uuid
int64 0
6k
| title
stringlengths 8
285
| abstract
stringlengths 22
4.43k
|
|---|---|---|
4,400 | Construction of Ti3C2 MXene based fire resistance nanocoating on flexible polyurethane foam for highly efficient photothermal conversion and solar water desalination | In this work, a bilayer nanocoating was constructed on the surface of flexible polyurethane (FPU) foam with Ti3C2 MXene and polyethyleneimine-modified silica nanoparticles (mSiO2-NP@PEI) through layer-by-layer self-assembly technology, successfully obtaining modified flexible polyurethane composites (MFPU) with excellent flame retardancy, photothermal conversion and solar water desalination properties. The structure and morphology of MFPU foams were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), Transmission electron microscope (TEM) and Scanning electron microscope (SEM). The MFPU with three coating cycles (MFPU3) had the best flame retardancy and smoke suppression performances, mainly in terms of decreased peak heat release rate (pHRR), peak smoke production rate (pSPR) and total smoke production (TSP) by 71.3 %, 62.1 % and 74.5 %, respectively, compared to those of neat FPU. In addition, MFPU foams exhibited extraordinary light-to-heat conversion and solar water desalination capabilities. MFPU3 could reach 120 °C in 138 s and its steam conversion efficiency η was as high as 89.6 %, which was 116.0 % higher than that of unmodified foam and had a 262.8 % increase over pure water. The flame retardant MFPU foams with excellent photothermal conversion efficiency will exhibit great application potential in solar water desalination and power generation. |
4,401 | Application of radiomics in precision prediction of diagnosis and treatment of gastric cancer | Gastric cancer is one of the most common malignant tumors. Although some progress has been made in chemotherapy and surgery, it is still one of the highest mortalities in the world. Therefore, early detection, diagnosis and treatment are very important to improve the prognosis of patients. In recent years, with the proposal of the concept of radiomics, it has been gradually applied to histopathological grading, differential diagnosis, therapeutic efficacy and prognosis evaluation of gastric cancer, whose advantage is to comprehensively quantify the tumor phenotype using a large number of quantitative image features, so as to predict and diagnose the lesion area of gastric cancer early. The purpose of this review is to evaluate the research status and progress of radiomics in gastric cancer, and reviewed the workflow and clinical application of radiomics. The 27 original studies on the application of radiomics in gastric cancer were included from web of science database search results from 2017 to 2021, the number of patients included ranged from 30 to 1680, and the models used were based on the combination of radiomics signature and clinical factors. Most of these studies showed positive results, the median radiomics quality score (RQS) for all studies was 36.1%, and the development prospect and challenges of radiomics development were prospected. In general, radiomics has great potential in improving the early prediction and diagnosis of gastric cancer, and provides an unprecedented opportunity for clinical practice to improve the decision support of gastric cancer treatment at a low cost. |
4,402 | TMO-Net: A Parameter-Free Tone Mapping Operator Using Generative Adversarial Network, and Performance Benchmarking on Large Scale HDR Dataset | Currently published tone mapping operators (TMO) are often evaluated on a very limited test set of high dynamic range (HDR) images. Thus, the resulting performance index is highly subject to extensive hyperparameter tuning, and many TMOs exhibit sub-optimal performance when tested on a broader spectrum of HDR images. This indicates that there are deficiencies in the generalizable applicability of these techniques. Finally, it is a challenge developing parameter-free tone mapping operators using data-hungry advanced deep learning methods due to the paucity of large scale HDR datasets. In this paper, these issues are addressed through the following contributions: a) a large scale HDR image benchmark dataset (LVZ-HDR dataset) with multiple variations in sceneries and lighting conditions is created to enable performance evaluation of TMOs across a diverse conditions and scenes that will also contribute to facilitate the development of more robust TMOs using state-of-the-art deep learning methods; b) a deep learning-based tone mapping operator (TMO-Net) is presented, which offers an efficient and parameter-free method capable of generalizing effectively across a wider spectrum of HDR content; c) finally, a comparative analysis, and performance benchmarking of 19 state-of-the-art TMOs on the new LVZ-HDR dataset are presented. Standard metrics including the Tone Mapping Quality Index (TMQI), Feature Similarity Index for Tone Mapped images (FSITM), and Natural Image Quality Evaluator (NIQE) are used to qualitatively evaluate the performance index of the benchmarked TMOs. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TMO-Net qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms current state-of-the-art TMOs. |
4,403 | ColorPoetry: Multi-Sensory Experience of Color with Poetry in Visual Arts Appreciation of Persons with Visual Impairment | Visually impaired visitors experience many limitations when visiting museum exhibits, such as a lack of cognitive and sensory access to exhibits or replicas. Contemporary art is evolving in the direction of appreciation beyond simply looking at works, and the development of various sensory technologies has had a great influence on culture and art. Thus, opportunities for people with visual impairments to appreciate visual artworks through various senses such as hearing, touch, and smell are expanding. However, it is uncommon to provide a multi-sensory interactive interface for color recognition, such as integrating patterns, sounds, temperature, and scents. This paper attempts to convey a color cognition to the visually impaired, taking advantage of multisensory coding color. In our previous works, musical melodies with different combinations of pitch, timbre, velocity, and tempo were used to distinguish vivid (i.e., saturated), light, and dark colors. However, it was rather difficult to distinguish among warm/cool/light/dark colors with using sound cues only. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to build a multisensory color-coding system with combining sound and poem such that poem leads to represent more color dimensions, such as including warm and cool colors for red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. To do this, we first performed an implicit association test to identify the most suitable poem among the candidate poems to represent colors in artwork by finding the common semantic directivity between the given candidate poem with voice modulation and the artwork in terms of light/dark/warm/color dimensions. Finally, we conducted a system usability test on the proposed color-coding system, confirming that poem will be an effective supplement for distinguishing between vivid, light, and dark colors with different color appearance dimensions, such as warm and cold colors. The user experience score of 15 college students was 75.1%, that was comparable with the color-music coding system that received a user experience rating of 74.1%. with proven usability. |
4,404 | (d, 3n) Reaction cross-section calculation of some reactor materials | Nuclear reactions with charged particles have applications in many fields such as radioisotope production, industrial applications, astrophysics, etc. Therefore, examining the excitation functions performed and obtained by the activation technique is also important for understanding the nature of nuclear reactions. Also, it is especially necessary to study these reactions to estimate the effects of radiation damage on the fusion structural materials used in the construction of the first walls and core of the reactor. In this study, cross-section data have been calculated theoretically to 45Sc (d, 3n)44Ti, 63Cu (d, 3n)62Zn, 89Y (d, 3n)88Zr, and 100Mo (d, 3n)99Tc reactions in the range of 1-50 MeV energy via ALICE/ASH, TALYS 1.95 and Empire 3.2.2 nuclear reaction codes. Optical Model Parameters (OMP) calculation for deuteron-induced reaction results has been performed via TALYS 1.95 code and the calculated cross-section values are reproduced well. Also, empirically developed (d, 3n) cross section formula (Kavun, 2020) calculations have been performed at 20 MeV energy. Finally, experimental EXFOR data was compared with all results and were found to be compatible with each other. |
4,405 | Blame it on the Drug: A Rare Case of Recurrent Doxycycline-Induced Pancreatitis | Doxycycline is a broad-spectrum bacteriostatic antibiotic that belongs to the tetracycline class. It is a relatively safe medication with reported side effects being gastrointestinal symptoms, bone and teeth discoloration, photosensitivity, and renal toxicity. Acute pancreatitis (AP) is an uncommon adverse effect with only a few reported cases in the literature. Despite tetracyclines being labeled as a probable causative agent of drug-induced pancreatitis (DIP), doxycycline has been rarely implicated. Herein we present the case of a 65-year-old patient who developed recurrent doxycycline-induced pancreatitis after she was inadvertently started on the medication for community-acquired pneumonia. The most common causes of pancreatitis were ruled out during her hospital admission and she was subsequently diagnosed with DIP. She was successfully treated with the cessation of the offending agent and with supportive therapy. It is critical that clinicians are aware of the possible association between doxycycline and pancreatitis to further aid in the prompt diagnosis and treatment of this condition. |
4,406 | Hybrid Automatic Lung Segmentation on Chest CT Scans | Accurate lung segmentation in chest Computed Tomography (CT) scans is a challenging problem because of variations in lung volume shape, susceptibility to partial volume effects that affect thin antero-posterior junction lines, and lack of contrast between the lung and surrounding tissues. To address the need for a robust method for lung segmentation, we present a new method, called Pixel-based two-Scan Connected Component Labeling-Convex Hull-Closed Principal Curve method (PSCCL-CH-CPC), which automatically detects lung boundaries, and surpasses state-of-the-art performance. The proposed method has two main steps: 1) an image preprocessing step to extract coarse lung contours, and 2) a refinement step to refine the coarse segmentation result on the basis of the improved principal curve model and the machine learning model. Experimental results show that the proposed method has good performance, with a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) as high as 98.21%. When compared with state-of-the-art methods, our proposed method achieved superior segmentation results, with an average DSC of 96.9%. |
4,407 | Patient-Reported Outcome Measures for Adults and Adolescents with Patellofemoral Pain: A Systematic Review of Content Validity and Feasibility Using the COSMIN Methodology | OBJECTIVE: To assess the content validity and feasibility of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) used to assess pain and function in adults and adolescents with patellofemoral pain (PFP). DESIGN: Systematic review. LITERATURE SEARCH: We searched the databases PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, SPORTDiscus, and the Cochrane Library from inception to January 6, 2022. STUDY SELECTION CRITERIA: We included studies that described the development or evaluation of the content validity of English-language PROMs for PFP, as well as their translations and cultural adaptations to different languages. DATA SYNTHESIS: Using the COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) methodology, we determined overall ratings and quality of evidence for the relevance, comprehensiveness, and comprehensibility of PROMs. We extracted data related to feasibility for clinical use (eg, administration time and scoring ease). RESULTS: Forty-three studies for 33 PROMs were included. The overall quality of most studies was "inadequate" due to failure to engage stakeholders and/or ensure adherence to rigorous qualitative research procedures. Of all PROMs evaluated, the Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score-Patellofemoral subscale (KOOS-PF), was the only PROM with sufficient content validity components. Quality of evidence for content validity of the KOOS-PF was low. Most PROMs were rated feasible for clinical and research purposes. CONCLUSION: Most PROMs used to measure pain and function in patients with PFP have inadequate content validity. The KOOS-PF had the highest overall content validity. We recommend the KOOS-PF for evaluating pain and function (in research and clinical practice) in adults and adolescents with PFP. J Orthop Sports Phys Ther 2023;53(1):23-39. Epub: 18 October 2022. doi:10.2519/jospt.2022.11317. |
4,408 | Metabology: Analysis of metabolomics data using community ecology tools | Several areas such as microbiology, botany, and medicine use genetic information and computational tools to organize, classify and analyze data. However, only recently has it been possible to obtain the chemical ontology of metabolites computationally. The systematic classification of metabolites into classes opens the way for adapting methods that previously used genetic taxonomy to now accept chemical ontology. Community ecology tools are ideal for this adaptation as they have mature methods and enable exploratory data analysis with established statistical tools. This study introduces the Metabology approach, which transforms metabolites into an ecosystem where the metabolites (species) are related by chemical ontology. In the present work, we demonstrate the applicability of this new approach using publicly available data from a metabolomics study of human plasma that searched for prognostic markers of COVID-19, and in an untargeted metabolomics study carried out by our laboratory using Lasiodiplodia theobromae fungal pathogen supernatants. |
4,409 | Completely Automated CNN Architecture Design Based on Blocks | The performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) highly relies on their architectures. In order to design a CNN with promising performance, extensive expertise in both CNNs and the investigated problem domain is required, which is not necessarily available to every interested user. To address this problem, we propose to automatically evolve CNN architectures by using a genetic algorithm (GA) based on ResNet and DenseNet blocks. The proposed algorithm is completely automatic in designing CNN architectures. In particular, neither preprocessing before it starts nor postprocessing in terms of CNNs is needed. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm does not require users with domain knowledge on CNNs, the investigated problem, or even GAs. The proposed algorithm is evaluated on the CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 benchmark data sets against 18 state-of-the-art peer competitors. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art CNNs hand-crafted and the CNNs designed by automatic peer competitors in terms of the classification performance and achieves a competitive classification accuracy against semiautomatic peer competitors. In addition, the proposed algorithm consumes much less computational resource than most peer competitors in finding the best CNN architectures. |
4,410 | Nanomaterials in anticancer applications and their mechanism of action - A review | The current challenges in cancer treatment using conventional therapies have made the emergence of nanotechnology with more advancements. The exponential growth of nanoscience has drawn to develop nanomaterials (NMs) with therapeutic activities. NMs have enormous potential in cancer treatment by altering the drug toxicity profile. Nanoparticles (NPs) with enhanced surface characteristics can diffuse more easily inside tumor cells, thus delivering an optimal concentration of drugs at tumor site while reducing the toxicity. Cancer cells can be targeted with greater affinity by utilizing NMs with tumor specific constituents. Furthermore, it bypasses the bottlenecks of indiscriminate biodistribution of the antitumor agent and high administration dosage. Here, we focus on the recent advances on the use of various nanomaterials for cancer treatment, including targeting cancer cell surfaces, tumor microenvironment (TME), organelles, and their mechanism of action. The paradigm shift in cancer management is achieved through the implementation of anticancer drug delivery using nano routes. |
4,411 | A Fully Polarity-Aware Double-Node-Upset-Resilient Latch Design | Due to aggressive scaling down, multiple-node-upset hardened design has become a major concern regarding radiation hardening. The proposed latch overcomes the architecture and performance limitations of state-of-the-art double-node-upset (DNU)-resilient latches. A novel stacked latch element is developed with multiple thresholds, regular architecture, increased number of single-event upset (SEU)-insensitive nodes, low power dissipation, and high robustness. The radiation-aware layout considering layout-level issues is also proposed. Compared with state-of-the-art DNU-resilient latches, simulation results show that the proposed latch exhibits up to 92% delay and 80% power reduction in data activity ratio (DAR) of 100%. The radiation simulation using the dual-double exponential current source model shows that the proposed latch has the strongest radiation-hardening capability among the other DNU-resilient latches. |
4,412 | Comparison of Virtual Management of Vulvovaginal Candidiasis to Traditional In-Person Care | Objective: Compare demographics, treatment, and follow-up rates for patients with complaints of vulvovaginitis suggestive of candida infection evaluated via e-visit, face-to-face (F2F) visits, or nurse-administered phone protocol. Methods: Manual review of 150 vaginitis visits of each visit type (e-visit, F2F, and phone protocol) completed between May 5, 2018 through January 31, 2020 by Mayo Clinic patients residing in Minnesota. Outcomes: Comparison between the three visit types of patient characteristics, treatment rates, type of treatment, follow-up rates, and types of follow-up. Results: Patients utilizing phone visits were significantly older than those seeking care via e-visit (p < 0.0001) or F2F (p = 0.001) and were more likely to be treated with oral fluconazole than those treated by e-visit (p < 0.0001) or F2F (p < 0.0001) encounters. Patients were significantly less likely to receive fungal directed treatment at a F2F visit than an e-visit (p < 0.0001) or phone encounter (p < 0.0001). There was no significant difference in follow-up rates between the three groups. Conclusion: Virtual visits (non-F2F) for suspected vulvovaginal candidiasis are unlikely to result in more follow-up visits than F2F encounters; however, prescriptions for antifungals are significantly higher with virtual visits. |
4,413 | Kartogenin-Conjugated Double-Network Hydrogel Combined with Stem Cell Transplantation and Tracing for Cartilage Repair | The effectiveness of existing tissue-engineering cartilage (TEC) is known to be hampered by weak integration of biocompatibility, biodegradation, mechanical strength, and microenvironment supplies. The strategy of hydrogel-based TEC holds considerable promise in circumventing these problems. Herein, a non-toxic, biodegradable, and mechanically optimized double-network (DN) hydrogel consisting of polyethylene glycol (PEG) and kartogenin (KGN)-conjugated chitosan (CHI) is constructed using a simple soaking strategy. This PEG-CHI-KGN DN hydrogel possesses favorable architectures, suitable mechanics, remarkable cellular affinity, and sustained KGN release, which can facilitate the cartilage-specific genes expression and extracellular matrix secretion of peripheral blood-derived mesenchymal stem cells (PB-MSCs). Notably, after tracing the transplanted cells by detecting the rabbit sex-determining region Y-linked gene sequence, the allogeneic PB-MSCs are found to survive for even 3 months in the regenerated cartilage. Here, the long-term release of KGN is able to efficiently and persistently activate multiple genes and signaling pathways to promote the chondrogenesis, chondrocyte differentiation, and survival of PB-MSCs. Thus, the regenerated tissues exhibit well-matched histomorphology and biomechanical performance such as native cartilage. Consequently, it is believed this innovative work can expand the choice for developing the next generation of orthopedic implants in the loadbearing region of a living body. |
4,414 | Degeneration of biological heart valve grafts in a rat model of superoxide dismutase-3 deficiency | While oxidative stress is known as key element in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis and calcific aortic valve disease, its role in the degeneration of biological cardiovascular grafts has not been clarified yet. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the impact of oxidative stress on the degeneration of biological cardiovascular allografts in a standardized chronic implantation model realized in rats exhibiting superoxide dismutase 3 deficiency (SOD3(-) ). Rats with SOD3 loss-of-function mutation (n = 24) underwent infrarenal implantation of cryopreserved valved aortic conduits, while SOD3-competent recipients served as controls (n = 28). After a follow-up period of 4 or 12 weeks, comparative analyses addressed degenerative processes, hemodynamics, and evaluation of the oxidative stress model. SOD3(-) rats presented decreased circulating SOD activity (p = .0079). After 12 weeks, 58% of the implant valves in SOD3(-) rats showed regurgitation (vs. 31% in controls, p = .2377). Intima hyperplasia and chondro-osteogenic transformation contributed to progressive graft calcification (p = .0024). At 12 weeks, hydroxyapatite deposition (p = .0198) and the gene expression of runt-related transcription factor-2 (Runx2) (p = .0093) were significantly enhanced in group SOD3(-) . This study provides the first in vivo evidence that impaired systemic antioxidant activity contributes to biological cardiovascular graft degeneration. |
4,415 | Providers' Perceptions of Neurology Care Delivered Through Telemedicine Technology | Background: The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent acceleration of telemedicine usage allowed many neurologists to trial telemedicine for neurological care. The purpose of this study is to explore neurology providers' experiences with delivering telemedicine care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: Semistructured video interviews were conducted with 27 neurology providers who practice at a single, urban academic center. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed for content and themes. Results: Five major themes were identified: virtual examination subspecialty differences, tips and tricks for the virtual examination, improved infrastructure needs, future technologies that could support the virtual examination, and preferences for the postpandemic telemedicine protocol. Subspecialists who described their visits as more focused on behavioral examination and obtaining patient history reported fewer limitations with delivering neurological care through telemedicine platforms. Conclusions: The implementation of a telemedicine system should reflect the needs of each neurology subspecialty. Funding is needed to improve logistical infrastructure for health providers' telemedicine visits, such as technical and administrative assistance, as well as creation and testing of technologies to support physical examination in the virtual environment. |
4,416 | Automatic music signal mixing system based on one-dimensional Wave-U-Net autoencoders | The purpose of this paper is to show a music mixing system that is capable of automatically mixing separate raw recordings with good quality regardless of the music genre. This work recalls selected methods for automatic audio mixing first. Then, a novel deep model based on one-dimensional Wave-U-Net autoencoders is proposed for automatic music mixing. The model is trained on a custom-prepared database. Mixes created using the proposed system are compared with amateur, state-of-the-art software, and professional mixes prepared by audio engineers. The results obtained prove that mixes created automatically by Wave-U-Net can objectively be evaluated as highly as mixes prepared professionally. This is also confirmed by the statistical analysis of the results of the conducted listening tests. Moreover, the results show a strong correlation between the experience of the listeners in mixing and the likelihood of a higher rating of the Wave-U-Net-based and professional mixes than the amateur ones or the mix prepared using state-of-the-art software. These results are also confirmed by the outcome of the similarity matrix-based analysis. |
4,417 | STUDY ON THE RELEVANCE OF ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS AND LOCAL IDENTITY BASED ON VISUAL IMAGERY | Many art creators are concerned about the importance of the environment and the maintenance of nature and use these as the background and motivation for their creation. Through this kind of thinking, many art creators reimagine an urban landscape that can balance nature and urban life. Therefore, through creation, they express their sighs that they are in an urban environment and want to create an urban environment with both nature and urban landscape so that the urban landscape can retain multiple elements. This study takes the public in Da Lian City of Liaoning Province as the research object. This study adopts experimental research, taking two groups of 300 people as experimental research objects to carry out experimental research on visual images. According to the results, the conclusion is put forward, expecting people to start from their hometown to every corner where garbage exists and gather more people who are concerned about their home environment to create together or to maintain the environment together. |
4,418 | New insights into cadmium tolerance and accumulation in tomato: Dissecting root and shoot responses using cross-genotype grafting | Cadmium (Cd) is one of the most threatening soil and water contaminants in agricultural settings. In previous studies, we observed that Cd affects the metabolism and physiology of tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) plants even after short-term exposure. The objective of this research was to use cross-genotype grafting to distinguish between root- and shoot-mediated responses of tomato genotypes with contrasting Cd tolerance at the early stages of Cd exposure. This study provides the first report of organ-specific contributions in two tomato genotypes with contrasting Cd tolerance: Solanum lycopersicum cv. Calabash Rouge and Solanum lycopersicum cv. Pusa Ruby (which have been classified and further characterized as sensitive (S) and tolerant (T) to Cd, respectively). Scion S was grafted onto rootstock S (S/S) and rootstock T (S/T), and scion T was grafted onto rootstock T (T/T) and rootstock S (T/S). A 35 μM cadmium chloride (CdCl2) treatment was used for stress induction in a hydroponic system. Both shoot and root contributions to Cd responses were observed, and they varied in a genotype- and/or organ-dependent manner for nutrient concentrations, oxidative stress parameters, antioxidant enzymes, and transporters gene expression. The findings overall provide evidence for the dominant role of the tolerant rootstock system in conferring reduced Cd uptake and accumulation. The lowest leaf Cd concentrations were observed in T/T (215.11 μg g-1 DW) and S/T (235.61 μg g-1 DW). Cadmium-induced decreases in leaf dry weight were observed only in T/S (-8.20%) and S/S (-13.89%), which also were the only graft combinations that showed decreases in chlorophyll content (-3.93% in T/S and -4.05% in S/S). Furthermore, the results show that reciprocal grafting is a fruitful approach for gaining insights into the organ-specific modulation of Cd tolerance and accumulation during the early stages of Cd exposure. |
4,419 | Early Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder: What the Pediatricians Should Know | Autism is a spectrum disorder marked by considerable heterogeneity and characterized by impairments in the social communication domain along with the presence of restricted and repetitive behaviors or interests. Comprehensive autism evaluation generally consists of assessments by a multidisciplinary team. Having multiple specialists in the evaluation team aids in diagnosis and in chalking out a comprehensive management plan. Diagnosis is generally based on detailed developmental history, clinical judgment, and the use of standardized diagnostic instruments. Differential diagnosis is complicated as many of the mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions that routinely coexist with autism also have some symptoms that overlap with autism. Several barriers are linked to delay in diagnosis including lack of comfort in diagnosing autism by primary care providers, delayed referrals, the inability of parents to raise critical developmental concerns, confusion of autism with other conditions, and health system that is not responsive to the needs of the underserved communities. The etiology of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is complex and still not completely understood; it involves genetics, neurobiology, and environmental exposures, leading to a diverse presentation of behaviors and symptoms. There is an imperative need to start therapeutic interventions as soon as a diagnosis of autism is suspected rather than wait for a definitive diagnosis. Early diagnosis is vital as timely intervention can lead to better outcomes for children and their families. |
4,420 | Major Depressive Disorder and Bipolar Disorder Predispose Youth to Accelerated Atherosclerosis and Early Cardiovascular Disease: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association | In the 2011 "Expert Panel on Integrated Guidelines for Cardiovascular Health and Risk Reduction in Children and Adolescents," several medical conditions among youth were identified that predispose to accelerated atherosclerosis and early cardiovascular disease (CVD), and risk stratification and management strategies for youth with these conditions were elaborated. Major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD) among youth satisfy the criteria set for, and therefore merit inclusion among, Expert Panel tier II moderate-risk conditions. The combined prevalence of MDD and BD among adolescents in the United States is ≈10%, at least 10 times greater than the prevalence of the existing moderate-risk conditions combined. The high prevalence of MDD and BD underscores the importance of positioning these diseases alongside other pediatric diseases previously identified as moderate risk for CVD. The overall objective of this statement is to increase awareness and recognition of MDD and BD among youth as moderate-risk conditions for early CVD. To achieve this objective, the primary specific aims of this statement are to (1) summarize evidence that MDD and BD are tier II moderate-risk conditions associated with accelerated atherosclerosis and early CVD and (2) position MDD and BD as tier II moderate-risk conditions that require the application of risk stratification and management strategies in accordance with Expert Panel recommendations. In this scientific statement, there is an integration of the various factors that putatively underlie the association of MDD and BD with CVD, including pathophysiological mechanisms, traditional CVD risk factors, behavioral and environmental factors, and psychiatric medications. |
4,421 | The Holocene humid period in the Nefud Desert: Hunters and herders in the Jebel Oraf palaeolake basin, Saudi Arabia | Archaeological surveys and excavations in the Jebel Oraf palaeolake basin, north-western Saudi Arabia, have identified a well-preserved early- to mid-Holocene landscape. Two types of occupation site can be distinguished: nine small and ephemeral scatters from single occupation phases on the slopes of sand dunes and three hearth sites indicative of repeated occupation on palaeolake shorelines. In addition, 245 rock art panels, 81 cairns, and 15 stone structures were recorded. This diverse dataset provides an opportunity to reconstruct occupation patterns and changes in landscape use. A particularly important site, Jebel Oraf 2, documents two episodes of lake high stands at ca. 6500 BC and 5300 BC, flooding parts of the locality. Neolithic pastoralists likely occupied the site after the end of the wet season, when the terrain was dry. Earlier sites are located in dune embayments some 7-14 m above the shore of the palaeolake. These locations are consistent with hunting strategies identifiable in the rock art that suggest wildlife was ambushed at watering places. Later rock art at Jebel Oraf also documents the hunting of wild camel in the Iron Age. The lithic industries documented in the Jebel Oraf basin support arguments of repeated contact with Levantine populations. |
4,422 | The Learning Needs of Art and Design Students in Chinese Vocational Colleges for Entrepreneurship Education: From the Perspectives of Theory of Entrepreneurial Thought and Action | Entrepreneurship education in Chinese colleges and universities began in the early 21st century. After more than 20 years of development, it has reached an unprecedented scale. At present, there are many studies on entrepreneurship education for undergraduates in Chinese colleges and universities, but only a few general studies on entrepreneurship education in higher vocational education. Particularly, the analysis of the status quo of students' entrepreneurship education and the research on the improvement of entrepreneurship education has not yet been widely discussed. This research adopted the semi-structured interview method and used purposive sampling to select 8 students with entrepreneurial willingness in lower grades and 8 in upper grades of higher vocational art and design in the Guangzhou area, as well as 8 students who have succeeded in entrepreneurship after graduation, giving a total of 24 students. The interview was designed based on the concept of Entrepreneurial Thought and Action (ET&A) entrepreneurship education. The interview outline was derived from the three aspects of learning, action, and creation. After the interviews were conducted, coding and qualitative analysis were performed to identify the knowledge and skills required by art students in higher vocational colleges to establish a business, and the problems encountered by successful students in entrepreneurship that might be encountered in the future. Based on the conclusions, the method and content of entrepreneurship education in schools could be improved. In addition, the research results showed that to fulfill the aim of entrepreneurship, art and design students in higher vocational colleges need to learn knowledge and skills such as entrepreneurial courses, professional knowledge, and entrepreneurial skills (competition, training, simulation, practice, etc.). Meanwhile, students who had succeeded in entrepreneurship believed that it was necessary to improve the entrepreneurship education curriculum system, pay attention to entrepreneurship practice teaching, and strengthen the linkage between home, school, and enterprise to promote entrepreneurship learning, thereby enhancing innovation and entrepreneurship ability. |
4,423 | Orientation judgment for abstract paintings | Artists decide the orientation at which an abstract painting should be hung based on their ideas, but the correct orientation is not obvious to other viewers. Some studies have found that abstract paintings at the correct orientations generally get higher aesthetic ratings from viewers. This encourages us to deal with the problem of orientation judgment for abstract paintings through machine learning. First, we design a group of methods to extract features from paintings based on the theories in abstract art. Then a machine leaning framework is proposed using Naive Bayes classifier and BP neural network classifier for training and orientation testing. Experiments show that it can classify abstract paintings into up and non-up ones with performance comparable to human. This is the first work of orientation judgment for abstract paintings through computer simulation, and the results demonstrate the validity of abstract art theories used for feature definition. This work provides a new scheme for exploring the relationship between aesthetic quality of abstract paintings and their computational visual features. |
4,424 | Decoupled Control of Grasp and Rotation Constraints During Prehension of Weightless Objects | Gravity provides critical information for the adjustment of body movement or manipulation of the handheld object. Indeed, the changes in gravity modify the mechanical constraints of prehensile actions, which may be accompanied by the changes in control strategies. The current study examined the effect of the gravitational force of a handheld object on the control strategies for subactions of multidigit prehension. A total of eight subjects performed prehensile tasks while grasping and lifting the handle by about 250 mm along the vertical direction. The experiment consisted of two conditions: lifting gravity-induced (1g) and weightless (0g) handheld objects. The weightless object condition was implemented utilizing a robot arm that produced a constant antigravitational force of the handle. The current analysis was limited to the two-dimensional grasping plane, and the notion of the virtual finger was employed to formulate the cause-effect chain of elemental variables during the prehensile action. The results of correlation analyses confirmed that decoupled organization of two subsets of mechanical variables was observed in both 1g and 0g conditions. While lifting the handle, the two subsets of variables were assumed to contribute to the grasping and rotational equilibrium, respectively. Notably, the normal forces of the thumb and virtual finger had strong positive correlations. In contrast, the normal forces had no significant relationship with the variables as to the moment of force. We conclude that the gravitational force had no detrimental effect on adjustments of the mechanical variables for the rotational action and its decoupling from the grasping equilibrium. |
4,425 | miR-140-3P Induces Chemotherapy Resistance in Esophageal Carcinoma by Targeting the NFYA-MDR1 Axis | Esophageal carcinoma (EC) is recognized as the 6th most frequent carcinoma in China, with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) being the predominant histologic type. Currently, chemotherapy is one among the most important therapy modalities for patients with ESCC. However, resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs leads to limited treatment options and poor prognosis. In our study, the analysis of small RNA sequencing and digital gene expression (DGE) profiling was done to recognize the microRNAs (miRNAs) and key genes related with drug resistance in ESCC. It was noticed that the hsa-miRNA-140-3p (miR-140-3p) expression was considerably higher in drug-resistant cells than in sensitive cells. In addition, DGE identified target genes of miR-140-3p might perform key roles in ESCC. Furthermore, this work exhibited that miR-140-3p represents the nuclear transcription factor Y subunit alpha (NFYA) gene by targeting its 3'-untranslated regions. Such an interaction might influence the formation of the transcription factor NFY trimer, which in turn may inhibit the transcription of the multidrug resistance 1 gene and, ultimately, to multidrug resistance in ESCC. The inhibition of miR-140-3p decreased resistance to oxaliplatin in EC. Therefore, miR-140-3p may serve as a molecular marker for treatment response, efficacy, and prognosis of chemotherapy in ESCC patients. |
4,426 | Well-Designed Teaching Examples Influence the Outcome of Technology Acceptance: The Example of Next-Generation Art Process Learning | With the upgrade of hardware and the consumer experience, the application of high-standard digital art technology to produce finished products is the current trend of digital entertainment visual development, through the application of next-generation art technology, which has become the basis for the application of the 3D digital media art industry. Based on the technology acceptance model, this study measured student acceptance of next-generation art production software by surveying students in two school districts who took a next-generation art course that used blended learning and worked examples. Intention to use was also assessed using variables such as the type of graduation project and the number of credits in the student's major course. A total of 104 valid questionnaires were obtained from four classes in the fourth year of college. Specifically, students' perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and attitudes toward using next-generation art software were determined, and correlations between students' acceptance of next-generation art use and their willingness to use next-generation art methods were explored. The worked examples increased the acceptance and willingness of students with poor 3D technical skills to use next-generation art, but also allowed them to overestimate their technical skills. |
4,427 | Lossless Compression of Microarray Images Using Image-Dependent Finite-Context Models | The use of microarray expression data in state-of-the-art biology has been well established. The widespread adoption of this technology, coupled with the significant volume of data generated per experiment, in the form of images, has led to significant challenges in storage and query retrieval. In this paper, we present a lossless bitplane-based method for efficient compression of microarray images. This method is based on arithmetic coding driven by image-dependent multibitplane finite-context models. It produces an embedded bitstream that allows progressive, lossy-to-lossless decoding. We compare the compression efficiency of the proposed method with three image compression standards (JPEG2000, JPEG-LS, and JBIG) and also with the two most recent specialized methods for microarray image coding. The proposed method gives better results for all images of the test sets and confirms the effectiveness of bitplane-based methods and finite-context modeling for the lossless compression of microarray images. |
4,428 | COPRAS (Complex Proportional Assessment): State of the Art Research and its Applications | This paper presents a state-of-the-art literature survey on COPRAS applications and methodologies. The classification this review contains 59 papers, where if analyzed: titles and authors, cited journal, area classification, application areas, other multi-criteria methods combined with the COPRAS, authors' nationality and country and most cited articles (or scientific recognition). This document provides useful insights about the COPRAS which is a new method, with many research opportunity. |
4,429 | Robust Low-Dose CT Perfusion Deconvolution via Tensor Total-Variation Regularization | Acute brain diseases such as acute strokes and transit ischemic attacks are the leading causes of mortality and morbidity worldwide, responsible for 9% of total death every year. "Time is brain" is a widely accepted concept in acute cerebrovascular disease treatment. Efficient and accurate computational framework for hemodynamic parameters estimation can save critical time for thrombolytic therapy. Meanwhile the high level of accumulated radiation dosage due to continuous image acquisition in CT perfusion (CTP) raised concerns on patient safety and public health. However, low-radiation leads to increased noise and artifacts which require more sophisticated and time-consuming algorithms for robust estimation. In this paper, we focus on developing a robust and efficient framework to accurately estimate the perfusion parameters at low radiation dosage. Specifically, we present a tensor total-variation (TTV) technique which fuses the spatial correlation of the vascular structure and the temporal continuation of the blood signal flow. An efficient algorithm is proposed to find the solution with fast convergence and reduced computational complexity. Extensive evaluations are carried out in terms of sensitivity to noise levels, estimation accuracy, contrast preservation, and performed on digital perfusion phantom estimation, as well as in vivo clinical subjects. Our framework reduces the necessary radiation dose to only 8% of the original level and outperforms the state-of-art algorithms with peak signal-to-noise ratio improved by 32%. It reduces the oscillation in the residue functions, corrects over-estimation of cerebral blood flow (CBF) and under-estimation of mean transit time (MTT), and maintains the distinction between the deficit and normal regions. |
4,430 | Seasonal changes in phytoplankton assemblages and environmental variables in highly turbid tropical estuaries of the Mekong River, Vietnam | The distribution of phytoplankton assemblages in response to physicochemical variables was assessed using Spearman's correlation and canonical correspondence analysis in four highly turbid estuaries of the Mekong River (MKR) system in Ben Tre Province, Vietnam. During two surveys (September 2017 and April 2018) at 20 sampling sites, a total of 162 species were recorded, with a dominance of diatoms (> 50%). Phytoplankton abundance varied from 3.01 × 105 to 11.85 × 105 cells/L, with the highest cell densities found at the BL2 station in the rainy season, mainly attributed to cyanobacteria during the rainy period, whereas diatoms were dominant in the dry season. Chlorophyll-a concentration in this area was low and decreased from the mouth stations. Similarity analysis distinguished the freshwater and oligohaline regions (characterized by lower phytoplankton abundance in the oligohaline areas) from the mesohaline and polyhaline zones (characterized by higher phytoplankton density in the polyhaline sections), based on the salinity gradient, which mostly explained the spatio-temporal distribution of phytoplankton. In which, freshwater and oligohaline sites were dominated by the diatom Coscinodiscus, the euglenoids Lepocinclis, and the green alga Scenedesmus in the rainy season, while mesohaline and polyhaline stations were dominated only by diatom species (Thalassionema and Skeletonema) in the dry season. High salinity and total dissolved solutes, and low nutrients are the major factors affecting phytoplankton growth and lead to low density and low primary biomass in turbid estuarine systems like the MKR estuaries. Our results further emphasize the importance of taking into account of salinity in understanding seasonal changes of phytoplankton communities, which can provide a valuable baseline data for ecological management strategies in tropical estuarine ecosystems. |
4,431 | Biocatalytic Synthesis Using Self-Assembled Polymeric Nano- and Microreactors | Biocatalysis is increasingly being explored for the sustainable development of green industry. Though enzymes show great industrial potential with their high efficiency, specificity, and selectivity, they suffer from poor usability and stability under abiological conditions. To solve these problems, researchers have fabricated nano- and micro-sized biocatalytic reactors based on the self-assembly of various polymers, leading to highly stable, functional, and reusable biocatalytic systems. This Review highlights recent progress in self-assembled polymeric nano- and microreactors for biocatalytic synthesis, including polymersomes, reverse micelles, polymer emulsions, Pickering emulsions, and static emulsions. We categorize these reactors into monophasic and biphasic systems and discuss their structural characteristics and latest successes with representative examples. We also consider the challenges and potential solutions associated with the future development of this field. |
4,432 | Hybrid algorithm for few-views computed tomography of strongly absorbing media: algebraic reconstruction, TV-regularization, and adaptive segmentation | The paper presents an original hybrid image reconstruction algorithm ART-TVS for few-views computed tomography of strongly absorbing media. It is based on the well-known algebraic reconstruction technique (ART), regularization of interim results through minimization of the total variation norm (TV-regularization), and a method of adaptive segmentation, which is a modernization of the known region growing algorithm. It is shown that the ART-TVS algorithm does not give stripe artifacts even if the number of views is very small (eight or less). ART-TVS reconstruction results for two numerical models of metal shells are compared with those obtained with the ART-TV algorithm (ART with TV-regularization and without adaptive segmentation), the iterative Potts minimization algorithm (IPMA), and our MART-AP algorithm (multiplicative ART with a priori information) we developed earlier for few-views discrete tomography. It is shown that ART-TVS outperforms ART-TV and IPMA and is comparable with MART-AP in reconstruction accuracy. Also, ART-TVS converges markedly faster than IRMA in cases where strongly underdetermined systems are treated. The algorithm we propose also demonstrates quite satisfactory resistance to projection data noise that is inherent in tomography of strongly absorbing media. (C) 2018 SPIE and IS&T |
4,433 | Distributed Beamforming for Multi-Group Multicasting Relay Networks | We generalize the concept of multiuser peer-to-peer (MUP2P) relay networks, where source-destination pairs communicate through relays, to that of a multi-group multicasting (MGM) relay network. In the MGM scenario, each source may broadcast its message to a group of multiple users rather than to a single user only. Common distributed beamformer designs for MUP2P relay networks aim to minimize the total transmitted relay power subject to receiver quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. In state-of-the-art techniques, the resulting nonconvex problem is approximated by a convex one which is efficiently solvable using interior point methods. These techniques are shown to be straightforwardly extendable to more general MGM relay networks. However, as the number of receivers increases (which may be typical for the proposed MGM networks where each multicast group may contain many users), these approximations become more and more inaccurate leading to severe performance degradation and problem infeasibility. To avoid this drawback, we propose an iterative method where in each iteration, a convex approximation of the original problem is solved and then adapted to the solution obtained in this iteration. We show that the approximate solution can be successively improved using such iterations. Simulation results show that in scenarios with large numbers of destination users, the proposed method substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art methods developed for MUP2P relay networks. |
4,434 | 3-D Freehand Ultrasound Calibration Using a Tissue-Mimicking Phantom With Parallel Wires | This article describes a method used to calibrate 3-D freehand ultrasound systems based on phantoms with parallel wires forming two perpendicular planes, such as the usual general-purpose commercial phantoms. In our algorithm, the phantom pose is co-optimized with the calibration to avoid the need to precisely track the phantom. We provide a geometrical analysis to explain the proposed acquisition protocol. Finally, we give an estimate of the system accuracy and precision based on measurements acquired on an independent test phantom. We obtained error norms of 1.6 mm up to 6 cm of depth and 3.5 mm between 6 and 14 cm of depth, in total average. In conclusion, it is possible to calibrate ultrasound tracked-probe systems with a reasonable accuracy based on a general-purpose phantom. Contrarily to most calibration methods that imply the construction of the phantom, the present algorithm is based on a standard phantom geometry that is commercially available. |
4,435 | Undergraduate Curriculum to Teach and Provide Research Skills on Hardware Design for SDR Applications in FPGA Technology | Software Defined Radio (SDR) technologies play today an important role in modern wireless networks due to their flexibility to implement re-configurable hardware designs. In light of the importance to operate and develop such technologies, academic programs in the communications engineering field demand an introduction to Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and SDR communication schemes accordingly. Typically, the teaching of this subject is afforded through projects and hands-on activities in classrooms. However, provided their relevance in the current state-of-the-art, this topic also provides a framework to teach soft skills concerning research abilities in students. This paper introduces an academic program to the development of SDR functionality as well as research skills based on exposure to state-of-the-art research. Through projects, hands-on activities are conducted to teach digital signal processing designs using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology. The course aims to develop technical skills to implement communication system blocks. Besides, workshops and seminars are prepared to support the development of research and communication skills. The proposed course is flexible to incorporate on a given academic program as an elective subject to further support topics related to communication theory and discrete-time signals. Learning outcomes are designed to develop enhanced technical skills in SDR design and simultaneously a critical discussion of the devised solutions in light of the state-of-the-art. Also, skills related to identifying, formulating, and discussing engineering problems are further reinforced. Results from supported projects developed in the classroom exhibit completed assignments superior to 90% of participant students. Learning objectives concerning the technical skills were successfully covered (90%) in comparison to research and communicating skills (80%). Additionally, research skills and the ability to disseminate knowledge gradually improved in seminars. Finally, results of the current course exhibit improvements of 25% regarding the acquired skills in digital signal processing in comparison to previous courses. |
4,436 | Intravital Microscopy for Hematopoietic Studies | The bone marrow (BM) is home to numerous cell types arising from hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) and nonhematopoietic mesenchymal stem cells, as well as stromal cell components. Together they form the BM microenvironment or HSC niche. HSCs critically depend on signaling from these niches to function and survive in the long term. Significant advances in imaging technologies over the past decade have permitted the study of the BM microenvironment in mice, particularly with the development of intravital microscopy (IVM), which provides a powerful method to study these cells in vivo and in real time. Still, there is a lot to be learnt about the interactions of individual HSCs with their environment - at steady state and under various stresses - and whether specific niches exist for distinct developing hematopoietic lineages. Here, we describe our protocol and techniques used to visualize transplanted HSCs in the mouse calvarium, using combined confocal and two-photon IVM. |
4,437 | Radical SAM enzymes: Nature's choice for radical reactions | Enzymes that use a [4Fe-4S]1+ cluster plus S-adenosyl-l-methionine (SAM) to initiate radical reactions (radical SAM) form the largest enzyme superfamily, with over half a million members across the tree of life. This review summarizes recent work revealing the radical SAM reaction pathway, which ultimately liberates the 5'-deoxyadenosyl (5'-dAdo•) radical to perform extremely diverse, highly regio- and stereo-specific, transformations. Most surprising was the discovery of an organometallic intermediate Ω exhibiting an Fe-C5'-adenosyl bond. Ω liberates 5'-dAdo• through homolysis of the Fe-C5' bond, in analogy to Co-C5' bond homolysis in B12 , previously viewed as biology's paradigmatic radical generator. The 5'-dAdo• has been trapped and characterized in radical SAM enzymes via a recently discovered photoreactivity of the [4Fe-4S]+ /SAM complex, and has been confirmed as a catalytically active intermediate in enzyme catalysis. The regioselective SAM S-C bond cleavage to produce 5'-dAdo• originates in the Jahn-Teller effect. The simplicity of SAM as a radical precursor, and the exquisite control of 5'-dAdo• reactivity in radical SAM enzymes, may be why radical SAM enzymes pervade the tree of life, while B12 enzymes are only a few. |
4,438 | HIV Care Outcomes among Hispanics/Latinos with Diagnosed HIV in the United States by Place of Birth-2015-2018, Medical Monitoring Project | Relocation from one's birthplace may affect human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) outcomes, but national estimates of HIV outcomes among Hispanics/Latinos by place of birth are limited. We analyzed Medical Monitoring Project data collected in 2015-2018 from 2564 HIV-positive Hispanic/Latino adults and compared clinical outcomes between mainland US-born (referent group), Puerto Rican (PR-born), and those born outside the United States (non-US-born). We reported weighted percentages of characteristics and used logistic regression with predicted marginal means to examine differences between groups (p < 0.05). PR-born Hispanics/Latinos were more likely to be prescribed antiretroviral therapy (ART) (94%) and retained in care (94%) than mainland-US-born (79% and 77%, respectively) and non-US-born (91% and 87%, respectively) Hispanics/Latinos. PR-born Hispanics/Latinos were more likely to have sustained viral suppression (75%) than mainland-US-born Hispanics/Latinos (57%). Non-US-born Hispanics/Latinos were more likely to be prescribed ART (91% vs. 79%), retained in care (87% vs. 77%), and have sustained viral suppression (74% vs. 57%) than mainland-US-born Hispanics/Latinos. Greater Ryan White HIV/AIDS-funded facility usage among PR-born, better mental health among non-US-born, and less drug use among PR-born and non-US-born Hispanics/Latinos may have contributed to better HIV outcomes. Expanding programs with comprehensive HIV/AIDS services, including for mental health and substance use, may reduce HIV outcome disparities among Hispanics/Latinos. |
4,439 | Nitrogen Fertilizer Application Alters the Root Endophyte Bacterial Microbiome in Maize Plants, but Not in the Stem or Rhizosphere Soil | Plant-associated microorganisms that affect plant development, their composition, and their functionality are determined by the host, soil conditions, and agricultural practices. How agricultural practices affect the rhizosphere microbiome has been well studied, but less is known about how they might affect plant endophytes. In this study, the metagenomic DNA from the rhizosphere and endophyte communities of root and stem of maize plants was extracted and sequenced with the "diversity arrays technology sequencing," while the bacterial community and functionality (organized by subsystems from general to specific functions) were investigated in crops cultivated with or without tillage and with or without N fertilizer application. Tillage had a small significant effect on the bacterial community in the rhizosphere, but N fertilizer had a highly significant effect on the roots, but not on the rhizosphere or stem. The relative abundance of many bacterial species was significantly different in the roots and stem of fertilized maize plants, but not in the unfertilized ones. The abundance of N cycle genes was affected by N fertilization application, most accentuated in the roots. How these changes in bacterial composition and N genes composition might affect plant development or crop yields has still to be unraveled. IMPORTANCE We investigated the bacterial community structure in the rhizosphere, root, and stem of maize plants cultivated under different agricultural techniques, i.e., with or without N fertilization, and with or without tillage. We found that the bacterial community was defined mostly by the plant compartment and less by agricultural techniques. In the roots, N fertilizer application affected the bacterial community structure, the microbiome functionality, and the abundance of genes involved in the N cycle, but the effect in the rhizosphere and stem was much smaller. Contrary, tillage did not affect the maize microbiome. This study enriches our knowledge about the plant-microbiome system and how N fertilization application affected it. |
4,440 | A Parent-Focused Creative Approach as a Treatment for a High-Functioning Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in Korea: A Case Study | This study was conducted on a 6-year-old girl with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in Korea. The case was initiated in February 2015, and intensive treatment was provided for one year. Then, the case was monitored over the course of 6 years until December 2021. The intervention plan was an art therapy-based treatment plan (Individual Therapeutic Education Plan: ITEP) with two integral foci: (1) creative arts-based parent counseling and education and (2) didactic art therapy with the child. This was a new type of integral approach that was not a standard of care practice in Korea, acknowledging the importance of including parents in therapy and the notion of creative arts therapy. There was no scientific evidence supporting this qualitive approach; however, the intervention was a notable success, sustaining a positive outcome-the intervention (1) reduced the anxiety levels of both the mother and the child in the short term; (2) enhanced the child-parent relationship as well as the home environment of the child while the art therapy-based counseling and education increased the mother's competence; and (3) enhanced the communicative and adaptive functioning of the child and the mother, with art becoming the supportive breakthrough for their emotional obstacles. The findings suggest that a parent-focused creative approach impacts parental changes and child development: the evidence indicates that parent-driven interventions are a viable option for parents and children with ASD to build a better home environment that supports the child's development. |
4,441 | Visual Target TRACTOR: Tracker and Detector | In this paper, we focus on developing a novel visual target tracking system (TRACTOR) that enables reliable operation in realistic tracking scenarios. Although much progress has been made in the field of visual target tracking, there are still challenging scenarios in which even state-of-the-art trackers do not operate reliably. For instance, most trackers are prone to drift if a target moves abruptly in unexpected directions, or reappears after being fully occluded by the clutters or disappeared from the field of view of a camera. To cope with these scenarios effectively, the proposed tracking system subdivides the task of visual target tracking into two subtasks, i.e., tracking and detection. 1) For target-visible frames, the tracker builds a collaborative framework with the proposed appearance, observation, and motion models thereby achieving robust performance against unexpected motions and appearance changes of a target and 2) for target-invisible frames, the detector verifies continuously whether a target candidate is the lost target or clutter thereby reducing false target alarms effectively. In extensive experiments, the proposed tracking system shows very promising performance in comparison with state-of-the-art tracking methods. |
4,442 | [Development and Application of Medical Device Recall Event Tracking System] | A medical device recall event tracking system was designed, which can enable the users to obtain the recall, early warning and other information related to medical devices in time. The tracking system can timely obtain and release the recall information of medical devices, effectively improve the quality control of hospital medical devices, reduce the use risk of medical devices, and ensure the life safety of patients. |
4,443 | Scope-Aware Useful Cache Block Calculation for Cache-Related Pre-Emption Delay Analysis With Set-Associative Data Caches | Timing analysis of real-time systems must consider cache-related pre-emption delay (CRPD) costs when pre-emptive scheduling is used. While most previous work on CRPD analysis only considers instruction caches, the CRPD incurred on data caches is actually more significant. The state-of-the-art CRPD analysis methods are based on useful cache block (UCB) calculation. Unfortunately, as shown in this article, directly extending the existing UCB calculation techniques from instruction caches to data caches will lead to both unsoundness and significant imprecision. To solve these problems, we develop a new UCB calculation technique for data caches, which redefines the analysis unit (to address the unsoundness in the existing method) and precisely captures the dynamic cache access behavior by taking the temporal scopes of memory blocks into consideration. The experimental results show that our new technique yields substantially tighter CRPD estimations comparing with the state-of-the-art. |
4,444 | Enterococcus faecium Clade Competition in the Presence of β-Lactam Antibiotics in a Mouse GI Tract Colonization Model | Previously, we showed that Enterococcus faecium clade B strains outcompeted health care-associated clade A1 strains in murine gastrointestinal colonization. Here, parenterally administered piperacillin-tazobactam and ceftriaxone significantly promoted colonization by clade A1 over clade B strains except that ceftriaxone, at the dose used, did not favor the least β-lactam-resistant A1 strain. The advantage that β-lactam administration gives to more highly ampicillin-resistant E. faecium over ampicillin-susceptible strains mirrors what occurs in hospitalized patients administered these antibiotics. |
4,445 | FoveaBox: Beyound Anchor-Based Object Detection | We present FoveaBox, an accurate, flexible, and completely anchor-free framework for object detection. While almost all state-of-the-art object detectors utilize predefined anchors to enumerate possible locations, scales and aspect ratios for the search of the objects, their performance and generalization ability are also limited to the design of anchors. Instead, FoveaBox directly learns the object existing possibility and the bounding box coordinates without anchor reference. This is achieved by: (a) predicting category-sensitive semantic maps for the object existing possibility, and (b) producing category-agnostic bounding box for each position that potentially contains an object. The scales of target boxes are naturally associated with feature pyramid representations. In FoveaBox, an instance is assigned to adjacent feature levels to make the model more accurate.We demonstrate its effectiveness on standard benchmarks and report extensive experimental analysis. Without bells and whistles, FoveaBox achieves state-of-the-art single model performance on the standard COCO and Pascal VOC object detection benchmark. More importantly, FoveaBox avoids all computation and hyper-parameters related to anchor boxes, which are often sensitive to the final detection performance. We believe the simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research for object detection. The code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/taokong/FoveaBox. |
4,446 | Coexistence in diverse communities with higher-order interactions | A central assumption in most ecological models is that the interactions in a community operate only between pairs of species. However, two species may interactively affect the growth of a focal species. Although interactions among three or more species, called higher-order interactions, have the potential to modify our theoretical understanding of coexistence, ecologists lack clear expectations for how these interactions shape community structure. Here we analytically predict and numerically confirm how the variability and strength of higher-order interactions affect species coexistence. We found that as higher-order interaction strengths became more variable across species, fewer species could coexist, echoing the behavior of pairwise models. If interspecific higher-order interactions became too harmful relative to self-regulation, coexistence in diverse communities was destabilized, but coexistence was also lost when these interactions were too weak and mutualistic higher-order effects became prevalent. This behavior depended on the functional form of the interactions as the destabilizing effects of the mutualistic higher-order interactions were ameliorated when their strength saturated with species' densities. Last, we showed that more species-rich communities structured by higher-order interactions lose species more readily than their species-poor counterparts, generalizing classic results for community stability. Our work provides needed theoretical expectations for how higher-order interactions impact species coexistence in diverse communities. |
4,447 | Anomaly Detection Using Local Kernel Density Estimation and Context-Based Regression | Current local density-based anomaly detection methods are limited in that the local density estimation and the neighborhood density estimation are not accurate enough for complex and large databases, and the detection performance depends on the size parameter of the neighborhood. In this paper, we propose a new kernel function to estimate samples' local densities and propose a weighted neighborhood density estimation to increase the robustness to changes in the neighborhood size. We further propose a local kernel regression estimator and a hierarchical strategy for combining information from the multiple scale neighborhoods to refine anomaly factors of samples. We apply our general anomaly detection method to image saliency detection by regarding salient pixels in objects as anomalies to the background regions. Local density estimation in the visual feature space and kernel-based saliency score propagation in the image enable the assignment of similar saliency values to homogenous object regions. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our anomaly detection methods overall outperform several state-of-art anomaly detection methods. The effectiveness of our image saliency detection method is validated by comparison with several state-of-art saliency detection methods. |
4,448 | An ultra-performance LC-MS/MS method for determination of JRF103 in human plasma: application in first in-patient study | Background: JRF103, a novel pan-HER inhibitor, has shown potent activity against HER1, HER2, HER4 and EGFR in vitro. To support its first in-patient trial, a sensitive and rapid method was developed and validated using ultra-performance LC-MS/MS. Materials & methods: JRF103 was extracted from plasma using protein precipitation. Extracts were subjected to ultra-performance LC-MS/MS with electrospray ionization. Results: Separation of analyte was achieved using a 1.7-μm C18 column (2.1 × 50-mm internal diameter) with a gradient elution. The developed method was fully validated following the international guides. Conclusion: The developed method was sensitive, specific and suitable for measuring JRF103 concentration in patients with advanced solid tumors in the first in-patient study of JRF103. |
4,449 | Cross-Modality Image Synthesis via Weakly Coupled and Geometry Co-Regularized Joint Dictionary Learning | Multi-modality medical imaging is increasingly used for comprehensive assessment of complex diseases in either diagnostic examinations or as part of medical research trials. Different imaging modalities provide complementary information about living tissues. However, multi-modal examinations are not always possible due to adversary factors, such as patient discomfort, increased cost, prolonged scanning time, and scanner unavailability. In additionally, in large imaging studies, incomplete records are not uncommon owing to image artifacts, data corruption or data loss, which compromise the potential of multi-modal acquisitions. In this paper, we propose a weakly coupled and geometry co-regularized joint dictionary learning method to address the problem of cross-modality synthesis while considering the fact that collecting the large amounts of training data is often impractical. Our learning stage requires only a few registered multi-modality image pairs as training data. To employ both paired images and a large set of unpaired data, a cross-modality image matching criterion is proposed. Then, we propose a unified model by integrating such a criterion into the joint dictionary learning and the observed common feature space for associating cross-modality data for the purpose of synthesis. Furthermore, two regularization terms are added to construct robust sparse representations. Our experimental results demonstrate superior performance of the proposed model over state-of-the-art methods. |
4,450 | Realising potentials for arts-based sustainability science | In recent years, a profusion of methods, practices, and experiences has emerged in the interface between arts and sustainability science. Drawing from two strong currents within sustainability science, namely, the emphasis on transdisciplinary approaches and the need to move towards societal transformations, such hybrid approaches seemingly contribute with unique methods to sustainability research. Despite repeated claims from sustainability scientists about art's role in sustainability transformations, joint analyses with artists and practitioners are still rare. We conveyed a collaborative and exploratory workshop with scientists, artists, and practitioners from the fields of education, public engagement, and activism to identify the potentials for arts-based sustainability research. Participants were invited to facilitate and trial various artistic practices from disciplines of performative, literary, narrative, audio-visual and plastic arts. In this paper, we present five key areas identified in the workshop, where arts-based methods can significantly contribute to sustainability research: embracing more-than-cognitive aspects of knowledge, improving communication, grappling with power dynamics, shifting relationships to nature, and facilitating futures visioning. Workshop participants also identified challenges related to power dynamics, tensions across paradigms, and implementation conditions, providing insights into how to leverage arts' potential to respond to global environmental challenges while boosting societal transformations. We then discuss research questions identified that address challenges and limitations for arts-based research in sustainability. Overall, these results suggest there are yet untapped resources and experiences within the field of arts-based sustainability science. (Audio-visual abstract available on S1) |
4,451 | 3-D + t Human Sperm Flagellum Tracing in Low SNR Fluorescence Images | Tracing tubular structures from biomedical images is important for a wide range of applications. Particularly, the spermatozoon is an essential cell whose flagella have a tubular form. Its main function is to fertilize the egg, and the flagellum is fundamental to achieve this task which depends importantly on the dynamics of intracellular calcium ([Ca2+]i). Measuring [Ca2+] i along the flagellum in 3-D is not a simple matter since it requires: 1) sophisticated fluorescence imaging techniques dealing with low intensity and signal to noise ratio (SNR) and 2) tracing the flagellum's centerline. Most of the algorithms proposed to trace tubular structures have been developed for multi-branch structures not being adequate for single tubular structures with low SNR. Taking into account the prior knowledge that the flagellum is constituted by a single tubular structure, we propose an automatic method to trace and track multiple single tubular structures from 3-D + t images. First, an algorithm based on one-class classification allows enhancement of the flagellum. This enhanced 3-D image permits guiding an iterative centerline algorithm toward the flagellum's centerline. Each sperm is assigned an ID to keep track of it in 3-D + t. Our algorithm was quantitatively evaluated using a ground truth 564 semi-manual traces (six 3-D + t image stacks) comparing them to those obtained from state-of-the-art tubular structure centerline extraction algorithms. The qualitative and quantitative results show that our algorithm is extracting similar traces as compared with ground truth, and it is more robust and accurate to trace the flagellum's centerline than multibranch algorithms. |
4,452 | Discovery of malathion resistance QTL in Drosophila melanogaster using a bulked phenotyping approach | Drosophila melanogaster has proved an effective system with which to understand the evolutionary genetics and molecular mechanisms of insecticide resistance. Insecticide use has left signatures of selection in the fly genome, and both functional and quantitative genetic studies in the system have identified genes and variants associated with resistance. Here, we use D. melanogaster and leverage a bulk phenotyping and pooled sequencing "extreme quantitative trait loci" approach to genetically dissect variation in resistance to malathion, an organophosphate insecticide. We resolve 2 quantitative trait loci, one of which implicates allelic variation at the cytochrome P450 gene Cyp6g1, a strong candidate based on previous work. The second shows no overlap with hits from a previous genome-wide association study for malathion resistance, recapitulating other studies showing that different strategies for complex trait dissection in flies can yield apparently different architectures. Notably, we see no genetic signal at the Ace gene. Ace encodes the target of organophosphate insecticide inhibition, and genome-wide association studies have identified strong Ace-linked associations with resistance in flies. The absence of quantitative trait locus implicating Ace here is most likely because our mapping population does not segregate for several of the known functional polymorphisms impacting resistance at Ace, perhaps because our population is derived from flies collected prior to the widespread use of organophosphate insecticides. Our fundamental approach can be an efficient, powerful strategy to dissect genetic variation in resistance traits. Nonetheless, studies seeking to interrogate contemporary insecticide resistance variation may benefit from deriving mapping populations from more recently collected strains. |
4,453 | A Novel Approach to Quantized Matrix Completion Using Huber Loss Measure | In this paper, we introduce a novel and robust approach to quantized matrix completion. First, we propose a rank minimization problem with constraints induced by quantization bounds. Next, we form an unconstrained optimization problem by regularizing the rank function with Huber loss. Huber loss is leveraged to control the violation from quantization bounds due to two properties: first, it is differentiable; and second, it is less sensitive to outliers than the quadratic lass. A smooth rank approximation is utilized to endorse lower rank on the genuine data matrix. Thus, an unconstrained optimization problem with differentiable objective function is obtained allowing us to advantage from gradient descent technique. Novel and firm theoretical analysis of the problem model and convergence of our algorithm to the global solution are provided. Another contribution of this letter is that our method does not require projections or initial rank estimation, unlike the state-of-the-art. In the Numerical Experiments section, the noticeable outperformance of our proposed method in learning accuracy and computational complexity compared to those of the state-of-the-art literature methods is illustrated as the main contribution. |
4,454 | Neural representational geometry underlies few-shot concept learning | Understanding the neural basis of the remarkable human cognitive capacity to learn novel concepts from just one or a few sensory experiences constitutes a fundamental problem. We propose a simple, biologically plausible, mathematically tractable, and computationally powerful neural mechanism for few-shot learning of naturalistic concepts. We posit that the concepts that can be learned from few examples are defined by tightly circumscribed manifolds in the neural firing-rate space of higher-order sensory areas. We further posit that a single plastic downstream readout neuron learns to discriminate new concepts based on few examples using a simple plasticity rule. We demonstrate the computational power of our proposal by showing that it can achieve high few-shot learning accuracy on natural visual concepts using both macaque inferotemporal cortex representations and deep neural network (DNN) models of these representations and can even learn novel visual concepts specified only through linguistic descriptors. Moreover, we develop a mathematical theory of few-shot learning that links neurophysiology to predictions about behavioral outcomes by delineating several fundamental and measurable geometric properties of neural representations that can accurately predict the few-shot learning performance of naturalistic concepts across all our numerical simulations. This theory reveals, for instance, that high-dimensional manifolds enhance the ability to learn new concepts from few examples. Intriguingly, we observe striking mismatches between the geometry of manifolds in the primate visual pathway and in trained DNNs. We discuss testable predictions of our theory for psychophysics and neurophysiological experiments. |
4,455 | Anomaly Detection in Self-Organizing Networks: Conventional Versus Contemporary Machine Learning | This paper presents a comparison of conventional and modern machine (deep) learning within the framework of anomaly detection in self-organizing networks. While deep learning has gained significant traction, especially in application scenarios where large volumes of data can be collected and processed, conventional methods may yet offer strong statistical alternatives, especially when using proper learning representations. For instance, support vector machines have previously demonstrated state-of-the-art potential in many binary classification applications and can be further exploited with different representations, such as one-class learning and data augmentation. We demonstrate for the first time, on a previously published and publicly available dataset, that conventional machine learning can outperform the previous state-of-the-art using deep learning by 15% on average across four different application scenarios. Our results further indicate that with nearly two orders of magnitude improvement in computational speed and an order of magnitude reduction in trainable parameters, conventional machine learning provides a robust alternative for 5G self-organizing networks especially when the execution and detection times are critical. |
4,456 | Terrestrial laser scanning and exploratory spatial data analysis for the mapping of weathering forms on rock art panels | Rock art conservators are faced with complex decisions to prioritize rock art panels for protection from destructive forces of weathering. We provide a system to facilitate such decision making that blends traditional remote sensing with interactive techniques of exploratory spatial data analysis. Our system, 'mapping weathering forms in three-dimensional (3D)' (MapWeF) uses a 3D laser scanning device for sub-centimetre data collection from in situ rock surfaces. After image and digital surface model processing, key rock weathering forms are highlighted through classification. Supervised classification builds training classes as a user probes known weathering forms. Guided by these training classes, the user then interactively brushes and assembles pixels from scatter plots until the user is confident that all manifestations of a particular weathering form have been mapped. The purpose of MapWeF is to construct detailed maps that highlight regions of decay on rock art panels. These maps can help rock art conservators take action on panels in need of urgent preservation or remediation. |
4,457 | Unsupervised detection of acoustic events using information bottleneck principle | An unsupervised approach based on Information Bottleneck (IB) principle is proposed for detecting acoustic events from audio streams. In this paper, the IB principle is first concisely presented, and then the practical issues related to the application of IB principle to acoustic event detection are described in detail, including definitions of various variables, criterion for determining the number of acoustic events, tradeoff between amount of information preserved and compression of the initial representation, and detection steps. Further, we compare the proposed approach with both unsupervised and supervised approaches on four different types of audio files. Experimental results show that the proposed approach obtains lower detection errors and higher running speed compared to two state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches, and is little inferior to the state-of-the-art supervised approach in terms of both detection errors and runtime. The advantage of the proposed unsupervised approach over the supervised approach is that it does not need to pre-train classifiers and pre-know any prior information about audio streams. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
4,458 | Service implementation in manufacturing: An organisational transformation perspective | The topic of servitization of manufacturing continues to gain attention from both the engineering and business research communities. As a consequence, the conceptual foundations of servitization are now becoming better established, and attention is focusing on the processes through which manufacturers go to develop innovative service capabilities that enable them to successfully compete through services. This Special Issue sets out to focus on these transformation processes. In this introductory article we review the selected articles that comprise this Special Issue. We provide a framework to contextualize and understand the research findings reported in the Special Issue and reflect on the contributions of the research to the theory and practice of servitization. Through this process we seek to consolidate the state-of-the-art in this area and identify important, challenging, but potentially fruitful topics for future studies. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. |
4,459 | State of the art in structural health monitoring of offshore and marine structures | The present paper deals with state of the art in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) methods in offshore and marine structures. Most of the SHM methods have been developed for onshore infrastructures. Few works are available to implement SHM technologies in offshore and marine structures. This paper aims to fill this gap and highlight the challenges in implementing SHM methods in offshore and marine structures. The present work categorizes the available techniques for establishing SHM models in oil rigs, offshore wind turbine structures, subsea systems, vessels, pipelines etc. Besides, the capabilities of the proposed ideas in the recent publications are classified into three main categories: a) the Model-Based, b) the Vibration-Based, and c) the Digital Twin methods. Recently developed novel signal processing and machine learning algorithms have been reviewed, and their abilities have been discussed. Developed methods in Vision-Based and Population-Based approaches have also been presented and discussed. The present paper aims to provide a guideline for selecting and establishing SHM in offshore and marine structures. |
4,460 | Dilated Residual Learning With Skip Connections for Real-Time Denoising of Laser Speckle Imaging of Blood Flow in a Log-Transformed Domain | Laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) is a wide-field and noncontact imaging technology for mapping blood flow. Although the denoising method based on block-matching and three-dimensional transform-domain collaborative filtering (BM3D) was proposed to improve its signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) significantly, the processing time makes it difficult to realize real-time denoising. Furthermore, it is still difficult to obtain an acceptable level of SNR with a few raw speckle images given the presence of significant noise and artifacts. A feed-forward denoising convolutional neural network (DnCNN) achieves state-of-the-art performance in denoising nature images and is efficiently accelerated by GPU. However, it performs poorly in learning with original speckle contrast images of LSCI owing to the inhomogeneous noise distribution. Therefore, we propose training DnCNN for LSCI in a log-transformed domain to improve training accuracy and it achieves an improvement of 5.13 dB in the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). To decrease the inference time and improve denoising performance, we further propose a dilated deep residual learning network with skip connections (DRSNet). The image-quality evaluations of DRSNet with five raw speckle images outperform that of spatially average denoising with 20 raw speckle images. DRSNet takes 35 ms (i.e., 28 frames per second) for denoising a blood flow image with $486\times648$ pixels on an NVIDIA 1070 GPU, which is approximately 2.5 times faster than DnCNN. In the test sets, DRSNet also improves 0.15 dB in the PSNR than that of DnCNN. The proposed network shows good potential in real-time monitoring of blood flow for biomedical applications. |
4,461 | 'It's a different way to do medicine': Exploring the affordances of telehealth for hepatitis C healthcare | While the use of telehealth was common in hepatitis C healthcare in Australia in remote and regional areas prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been used more broadly to improve access to hepatitis C heathcare during the pandemic. Despite its widespread uptake, little research has explored how telehealth shapes hepatitis C healthcare. In this article, we draw on the concept of affordances (Latour, 2002) and interviews with 25 healthcare practitioners to explore the emergent possibilities for hepatitis C care that take shape through telehealth. Despite suggestions that telehealth is comparable to in-person care, healthcare practitioners' accounts suggest that telehealth significantly changes the nature of their experience of providing healthcare for hepatitis C. According to these service practitioners, while it increased access to hepatitis C healthcare during the pandemic, it also afforded narrower, less personal healthcare encounters, with a focus on simple and singular issues, and reduced opportunities for communication and rapport. These affordances also discouraged the use of interpreters and by extension the inclusion of patients from non-English speaking backgrounds. However, the data collected also suggest that telehealth has the potential to afford more informal and relaxed healthcare environments and dispositions between healthcare practitioners and patients, potentially disrupting classic practitioner-patient power dynamics. In concluding, the article considers how telehealth models of care might better afford quality hepatitis C healthcare and care beyond COVID-19 pandemic conditions. |
4,462 | Weakly Supervised Classification of Hyperspectral Image Based on Complementary Learning | In recent years, supervised learning-based methods have achieved excellent performance for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, the collection of training samples with labels is not only costly but also time-consuming. This fact usually causes the existence of weak supervision, including incorrect supervision where mislabeled samples exist and incomplete supervision where unlabeled samples exist. Focusing on the inaccurate supervision and incomplete supervision, the weakly supervised classification of HSI is investigated in this paper. For inaccurate supervision, complementary learning (CL) is firstly introduced for HSI classification. Then, a new method, which is based on selective CL and convolutional neural network (SeCL-CNN), is proposed for classification with noisy labels. For incomplete supervision, a data augmentation-based method, which combines mixup and Pseudo-Label (Mix-PL) is proposed. And then, a classification method, which combines Mix-PL and CL (Mix-PL-CL), is designed aiming at better semi-supervised classification capacity of HSI. The proposed weakly supervised methods are evaluated on three widely-used hyperspectral datasets (i.e., Indian Pines, Houston, and Salinas datasets). The obtained results reveal that the proposed methods provide competitive results compared to the state-of-the-art methods. For inaccurate supervision, the proposed SeCL-CNN has outperformed the state-of-the-art method (i.e., SSDP-CNN) by 0.92%, 1.84%, and 1.75% in terms of OA on the three datasets, when the noise ratio is 30%. And for incomplete supervision, the proposed Mix-PL-CL has outperformed the state-of-the-art method (i.e., AROC-DP) by 1.03%, 0.70%, and 0.82% in terms of OA on the three datasets, with 25 training samples per class. |
4,463 | Smoke promotes germination of peatland bryophyte spores | Northern peatlands are globally important carbon stores. With increasing fire frequency, the re-establishment of bryophytes becomes crucial for their carbon sequestration. Smoke-responsive germination is a common trait of seeds in fire-prone ecosystems but has not been demonstrated in bryophytes. To investigate the potential role of smoke in post-fire peatland recovery, we tested the germination of spores of 15 bryophyte species after treatment with smoke-water. The smoke responsiveness of spores with different laboratory storage times and burial depths/age (3-200 years) was subsequently tested. Smoke increased the germination percentage for 10 of the species and the germination speed for four of these. Smoke responsiveness increased along the fire frequency gradient from open expanse to forest margin, consistent with the theory that this selects for the maintenance of fire-adapted traits. Smoke enhanced the germinability of 1-year but not 4-year laboratory-stored spores, and considerably increased the germinability of spores naturally buried in peat for up to ~200 years. The effect of fire may be overlooked in non-fire-prone ecosystems, such as those in which wetland bryophytes dominate. Our study reveals a mechanism by which an increase in fire frequency may lead to shifts in species dominance, which may affect long-term carbon sequestration in peatlands. |
4,464 | First-time mothers' experiences of pregnancy and birth following assisted reproductive technology treatment in Taiwan | BackgroundAssisted reproductive technology (ART) treatment tends to involve significant physical and emotional commitments that can impact maternal, infant, and family health and well-being. An in-depth understanding of experiences is necessary to provide adequate support for women and their families during pregnancy and transition to parenthood following ART treatment. The aim of this study was to explore first-time mothers' experiences of pregnancy and transition to parenthood following successful ART treatment in Taiwan.MethodTwelve first-time mothers who conceived and gave live birth using ART treatment were purposively selected from a fertility centre in Taipei, Taiwan. Women's experiences in pregnancy and in their transition to motherhood were explored using semi-structured in-depth interviews. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using the Colaizzi strategy.ResultsThe mothers' accounts reflected three main themes: being different from mothers who became pregnant naturally', ensuring health and safety of the foetus', and welcoming new lives with excitement'. The difference mothers felt about themselves was evident in four subthemes: becoming pregnant after a long wait, feeling vulnerable during pregnancy, relying on family's assistance and support, and worrying about the impact of ART on health. The theme on ensuring health and safety of the foetus' encompassed three subthemes: activities to protect the unborn baby, monitoring foetal movement constantly to maintain peace of mind, and receiving foetal reduction for the sake of the pregnancy. Narratives around welcoming new lives with excitement' reflected four subthemes: overcoming hardship for worthwhile results, realising one's life and dreams, proving to be fertile enough to give birth, and return to normal life track.ConclusionFindings indicate the need for educational and psychosocial interventions to support women and their families physically and psychologically during ART treatment. The stigma related to infertility and the psychosocial support from family are aspects to consider while planning intervention programmes. |
4,465 | The State-of-the-Art Sensing Techniques in Human Activity Recognition: A Survey | Human activity recognition (HAR) has become an intensive research topic in the past decade because of the pervasive user scenarios and the overwhelming development of advanced algorithms and novel sensing approaches. Previous HAR-related sensing surveys were primarily focused on either a specific branch such as wearable sensing and video-based sensing or a full-stack presentation of both sensing and data processing techniques, resulting in weak focus on HAR-related sensing techniques. This work tries to present a thorough, in-depth survey on the state-of-the-art sensing modalities in HAR tasks to supply a solid understanding of the variant sensing principles for younger researchers of the community. First, we categorized the HAR-related sensing modalities into five classes: mechanical kinematic sensing, field-based sensing, wave-based sensing, physiological sensing, and hybrid/others. Specific sensing modalities are then presented in each category, and a thorough description of the sensing tricks and the latest related works were given. We also discussed the strengths and weaknesses of each modality across the categorization so that newcomers could have a better overview of the characteristics of each sensing modality for HAR tasks and choose the proper approaches for their specific application. Finally, we summarized the presented sensing techniques with a comparison concerning selected performance metrics and proposed a few outlooks on the future sensing techniques used for HAR tasks. |
4,466 | Mapping pontocerebellar connectivity with diffusion MRI | The cerebellum's involvement in cognitive, affective and motor functions is mediated by connections to different regions of the cerebral cortex. A distinctive feature of cortico-cerebellar loops that has been demonstrated in the animal work is a topographic organization that is preserved across its corticopontine, pontocerebellar, and cerebello-thalmo-cortical segments. Here we used tractography derived from diffusion imaging data to characterize the connections between the pons and the individual lobules of the cerebellum and generate a parcellation of the pons and middle cerebellar peduncle based on the pattern of connectivity. We identified a rostral to caudal gradient in the pons, similar to that observed in the animal work, such that rostral regions were preferentially connected to cerebellar lobules involved in non-motor, and caudal regions with motor regions. These findings advance our fundamental understanding of the cerebellum, and the parcellations we generated provide context for future research into the pontocerebellar tract's involvement in health and disease. |
4,467 | A new relative chain code in 3D | A new chain code to represent 3D discrete curves is proposed. The method is based on a search for relative changes in the 3D Euclidean space, composed of three main vectors: a reference vector, a support vector, and a change direction vector, utilized to obtain a directed simple path in a grid of 26 connected components. A set of rotation transformations is defined in the 3D Euclidean space, and an alphabet of only 25 symbols is required to represent any face, edge or vertex-connected discrete curve. Important properties of this code are found: independence under translation, rotation and mirror transformations, as well as high compression levels. A set of 3D curve-skeletons and digital elevation model data to study the terrain were utilized to prove the proposed code. Compared with the state-of-the-art, our method has more advantages: at first, it represents voxelized paths independently of vicinity, also it gives better representation for the tested objects and detects better the redundant parts. This fact is shown in the entropy calculated for 3D curve-skeletons: our method gives 3.03 bits/symbol, whereas the state-of-the-art method gives 435 bits/symbol. On the other hand, our proposed chain code uses 23% less memory than the well known Freeman code of 26 directions. In case of digital elevation models, our method improves memory for 36.1% regarding Freeman code and 10.7% regarding the well known relative code called orthogonal direction change chain code. Finally, average length of the chain code proposed is 14% shorter than the relative code of the state-of-the-art. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. |
4,468 | Enterovirus strain and type-specific differences in growth kinetics and virus-induced cell destruction in human pancreatic duct epithelial HPDE cells | Enterovirus infections have been suspected to be involved in the development of type 1 diabetes. However, the pathogenetic mechanism of enterovirus-induced type 1 diabetes is not known. Pancreatic ductal cells are closely associated with pancreatic islets. Therefore, enterovirus infections in ductal cells may also affect beta-cells and be involved in the induction of type 1 diabetes. The aim of this study was to assess the ability of different enterovirus strains to infect, replicate and produce cytopathic effect in human pancreatic ductal cells. Furthermore, the viral factors that affect these capabilities were studied. The pancreatic ductal cells were highly susceptible to enterovirus infections. Both viral growth and cytolysis were detected for several enterovirus serotypes. However, the viral growth and capability to induce cytopathic effect (cpe) did not correlate completely. Some of the virus strains replicated in ductal cells without apparent cpe. Furthermore, there were strain-specific differences in the growth kinetics and the ability to cause cpe within some serotypes. Viral adaptation experiments were carried out to study the potential genetic determinants behind these phenotypic differences. The blind-passage of non-lytic CV-B6-Schmitt strain in HPDE-cells resulted in lytic phenotype and increased progeny production. This was associated with the substitution of a single amino acid (K257E) in the virus capsid protein VP1 and the viral ability to use decay accelerating factor (DAF) as a receptor. This study demonstrates considerable plasticity in the cell tropism, receptor usage and cytolytic properties of enteroviruses and underlines the strong effect of single or few amino acid substitutions in cell tropism and lytic capabilities of a given enterovirus. Since ductal cells are anatomically close to pancreatic islets, the capability of enteroviruses to infect and destroy pancreatic ductal cells may also implicate in respect to enterovirus induced type 1 diabetes. In addition, the capability for rapid adaptation to different cell types suggests that, on occasion, enterovirus strains with different pathogenetic properties may arise from less pathogenic ancestors. |
4,469 | Age-Related Learning and Working Memory Impairment in the Common Marmoset | Aging is the greatest risk factor for the development of neurodegenerative diseases, yet we still do not understand how the aging process leads to pathologic vulnerability. The research community has relied heavily on mouse models, but the considerable anatomic, physiological, and cognitive differences between mice and humans limit their translational relevance. Ultimately, these barriers necessitate the development of novel aging models. As a nonhuman primate (NHP), the common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) shares many features in common with humans and yet has a significantly shorter lifespan (10 years) than other primates, making it ideally suited to longitudinal studies of aging. Our objective was to evaluate the marmoset as a model of age-related cognitive impairment. To do this, we used the Delayed Recognition Span Task (DRST) to characterize age-related changes in working memory capacity in a cohort of sixteen marmosets, of both sexes, varying in age from young adult to geriatric. These monkeys performed thousands of trials over periods of time ranging up to 50% of their adult lifespan. To our knowledge, this represents the most thorough cognitive profiling of any marmoset aging study conducted to date. By analyzing individual learning curves, we found that aged animals exhibited delayed onset of learning, slowed learning rate after onset, and decreased asymptotic working memory performance. These findings are not accounted for by age-related impairments in motor speed and motivation. This work firmly establishes the marmoset as a model of age-related cognitive impairment.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Understanding the normal aging process is fundamental to identifying therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases for which aging is the biggest risk factor. Historically, the aging field has relied on animal models that differ markedly from humans, constraining translatability. Here, we firmly establish a short-lived nonhuman primate (NHP), the common marmoset, as a key model of age-related cognitive impairment. We demonstrate, through continuous testing over a substantial portion of the adult marmoset lifespan, that aging is associated with both impaired learning and working memory capacity, unaccounted for by age-related changes in motor speed and motivation. Characterizing individual cognitive aging trajectories reveals inherent heterogeneity, which could lead to earlier identification of the onset of impairment, and extended timelines during which therapeutics are effective. |
4,470 | What's behind your eosinophilic myocarditis? A case of Churg-Strauss syndrome diagnosed during acute heart failure | Eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis (EGPA) is a rare multisystem disorder; cardiac involvement may include eosinophilic myocarditis. A 67-year-old woman presented with 1-week history of dyspnoea and orthopnoea. She had a history of adult-onset asthma and peripheral eosinophilia. The investigations showed T-wave inversion on lateral leads, peripheral eosinophilia, elevated troponin and BNP values, and severe biventricular systolic dysfunction with diffuse hypokinesia and apical akinesia. Computed tomography excluded coronary disease and showed bilateral basal ground-glass opacities, air-space consolidation, and bilateral reticular-nodular pattern. Cardiac magnetic resonance findings were compatible with active myocardial inflammation. An endomyocardial biopsy (EMB) confirmed the diagnosis of eosinophilic myocarditis, and a therapy with oral corticosteroids and heart failure medications was started. |
4,471 | Determination of cadmium in Chinese pepper and its health implications based on bioaccessibility | The contamination of cadmium (Cd) in agro-products causes major concern because of its potential dietary risks. In this study, a total of 647 pepper samples from 21 provinces in China were randomly collected according to the distribution of pepper production. Cd pollution levels in Chinses pepper and its health risks were evaluated based on bioaccessibility, which was measured by the physiologically based extraction test (PBET). The results showed that Cd concentration in all pepper ranged from 0.002 to 1.470 mg/kg, with an average of 0.222 mg/kg and a median of 0.132 mg/kg. The highest daily intake of Cd was observed in the female child group (4.037 × 10-5 mg/kg bw/day), which accounted for 4% of the maximum daily permissible dose - 0.001 mg/kg bw/day. The target hazard quotients of Cd were all lower than 1, indicating low potential non-carcinogenic health risks to residents via the consumption of pepper. Notably, carcinogenic risk values suggested potential adverse health effects to adults, while after considering the bioaccessibility of Cd in pepper (mean of 43.07%), those values had fallen under the acceptable level (1 × 10-4). This may indicate that dietary risk assessment of heavy metals in crops could not be conducted just based on their content; the bioaccessibility of metals is also an important factor for consideration. |
4,472 | Superpixel Embedding Network | Superpixel segmentation is a fundamental computer vision technique that finds application in a multitude of high level computer vision tasks. Most state-of-the-art superpixel segmentation methods are unsupervised in nature and thus cannot fully utilize frequently occurring texture patterns or incorporate multi-scale context. In this paper, we show that superpixel segmentation can be improved by leveraging the superior modeling power of deep convolutional autoencoders in a fully unsupervised manner. We pose the superpixel segmentation problem as one of manifold learning where pixels that belong to similar texture patterns are assigned near identical embedding vectors. The proposed deep network is able to learn image-wide and dataset-wide feature patterns and the relationships between them. This knowledge is used to segment and group pixels in a way that is consistent with a more global definition of pattern coherence. Experiments demonstrate that the superpixels obtained from the embeddings learned by the proposed method outperform the state-of-the-art superpixel segmentation methods for boundary precision and recall values. Additionally, we find that semantic edges obtained from the superpixel embeddings to be significantly better than the contemporary unsupervised approaches. |
4,473 | Multi-modal chemical information reconstruction from images and texts for exploring the near-drug space | Identification of new chemical compounds with desired structural diversity and biological properties plays an essential role in drug discovery, yet the construction of such a potential space with elements of 'near-drug' properties is still a challenging task. In this work, we proposed a multimodal chemical information reconstruction system to automatically process, extract and align heterogeneous information from the text descriptions and structural images of chemical patents. Our key innovation lies in a heterogeneous data generator that produces cross-modality training data in the form of text descriptions and Markush structure images, from which a two-branch model with image- and text-processing units can then learn to both recognize heterogeneous chemical entities and simultaneously capture their correspondence. In particular, we have collected chemical structures from ChEMBL database and chemical patents from the European Patent Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office using keywords 'A61P, compound, structure' in the years from 2010 to 2020, and generated heterogeneous chemical information datasets with 210K structural images and 7818 annotated text snippets. Based on the reconstructed results and substituent replacement rules, structural libraries of a huge number of near-drug compounds can be generated automatically. In quantitative evaluations, our model can correctly reconstruct 97% of the molecular images into structured format and achieve an F1-score around 97-98% in the recognition of chemical entities, which demonstrated the effectiveness of our model in automatic information extraction from chemical patents, and hopefully transforming them to a user-friendly, structured molecular database enriching the near-drug space to realize the intelligent retrieval technology of chemical knowledge. |
4,474 | Mussel-Inspired Adhesive, Antibacterial, and Stretchable Composite Hydrogel for Wound Dressing | Hydrogels have attracted extensive attention in the field of biomedicine because of their similar structure to extracellular matrix (ECM) and good biocompatibility. However, the adhesiveness, mechanical properties, and antibacterial properties of conventional hydrogels are not satisfactory. In this study, multifunctional chitosan/polydopamine/polyacrylamide (CS/PDA/PAM) hydrogels are prepared through a nature-inspired strategy. The catechol group of polydopamine (PDA) component endows CS/PDA/PAM hydrogels with tissue adhesion and self-healing properties. The introduction of chitosan (CS) not only greatly improves antibacterial ability, but also enhances the mechanical properties of CS/PDA/PAM hydrogels. Skin wound healing experiments show that CS/PDA/PAM hydrogels could accelerate skin tissue regeneration and promote wound healing. Therefore, CS/PDA/PAM hydrogels have great potential in the application of new wound dressings. |
4,475 | Routing With Traffic Awareness and Link Preference in Internet of Vehicles | Considering the high mobility and uneven distribution of vehicles, an efficient routing protocol should avoid that the sent packets are forwarded within road segments with ultra-low density or serious data congestion in vehicular networks. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Traffic aware and Link Quality sensitive Routing Protocol (TLRP) for urban Internet of Vehicles (IoV). First, we design a novel routing metric, i.e., Link Transmission Quality (LTQ), to account for the impact of the number, quality and relative positions of communication links along a routing path on the network performance. Then, to adapt to the dynamic characteristics of IoV, a road weight evaluation scheme is presented to assess each road segment using the real-time traffic and link information quantified by the LTQ. Next, the path with the lowest aggregated weight is selected as the routing candidate. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposed protocol achieves significant performance improvements compared to the state-of-the-art protocol MM-GPSR, the typical junction-based scheme E-GyTAR, and the classic connectivity-based routing iCAR, in terms of packet delivery ratio and average transmission delay. |
4,476 | PEM fuel cell modeling using differential evolution | This paper develops a differential-evolution-based solution for the problem of proton exchange membrane fuel cell stack modeling. The problem is analytically intractable and computationally hard. The present paper produces results that outperform state-of-the-art approaches on three performance metrics: solution quality corresponding to a given cost, cost of finding a solution of a given quality, and frequency of producing an optimal or near-optimal solution. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. |
4,477 | MOSFET ESD breakdown modeling and parameter extraction in advanced CMOS technologies | This paper describes an approach for modeling the breakdown and snapback behavior of state-of-the-art MOSFET structures using equivalent-circuit description. Such models are required to enable circuit-level electrostatic discharge reliability simulations, which are a major challenge for the industry nowadays. Special attention is given to,accurately describing the junction and gate leakage currents due to the increased tunneling generation in the scaled-down CMOS. Consistent parameter extraction procedures for the model parameters are described as well. |
4,478 | Interactive Improvements of Visual and Auditory Function for Enhancing Performance in Youth Soccer Players | We analyzed the effects of a regular training program on the health- and skill-related physical fitness (PF) of talented soccer players aged < 12 years; visual reaction time (VRT) and auditory reaction time (ART) were also assessed. In this single-group interventional study, 78 talented male youth soccer players (mean age, 9.54 years) were critically selected by the Korean Educational Development Institute and underwent a 22-week training program consisting of 16 weeks of PF and basic skill training (90 min/week) and 6 weeks of intensive training (3, 150-min sessions/week). We assessed the pre- and post-training body composition, cardiovascular endurance, muscle strength and endurance, and flexibility. We also measured power, agility, coordination and speed, passing ability, VRT, and ART. All variables improved after training. Post-training VRT correlated with ART, muscle mass, power, cardiovascular endurance, 10-m dribble time, 10-m ball touch count, and 10-m successful pass count. ART only correlated with muscle mass. ART and 10-m ball-touch count influenced VRT, and VRT influenced ART. In conclusion, the training program enhanced the PF and visual- and auditory-related reactions in talented youth soccer players. This study suggests the importance of the assessed relationships, indicating that a training program that improves these parameters enhances the players' performance. |
4,479 | Microlearning in Diverse Contexts: A Bibliometric Analysis | In recent years, publications on microlearning have substantially increased, as this topic has received extensive attention from scholars in the instructional design and technology discipline. To better characterize and understand microlearning, there is a need for comprehensive bibliometrics assessments of the literature on microlearning. To this end, this bibliometric study collected 208 relevant publications on microlearning from the Scopus database, published in diverse contexts. Using quantitative topic modeling and qualitative content analysis methods, we identified four major themes in these publications, namely: (1) design of microlearning; (2) implementation of microlearning as an instructional method strategy and an intervention; (3) evaluation of microlearning; and (4) the utilization of mobile devices for microlearning. Based on the study findings, we discuss the significance of the study and provide implications for research and practice, particularly in fostering rigorous inquiry on the topic of microlearning, expanding the context of research to include K-12 settings, and focusing on mobile-based microlearning. |
4,480 | Strategies toward Metal-Free Carbon Monoxide Prodrugs: An Update | Carbon monoxide is an important gasotransmitter in mammals, with pleiotropic therapeutic potential against a wide range of human diseases. However, clinical translation of CO is severely hampered by the lack of a reliable CO delivery form. The development of metal-free CO prodrugs is the key to resolving such delivery issues. Over the past three years, some new exciting progress has been made in this field. In this review, we highlight these advances and discuss related issues. |
4,481 | Phytoplankton production in Italian freshwater and marine ecosystems: State of the art and perspectives | The present work aims at evaluating the state of art of phytoplankton production research in Italy. We present a synthesis of the main results achieved in three ecosystems where primary production studies have been carried out most intensively: a large subalpine take (Lago Maggiore, LM), a shallow marine ecosystem with strong fluvial influence (the Northern Adriatic Sea, NAS). and a coastal area of the Southern Tyrrhenian Sea (the Gulf of Naples, GoN). The present yearly production values are around 150 g C m(-2) yr(-1) in LM and GoN; this ranges between 80 (offshore) and 150 g C m(-2) yr(-1) (coast) in the NAS. The temporal and spatial variations of phytoplankton production appeared, in each ecosystem. in accordance with the trophic changes. Significant correlations between production, chlorophyll. and light were generally observed for LM and for GoN. On the contrary, these parameters were poorly correlated in the NAS, hampering the use of predictive models in this ecosystem. Discrepancies between primary production and the actual phytoplankton biomass changes were observed across trophic gradients: the largest pail of the carbon that is photosynthetically produced does not seem to be transformed into new phytoplankton biomass, strongly affecting the interpretation of the production figures in the ecosystems. |
4,482 | Utero-cutaneous fistula after caesarean section delivery: diagnosis and management of a rare complication | Utero-cutaneous fistula is an extremely rare condition characterized by an abnormal communication between the anterior wall of the uterus and the abdominal wall. The causes include multiple caesarean sections, incomplete hysterorrhaphy, miscarriages, uterine cavity revision, retention of placental material after delivery, use of drains, post-operative infections, or injuries. Herein, we report a case of a 38-year-old female, who underwent caesarean section 42 days earlier and presented to the emergency room complaining of fever, abdominal pain, and purulent discharge from the abdominal wall from 6 days. Her medical history included 2 previous term caesarean section deliveries and an hysteroscopic polypectomy 2 years earlier. A pelvic computed tomography scan with contrast medium showed fluid/super-fluid phlogistic collection reported at the anterior wall of the uterus with a continuous solution of the uterine wall itself. Magnetic resonance imaging demonstrated the presence of a probable hyperintense fistula, extended for 30 mm and 16 mm of thickness, which ended in the subcutaneous area with an abscess joint without continuous solution with the skin. A laparotomic surgical procedure was successfully performed. Histopathology confirmed the surgical suspect of utero-cutaneous fistula. Although utero-cutaneous fistula is an extremely rare complication, it should be considered if after caesarean section delivery signs and symptoms of skin inflammation and/or infection persist. |
4,483 | Incremental Mining of High Utility Patterns in One Phase by Absence and Legacy-Based Pruning | Mining high utility patterns in dynamic databases is an important data mining task. While a naive approach is to mine a newly updated database in its entirety, the state-of-the-art mining algorithms all take an incremental approach. However, the existing incremental algorithms either take a two-phase paradigm that generates a large number of candidates that causes scalability issues or employ a vertical data structure that incurs a large number of join operations that leads to efficiency issues. To address the challenges with the existing incremental algorithms, this paper proposes a new algorithm incremental direct discovery of high utility patterns (Id(2)HUP+). Id(2)HUP+ adapts a one-phase paradigm by improving the relevance-based pruning and upper-bound-based pruning proposes a novel data structure for a quick update of dynamic databases and proposes the absence-based pruning and legacy-based pruning dedicated to incremental mining. The extensive experiments show that our algorithm is up to 1-3 orders of magnitude more efficient than the state-of-the-art algorithms, and is the most scalable algorithm. |
4,484 | Presence of antibodies against Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis in Brazilian high-producing dairy herds | This study aimed to determine the presence of antibodies against Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) in high-producing dairy cows, the presence of the pathogen in the feces, and the risk factors associated with the disease. Blood and fecal samples were collected from 708 dairy cows over 2 years from 54 herds located in five municipalities of Paraná, Brazil. The serum samples were evaluated for the presence of antibodies against MAP using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Fecal samples from 100 cows (69 seropositive and 31 seronegative) were assessed using real-time PCR (qPCR) for IS900 of MAP. The herd prevalence of antibodies against MAP was 61.1% (33/54; 95% CI 46.88-74.08), ranging from 12.5 to 80% across the municipalities, and the prevalence in the animals was 9.8% (69/708; 95% CI 7.77-12.15); it ranged from 0 to 87.5% per herd. Only one of the 69 (1.45%) fecal samples from the seropositive cows was positive for the qPCR. The factors associated with the occurrence of paratuberculosis in herds were the use of compost barn system and the type of bed, whereas only the type of bed was associated with the infection of cows. The only risk factor (OR = 2.45; 95% CI 1.03-5.85) associated with the occurrence of paratuberculosis was the introduction of animals purchased from other dairy farms. The prevalence of active infection was low; however, our results demonstrate the presence of MAP in high-producing dairy herds in Paraná state, Brazil. |
4,485 | Video Synchronization With Bit-Rate Signals and Correntropy Function | We propose an approach for the synchronization of video streams using correntropy. Essentially, the time offset is calculated on the basis of the instantaneous transfer rates of the video streams that are extracted in the form of a univariate signal known as variable bit-rate (VBR). The state-of-the-art approach uses a window segmentation strategy that is based on consensual zero-mean normalized cross-correlation (ZNCC). This strategy has an elevated computational complexity, making its application to synchronizing online data streaming difficult. Hence, our proposal uses a different window strategy that, together with the correntropy function, allows the synchronization to be performed for online applications. This provides equivalent synchronization scores with a rapid offset determination as the streams come into the system. The efficiency of our approach has been verified through experiments that demonstrate its viability with values that are as precise as those obtained by ZNCC. The proposed approach scored 81% in time reference classification against the equivalent 81% of the state-of-the-art approach, requiring much less computational power. |
4,486 | Environmental monitoring of sacred artworks - A case study for the search for an index of correlation between particle concentration and mass of fine dust | The present work concerns the study of the concentration of Total Suspended Powders (TSP) mainly from uncombusted residues of smoke candles or incense. The aim is identifying the most critical situations for the preservation and conservation in situ of works of sacred art, normally exposed to the veneration of the faithful. These peculiar types of works of art cannot be placed out of context. This because the artifact is an object of worship for many years, it is often object to physical contati by the faithful, subjected to frequent expositions and microclimate changes. Also it suffers an intensive smoking derived from incense and votive candles. The experimental analysis carried out by the authors concerned the monitoring of TSP in the niche of the SS. Crucifix in the Church of St. Papino in Milazzo (ME). The niche, as well as the wooden statue of the Crucified contained, includes a great variety of objects of different nature: bone relics, scrolls, tapestries, precious votive offerings. At present all this precious material is been pouring in clear degradation. The monitoring of TSP was performed using a particle counter and a extractor plug with a collection filter for the gravimetric test. Tools have provided quantitative data of the number of particles per unit volume and the value of particles mass per unit volume, respectively. Then it was possible to determine a correlation marker between the two different instrumental control methods. Scanning electronic microscope analysis, applied to the samples collected, also provided detailed indication on the nature of various inorganic components stored on filters. The research results will lead to the definition of new screening equipment useful for particulate matter filtering or suppression, specifically in churches. These devices can be validated by subsequent and more detailed monitoring surveys. |
4,487 | PushBox: Making Use of Every Bit of Time to Accelerate Completion of Data-Parallel Jobs | To minimize a job's completion time, we need to minimize the completion time of its final stage's last task. Scheduling of machine slots and networks largely dominates the variable part of each task's duration. Finding an optimal schedule is NP-hard even for offline and simplified scenarios. Previous work does lead to improved performance with various strategies. State-of-the-art task placement and network scheduling efforts are largely disjunctive. Without joint optimization, they are sub-optimal and myopic in many scenarios. Task placement usually treats the network as a black box. Thus, we use prioritized bandwidth allocation among tasks making the network both predictable and efficient to achieve joint scheduling. With this feature, joint scheduling can be transformed into a special bin-packing problem. Over this minimal yet power-enough abstraction, we propose PushBox to schedule data-parallel jobs in multi-tenant clusters. When designing the joint scheduling algorithm, we not only embrace the wisdom of prior art but also respect administrators' fairness intent, which is so far largely ignored. We implement PushBox on Hadoop 3. PushBox performs persistently well on both a small testbed and a trace-driven simulator. |
4,488 | Sources of Joy In Medical Educators as Described by the PERMA Model | Phenomenon: Burnout is prevalent amongst long-practicing physicians. For medical educators, it has deleterious effects not only on the educator themselves, but also the students they are teaching. Though significant research has focused on factors associated with burnout, there is limited understanding of its counter: how physicians, particularly medical educators, derive joy from their work. Approach: This qualitative study included 15 highly-rated clinician educators in Internal Medicine who took part in individual semi-structured interviews. Participants were invited to discuss their sources of professional joy. After transcription, we used thematic content analysis: 50 themes were identified. Themes were then coded using the domains of the PERMA (Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment) model of positive psychology, assigning each theme a best fit domain. Forty-five themes were mapped into the PERMA model. Findings: When describing professional joy, highly-rated clinician educators displayed high levels of overlap with all domains of the PERMA model. Interaction with the learner was a prominent source of professional joy, particularly within Positive Emotion, Engagement, and Relationship domains. Insights: Our findings indicate that the PERMA model appropriately defines the sources of professional joy for these educators. Future research could employ this model to identify targets for interventions aimed at amplifying joy at work for this group. |
4,489 | Utilizing Sub-topic Units for Patent Prior-Art Search | One of the defining challenges in patent prior-art search is the problem of representing a long, technical document as a query. Previously work on this problem has concentrated on single query representations of the patent application. In the following paper, we describe an approach which uses multiple query representations generated from semantically coherent passages extracted from patent documents. We validate our technique in an experiment using the CLEF-IP 2011 patent search collection. Our system achieves statistically significant improvements over various state-of-art query generation techniques. |
4,490 | Long-Term Visual Localization Revisited | Visual localization enables autonomous vehicles to navigate in their surroundings and augmented reality applications to link virtual to real worlds. Practical visual localization approaches need to be robust to a wide variety of viewing conditions, including day-night changes, as well as weather and seasonal variations, while providing highly accurate six degree-of-freedom (6DOF) camera pose estimates. In this paper, we extend three publicly available datasets containing images captured under a wide variety of viewing conditions, but lacking camera pose information, with ground truth pose information, making evaluation of the impact of various factors on 6DOF camera pose estimation accuracy possible. We also discuss the performance of state-of-the-art localization approaches on these datasets. Additionally, we release around half of the poses for all conditions, and keep the remaining half private as a test set, in the hopes that this will stimulate research on long-term visual localization, learned local image features, and related research areas. Our datasets are available at visuallocalization.net, where we are also hosting a benchmarking server for automatic evaluation of results on the test set. The presented state-of-the-art results are to a large degree based on submissions to our server. |
4,491 | Guidelines for Underwater Image Enhancement Based on Benchmarking of Different Methods | Images obtained in an underwater environment are often affected by colour casting and suffer from poor visibility and lack of contrast. In the literature, there are many enhancement algorithms that improve different aspects of the underwater imagery. Each paper, when presenting a new algorithm or method, usually compares the proposed technique with some alternatives present in the current state of the art. There are no studies on the reliability of benchmarking methods, as the comparisons are based on various subjective and objective metrics. This paper would pave the way towards the definition of an effective methodology for the performance evaluation of the underwater image enhancement techniques. Moreover, this work could orientate the underwater community towards choosing which method can lead to the best results for a given task in different underwater conditions. In particular, we selected five well-known methods from the state of the art and used them to enhance a dataset of images produced in various underwater sites with different conditions of depth, turbidity, and lighting. These enhanced images were evaluated by means of three different approaches: objective metrics often adopted in the related literature, a panel of experts in the underwater field, and an evaluation based on the results of 3D reconstructions. |
4,492 | NK-CDS: A Creative Design System for Museum Art Derivatives | At present, designing museum art derivatives attracts more and more attention. Experts in the field often use hand painting or image editing software to process images. This is time-consuming work and requires professional knowledge for design. In order to address this problem, by exploiting the advanced computer simulation and image processing techniques, we develop a novel museum art derivative design system, named NK-CDS. This system consists of element operation and element application modules. Given a cultural relic image, the user extracts the interest region in the image, then processes the appearance of the element by denoising, sharpening, etc. Finally, with the application interface, the user can flexibly map the processed elements to any location of a lifestyle model. This system is intuitive and easy to operate, which can improve the design efficiency of museum derivatives and inspire ideas for creative culture product design. |
4,493 | Multi-Object Tracking with Correlation Filter for Autonomous Vehicle | Multi-object tracking is a crucial problem for autonomous vehicle. Most state-of-the-art approaches adopt the tracking-by-detection strategy, which is a two-step procedure consisting of the detection module and the tracking module. In this paper, we improve both steps. We improve the detection module by incorporating the temporal information, which is beneficial for detecting small objects. For the tracking module, we propose a novel compressed deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) feature based Correlation Filter tracker. By carefully integrating these two modules, the proposed multi-object tracking approach has the ability of re-identification (ReID) once the tracked object gets lost. Extensive experiments were performed on the KITTI and MOT2015 tracking benchmarks. Results indicate that our approach outperforms most state-of-the-art tracking approaches. |
4,494 | GVLE: a highly optimized GPU-based implementation of variable-length encoding | Nowadays, the massive use of multimedia data gives to data compression a funda-mental role in reducing the storage requirements and communication bandwidth. Variable-length encoding (VLE) is a relevant data compression method that reduces input data size by assigning shorter codewords to mostly used symbols, and longer codewords to rarely utilized symbols. As it is a common strategy in many compres-sion algorithms, such as the popular Huffman coding, speeding VLE up is essen-tial to accelerate them. For this reason, during the last decade and a half, efficient VLE implementations have been presented in the area of General Purpose Graph-ics Processing Units (GPGPU). The main performance issues of the state-of-the-art GPU-based implementations of VLE are the following. First, the way in which the codeword look-up table is stored in shared memory is not optimized to reduce the bank conflicts. Second, input/output data are read/written through inefficient strided global memory accesses. Third, the way in which the thread-codes are built is not optimized to reduce the number of executed instructions. Our goal in this work is to significantly speed up the state-of-the-art implementations of VLE by solving their performance issues. To this end, we propose GVLE, a highly optimized implemen-tation of VLE on GPU, which uses the following optimization strategies. First, the caching of the codeword look-up table is done in a way that minimizes the bank conflicts. Second, input data are read by using vectorized loads to exploit fully the available global memory bandwidth. Third, each thread encoding is performed effi-ciently in the register space with high instruction-level parallelism and lower num-ber of executed instructions. Fourth, a novel inter-block scan method, which out-performs those of state-of-the-art solutions, is used to calculate the bit-positions of the thread-blocks encodings in the output bit-stream. Our proposed mechanism is based on a regular segmented scan performed efficiently on sequences of bit-lengths of 32 consecutive thread-blocks encodings by using global atomic additions. Fifth, output data are written efficiently by executing coalesced global memory stores. An exhaustive experimental evaluation shows that our solution is on average 2.6x faster than the best state-of-the-art implementation. Additionally, it shows that the scan algorithm is on average 1.62x faster if it utilizes our inter-block scan method instead of that of the best state-of-the-art VLE solution. Hence, our inter-block scan method offers promising possibilities to accelerate algorithms that require it, such as the scan itself or the stream compaction. |
4,495 | Image-Based Gating of Intravascular Ultrasound Sequences Using the Phase Information of Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform Coefficients | Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is a widely used interventional imaging technique for the assessment of atherosclerosis plaque. Due to pulsatile heart motions, transverse and longitudinal motions are observed during in vivo pullbacks of IVUS sequences. These motion artifacts can mislead the volume-based data retrieved from IVUS studies and hinder the visualization of the vessel condition. To overcome this problem, a new fully automatic image-based gating algorithm was proposed in the current study. We utilized the phase information of the dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) coefficients to detect the motion of edge-like structures. For each IVUS sequence, first, six motion signals were detected by analyzing the phase of DT-CWT coefficients in six different directions. Then, the three best motion signals were selected by analyzing the frequency properties of each signal. Subsequently, these extracted signals were filtered using a modified Butter worth band-pass filter and the gated sequence was formed by using a combination of them. The proposed method was compared to four state-of-the-art methods and its frequency spectrum had more accurate characteristics in the cardiac frequency. In addition, the gated sequence extracted by the proposed method had the highest similarity to the extracted gated sequence by the physician. |
4,496 | Acoustic monitoring and analyses of air gun, pile driving, vessel, and ambient sounds during the 2015 seismic surveys on the Sakhalin shelf | During the summer of 2015, four 4D seismic surveys were conducted on the northeastern Sakhalin shelf near the feeding grounds of the Korean-Okhotsk (western) gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus) population. In addition to the seismic surveys, onshore pile driving activities and vessel operations occurred. Forty autonomous underwater acoustic recorders provided data in the 2 Hz to15 kHz frequency band. Recordings were analyzed to evaluate the characteristics of impulses propagating from the seismic sources. Acoustic metrics analyzed comprised peak sound pressure level (PK), mean square sound pressure level (SPL), sound exposure level (SEL), T100%, T90% (the time intervals that contain the full and 90% of the energy of the impulse), and kurtosis. The impulses analyzed differed significantly due to the variability and complexity of propagation in the shallow water of the northeast Sakhalin shelf. At larger ranges, a seismic precursor propagated in the seabed ahead of the acoustic impulse, and the impulses often interfered with each other, complicating analyses. Additional processing of recordings allowed evaluation and documentation of relevant metrics for pile driving, vessel sounds, and ambient background levels. The computed metrics were used to calibrate acoustic models, generating time resolved estimates of the acoustic levels from seismic surveys, pile driving, and vessel operations on a gray whale distribution grid and along observed gray whale tracks. This paper describes the development of the metrics and the calibrated acoustic models, both of which will be used in work quantifying gray whale behavioral and distribution responses to underwater sounds and to determine whether these observed responses have the potential to impact important parameters at the population level (e.g., reproductive success). |
4,497 | A 2.4 GHz ISM Band OOK Transceiver With High Energy Efficiency for Biomedical Implantable Applications | This article presents a high energy efficiency, high-integrated, and low-power on-off keying transceiver for a 2.4 GHz industrial scientific medical band. The proposed receiver includes an input matching network, a low-noise amplifier, a novel single-to-differential envelope detector, a level shifter, cascaded baseband amplifiers, and a hysteresis comparator. The proposed transmitter includes a bias-stimulating circuit, a current-reused self-mixing voltage controlled oscillator, and a quadruple-transconductance power amplifier. Numerous proposed techniques implemented in the mentioned circuits improve the energy per bit and power efficiency. Therefore, the proposed receiver for short-distanced propagation can achieve a sensitivity of -46 dBm with a carrier frequency of 2.45 GHz and a high data rate of 2 Mbps. The proposed transmitter achieves an output power of -17 dBm with a high data rate of 20 Mbps. This work is fabricated in a TSMC 0.18 mu m CMOS process and consumes 160 mu W and 0.6 mW in the receiver and transmitter, respectively, from a 1.2 V supply voltage. The energy per bit of 80 pJ/bit in the receiver part and the figure of merit of 9 in the transmitter part are better than those of existing state-of-the-art transceivers. |
4,498 | Low-density parity check codes for long-haul optical communication systems | Foward error correction (FEC) scheme based on low density parity check codes (LDPC) codes is presented in this paper. We show that LDPC codes provide a significant system performance enhancement with respect to the state-of-the-art FEC schemes employed in optical communication systems. |
4,499 | Transcriptome and proteome associated analysis of flavonoid metabolism in haploid Ginkgo biloba | Having different number if genome copies affect transcription and metabolite production of plants. This may be due to different gene transcription and protein expression, but the reasons for this remains poorly known. Here we measured flavonoid content in leaves of three haploid and diploid grafted plants of Ginkgo biloba, a model gymnosperm important economically for its flavonoid content. We reported the first combined transcriptomic and proteomic analysis of the difference in flavonoid content in three haploid ginkgos to investigate the effect of haploidy. Haploids had always smaller leaves and flavonoid content than the diploids. The selected haploid had also generally lower gene dosage than the selected diploid, with 1149 up-regulated (46.8 %) and 1309 down-regulated (53.2 %) among 2452 differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Of 686 differentially expressed proteins (DEPs) detected, 289 proteins (42.1 %) were upregulated, and 397 proteins (57.9 %) were downregulated in haploids. A particular attention deserves the downregulation of PAL, PAM, FLS, OMT1 hub genes involved in flavonoid biosynthesis regulation. Our study confirms the trend of haploids to have lower metabolic contents and points that lower flavonoid content in ginkgo monoploids could be due to reduced dosage of the corresponding regulatory genes and downregulation of genes involved in flavonoid synthesis. |
Subsets and Splits
No saved queries yet
Save your SQL queries to embed, download, and access them later. Queries will appear here once saved.