Debye frequency-extended waveguide permittivity extraction for high complex permittivity materials. Concrete setting process characterization

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.A waveguide with central frequency 868 MHz is used in transmission/reflection operation regime to accurately measure the behaviour of the complex permittivity of high complex permittivity granular materials and it has been frequency-extended up to 3 GHz using the Debye fitted relaxation model. It is shown that for highly granular high permittivity materials a waveguide based transmission/reflection technique is necessary to reduce the uncertainty of the extracted permittivity values. The technique is first described and validated with isopropyl alcohol and then applied to the characterization of cement based materials. This paper provides accurate data on the evolution of the complex permittivity of concrete and mortar from the moment of pouring until air dried condition is achieved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Projecte CLEAR: Collaborative Learning on ECTS Array Resolution

El Projecte CLEAR s’emmarca en el procés de desenvolupament del mòdul d’aprenentatge interactiu “Array Antennas” en el context de l’assignatura d’Antenes de l’Escola Tècnica Superior Enginyeria de Telecomunicació de Barcelona. Aquest bloc del temari suposa un crèdit ECTS sent els principals objectius en aquest procés d’adaptació: fomentar el treball progressiu de l’estudiant, el seu esperit innovador i creatiu alhora que adquireixi major capacitat de relació entre els models conceptuals explicats i les estructures reals. Per assolir aquestes fites s’ha dut a terme una experiència pilot d’aprenentatge col·laboratiu de forma que es cobreixen els punts esmentats i s’aconsegueixi que l’estudiant tingui un rol més actiu en el seu propi aprenentatge fent que aquest li resulti més atractiu. A més d’aquest pilot realitzat durant el quadrimestre de tardor 2004, s’han introduït presentacions en power point del tema d’arrays i s’ha posat a disposició de tots els alumnes video-based lectures, i una eina de simulació que els permet fer tan síntesi com anàlisi per l’estudi del comportament d’antenes i les seves agrupacions

Inhibition pattern of sulfamide-related compounds in binding to carbonic anhydrase isoforms I, II, VII, XII and XIV

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Disability and perceived stress in primary care patients with major depression

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is highly prevalent in the Spanish primary care (PC) setting and the leading cause of disability in Spain. The aim of this study was to evaluate several key psychometric properties of the Sheehan Disability Scale (SDS) in patients with or without MDD and varying degrees of symptom severity using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). Method: A total of 1, 704 PC patients participating in the PsicAP clinical trial completed the SDS and PHQ-9. We evaluated the factor structure, measurement invariance across gender, internal consistency, and the discriminative and predictive validity. Results: Confirmatory factor analyses revealed a unifactorial model of the SDS containing 4 items (SDS-4) with the best model fit (CFI: .99; GFI: .99; TLI: 96; RMSEA: .10). This model contained the three life domain items (work, family, and social life) plus perceived stress (PS) with significant loadings. The internal consistency of the SDS-4 was acceptable in patients with or without MDD, regardless of symptom severity. The SDS-4 also showed good discriminative capacity and acceptable predictive validity in all subsamples. Conclusions: These findings support the use of the SDS-4 to assess depression-related disability in patients at Spanish primary care centres

Active wetting of epithelial tissues

Development, regeneration and cancer involve drastic transitions in tissue morphology. In analogy with the behavior of inert fluids, some of these transitions have been interpreted as wetting transitions. The validity and scope of this analogy are unclear, however, because the active cellular forces that drive tissue wetting have been neither measured nor theoretically accounted for. Here we show that the transition between 2D epithelial monolayers and 3D spheroidal aggregates can be understood as an active wetting transition whose physics differs fundamentally from that of passive wetting phenomena. By combining an active polar fluid model with measurements of physical forces as a function of tissue size, contractility, cell-cell and cell-substrate adhesion, and substrate stiffness, we show that the wetting transition results from the competition between traction forces and contractile intercellular stresses. This competition defines a new intrinsic lengthscale that gives rise to a critical size for the wetting transition in tissues, a striking feature that has no counterpart in classical wetting. Finally, we show that active shape fluctuations are dynamically amplified during tissue dewetting. Overall, we conclude that tissue spreading constitutes a prominent example of active wetting --- a novel physical scenario that may explain morphological transitions during tissue morphogenesis and tumor progression

Oral metronomic vinorelbine combined with endocrine therapy in hormone receptor-positive HER2-negative breast cancer: SOLTI-1501 VENTANA window of opportunity trial

Background: The biological effect of oral metronomic vinorelbine (mVNB) alone or in combination with endocrine therapy in patients with hormone receptor-positive (HR+)/HER2-negative breast cancer has been scarcely addressed. Methods: Postmenopausal women with untreated stage I-III HR+/HER2-negative breast cancer were randomized (1:1:1) to receive 3 weeks of letrozole (LTZ) 2.5 mg/day, oral mVNB 50 mg 3 days/week, or the combination. The primary objective was to evaluate, within PAM50 Luminal A/B disease, if the anti-proliferative effect of LTZ+mVNB was superior to monotherapy. An anti-proliferative effect was defined as the mean relative decrease of the PAM50 11-gene proliferation score in combination arm vs. both monotherapy arms. Secondary objectives included the evaluation of a comprehensive panel of breast cancer-related genes and safety. An unplanned analysis of stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (sTILs) was also performed. PAM50 analyses were performed using the nCounter®-based Breast Cancer 360 gene panel, which includes 752 genes and 32 signatures. Results: Sixty-one patients were randomized, and 54 paired samples (89%) were analyzed. The main patient characteristics were mean age of 67, mean tumor size of 1.7 cm, mean Ki67 of 14.3%, stage I (55.7%), and grades 1-2 (90%). Most baseline samples were PAM50 Luminal A (74.1%) or B (22.2%). The anti-proliferative effect of 3 weeks of LTZ+mVNB (- 73.2%) was superior to both monotherapy arms combined (- 49.9%; p = 0.001) and mVNB (- 19.1%; p < 0.001). The anti-proliferative effect of LTZ+mVNB (- 73.2%) was numerically higher compared to LTZ (- 65.7%) but did not reach statistical significance (p = 0.328). LTZ+mVNB induced high expression of immune-related genes and gene signatures, including CD8 T cell signature and PDL1 gene and low expression of ER-regulated genes (e.g., progesterone receptor) and cell cycle-related and DNA repair genes. In tumors with ≤ 10% sTILs at baseline, a statistically significant increase in sTILs was observed following LTZ (paired analysis p = 0.049) and LTZ+mVNB (p = 0.012). Grade 3 adverse events occurred in 3.4% of the cases. Conclusions: Short-term mVNB is well-tolerated and presents anti-proliferative activity alone and in combination with LTZ. The high expression of immune-related biological processes and sTILs observed with the combination opens the possibility of studying this combination with immunotherapy. Further investigation comparing these biological results with other metronomic schedules or drug combinations is warranted

Impact of Sexualized Substance Use and Other Risk Practices on HCV Microelimination in gbMSM Living with HIV: Urgent Need for Targeted Strategies

In the original publication of the article, the article funding note was incorrectly published, the correct one should read as: This study has been funded by Instituto de Salud Carlos III through the project ‘‘PI18/00583’’ and co-funded by European Regional Development Fund ‘‘A way to make Europe’’. This has been corrected in this paper. © The Author(s) 2022