Study on Microchannel Design and Burst Frequency Detection for Centrifugal Microfluidic System

A centrifugal microfluidic system has been developed in this study, enabling the control and measurement of the burst frequency in order to manipulate the liquid. The radial microfluid chips with different microchannel dimensions were designed for simulation analyses and experimental verifications. The microfluidic flow in the microchannel was analyzed using software CFDRC, providing an accurate result compared with that from experiment. The results show that the design of the overflow microchannel can correctly keep the liquid volume with error as low as 5%. For mercurochrome, the burst frequency has an inverse proportion to the channel width, and the simulation results agree with the experimental results. For oil, however, the experimental and simulation results indicate that the relationship between the burst frequency and channel width is not obvious due to oil properties. Since the simulation approach can provide an accurate prediction of flow behavior in the microchannel, the design of radial microfluid chip and the control of burst frequency can be achieved effectively. A practical application to design the centrifugal microfluidic disc for blood typing test was also carried out in this study. The centrifugal microfluidic system can successfully control the spinning speed to achieve the result of adding reagents in a specific sequence

Morphea-like localized involutional lipoatrophy—a case report associated with family history

AbstractLocalized involutional lipoatrophy is a rare, sporadic disease with female tendency and characterized by focal loss of adipose tissue. We report two sisters, aged 8 years and 6 years, who developed asymptomatic depressive areas on the upper left arm and upper right arm, respectively. Cutaneous sonography showed slight thickening of the dermis and remarkably decreased thickness of the cutaneous fat tissue. Histopathology of a biopsy specimen from the elder sister revealed an increase in homogenized collagen bundles and entrapment of eccrine glands high in the dermis, as well as small to medium-sized lipocytes with a scarcity of inflammatory cells

On the Momentum Dependence of the Flavor Structure of the Nucleon Sea

Difference between the $\bar u$ and $\bar d$ sea quark distributions in the proton was first observed in the violation of the Gottfried sum rule in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) experiments. The parton momentum fraction $x$ dependence of this difference has been measured over the region $0.02 < x < 0.35$ from Drell-Yan and semi-inclusive DIS experiments. The Drell-Yan data suggested a possible sign-change for $\bar d(x)-\bar u(x)$ near $x \sim 0.3$, which has not yet been explained by existing theoretical models. We present an independent evidence for the $\bar d(x)-\bar u(x)$ sign-change at $x \sim 0.3$ from an analysis of the DIS data. We further discuss the $x$-dependence of $\bar d(x)-\bar u(x)$ in the context of meson cloud model and the lattice QCD formulation.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, final versio

FFTPL: An Analytic Placement Algorithm Using Fast Fourier Transform for Density Equalization

We propose a flat nonlinear placement algorithm FFTPL using fast Fourier transform for density equalization. The placement instance is modeled as an electrostatic system with the analogy of density cost to the potential energy. A well-defined Poisson's equation is proposed for gradient and cost computation. Our placer outperforms state-of-the-art placers with better solution quality and efficiency

Neuropsin Inactivation Has Protective Effects against Depressive-Like Behaviours and Memory Impairment Induced by Chronic Stress

Mounting evidence suggests the interaction between stress and genetics contribute to the development of depressive symptoms. Currently, the molecular mechanisms mediating this process are poorly understood, hindering the development of new clinical interventions. Here, we investigate the interaction between neuropsin, a serine protease, and chronic stress on the development of depressive-like behaviours in mice. We found no difference in baseline behaviour between neuropsin knockout and wild-type mice. However, our results show that neuropsin knockout mice are protected against the development of depressive-like behaviours and memory impairment following chronic stress. We hypothesised that this difference in behaviour may be due to an interaction between neuropsin and elevated plasma corticosterone. To test this, we subjected mice to chronic corticosterone injections. These injections resulted in changes to hippocampal structure similar to that observed following chronic stress. We found that inactivation of neuropsin limits the extent of these anatomical changes in both the chronic stress and the corticosterone injection exposed cohorts. We next used viral vectors to knockdown or overexpress neuropsin in the hippocampus to confirm the results of the KO study. Additionally, we found that inactivation of neuropsin limited glutamate dysregulation, associated with increased generation of reactive oxygen species, resulting from prolonged elevated plasma corticosterone. In this study, we demonstrate that neuropsin inactivation protects against the impairment of hippocampal functions and the depressive-like behaviour induced by chronic stress or high levels of corticosterone. Consequently, we suggest neuropsin is a potential target for clinical interventions for the management of stress disorders.</p

A Reinforcement Learning Approach for the Multichannel Rendezvous Problem

In this paper, we consider the multichannel rendezvous problem in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) where the probability that two users hopping on the same channel have a successful rendezvous is a function of channel states. The channel states are modelled by two-state Markov chains that have a good state and a bad state. These channel states are not observable by the users. For such a multichannel rendezvous problem, we are interested in finding the optimal policy to minimize the expected time-to-rendezvous (ETTR) among the class of {\em dynamic blind rendezvous policies}, i.e., at the $t^{th}$ time slot each user selects channel $i$ independently with probability $p_i(t)$, $i=1,2, \ldots, N$. By formulating such a multichannel rendezvous problem as an adversarial bandit problem, we propose using a reinforcement learning approach to learn the channel selection probabilities $p_i(t)$, $i=1,2, \ldots, N$. Our experimental results show that the reinforcement learning approach is very effective and yields comparable ETTRs when comparing to various approximation policies in the literature.Comment: 5 pages, 9 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1906.1042