Accreditation of The Hydrographic Surveying Course at UCL and The PLA

In September 1999, the Department of Geomatic Engineering at University College London (UCL) introduced a new MSc in Hydrographic Surveying, in partnership with the Port of London Authority (PLA). In May 2001 this degree programme was approved by the courses board of the International Hydrographic Organisation and the International Federation of Surveyors as a Category A course. The aim of this article is to explain the background to the partnership between UCL and the PLA, and to describe how the course has been designed to meet the IHO/FIG criteria

Generative Invertible Networks (GIN): Pathophysiology-Interpretable Feature Mapping and Virtual Patient Generation

Machine learning methods play increasingly important roles in pre-procedural planning for complex surgeries and interventions. Very often, however, researchers find the historical records of emerging surgical techniques, such as the transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), are highly scarce in quantity. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing novel generative invertible networks (GIN) to select features and generate high-quality virtual patients that may potentially serve as an additional data source for machine learning. Combining a convolutional neural network (CNN) and generative adversarial networks (GAN), GIN discovers the pathophysiologic meaning of the feature space. Moreover, a test of predicting the surgical outcome directly using the selected features results in a high accuracy of 81.55%, which suggests little pathophysiologic information has been lost while conducting the feature selection. This demonstrates GIN can generate virtual patients not only visually authentic but also pathophysiologically interpretable

The various power decays of the survival probability at long times for free quantum particle

The long time behaviour of the survival probability of initial state and its dependence on the initial states are considered, for the one dimensional free quantum particle. We derive the asymptotic expansion of the time evolution operator at long times, in terms of the integral operators. This enables us to obtain the asymptotic formula for the survival probability of the initial state $\psi (x)$, which is assumed to decrease sufficiently rapidly at large $|x|$. We then show that the behaviour of the survival probability at long times is determined by that of the initial state $\psi$ at zero momentum $k=0$. Indeed, it is proved that the survival probability can exhibit the various power-decays like $t^{-2m-1}$ for an arbitrary non-negative integers $m$ as $t \to \infty$, corresponding to the initial states with the condition $\hat{\psi} (k) = O(k^m)$ as $k\to 0$.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in J. Phys.

Barley Hv CIRCADIAN CLOCK ASSOCIATED 1 and Hv PHOTOPERIOD H1 Are Circadian Regulators That Can Affect Circadian Rhythms in Arabidopsis.

Circadian clocks regulate many aspects of plant physiology and development that contribute to essential agronomic traits. Circadian clocks contain transcriptional feedback loops that are thought to generate circadian timing. There is considerable similarity in the genes that comprise the transcriptional and translational feedback loops of the circadian clock in the plant Kingdom. Functional characterisation of circadian clock genes has been restricted to a few model species. Here we provide a functional characterisation of the Hordeum vulgare (barley) circadian clock genes Hv circadian clock associated 1 (HvCCA1) and Hv photoperiodh1, which are respectively most similar to Arabidopsis thaliana circadian clock associated 1 (AtCCA1) and pseudo response regulator 7 (AtPRR7). This provides insight into the circadian regulation of one of the major crop species of Northern Europe. Through a combination of physiological assays of circadian rhythms in barley and heterologous expression in wild type and mutant strains of A. thaliana we demonstrate that HvCCA1 has a conserved function to AtCCA1. We find that Hv photoperiod H1 has AtPRR7-like functionality in A. thaliana and that the effects of the Hv photoperiod h1 mutation on photoperiodism and circadian rhythms are genetically separable.ZR is grateful to the National Institute of Agricultural Botany for the Award of Scholarship. We acknowledge funding from a Marie Curie Early Stage Training project MEST-CT-2005-020526 for JK and the BBSRC-DTP for funding SC. AARW and MCM are grateful to the BBSRC for the award of BBSRC Grant BB/M006212/1, which supported aspects of the study.This is the final published version. It first appeared at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.012744

Synthesis and biological evaluation of benzodiazepines containing a pentafluorosulfanyl group

The widely used pentafluorosulfanyl group (SF5) was deployed as a bioisosteric replacement for a chloro-group in the benzodiazepine diazepam (Valium™). Reaction of 2-amino-5-pentafluorosulfanyl-benzophenone with chloroacetyl chloride followed by hexamethylenetetramine, in the presence of ammonia, led to 7-sulfurpentafluoro-5-phenyl-1H-benzo[1,4]diazepin-2(3H)-one (2c). The latter was able to undergo a Pd-catalysed ortho-arylation, demonstrating that these highly fluorinated benzodiazepines can be further modified to form more complicated scaffolds. The replacement of Cl by the SF5 group, led to a loss of potency for potentiating GABAA receptor activation, most likely because of a lost ligand interaction with His102 in the GABAA receptor α subunit. Dedicated to Professor Jonathan Williams, an inspirational and humble pioneer, a colleague and mentor in chemistry

Plasma 25-Hydroxyvitamin D Concentration and Risk of Incident Type 2 Diabetes in Women

OBJECTIVE — To determine the association between 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25-OHD) con-centration and risk of incident type 2 diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS — In a nested case-control study conducted among 608 women with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes and 559 control subjects in the Nurses’ Health Study, we measured the association between baseline plasma 25-OHD concentration and risk of incident diabetes. RESULTS — After adjusting for matching factors and diabetes risk factors, including BMI, higher levels of plasma 25-OHD were associated with a lower risk for type 2 diabetes. The odds ratio for incident type 2 diabetes in the top (median 25-OHD, 33.4 ng/ml) versus the bottom (median 25-OHD, 14.4 ng/ml) quartile was 0.52 (95 % CI 0.33–0.83). The associations were consistent across subgroups of baseline BMI, age, and calcium intake. CONCLUSIONS — Plasma 25-OHD concentration was associated with lower risk of inci-dent type 2 diabetes in women. Diabetes Care 33:2021–2023, 2010 G rowing evidence indicates that sub-optimal vitamin D status may play arole in the development of type 2 diabetes (1). Results from longitudinal observational studies support the hypoth-esis that low vitamin D status is associated with development of type 2 diabetes; however, only one study has examined the association between blood 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25-OHD) concentra-tion and incident type 2 diabetes, and there was no significant association among women (2,3). We examined pro-spectively the association between plasma 25-OHD concentration and risk of inci-dent type 2 diabetes among women in a case-control study nested within th

Stressful life events and cancer risk

In a prospective cohort study in Denmark of 8736 randomly selected people, no evidence was found among 1011 subjects who developed cancer that self-reported stressful major life events had increased their risk for cancer

Using ordinal logistic regression to evaluate the performance of laser-Doppler predictions of burn-healing time

Background Laser-Doppler imaging (LDI) of cutaneous blood flow is beginning to be used by burn surgeons to predict the healing time of burn wounds; predicted healing time is used to determine wound treatment as either dressings or surgery. In this paper, we do a statistical analysis of the performance of the technique. Methods We used data from a study carried out by five burn centers: LDI was done once between days 2 to 5 post burn, and healing was assessed at both 14 days and 21 days post burn. Random-effects ordinal logistic regression and other models such as the continuation ratio model were used to model healing-time as a function of the LDI data, and of demographic and wound history variables. Statistical methods were also used to study the false-color palette, which enables the laser-Doppler imager to be used by clinicians as a decision-support tool. Results Overall performance is that diagnoses are over 90% correct. Related questions addressed were what was the best blood flow summary statistic and whether, given the blood flow measurements, demographic and observational variables had any additional predictive power (age, sex, race, % total body surface area burned (%TBSA), site and cause of burn, day of LDI scan, burn center). It was found that mean laser-Doppler flux over a wound area was the best statistic, and that, given the same mean flux, women recover slightly more slowly than men. Further, the likely degradation in predictive performance on moving to a patient group with larger %TBSA than those in the data sample was studied, and shown to be small. Conclusion Modeling healing time is a complex statistical problem, with random effects due to multiple burn areas per individual, and censoring caused by patients missing hospital visits and undergoing surgery. This analysis applies state-of-the art statistical methods such as the bootstrap and permutation tests to a medical problem of topical interest. New medical findings are that age and %TBSA are not important predictors of healing time when the LDI results are known, whereas gender does influence recovery time, even when blood flow is controlled for. The conclusion regarding the palette is that an optimum three-color palette can be chosen 'automatically', but the optimum choice of a 5-color palette cannot be made solely by optimizing the percentage of correct diagnoses