Application of Depth-Averaged 2D Numerical Model for Evaluation of the Vegetal Resistance in a Natural River

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchiv

Inter-KD: Intermediate Knowledge Distillation for CTC-Based Automatic Speech Recognition

Recently, the advance in deep learning has brought a considerable improvement in the end-to-end speech recognition field, simplifying the traditional pipeline while producing promising results. Among the end-to-end models, the connectionist temporal classification (CTC)-based model has attracted research interest due to its non-autoregressive nature. However, such CTC models require a heavy computational cost to achieve outstanding performance. To mitigate the computational burden, we propose a simple yet effective knowledge distillation (KD) for the CTC framework, namely Inter-KD, that additionally transfers the teacher's knowledge to the intermediate CTC layers of the student network. From the experimental results on the LibriSpeech, we verify that the Inter-KD shows better achievements compared to the conventional KD methods. Without using any language model (LM) and data augmentation, Inter-KD improves the word error rate (WER) performance from 8.85 % to 6.30 % on the test-clean.Comment: Accepted by 2022 SLT Worksho

Cell density-dependent differential proliferation of neural stem cells on omnidirectional nanopore-arrayed surface

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Valproic Acid Downregulates the Expression of MGMT and Sensitizes Temozolomide-Resistant Glioma Cells

Temozolomide (TMZ) has become a key therapeutic agent in patients with malignant gliomas; however, its survival benefit remains unsatisfactory. Valproic acid (VPA) has emerged as an anticancer drug via inhibition of histone deacetylases (HDACs), but the therapeutic advantages of a combination with VPA and TMZ remain poorly understood. The main aim of the present study was to determine whether an antitumor effect could be potentiated by a combination of VPA and TMZ, especially in TMZ-resistant cell lines. A combination of VPA and TMZ had a significantly enhanced antitumor effect in TMZ-resistant malignant glioma cells (T98 and U138). This enhanced antitumor effect correlated with VPA-mediated reduced O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) expression, which plays an important role in cellular resistance to alkylating agents. In vitro, the combination of these drugs enhanced the apoptotic and autophagic cell death, as well as suppressed the migratory activities in TMZ-resistant cell lines. Furthermore, in vivo efficacy experiment showed that treatment of combination of VPA and TMZ significantly inhibited tumor growth compared with the monotherapy groups of mice. These results suggest that the clinical efficacy of TMZ chemotherapy in TMZ-resistant malignant glioma may be improved by combination with VPA

Can a Biomechanical Foot Orthosis Affect Gait in Patients With Hallux Valgus? A Pilot Study

Objective To investigate the effects of customized biomechanical foot orthosis (BFO) on kinematic data during gait in patients with hallux valgus (HV) deformities and compare the results with those of a normal control group. Methods Ten patients with HV deformities and 10 healthy volunteers were enrolled in this study. HV deformity was diagnosed using biomechanical and radiological assessments by a rehabilitation physician. Patients received the customized BFO manufactured at a commercial orthosis laboratory (Biomechanics, Goyang, South Korea) according to the strictly defined procedure by a single experienced technician. The spatiotemporal and kinematic data acquired by the Vicon 3D motion capture system (Oxford Metrics, Oxford, UK) were compared between the intervention groups (control vs. HV without orthosis) and between the HV groups (with vs. without orthosis). Results The temporal-spatial and kinematic parameters of the HV group were significantly different from those of the control group. After applying BFO to the HV group, significantly increased ranges of plantar flexion motion and hindfoot inversion were observed. Furthermore, the HV group with BFO showed improved gait cadence, walking speed, and stride length, although the results were not statistically significant. Conclusion Our results suggest that it is imperative to understand the pathophysiology of HV, and the application of customized BFO can be useful for improving kinematics in HV deformities

Efficacy evaluation of combination vaccine of recombinant C-terminal fragments of ApxIA, ApxIIA and ApxIIIA in piglets

The efficacy of the combination vaccine of the individual C-terminal fragments of ApxIA, ApxIIA and ApxIIIA of Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae (APP) was evaluated in piglets. Twenty piglets were divided equally into 2 groups (n=10). All piglets were intramuscularly primed at 4 week-of-age (0 week post prime inoculation (WPPI)) and were intramuscularly boosted at 6 week-of-age (2 WPPI). Group A piglets were inoculated with sterile PBS and group B piglets were inoculated with the combination vaccine. Concentrations of each of the C-terminal fragment-specific IgG as determined by ELISA were significantly higher in group B than in group A from 2 WPPI until the end of this study. Clinical signs were observed from only 10% of group B piglets after the challenge with the mixture of APP serotypes 1, 2 and 5 at 4 WPPI, while 50% of group A piglets were protected against APP infections. Overall, intramuscular inoculation with the vaccine candidate can efficiently protect piglets against APP infection