60 research outputs found
Subsurface Hydrogeochemical Processes in Lower Bhavani River Basin, Tamil Nadu, India
Bhavani River is one of the important tributaries of Cauvery River, and originates in the Silent Valley range of Kerala State, India. The Lower Bhavani River Basin lies between 11 15' N and 11 45' N latitudes and 77 00' E and 77 40' E longitudes with an area of 2,475 km2. Variation of groundwater quality in an area is a function of physical and chemical parameters that are greatly influenced by geological formations, recharge-discharge mechanisms of groundwater and anthropogenic activities. The correlation of groundwater chemistry with hydrologic and geologic environments gives valuable information to understand the effect of these processes and to properly manage aquifer systems. A detailed study has been carried out to understand the subsurface hydrogeochemical processes that are responsible for the quality variation of groundwater. Residence time of groundwater was also considered to be an important parameter to study groundwater evolution. The NETPATH computer code was used to model the major subsurface processes contributing to the evolution of groundwater chemistry. The occurrence of such chemical processes as silicate weathering, carbonate dissolution, ion exchange and dilution due to rain were verified by performing inverse mass balance modeling using the same code. The net geochemical mass balance reactions between initial and final water were identified and quantified based on the flow in selected well pairs. The model output shows that dilution, ion exchange and illite precipitation are the dominant processes that control the chemistry of the groundwater along the flow paths. Calcite and NaCl dissolution are also involved to a certain extent. Reverse ion exchange process is also observed in two models
A Knowledge Distillation Framework For Enhancing Ear-EEG Based Sleep Staging With Scalp-EEG Data
Sleep plays a crucial role in the well-being of human lives. Traditional
sleep studies using Polysomnography are associated with discomfort and often
lower sleep quality caused by the acquisition setup. Previous works have
focused on developing less obtrusive methods to conduct high-quality sleep
studies, and ear-EEG is among popular alternatives. However, the performance of
sleep staging based on ear-EEG is still inferior to scalp-EEG based sleep
staging. In order to address the performance gap between scalp-EEG and ear-EEG
based sleep staging, we propose a cross-modal knowledge distillation strategy,
which is a domain adaptation approach. Our experiments and analysis validate
the effectiveness of the proposed approach with existing architectures, where
it enhances the accuracy of the ear-EEG based sleep staging by 3.46% and
Cohen's kappa coefficient by a margin of 0.038.Comment: Code available at :
https://github.com/Mithunjha/EarEEG_KnowledgeDistillatio
Towards Interpretable Sleep Stage Classification Using Cross-Modal Transformers
Accurate sleep stage classification is significant for sleep health
assessment. In recent years, several machine-learning based sleep staging
algorithms have been developed, and in particular, deep-learning based
algorithms have achieved performance on par with human annotation. Despite the
improved performance, a limitation of most deep-learning based algorithms is
their black-box behavior, which has limited their use in clinical settings.
Here, we propose a cross-modal transformer, which is a transformer-based method
for sleep stage classification. The proposed cross-modal transformer consists
of a novel cross-modal transformer encoder architecture along with a
multi-scale one-dimensional convolutional neural network for automatic
representation learning. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods
and eliminates the black-box behavior of deep-learning models by utilizing the
interpretability aspect of the attention modules. Furthermore, our method
provides considerable reductions in the number of parameters and training time
compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at
https://github.com/Jathurshan0330/Cross-Modal-Transformer.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 6 table
Assessing genetic diversity, allelic richness and genetic relationship among races in ICRISAT foxtail millet core collection
Foxtail millet (Setaria italica (L.) P. Beauv.) is an ideal crop for changing climate and food habits of peoples due to its short duration, high photosynthetic efficiency, nutritional richness and fair resistance to pest and diseases. However, foxtail millet yields are low mainly due to the lack of effort for its improvement and the lack of proper utilization of existing genetic variability. To enhance the use of diverse germplasm in breeding programmes, a core collection in foxtail millet consisting of 155 accessions was established. Core collection accessions were fingerprinted using 84 markers (81 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and three Expressed Sequence Tag (EST)-SSRs). Our results showed the presence of greater molecular diversity in the foxtail millet core collection. The 84 markers detected a total of 1356 alleles with an average of 16.14 alleles (4–35) per locus. Of these, 368 were rare alleles, 906 common alleles and 82 the most frequent alleles. Sixty-one unique alleles that were specific to a particular accession and useful for germplasm identification were also detected. In this study, the genetic diversity of foxtail millet was fairly correlated well with racial classification, and the race Indica showed a greater genetic distance from the races Maxima and Moharia. The pairwise estimate of dissimilarity was >0.50 except in 123 out of 11,935 pairs which indicated a greater genetic variability. Two hundred and fifty pairs of genetically most diverse accessions were identified. This large molecular variation observed in the core collection could be utilized effectively by breeders or researchers for the selection of diverse parents for breeding cultivars and the development of mapping populations
VEGF-B hypertrophy predisposes to transition from diastolic to systolic heart failure in hypertensive rats
AIMS: Cardiac energy metabolism is centrally involved in heart failure (HF), although the direction of the metabolic alterations is complex and likely dependent on the particular stage of HF progression. Vascular endothelial growth factor B (VEGF-B) has been shown to modulate metabolic processes and to induce physiological cardiac hypertrophy; thus, it could be cardioprotective in the failing myocardium. This study investigates the role of VEGF-B in cardiac proteomic and metabolic adaptation in HF during aldosterone and high-salt hypertensive challenges. METHODS AND RESULTS: Male rats overexpressing the cardiac-specific VEGF-B transgene (VEGF-B TG) were treated for 3 or 6 weeks with deoxycorticosterone-acetate combined with a high-salt (HS) diet (DOCA + HS) to induce hypertension and cardiac damage. Extensive longitudinal echocardiographic studies of HF progression were conducted, starting at baseline. Sham-treated rats served as controls. To evaluate the metabolic alterations associated with HF, cardiac proteomics by mass spectrometry was performed. Hypertrophic non-treated VEGF-B TG hearts demonstrated high oxygen and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) demand with early onset of diastolic dysfunction. Administration of DOCA + HS to VEGF-B TG rats for 6 weeks amplified the progression from cardiac hypertrophy to HF, with a drastic drop in heart ATP concentration. Dobutamine stress echocardiographic analyses uncovered a significantly impaired systolic reserve. Mechanistically, the hallmark of the failing TG heart was an abnormal energy metabolism with decreased mitochondrial ATP, preceding the attenuated cardiac performance and leading to systolic HF. CONCLUSIONS: This study shows that the VEGF-B TG accelerates metabolic maladaptation which precedes structural cardiomyopathy in experimental hypertension and ultimately leads to systolic HF
Capsaicin mediates caspases activation and induces apoptosis through P38 and JNK MAPK pathways in human renal carcinoma
Association of pelvic fracture patterns, pelvic binder use and arterial angio-embolization with transfusion requirements and mortality rates; a 7-year retrospective cohort study
Deflection of Steel Reinforced Concrete Beam Prestressed with CFRP Bar
Carbon Fiber Reinforced polymer (CFRP) bars are weak in yielding property which results in sudden failure of structure
at failure load. Inclusion of non-pretensioned steel reinforcement in the tension side of CFRP based prestressed concrete beam
will balance the yielding requirements of member and it will show the definite crack failure pattern before failure. Experimental
investigation has been carried out to study the deflection behavior of partially prestressed beam. Experimental works includes four
beam specimens stressed by varying degree of prestressing. The Partial Prestressing Ratio (PPR) of specimen is considered for
experimental works in the range of 0.6 to 0.8. A new deflection model is recommended in the present study considering the strain
contribution of CFRP bar and steel reinforcement for the fully bonded member. New deflection model converges to experimental
results with the error of less than 5%
Not Available
Not AvailableLoop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) is a rapid, highly specific and reliable technique, which is widely incorporated in the field for diagnosis of pathogens at their early stage of infection. In present study, RT-LAMP (Reverse transcription- Loop mediated isothermal amplification) assay was developed successfully to detect Sugarcane yellow leaf virus (SCYLV) causing yellow leaf disease (YLD) in sugarcane and compared with conventional reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) and quantitative real time (qRT-PCR) to assess its sensitivity. RT-LAMP was able to detect the SCYLV up to a limit of 10 pg (picogram), while, RT-PCR assays were able to detect this virus up to 100 pg only. Similarly, RT-LAMP was able to detect up to a limit of 10 pg in the sugarcane cultivar (Co 06030) showing low virus titre whereas, in the same cultivar, RT-PCR and qRT-PCR showed a detection limit of 100 pg. This study revealed high sensitivity of RT-LAMP in detecting SCYLV in sugarcane and this is the first study to be reported on RT-LAMP based diagnosis of SCYLV in Indian sugarcane cultivars.Not Availabl
A Test of Everyday Reading Comprehension (TERC)
The aim of this study was to develop a standardised test of everyday reading comprehension for children in Australian schools. To this end, we developed two forms for the Test of Everyday Comprehension (TERC) and developed norms for children aged 6 to 12 and in grades 1 to 6. Measures of parallel form reliability indicated that the two TERC forms were equal in difficulty and measured a common concept. Measures of inter-rater reliability indicated that scoring the two TERC forms was simple enough to minimise differences between testers. Ideally, the TERC should be used (1) as a screening test for poor reading comprehension in primary-school children and (2) as a tool to communicate to parents the impact that a child's reading difficulty can have on their everyday life. Poor performance on the TERC should be followed-up by tests that target other aspects of the child's reading and language skills to locate the source of their reading comprehension problem.51 page(s
- …