High performance Ge nanowire anode sheathed with carbon for lithium rechargeable batteries

We present a single crystalline Ge nanowire anode material sheathed with carbon prepared by a solid-liquid solution method. The composite electrode composed of Ge nanowires shows impressive electrochemical properties, exhibiting a very high reversible charge capacity (after lithium removal) of 963 mA h g(-1) with a coulombic efficiency of 91%.close11810

REFUGE Challenge: A unified framework for evaluating automated methods for glaucoma assessment from fundus photographs

[EN] Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of irreversible but preventable blindness in working age populations. Color fundus photography (CFP) is the most cost-effective imaging modality to screen for retinal disorders. However, its application to glaucoma has been limited to the computation of a few related biomarkers such as the vertical cup-to-disc ratio. Deep learning approaches, although widely applied for medical image analysis, have not been extensively used for glaucoma assessment due to the limited size of the available data sets. Furthermore, the lack of a standardize benchmark strategy makes difficult to compare existing methods in a uniform way. In order to overcome these issues we set up the Retinal Fundus Glaucoma Challenge, REFUGE (https://refuge.grand-challenge.org), held in conjunction with MIC-CAI 2018. The challenge consisted of two primary tasks, namely optic disc/cup segmentation and glaucoma classification. As part of REFUGE, we have publicly released a data set of 1200 fundus images with ground truth segmentations and clinical glaucoma labels, currently the largest existing one. We have also built an evaluation framework to ease and ensure fairness in the comparison of different models, encouraging the development of novel techniques in the field. 12 teams qualified and participated in the online challenge. This paper summarizes their methods and analyzes their corresponding results. In particular, we observed that two of the top-ranked teams outperformed two human experts in the glaucoma classification task. Furthermore, the segmentation results were in general consistent with the ground truth annotations, with complementary outcomes that can be further exploited by ensembling the results.This work was supported by the Christian Doppler Research Association, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs and the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development, J.I.O is supported by WWTF (Medical University of Vienna: AugUniWien/FA7464A0249, University of Vienna: VRG12- 009). Team Masker is supported by Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province of China (Grant 2017A030310647). Team BUCT is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 11571031). The authors would also like to thank REFUGE study group for collaborating with this challenge.Orlando, JI.; Fu, H.; Breda, JB.; Van Keer, K.; Bathula, DR.; Diaz-Pinto, A.; Fang, R.... (2020). REFUGE Challenge: A unified framework for evaluating automated methods for glaucoma assessment from fundus photographs. Medical Image Analysis. 59:1-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.media.2019.101570S12159Abramoff, M. D., Garvin, M. K., & Sonka, M. (2010). Retinal Imaging and Image Analysis. IEEE Reviews in Biomedical Engineering, 3, 169-208. doi:10.1109/rbme.2010.2084567Abràmoff, M. D., Lavin, P. T., Birch, M., Shah, N., & Folk, J. C. (2018). Pivotal trial of an autonomous AI-based diagnostic system for detection of diabetic retinopathy in primary care offices. npj Digital Medicine, 1(1). doi:10.1038/s41746-018-0040-6Al-Bander, B., Williams, B., Al-Nuaimy, W., Al-Taee, M., Pratt, H., & Zheng, Y. (2018). Dense Fully Convolutional Segmentation of the Optic Disc and Cup in Colour Fundus for Glaucoma Diagnosis. Symmetry, 10(4), 87. doi:10.3390/sym10040087Almazroa, A., Burman, R., Raahemifar, K., & Lakshminarayanan, V. (2015). Optic Disc and Optic Cup Segmentation Methodologies for Glaucoma Image Detection: A Survey. Journal of Ophthalmology, 2015, 1-28. doi:10.1155/2015/180972Burlina, P. M., Joshi, N., Pekala, M., Pacheco, K. D., Freund, D. E., & Bressler, N. M. (2017). Automated Grading of Age-Related Macular Degeneration From Color Fundus Images Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. JAMA Ophthalmology, 135(11), 1170. doi:10.1001/jamaophthalmol.2017.3782Carmona, E. J., Rincón, M., García-Feijoó, J., & Martínez-de-la-Casa, J. M. (2008). Identification of the optic nerve head with genetic algorithms. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 43(3), 243-259. doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2008.04.005Chawla, N. V., Bowyer, K. W., Hall, L. O., & Kegelmeyer, W. P. (2002). SMOTE: Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 16, 321-357. doi:10.1613/jair.953Christopher, M., Belghith, A., Bowd, C., Proudfoot, J. A., Goldbaum, M. H., Weinreb, R. N., … Zangwill, L. M. (2018). Performance of Deep Learning Architectures and Transfer Learning for Detecting Glaucomatous Optic Neuropathy in Fundus Photographs. Scientific Reports, 8(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-018-35044-9De Fauw, J., Ledsam, J. R., Romera-Paredes, B., Nikolov, S., Tomasev, N., Blackwell, S., … Ronneberger, O. (2018). Clinically applicable deep learning for diagnosis and referral in retinal disease. Nature Medicine, 24(9), 1342-1350. doi:10.1038/s41591-018-0107-6Decencière, E., Zhang, X., Cazuguel, G., Lay, B., Cochener, B., Trone, C., … Klein, J.-C. (2014). FEEDBACK ON A PUBLICLY DISTRIBUTED IMAGE DATABASE: THE MESSIDOR DATABASE. Image Analysis & Stereology, 33(3), 231. doi:10.5566/ias.1155DeLong, E. R., DeLong, D. M., & Clarke-Pearson, D. L. (1988). Comparing the Areas under Two or More Correlated Receiver Operating Characteristic Curves: A Nonparametric Approach. Biometrics, 44(3), 837. doi:10.2307/2531595European Glaucoma Society Terminology and Guidelines for Glaucoma, 4th Edition - Part 1Supported by the EGS Foundation. (2017). British Journal of Ophthalmology, 101(4), 1-72. doi:10.1136/bjophthalmol-2016-egsguideline.001Farbman, Z., Fattal, R., Lischinski, D., & Szeliski, R. (2008). Edge-preserving decompositions for multi-scale tone and detail manipulation. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 27(3), 1-10. doi:10.1145/1360612.1360666Fu, H., Cheng, J., Xu, Y., Wong, D. W. K., Liu, J., & Cao, X. (2018). Joint Optic Disc and Cup Segmentation Based on Multi-Label Deep Network and Polar Transformation. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 37(7), 1597-1605. doi:10.1109/tmi.2018.2791488Gómez-Valverde, J. J., Antón, A., Fatti, G., Liefers, B., Herranz, A., Santos, A., … Ledesma-Carbayo, M. J. (2019). Automatic glaucoma classification using color fundus images based on convolutional neural networks and transfer learning. Biomedical Optics Express, 10(2), 892. doi:10.1364/boe.10.000892Gulshan, V., Peng, L., Coram, M., Stumpe, M. C., Wu, D., Narayanaswamy, A., … Webster, D. R. (2016). Development and Validation of a Deep Learning Algorithm for Detection of Diabetic Retinopathy in Retinal Fundus Photographs. JAMA, 316(22), 2402. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.17216Hagiwara, Y., Koh, J. E. W., Tan, J. H., Bhandary, S. V., Laude, A., Ciaccio, E. J., … Acharya, U. R. (2018). Computer-aided diagnosis of glaucoma using fundus images: A review. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, 165, 1-12. doi:10.1016/j.cmpb.2018.07.012Haleem, M. S., Han, L., van Hemert, J., & Li, B. (2013). Automatic extraction of retinal features from colour retinal images for glaucoma diagnosis: A review. Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics, 37(7-8), 581-596. doi:10.1016/j.compmedimag.2013.09.005Holm, S., Russell, G., Nourrit, V., & McLoughlin, N. (2017). DR HAGIS—a fundus image database for the automatic extraction of retinal surface vessels from diabetic patients. Journal of Medical Imaging, 4(1), 014503. doi:10.1117/1.jmi.4.1.014503Joshi, G. D., Sivaswamy, J., & Krishnadas, S. R. (2011). Optic Disk and Cup Segmentation From Monocular Color Retinal Images for Glaucoma Assessment. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 30(6), 1192-1205. doi:10.1109/tmi.2011.2106509Kaggle, 2015. Diabetic Retinopathy Detection. https://www.kaggle.com/c/diabetic-retinopathy-detection. [Online; accessed 10-January-2019].Kumar, J. R. H., Seelamantula, C. S., Kamath, Y. S., & Jampala, R. (2019). Rim-to-Disc Ratio Outperforms Cup-to-Disc Ratio for Glaucoma Prescreening. Scientific Reports, 9(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-019-43385-2Lavinsky, F., Wollstein, G., Tauber, J., & Schuman, J. S. (2017). The Future of Imaging in Detecting Glaucoma Progression. Ophthalmology, 124(12), S76-S82. doi:10.1016/j.ophtha.2017.10.011Lecun, Y., Bottou, L., Bengio, Y., & Haffner, P. (1998). Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition. Proceedings of the IEEE, 86(11), 2278-2324. doi:10.1109/5.726791Li, Z., He, Y., Keel, S., Meng, W., Chang, R. T., & He, M. (2018). Efficacy of a Deep Learning System for Detecting Glaucomatous Optic Neuropathy Based on Color Fundus Photographs. Ophthalmology, 125(8), 1199-1206. doi:10.1016/j.ophtha.2018.01.023Litjens, G., Kooi, T., Bejnordi, B. E., Setio, A. A. A., Ciompi, F., Ghafoorian, M., … Sánchez, C. I. (2017). A survey on deep learning in medical image analysis. Medical Image Analysis, 42, 60-88. doi:10.1016/j.media.2017.07.005Liu, S., Graham, S. L., Schulz, A., Kalloniatis, M., Zangerl, B., Cai, W., … You, Y. (2018). A Deep Learning-Based Algorithm Identifies Glaucomatous Discs Using Monoscopic Fundus Photographs. Ophthalmology Glaucoma, 1(1), 15-22. doi:10.1016/j.ogla.2018.04.002Lowell, J., Hunter, A., Steel, D., Basu, A., Ryder, R., Fletcher, E., & Kennedy, L. (2004). Optic Nerve Head Segmentation. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 23(2), 256-264. doi:10.1109/tmi.2003.823261Maier-Hein, L., Eisenmann, M., Reinke, A., Onogur, S., Stankovic, M., Scholz, P., … Kopp-Schneider, A. (2018). Why rankings of biomedical image analysis competitions should be interpreted with care. Nature Communications, 9(1). doi:10.1038/s41467-018-07619-7Miri, M. S., Abramoff, M. D., Lee, K., Niemeijer, M., Wang, J.-K., Kwon, Y. H., & Garvin, M. K. (2015). Multimodal Segmentation of Optic Disc and Cup From SD-OCT and Color Fundus Photographs Using a Machine-Learning Graph-Based Approach. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 34(9), 1854-1866. doi:10.1109/tmi.2015.2412881Niemeijer, M., van Ginneken, B., Cree, M. J., Mizutani, A., Quellec, G., Sanchez, C. I., … Abramoff, M. D. (2010). Retinopathy Online Challenge: Automatic Detection of Microaneurysms in Digital Color Fundus Photographs. IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 29(1), 185-195. doi:10.1109/tmi.2009.2033909Odstrcilik, J., Kolar, R., Budai, A., Hornegger, J., Jan, J., Gazarek, J., … Angelopoulou, E. (2013). Retinal vessel segmentation by improved matched filtering: evaluation on a new high‐resolution fundus image database. IET Image Processing, 7(4), 373-383. doi:10.1049/iet-ipr.2012.0455Orlando, J. I., Prokofyeva, E., & Blaschko, M. B. (2017). A Discriminatively Trained Fully Connected Conditional Random Field Model for Blood Vessel Segmentation in Fundus Images. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 64(1), 16-27. doi:10.1109/tbme.2016.2535311Park, S. J., Shin, J. Y., Kim, S., Son, J., Jung, K.-H., & Park, K. H. (2018). A Novel Fundus Image Reading Tool for Efficient Generation of a Multi-dimensional Categorical Image Database for Machine Learning Algorithm Training. Journal of Korean Medical Science, 33(43). doi:10.3346/jkms.2018.33.e239Poplin, R., Varadarajan, A. V., Blumer, K., Liu, Y., McConnell, M. V., Corrado, G. S., … Webster, D. R. (2018). Prediction of cardiovascular risk factors from retinal fundus photographs via deep learning. Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2(3), 158-164. doi:10.1038/s41551-018-0195-0Porwal, P., Pachade, S., Kamble, R., Kokare, M., Deshmukh, G., Sahasrabuddhe, V., & Meriaudeau, F. (2018). Indian Diabetic Retinopathy Image Dataset (IDRiD): A Database for Diabetic Retinopathy Screening Research. Data, 3(3), 25. doi:10.3390/data3030025Prokofyeva, E., & Zrenner, E. (2012). Epidemiology of Major Eye Diseases Leading to Blindness in Europe: A Literature Review. Ophthalmic Research, 47(4), 171-188. doi:10.1159/000329603Raghavendra, U., Fujita, H., Bhandary, S. V., Gudigar, A., Tan, J. H., & Acharya, U. R. (2018). Deep convolution neural network for accurate diagnosis of glaucoma using digital fundus images. Information Sciences, 441, 41-49. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2018.01.051Reis, A. S. C., Sharpe, G. P., Yang, H., Nicolela, M. T., Burgoyne, C. F., & Chauhan, B. C. (2012). Optic Disc Margin Anatomy in Patients with Glaucoma and Normal Controls with Spectral Domain Optical Coherence Tomography. Ophthalmology, 119(4), 738-747. doi:10.1016/j.ophtha.2011.09.054Russakovsky, O., Deng, J., Su, H., Krause, J., Satheesh, S., Ma, S., … Fei-Fei, L. (2015). ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. International Journal of Computer Vision, 115(3), 211-252. doi:10.1007/s11263-015-0816-ySchmidt-Erfurth, U., Sadeghipour, A., Gerendas, B. S., Waldstein, S. M., & Bogunović, H. (2018). Artificial intelligence in retina. Progress in Retinal and Eye Research, 67, 1-29. doi:10.1016/j.preteyeres.2018.07.004Sevastopolsky, A. (2017). Optic disc and cup segmentation methods for glaucoma detection with modification of U-Net convolutional neural network. Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, 27(3), 618-624. doi:10.1134/s1054661817030269Taha, A. A., & Hanbury, A. (2015). Metrics for evaluating 3D medical image segmentation: analysis, selection, and tool. BMC Medical Imaging, 15(1). doi:10.1186/s12880-015-0068-xThakur, N., & Juneja, M. (2018). Survey on segmentation and classification approaches of optic cup and optic disc for diagnosis of glaucoma. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 42, 162-189. doi:10.1016/j.bspc.2018.01.014Tham, Y.-C., Li, X., Wong, T. Y., Quigley, H. A., Aung, T., & Cheng, C.-Y. (2014). Global Prevalence of Glaucoma and Projections of Glaucoma Burden through 2040. Ophthalmology, 121(11), 2081-2090. doi:10.1016/j.ophtha.2014.05.013Johnson, S. S., Wang, J.-K., Islam, M. S., Thurtell, M. J., Kardon, R. H., & Garvin, M. K. (2018). Local Estimation of the Degree of Optic Disc Swelling from Color Fundus Photography. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 277-284. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-00949-6_33Trucco, E., Ruggeri, A., Karnowski, T., Giancardo, L., Chaum, E., Hubschman, J. P., … Dhillon, B. (2013). Validating Retinal Fundus Image Analysis Algorithms: Issues and a Proposal. Investigative Opthalmology & Visual Science, 54(5), 3546. doi:10.1167/iovs.12-10347Vergara, I. A., Norambuena, T., Ferrada, E., Slater, A. W., & Melo, F. (2008). StAR: a simple tool for the statistical comparison of ROC curves. BMC Bioinformatics, 9(1). doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-265Wu, Z., Shen, C., & van den Hengel, A. (2019). Wider or Deeper: Revisiting the ResNet Model for Visual Recognition. Pattern Recognition, 90, 119-133. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2019.01.006Zheng, Y., Hijazi, M. H. A., & Coenen, F. (2012). Automated «Disease/No Disease» Grading of Age-Related Macular Degeneration by an Image Mining Approach. Investigative Opthalmology & Visual Science, 53(13), 8310. doi:10.1167/iovs.12-957

Dynamic interaction in polyurethane containing the boronic ester groups

Dynamic interaction can impart useful functionality to the polymer. Boronic esters are known to form a variety of dynamic-covalent bonds by reacting with diols. Dynamic-covalent bonds can be readily controlled by temperature or the addition of water. Boronic ester-containing molecules have been noted in a number of self-healing applications. The self-healing material restores their function by restoring the physical damage, fracture, cracks and prevents destruction. When boronic ester-containing molecules exposed to moisture in the atmosphere, hydrolysis occurs on the surface and healing is caused by re-esterification. Here in, the polyurethane-based polymers were synthesized with boronic ester compounds and Polytetrahydrofuran (PTMEG). The restored property of boronic esters was observed under ambient conditions. The re-esterification experiments of boronic esters were carried out in surface force apparatus (SFA) through water and dry environments. These bulk materials confirmed by mechanical testing, polymer properties.2

Modeling Quadrotor Dynamics in a Wind Field

This article presents aerodynamic modeling of quadrotors taking into account the effect of wind. Model equations are derived using blade element momentum theory and combined with classical quadrotor dynamics. Parameters are identified by a wind tunnel experiment. The resulting dynamics differ from the classical ones in two aspects. First, the effect of external wind is directly included. Second, the drag force and torque generated due to the movement of quadrotor itself, which exists without external wind, are also included. The second takes place because four propellers move in the air due to translational and rotational motions of the quadrotor. Both aspects are novel to the widely used quadrotor dynamics. Model validation is carried out by both theoretical analysis and experiment. Analyzing the model leads to the fact that when the quadrotor is linear-quadratic regulator controlled, it loses stability when wind amplitude exceeds a threshold. This fact has been experimentally validated using 20 different cases of wind amplitudes and directions. The experimental results well agree with the theoretical prediction. © 1996-2012 IEEE.1

Y‑Shaped Ligand-Driven Gold Nanoparticles for Highly Efficient Tumoral Uptake and Photothermal Ablation

We report functional gold nanoparticles (AuNP) with antibody-like ligands. These particles consist of Y-shaped ligands and AuNP. Transferrin (Tf) and Tat peptide were linked to each head of a Y-shaped poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG)-containing dopamine at one tail site. Also, Y-shaped ligands (with Tf and Tat peptide) were anchored to the surface of the AuNP as the result of noncovalent conjugation of dopamine and the AuNP. Interestingly, the partial shielding of Tat peptides by large Tf molecules rather improved Tf-mediated endocytosis of the AuNP, while minimizing the natural nonspecific cell interaction of Tat peptides. This system resulted in highly improved <i>in vitro</i>/<i>in vivo</i> tumor-selective uptake over AuNP bearing a single ligand (Tf or Tat peptides). Furthermore, this system resulted in significant enhancement of <i>in vivo</i> photothermal tumor cell ablation under light-irradiation conditions for AuNP. We believe that this design is a promising method to easily modify conventional antibodies or ligands to improve their disease-recognition ability