Meta-Analysis of Coronary Bypass Graft Patency Assessment With Invasive vs Computed Tomographic Angiography

BACKGROUND: Computed tomography (CT) coronary angiography has emerged as a non-invasive alternative for evaluating graft patency after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), but there is ongoing debate regarding its diagnostic performance compared to invasive coronary angiography, particularly for arterial and composite grafts. METHODS: MEDLINE, Embase, and Cochrane databases were searched to identify studies comparing CT coronary angiography to invasive coronary angiography for detection of graft occlusion in post-CABG patients. Outcomes included sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and diagnostic accuracy. Meta-regression explored key modifiers. Pooled estimates were calculated using random-effects models, with heterogeneity measured via I2. RESULTS: Fifty studies met inclusion criteria, including 3,449 patients (25% women). CT coronary angiography sensitivity for graft occlusion was 0.96 (I2 = 48%), specificity was 0.97 (I2 = 46%), positive predictive value was 0.94 (I2 = 62%), negative predictive value was 0.98 (I2 = 41%) and overall diagnostic accuracy was 0.97 (I2 = 58%). The pooled incidence rate of graft occlusion across 7,506 included grafts was 0.08 per graft-year (PGY) (95% CI: 0.06-0.10) using a random-effects model, and 0.07 PGY (95% CI: 0.07-0.08). At meta-regression, study year, sample size, β-blocker use, number of slices, and time since surgery, but not type and configuration of CABG grafts, were significantly associated with CT coronary angiography sensitivity. CONCLUSIONS: CT coronary angiography detects coronary artery bypass graft occlusion with a high degree of sensitivity and specificity independently of graft type and configuration and can be used for imaging of every type of CABG graft.2026-07-0

Asesing Short term Study Abroad Impact on Host Communities: The case of Ghana

The numerous surveys and publications on short term study abroad programs have neglected, or largely ignored, how host communities are impacted by these programs. Questions such as what sort of interactions the students have with local communities in host countries and how these communities view and relate to the students have almost no published assessment to inform STA practitioners and international program that’s develop STAs. Organizations such as the Institute for International Education (IIE), School of International Training (SIT), and many others have little or no data on the effects of study abroad programs on local communities. The Forum on Education Abroad Standards of Good Practice for Education Abroad (2008, 19) only cautions students and the organizations sending the students to “respect the cultures and values of the countries in which it operates.” This study seeks to shed light on how these programs influence, impact, and effect change on host communities and how those in the communities view the STAs. Two communities, Tse Addo and UG, were the survey sites. Findings of the study reveal the need for more collaboration and effort be placed in developing mutually beneficial, targeted, and meaningful experiential learning not only for he students, but also where that learning takes place

Navigating The Intersection of Policy and Local Priorities: A Reflective Assessment of Transportation Vulnerability in Watertown Jefferson County

This study investigates the broader challenge of conducting vulnerability assessments in transportation planning, particularly in rural regions where balancing federal funding mandates with local infrastructure priorities presents significant complexities. Vulnerability assessments are essential tools for identifying infrastructure risks, yet their effectiveness is often constrained by funding eligibility requirements and policy frameworks that may overlook locally significant assets. This research examines how vulnerability assessments can better integrate data-driven methodologies with community-informed insights to ensure equitable resilience outcomes. Drawing from established frameworks like those employed by the Genesee and Ulster Transportation Councils, this study explores strategies for improving vulnerability assessments in the Watertown Jefferson County Transportation Council (WJCTC) region. The study highlights the need for improved flexible funding models, enhanced local engagement, and tailored assessment frameworks to ensure that critical infrastructure in Watertown is effectively identified and prioritized, particularly for roads and facilities that serve underserved communities or face heightened climate risks.Barton & Loguidic

Enhancing Juice Safety and Technology Knowledge for Small Producers: A Needs Based Assessment Outreach Activities Initiative in New York State

Small- to mid-sized juice and beverage producers face unique challenges related to food safety, regulatory compliance, and technical capacity. To better understand these challenges and inform targeted outreach, a need assessment survey was conducted as part of an Extension Outreach and Assessment (EOA) project sponsored by Cornell AgriTech. The 25-question online survey, distributed via extension networks, was completed by 30 producers across New York State, representing a diverse range of businesses, production scales, and distribution strategies. Survey results revealed critical knowledge gaps in areas such as shelf-life determination, non-thermal processing, and regulatory compliance. These findings guided the development of two one-hour webinars focused on product quality and juice safety. Two webinars were conducted "Food Safety and Shelf life Strategies for Small Juice Beverage Producers" and "Safety and Quality in Juice Processing: Validating Non-thermal Processes" , reaching about 120 participants and offering high-impact learning on shelf-life, validation, and non-thermal processing. Attendance data highlighted strong engagement and interest across both sessions. The webinars incorporated live Q&A sessions to enhance engagement and assess learning outcomes. This ongoing project highlights the importance of data-driven outreach and underscores the need for continued support and training tailored to the specific needs of small-scale juice and juice-containing processors.This project was supported by Cornell AgriTech Extension Outreach Assistanshi

Soil health and corn silage performance: Comparing grain and dairy field systems

Soil health is a key focus of corn growers who are working towards sustainability goals and safeguarding their operation against increasingly challenging growing conditions. Understanding the contributing factors that lead to resilient cropping systems in the Northeast is important for farmers to meet those goals. With funding support from the New York Corn Growers Association Corn Research and Education Program, soil health data was collected from the Cornell PRO-DAIRY’s NY Corn Silage Hybrid Evaluation Program in 2023. The annual hybrid evaluation program offers the opportunity to compare the same hybrids in different growing environments. Measuring key soil health parameters at each location with the Cornell Assessment of Soil Health (CASH) test offered additional insight into the role of soil health in the overall performance of the crop grown at each location.The Manager, published by Progressive Dairy, is sponsored by Papillon

Conversation Redirection in Mental-Health Therapy

56 pagesMental-health therapy involves a complex conversation flow in which patients and therapists continuously negotiate what should be talked about next. For example, therapists might try to shift the conversation’s direction to keep the therapeutic process on track and avoid stagnation, or patients might push the discussion towards issues they want to focus on. How do such patient and therapist redirections relate to the development and quality of their relationship? In this thesis, we introduce a probabilistic measure of the extent to which a certain utterance immediately redirects the flow of the conversation, accounting for both the intention and the actual realization of such a change. We apply this new measure to characterize the development of patient-therapist relationships over multiple sessions in a very large, widely used online therapy platform. We draw correspondences between the interactional behaviors and the relationship’s progression and eventual success. We then conclude with directions for future work as well as an initial exploration of how our framework can be broadly applied in other domains beyond therapy

Adaptive RF/mmWave Circuit Architectures for Spectrum-Dense Networks

137 pagesIn the quest for ever-increasing data rates and network reliability, Software-Defined Radios (SDRs) and massive Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) architectures have been explored. With the push towards millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies, a wide swath of bandwidth can be made available. A long-term goal of frequency-flexible SDRs is to create RF/mmWave receivers capable of operating in any band over a wide frequency range. Often, this goal is thwarted by the need to withstand large blockers at various frequencies within that same wide turning range, necessitating band-select filters, and thus limiting which band can be accessed. N-path passive mixer-first receivers have been explored to meet this need based on their easily tuned center frequency and bandwidth, combined with extremely high linearity with respect to Out-Of-Band (OOB) blockers. In addition, many radio systems today require access not only to arbitrary bands in a wide frequency range but also to multiple concurrent bands in that range with high selectivity. In contrast, massive MU-MIMO systems alleviate traffic congestion present in dense urban environments by providing spatial multiplexing and filtering, resulting in huge improvements in throughput and radiated energy efficiency. Furthermore, jammer equalization techniques can be implemented in MIMO architectures using synthesized spatial notch filters in the direction of the estimated blockers, thereby relaxing the dynamic range requirements for downstream circuitry

Data from: Assessing the use of organic residue analysis to investigate plant oils in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean: An environmentally and archaeologically contextualized approach (Ph.D. dissertation by Rebecca F. Gerdes)

Please cite as: Gerdes, Rebecca F., Hanna Wiandt, Malak Abuhashim, Avery Williams, Bridget Childs, Jillian Goldfarb, Joe M. Regenstein, Despina Pilides, and Sturt W. Manning (2025) Data from: Assessing the use of organic residue analysis to investigate plant oils in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean: An environmentally and archaeologically contextualized approach (Ph.D. dissertation by Rebecca F. Gerdes). [dataset] Cornell University eCommons Repository. https://doi.org/10.7298/vg43-f202These files contain data along with associated output and instrumentation supporting all results reported in Gerdes 2024, "Assessing the use of organic residue analysis to investigate plant oils in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean: An environmentally and archaeologically contextualized approach." In the dissertation by Gerdes (2024), we found: The ways people store food and other products are intertwined with their social, political, and economic context. Reconstructing storage activities is thus an important archaeological research aim. Organic residue analysis (ORA) of lipids, the study of trace fats, oils, and similar substances preserved in the pores of pottery, can provide direct evidence for pottery use, yet ORA has often been misunderstood and overinterpreted in Mediterranean archaeology. This dissertation proposes an archaeologically and environmentally contextualized approach to better incorporate ORA into Mediterranean archaeology. A “relational assemblage” theoretical framework opens the “black box” of ORA and incorporate residues into archaeological interpretation by viewing residues as part of a “molecular scale” of the archaeological assemblage and by considering all the processes that might shape residues, including archaeologists’ interventions. A reevaluation of a 30-year-old hypothesis that olive oil storage played a role in the changing sociopolitics of early urban cities in Late Bronze Age (LBA) Cyprus (1600-1150 BCE) with this contextualized approach showed that the flaws in the ORA evidence used to argue for the storage of olive oil in monumental storerooms at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios (K-AD). A novel long-term degradation experiment showed that calcareous soil contexts, which are common in the eastern and southern Mediterranean, lead to poorer preservation of plant oils in ceramics and partial preservation of plant oil biomarkers compared to a mildly acidic soil. A new ORA study of sherds from several buildings at K-AD and an inland site, Ampelia, suggested that some (but not necessarily all) pithoi from K-AD might have contained a plant oil, but also raise the possibility that residues reflected soil contamination. The results raise new questions about the roles of storage and of plant oils in the economy and politics of LBA Cyprus. The comprehensive, contextualized approach applied in this dissertation showed how organic residues and their interpretations in archaeological narrative emerge from a wide range of contingencies, from people’s uses of pottery in the past and climatic and environmental processes where pottery is buried to the analytical interventions of archaeologists.This research was supported by an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award BSC-2032037, a Research Grant from the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS, 2018), and support from the Cyprus Institute (Nicosia, Cyprus), and made use of the facilities of the Cornell Center for Materials Research, which are supported by NSF Award Number DMR-1719875. R.F.G. was supported by Sage Fellowships [years] and a Research Travel Grant (2022) from the Graduate School of Cornell University, the Florence May Smith Fellowship and Lane Cooper Fellowship as well as research travel awards from the Department of Classics at Cornell University, two International Research Travel Awards from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies (Cornell University), a Graduate Research Fellowship from the Institute for European Studies (Cornell University), and Hirsch Travel and Research Grants from CIAMS. M. A. was supported by the Engineering Learning Initiatives program (2022). A. W. was supported by a fieldwork participation scholarship from the American Society of Overseas Research (2022). The archaeological samples were exported and analyzed under a permit from the Department of Antiquities of Cyprus. The authors would also like to thank Alison South and Kevin Fisher, former and current director of excavations at Kalavasos-Ayios Dhimitrios, respectively, and Despina Pilides, director of excavations at Agios Sozomenos Ampelia, for the archaeological samples included in the dataset

DEVELOPMENT OF A PLANT MEMBRANE-ON-CHIP PLATFORM FOR INTERROGATING PROTEIN-MEDIATED METAL TRANSPORT

101 pagesTransporter proteins are ubiquitous in nature and play major roles in the uptake, redistribution, and efflux of ions and small molecules required by organisms to maintain homeostasis. Disruptions to transporter function are associated with a variety of diseases and phenotypical abnormalities. In humans, this is evident in the case of diseases such as Menkes and Wilson while in plants, disruption of copper transporters has been associated with phenotypic abnormalities such as reduced growth, fruit yield, and death. The prevalence and association of transporter proteins to many diseases and disorders have highlighted their importance and made them the target of scientific investigation. Despite the strong interest in these proteins, transporter proteins remain a challenge to study. In plants, access to the plasma membrane is hampered by the presence of the cell wall and transport proteins may also be localized to internal organelles further limiting their accessibility. Membrane proteins contain hydrophobic regions complicating attempts to isolate and study them, as these non-polar moieties must be stabilized to maintain form and function. Traditional methodologies for measuring transporter proteins heavily rely on indirect in vivo assays that often require expression in non-native systems, possibly resulting in changes in protein behavior. Direct measurement modalities such as patch-clamp are mainly amenable to certain transporter proteins, such as ion channels, which display electrogenic and fast transport activity. This precludes the measurement of ion transport of many slower or electroneutral transporters such as transport proteins. To address the demand for characterizing this class of proteins, I developed a biomimetic system capable of the direct translation of transport protein function to measurable output, called, “Plant Membrane-on-Chip” platform. This platform leverages the properties of supported lipid membranes to recapitulate the native membrane environment of the transporter proteins through the inclusion of native membrane materials and retention of orientation and fluidity properties. The crucial addition of a biocompatible electronic chip enables the measurement of transporter function using traditional electrochemical characterization techniques that are label-free, sensitive, and non-destructive. For this dissertation, I demonstrate the use of a Plant Membrane-on-Chip device derived from Arabidopsis thaliana plasma membrane material in electrically measuring the function of the copper transporter protein AtCOPT1. Critically, this project highlighted how the use of traditional resistance-based analysis methodologies can be incorporated with new bio-mimics to detect the activity of a non electrogenic transporter previously thought to be unamenable to direct electrical analyses