Hyperlipidemia is a well-recognized risk factor for atherosclerosis and can be regulated by adipokines. Expression of the adipokine resistin-like molecule alpha (Retnla) is regulated by food intake; whether Retnla has a role in the pathogenesis of hyperlipidemia and atherosclerosis is unknown. Here we report that Retnla has a cholesterol-lowering effect and protects against atherosclerosis in low-density lipoprotein receptor-deficient mice. On a high-fat diet, Retnla deficiency promotes hypercholesterolaemia and atherosclerosis, whereas Retnla overexpression reverses these effects and improves the serum lipoprotein profile, with decreased cholesterol in the very low-density lipoprotein fraction concomitant with reduced serum apolipoprotein B levels. We show that Retnla upregulates cholesterol-7-a-hydroxylase, a key hepatic enzyme in the cholesterol catabolic pathway, through induction of its transcriptional activator liver receptor homologue-1, leading to increased excretion of cholesterol in the form of bile acids. These findings define Retnla as a novel therapeutic target for treating hypercholesterolaemia and atherosclerosis.

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Video decoding is a must-have feature in modern electronic devices in consumer market. A real-time processing demand is crucial in H.264 video application. In this paper, we present a fast H.264 video decoding technology based on a fast and quick bit pattern extraction method in video stream that is coded with variable-length code stored in little-endian systems. The Key of our approach is to make the video stream encoded as a decoding friendly formatted stream. In addition, we present a very quick converting method based on LUT(Look-up Table) technique. The experimental results show that about 11.45% reduction in bit pattern extraction time. Keywords-component; H.264 decoder; fast video decoder; real-time pattern extraction; Lookup-Table based decoding; video stream decoding I. MOTIVATIONMore and more video data capturing devices are prevailing in these days. And, all of the video data are stored in the compressed format because of its huge data volume. Therefore, video encoding and decoding are necessary operation and need to be as fast as possible to allow high frame rate and high resolution for better perceptual quality and stream services. Standard compressed video data is formatted by means of variable length code (VLC) system to maximize the compression ratio. The main hurdle to speed up the decoding of video stream is the variable length of encoded video code bit-streams because the data token boundary in VLC is not fixed but is different in each byte according to different token length with each symbol. According to our preliminary experimental observation the bit pattern extraction part for each symbol identification function consumes more than 33% of the total processing time in a video decoder.There are a few previous works to reduce the decoding processing time of video stream. A study [1] performed macro block level scheduling to utilize many-core processor feature for speedup. And, other study [4] used GPU of Xbox 360 as parallel processing unit to accelerate the H.264 decoding in HD video In [5], authors presented H.264 multiprocessing proposal by combining coarse-grained frame-level parallel decoding with fine-grained macro-block-level parallelism. On the other hand, in [6] and [7], a new hardware architecture was presented for variable-length decoder of H.264/AVC utilizing parallel nature of CAVLC algorithm.In this paper, we present a fast bit pattern extraction method by providing a best format for retrieval of data in a variable length code, especially for little-endian system. And, we present a very quick method to convert input data stream to our best formatted stream. We use LUT (Look-Up Table) to accelerate the bit-pattern format conversion and parsing of data stream. Experimental results show the speedup is about 11.45% in the bit-pattern extraction.

In the key for Fig. 4d in this Article, the labels indicating the Ldlr À / À and Ldlr À / À /Retnla-Tg groups were unintentionally placed next to the wrong symbol. The correct version of Fig. 4 appears below.