Fatigue life prediction of orthotropic steel deck strengthened with UHPC under stochastic traffic load

In recent years, the ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) has been increasingly used to strengthen orthotropic steel decks (OSD) to solve the cracking problems at fatigue-prone details and pavement damage. In this paper, the fatigue life of a cable-stayed orthotropic steel decks bridge under stochastic traffic loads is calculated before and after the orthotropic steel decks strengthened with the ultra-high performance concrete layer. The traffic data of the real bridge for 1 week is first obtained based on the weigh-in-motion system. Then, a stochastic traffic load on the bridge is simulated for its service life by the Monte Carlo method. A fatigue life analysis framework, which includes the traffic load simulation, a refined finite element model, the S-N curve and Miner linear cumulative damage criterion, is proposed for fatigue life prediction of orthotropic steel decks. For the bridge before reinforcement, the predicting results for the fatigue life of three fatigue-prone details, including the scallop cutout, rib-to-diagram and rib-to-deck joint are basically consistent with that of the actual bridge inspection results. After strengthening by ultra-high performance concrete, the fatigue life of the three structural details are increased from 15.87, 13.89, and 32.26 years to more than 100 years, respectively, as compared with the original orthotropic steel decks structure

Weakly-supervised Caricature Face Parsing through Domain Adaptation

A caricature is an artistic form of a person's picture in which certain striking characteristics are abstracted or exaggerated in order to create a humor or sarcasm effect. For numerous caricature related applications such as attribute recognition and caricature editing, face parsing is an essential pre-processing step that provides a complete facial structure understanding. However, current state-of-the-art face parsing methods require large amounts of labeled data on the pixel-level and such process for caricature is tedious and labor-intensive. For real photos, there are numerous labeled datasets for face parsing. Thus, we formulate caricature face parsing as a domain adaptation problem, where real photos play the role of the source domain, adapting to the target caricatures. Specifically, we first leverage a spatial transformer based network to enable shape domain shifts. A feed-forward style transfer network is then utilized to capture texture-level domain gaps. With these two steps, we synthesize face caricatures from real photos, and thus we can use parsing ground truths of the original photos to learn the parsing model. Experimental results on the synthetic and real caricatures demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed domain adaptation algorithm. Code is available at: https://github.com/ZJULearning/CariFaceParsing .Comment: Accepted in ICIP 2019, code and model are available at https://github.com/ZJULearning/CariFaceParsin

Analysis of only 0-1 min clip or 1-4 min Clip for focal liver lesions during contrast-enhanced ultrasonography

Purpose: To evaluate the reliability of analysis of only 0-1min clips and 1-4min clips versus the entire clips in performing contrast-enhanced ultrasonography (CEUS) of focal liver lesions (FLLs).Methods: Contrast-enhanced ultrasonography (CEUS) examinations of 43 single FLLs were performed. All clips were analyzed in three ways, the entire clips, 0-1 min clips and 1-4 min clips, benign or malignant diagnosis and pathological diagnosis of each FLL were concluded by the three ways subsequently.Results: The results of correct diagnosis were assessed using Chi-square test. There was no difference with regard to benign or malignant diagnosis, between 0-1min clips and the entire clips, or between 1-4 min clips and the entire clips (p = 0.243 and p = 0.747, respectively). Moreover, no significant differences in pathological diagnosis existed between 0-1min clips and the entire clips, and 1- 4min clips versus entire clips (p=0.808 and p = 0.808, respectively). No significant differences existed among CEUS entire clip, 0-1min clip and 1-4min clip in identifying FLLs, and based on which the diagnosis of two different FLLs during CEUS with only one injection of contrast agent can be available.Conclusion: Only 0-1min clips or 1-4 min clips can be used to instead of the entre clip in performing CEUS of FLLs.Keywords: Focal liver lesions, Contrast-enhanced ultrasonography, Ultrasonic diagnosis, Clip

Construction and Validation of a Geometry-based Mathematical Model for Hard X-ray Imager

Quantitative and analytical analysis of modulation process of the collimator is a great challenge, and is also of great value to the design and development of Fourier transform imaging telescopes. The Hard X-ray Imager (HXI), as one of the three payloads onboard the Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory(ASO-S) mission, adopts modulating Fourier-Transformation imaging technique and will be used to explore mechanism of energy release and transmission in solar flare activities. In this paper, a mathematical model is developed to analyze the modulation function under a simplified condition first. Then its behavior under six degrees of freedom is calculated after adding the rotation matrix and translation change to the model. In addition, unparalleled light and extended sources also are considered so that our model can be used to analyze the X-ray beam experiment. Next, applied to the practical HXI conditions, the model has been confirmed not only by Geant4 simulations but also by some verification experiments. Furthermore, how this model will help to improve the image reconstruction process after the launch of ASO-S is also presented

Porcine circovirus type 2 (PCV2) infection decreases the efficacy of an attenuated classical swine fever virus (CSFV) vaccine

The Lapinized Philippines Coronel (LPC) vaccine, an attenuated strain of classical swine fever virus (CSFV), is an important tool for the prevention and control of CSFV infection and is widely and routinely used in most CSF endemic areas, including Taiwan. The aim of this study was to investigate whether PCV2 infection affects the efficacy of the LPC vaccine. Eighteen 6-week-old, cesarean-derived and colostrum-deprived (CDCD), crossbred pigs were randomly assigned to four groups. A total of 105.3 TCID50 of PCV2 was experimentally inoculated into pigs through both intranasal and intramuscular routes at 0 days post-inoculation (dpi) followed by LPC vaccination 12 days later. All the animals were challenged with wild-type CSFV (ALD stain) at 27 dpi and euthanized at 45 dpi. Following CSFV challenge, the LPC-vaccinated pigs pre-inoculated with PCV2 showed transient fever, viremia, and viral shedding in the saliva and feces. The number of IgM+, CD4+CD8-CD25+, CD4+CD8+CD25+, and CD4-CD8+CD25+ lymphocyte subsets and the level of neutralizing antibodies against CSFV were significantly higher in the animals with LPC vaccination alone than in the pigs with PCV2 inoculation/LPC vaccination. In addition, PCV2-derived inhibition of the CSFV-specific cell proliferative response of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) was demonstrated in an ex vivo experiment. These findings indicate that PCV2 infection decreases the efficacy of the LPC vaccine. This PCV2-derived interference may not only allow the invasion of wild-type CSFV in pig farms but also increases the difficulty of CSF prevention and control in CSF endemic areas