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4,300 | Mangrove fruit ( Bruguiera gymnorhiza) increases circulating GLP-1 and PYY, modulates lipid profiles, and reduces systemic inflammation by improving SCFA levels in obese wistar rats | Bruguiera gymnorhiza (BG) has potential as a functional food because of its dietary fibre content and bioactive components such as flavonoids and phenolic compounds. However, it is not studied in the context of diet-related disease prevention. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the effects of Bruguiera gymnorhiza fruit flour (BGF) on satiety hormone, lipid profile, systemic inflammation, body weight, and caecum SCFA levels in diet-induced obese rats. A total of 28 obese male Wistar rats were divided into four groups. Group 1 (K1) was given a standard chow, group 2 (K2) standard chow + orlistat, group 3 (P1) standard chow + BGF 2 g/200 g BW/day, and group 4 (P2) standard chow + BGF 4 g/200 g BW/day for 28 days. The levels of GLP-1, PYY, total cholesterol (TC), triglyceride (TG), HDL, IL-6, TNF-α, and body weight were measured before and after the intervention; meanwhile, the caecum SCFA levels were assessed only after the intervention. In this study, BGF intervention increased the dose-dependent plasma GLP-1 and PYY levels (P < 0.000). In addition, BGF intervention also decreased lipid profiles (TC & TG) (P < 0.000, respectively) and systemic inflammation in a dose-dependent manner. Finally, acetate, propionate, and total SCFA concentrations were higher in the BGF intervention group (P2) compared to the other groups (p < 0.05). The SCFA levels were associated with satiety hormones, lipids, and systemic inflammation (P < 0.05). The BGF intervention improved satiety hormone, lipid profile, systemic inflammation, and SCFA levels. |
4,301 | Immunocompetent Patient With Primary Bone Marrow Hodgkin Lymphoma | Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) is a hematologic malignancy that comprises about 10% of all lymphomas with the most common type being classical HL (cHL). The typical clinical presentation of cHL involves multiple region lymphadenopathy and a chest mass found on imaging. However, not all patients present with the typical symptomology of cHL which poses a diagnostic challenge. Extranodal HL, especially primary bone marrow HL (PBMHL), has been described in immunocompromised patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In this case report, we present a PBMHL case in an immunocompetent patient with no HIV exposure. We discuss a 51-year-old immunocompetent female who presented with 2 - 3 months of fever, confusion, generalized myalgias, and fatigue. She had no lymphadenopathy on physical exam. On further testing, the patient's blood work demonstrated cytopenia and imaging confirmed no lymphadenopathy. Eventually, a bone marrow evaluation established her diagnosis of PBMHL. The patient expired after receiving one cycle of a modified chemotherapy regimen. This case illustrates that HL can be associated with an atypical clinical presentation which may delay diagnosis and treatment. PBMHL can occur in the normal population who is not immunocompromised nor HIV positive. In this situation, the best diagnostic approach is a thorough medical history, physical exam, and bone marrow aspiration and biopsy. Presence of constitutional symptoms without any lymphadenopathy or chest mass should raise the concern for possible atypical HL such as PBMHL. Accurate and timely identification of PBMHL allows for timely initiation of appropriate therapy. While cHL is responsive to chemotherapy, further research is required to improve the therapy for PBMHL. |
4,302 | Profitability of Ichimoku-Based Trading Rule in Vietnam Stock Market in the Context of the COVID-19 Outbreak | Ichimoku Kinkohyo or Ichimoku Cloud Chart is one of the most popular technical indicators used by traders all over the world. However, its profitability is heavily influenced by the market environment, to which it is applied. Furthermore, the COVID-19 outbreak may have an impact on the market environment as well as the performance of all technical indicators. This study is the first to look into the profitability of Ichimoku-based trading rules in the Vietnamese stock market in the context of the COVID-19 outbreak. More particularly, the COVID-19 outbreak has a positive influence on the performance of this strategy when considering the entire market as well as a variety of industries including real estate industry, food and beverage industry, resource industry, and automotive and electronic components industry. Compared to the pre-pandemic period, the return on investment obtained per each transaction using the Ichimoku-based strategy increased by roughly 8 - 9 % in the pandemic period. Compared to the Buy-and-hold method, the Ichimoku-based strategy could slightly increase Accumulated return while posing a lower risk. The findings indicate that the Ichimoku-based strategy is applicable to the Vietnam stock market, regardless of the adverse effects of the pandemic on the industries. |
4,303 | The comparative effects of group prenatal care on psychosocial outcomes | To compare the psychosocial outcomes of the CenteringPregnancy (CP) model of group prenatal care to individual prenatal care, we conducted a prospective cohort study of women who chose CP group (N = 124) or individual prenatal care (N = 124). Study participants completed the first survey at study recruitment (mean gestational age 12.5 weeks), with 89% completing the second survey (mean gestational age 32.7 weeks) and 84% completing the third survey (6 weeks' postpartum). Multiple linear regression models compared changes by prenatal care model in pregnancy-specific distress, prenatal planning-preparation and avoidance coping, perceived stress, affect and depressive symptoms, pregnancy-related empowerment, and postpartum maternal-infant attachment and maternal functioning. Using intention-to-treat models, group prenatal care participants demonstrated a 3.2 point greater increase (p < 0.05) in their use of prenatal planning-preparation coping strategies. While group participants did not demonstrate significantly greater positive outcomes in other measures, women who were at greater psychosocial risk benefitted from participation in group prenatal care. Among women reporting inadequate social support in early pregnancy, group participants demonstrated a 2.9 point greater decrease (p = 0.03) in pregnancy-specific distress in late pregnancy and 5.6 point higher mean maternal functioning scores postpartum (p = 0.03). Among women with high pregnancy-specific distress in early pregnancy, group participants had an 8.3 point greater increase (p < 0.01) in prenatal planning-preparation coping strategies in late pregnancy and a 4.9 point greater decrease (p = 0.02) in postpartum depressive symptom scores. This study provides further evidence that group prenatal care positively impacts the psychosocial well-being of women with greater stress or lower personal coping resources. Large randomized studies are needed to establish conclusively the biological and psychosocial benefits of group prenatal care for all women. |
4,304 | Treatment of textile industry wastewater based on coagulation-flocculation aided sedimentation followed by adsorption: Process studies in an industrial ecology concept | This study examines the feasibility of treatment of textile industry wastewater using a two-step process that includes coagulation-flocculation aided sedimentation and adsorption. It also aims at finding reuse potential of the generated sludge while making the treated water recyclable for the same industry in an industrial ecology concept. The wastewater was collected from a small-scale textile plant with a discharge of 400 L/week, where more than 70 similar textile plants are located in and around the area. FeCl3 was selected as the coagulant for the initial step in the treatment process, and a bimetallic oxide Graphene Oxide (GO) hybrid was selected as the adsorbent for the latter step of the treatment process. The experimental conditions for the coagulation process included the optimization of dose, stirring speed, stirring time, and settling time. For the adsorption process it included the optimization of stirring time, dose, and rate. The parameters like Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) and color were checked during the treatment process and near complete removal of COD and color were achieved using the suggested materials and process. The treated water was found fit for recycling - towards making zero liquid discharge plant. Later, the sludge generated from both the steps in the processes was sundried and mixed with cement and tested for 7 days and 28 days of compressive strength. A total of 26 kg of cement was replaced, by using sludge generated from treating 100 L of textile wastewater, in the sludge-cement mix. In addition to solving the sludge problem, the process can help in reducing the requirement of cement in concrete. Finally, a detailed economic assessment for the entire study was also performed and is reported. |
4,305 | Multi-snapshot Newtonized orthogonal matching pursuit for line spectrum estimation with multiple measurement vectors | In this paper, multi-snapshot Newtonized orthogonal matching pursuit (MNOMP) algorithm is proposed to deal with the line spectrum estimation with multiple measurement vectors (MMVs). MNOMP has the low computation complexity and state-of-the-art performance advantage of NOMP, and also includes two key steps: Detecting a new sinusoid on an oversampled discrete Fourier transform (DFT) grid and refining the parameters of already detected sinusoids to avoid the problem of basis mismatch. We provide a stopping criterion based on the overestimating probability of the model order. In addition, the convergence of the proposed algorithm is also proved. Finally, numerical results are conducted to show that the performance of MNOMP benefits from MMVs, and the effectiveness of MNOMP when compared against the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of frequency estimation accuracy and computation complexity. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. |
4,306 | High rate of hematological responses to sorafenib in FLT3-ITD acute myeloid leukemia relapsed after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation | Relapse represents the most significant cause of failure of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) for FLT3-ITD-positive acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and available therapies are largely unsatisfactory. In this study, we retrospectively collected data on the off-label use of the tyrosine kinase inhibitor sorafenib, either alone or in association with hypomethylating agents and adoptive immunotherapy, in 13 patients with post-transplantation FLT3-ITD-positive AML relapses. Hematological response was documented in 12 of 13 patients (92%), and five of 13 (38%) achieved complete bone marrow remission. Treatment was overall manageable in the outpatient setting, although all patients experienced significant adverse events, especially severe cytopenias (requiring a donor stem cell boost in five patients) and typical hand-foot syndrome. None of the patients developed graft-vs.-host disease following sorafenib alone, whereas this was frequently observed when this was given in association with donor T-cell infusions. Six patients are alive and in remission at the last follow-up, and four could be bridged to a second allogeneic HSCT, configuring a 65 ± 14% overall survival at 100 d from relapse. Taken together, our data suggest that sorafenib might represent a valid treatment option for patients with FLT3-ITD-positive post-transplantation relapses, manageable also in combination with other therapeutic strategies. |
4,307 | Application of internet thinking in the teaching of environmental art design | Views or fragility of our environment and its cultural reaction, we need to understand how artists have depicted the environment in the past and how they continue to shape it at the moment. Environmental art is a new genre in this paper to describe how artworks directly characterize the environment. Abstract work of art is clear and every form of resistance, such as a long line by the Pollution or by Skyspaces. The need for Terrell a new genre to describe the overall environmental art is quite obvious, as it has been given the label of this kind of art since the late 1960s, such as land art, earthworks, site host network arts, arts destination, eco-art, Eco-art, environmental sculpture. The review also considered the potential for teaching change to convey environmental art. Art provides a lens by exploring all aspects of society - from Water Pollution production, Teaching policy, watershed management, and transport infrastructure, to educate and costume design from an ecological perspective. This article provides a brief history and prominence in the last decades of programs and practices in this field examples. Although primarily to the U.S. point of view to provide environmental art movement, all the work cited characteristics of the networked global system?s rapid exchange of ideas exist. |
4,308 | The in vitro genotoxicity potency of mixtures of pyrrolizidine alkaloids can be explained by dose addition of the individual mixture components | Plant-based 1,2-unsaturated Pyrrolizidine Alkaloids (PAs) are responsible for liver genotoxicity/carcinogenicity following metabolic activation, making them a relevant concern for safety assessment. Due to 21st century toxicology approaches, risk of PAs can be better discerned though an understanding of differing toxic potencies, but it is often mixtures of PAs that are found as contaminants in foods, for example, herbal teas and honey, food supplements and herbal medicines. Our study investigated whether genotoxicity potency of PAs dosed individually or in mixtures differed when measured using micronuclei formation in vitro in HepaRG human liver cells, which we and others have shown to be suitable for observing genotoxic potency differences across different PA structural classes. When equipotent concentrations of up to six different PAs representing a wide range of potencies in vitro were tested as mixtures, the observed genotoxic potency aligned favorably with results for single PAs. Similarly, when the BMD confidence intervals of these equipotent mixtures were compared with the confidence intervals of the individual PAs, only minimal variation was observed. These data support a conclusion that for this class of plant impurities, all acting via the same DNA-reactive mode of action, genotoxic potency can be regarded as additive when assessing the risk of mixtures of PAs. |
4,309 | V-band HJFET MMIC DROs with low phase noise, high power, and excellent temperature stability | This paper describes the development, along with detailed phase-noise analysis, of V-band monolithic-microwave integrated-circuit (MMIC) dielectric-resonator oscillators (DROs) achieving state-of-the-art performances. A TE01delta-mode Ba(Mg,Ta)O-3 cylindrical dielectric resonator (DR) is directly placed on a MMIC GaAs substrate to avoid the loss and uncertainty of bonding wires. A 0.15-mum AlGaAs-InGaAs heterojunction field-effect transistor with optimized structure, is developed as an active device. A design procedure proposed by the authors is employed, which allows us to analyze and optimize circuits in consideration for the output power, phase noise, and temperature stability. A developed DRO co-integrated with a buffer amplifier exhibits a low phase noise of -90 dBc/Hz at 100-kHz offset, a high output power of 10.0 dBm, and an excellent frequency stability of 1.6 ppm/degreesC at an oscillation frequency of 59.6 GHz, all of which are state-of-the-art performances reported for MMIC DROs above V-band. An experimental and theoretical analysis for the phase-noise-reduction effect of a DR is also addressed. |
4,310 | Robust Attitude Estimation from Uncertain Observations of Inertial Sensors Using Covariance Inflated Multiplicative Extended Kalman Filter | This paper presents an attitude estimation method from uncertain observations of inertial sensors, which is highly robust against different uncertainties. The proposed method of covariance inflated multiplicative extended Kalman filter (CI-MEKF) takes the advantage of non-singularity of covariance in MEKF as well as a novel covariance inflation (CI) approach to fuse inconsistent information. The proposed CI approach compensates the undesired effect of magnetic distortion and body acceleration (as inherent biases of magnetometer and accelerometer sensors data, respectively) on the estimated attitude. Moreover, the CI-MEKF can accurately estimate the gyro bias. A number of simulation scenarios are designed to compare the performance of the proposed method with the state of the art in attitude estimation. The results show the proposed method outperforms the state of the art in terms of estimation accuracy and robustness. Moreover, the proposed CI-MEKF method is shown to be significantly robust against different uncertainties, such as large body acceleration, magnetic distortion, and errors, in the initial condition of the attitude. |
4,311 | A Survey on Wind Turbine Condition Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis-Part II: Signals and Signal Processing Methods | This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art condition monitoring and fault diagnostic technologies for wind turbines. The Part II of this survey focuses on the signals and signal processing methods used for wind turbine condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. |
4,312 | Queer Pilgrimage: Anne Lister, Gentleman Jack, and Locating Community | Queer pilgrimage is a journey made by an individual or a group to a location, permanent or transitory, which bears relevance to the lives, cultures, and politics of queer people. It is undertaken for the pilgrim/s to feel an affinity with the space itself through emotional and/or physical proximity. Since Gentleman Jack first aired in 2019, acts of queer pilgrimage have increased substantially to key sites associated with Lister, including to Shibden Hall (her ancestral home), Halifax, York, and beyond. In this article I draw upon two forms of queer pilgrimage in relation to Anne Lister. The first is this substantial increase in tourism and attraction to sites associated with Lister. The second is the queer pilgrimage Lister herself undertook in 1822 to the Ladies of Llangollen at their home, Plas Newydd.In drawing out these two comparatively, I propose that historical and contemporary forms of queer pilgrimage have more in common than may initially be apparent, namely a commonality between the queer pilgrims of the 19th and 21st centuries around a desire for community. |
4,313 | Potentially toxic elements in groundwater of the upper Brahmaputra floodplains of Assam, India: water quality and health risk | This paper presents the groundwater quality assessment of the upper Brahmaputra floodplains of Assam on a seasonal basis. A total of 88 samples were analyzed for the presence of potentially toxic elements in two seasons. In addition, an attempt is made to identify any possible associated health risks to the residents via the drinking water pathway. The study reveals the presence of various potentially toxic elements, in particular, manganese, iron, nickel, and fluoride concentration exceeding the drinking water specifications set by BIS and WHO drinking water standards. The degree of groundwater contamination was assessed using the Water Quality Index, Heavy metal Pollution Index, Heavy metal Evaluation Index, and Degree of Contamination. The spatial distribution maps of groundwater quality were prepared using geographical information system. The non-carcinogenic health risk was evaluated using hazard quotients and hazard index as per the United States Environmental Protection Agency methodology. The hazard quotient of fluoride and manganese have values > 1, which exceeds USEPA recommended benchmark. The health risk assessment identified that the risk was highest during the pre-monsoon season, and the child population is more vulnerable to non-carcinogenic risk than the adults. Findings of cancer risk identified that pre-monsoon groundwater samples from the Golaghat District pose the highest health risks in the upper Brahmaputra floodplains. The risk is highest in the southwest of the study area, followed by the south and then by the north. |
4,314 | Towards Intelligent Intracortical BMI Low-Power Neuromorphic Decoders That Outperform Kalman Filters | Fully-implantable wireless intracortical Brain Machine Interfaces (iBMI) is one of the most promising next frontiers in the nascent field of neurotechnology. However, scaling the number of channels in such systems by another 10x is difficult due to power and bandwidth requirements of the wireless transmitter. One promising solution for that is to include more processing, up to the decoder, in the implant so that transmission data-rate is reduced drastically. Earlier work on neuromorphic decoder chips only showed classification of discrete states. We present results for continuous state decoding using a low-power neuromorphic decoder chip termed Spike-input Extreme LearningMachine (SELMA) that implements a nonlinear decoder without memory and its memory-based version with time-delayed bins, SELMAbins. We have compared SELMA, SELMA-bins against state-ofthe-art Steady-State Kalman Filter (SSKF), a linear decoder with memory, across two different datasets involving a total of 4 non-human primates (NHPs). Results show at least a 10% (20%) or more increase in the fraction of variance accounted for (FVAF) by SELMA (SELMA-bins) over SSKF across the datasets. Estimated energy consumption comparison shows SELMA (SELMA-bins) consuming approximate to 9 nJ/update (23 nJ/update) against SSKF's approximate to 7.4 nJ/update for an iBMI with a 10 degree of freedom control. Thus, SELMA yields better performance against SSKF while consuming energy in the same range as SSKF whereas SELMA-bins performs the best with moderately increased energy consumption, albeit far less than energy required for raw data transmission. This paves the way for reducing transmission data rates in future scaled iBMI systems. |
4,315 | Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Site PV Power Forecasting | Accurate forecasting of solar power generation with fine temporal and spatial resolution is vital for the operation of the power grid. However, state-of-the-art approaches that combine machinelearning with numerical weather predictions (NWP) have coarse resolution. In this paper, we take a graph signal processing perspective and model multi-site photovoltaic (PV) production time series as signals on a graph to capture their spatio-temporal dependencies and achieve higher spatial and temporal resolution forecasts. We present two novel graph neural network models for deterministic multi-site PV forecasting dubbed the graph-convolutional long short term memory (GCLSTM) and the graph-convolutional transformer (GCTrafo) models. These methods rely solely on production data and exploit the intuition that PV systems provide a dense network of virtual weather stations. The proposed methods were evaluated in two data sets for an entire year: 1) production data from 304 real PV systems, and 2) simulated production of 1000 PV systems, both distributed over Switzerland. The proposed models outperform state-of-the-art multi-site forecasting methods for prediction horizons of six hours ahead. Furthermore, the proposed models outperform state-of-the-art single-site methods with NWP as inputs on horizons up to four hours ahead. |
4,316 | Symbolic Music Generation Conditioned on Continuous-Valued Emotions | In this paper we present a new approach for the generation of multi-instrument symbolic music driven by musical emotion. The principal novelty of our approach centres on conditioning a state-of-the-art transformer based on continuous-valued valence and arousal labels. In addition, we provide a new large-scale dataset of symbolic music paired with emotion labels in terms of valence and arousal. We evaluate our approach in a quantitative manner in two ways, first by measuring its note prediction accuracy, and second via a regression task in the valence-arousal plane. Our results demonstrate that our proposed approaches outperform conditioning using control tokens which is representative of the current state of the art. |
4,317 | Application of the ALARA principle for radon at work: feedback from the European ALARA network | The Council Directive 2013/59/Euratom has introduced binding requirements for the management of radon in the workplace in Member States of the European Union. How does it work in practice? In 2021, the European ALARA Network created a working group on ALARA for Radon at Work with the objective of collecting and sharing experiences from the field. A survey was developed to detail each step of the national regulations for the control of radon and to describe case studies showing implementation. This article presents a qualitative analysis of the answers received from seven countries. There are no two similar national regulations and, at each step, different provisions, protocols, techniques etc are applicable or recommended. This diversity contributes to the richness of the results and can inform about interesting and good practices, where 'good' is defined by what is appropriate in the nationally and locally prevailing circumstances. All national regulations follow a graded approach, which is a key component for the implementation of the optimisation (ALARA) principle, yet several potential weak points that may be challenging to ALARA have been identified and are discussed, namely the radon risk assessment, the focus on numerical values, uncertainties in the measurement, how to obtain economically efficient remediation, and the interface with other regulations. Strengthening collaboration between risk prevention and radiation protection actors could help to provide and build expertise on radon management in the workplace, especially when exposure is managed as a planned exposure situation. |
4,318 | Conjoint belief adaption functionality for statistically secure communication paradigm for CR-IIoTs | In an infrastructure-critical manufacturing industry, continuous monitoring of the assembly lines with internet-integrated sensors in an unforeseeable, stochastic, and harsh environment becomes indispensable for real-time fault detection, location, and isolation. State-of-the-art literature suggest that the Cognitive Radio-based Industrial Internet of Things (CR-IIoTs), a spectrum aware wireless communication paradigm, is best suited for monitoring as they are proficient in overcoming spectrum scarcity in a 2.4-GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band and guarantee a threshold Quality of Service (QoS) in hostile environs. Nonetheless, CR-IIoTs and the Cognitive Radio-based network archetype are susceptible to internal and external security threats at the application layer and vulnerable to Spectrum Sensing Data Falsification (SSDF) at Data Link Layer (DLL). In CR-IIoTs, cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is a competent technique to ameliorate the performance of Primary User (PU) detection and optimizes the idle licensed spectrum bands access management. In this paper, a novel belief adaption framework in conjunction with an optimized secure communication scheme (termed as CBAF) based on the Certificateless-Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC) is proposed for robust CSS in CR-IIoTs. CBAF proficiently provides full-Perfect Forward Secrecy, Ephemeral Secret Leakage-Resilience, Public Key Replacement-Resilience Malicious but Passive KGC-Resilience, and Key Escrow Resilience. Simulation analysis pertaining to network performance indices ascertains the efficacy of CBAF, as it outperforms the state-of-the-art in throughput, packet delivery ratio, and communication overhead by 8.5%, 6.7%, and 19.9% respectively. Under internal attacks, CBAF outperforms the best from state-of-the-art by 11.3% in On-Off attack, 19.7% in Data Tampering attack, 21.1% in SDF attack, and 13.4% in DDoS attack. |
4,319 | Protective effect of Secukinumab on severe sepsis model rats by neutralizing IL-17A to inhibit IKBα/NFκB inflammatory signal pathway | Secukinumab is a specific neutralizing antibody for IL-17A. At present, numerous studies have confirmed the important role of IL-17A in sepsis, but the role of secukinumab in sepsis has not been studied. The present study explored the protective effect and underlying mechanism of secukinumab in severe sepsis model rats. We established a severe sepsis rat model using cecal ligation and puncture (CLP). The optimal dose of secukinumab was determined by observing the 7-day survival rate of severe sepsis model rats. The expression levels of TNF-α, IL-6, and IL-17A in plasma and lung tissue were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. The degree of pathological damage to lung tissue was evaluated by hematoxylin-eosin (H-E) staining and pathological damage scale. The expressions of IKBα/NFκB pathway proteins and downstream-related inflammatory factors were detected by western blotting and real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). Our results show that high-dose secukinumab can inhibit the activation of the IKBα/NFκB inflammatory pathway by neutralizing IL-17A and reducing the gene expression of pathway-related inflammatory cytokines, thereby reducing the levels of inflammatory cytokines in lung tissue and plasma, thereby reducing the damage of lung tissue in severe sepsis model rats and improving the systemic inflammatory response. |
4,320 | CA-Net: Comprehensive Attention Convolutional Neural Networks for Explainable Medical Image Segmentation | Accurate medical image segmentation is essential for diagnosis and treatment planning of diseases. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for automatic medical image segmentation. However, they are still challenged by complicated conditions where the segmentation target has large variations of position, shape and scale, and existing CNNs have a poor explainability that limits their application to clinical decisions. In this work, we make extensive use of multiple attentions in a CNN architecture and propose a comprehensive attention-based CNN (CA-Net) for more accurate and explainable medical image segmentation that is aware of the most important spatial positions, channels and scales at the same time. In particular, we first propose a joint spatial attention module to make the network focus more on the foreground region. Then, a novel channel attention module is proposed to adaptively recalibrate channel-wise feature responses and highlight the most relevant feature channels. Also, we propose a scale attention module implicitly emphasizing the most salient feature maps among multiple scales so that the CNN is adaptive to the size of an object. Extensive experiments on skin lesion segmentation from ISIC 2018 and multi-class segmentation of fetal MRI found that our proposed CA-Net significantly improved the average segmentation Dice score from 87.77% to 92.08% for skin lesion, 84.79% to 87.08% for the placenta and 93.20% to 95.88% for the fetal brain respectively compared with U-Net. It reduced the model size to around 15 times smaller with close or even better accuracy compared with state-of-the-art DeepLabv3+. In addition, it has a much higher explainability than existing networks by visualizing the attention weight maps. Our code is available at https://github.com/HiLab-git/CA-Net. |
4,321 | A Transcriptomic Analysis of Higher-Order Ecological Interactions in a Eukaryotic Model Microbial Ecosystem | Nonlinear ecological interactions within microbial ecosystems and their contribution to ecosystem functioning remain largely unexplored. Higher-order interactions, or interactions in systems comprised of more than two members that cannot be explained by cumulative pairwise interactions, are particularly understudied, especially in eukaryotic microorganisms. The wine fermentation ecosystem presents an ideal model to study yeast ecosystem establishment and functioning. Some pairwise ecological interactions between wine yeast species have been characterized, but very little is known about how more complex, multispecies systems function. Here, we evaluated nonlinear ecosystem properties by determining the transcriptomic response of Saccharomyces cerevisiae to pairwise versus tri-species culture. The transcriptome revealed that genes expressed during pairwise coculture were enriched in the tri-species data set but also that just under half of the data set comprised unique genes attributed to a higher-order response. Through interactive protein-association network visualizations, a holistic cell-wide view of the gene expression data was generated, which highlighted known stress response and metabolic adaptation mechanisms which were specifically activated during tri-species growth. Further, extracellular metabolite data corroborated that the observed differences were a result of a biotic stress response. This provides exciting new evidence showing the presence of higher-order interactions within a model microbial ecosystem. IMPORTANCE Higher-order interactions are one of the major blind spots in our understanding of microbial ecosystems. These systems remain largely unpredictable and are characterized by nonlinear dynamics, in particular when the system is comprised of more than two entities. By evaluating the transcriptomic response of S. cerevisiae to an increase in culture complexity from a single species to two- and three-species systems, we were able to confirm the presence of a unique response in the more complex setting that could not be explained by the responses observed at the pairwise level. This is the first data set that provides molecular targets for further analysis to explain unpredictable ecosystem dynamics in yeast. |
4,322 | How can the UK statutory Cryptosporidium monitoring be used for Quantitative Risk Assessment of Cryptosporidium in drinking water? | Quantitative Microbiological Risk Assessment (QMRA) is increasingly being used to complement traditional verification of drinking water safety through the absence of indicator bacteria. However, the full benefit of QMRA is often not achieved because of a lack of appropriate data on the fate and behaviour of pathogens. In the UK statutory monitoring for Cryptosporidium has, provided a unique dataset of pathogens directly measured in large volumes of treated drinking water. Using this data a QMRA was performed to determine the benefits and limitations of such state-of-the-art monitoring for risk assessment. Estimates of the risk of infection at the 216 assessed treatment sites ranged from 10(-6.5) to 10(-2.5) person(-1) d(-1). In addition, Cryptosporidium monitoring data in source water was collected at eight treatment sites to determine how Cryptosporidium removal could be quantified for QMRA purposes. Cryptosporidium removal varied from 1.8 to 5.2 log units and appeared to be related to source water Cryptosporidium concentration. Application of general removal credits can either over- or underestimate Cryptosporidium removal by full-scale sedimentation and filtration. State-of-the-art pathogen monitoring can identify poorly performing systems, although it is ineffective to verify drinking water safety to the level of 10(-4) infections person(-1) yr(-1). |
4,323 | Dexmedetomidine attenuates renal ischemia-reperfusion injury through activating PI3K/Akt-eNOS signaling via α2 adrenoreceptors in renal microvascular endothelial cells | Renal microvascular endothelial cells (RMECs), which are closely related to regulation of vascular reactivity and modulation of inflammation, play a crucial role in the process of renal ischemia and reperfusion (I/R) injury. Previous studies have reported the protective effects of dexmedetomidine (DEX) against renal I/R injury, but little is known about the role of DEX on RMECs. This study aimed to investigate whether DEX alleviated renal I/R injury via acting on the RMECs. Mice underwent bilateral renal artery clamping for 45 min followed by reperfusion for 48 h, and the cultured neonatal mice RMECs were subjected to hypoxia for 1 h followed by reoxygenation (H/R) for 24 h. The results suggest that DEX alleviated renal I/R injury in vivo and improved cell viability of RMECs during H/R injury in vitro. Gene sequencing revealed that the PI3K/Akt was the top enriched signaling pathway and the endothelial cells were widely involved in renal I/R injury. DEX activated phosphorylation of PI3K and Akt, increased eNOS expression, and attenuated inflammatory responses. In addition, the results confirmed the distribution of α2 adrenoreceptor (α2 -AR) in RMECs. Furthermore, the protective effects of DEX against renal I/R injury were abolished by α2 -AR antagonist (atipamezole), which was partly reversed by the PI3K agonist (740 Y-P). These findings indicated that DEX protects against renal I/R injury by activating the PI3K/Akt-eNOS pathway and inhibiting inflammation responses via α2 -AR in RMECs. |
4,324 | Interior Design with Consumers' Perception about Art, Brand Image, and Sustainability | In this study, the main research purpose was to determine whether artistic components of interior design in a store lead consumers to have different perceptions of the store. There were three main research questions. The first was whether consumers perceived the artistic components in a store visually. Second, based on the first research question, this study explored whether the artistic displays at the show window, around the furniture, and around the stairs were associated with consumers' perceptions of the store as environmental-friendly. The third research question explored how the consumers' perceptions of artistic and environment-friendly components were associated with the conventional marketing performance of the store. The 2 Stages Probit Least Squares (2SPLS) method was utilized to answer the first and second research questions and the 2 Stage Least Squares (2SLS) method was utilized for the third research question. Findings indicated that consumers had significant emotional responses from seeing artistic components in a store. In addition, these perceived art elements were associated with marketing performances, including pro-environmental perception, store differentiation, brand image, and consumer satisfaction. The practical implications were included in the discussion. |
4,325 | Biochemical studies highlight determinants for metal selectivity in the Escherichia coli periplasmic solute binding protein NikA | Nickel is an essential micronutrient for the survival of many microbes. On account of the toxicity of nickel and its scarcity in the environment, microbes have evolved specific systems for uptaking and delivering nickel to enzymes. NikA, the solute binding protein for the ATP-binding cassette (ABC) importer NikABCDE, plays a vital role in the nickel homeostasis of Escherichia coli by selectively binding nickel over other metals in the metabolically complex periplasm. While the endogenous ligand for NikA is known to be the Ni(II)-(L-His)2 complex, the molecular basis by which NikA selectively binds Ni(II)-(L-His)2 is unclear, especially considering that NikA can bind multiple metal-based ligands with comparable affinity. Here we show that, regardless of its promiscuous binding activity, NikA preferentially interacts with Ni(II)-(L-His)2, even over other metal-amino acid ligands with an identical coordination geometry for the metal. Replacing both the Ni(II) and the L-His residues in Ni(II)-(L-His)2 compromises binding of the ligand to NikA, in part because these alterations affect the degree by which NikA closes around the ligand. Replacing H416, the only NikA residue that ligates the Ni(II), with other potential metal-coordinating amino acids decreases the binding affinity of NikA for Ni(II)-(L-His)2 and compromises uptake of Ni(II) into E. coli cells, likely due to altered metal selectivity of the NikA mutants. Together, the biochemical and in vivo studies presented here define key aspects of how NikA selects for Ni(II)-(L-His)2 over other metal complexes, and can be used as a reference for studies into the metal selectivity of other microbial solute binding proteins. |
4,326 | Does Public Participation Matter to Planning? Urban Sculpture Reception in the Context of Elite-Led Planning in Shanghai | Scholars have long debated how effective public participation is in urban planning. While most research was designed to assess the effect of public participation, the knowledge gap concerns whether urban planning would receive negative reception without public participation due to failure in managing people's emotions. One of the underlying reasons is that public participation is crucial to public emotion management. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of a case of public planning, and more specifically, the effects on public art reception when the planning project is developed by elites, without the involvement and participation of residents. Public art planning involves substantial symbolic and emotional components, and therefore constitutes a suitable case study. This research examines urban sculpture planning in Shanghai. The primary research method is a questionnaire survey, completed by 244 respondents. We argue that public participation is not the sole determinant of public art reception; other factors, particularly locality, also matter: an authoritarian-style urban sculpture planning creates a unanimous reverence and appreciation for flagship art projects on prominent public venues in central cities. However, people's feelings towards sculptures vary in neighborhoods; people are more likely to resist imposed artworks in the environment of their everyday life. Finally, we conclude that a lack of public participation does not always result in a negative reception to cultural projects on the part of the public; however, this lack of public participation is, nevertheless, culturally unsustainable. |
4,327 | A parallel distributed computing framework for Newton-Raphson load flow analysis of large interconnected power systems | This paper proposes a simple parallel and distributed computing framework for the conventional Newton-Raphson load flow (NRLF) solution of large interconnected power systems. The proposed approach is based on message-passing distributed-memory architecture with separate workstations, and involves the piecewise analysis of power systems utilizing the network tearing procedure. The NRLF solution method, applied to each torn system at the selected buses, employs the matrix inversion lemma consisting of the factorization, forward elimination and back substitution procedures. The computational requirements of the state-of-the art parallel algorithm to obtain the correction vector involved in the back substitution procedure is reduced with the proposed approach in which the back substitution is carried out in parallel taking into account the split buses, rather than the order in which the forward elimination is performed. The investigations are carried out on the IEEE 118 bus standard test system in a Redhat Linux based 100 Mbps Ethernet LAN environment. The investigations reveal that the proposed method is significantly faster than the conventional NRLF and also the NRLF based on the state-of-the-art parallel algorithm, and thus finds potential applications for the real-time load flow solution of both regulated and deregulated power systems distributed over large geographical areas. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. |
4,328 | Briefing: The Breakwaters and Coastal Structures conference: what progress in 30 years? | The Institution of Civil Engineers 'Breakwaters' conference has been run for more than 30 years. The proceedings for each conference have presented both the papers and their discussions. This short briefing reviews changes in the 'state of art' in designing and constructing breakwaters and coastal structures as revealed by this series of ten conferences. The briefing highlights a number of key papers or reports part have made me most contribution to knowledge. |
4,329 | Dynamic Online Trajectory Planning for a UAV-Enabled Data Collection System | Due to the maneuverability and flexibility of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the UAV-enabled data collection systems for wireless sensor networks (WSN) have received widespread attention. However, the state-of-the-art UAV trajectory designs mainly focus on static environments, which are not applicable in the practical scenarios considered in this work, e.g., mobile nodes, decommissioning of existing nodes, and new emergency nodes. This article proposes a two-level deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework to solve this challenge. The first-level deep neural network (DNN) is applied to model the dynamic changing environment. In the second level, we employ a deep Q-learning network to plan a trajectory online according to the environment features from the first level DNN. Besides, online trajectory planning is performed by a low-power UAV edge computing platform. To enable online planning on the power-constraint UAV edge-computing platform, all networks adopt a lightweight low-complexity optimization design. According to simulation results, the proposed system achieves higher data acquisition success rates when compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. We also perform field tests on the proposed UAV edge computing platform, which also demonstrates high data acquisition performance. |
4,330 | RESEARCH ON THE INTEGRATION OF ECOLOGICAL CULTURE INTO COLLEGE MUSIC TEACHING | With the acceleration of the modernisation of human society, the natural ecology is constantly destroyed, which inevitably brings about the crisis of human spirit. Similarly, music art is losing its function of expressing nature and ecology. The sustainable development of ecological environment is of great significance to the sustainable development of music. The development of music art is inseparable from the objective existence of music function and people's deepening aesthetic understanding of it. Therefore, music aesthetic education must be based on the original concept, guided by ecological philosophy, and learn from the concept of ecological aesthetics to reconstruct the overall function of music aesthetic education. This paper focuses on how to innovate and develop music, how to spread the value of ecological culture, and how to lead the value of ecological culture. From the perspective of music workers, this paper explores the essential requirements of music aesthetic education and the construction and development of ecological culture, so as to explore the important significance of the integration of traditional ecological culture and music aesthetic education. |
4,331 | Deterministic programming of human pluripotent stem cells into microglia facilitates studying their role in health and disease | Microglia, the resident immune cells of the central nervous system (CNS), are derived from yolk-sac macrophages that populate the developing CNS during early embryonic development. Once established, the microglia population is self-maintained throughout life by local proliferation. As a scalable source of microglia-like cells (MGLs), we here present a forward programming protocol for their generation from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs). The transient overexpression of PU.1 and C/EBPβ in hPSCs led to a homogenous population of mature microglia within 16 d. MGLs met microglia characteristics on a morphological, transcriptional, and functional level. MGLs facilitated the investigation of a human tauopathy model in cortical neuron-microglia cocultures, revealing a secondary dystrophic microglia phenotype. Single-cell RNA sequencing of microglia integrated into hPSC-derived cortical brain organoids demonstrated a shift of microglia signatures toward a more-developmental in vivo-like phenotype, inducing intercellular interactions promoting neurogenesis and arborization. Taken together, our microglia forward programming platform represents a tool for both reductionist studies in monocultures and complex coculture systems, including 3D brain organoids for the study of cellular interactions in healthy or diseased environments. |
4,332 | Large-scale investigation of zoonotic viruses in the era of high-throughput sequencing | Zoonotic diseases considerably impact public health and socioeconomics. RNA viruses reportedly caused approximately 94% of zoonotic diseases documented from 1990 to 2010, emphasizing the importance of investigating RNA viruses in animals. Furthermore, it has been estimated that hundreds of thousands of animal viruses capable of infecting humans are yet to be discovered, warning against the inadequacy of our understanding of viral diversity. High-throughput sequencing (HTS) has enabled the identification of viral infections with relatively little bias. Viral searches using both symptomatic and asymptomatic animal samples by HTS have revealed hidden viral infections. This review introduces the history of viral searches using HTS, current analytical limitations, and future potentials. We primarily summarize recent research on large-scale investigations on viral infections reusing HTS data from public databases. Furthermore, considering the accumulation of uncultivated viruses, we discuss current studies and challenges for connecting viral sequences to their phenotypes using various approaches: performing data analysis, developing predictive modeling, or implementing high-throughput platforms of virological experiments. We believe that this article provides a future direction in large-scale investigations of potential zoonotic viruses using the HTS technology. |
4,333 | Unmatched Case-Control Study on Late Presentation of HIV Infection in Santiago, Cape Verde (2004-2011) | Access to free antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Sub-Saharan Africa has been steadily increasing over the past decade. However, the success of large-scale ART programmes depends on timely diagnosis and early initiation of HIV care. This study characterizes late presenters to HIV care in Santiago (Cape Verde) between 2004 and 2011, and identifies factors associated with late presentation for care. We defined late presentation as persons presenting to HIV care with a CD4 count below 350 cells/mm(3). An unmatched case-control study was conducted using socio-demographic and behavioural data of 368 individuals (191 cases and 177 controls) collected through an interviewer-administered questionnaire, comparing HIV patients late and early presented to care. Logistic regression was performed to estimate odds ratio and 95% confidence intervals. Results show that 51.9% were late presenters for HIV. No differences were found in gender distribution, marital status, or access to health services between cases and controls. Participants who undertook an HIV test by doctor indication were more likely to present late compared with those who tested for HIV by their own initiative. Also, individuals taking less time to initiate ART are more likely to present late. This study highlights the need to better understand reasons for late presentation to HIV care in Cape Verde. People in older age groups should be targeted in future approaches focused on late presenters to HIV care. |
4,334 | Site-to-site cross-talk in OST-B glycosylation of hCEACAM1-IgV | N-glycosylation is a common posttranslational modification of secreted proteins in eukaryotes. This modification targets asparagine residues within the consensus sequence, N-X-S/T. While this sequence is required for glycosylation, the initial transfer of a high-mannose glycan by oligosaccharyl transferases A or B (OST-A or OST-B) can lead to incomplete occupancy at a given site. Factors that determine the extent of transfer are not well understood, and understanding them may provide insight into the function of these important enzymes. Here, we use mass spectrometry (MS) to simultaneously measure relative occupancies for three N-glycosylation sites on the N-terminal IgV domain of the recombinant glycoprotein, hCEACAM1. We demonstrate that addition is primarily by the OST-B enzyme and propose a kinetic model of OST-B N-glycosylation. Fitting the kinetic model to the MS data yields distinct rates for glycan addition at most sites and suggests a largely stochastic initial order of glycan addition. The model also suggests that glycosylation at one site influences the efficiency of subsequent modifications at the other sites, and glycosylation at the central or N-terminal site leads to dead-end products that seldom lead to full glycosylation of all three sites. Only one path of progressive glycosylation, one initiated by glycosylation at the C-terminal site, can efficiently lead to full occupancy for all three sites. Thus, the hCEACAM1 domain provides an effective model system to study site-specific recognition of glycosylation sequons by OST-B and suggests that the order and efficiency of posttranslational glycosylation is influenced by steric cross-talk between adjoining acceptor sites. |
4,335 | Iterative Multiresolution Bayesian CS for Microwave Imaging | A new compressive sensing (CS) imaging method is proposed to exploit, during the inversion process and unlike state-of-the-art CS-based approaches, additional information besides that on the target sparsity. More specifically, such an innovative multiresolution (MR) Bayesian CS scheme profitably combines: 1) the a priori knowledge on the class of targets under investigation and 2) the progressively acquired information on the scatterer location and size to improve the accuracy, the robustness, and the efficiency of both standard (i.e., uniform-resolution) CS techniques and MR/synthetic-zoom approaches. Toward this end, a new MR-based information-driven relevance vector machine (RVM) is derived and implemented. Selected results from an extensive numerical and experimental validation are shown to give the interested readers some indications on the effectiveness and the reliability of the proposed method also in comparison with state-of-the-art deterministic and Bayesian inversion techniques. |
4,336 | Efficient Phase Estimation for Interferogram Stacks | Signal decorrelation poses a limitation to multipass SAR interferometry. In pursuit of overcoming this limitation to achieve high-precision deformation estimates, different techniques have been developed, with short baseline subset, SqueeSAR, and CAESAR as the overarching schemes. These different analysis approaches raise the question of their efficiency and limitation in phase and consequently deformation estimation. This contribution first addresses this question and then proposes a new estimator with improved performance, called Eigendecomposition-based Maximum-likelihood-estimator of Interferometric phase (EMI). The proposed estimator combines the advantages of the state-of-the-art techniques. Identical to CAESAR, EMI is solved using eigendecomposition; it is therefore computationally efficient and straightforward in implementation. Similar to SqueeSAR, EMI is a maximumlikelihood-estimator; hence, it retains estimation efficiency. The computational and estimation efficiency of EMI renders it as an optimum choice for phase estimation. A further marriage of EMI with the proposed Sequential Estimator by Ansari et al. provides an efficient processing scheme tailored to the analysis of Big InSAR Data. EMI is formulated and verified in relation to the state-of-the-art approaches via mathematical formulation, simulation analysis, and experiments with time series of Sentinel-1 data over the volcanic island of Vulcano, Italy. |
4,337 | Holistic approach to effects of foods, human physiology, and psychology on food intake and appetite (satiation & satiety) | Appetite (satiation and satiety) is an essential element for the control of eating behavior, and as a consequence human nutrition, body weight, and chronic disease risk. A better understanding of appetite mechanisms is necessary to modulate eating behavior and food intake, and also provide a practical approach for weight management. Although many researchers have investigated the relationships between satiation/satiety and specific factors including human physiology, psychology, and food characteristics, limited information on the interactions between factors or comparisons between the relative importance of factors in contributing to satiation/satiety have been reported. This article reviews progress and gaps in understanding individual attributes contributing to perceived satiation/satiety, the advantages of considering multiple factors together in appetite experiments, as well as the applications of nondestructive sensing in evaluating human factors contributing to relative appetite perception. The approaches proposed position characterization of appetite (satiation and satiety) for personalized and precision nutrition in relation to human status and healthy diets. In particular, it is recommended that future studies of appetite perception recognize the inter-dependence of food type and intake, appetite (satiation and satiety), and individual status. |
4,338 | Human health risk assessment related to contaminated land: state of the art | Exposure of humans to contaminants from contaminated land may result in many types of health damage ranging from relatively innocent symptoms such as skin eruption or nausea, on up to cancer or even death. Human health protection is generally considered as a major protection target. State-of-the-art possibilities and limitations of human health risk assessment tools are described in this paper. Human health risk assessment includes two different activities, i.e. the exposure assessment and the hazard assessment. The combination of these is called the risk characterization, which results in an appraisal of the contaminated land. Exposure assessment covers a smart combination of calculations, using exposure models, and measurements in contact media and body liquids and tissue (biomonitoring). Regarding the time frame represented by exposure estimates, biomonitoring generally relates to exposure history, measurements in contact media to actual exposures, while exposure calculations enable a focus on exposure in future situations. The hazard assessment, which is different for contaminants with or without a threshold for effects, results in a critical exposure value. Good human health risk assessment practice accounts for tiered approaches and multiple lines of evidence. Specific attention is given here to phenomena such as the time factor in human health risk assessment, suitability for the local situation, background exposure, combined exposure and harmonization of human health risk assessment tools. |
4,339 | MUSEUM AS AN OBJECT OF LIGHT DESIGN | The article reviews the problem of light design of a modern museum not only as a place for conservation and demonstration of art works but also as a leisure place. Contemporary lighting technologies applied in museums are reviewed, advantages of adoption of LED lighting in museums are described, major problems and objectives specific for lighting of exhibits in museums as well as possible methods and ways of their solution by light designers are described. |
4,340 | A New Low-Rank Representation Based Hyperspectral Image Denoising Method for Mineral Mapping | Hyperspectral imaging technology has been used for geological analysis for many years wherein mineral mapping is the dominant application for hyperspectral images (HSIs). The very high spectral resolution of HSIs enables the identification and the diagnosis of different minerals with detection accuracy far beyond that offered by multispectral images. However, HSIs are inevitably corrupted by noise during acquisition and transmission processes. The presence of noise may significantly degrade the quality of the extracted mineral information. In order to improve the accuracy of mineral mapping, denoising is a crucial pre-processing task. By leveraging on low-rank and self-similarity properties of HSIs, this paper proposes a state-of-the-art HSI denoising algorithm that implements two main steps: (1) signal subspace learning via fine-tuned Robust Principle Component Analysis (RPCA); and (2) denoising the images associated with the representation coefficients, with respect to an orthogonal subspace basis, using BM3D, a self-similarity based state-of-the-art denoising algorithm. Accordingly, the proposed algorithm is named Hyperspectral Denoising via Robust principle component analysis and Self-similarity (HyDRoS), which can be considered as a supervised version of FastHyDe. The effectiveness of HyDRoS is evaluated in a series of mineral mapping experiments using noise-reduced AVIRIS and Hyperion HSIs. In these experiments, the proposed denoiser yielded systematically state-of-the-art performance. |
4,341 | Comparative phylogeography of two commensal rat species ( Rattus tanezumi and Rattus norvegicus) in China: Insights from mitochondrial DNA, microsatellite, and 2b-RAD data | Rattus norvegicus and Rattus tanezumi are dominant species of Chinese house rats, but the colonization and demographic history of two species in China have not been thoroughly explored. Phylogenetic analyses with mitochondrial DNA including 486 individuals from 31 localities revealed that R. norvegicus is widely distributed in China, R. tanezumi is mainly distributed in southern China with currently invading northward; northeast China was the natal region of R. norvegicus, while the spread of R. tanezumi in China most likely started from the southeast coast. A total of 123 individuals from 18 localities were subjected to 2b-RAD analyses. In neighbor-joining tree, individuals of R. tanezumi grouped into geographic-specific branches, and populations from southeast coast were ancestral groups, which confirmed the colonization route from southeast coast to central and western China. However, individuals of R. norvegicus were generally grouped into two clusters instead of geographic-specific branches. One cluster comprised inland populations, and another cluster included both southeast coast and inland populations, which indicated that spread history of R. norvegicus in China was complex; in addition to on-land colonization, shipping transportation also have played great roles. ADMIXTURE and principal component analyses provided further supports for the colonization history. Demographic analyses revealed that climate changes at ~40,000 to 18,000 years ago and ~4000 years ago had led to population declines of both species; the R. norvegicus declined rapidly while the population of R. tanezumi continuously expanded since ~1500 years ago, indicating the importance of interspecies' competition in their population size changes. Our study provided a valuable framework for further investigation on phylogeography of two species in China. |
4,342 | Recent advances in local drug delivery to the inner ear | Inner ear diseases are not adequately treated by systemic drug administration mainly because of the blood-perilymph barrier that reduces exchanges between plasma and inner ear fluids. Local drug delivery methods including intratympanic and intracochlear administrations are currently developed to treat inner ear disorders more efficiently. Intratympanic administration is minimally invasive but relies on diffusion through middle ear barriers for drug entry into the cochlea, whereas intracochlear administration offers direct access to the colchlea but is rather invasive. A wide range of drug delivery systems or devices were evaluated in research and clinic over the last decade for inner ear applications. In this review, different strategies including medical devices, hydrogels and nanoparticulate systems for intratympanic administration, and cochlear implant coating or advanced medical devices for intracoclear administration were explored with special attention to in vivo studies. This review highlights the promising systems for future clinical applications as well as the current hurdles that remain to be overcome for efficient inner ear therapy. |
4,343 | A Zn8 Double-Cavity Metallacalix[8]arene as Molecular Sieve to Realize Self-Cleaning Intramolecular Tandem Transformation of Li-S Chemistry | Toward the well-explored lithium-sulfur (Li-S) catalytic chemistry, the slow adsorption-migration-conversion kinetics of lithium polysulfides on catalytic materials and Li2 S deposition-induced passivation of active sites limit the rapid and complete conversion of sulfur. Conceptively, molecular architectures can provide atom-precise models to understand the underlying active sites responsible for selective adsorption and conversion of LiPSs and Li2 S2 /Li2 S species. Here, an octanuclear Zn(II) (Zn8 ) cluster is presented, which features a metallacalix[8]arene with double cavities up and down the Zn8 ring. The central Zn8 ring and the specific double cavities with organic ligands of different electronegativity and bonding environments render active sites with variable steric hindrance and interaction toward the sulfur-borne species. An intramolecular tandem transformation mechanism is realized exclusively by Zn8 cluster, which promotes the self-cleaning of active sites and continuous electrochemical reaction. Notably, the external azo groups and internal Zn/O sites of Zn8 cluster in sequence stimulate the adsorption and conversion of long chain Li2 Sx (x ≥ 4) and short chain Li2 S/Li2 S2 , contributing to remarkable rate performance and cycling stability. This work pioneers the application of metallacalix[n]arene clusters with atom-precise structure in Li-S batteries, and the proposed mechanism advances the molecule-level understanding of Li-S catalytic chemistry. |
4,344 | PHM SURVEY: Implementation of Prognostic Methods for Monitoring Industrial Systems | Prognostics and Health Management (commonly called PHM) is a field that focuses on the degradation mechanisms of systems in order to estimate their health status, anticipate their failure and optimize their maintenance. PHM uses methods, tools and algorithms for monitoring, anomaly detection, cause diagnosis, prognosis of the remaining useful life (RUL) and maintenance optimization. It allows for permanently monitoring the health of the system and provides operators and managers with relevant information to decide on actions to be taken to maintain the system in optimal operational conditions. This paper aims to present the emergence of the PHM thematically to describe the subjacent processes, particularly prognosis, how it supplies the different maintenance strategies and to explain the benefits that can be anticipated. More specifically, this paper establishes a state of the art in prognostic methods used today in the PHM strategy. In addition, this paper shows the multitude of possible prognostic approaches and the choice of one among them that will help to provide a framework for industrial companies. |
4,345 | SVR-AMA: An Asynchronous Alternating Minimization Algorithm With Variance Reduction for Model Predictive Control Applications | This paper focuses on the design of an asynchronous dual solver suitable for model predictive control (MPC) applications. The proposed solver relies on a state-of-the-art variance reduction (VR) scheme, previously used in the context of proximal stochastic gradient methods (Prox-SVRG) and on the alternating minimization algorithm (AMA). The resultant algorithm, a stochastic AMA with VR (SVR-AMA), shows geometric convergence (in the expectation) to a suboptimal solution of the MPC problem and, compared to other state-of-the-art dual asynchronous algorithms, allows one to tune the probability of the asynchronous updates to improve the quality of the estimates. Two novel accelerated versions of the Prox-SVRG (and, by duality, of SVR-AMA) are also provided. We apply the proposed algorithm to a specific class of splitting methods, that is, the decomposition along the length of the prediction horizon. Numerical results on the longitudinal control problem of an Airbus passenger aircraft show the benefits that we can gain in terms of computation time when using our proposed solver with an adaptive probability distribution. |
4,346 | Brain Tumour Image Segmentation Using Deep Networks | Automated segmentation of brain tumour from multimodal MR images is pivotal for the analysis and monitoring of disease progression. As gliomas are malignant and heterogeneous, efficient and accurate segmentation techniques are used for the successful delineation of tumours into intra-tumoural classes. Deep learning algorithms outperform on tasks of semantic segmentation as opposed to the more conventional, context-based computer vision approaches. Extensively used for biomedical image segmentation, Convolutional Neural Networks have significantly improved the state-of-the-art accuracy on the task of brain tumour segmentation. In this paper, we propose an ensemble of two segmentation networks: a 3D CNN and a U-Net, in a significant yet straightforward combinative technique that results in better and accurate predictions. Both models were trained separately on the BraTS-19 challenge dataset and evaluated to yield segmentation maps which considerably differed from each other in terms of segmented tumour sub-regions and were ensembled variably to achieve the final prediction. The suggested ensemble achieved dice scores of 0.750, 0.906 and 0.846 for enhancing tumour, whole tumour, and tumour core, respectively, on the validation set, performing favourably in comparison to the state-of-the-art architectures currently available. |
4,347 | Convolutional Oriented Boundaries: From Image Segmentation to High-Level Tasks | We present Convolutional Oriented Boundaries ( COB), which produces multiscale oriented contours and region hierarchies starting from generic image classification Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). COB is computationally efficient, because it requires a single CNN forward pass for multi-scale contour detection and it uses a novel sparse boundary representation for hierarchical segmentation; it gives a significant leap in performance over the state-of-the-art, and it generalizes very well to unseen categories and datasets. Particularly, we show that learning to estimate not only contour strength but also orientation provides more accurate results. We perform extensive experiments for low-level applications on BSDS, PASCAL Context, PASCAL Segmentation, and NYUD to evaluate boundary detection performance, showing that COB provides state-of-the-art contours and region hierarchies in all datasets. We also evaluate COB on high-level tasks when coupled with multiple pipelines for object proposals, semantic contours, semantic segmentation, and object detection on MS-COCO, SBD, and PASCAL; showing that COB also improves the results for all tasks. |
4,348 | Waste tire rubber devulcanization technologies: State-of-the-art, limitations and future perspectives | Waste tires management is a serious and global environmental problem. Therefore, searching for low-cost and industrial-scale applicable tire recycling methods is gaining more and more attention. Waste tire rubber is valuable source of secondary raw materials for the circular economy and current trends indicate that application of waste rubbers during manufacturing value-added products should increase in near future. Sustainable development of rubber devulcanization technologies and appropriate design of cradle-to-cradle loops for rubber goods are the most promising strategies for achieving a higher level of rubber recycling.This work presents the state-of-the-art in the patented waste tire rubber devulcanization technologies including dynamic desulfurization, reactive extrusion, microwave treatment, and also other less popular methods. Special attention was focused on the used components, rubber treatment conditions and static me-chanical properties of reclaimed rubbers. Moreover, environmental aspects and limitations related to rubber devulcanization technologies implementation are also discussed.Our findings showed that reclaimed rubbers described in patents are characterized by higher tensile strength and elongation break (depending on devulcanization technology median: 16.6-19.0 MPa and 321-443%, respectively) compared to the literature data (median: 10.3 MPa and 309%) or commercial products (median: 6.8 MPa and 250%). The significant differences observed in performance properties of reclaimed rubbers resulted mainly from devulcanization efficiency related to waste tires composition or source and rubber treatment conditions.Considering environmental and economic aspects, reactive extrusion is the most promising method further development rubber devulcanization technologies. |
4,349 | Perspectives for the application of neurogenetic research in programming Neurorehabilitation | Certain genetic variants underlie the proper functioning of the nervous system. They affect the nervous system in all aspects - molecular, systemic, cognitive, computational and sensorimotor. The greatest changes in the nervous system take place in the process of its maturation in the period of psychomotor development, as well as during neurorehabilitation, the task of which is to rebuild damaged neuronal pathways, e.g. by facilitating movement or training cognitive functions. Certain genetic polymorphisms affect the effectiveness of the processes of reconstruction or restoration of neural structures, which is clearly reflected in the effects of neurorehabilitation. This review presents the perspectives for the application of neurogenetic research in programming neurorehabilitation by determining the relationship of as many as 16 different genetic polymorphisms with specific functions of importance in rehabilitation. Thanks to this broad view, it may be possible to predict the effectiveness of rehabilitation on the basis of genetic testing, which would significantly contribute to the development of personalized medicine and to the optimal management of medical services in healthcare systems. |
4,350 | SUSTAINABLE PRODUCTION OF CLEAN ENERGY CARRIER - HYDROGEN | The state-of-the-art in biological hydrogen production methods is presented with a special focus on the process of the anaerobic fermentation of organic wastes. The recently reported levels of hydrogen yields in laboratory scale bioreactors and main challenges on the way to commercial implementations of biological, fermentative hydrogen production systems are given. |
4,351 | Fast and accurate line detection with GPU-based least median of squares | We propose an accurate and efficient 2D line detection technique based on the standard Hough transform (SHT) and least median of squares (LMS). We prove our method to be very accurate and robust to noise and occlusions by comparing it with state-of-the-art line detection methods using both qualitative and quantitative experiments. LMS is known as being very robust but also as having high computation complexity. To make our method practical for real-time applications, we propose a parallel algorithm for LMS computation which is based on point-line duality. We also offer a very efficient implementation of this algorithm for GPU on CUDA architecture. Despite many years since LMS methods have first been described and the widespread use of GPU technology in computer vision and image-processing systems, we are unaware of previous work reporting the use of GPUs for LMS and line detection. We measure the computation time of our GPU-accelerated algorithm and prove it is suitable for real-time applications. Our accelerated LMS algorithm is up to 40 times faster than the fastest single-threaded CPU-based implementation of the state-of-the-art sequential algorithm. |
4,352 | Photobiomodulation in Pain Control in Diseases of the Oral Cavity: Overview (Evidence Map) and Its Implementation in Integrative Complementary Medicine | Objective: To assess the evidence available and knowledge gaps in photobiomodulation (PBM) for oral facial pain. Background data: Effective identification of a noninvasive resource for oral facial pain such as PBM may mitigate the risks of invasive therapeutic resources. Methods: Nine electronic databases were searched for systematic reviews reporting oral facial pain outcome for PBM. The 3iE (International Initiative for Impact Evaluation) evidence gap map methodology with the tableau was used to graphically display the parameters analyzed in the research. Results: Several wavelengths within the range of infrared were used in 37.6% of the studies, accompanied by the 32.4% in the red range. The quality of the effect was positive in 61.4% of the studies, whereas the impact degree was low, according to the measurement tool used to assess systematic reviews 2 (AMSTAR 2), in 60.2%. Conclusions: Despite the positive potential of PBM in the treatment and control of pain in diseases of the oral cavity, complete information on dosimetry in published studies with PBM is still lacking, making it difficult to reproduce the results found. |
4,353 | Combined dendrochronological and radiocarbon dating of three Russian icons from the 15th-17th century | Dendrochronology is usually the only method of precise dating of unsigned art objects made on or of wood. It has a long history of application in Europe, however in Russia such an approach is still at an infant stage, despite its cultural importance. Here we present the results of dendrochronological and radiocarbon accelerated mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of three medieval icons from the 15th-17th century that originate from the North of European Russia and are painted on wooden panels made from Scots pines. For each icon the wooden panels were dendrochronologically studied and five to six AMS dates were made. Two icons were successfully dendro-dated whereas one failed to be reliably cross-dated with the existing master tree-ring chronologies, but was dated by radiocarbon wiggle-matching. Wiggle matching of radiocarbon dates is the most promising method for dating Russian icons in the absence of a dense dendrochronological network. However, for this case uncertainties connected with the radiocarbon method have to be taken into account and further studies of these uncertainties must be undertaken by comparing dendro-dated and radiocarbon-dated wooden works of art. Our results, moreover, showed that in two cases art-historical dates were by five to ten decades older than the earliest possible time of the creation of the icons, based on dendrochronology. (C) 2015 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved. |
4,354 | Apparent Defective Abduction Without Diplopia | Sixth nerve palsies present with horizontal diplopia and typically have a neurological or neurovascular aetiology. They can be confirmed by clinically evaluating the velocity of the abducting saccade, which is slowed. Three cases are presented in which the patients had apparent defective abduction of one eye, resulting from not only neurological causes but also orbital causes. Clinicians should have a high index of suspicion in patients with defective abduction without diplopia and should include apparent defective abduction without diplopia (ADAD) in the list of potential differential diagnoses, considering not only neurological involvement but also orbital involvement. |
4,355 | Evaluation of Community-Based, Mobile HIV-Care, Peer-Delivered Linkage Case Management in Manzini Region, Eswatini | The success of antiretroviral therapy (ART) requires continuous engagement in care and optimal levels of adherence to achieve sustained HIV viral suppression. We evaluated HIV-care cascade costs and outcomes of a community-based, mobile HIV-care, peer-delivered linkage case-management program (CommLink) implemented in Manzini region, Eswatini. Abstraction teams visited referral facilities during July 2019-April 2020 to locate, match, and abstract the clinical data of CommLink clients diagnosed between March 2016 and March 2018. An ingredients-based costing approach was used to assess economic costs associated with CommLink. The estimated total CommLink costs were $2 million. Personnel costs were the dominant component, followed by travel, commodities and supplies, and training. Costs per client tested positive were $499. Costs per client initiated on ART within 7, 30, and 90 days of diagnosis were $2114, $1634, and $1480, respectively. Costs per client initiated and retained on ART 6, 12, and 18 months after diagnosis were $2343, $2378, and $2462, respectively. CommLink outcomes and costs can help inform community-based HIV testing, linkage, and retention programs in other settings to strengthen effectiveness and improve efficiency. |
4,356 | MTT: Multi-Scale Temporal Transformer for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition | In the task of skeleton-based action recognition, long-term temporal dependencies are significant cues for sequential skeleton data. State-of-the-art methods rarely have access to long-term temporal information, due to the limitations of their receptive fields. Meanwhile, most of the recent multiple branches methods only consider different input modalities but ignore the information in various temporal scales. To address the above issues, we propose a multi-scale temporal transformer (MTT) in this letter, for skeleton-based action recognition. Firstly, the raw skeleton data are embedded by graph convolutional network (GCN) blocks and multi-scale temporal embedding modules (MT-EMs), which are designed as multiple branches to extract features in various temporal scales. Secondly, we introduce transformer encoders (TE) to integrate embeddings and model the long-term temporal pattern. Moreover, we propose a task-oriented lateral connection (LaC) aiming to align semantical hierarchies. LaC distributes input embeddings to the downstream transformer encoders (TE), according to semantical levels. The classification headers aggregate results from TE and predict the action categories at last. The proposed method is shown efficiency and universality during experiments and achieves the state-of-the-art on three large datasets, NTU-RGBD 60, NTU-RGBD 120 and Kinetics-Skeleton 400. |
4,357 | Regularized LTI system identification in the presence of outliers: A variational EM approach | Regularized system identification of linear time invariant systems in the presence of outliers is investigated. The finite impulse response (FIR) model and the Gaussian scale mixture are chosen to be the system model and the noise model, respectively. Two special cases of the noise model are considered: the well-known Student's t distribution and a proposed G-confluent distribution. Both the FIR model parameter and the latent variables in the noise model are treated as parameters of our statistical model and moreover, the scale of the noise variance is treated as a hyper-parameter besides the hyper-parameters used to parameterize the priors of the impulse response and the latent variables. Then a variational expectation-maximization algorithm is proposed for inference of the parameters and hyper-parameters of the statistical model, and the algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a stationary point. Monte Carlo numerical simulations show that when the relative size of outliers is small, the proposed approach performs comparably to a state-of-the-art method and when the relative size of outliers and/or the occurrence probability of outliers is large, the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. |
4,358 | Arts-Aided Recognition of Citizens' Perceptions for Urban Open Space Management | Urban open spaces of local natural environments can promote the health and well-being of both ecosystems and humans, and the management of the urban spaces can benefit from knowledge of individuals'/citizens' perceptions of such environments. However, such knowledge is scarce and contemporary inquiries are often limited to cognitive observations and focused on built environmental elements rather than encouraged to recognize and communicate comprehensive perceptions. This paper investigates whether arts-based methods can facilitate recognition and understanding perceptions of urban open spaces. Two arts-based methods were used to capture perceptions: drifting, which is a walking method, and theatrical images, which is a still image method and three reflective methods to recognize and communicate the perceptions. The results show related sensations and perceptions enabled by arts-based methods comparing them to a sticker map method. The main findings were perceptions, which included information about human-environment interaction, about relations to other people and about 'sense of place' in urban open spaces. The hitherto unidentified perceptions about urban open space were associations, metaphors and memories. The methods used offer initial practical implications for future use. |
4,359 | Associations between breast milk intake volume, macronutrient intake, and infant growth in a longitudinal birth cohort: the Cambridge Baby Growth and Breastfeeding Study (CBGS-BF) | Growth patterns of breastfed infants, while widely considered to be optimal, show substantial inter-individual differences, partly influenced by breast milk (BM) nutritional composition. However, BM nutritional composition does not accurately indicate BM nutrient intakes. This study aimed to examine the associations between both BM intake volumes and macronutrient intakes with infant growth and adiposity. Mother-infant dyads (N=94) were recruited into the Cambridge Baby Growth and Breastfeeding Study (CBGS-BF) from a single maternity hospital at birth; all infants were vaginally delivered and received exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) for at least 6 weeks. Infant weight, length, and skinfolds thicknesses (reflecting adiposity) were repeatedly measured from birth to 12 months. Post-feed BM samples were collected at 6 weeks to measure triglycerides (fat), lactose (carbohydrate) (both by 1H-NMR) and protein concentrations (DUMAS method). BM intake volume was estimated from 70 infants between 4-6 weeks using dose-to-the-mother deuterium-oxide (2H2O) turnover. In the full cohort and among 60 infants who received EBF for 3+ months, higher BM intake at 6 weeks was associated with initial faster growth between 0-6 weeks (B±SE 3.58±0.47 for weight and 4.53±0.6 for adiposity gains, both p<0.0001) but subsequent slower growth between 3-12 months (B±SE -2.27±0.7 for weight and -2.65±0.69 for adiposity gains, both p<0.005). BM carbohydrate and protein intakes at 4-6 weeks were positively associated with early (0-6 weeks) but tended to be negatively related with later (3-12 months) adiposity gains, while BM fat intake showed no association, suggesting that carbohydrate and protein intakes may have more functional relevance to later infant growth and adiposity. |
4,360 | Weakly-Supervised Learning With Complementary Heatmap for Retinal Disease Detection | There are many types of retinal disease, and accurately detecting these diseases is crucial for proper diagnosis. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) typically perform well on detection tasks, and the attention module of CNNs can generate heatmaps as visual explanations of the model. However, the generated heatmap can only detect the most discriminative part, which is problematic because many object regions may exist in the region beside the heatmap in an area known as a complementary heatmap. In this study, we developed a method specifically designed multi-retinal diseases detection from fundus images with the complementary heatmap. The proposed CAM-based method is designed for 2D color images of the retina, rather than MRI images or other forms of data. Moreover, unlike other visual images for disease detection, fundus images of multiple retinal diseases have features such as distinguishable lesion region boundaries, overlapped lesion regions between diseases, and specific pathological structures (e.g. scattered blood spots) that lead to mis-classifications. Based on these considerations, we designed two new loss functions, attention-explore loss and attention-refine loss, to generate accurate heatmaps. We select both "bad" and "good" heatmaps based on the prediction score of ground truth and train them with the two loss functions. When the detection accuracy increases, the classification performance of the model is also improved. Experiments on a dataset consisting of five diseases showed that our approach improved both the detection accuracy and the classification accuracy, and the improved heatmaps were closer to the lesion regions than those of current state-of-the-art methods. |
4,361 | Exploring canyons in glassy energy landscapes using metadynamics | The complex physics of glass-forming systems is controlled by the structure of the low-energy portions of their potential energy landscapes. Here we report that a modified metadynamics algorithm efficiently explores and samples low-energy regions of such high-dimensional landscapes. In the energy landscape for a model foam, our algorithm finds and descends meandering canyons in the landscape, which contain dense clusters of energy minima along their floors. Similar canyon structures in the energy landscapes of two model glass formers-hard sphere fluids and the Kob-Andersen glass-allow us to reach high densities and low energies, respectively. In the hard sphere system, fluid configurations are found to form continuous regions that cover the canyon floors up to densities well above the jamming transition. For the Kob-Andersen glass former, our technique samples low-energy states with modest computational effort, with the lowest energies found approaching the predicted Kauzmann limit. |
4,362 | Image-dependent shape coding and representation | We present a new shape-coding algorithm to support object-based representation, which differs from previous algorithms in that it encodes shape as dependent meta data for image description. Therefore, both the shape-coding and decoding processes of this algorithm are designed to be dependent on the underlying image in which the object (described by the shape) is contained. This way, the correlation between image and shape is effectively removed and the shape-coding efficiency is improved on average by three times over the state-of-the-art algorithms. To facilitate comparison, a generalized "contour-generating" framework is introduced to formulate the shape-coding problem. From this framework we derive both the proposed algorithm and a number of state-of-the-art algorithms, and show that the rate-distortion (RD) criterion can be studied in a uniform way under this framework. Specifically, a dynamic-programming-based algorithm is designed to find the RD optimal coding result for the proposed algorithm. As an extension, we also discuss the complexity and scalability issues related to the application design of the proposed algorithm. |
4,363 | Clonal Spread of pESI-Positive Multidrug-Resistant ST32 Salmonella enterica Serovar Infantis Isolates among Broilers and Humans in Slovenia | Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Infantis is the most prevalent serovar found in broilers and broiler meat and is among the top five serovars responsible for human infections in Europe. In 2008, a multidrug-resistant S. Infantis isolate emerged in Israel with a mosaic megaplasmid named pESI, associated with increased virulence, biofilm formation, and multidrug resistance. Since then, S. Infantis clones with pESI-like plasmids have been reported worldwide, replacing pESI-free clones. Here, we typed 161 S. Infantis isolates of poultry (n = 133) and human clinical (n = 28) origin using whole-genome sequencing. The isolates were collected between 2007 and 2021. In addition, we performed PacBio/Illumina sequencing for two representative pESI-like plasmids and compared them with publicly available sequences. All isolates belonged to sequence type 32 (ST32), except for one isolate that represented a novel single-locus variant of ST32. Core genome MLST (cgMLST) analysis revealed 14 clusters of genetically closely related isolates, of which four suggested broiler-to-human transmission of S. Infantis. pESI-like plasmids were present in 148/161 (91.9%) isolates; all were highly similar to the publicly available pESI-like sequences but lacked extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) genes. PacBio/Illumina hybrid assembly allowed the reconstruction of two novel complete pESI variants. The present study revealed that the multidrug-resistant, pESI-positive S. Infantis clone became the predominant S. Infantis clone in Slovenian broilers and humans during the last decade. Continued surveillance of resistant S. Infantis clones along the food chain is needed to guide public health efforts. IMPORTANCE Salmonella Infantis clones with pESI-like plasmids harboring several virulence and resistance genes have been reported worldwide. In the present study, we compared the population structure of 161 Salmonella Infantis isolates obtained from humans and broilers in Slovenia from 2007 to 2021. Whole-genome sequencing showed that most human isolates clustered apart from broiler isolates, suggesting an alternative source of infection. Most isolates were multidrug resistant due to the presence of pESI-like plasmids, of which two variants (pS89 and pS19) were fully reconstructed using long-read sequencing. Both exhibited high similarity with the original Israeli pESI plasmid and German p2747 plasmid. The prototype plasmid pS89 harbored the typical pESI-associated resistance genes aadA1, qacEΔ1, sul1, and tet(A), which were absent in the truncated plasmid pS19. |
4,364 | Artificial nerve graft constructed by coculture of activated Schwann cells and human hair keratin for repair of peripheral nerve defects | Studies have shown that human hair keratin (HHK) has no antigenicity and excellent mechanical properties. Schwann cells, as unique glial cells in the peripheral nervous system, can be induced by interleukin-1β to secrete nerve growth factor, which promotes neural regeneration. Therefore, HHK with Schwann cells may be a more effective approach to repair nerve defects than HHK without Schwann cells. In this study, we established an artificial nerve graft by loading an HHK skeleton with activated Schwann cells. We found that the longitudinal HHK microfilament structure provided adhesion medium, space and direction for Schwann cells, and promoted Schwann cell growth and nerve fiber regeneration. In addition, interleukin-1β not only activates Schwann cells, but also strengthens their activity and increases the expression of nerve growth factors. Activated Schwann cells activate macrophages, and activated macrophages secrete interleukin-1β, which maintains the activity of Schwann cells. Thus, a beneficial cycle forms and promotes nerve repair. Furthermore, our studies have found that the newly constructed artificial nerve graft promotes the improvements in nerve conduction function and motor function in rats with sciatic nerve injury, and increases the expression of nerve injury repair factors fibroblast growth factor 2 and human transforming growth factor B receptor 2. These findings suggest that this artificial nerve graft effectively repairs peripheral nerve injury. |
4,365 | Causal involvement of the left angular gyrus in higher functions as revealed by transcranial magnetic stimulation: a systematic review | Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive technique that can transiently interfere with local cortical functioning, thus enabling inferences of causal left AG involvement in higher functions from experimentation with healthy participants. Here, we examine 35 studies that measure behavioural outcomes soon after or during targeting TMS to the left AG, by design and as documented by individual magnetic resonance images, in healthy adult participants. The reviewed evidence suggests a specific causal involvement of the left AG in a wide range of tasks involving language, memory, number processing, visuospatial attention, body awareness and motor planning functions. These core findings are particularly valuable to inform theoretical models of the left AG role(s) in higher functions, due to the anatomical specificity afforded by the selected studies and the complementarity of TMS to different methods of investigation. In particular, the variety of the operations within and between functions in which the left AG appears to be causally involved poses a formidable challenge to any attempts to identify a single computational process subserved by the left AG (as opposed to just outlining a broad type of functional contribution) that could apply across thematic areas. We conclude by highlighting directions for improvement in future experimentation with TMS, in order to strengthen the available evidence, while taking into account the anatomical heterogeneity of this brain region. |
4,366 | Application of preconditioned alternating direction method of multipliers in depth from focal stack | Postcapture refocusing effect in smartphone cameras is achievable using focal stacks. However, the accuracy of this effect is totally dependent on the combination of the depth layers in the stack. The accuracy of the extended depth of field effect in this application can be improved significantly by computing an accurate depth map, which has been an open issue for decades. To tackle this issue, a framework is proposed based on a preconditioned alternating direction method of multipliers for depth from the focal stack and synthetic defocus application. In addition to its ability to provide high structural accuracy, the optimization function of the proposed framework can, in fact, converge faster and better than state-of-the-art methods. The qualitative evaluation has been done on 21 sets of focal stacks and the optimization function has been compared against five other methods. Later, 10 light field image sets have been transformed into focal stacks for quantitative evaluation purposes. Preliminary results indicate that the proposed framework has a better performance in terms of structural accuracy and optimization in comparison to the current state-of-the-art methods. (C) 2018 SPIE and IS&T |
4,367 | Intra-Household Decision-Making and their Effects on Women Dietary Diversity: Evidence from Ethiopia | This paper attempts to analyze the status of women in household decision-making processes and their effects on dietary diversity in Ethiopia. The results indicate that men and women do not have equal decision-making authority within a household when it comes, particularly to decisions on food crop production, proportion of produced crop consumed at home and to be sold out in the market, and income generating activities. The results show variations in minimum dietary diversity for women across regions in Ethiopia. Therefore, more emphasis needed to empower women to improve their benefit from agricultural production and other income generating activities in Ethiopia. |
4,368 | Auto-Pytorch: Multi-Fidelity MetaLearning for Efficient and Robust AutoDL | While early AutoML frameworks focused on optimizing traditional ML pipelines and their hyperparameters, a recent trend in AutoML is to focus on neural architecture search. In this paper, we introduce Auto-PyTorch, which brings together the best of these two worlds by jointly and robustly optimizing the network architecture and the training hyperparameters to enable fully automated deep learning (AutoDL). Auto-PyTorch achieves state-of-the-art performance on several tabular benchmarks by combining multi-fidelity optimization with portfolio construction for warmstarting and ensembling of deep neural networks (DNNs) and common baselines for tabular data. To thoroughly study our assumptions on how to design such an AutoDL system, we additionally introduce a new benchmark on learning curves for DNNs, dubbed LCBench, and run extensive ablation studies of the full Auto-PyTorch on typical AutoML benchmarks, eventually showing that Auto-PyTorch performs better than several state-of-the-art competitors. |
4,369 | Head Trauma Exposure in Mixed Martial Arts | Combat sports training involves a high risk of head injury. Previously published research on head trauma exposure in MMA evaluated only the knockouts (KO), without calculating all head strikes. The aim of the research was to evaluate the total head trauma exposure during MMA competitions among male and female fighters. Two thousand four hundred and eighty-eight MMA fights from all numbered UFC events between 2000 and 2021 were analyzed. A database containing the results from officially published scorecards with information such as the outcome of a fight, its duration, number of strikes (significant and total amount of hits) depending on location and knockdowns was created. Additional video verification of the knockout technique was carried out. The athletes received an average of 2.41 significant head strikes out of a total of 6.30 head strikes per minute. Head strikes were more common in female fights than in male. Women executed more total and significant head strikes per minute than men. Head trauma caused the ending of 31.6% of all fights-more often in male fights (32.2%) than female (23.1%). It was the most common cause of knockouts-88.1%. Professional fights in mixed martial arts involve high exposure to head trauma. A careful evaluation of the risk involved in training in such a discipline is necessary to provide adequate prevention methods. |
4,370 | Sparse analysis for mesoscale convective systems tracking | In this paper, we study the tracking of deformable shapes in sequences of images. Our target application is the tracking of clouds in satellite images. We propose to use a recent state-of-the-art method for off-the-grid sparse analysis to describe clouds in image as mixtures of 2D atoms. Then, we introduce a method to handle the tracking with its specificities: apparition or disappearance of objects, merging, and splitting. Numerically, this method corroborates the magnitude of the results provided by recent state-of-the-art alternatives. Unlike its counterparts, the choice or regularization and correlation parameters allows additional flexibility regarding the interpretation of clouds' life cycles. Finally, it also provides additional information on the cloud temperature during its life cycle, which seem in accordance with the underlying physical processes. |
4,371 | An Efficient SVD Shrinkage for Rank Estimation | Matrix rank estimation is a classical problem with many applications in statistical signal processing. In this letter, a logistic function based thresholding of the singular values is proposed for the rank estimation purpose. Parameters of the proposed shrinkage function are tuned using Stein's unbiased risk estimator. The proposed method is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of rank estimation accuracy. Further, it is also noted to result in a better denoising performance. |
4,372 | Toward Location-Enabled IoT (LE-IoT): IoT Positioning Techniques, Error Sources, and Error Mitigation | Localization techniques are becoming key to add location context to the Internet-of-Things (IoT) data without human perception and intervention. Meanwhile, the newly emerged low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) and 5G technologies have become strong candidates for mass-market localization applications. However, various error sources have limited localization performance by using such IoT signals. This article reviews the IoT localization system through the following sequence: IoT localization system review, localization data sources, localization algorithms, localization error sources and mitigation, and localization performance evaluation. Compared to the related surveys, this article has a more comprehensive and state-of-the-art review on IoT localization methods, an original review on IoT localization error sources and mitigation, an original review on IoT localization performance evaluation, and a more comprehensive review of IoT localization applications, opportunities, and challenges. Thus, this survey provides comprehensive guidance for peers who are interested in enabling localization ability in the existing IoT systems, using IoT systems for localization, or integrating IoT signals with the existing localization sensors. |
4,373 | Rhythmic auditory stimulation during gait adaptation enhances learning aftereffects and savings by reducing common neural drives to lower limb muscles | Rhythmic auditory stimulation (RAS) improves gait symmetry in neurological patients with asymmetric gait patterns. However, whether RAS can accelerate gait adaptation remains unclear. This study aimed to investigate whether RAS during gait adaptation can enhance learning aftereffects and savings of gait symmetries. Furthermore, we investigated the differences in the coherence of paired surface electromyographic (EMG) recordings during gait adaptation between with and without RAS. Nineteen healthy young adults were subjected to continuous treadmill gait with swing phase perturbation (adaptation period) with or without RAS (RAS or no-RAS condition) for 5 or 10 min (short- or long-time condition), without the perturbation for 5 min (de-adaptation period), and with the perturbation for another 5 min (re-adaptation period). Swing phase and step length symmetries were significantly greater in the RAS conditions than in the no-RAS conditions during the adaptation period. Learning aftereffects and savings of gait symmetries were significantly greater in the RAS conditions than in the no-RAS conditions in the early de-adaptation and re-adaptation periods, respectively. There were no significant differences in savings in the early re-adaptation period between the short- and long-time conditions in the RAS condition. EMG-EMG coherence in the rectus femoris muscle in the β band (15-35 Hz) on the perturbed side was significantly lower during the early adaptation period in the RAS than in the no-RAS conditions. Therefore, RAS may enhance learning efficiency by reducing common neural drives from a cortical structure during gait adaptation, which could induce high savings of a learned gait pattern, even within short-time periods.NEW & NOTEWORTHY RAS during gait adaptation against swing phase perturbation enhances learning aftereffects and savings of gait symmetries. EMG-EMG coherence in the rectus femoris muscle in the β band on the perturbed side during the swing phase was significantly lower in the RAS than in the no-RAS conditions during the early adaptation period. These results support the application of RAS as external feedback to improve gait symmetry during gait adaptation in the rehabilitation of neurological patients. |
4,374 | Multimodal Triplet Attention Network for Brain Disease Diagnosis | Multi-modal imaging data fusion has attracted much attention in medical data analysis because it can provide complementary information for more accurate analysis. Integrating functional and structural multi-modal imaging data has been increasingly used in the diagnosis of brain diseases, such as epilepsy. Most of the existing methods focus on the feature space fusion of different modalities but ignore the valuable high-order relationships among samples and the discriminative fused features for classification. In this paper, we propose a novel framework by fusing data from two modalities of functional MRI (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) for epilepsy diagnosis, which effectively captures the complementary information and discriminative features from different modalities by high-order feature extraction with the attention mechanism. Specifically, we propose a triple network to explore the discriminative information from the high-order representation feature space learned from multi-modal data. Meanwhile, self-attention is introduced to adaptively estimate the degree of importance between brain regions, and the cross-attention mechanism is utilized to extract complementary information from fMRI and DTI. Finally, we use the triple loss function to adjust the distance between samples in the common representation space. We evaluate the proposed method on the epilepsy dataset collected from Jinling Hospital, and the experiment results demonstrate that our method is significantly superior to several state-of-the-art diagnosis approaches. |
4,375 | Multi-sense embeddings through a word sense disambiguation process | Natural Language Understanding has seen an increasing number of publications in the last few years, especially after robust word embeddings models became prominent, when they proved themselves able to capture and represent semantic relationships from massive amounts of data. Nevertheless, traditional models often fall short in intrinsic issues of linguistics, such as polysemy and homonymy. Any expert system that makes use of natural language in its core, can be affected by a weak semantic representation of text, resulting in inaccurate outcomes based on poor decisions. To mitigate such issues, we propose a novel approach called Most Suitable Sense Annotation (MSSA), that disambiguates and annotates each word by its specific sense, considering the semantic effects of its context. Our approach brings three main contributions to the semantic representation scenario: (i) an unsupervised technique that disambiguates and annotates words by their senses, (ii) a multi-sense embeddings model that can be extended to any traditional word embeddings algorithm, and (iii) a recurrent methodology that allows our models to be re-used and their representations refined. We test our approach on six different benchmarks for the word similarity task, showing that our approach can produce state-of-the-art results and outperforms several more complex state-of-the-art systems. Keywords: Multi-sense embeddings Natural language processing Word similarity Systems. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. |
4,376 | Data Extrapolation From Learned Prior Images for Truncation Correction in Computed Tomography | Data truncation is a common problem in computed tomography (CT). Truncation causes cupping artifacts inside the field-of-view (FOV) and anatomical structures missing outside the FOV. Deep learning has achieved impressive results in CT reconstruction from limited data. However, its robustness is still a concern for clinical applications. Although the image quality of learning-based compensation schemes may be inadequate for clinical diagnosis, they can provide prior information for more accurate extrapolation than conventional heuristic extrapolation methods. With extrapolated projection, a conventional image reconstruction algorithm can be applied to obtain a final reconstruction. In this work, a general plug-and-play (PnP) method for truncation correction is proposed based on this idea, where various deep learning methods and conventional reconstruction algorithms can be plugged in. Such a PnP method integrates data consistency for measured data and learned prior image information for truncated data. This shows to have better robustness and interpretability than deep learning only. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed PnP method, two state-of-the-art deep learning methods, FBPConvNet and Pix2pixGAN, are investigated for truncation correction in cone-beam CT in noise-free and noisy cases. Their robustness is evaluated by showing false negative and false positive lesion cases. With our proposed PnP method, false lesion structures are corrected for both deep learning methods. For FBPConvNet, the root-mean-square error (RMSE) inside the FOV can be improved from 92HU to around 30HU by PnP in the noisy case. Pix2pixGAN solely achieves better image quality than FBPConvNet solely for truncation correction in general. PnP further improves the RMSE inside the FOV from 42HU to around 27HU for Pix2pixGAN. The efficacy of PnP is also demonstrated on real clinical head data. |
4,377 | Lightweight Polymer-Carbon Composite Current Collector for Lithium-Ion Batteries | A hermetic dense polymer-carbon composite-based current collector foil (PCCF) for lithium-ion battery applications was developed and evaluated in comparison to state-of-the-art aluminum (Al) foil collector. Water-processed LiNi0.5Mn1.5O4 (LMNO) cathode and Li4Ti5O12 (LTO) anode coatings with the integration of a thin carbon primer at the interface to the collector were prepared. Despite the fact that the laboratory manufactured PCCF shows a much higher film thickness of 55 mu m compared to Al foil of 19 mu m, the electrode resistance was measured to be by a factor of 5 lower compared to the Al collector, which was attributed to the low contact resistance between PCCF, carbon primer and electrode microstructure. The PCCF-C-primer collector shows a sufficient voltage stability up to 5 V vs. Li/Li+ and a negligible Li-intercalation loss into the carbon primer. Electrochemical cell tests demonstrate the applicability of the developed PCCF for LMNO and LTO electrodes, with no disadvantage compared to state-of-the-art Al collector. Due to a 50% lower material density, the lightweight and hermetic dense PCCF polymer collector offers the possibility to significantly decrease the mass loading of the collector in battery cells, which can be of special interest for bipolar battery architectures. |
4,378 | Learning Linear Discriminant Projections for Dimensionality Reduction of Image Descriptors | In this paper, we present Linear Discriminant Projections (LDP) for reducing dimensionality and improving discriminability of local image descriptors. We place LDP into the context of state-of-the-art discriminant projections and analyze its properties. LDP requires a large set of training data with point-to-point correspondence ground truth. We demonstrate that training data produced by a simulation of image transformations leads to nearly the same results as the real data with correspondence ground truth. This makes it possible to apply LDP as well as other discriminant projection approaches to the problems where the correspondence ground truth is not available, such as image categorization. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation on standard data sets in the context of image matching and categorization. We demonstrate that LDP enables significant dimensionality reduction of local descriptors and performance increases in different applications. The results improve upon the state-of-the-art recognition performance with simultaneous dimensionality reduction from 128 to 30. |
4,379 | RESEARCH ON THE FACTORS OF ART IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF URBAN ENVIRONMENT | In recent years, artworks have continued to appear in cities, building an art city to achieve sustainable development. The art area is a cultural and artistic area featuring "art" in urban cultural construction with social service and commercial functions. Summarising the development process of more than 20 years, in the process of building the art district, we should highlight cultural characteristics and increase the "participation" of the people; strengthen the social service function and improve the "publicity" of the art district; promote aesthetic life, raise the residents' "happiness index" to construct a new model of sustainable art district development and give play to the new role of art districts in urban cultural construction. Identify the critical success factors for urban environmental development, verify the effectiveness of the evaluation process, and analyse the interrelationship between them. The research results can help the stakeholders of the better understand the successful development of the eco-city project and provide a valuable reference for managers to adopt the development strategy of the eco-city project in the future. |
4,380 | Fast incremental structure from motion based on parallel bundle adjustment | Structure from motion has attracted a lot of research in recent years, with new state-of-the-art approaches coming almost every year. One of its advantages over 3D reconstruction is that it can be used for any cameras (UAVs, depth sensor, light field) and produces relatively accurate point clouds and camera parameters. One of its disadvantages compared to other approaches is that it is computationally expensive. In this paper, we design a novel structure-from-motion framework to reduce the computational cost and implement a parallel bundle adjustment on GPU device for large-scale optimization. In our framework, the local bundle adjustment is added into the architecture of the incremental structure from motion; namely, the point clouds and camera's parameters are optimized when an additional number of images was added. Then, the purpose is not only to improve the quality of the produced point clouds but also to reduce computation time via parallel bundle adjustment. We conduct extensively experiments on several challenging datasets and make comparison with the state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that the proposed method has the best performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency. |
4,381 | Integrating Interactive Clothing and Cyber-Physical Systems: A Humanistic Design Perspective | This study is aimed at bridging the gap from a transdisciplinary perspective between cyber-physical systems (CPS) architecture in the field of information science and emotional design in the field of humanistic science for interactive fashion innovation. Information related to a familiar feeling in the process of interactive clothing design is used to explain how the transformation could be realized from data. By creating the cyber-physical-clothing systems (CPCS), the architecture model in the hyper world and takes the development process of an interactive parent-child clothing as a case study for analyzing the transformation from the physical signal input to the social symbol recognition output. The experimental results, which from the perspective of clothing art design rather than information discipline, show that interactive parent-child clothing is not only suitable for the rehabilitation of autistic children but also recognized by most parents. The reasonable embedding of sensing technology can greatly enhance the added value of clothing products. This study provides a fruitful practical application reference for designers who are engaged in the field of art and design but not familiar with the relevant information technology. Furthermore, the application principle and the technical process of CPCS for further interactive clothing design is explained. |
4,382 | Estrogen Receptor Beta 1: A Potential Therapeutic Target for Female Triple Negative Breast Cancer | Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive subtype of breast cancer characterized by the absence of estrogen receptor alpha, progesterone receptor, and HER2. These receptors often serve as targets in breast cancer treatment. As a result, TNBCs are difficult to treat and have a high propensity to metastasize to distant organs. For these reasons, TNBCs are responsible for over 50% of all breast cancer mortalities while only accounting for 15% to 20% of breast cancer cases. However, estrogen receptor beta 1 (ERβ1), an isoform of the ESR2 gene, has emerged as a potential therapeutic target in the treatment of TNBCs. Using an in vivo xenograft preclinical mouse model with human TNBC, we found that expression of ERβ1 significantly reduced both primary tumor growth and metastasis. Moreover, TNBCs with elevated levels of ERβ1 showed reduction in epithelial to mesenchymal transition markers and breast cancer stem cell markers, and increases in the expression of genes associated with inhibition of cancer cell invasiveness and metastasis, suggesting possible mechanisms underlying the antitumor activity of ERβ1. Gene expression analysis by quantitative polymerase chain reaction and RNA-seq revealed that treatment with chloroindazole, an ERβ-selective agonist ligand, often enhanced the suppressive activity of ERβ1 in TNBCs in vivo or in TNBC cells in culture, suggesting the potential utility of ERβ1 and ERβ ligand in improving TNBC treatment. The findings enable understanding of the mechanisms by which ERβ1 impedes TNBC growth, invasiveness, and metastasis and consideration of ways by which treatments involving ERβ might improve TNBC patient outcome. |
4,383 | Dyeing and finishing wastewater treatment in China: State of the art and perspective | China has the largest textile production and export in the world, with a massive amount of wastewater and related pollutants releasing. With an increasing concern to improve water quality, dyeing and finishing wastewater (DFW) requires better disposal or reclamation. In this review, the characteristics of wastewater in different natural and synthetic fiber production processes as well as the origins of their specific pollutants such as aniline, absorbable organic halogens (AOX), sulfide, hexavalent chromium and antimony were summarized. The discharge standards for DFW in China, have undergone complex evolution processes, which were discussed including the current standard, the revision detail and the one to be implemented. Furthermore, the current status of pollutant reduction in the textile industry, covering cleaner production and wastewater treatment, was targeted, in particular the state of the art of specific pollutant removal technologies and their feasibility of application for DFW treatment. Also, reclamation systems based on wastewater discharge characteristics and reclaimed water quality requirements were reviewed. Overall, the systematic solution of source reduction of wastewater and contaminants, coupled with subsequent treatment and recycling, is crucial for the sustainable development of the textile industry. |
4,384 | Social and Structural Factors Shaping High Rates of Incarceration among Sex Workers in a Canadian Setting | In light of the emphasis on enforcement-based approaches towards sex work, and the well-known negative impacts of these approaches on women's health, safety and well-being, we conducted a study to investigate the prevalence and correlates of recent incarceration among a cohort of women sex workers in Vancouver, Canada. Data were obtained from an open prospective community cohort of female and transgender women sex workers, known as An Evaluation of Sex Workers' Health Access (AESHA). Bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses, using generalized estimating equations (GEE), were used to model the effect of social and structural factors on the likelihood of incarceration over the 44-month follow-up period (January 2010-August 2013). Among 720 sex workers, 62.5 % (n = 450) reported being incarcerated in their lifetime and 23.9 % (n = 172) being incarcerated at least once during the study period. Of the 172 participants, about one third (36.6 %) reported multiple episodes of incarceration. In multivariable GEE analyses, younger age (adjusted odds ratio [AOR] = 1.04 per year younger, 95 % confidence interval [CI] 1.02-1.06), being of a sexual/gender minority (AOR = 1.62, 95 % CI 1.13-2.34), heavy drinking (AOR = 1.99, 95 % CI 1.20-3.29), being born in Canada (AOR = 3.28, 95 % CI 1.26-8.53), living in unstable housing conditions (AOR = 4.32, 95 % CI 2.17-8.62), servicing clients in public spaces (versus formal sex work establishments) (AOR = 2.33, 95 % CI 1.05-5.17) and experiencing police harassment without arrest (AOR = 1.82, 95 % CI 1.35-2.45) remain independently correlated with incarceration. This prospective study found a very high prevalence and frequency of incarceration among women sex workers in Vancouver, Canada, with the most vulnerable and marginalized women at increased risk of incarceration. Given the well-known social and health harms associated with incarceration, and associations between police harassment and incarceration in this study, our findings further add to growing calls to move away from criminalized and enforcement-based approaches to sex work in Canada and globally. |
4,385 | Uniform Distribution of Ruthenium Nanoparticles on Nitrogen-Doped Carbon Nanostructure for Oxygen Reduction Reaction | Highly efficient, durable, and economically viable electrocatalysts for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) is central for energy conversion and storage devices such as fuel cells and metal-air batteries. Despite of the enormous recent achievements, it is challenging to achieve satisfactory activity and stability at the same time due to lack of fundamental understanding on the activity governing factors. Here, we demonstrate the mechanistic insight of oxygen reduction on the uniformly dispersed Ru nanoparticles on N-doped carbon support (Ru@NC). The promotion of energy efficient inner-sphere electron transfer mechanism with reduced HO2- generation demonstrates as the crucial descriptor for appreciable activity and remarkable stability. In terms of the mass activity, the developed catalyst outperforms other previously reported state-of-the-art catalysts. The greatly suppressed HO2- generation endows remarkable stability (similar to 6 mV of negative shift in half-wave potential and only 1.9% reduction of activity at 0.9 V after 10000 potential cycles) in alkaline medium. Overall, Ru@NC exhibits remarkably superior stability which is much better than the limit fixed the U.S. of (DOE) and the state-of-the-art Pt/C |
4,386 | Resting-state functional connectivity in adults with 47,XXX: a 7 Tesla MRI study | Triple X syndrome is a sex chromosomal aneuploidy characterized by the presence of a supernumerary X chromosome, resulting in a karyotype of 47,XXX in affected females. It has been associated with a variable cognitive, behavioral, and psychiatric phenotype, but little is known about its effects on brain function. We therefore conducted 7 T resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and compared data of 19 adult individuals with 47,XXX and 21 age-matched healthy control women using independent component analysis and dual regression. Additionally, we examined potential relationships between social cognition and social functioning scores, and IQ, and mean functional connectivity values. The 47,XXX group showed significantly increased functional connectivity of the fronto-parietal resting-state network with the right postcentral gyrus. Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) variability was not associated with IQ and social cognition and social functioning deficits in the participants with 47,XXX. We thus observed an effect of a supernumerary X chromosome in adult women on fronto-parietal rsFC. These findings provide additional insight into the role of the X chromosome on functional connectivity of the brain. Further research is needed to understand the clinical implications of altered rsFC in 47,XXX. |
4,387 | Triple Antibiotic Paste: A Suitable Medicament for Intracanal Disinfection | With increasing cases of odontogenic infections, advancements in the treatment modality gain utmost importance. Complexity in the anatomy of the root canal necessitates the selection of the correct medicament and disinfectant. Furthermore, exacerbation of the problem results due to improper cleaning and disinfection of the root canal space. In such cases, manual preparation and irrigation alone will be of no help. The treatment outcome mostly depends upon the correct selection and application of the proper intracanal disinfectant along with the proper choice of medicament. One such intracanal disinfectant is triple antibiotic paste (TAP), a mix of three antibiotics. It's the combined effect of the three drugs mixed in the paste that makes the mix a potent antimicrobial agent effective against microbes. This review aims to evaluate the properties of TAP, its composition, its various application, and its property to help maintain the vitality of the diseased pulp. This review also talks about its drawbacks and its application in primary teeth. |
4,388 | Performance estimation of the state-of-the-art convolution neural networks for thermal images-based gender classification system | Gender classification has found many useful applications in the broader domain of computer vision systems including in-cabin driver monitoring systems, human-computer interaction, video surveillance systems, crowd monitoring, data collection systems for the retail sector, and psychological analysis. In previous studies, researchers have established a gender classification system using visible spectrum images of the human face. However, there are many factors affecting the performance of these systems including illumination conditions, shadow, occlusions, and time of day. Our study is focused on evaluating the use of thermal imaging to overcome these challenges by providing a reliable means of gender classification. As thermal images lack some of the facial definition of other imaging modalities, a range of state-of-the-art deep neural networks are trained to perform the classification task. For our study, the Tufts University thermal facial image dataset was used for training. This features thermal facial images from more than 100 subjects gathered in multiple poses and multiple modalities and provided a good gender balance to support the classification task. These facial samples of both male and female subjects are used to fine-tune a number of selected state-of-the-art convolution neural networks (CNN) using transfer learning. The robustness of these networks is evaluated through cross validation on the Carl thermal dataset along with an additional set of test samples acquired in a controlled lab environment using prototype uncooled thermal cameras. Finally, a new CNN architecture, optimized for the gender classification task, GENNet, is designed and evaluated with the pretrained networks. (C) The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. |
4,389 | Key Advances in Pervasive Edge Computing for Industrial Internet of Things in 5G and Beyond | This article surveys emerging technologies related to pervasive edge computing (PEC) for industrial internet-of-things (IIoT) enabled by fifth-generation (5G) and beyond communication networks. PEC encompasses all devices that are capable of performing computational tasks locally, including those at the edge of the core network (edge servers co-located with 5G base stations) and in the radio access network (sensors, actuators, etc.). The main advantages of this paradigm are core network offloading (and benefits therefrom) and low latency for delay-sensitive applications (e.g., automatic control). We have reviewed the state-of-the-art in the PEC paradigm and its applications to the IIoT domain, which have been enabled by the recent developments in 5G technology. We have classified and described three important research areas related to PEC-distributed artificial intelligence methods, energy efficiency, and cyber security. We have also identified the main open challenges that must be solved to have a scalable PEC-based IIoT network that operates efficiently under different conditions. By explaining the applications, challenges, and opportunities, our paper reinforces the perspective that the PEC paradigm is an extremely suitable and important deployment model for industrial communication networks, considering the modern trend toward private industrial 5G networks with local operations and flexible management. |
4,390 | Transition from Pediatric to Adult Specialty Care for Adolescents and Young Adults with Refractory Epilepsy: A Quality Improvement Approach | Adolescents and young adults with refractory epilepsy are particularly vulnerable to serious medical and psychosocial challenges during transition from pediatric to adult care. Quality improvement methods were used to address the transition process on an academic medical campus. Outcomes achieved were decreased time from referral to first appointment in the adult clinic, H=8.2, p=0.004, r=0.43; and increased social work referrals using decision support, z=10.0, p=0.0006, OR=6.13. As measured by the 13-item Patient Activation Measure, pre-post change in patient activation as an outcome of self-management education was not statistically significant. |
4,391 | A Multistage Deep Residual Network for Biomedical Cyber-Physical Systems | In this paper, we propose a novel biomedical cyber-physical system for automated and efficient arrhythmia and seizure detection in the time-series biomedical signals such as electrocardiogram (ECG) and electroencephalography (EEG). We use a novel multilayer, automated, and multistage deep residual network for the anomaly detection in the biomedical signals. Generally, the biomedical datasets have class imbalance problem; hence, we leverage the concepts of undersampling techniques to address this issue. The proposed algorithm is validated on the publicly available benchmark MIT-BIH Arrhythmia and CHB-MIT Scalp databases. The results show a significant improvement in terms of the sensitivity of 90% and 97.1% for supraventricular and ventricular beats for best fold, respectively. The accuracy obtained is at par with most of the state-of-the-art methods, and in particular, for the supraventricular beats, the proposed method outperforms all but one state-of-the-art method. The advantage of the proposed method is that it gives reliable results with EEG samples of small duration and, as opposed to other state-of-the-artmethods, it does not involve any preprocessing, hence computationally efficient. Additionally, the proposed algorithm provides 81% sensitivity for seizure detection in EEG signals, which is comparable to existing deep learning methods. |
4,392 | Large-scale evaluation of multimodal biometric authentication using state-of-the-art systems | We examine the performance of multimodal biometric authentication systems using state-of-the-art Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) fingerprint and face biometric systems on a population approaching 1,000 individuals. The majority of prior studies of multimodal biometrics have been limited to relatively low accuracy non-COTS systems and populations of a few hundred users. Our work is the first to demonstrate that multimodal fingerprint and face biometric systems can achieve significant accuracy gains over either biometric alone, even when using highly accurate COTS systems on a relatively large-scale population. In addition to examining well-known multimodal methods, we introduce new methods of normalization and fusion that further improve the accuracy. |
4,393 | Microbiological Surveillance and State of the Art Technological Strategies for the Prevention of Dialysis Water Pollution | Methods: The present report attempts to illustrate the positive impact on the microbiological quality of dialysis patients over a 15-year period through the progressive implementation of state-of-the-art technological strategies and the optimization of microbiological surveillance procedures in five dialysis units in Sardinia. Results: Following on better microbiological, quality controls of dialysis water and improvement of procedures and equipment, a drastic improvement of microbiological water quality was observed in a total of 945 samples. The main aim was to introduce the use of microbiological culture methods as recommended by the most important guidelines. The microbiological results obtained have led to a progressive refining of controls and introduction of new materials and equipment, including two-stage osmosis and piping distribution rings featuring a greater capacity to prevent biofilm adhesion. The actions undertaken have resulted in unexpected quality improvements. Conclusions: Dialysis water should be viewed by the nephrologist as a medicinal product exerting a demonstrable positive impact on microinflammation in dialysis patients. A synergic effort between nephrologists and microbiologists undoubtedly constitutes the most effective means of preventing dialysis infections. |
4,394 | An initial radiation safety needs assessment of Costa Rica: The South Texas Chapter of the Health Physics Society's strategic planning appraisal for participation in the "radiation safety without boarders" initiative | In response to the Health Physics Society's recent "radiation safety without borders" initiative, the South Texas Chapter of the Health Physics Society selected Costa Rica as its partner country of choice. To develop an understanding of the radiation safety needs or this country, the fall 2001 University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health Environmental Radiation and Radioactivity class was tasked with the assignment of assessing the possible radiation safety needs and concerns for this country. The assignment culminated in a class presentation to the membership of the South Texas Chapter during its annual rail meeting. Using library and web based resources, the students reviewed a number of public health anti radiation-related topics. Life expectancies were found to be equivalent to the United States, even though significant differences in per capita health expenditures were noted. Costa Rica exhibited lower population mortality rates from major causes such as cardiovascular diseases, neoplasms, and external sources. Maternal anti infant mortality rates were found to be much higher in Costa Rica than in the United States. Naturally occurring radiation sources such as uranium deposits were not identified as apparent major radiation issues of concern, although ultraviolet radiation exposures are consistently high. Several recent events in the country anti the region involving patient overexposures suggest that concerns are likely focused on ensuring the proper use and maintenance of healing arts radiation equipment. The lack of available information on radioactive waste disposal suggests that waste handling also may be an issue warranting attention. The exercise proved to be very educational for the students, and the information gathered will serve to focus the Chapter's efforts when technical exchanges are initiated. The importance of linking this initiative to other existing programs within the country is also discussed. |
4,395 | ["The city-hospital link is based on the characteristics of the target population and its needs"] | Strengthening the city-hospital network is intended to improve the response to the needs of people who move back and forth through the healthcare system. Édouard Habib, Director of the Fédération régionale des dispositifs de ressources et d'appui à la coordination des parcours de santé d'Île-de-France, and Marie-Dominique Lussier, a geriatrician and expert in the field of health care pathways, discussed ways to achieve this goal. In particular, they specified that it was important to think in terms of target populations, to consider networking as a meta-organization capable of adapting to changing needs, and to transform digital tools into vectors for this networking. |
4,396 | Efficient Wireless Multimedia Multicast in Multi-Rate Multi-Channel Mesh Networks | Devices in wireless mesh networks can operate on multiple channels (MC) and automatically adjust their transmission rates for the occupied channels. This paper shows how to improve performance-guaranteed multicasting transmission coverage for wireless multihop mesh networks by exploring the transmission opportunity offered by multiple rates (MR) and MC. Based on the characteristics of transmissions with different rates, we propose and analyze parallel low-rate transmissions and alternative rate transmissions (ART) to explore the advantages of MRMC in improving the performance and coverage tradeoff under the constraint of limited channel resources. We then apply these new transmission schemes to improve the WMN multicast experience. Combined with the strategy of reliable interference-controlled connections, a novel MRMC multicast algorithm (LC-MRMC) is designed to make efficient use of channel and rate resources to greatly extend wireless multicast coverage with high throughput and short delay performance. Our NS2 simulation results prove that ART and LC-MRMC achieve improved wireless transmission quality across much larger areas as compared to other related studies. |
4,397 | Comparative Genomic Insights into the Evolution of Halobacteria-Associated " Candidatus Nanohaloarchaeota" | Members of the phylum "Candidatus Nanohaloarchaeota," a representative lineage within the DPANN superphylum, are characterized by their nanosized cells and symbiotic lifestyle with Halobacteria. However, the development of the symbiosis remains unclear. Here, we propose two novel families, "Candidatus Nanoanaerosalinaceae" and "Candidatus Nanohalalkaliarchaeaceae" in "Ca. Nanohaloarchaeota," represented by five dereplicated metagenome-assembled genomes obtained from hypersaline sediments or related enrichment cultures of soda-saline lakes. Phylogenetic analyses reveal that the two novel families are placed at the root of the family "Candidatus Nanosalinaceae," including the cultivated taxa. The two novel families prefer hypersaline sediments, and the acid shift of predicted proteomes indicates a "salt-in" strategy for hypersaline adaptation. They contain a lower proportion of putative horizontal gene transfers from Halobacteria than "Ca. Nanosalinaceae," suggesting a weaker association with Halobacteria. Functional prediction and historical events reconstruction disclose that they exhibit divergent potentials in carbohydrate and organic acid metabolism and environmental responses. Globally, comparative genomic analyses based on the new families enrich the taxonomic and functional diversity of "Ca. Nanohaloarchaeota" and provide insights into the evolutionary process of "Ca. Nanohaloarchaeota" and their symbiotic relationship with Halobacteria. IMPORTANCE The DPANN superphylum is a group of archaea widely distributed in various habitats. They generally have small cells and have a symbiotic lifestyle with other archaea. The archaeal symbiotic interaction is vital to understanding microbial communities. However, the formation and evolution of the symbiosis between the DPANN lineages and other diverse archaea remain unclear. Based on phylogeny, habitat distribution, hypersaline adaptation, host prediction, functional potentials, and historical events of "Ca. Nanohaloarchaeota," a representative phylum within the DPANN superphylum, we report two novel families representing intermediate stages, and we infer the evolutionary process of "Ca. Nanohaloarchaeota" and their Halobacteria-associated symbiosis. Altogether, this research helps in understanding the evolution of symbiosis in "Ca. Nanohaloarchaeota" and provides a model for the evolution of other DPANN lineages. |
4,398 | A bacterial secretosome for regulated envelope biogenesis and quality control? | The Gram-negative bacterial envelope is the first line of defence against environmental stress and antibiotics. Therefore, its biogenesis is of considerable fundamental interest, as well as a challenge to address the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance. All bacterial proteins are synthesised in the cytosol, so inner- and outer-membrane proteins, and periplasmic residents have to be transported to their final destinations via specialised protein machinery. The Sec translocon, a ubiquitous integral inner-membrane (IM) complex, is key to this process as the major gateway for protein transit from the cytosol to the cell envelope; this can be achieved during their translation, or afterwards. Proteins need to be directed into the inner-membrane (usually co-translational), otherwise SecA utilises ATP and the proton-motive-force (PMF) to drive proteins across the membrane post-translationally. These proteins are then picked up by chaperones for folding in the periplasm, or delivered to the β-barrel assembly machinery (BAM) for incorporation into the outer-membrane. The core hetero-trimeric SecYEG-complex forms the hub for an extensive network of interactions that regulate protein delivery and quality control. Here, we conduct a biochemical exploration of this 'secretosome' -a very large, versatile and inter-changeable assembly with the Sec-translocon at its core; featuring interactions that facilitate secretion (SecDF), inner- and outer-membrane protein insertion (respectively, YidC and BAM), protein folding and quality control (e.g. PpiD, YfgM and FtsH). We propose the dynamic interplay amongst these, and other factors, act to ensure efficient envelope biogenesis, regulated to accommodate the requirements of cell elongation and division. We believe this organisation is critical for cell wall biogenesis and remodelling and thus its perturbation could be a means for the development of anti-microbials. |
4,399 | A Fast Iterative Method for Removing Impulsive Noise From Sparse Signals | In this paper, we propose a new method to reconstruct a signal corrupted by noise where both signal and noise are sparse but in different domains. The main contribution of our algorithm is its low complexity; it has much lower run-time than most other algorithms. The reconstruction quality of our algorithm is both objectively (in terms of PSNR and SSIM) and subjectively better or comparable to other state-of-the-art algorithms. We provide a cost function for our problem, present an iterative method to find its local minimum, and provide the analysis of the algorithm. As an application of this problem, we apply our algorithm for Salt-and-Pepper noise (SPN) and Random-Valued Impulsive Noise (RVIN) removal from images and compare our results with other notable algorithms in the literature. Furthermore, we apply our algorithm for removing clicks from audio signals. Simulation results show that our algorithms are simple and fast, and it outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction quality and/or complexity. |
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