6,030 research outputs found
Preliminary evidence supports circulating microRNAs as prognostic biomarkers for type 2 diabetes.
Background:Circulating microRNAs are emerging as potential prognostic biomarkers for the development of type 2 diabetes. However, microRNAs are also associated with complications from impaired glucose metabolism (e.g. endothelial cell function). Prior studies have not evaluated for associations between trajectories of circulating microRNAs with trajectories of fasting blood glucose over time and the responses to behavioral interventions to reduce risk. This study performed longitudinal assessment of microRNAs and fasting blood glucose and identified relationships between microRNAs and behavioral risk reduction interventions. Methods:MicroRNAs (n = 353) were measured in subsets (n = 10, n = 8) of participants from previously completed clinical trials that studied behavioral risk reduction interventions. Fasting blood glucose trajectories were associated with changes in 45 microRNAs over 12 months. Results:Following a 3-month physical activity and dietary intervention compared with baseline, 13 microRNAs were differentially expressed. Seven microRNAs (i.e. miR-106b, miR-20b, miR-363, miR-486, miR-532, miR-92a and miR-93) were commonly identified between the two analyses. Conclusions:Further studies are needed to determine which microRNAs are prognostic biomarkers of risk for type 2 diabetes versus consequences of impaired glucose metabolism. Additional future directions of this research are to differentiate whether microRNAs are prognostic and/or diagnostic biomarkers for risk for type 2 diabetes and predictive biomarkers of responses to risk reduction interventions
Maximum Resilience of Artificial Neural Networks
The deployment of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) in safety-critical
applications poses a number of new verification and certification challenges.
In particular, for ANN-enabled self-driving vehicles it is important to
establish properties about the resilience of ANNs to noisy or even maliciously
manipulated sensory input. We are addressing these challenges by defining
resilience properties of ANN-based classifiers as the maximal amount of input
or sensor perturbation which is still tolerated. This problem of computing
maximal perturbation bounds for ANNs is then reduced to solving mixed integer
optimization problems (MIP). A number of MIP encoding heuristics are developed
for drastically reducing MIP-solver runtimes, and using parallelization of
MIP-solvers results in an almost linear speed-up in the number (up to a certain
limit) of computing cores in our experiments. We demonstrate the effectiveness
and scalability of our approach by means of computing maximal resilience bounds
for a number of ANN benchmark sets ranging from typical image recognition
scenarios to the autonomous maneuvering of robots.Comment: Timestamp research work conducted in the project. version 2: fix some
typos, rephrase the definition, and add some more existing wor
Avoiding overfitting of multilayer perceptrons by training derivatives
Resistance to overfitting is observed for neural networks trained with
extended backpropagation algorithm. In addition to target values, its cost
function uses derivatives of those up to the order. For
common applications of neural networks, high order derivatives are not readily
available, so simpler cases are considered: training network to approximate
analytical function inside 2D and 5D domains and solving Poisson equation
inside a 2D circle. For function approximation, the cost is a sum of squared
differences between output and target as well as their derivatives with respect
to the input. Differential equations are usually solved by putting a multilayer
perceptron in place of unknown function and training its weights, so that
equation holds within some margin of error. Commonly used cost is the
equation's residual squared. Added terms are squared derivatives of said
residual with respect to the independent variables. To investigate overfitting,
the cost is minimized for points of regular grids with various spacing, and its
root mean is compared with its value on much denser test set. Fully connected
perceptrons with six hidden layers and , and
weights in total are trained with Rprop until cost changes by
less than 10% for last 1000 epochs, or when the epoch is
reached. Training the network with weights to represent simple
2D function using 10 points with 8 extra derivatives in each produces cost test
to train ratio of , whereas for classical backpropagation in comparable
conditions this ratio is
STM fluorescence of porphyrin enhanced by a strong plasmonic field and its nanoscale confinement in an STM cavity
We have investigated scanning tunneling microscope-induced luminescence STML from porphyrin molecules by varying the tip PtIr, Ag, and Au/substrate Pt, Ag, Au, and indium tin oxide combinations. Strong molecular fluorescence by highest-occupied molecular orbital and lowest-unoccupied molecular orbital transition comparable to plasmon-mediated light is emitted only when both the substrate and the tip are metals but not in other cases. Along with calculations of relative electromagnetic-field powers in the tip-substrate gaps, the enhancement of STML from molecules can be interpreted in terms of the strong plasmon field and its confinement in an STM cavity. We also find rather strong energy-forbidden fluorescence of porphyrin in an Au-tip/porphyrin/Au cavity that occurs under the extremely strong field in the plasmonic nanocavity
Detergent and sanitizer stresses decrease the thermal resistance of Enterobacter sakazakii in infant milk formula
Infant milk formula has been identified as a potential source of Enterobacter sakazakii. This bacterium can cause a severe form of neonatal meningitis and necrotizing entercolitis. This study determined the effect of acid, alkaline, chlorine and ethanol stresses on the thermal inactivation of E. sakazakii in infant milk formula. Stressed cells were mixed with reconstituted powdered infant milk formula (PIMF) at temperatures between 52 and 58°C for various time periods or mixed with PFMF prior to reconstitution with water at temperatures between 50 and 100°C. The D- and z-values of the cells were determined using linear regression analysis. Detergent and sanitizer stresses decreased the thermal resistance of E. sakazakii in powdered and reconstituted infant milk formula. The values for Z)- acid, alkaline, chlorine and ethanol stressed E. sakazakii at 52-58°C were 14.57-0.54, 12.07-0.37, 10.08-0.40 and 11.61-0.50 min, respectively. The values of alkaline, chlorine and ethanol stressed cells were significantly lower than those of unstressed cells. Only the z-value (4.4°C) of ethanol stressed E. sakazakii was significantly different than that of unstressed cells (4.12°C). Reconstitution at 60°C did not significantly reduce the number of pre-stressed E. sakazakii cells compared with unstressed control cells, whereas significant decreases were obtained at 70°C. Using water at 70°C during the preparation of reconstituted PIMF before feeding infants, may be a suitable and applicable means of reducing the risk of E. sakazakii in the formula. The results of this study may be of use to regulatory agencies, infant milk producers and infant caregivers to design heating processes to eliminate E. sakazakii that may be present in infant milk formula
Security considerations for Galois non-dual RLWE families
We explore further the hardness of the non-dual discrete variant of the
Ring-LWE problem for various number rings, give improved attacks for certain
rings satisfying some additional assumptions, construct a new family of
vulnerable Galois number fields, and apply some number theoretic results on
Gauss sums to deduce the likely failure of these attacks for 2-power cyclotomic
rings and unramified moduli
Simultaneous segmentation of the left and right heart ventricles in 3D cine MR images of small animals
New high resolution image techniques allow to capture the anatomy and movement of the heart of small animals. The availability of these in vivo images can be very useful for medical research, however the amount of generated data for large animal studies makes manual analysis a very tedious task. To cope with the problem of automatic analysis of these images, we propose the use of the Deformable Elastic Template method to perform automatic segmentation of the ventricles. To adapt the method to the specificities of high-resolution MRI, several improvements are presented, including an image-context dependent scheme for more robust segmentation. Qualitative results show that our method is able to correctly retrieve the heart’s contours in 3D. 1
Universal strategy for Ohmic hole injection into organic semiconductors with high ionization energies
Preparation and characterisation of titanium dioxide produced from Ti-salt flocculated sludge in water treatment
During the past few years, titanium salts were investigated as alternative coagulants for the removal of organic matter of different molecular sizes in contaminated water. The flocculation efficiency of Ti-salt was comparable to those of FeCl3 and Al2(SO4)3 salts, commonly used coagulants. Incinerated sludge-TiO2 showed higher surface area and photocatalytic activity than commercially available TiO2. Metal-doped forms were produced by adding coagulant aids such as iron (Fe-), aluminium (Al-) and (Ca-) calcium salts during Ti-salt flocculation to increase pH. Ca- and Al- doped TiO2 showed very high photocatalytic activity compared to Fe-doped TiO2. When tested in a pilot scale plant for treatment of dye wastewater to check practical feasibility of the novel process, the removal ratio of the chemical oxygen demand was comparable to those of commonly used coagulants but the settling of sludge was faster. The TiO2 generated after sludge incineration showed a high photocatalytic activity for degradation of volatile organic compounds and increased the rate of hydrogen production by water photosplitting. TiCl4 coagulant and TiO2 produced from different water sources with different concentrations had low acute toxicity compared to heavy metals and commercial TiO2 when examined based on D. Magna mortality. This paper presents the production, characterisation and the photoactivity of TiO2 produced from Ti-salt flocculated sludge. Different case studies are discussed to highlighted recent advances in this field
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