Surfactant status and respiratory outcome in premature infants receiving late surfactant treatment.

BACKGROUND:Many premature infants with respiratory failure are deficient in surfactant, but the relationship to occurrence of bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) is uncertain. METHODS:Tracheal aspirates were collected from 209 treated and control infants enrolled at 7-14 days in the Trial of Late Surfactant. The content of phospholipid, surfactant protein B, and total protein were determined in large aggregate (active) surfactant. RESULTS:At 24 h, surfactant treatment transiently increased surfactant protein B content (70%, p < 0.01), but did not affect recovered airway surfactant or total protein/phospholipid. The level of recovered surfactant during dosing was directly associated with content of surfactant protein B (r = 0.50, p < 0.00001) and inversely related to total protein (r = 0.39, p < 0.0001). For all infants, occurrence of BPD was associated with lower levels of recovered large aggregate surfactant, higher protein content, and lower SP-B levels. Tracheal aspirates with lower amounts of recovered surfactant had an increased proportion of small vesicle (inactive) surfactant. CONCLUSIONS:We conclude that many intubated premature infants are deficient in active surfactant, in part due to increased intra-alveolar metabolism, low SP-B content, and protein inhibition, and that the severity of this deficit is predictive of BPD. Late surfactant treatment at the frequency used did not provide a sustained increase in airway surfactant

Adaptive Optics Images of Kepler Objects of Interest

All transiting planets are at risk of contamination by blends with nearby, unresolved stars. Blends dilute the transit signal, causing the planet to appear smaller than it really is, or produce a false positive detection when the target star is blended with eclipsing binary stars. This paper reports on high spatial-resolution adaptive optics images of 90 Kepler planetary candidates. Companion stars are detected as close as 0.1 arcsec from the target star. Images were taken in the near-infrared (J and Ks bands) with ARIES on the MMT and PHARO on the Palomar Hale 200-inch. Most objects (60%) have at least one star within 6 arcsec separation and a magnitude difference of 9. Eighteen objects (20%) have at least one companion within 2 arcsec of the target star; 6 companions (7%) are closer than 0.5 arcsec. Most of these companions were previously unknown, and the associated planetary candidates should receive additional scrutiny. Limits are placed on the presence of additional companions for every system observed, which can be used to validate planets statistically using the BLENDER method. Validation is particularly critical for low-mass, potentially Earth-like worlds, which are not detectable with current-generation radial velocity techniques. High-resolution images are thus a crucial component of any transit follow-up program.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, accepted to A

Building an Interdisciplinary Research Program in Water Conservation: Approach, Preliminary Findings, and Next Steps

Effective urban water conservation programs must harness a synergy of new technologies, public policies, social cost pricing, information dissemination, citizen engagement, and coordinated actions across decision making scales. Together, these factors affect the volume of water an individual user ultimately saves and the overall success of a conservation program or programs. Over the past 18 months, we have started building an interdisciplinary research program in urban water conservation to quantify and assess the effects of these interconnected factors to motivate citizen engagement. We have interviewed water utility managers and conservation coordinators across the state of Utah, held focus groups with different water user groups, and tested our ability to recruit households into a future, multi-year water conservation study. Preliminary results suggest: Nearly all households we recruited agreed to enroll in the future study; Differences in enrollment were statistically insignificant across the different methods we used to interact with participants; and, Participants expressed interest in a broad range of information, technology, financial, and community conservation programs. In developing our research program, we have also identified the importance of: Broadly conceiving motivators, contexts, and scales (e.g. household or community) that may influence water use and conservation behavior; Developing integrated cyber-infrastructure and computing capabilities to collect and organize data, process it into site-specific, contextualized information, share it as feedback with participants, and subsequently measure its effects; Differentiating household capacity to conserve (comparing water use to need) from stated willingness-to-conserve and conservation actions; Involving household participants as collaborators through participatory action research; Training and delegating responsibilities to graduate student researchers; and, Collaborating with local water utilities. We are pursuing funding to run a large, multi-year study that will allow us to investigate the separate and cumulative effects of various water conservation programs on household water use. As part of the study, we also seek to test whether presenting households with estimates of their capacity to conserve can effectively motivate willingness-toconserve and conservation actions. The study will elucidate the contextualized factors that shape residential water use and people’s conservation actions

Tai Chi Exercise on Muscle Strength and Physical Function in Peripheral Neuropathy Patients

This poster was presented at the American College of Sports Medicine\u27s (ACSM) 63rd Annual Meeting and World Congresses, Boston, MA.https://scholarworks.uttyler.edu/fac_posters/1016/thumbnail.jp

Effect of Tai Chi on Vascular Function Among Patients with Peripheral Neuropathy

Foot pain due to Peripheral Neuropathy (PN) is one of the factors affecting walking ability. It has been reported that diminished vascular function contributes to a decrease in physical function in individuals with PN. Microvascular disturbances have been reported in humans with neuropathic pain. Tai Chi, a Chinese conditioning exercise, has been associated with enhanced endothelial function. However, the effect of Tai Chi training on microvascular function in patients with PN has not been studied. This study aimed to assess the effects of Tai Chi on vascular function (i.e., vascular reactivity) and functional exercise capacity among patients with PN. Thirty-seven participants (men = 21, women = 16) were randomly assigned to either Tai Chi exercise (Ex, n = 20, age: 71 ± 9.50 years) or control group (Con, n = 17, age: 75 ± 9.02 years). Exercise training consisted of 12-week progressive Tai Chi (i.e., Yang Style), offered 3 times per week, 60 minutes sessions. The Con group did not participate in any exercise activity. Before and after training, vascular function [finger tip digital thermal monitoring of vascular reactivity] and functional exercise capacity [Six-Minute Walk test (6MW)] were evaluated. The Ex group experienced a significant 25% increase in vascular reactivity index from baseline [1.93 ± 0.43 to 2.41 ± 0.47, (P \u3c 0.05)]. In addition, the 6MW test increased significantly in the Ex group by 28% [pre = 392 ± 93; post = 503 ± 105 m, (P \u3c 0.05)]. In the control group no significant changes were observed in either vascular function [1.83 ± 0.43 to 1.81 ± 0.37] or in the 6MW test [393 ± 142 to 398 ± 149 m]. Participants experienced no complications and/or falls as a result of the intervention. These findings demonstrated that in patients with PN, a 12-week progressive Tai Chi exercise program was capable of increasing not only vascular function, specifically vascular reactivity index, but also of increasing the distance covered during the 6MW test. Clearly, this study underlies the importance of Tai Chi as an effective and safe exercise intervention suitable for patients with PN

HoughNet: Integrating Near and Long-Range Evidence for Bottom-Up Object Detection

© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.This paper presents HoughNet, a one-stage, anchor-free, voting-based, bottom-up object detection method. Inspired by the Generalized Hough Transform, HoughNet determines the presence of an object at a certain location by the sum of the votes cast on that location. Votes are collected from both near and long-distance locations based on a log-polar vote field. Thanks to this voting mechanism, HoughNet is able to integrate both near and long-range, class-conditional evidence for visual recognition, thereby generalizing and enhancing current object detection methodology, which typically relies on only local evidence. On the COCO dataset, HoughNet’s best model achieves 46.4 AP (and 65.1 AP50), performing on par with the state-of-the-art in bottom-up object detection and outperforming most major one-stage and two-stage methods. We further validate the effectiveness of our proposal in another task, namely, “labels to photo” image generation by integrating the voting module of HoughNet to two different GAN models and showing that the accuracy is significantly improved in both cases. Code is available at https://github.com/nerminsamet/houghnet

Increased growing temperature reduces content of polyunsaturated fatty acids in four oilseed crops

Environmental temperature directly influences the lipid profile produced by oilseeds. If growing temperatures increase, as is predicted by current models, the precise profile of lipids produced are likely to change. This paper develops models to predict lipid profiles as a function of growing temperature. Data relating to lipid profiles of soybean (Glycine max), spring canola (Brassica napus), spring camelina (Camelina sativa), and sunflower (Helianthus annuus) were gathered from the literature and evaluated to examine the influence of temperature on relative production of oleic, linoleic, and linolenic acid. For each crop, a set of linear regressions was used to correlate temperature during the grain fill, defined as 30 days before harvest, with the molar percentages of oleic, linoleic, and linolenic acid present. An increase in temperature from 10 to 40°C resulted in an increase in the production of oleic acid and a decrease in the production of linoleic and linolenic acid in soybeans, canola, and sunflowers. Over the range of data available, the lipid profile of camelina was temperature insensitive. To test the validity of the correlations, the four crops were grown in a field study in Manhattan, Kansas simultaneously, in the same environment, in 2011. The correlations accurately predicted the field data for soybean, canola, and camelina but not for sunflower. The correlation for sunflower under-predicted the molar amount of oleic acid and over-predicted the molar amount of linoleic acid. This study indicates increasing growing temperatures from 10 to 40°C will result in more monounsaturated oils and less polyunsaturated oils in soybean, canola, and sunflower