Autonomous Golf Cart

Cedarville University’s Autonomous Golf Cart Senior Design Project’s mission is to provide engineering students with hands on experience with industry standard intelligent vehicle technologies, solve open-ended, multi-dimensional problems, and provide an autonomous transportation service to the greater campus community. Our autonomous technology will share the sidewalks; therefore, the public image of our autonomous routing service is critically linked with its technical performance. The autonomous golf cart has two major design areas: the cart’s hardware and its software. Within hardware, our team created functional braking and an H-Bridge for reversing. Within software, our team moved the codebase to a new software framework, implemented dynamic routing, and began obstacle avoidance using LiDAR

Evaluation of α-hydroxycinnamic Acids as Pyruvate Carboxylase Inhibitors

Through a structure-based drug design project (SBDD), potent small molecule inhibitors of pyruvate carboxylase (PC) have been discovered. A series of α-keto acids (7) and α-hydroxycinnamic acids (8) were prepared and evaluated for inhibition of PC in two assays. The two most potent inhibitors were 3,3′-(1,4-phenylene)bis[2-hydroxy-2-propenoic acid] (8u) and 2-hydroxy-3-(quinoline-2-yl)propenoic acid (8v) with IC50 values of 3.0 ± 1.0 μM and 4.3 ± 1.5 μM respectively. Compound 8v is a competitive inhibitor with respect to pyruvate (Ki = 0.74 μM) and a mixed-type inhibitor with respect to ATP, indicating that it targets the unique carboxyltransferase (CT) domain of PC. Furthermore, compound 8v does not significantly inhibit human carbonic anhydrase II, matrix metalloproteinase-2, malate dehydrogenase or lactate dehydrogenase

Changes in Clinical Pain in Fibromyalgia Patients Correlate with Changes in Brain Activation in the Cingulate Cortex in a Response Inhibition Task

Objective The primary symptom of fibromyalgia is chronic, widespread pain; however, patients report additional symptoms including decreased concentration and memory. Performance‐based deficits are seen mainly in tests of working memory and executive functioning. It has been hypothesized that pain interferes with cognitive performance; however, the neural correlates of this interference are still a matter of debate. In a previous, cross‐sectional study, we reported that fibromyalgia patients (as compared with healthy controls) showed a decreased blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response related to response inhibition (in a simple G o/ N o‐ G o task) in the anterior/mid cingulate cortex, supplementary motor area, and right premotor cortex. Methods Here in this longitudinal study, neural activation elicited by response inhibition was assessed again in the same cohort of fibromyalgia patients and healthy controls using the same G o/ N o‐ G o paradigm. Results A decrease in percentage of body pain distribution was associated with an increase in BOLD signal in the anterior/mid cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor area, regions that have previously been shown to be “hyporeactive” in this cohort. Conclusions Our results suggest that the clinical distribution of pain is associated with the BOLD response elicited by a cognitive task. The cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor area are critically involved in both the pain system as well as the response inhibition network. We hypothesize that increases in the spatial distribution of pain might engage greater neural resources, thereby reducing their availability for other networks. Our data also point to the potential for, at least partial, reversibility of these changes.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108346/1/pme12460.pd

Let's agree to disagree: learning highly debatable multirater labelling

Classification and differentiation of small pathological objects may greatly vary among human raters due to differences in training, expertise and their consistency over time. In a radiological setting, objects commonly have high within-class appearance variability whilst sharing certain characteristics across different classes, making their distinction even more difficult. As an example, markers of cerebral small vessel disease, such as enlarged perivascular spaces (EPVS) and lacunes, can be very varied in their appearance while exhibiting high inter-class similarity, making this task highly challenging for human raters. In this work, we investigate joint models of individual rater behaviour and multirater consensus in a deep learning setting, and apply it to a brain lesion object-detection task. Results show that jointly modelling both individual and consensus estimates leads to significant improvements in performance when compared to directly predicting consensus labels, while also allowing the characterization of human-rater consistency.Comment: Accepted at MICCAI 201

Electrocatalytic four-electron reduction of oxygen to water by a highly flexible cofacial cobalt bisporphyrin

Dicobalt(II) cofacial bisporphyrins anchored by dibenzofuran (DPD) and xanthene (DPX) are efficient electrocatalysts for the four-electron reduction of oxygen to water despite their ca. 4 Å difference in metal–metal distances, suggesting that the considerable longitudinal Pac-Man flexibility of the pillared platforms is the origin for the similar catalytic reactivity of these structurally disparate systems

Circulating Tumor Cell Transcriptomics as Biopsy Surrogates in Metastatic Breast Cancer

BACKGROUND Metastatic breast cancer (MBC) and the circulating tumor cells (CTCs) leading to macrometastases are inherently different than primary breast cancer. We evaluated whether whole transcriptome RNA-Seq of CTCs isolated via an epitope-independent approach may serve as a surrogate for biopsies of macrometastases. METHODS We performed RNA-Seq on fresh metastatic tumor biopsies, CTCs, and peripheral blood (PB) from 19 newly diagnosed MBC patients. CTCs were harvested using the ANGLE Parsortix microfluidics system to isolate cells based on size and deformability, independent of a priori knowledge of cell surface marker expression. RESULTS Gene expression separated CTCs, metastatic biopsies, and PB into distinct groups despite heterogeneity between patients and sample types. CTCs showed higher expression of immune oncology targets compared with corresponding metastases and PB. Predictive biomarker (n = 64) expression was highly concordant for CTCs and metastases. Repeat observation data post-treatment demonstrated changes in the activation of different biological pathways. Somatic single nucleotide variant analysis showed increasing mutational complexity over time. CONCLUSION We demonstrate that RNA-Seq of CTCs could serve as a surrogate biomarker for breast cancer macrometastasis and yield clinically relevant insights into disease biology and clinically actionable targets