76 research outputs found
Microscale 3-D Capacitance Tomography with a CMOS Sensor Array
Electrical capacitance tomography (ECT) is a nonoptical imaging technique in
which a map of the interior permittivity of a volume is estimated by making
capacitance measurements at its boundary and solving an inverse problem. While
previous ECT demonstrations have often been at centimeter scales, ECT is not
limited to macroscopic systems. In this paper, we demonstrate ECT imaging of
polymer microspheres and bacterial biofilms using a CMOS microelectrode array,
achieving spatial resolution of 10 microns. Additionally, we propose a deep
learning architecture and an improved multi-objective training scheme for
reconstructing out-of-plane permittivity maps from the sensor measurements.
Experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to resolve
microscopic 3-D structures, achieving 91.5% prediction accuracy on the
microsphere dataset and 82.7% on the biofilm dataset, including an average of
4.6% improvement over baseline computational methods
Space-Time Cluster Analysis of Invasive Meningococcal Disease
Field clusters are commonly misinterpreted as clusters and would require genotyping to rule out misclassification
Manifestation of Resonance-Related Chaos in Coupled Josephson Junctions
Chaotic features of systems of coupled Josephson junctions are studied.
Manifestation of chaos in the temporal dependence of the electric charge,
related to a parametric resonance, is demonstrated through the calculation of
the maximal Lyapunov exponent, phase-charge and charge-charge Lissajous
diagrams and correlation functions. The number of junctions in the stack
strongly influences the fine structure in the current voltage characteristics
and a strong proximity effect results from the nonperiodic boundary conditions.
The observed resonance-related chaos exhibits intermittency over a range of
conditions and parameters. General features of the system are analyzed by means
of a linearized equation and the criteria for a breakpoint region with no chaos
are obtained. Such criteria could clarify recent experimental observations of
variations in the power output from intrinsic Josephson junctions in high
temperature superconductors.Comment: 13 pages, 16 figure
Automatic analysis of facilitated taste-liking
This paper focuses on: (i) Automatic recognition of taste-liking
from facial videos by comparatively training and evaluating models
with engineered features and state-of-the-art deep learning
architectures, and (ii) analysing the classification results along the
aspects of facilitator type, and the gender, ethnicity, and personality
of the participants. To this aim, a new beverage tasting dataset
acquired under different conditions (human vs. robot facilitator
and priming vs. non-priming facilitation) is utilised. The experimental
results show that: (i) The deep spatiotemporal architectures
provide better classification results than the engineered feature
models; (ii) the classification results for all three classes of liking,
neutral and disliking reach F1 scores in the range of 71%-91%; (iii)
the personality-aware network that fuses participantsâ personality
information with that of facial reaction features provides improved
classification performance; and (iv) classification results vary across
participant gender, but not across facilitator type and participant
ethnicity.EPSR
Negative Regulation of Schistosoma japonicum Egg-Induced Liver Fibrosis by Natural Killer Cells
The role of natural killer (NK) cells in infection-induced liver fibrosis remains obscure. In this study, we elucidated the effect of NK cells on Schistosoma japonicum (S. japonicum) egg-induced liver fibrosis. Liver fibrosis was induced by infecting C57BL/6 mice with 18â20 cercariae of S. japonicum. Anti-ASGM1 antibody was used to deplete NK cells. Toll-like receptor 3 ligand, polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid (poly Iâ¶C) was used to enhance the activation of NK cells. Results showed that NK cells were accumulated and activated after S. japonicum infection, as evidenced by the elevation of CD69 expression and IFN-Îł production. Depletion of NK cells markedly enhanced S. japonicum egg-induced liver fibrosis. Administration of poly Iâ¶C further activated NK cells to produce IFN-Îł and attenuated S. japonicum egg-induced liver fibrosis. The observed protective effect of poly Iâ¶C on liver fibrosis was diminished through depletion of NK cells. Disruption of IFN-Îł gene enhanced liver fibrosis and partially abolished the suppression of liver fibrosis by poly Iâ¶C. Moreover, expression of retinoic acid early inducible 1 (RAE 1), the NKG2D ligand, was detectable at high levels on activated hepatic stellate cells derived from S. japonicum-infected mice, which made them more susceptible to hepatic NK cell killing. In conclusion, our findings suggest that the activated NK cells in the liver after S. japonicum infection negatively regulate egg-induced liver fibrosis via producing IFN-Îł, and killing activated stellate cells
Effect of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker initiation on organ support-free days in patients hospitalized with COVID-19
IMPORTANCE Overactivation of the renin-angiotensin system (RAS) may contribute to poor clinical outcomes in patients with COVID-19.
Objective To determine whether angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker (ARB) initiation improves outcomes in patients hospitalized for COVID-19.
DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS In an ongoing, adaptive platform randomized clinical trial, 721 critically ill and 58 nonâcritically ill hospitalized adults were randomized to receive an RAS inhibitor or control between March 16, 2021, and February 25, 2022, at 69 sites in 7 countries (final follow-up on June 1, 2022).
INTERVENTIONS Patients were randomized to receive open-label initiation of an ACE inhibitor (nâ=â257), ARB (nâ=â248), ARB in combination with DMX-200 (a chemokine receptor-2 inhibitor; nâ=â10), or no RAS inhibitor (control; nâ=â264) for up to 10 days.
MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The primary outcome was organ supportâfree days, a composite of hospital survival and days alive without cardiovascular or respiratory organ support through 21 days. The primary analysis was a bayesian cumulative logistic model. Odds ratios (ORs) greater than 1 represent improved outcomes.
RESULTS On February 25, 2022, enrollment was discontinued due to safety concerns. Among 679 critically ill patients with available primary outcome data, the median age was 56 years and 239 participants (35.2%) were women. Median (IQR) organ supportâfree days among critically ill patients was 10 (â1 to 16) in the ACE inhibitor group (nâ=â231), 8 (â1 to 17) in the ARB group (nâ=â217), and 12 (0 to 17) in the control group (nâ=â231) (median adjusted odds ratios of 0.77 [95% bayesian credible interval, 0.58-1.06] for improvement for ACE inhibitor and 0.76 [95% credible interval, 0.56-1.05] for ARB compared with control). The posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitors and ARBs worsened organ supportâfree days compared with control were 94.9% and 95.4%, respectively. Hospital survival occurred in 166 of 231 critically ill participants (71.9%) in the ACE inhibitor group, 152 of 217 (70.0%) in the ARB group, and 182 of 231 (78.8%) in the control group (posterior probabilities that ACE inhibitor and ARB worsened hospital survival compared with control were 95.3% and 98.1%, respectively).
CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE In this trial, among critically ill adults with COVID-19, initiation of an ACE inhibitor or ARB did not improve, and likely worsened, clinical outcomes.
TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT0273570
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Noise Optimization for High-Bandwidth Ion Channel Recordings
Single-molecule measurements often exhibit weak signals and fast kinetics, making them particularly challenging to record with high fidelity. This thesis presents an analysis of voltage-clamp current recordings of single ion channels, and concludes that considerable improvements in signal-to-noise ratios can be achieved by minimizing all parasitic capacitances associated with these measurements. A custom integrated amplifier in a 0.13-micron complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process is designed for high-bandwidth ion channel recordings, and systems are designed to closely incorporate this amplifier with solid-state nanopore sensors, lipid membranes, and biological ion channels. The low capacitance of these integrated platforms reduces noise at high frequencies, enabling signals to be measured up to ten times faster than had been previously achieved. In addition to improving signal quality, the small physical size of these integrated systems portends the arrival of massively parallel high-performance ion channel recording systems for drug discovery and biomolecular sensing applications
Mug Shots: Systematic Biases in the Perception of Facial Orientation within Pictorial Spaces
Pictures are 2-D projections of a 3-D world, so pictorial spaces behave differently than the 3-D visual spaces we inhabit. For instance, the angular orientation of a face pictured in half-profile view is systematically overestimated by the human observer â a 35° view is estimated to be approximately 45°. What is the cause for this perceptual orientation bias? We tested three different hypotheses. (1) The phenomenon is specific to pictorial projections due to the twofoldness of the medium and does not occur in 3-D space. (2) It can be explained with the depth compression expected when the vantage point of the observer is closer to the picture than the point of projection. (3) The visual system uses a shape prior that does not match the elliptical horizontal cross section of a typical head. Our results support the third hypothesis, and this effect can be mitigated through adding geometric information through structure-from-motion
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