A New Arg54Gly Transthyretin Gene Mutation Associated with Vitreous Amyloidosis in Chinese

Purpose:To analyse the hereditary features of a Chinese pedigree with familial vitreous amyloidosis in Liaoning Province,China,and to investigate the correlation between the clinical appearance of the disease and transthyretin(TTR)gene mutation,including the locus and type of TTR gene mutation.Methods:Five patients (10 eyes) from one Chinese family were diagnosed with vitreous amyloidosis between July 1996 and April 2009.Family members were followed up subsequently,and peripheral venous blood was obtained from 13 subjects (including 2 patients,and 11 controls without clinical signs of disease).DNA samples were extracted and 4 exons of the TTR gene were amplified by polymerase chain reaction (PCR).The gene fragments were subjected to sequencing analysis.The results were analyzed with DNAMAN Windows 5.2.2.0 and Chromas sequence chart analysis software,TTR gene exons were compared between affected patients and normal controls.Results:Family pedigree analysis revealed that patients were distributed in three generations.Male and female subjects had equal prevalence,and only one parent of affected patients had signs of disease.TTR gene exon sequencing showed that the sequence of patients was identical to that of normal individuals.No TTR gene mutations were noted in 10 unaffected family members.However,a TTR Gly-54 point mutation in the 2nd exon was detected in two patients and 1 unaffected family member (one of the patients' daughters).Vitreous samples in 4 cases (7 eyes) showed positive Congo red staining,suggesting that these family members suffered from familial vitreous amyloidosis.Conclusion:This pedigree affected with familial vitreous amyloidosis was characterized by autosomal dominant inheritance;.a TTR Gly-54 point mutation in the 2nd exon is presumed to be the cause.This Gly-54 point mutation of the TTR gene is a novel mutation in vitreous amyloidosis.

Tendency for Evolution of High Myopia in 308 Chinese School Children from Xi'an City

Purpose: To observe the refractive status, especially the tendency for evolution of high myopia, in eyes of Chinese school children from Xi’an city.Methods: The study was conducted in 11514 eyes of the 5757students aged between 7~18 years in Xi’an city primary and high schools. The inclusion criterion was >-6D of the spherical equivalent refraction. The object ophthalmic examinations were done, included non-cycloplegic objective refraction, visual acuity, intraocular pressure, fundus evaluation by ophthalmologists and nurses with professional training. Specially designed questionnaires were filled in and the data were statistically analyzed with SPSS10.0.Results: Of 11514 eyes, the detection rate was 81.4%(9376eyes) for myopia and 5.3%(615 eyes) for high myopia. High myopia was found in 2.6%.(300 eyes).of right eyes, 2.7%(315 eyes) in left eyes, and 2.4%(275 eyes) were in boys and 2.9%(340 eyes) in girls. Among 12 school grades, the detection rates of high myopia increased significantly with student age, with 0.9% in the 1stgrade of primary school and12.5% in the 3rd year of senior middle school. The average refractive error of spherical equivalent refraction was(-7.43±1.29) D with 95% confidence interval(-7.54,-7.33). No significant differences were found between the right and left eyes or both genders. The distribution of myopic severity was lowest(-6D).in primary school students younger than 12 years,was higher(-8D) in junior middle school students older than13 years, and highest(-13D) in senior middle school students.Conclusion: A continuous growth was evident in the severity of high myopia throughout 12 years of primary and middle school except for the first year of primary school, with growth occurring in two transitional stages between the senior primary and junior middle school years, and between the junior and senior middle school years. The distribution of high myopia was lowest, at-6D, in primary school, increased to-8D in junior middle school, and progressed to-10D in senior middle school, indicating a high risk of development of pathologic myopia during the students’ later lifespan. The adolescent period of 13 to 18 years of age in middle school is a critical period for the development of pathological myopia over-8D.

Advances in Atmospheric Radiation:Theories,Models,and Their Applications.PartⅡ:Radiative Transfer Models and Related Applications

The subject of“atmospheric radiation”includes not only fundamental theories on atmospheric gaseous absorption and the scattering and radiative transfer of particles(molecules,cloud,and aerosols),but also their applications in weather,climate,and atmospheric remote sensing,and is an essential part of the atmospheric sciences.This review includes two parts(Part I and PartⅡ);following the first part on gaseous absorption and particle scattering,this part(PartⅡ)reports the progress that has been made in radiative transfer theories,models,and their common applications,focusing particularly on the contributions from Chinese researchers.The recent achievements on radiative transfer models and methods developed for weather and climate studies and for atmospheric remote sensing are firstly reviewed.Then,the associated applications,such as surface radiation estimation,satellite remote sensing algorithms,radiative parameterization for climate models,and radiative-forcing related climate change studies are summarized,which further reveals the importance of radiative transfer theories and models.

PTMOT: A Probabilistic Multiple Object Tracker Enhanced by Tracklet Confidence for Autonomous Driving

Real driving scenarios,due to occlusions and disturbances,provide disordered and noisy measurements,which makes the task of multi-object tracking quite challenging.Conventional approach is to find deterministic data association;however,it has unstable performance in high clutter density.This paper proposes a novel probabilistic tracklet-enhanced multiple object tracker(PTMOT),which integrates Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture(PMBM)filter with confidence of tracklets.The proposed method is able to realize efficient and robust probabilistic association for 3D multi-object tracking(MOT)and improve the PMBM filter’s continuity by smoothing single target hypothesis with global hypothesis.It consists of two key parts.First,the PMBM tracker based on sets of tracklets is implemented to realize probabilistic fusion of disordered measure-ments.Second,the confidence of tracklets is smoothed through a smoothing-while-filtering approach.Extensive MOT tests on nuScenes tracking dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance in different modalities.