A Systematic Review Examining the Experimental Methodology Behind In Vivo Testing of Hiatus Hernia and Diaphragmatic Hernia Mesh

INTRODUCTION: Mesh implants are regularly used to help repair both hiatus hernias (HH) and diaphragmatic hernias (DH). In vivo studies are used to test not only mesh safety, but increasingly comparative efficacy. Our work examines the field of in vivo mesh testing for HH and DH models to establish current practices and standards. METHOD: This systematic review was registered with PROSPERO. Medline and Embase databases were searched for relevant in vivo studies. Forty-four articles were identified and underwent abstract review, where 22 were excluded. Four further studies were excluded after full-text review-leaving 18 to undergo data extraction. RESULTS: Of 18 studies identified, 9 used an in vivo HH model and 9 a DH model. Five studies undertook mechanical testing on tissue samples-all uniaxial in nature. Testing strip widths ranged from 1-20 mm (median 3 mm). Testing speeds varied from 1.5-60 mm/minute. Upon histology, the most commonly assessed structural and cellular factors were neovascularisation and macrophages respectively (n = 9 each). Structural analysis was mostly qualitative, where cellular analysis was equally likely to be quantitative. Eleven studies assessed adhesion formation, of which 8 used one of four scoring systems. Eight studies measured mesh shrinkage. DISCUSSION: In vivo studies assessing mesh for HH and DH repair are uncommon. Within this relatively young field, we encourage surgical and materials testing institutions to discuss its standardisation

Outdoor Microplastic Analysis Using Inlet Filters from an NOx Regulatory Air Quality Monitoring Device

Atmospheric microplastics (MPs) are a ubiquitous environmental contaminant of emerging concern. Sampling methods provide information relating to surface area concentration and MP characteristics, without direct comparison with routinely measured standard air quality parameters. This study analysed 6 active air samples generated by a local authority as part of their routine air quality monitoring activities. Continuous sampling totalled 10 months, within the city centre of Kingston-upon-Hull. By using μFTIR analysis, levels of total particles detected using the NOx inlet filters ranged from 5139 ± 2843 particles m−2 day−1, comprising 1029 ± 594 MPs m−2 day−1. The controls displayed a mean level of 2.00 ± 3.49 MPs. The polymers nylon (32%) and polypropylene, PP (22%) were the most abundant. Small fragments of 47.42 ± 48.57 μm (length) and 21.75 ± 13.62 μm (width) were most common. An increase in MP levels during April 2020 coincided with an increase in PM10 levels. This study used robust procedures to measure MPs in the air by exploiting existing air quality monitoring equipment. Knowing the levels, types, and characteristics of MPs can inform toxicity studies to provide more environmentally relevant exposures, which is urgent now that MPs have been reported in human lung tissu

Advanced imaging and tissue engineering of the human limbal epithelial stem cell niche

The limbal epithelial stem cell niche provides a unique, physically protective environment in which limbal epithelial stem cells reside in close proximity with accessory cell types and their secreted factors. The use of advanced imaging techniques is described to visualize the niche in three dimensions in native human corneal tissue. In addition, a protocol is provided for the isolation and culture of three different cell types, including human limbal epithelial stem cells from the limbal niche of human donor tissue. Finally, the process of incorporating these cells within plastic compressed collagen constructs to form a tissue-engineered corneal limbus is described and how immunohistochemical techniques may be applied to characterize cell phenotype therein

The International Natural Product Sciences Taskforce (INPST) and the power of Twitter networking exemplified through #INPST hashtag analysis

Background: The development of digital technologies and the evolution of open innovation approaches have enabled the creation of diverse virtual organizations and enterprises coordinating their activities primarily online. The open innovation platform titled "International Natural Product Sciences Taskforce" (INPST) was established in 2018, to bring together in collaborative environment individuals and organizations interested in natural product scientific research, and to empower their interactions by using digital communication tools. Methods: In this work, we present a general overview of INPST activities and showcase the specific use of Twitter as a powerful networking tool that was used to host a one-week "2021 INPST Twitter Networking Event" (spanning from 31st May 2021 to 6th June 2021) based on the application of the Twitter hashtag #INPST. Results and Conclusion: The use of this hashtag during the networking event period was analyzed with Symplur Signals (https://www.symplur.com/), revealing a total of 6,036 tweets, shared by 686 users, which generated a total of 65,004,773 impressions (views of the respective tweets). This networking event's achieved high visibility and participation rate showcases a convincing example of how this social media platform can be used as a highly effective tool to host virtual Twitter-based international biomedical research events

Robust mouldable intelligent scheduling using application benchmarking for elastic environments

In a green IT obsessed world hardware efficiency and usage of computer systems becomes essential. There is a multiplier effect when this is applied to High Performance Computing systems. With an average compute rack consuming between 7 and 25kW it is essential that resources be utilised in the most optimum way possible. Currently the batch schedulers employed to manage these multi-user multi-application environments are nothing more than match making and service level agreement (SLA) enforcing tools. System Administrators strive to get maximum “usage efficiency” from the systems by fine-tuning and restricting queues to get a predictable performance characteristic, e.g. any software package running in queue X will take N number of cores and run for a maximum of T time. These fixed approximations of performance characteristics are used then to schedule queued jobs in the system, in the hope of achieving 100% utilisation. Choosing which queue to place a job in, falls on the user. A savvy user may use trial an error to establish which queue is best suited to his/her needs, but most users will find a queue that gives them results and stick to it – even if they change the model being simulated. This usually leads to a job receiving either an over or under allocation of resources, resulting in either hardware failure or inefficient utilisation of the system. Ideally the system should know how a particular application with a particular dataset would behave when run. Benchmarking Schemes have historically been used as marketing and administration tools. Some schemes like Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) and Perfect Benchmark used “real” applications with generic datasets to test a systems performance. This way a scientist looking for a cluster computer could ask questions such as “How well will my software run?” rather than “How many FLOPS can I get out of this system?” If adapted to include an API to plug in any software to benchmark and to pass results to other software, these toolkits can be used for purposes other than sales and marketing. If a job scheduler can get access to performance characteristic curves for every application on the system, optimal resource allocation and scheduling/queuing decisions can be made at submit time by the system rather than the user. This would further improve the performance of Mouldable schedulers that currently follow the Downey model. Along with the decision-making regarding resource allocation and scheduling, if the scheduler is able to collect a historic record of simulations by the particular users, then further optimisation is possible. This would lead to better and safer utilisation of the system. Currently AI is used in some decision making in Mouldable schedulers. Given a user inputted variance of resources required the scheduler makes a decision on resource allocation by selecting from the available range. If the user supplied range is incorrect, the scheduler is powerless to adapt, and on a next run cannot learn from previous mistakes or successes. This project aims to adapt an open-framework benchmarking scheme to feed information to a job scheduler. This job scheduler will also use gathered heuristic data to make scheduling decisions and optimise the resource allocation and the system utilisation. This work will be further expanded to include elastic or even shared resource environments where the scheduler can expand the size of its world based on either financial or SLA driven decision

Integrating refugee doctors into host health-care systems

Refugee doctors face a number of barriers to practising medicine, despite the significant contributions that they can make

Two days National Conference -VISHWATECH 2014 Design of Sub Threshold Flip Flop For Ultra Low Power Applications

Abstract: Power consumption is considered as one of the important challenge in modern VLSI design along with area and speed consideration. Flip flop plays very important role in digital systems. In this paper comparative study of four different flip flops which includes pulse triggered as well as conditional technique flip flop such as IP-DCO, MHLFF, CPSFF, and CPFF topologies in sub threshold operation are examined. In recent years the ultra low power application can be possible using sub threshold technology. Using the advantage of this technology the power consumption of these flip flops is minimized. Sub threshold circuit consume less power than strong inversion circuit at the same frequency. Design is done using HSPICE in TSMC 180nm technology. The flip flops are analysed in all corners and parameters such as delay, power delay product, Energy delay product, and average power is measured at power supply voltage 300mV, and applied clock frequency is 1 MHz at temperature of 27 0

Epoxidation of cyclohexene with iodosylbenzene catalysed by Ru(III)-dmg and Ru(III)-dpg complexes: synthesis and characterisation of catalytically active Ru(V)-oxo intermediates

The complexes K[RuIII(H-dmg)2Cl2], 1 (dmg= dimethylglyoxime), and K[RuIII(H-dpg)2Cl2], 2 (dpg=diphenylglyoxime), and the oxo complexes [Ruv(H-dmg)2(O)Cl], 3, and [Ruv(H-dpg)2(O)Cl], 4, were synthesised and characterised by elemental analysis, UV-Vis and IR spectroscopy and electrochemical studies. The epoxidation of cyclohexene with iodosylbenzene catalysed by complexes 1 and 2 is reported