The ABC130 barrel module prototyping programme for the ATLAS strip tracker

For the Phase-II Upgrade of the ATLAS Detector, its Inner Detector, consisting of silicon pixel, silicon strip and transition radiation sub-detectors, will be replaced with an all new 100 % silicon tracker, composed of a pixel tracker at inner radii and a strip tracker at outer radii. The future ATLAS strip tracker will include 11,000 silicon sensor modules in the central region (barrel) and 7,000 modules in the forward region (end-caps), which are foreseen to be constructed over a period of 3.5 years. The construction of each module consists of a series of assembly and quality control steps, which were engineered to be identical for all production sites. In order to develop the tooling and procedures for assembly and testing of these modules, two series of major prototyping programs were conducted: an early program using readout chips designed using a 250 nm fabrication process (ABCN-25) and a subsequent program using a follow-up chip set made using 130 nm processing (ABC130 and HCC130 chips). This second generation of readout chips was used for an extensive prototyping program that produced around 100 barrel-type modules and contributed significantly to the development of the final module layout. This paper gives an overview of the components used in ABC130 barrel modules, their assembly procedure and findings resulting from their tests.Comment: 82 pages, 66 figure

The United States COVID-19 Forecast Hub dataset

Academic researchers, government agencies, industry groups, and individuals have produced forecasts at an unprecedented scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. To leverage these forecasts, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with an academic research lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub. Launched in April 2020, the Forecast Hub is a dataset with point and probabilistic forecasts of incident cases, incident hospitalizations, incident deaths, and cumulative deaths due to COVID-19 at county, state, and national, levels in the United States. Included forecasts represent a variety of modeling approaches, data sources, and assumptions regarding the spread of COVID-19. The goal of this dataset is to establish a standardized and comparable set of short-term forecasts from modeling teams. These data can be used to develop ensemble models, communicate forecasts to the public, create visualizations, compare models, and inform policies regarding COVID-19 mitigation. These open-source data are available via download from GitHub, through an online API, and through R packages

Online Study of Melanoma Identification: The Roles of ABC Information and Photographic Examples in Lesion Discrimination

Public education campaigns designed to increase awareness about malignant melanoma, the most fatal form of skin cancer, currently use written criteria (ABCD) to describe its common features, but an increasing body of evidence has suggested that the public would benefit more from the use of photographic examples of lesions. This study explored possible public education techniques to optimize laypeople’s recognition of melanoma through an online melanoma identification task. We were particularly interested in (a) exploring the role of dermatological expertise in selecting lesion training examples, (b) comparing performance with ABC information to that of melanoma examples, and (c) determining the effect of adding benign training examples to melanomas. Before beginning with the online portion of the study we developed a set of melanoma training examples to compare against those selected by dermatologists, by statistically extracting eight lesions from similarities seen independently by laypeople. The online part of study consisted of 6 conditions: no training, training using written ABC criteria, using photographic examples of melanoma selected by dermatologists, photographic examples of melanoma selected by laypeople, a combination of both ABC information and melanoma examples, and photographic examples of melanoma and of benign (harmless) lesions. We calculated measures of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy in melanoma detection for 976 participants. We found that dermatologist-selected melanoma examples were in fact useful in increasing specificity (p=.001) and accuracy (p<.001), that the provision of ABC information significantly lowered specificity (p=.001), and that the provision of both melanoma and benign examples had significantly higher specificity (p<.001) and accuracy (p<.001) than melanomas alone. All conditions raised sensitivity as compared to no control, but the substantial increase in specificity and accuracy seen with both melanoma and benign examples made it the best preforming condition

Development of an optimized activatable MMP-14 targeted SPECT imaging probe

Matrix metalloproteinase-14 (MT1-MMP or MMP-14) is a membrane-associated protease implicated in a variety of tissue remodeling processes and a molecular hallmark of select metastatic cancers. The ability to detect MMP-14 in vivo would be useful in studying its role in pathologic processes and may potentially serve as a guide for the development of targeted molecular therapies. Four MMP-14 specific probes containing a positively charged cell penetrating peptide (CPP) d-arginine octamer (r8) linked with a MMP-14 peptide substrate and attenuating sequences with glutamate (8e, 4e) or glutamate-glycine (4eg and 4egg) repeating units were modeled using an AMBER force field method. The probe with 4egg attenuating sequence exhibited the highest CPP/attenuator interaction, predicting minimized cellular uptake until cleaved. The in vitro MMP-14-mediated cleavage studies using the human recombinant MMP-14 catalytic domain revealed an enhanced cleavage rate that directly correlated with the linearity of the embedded peptide substrate sequence. Successful cleavage and uptake of a technetium-99m labeled version of the optimal probe was demonstrated in MMP-14 transfected human breast cancer cells. Two-fold reduction of cellular uptake was found in the presence of a broad spectrum MMP inhibitor. The combination of computational chemistry, parallel synthesis and biochemical screening, therefore, shows promise as a set of tools for developing new radiolabeled probes that are sensitive to protease activity