media recordation and hotspots rankings in microblogs platform in a specified period. Based on the optimal settings of topic numbers in the previous experiments, we set the topic numbers to be 20 on Tencent data and 50 on Twitter data. The results of CR on Tencent data and Twitter data is as Compared with the standard LDA and TFLDA, our method produces the highest CR. Firstly, as described in the literature, the TFLDA is the result of a rearrangement of keywords (from the words distribution of topics) in accordance with word frequency statistics after first running LDA, thus producing more expressive and accurate results compared with LDA. We can observe that the TFLDA outperforms standard LDA by as much as 48.8%. However, based on the same reason, some detected topics in TFLDA are what users often talk about but are irrelevant to hot topics. Our model outperforms TFLDA by 21% on average. Both MA-LDA4  and MA-LDA3 (with hot hashtags) are optimum strategies in this paper.At last, to intuitively show the results achieved through MA-LDA, some visualized results are listed in In this paper, we introduce a new method called MA-LDA for hot topic detection on the platform of microblogs. Our model is based on LDA, and some attributions such as time stamps, hashtags as well as retweet and comment counts are also taken into account. We test the performance of our model on document modeling, document classification and hot topic detection, respectively. Standard LDA and the other baseline TFLDA mentioned in this paper are selected to compare with our model. In addition, there are four ways of settings on MA-LDA according to the usage situation of hashtags.The experimental results on two datasets show that by incorporating time distribution and hashtags into LDA, our method performs better with greater stability than the standard LDA on both document modeling and document classification. More importantly, more hot topics are identified by our model. The obtained outcomes are more representative. It is clear that MA-LDA with all hashtags or hot hashtags is able to achieve better results.In the future work, hot terms detection automatically based on the time distribution will be considered. Semantic relations between terms will be taken into consideration as well. Furthermore, we may consider the influence of dynamics or evolution of networks.


Owing to the high sensitivity, high resolution, and the wealth of contrast mechanisms, fluorescence imaging is the most versatile and widely used visualization modality to study the structure and function of biological systems and the molecular process in living organisms without perturbing them.Fluorescence molecular imaging is an evolving field of imaging sciences, which involves the development of microscopic techniques for live cell imaging at super resolution and macroscopic techniques to monitor molecular events in living organism. The breakthrough of super-resolution techniques allows researchers to obtain fluorescence images with a higher resolution than the diffraction limit. On the other hand, fluorescence imaging is also facing important challenges. Because the imaging requires exogenous probes to enhance imaging contrast or provide signal readout, the probe performance largely determines the detection limit and sensitivity. The intrinsic poor penetration of UV and visible light limits their broad applications in biology. Therefore, promising probes that exhibit high photostability, long fluorescence lifetime, strong absorption, and/or emission in the near-infrared (NIR) region are highly desirable.Nanoparticle is a collection of atoms or molecules with much higher intensity of absorbance and emissions compared to small molecular probes, which can provide strong local contrast in biological imaging. Two-photon fluorescent probe simultaneously absorbs two infrared (IR) or NIR photons. Using IR or NIR light as excitation can minimize the light scattering and suppress the background signal, which allows imaging of living tissue up to about one millimetre in depth.Applications of fluorescent probes for fluorescence molecular imaging are growing quickly for recording events from single live cells to whole animals with high sensitivity and accurate quantification. Such approaches have immense potential to track progression of metastasis, immune cell trafficking, stem cell therapy, transgenic animals, and even molecular interactions in living subjects, which represent the future and trends of optical molecular imaging technologies.This special issue compiles several selected original and overview articles that range from design of contrast agents including fluorescent molecules and nanoparticles to biomedical molecular imaging and sensing with various applications. The editors believe that the selected work presented in this issue may provide useful information and promote further investigations on the development of novel fluorescent probes to be used for diagnosis and treatment of disorders and diseases as well as understanding the biological processes.


Rationale: Synaptic dopamine (DA) release induced by amphetamine or other experimental manipulations can displace [11C]raclopride (RAC*) from dopamine D2-like receptors. We hypothesized that exogenous levodopa might increase dopamine release at striatal synapses under some conditions but not others, allowing a more naturalistic assessment of presynaptic dopaminergic function. Presynaptic dopaminergic abnormalities have been reported in Tourette syndrome (TS).Objective: Test whether levodopa induces measurable synaptic DA release in healthy people at rest, and gather pilot data in TS.Methods: This double-blind crossover study used RAC* and positron emission tomography (PET) to measure synaptic dopamine release 4 times in each of 10 carbidopa-pretreated, neuroleptic-naïve adults: before and during an infusion of levodopa on one day and placebo on another (in random order). Five subjects had TS and 5 were matched controls. RAC* binding potential (BPND) was quantified in predefined anatomical volumes of interest (VOIs). A separate analysis compared BPND voxel by voxel over the entire brain.Results: DA release declined between the first and second scan of each day (p=0.012), including on the placebo day. Levodopa did not significantly reduce striatal RAC* binding and striatal binding did not differ significantly between TS and control groups. However, levodopa’s effect on DA release differed significantly in a right midbrain region , where levodopa displaced RAC* by 59% in control subjects butincreased BPND by 74% in TS subjects.Discussion: Decreased DA release on the second scan of the day is consistent with the few previous studies with a similar design, and may indicate habituation to study procedures. We hypothesize that mesostriatal DA neurons fire relatively little while subjects rest, possibly explaining the non-significant effect of levodopa on striatal RAC* binding. The modest sample size argues for caution in interpreting the group difference in midbrain DA release with levodopa. Phasic dopamine release is crucial to dopamine’s role in changing behavior2, including in learning sequences of movements3. Normal tonic dopamine release but abnormal phasic dopamine release has been postulated to occur in several disease states, including drug abuse4 and Tourette syndrome (TS)8.Dopamine (DA) release from neurons has often been conceptualized as occurring via two separable mechanisms: tonic, referring to low levels of DA in extrasynaptic spaces that may be more accessible to microdialysis, and phasic, referring to synaptic DA release at synapses following presynaptic action potentials11C]raclopride (hereinafter RAC*) binds to dopamine D2-like  receptors loosely enough to be displaced by physiological increases of dopamine at the synapse. This property has been exploited to detect changes in synaptic DA release induced by experimental manipulations including the administration of amphetamine9. However, amphetamine also has some disadvantages in this context—primarily, that it does not really producephasic dopamine release in the usual, temporal, sense of the word. Rather, it causes prolonged, substantial dopamine release regardless of environmental demands. Scientific questions about DA release in the absence of amphetamine might be better tested with a pharmacological stimulus that could potentially increase the magnitude of DA release, but under tighter endogenous control. Additionally, amphetamine can induce symptomatic effects including euphoria10 and transiently increased tic severity11; these effects can themselves alter brain activity, complicating interpretation of the results. Ideally, a pharmacological challenge drug to test phasic dopamine release would not produce effects noticed by the subject.The radioligand raclopride was prepared byO-[11C]methylation of (S)-O-desmethylraclopride HBr  using a modification of previously reported procedures33. Carbon-11 was produced as11CO2 using the Washington University JSW BC 16/8 cyclotron and the14N11C nuclear reaction. The11CO2 was converted to11CH3I using the microprocessor-controlled PETtrace MeI MicroLab , and immediately used for [11C]methylation of (S)-O-desmethylraclopride. Product [11C]raclopride was purified via semipreparative HPLC, and reformulated in a 10% ethanol/normal saline solution. The radiochemical purity exceeded 95%, and the specific activity exceeded 500 Ci/mmol, as determined by analytical HPLC. The mass of raclopride was ≤13.9 µg per injected dose.fallypride) in SN, consistent with greater dopamine release60. Functional MRI studies have also demonstrated substantia nigra signal related to stimulus novelty or to the Novelty Seeking trait63. Healthy adults receiving a sweet vs salty taste had BOLD activation in this region64. Despite this information, it is not clear how to relate a decrease in levodopa-stimulated dopamine release in substantia nigra to the pathophysiology of TS. Explaining the similar difference in nigral levodopa response in TS in parahippocampal gyrus and orbital cortex is no easier, though dopaminergic effects on D2-like binding in hippocampus have been documented in Parkinson disease65 and dopamine agonists evoke changes in orbital cortex activity66. The trend for a similar effect in thalamus is consistent with a [11C]FLB-457 PET study in which amphetamine provoked thalamic dopamine release in control subjects but not in TS67. Overall, these results are consistent with an abnormality of presynaptic dopaminergic pharmacology in TS, but the limitations of this comparison must be acknowledged.Subjects with TS, however, showed an increase in substantia nigra RAC* binding with levodopa, consistent with a decrease in nigral dopamine release. Nigral dopamine release has been related to reward and novelty in humans. Healthy adults with higher novelty seeking scores had lower D2-like binding . More importantly, the small sample size lowers confidence in how representative the statistically significant differences are of the overall population of adults with TS.72. A newer levodopa infusion method produced roughly twice as high a levodopa plasma concentration as the infusion used in this study12, and may produce greater dopamine release.These results suggest that a natural next step for research in TS is to test whether dopamine release in TS differs during a dopamine-releasing cognitive (or other) task. Levodopa may augment the task-evoked release or interact with it differently in people with versus without tics. Along these lines, a cognitive-pharmacological interaction fMRI study in TS found that LD changed the BOLD responses to a working memory taskPET images and clinical datahttp://www.turkupetcentre.net/petanalysis/format_image_ecat.htmlThe spreadsheet in OpenDocument file format provides the clinical data and links each PET scan to the subject scanned and the condition . Also 40 PET files are provided with the filename extension .v, one for each dynamic PET scan. These files are in ECAT file format; users of other imaging file formats will find useful information at the following web site:Click here for additional data file.F1000Research: Dataset 1. PET images and clinical data,10.5256/f1000research.5672.d4217274All subjects provided written confirmation of informed consent before study participation. The most novel aspect of the study was the investigation of levodopa. This is very interesting. No significant levodopa effects were, however, observed. The authors offer some interesting thoughts on the reason for this null effect, most critically pointing to a need to have an active task PET design. This is a plausible argument that may stimulate further research on this topic.st and 2nd scan on each day of scanning.A potentially interesting methodological contribution is the observation of a difference between the 1The study is likely underpowered, in particular for any group comparison , so the repeated-measures analysis was most likely not very sensitive. I would treat the observed differences between TS and control groups from the whole-brain analysis as preliminary.I may have missed it, but I could not find information about how the PET scans were reconstructed.I have read this submission. I believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. The authors thank Prof. Nyberg for the thoughtful review. 11C]raclopride PET data were collected in 3D mode and reconstructed on the Siemens ECAT 961 scanner console using filtered backprojection (ramp filter), with attenuation measured before each emission scan using an external 68Ge/68Ga source.The [We agree with all the reviewers that the between-group comparison is useful primarily as pilot data because of the small group sizes. This is a carefully performed study that presents a novel approach to measure presynaptic dopamine release using the administration of exogenous levodopa, coupled with raclopride PET scanning. Preliminary data are provided using this method in a small group of controls and subjects with Tourette syndrome. The authors describe a decline in dopamine release in striatum, thalamus and frontal lobe between the first and second scan of each day in response to placebo administration in normal subjects, possibly due to habituation to study procedures. Levodopa administration did not alter striatal dopamine release differently in Tourette syndrome vs. controls. However, dopamine release differed significantly in the midbrain and parahippocampal gyrus in the two conditions. Levodopa stimulated dopamine release in controls but reduced it in Tourette subjects.Although these are important observations, the number of subjects studied was small. Hence, these must be considered pilot data although they are consistent with a rather complex dopaminergic role in Tourette syndrome. Of interest for future studies would be the evaluation of task-evoked dopamine release in response to cognitive tasks. Lastly, the observation that habituation occurs in response to placebo infusions has important implications to the interpretation of placebo-controlled studies of dopamine release.I have read this submission. I believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. The authors studies the raclopride binding (displacement) in groups of subjects . They studied the effect of levodopa infusions and of a placebo. The subjects were studied at rest.Basically, they found that in Tourette syndrome, dopamine release was smaller  (reduced) than in controls, in midbrain (approximately substantia nigra/VTA) and in parahippocampal gyrus.This is an interesting paper and the methodology is adequate. The subjects are studied at rest, this may underestimate the dynamic of dopamine release and it would have be more interesting to study this phenomenon during a task. The groups are very small, and the effect in Tourette syndrome may also be different according to the characteristics of the patient .Nevetherless, the study is consistent with the presence of abnormality of presynaptic dopaminergic pharmacology in Tourette syndrome.I have read this submission. I believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard.