Lesion area assessment in psoriasis patients.

Psoriasis is an autoimmune skin disease, afflicting skin with red plaques that are usually accompanied by silvery-white scales. Various medical treatments are used, with different impacts on the patients, but there is no definite cure for the disease. The PASI standard is employed to measure the performance of the treatments. It includes four parameters, namely area, erythema, scaliness and skin thickness. The PASI parameters are usually measured manually by physicians through subjective clinical observations which are imprecise, time consuming and in some cases lead to diverse results. This paper presents a computer-based automatic method to measure the area parameter in the PASI standard. In the proposed method, the YCbCr colour space is used to differentiate the plaques from the skin by applying an optimal threshold method. Performance evaluation results indicate that the proposed method is able to determine lesion areas with accuracy higher than 96% for 18 out of 20 cases and higher than 92% for another case. As well as high accuracy the proposed method has another advantage over previous methods: it can automatically detect plaques with silvery-white scales, plaques on hairy skins and tiny plaques, as well as simple (scale-less) plaques.

Using the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) for analysis of protein similarities and structure.

The Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) collects and organizes information about the molecular biology and genetics of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The latest protein structure and comparison tools available at SGD are presented here. With the completion of the yeast sequence and the Caenorhabditis elegans sequence soon to follow, comparison of proteins from complete eukaryotic proteomes will be an extremely powerful way to learn more about a particular protein's structure, its function, and its relationships with other proteins. SGD can be accessed through the World Wide Web at http://genome-www.stanford.edu/Saccharomyces/

Unified display of Arabidopsis thaliana physical maps from AtDB, the A.thaliana database.

In the past several years, there has been a tremendous effort to construct physical maps and to sequence the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana. As a result, four of the five chromosomes are completely covered by overlapping clones except at the centromeric and nucleolus organizer regions (NOR). In addition, over 30% of the genome has been sequenced and completion is anticipated by the end of the year 2000. Despite these accomplishments, the physical maps are provided in many formats on laboratories' Web sites. These data are thus difficult to obtain in a coherent manner for researchers. To alleviate this problem, AtDB (Arabidopsis thaliana DataBase, URL: http://genome-www.stanford.edu/Arabidopsis/) has constructed a unified display of the physical maps where all publicly available physical-map data for all chromosomes are presented through the Web in a clickable, 'on-the-fly' graphic, created by CGI programs that directly consult our relational database.