Analysis of the geographic distribution of HFRS in Liaoning Province between 2000 and 2005

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) is endemic in Liaoning Province, China, and this province was the most serious area affected by HFRS during 2004 to 2005. In this study, we conducted a spatial analysis of HFRS cases with the objective to determine the distribution of HFRS cases and to identify key areas for future public health planning and resource allocation in Liaoning Province.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The annual average incidence at the county level was calculated using HFRS cases reported between 2000 and 2005 in Liaoning Province. GIS-based spatial analyses were conducted to detect spatial distribution and clustering of HFRS incidence at the county level, and the difference of relative humidity and forestation between the cluster areas and non-cluster areas was analyzed.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Spatial distribution of HFRS cases in Liaoning Province from 2000 to 2005 was mapped at the county level to show crude incidence, excess hazard, and spatial smoothed incidence. Spatial cluster analysis suggested 16 and 41 counties were at increased risk for HFRS (p < 0.01) with the maximum spatial cluster sizes at ≤ 50% and ≤ 30% of the total population, respectively, and the analysis showed relative humidity and forestation in the cluster areas were significantly higher than in other areas.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Some clustering of HFRS cases in Liaoning Province may be etiologically linked. There was strong evidence some HFRS cases in Liaoning Province formed clusters, but the mechanism underlying it remains unknown. In this study we found the clustering was consistent with the relative humidity and amount of forestation, and showed data indicating there may be some significant relationships.</p

MLTK01: A Prototyping Toolkit for Tangible Learning Things

This work illustrates and reflects on the design process of MLTK01, an open-source toolkit for fast prototyping tangible learning things, built on top of Arduino and ml5js. The toolkit was developed as a response to the current lack of fast and easy to use tools for tangible experiments with machine learning. Learning from insights gained through previous projects, we defined a set of basic building blocks necessary to enable such experiments and engaged in an iterative process of sketching, prototyping and preliminary testing of the toolkit. MLTK01 includes a custom PCB, a software library and accessories. Together with a descriptive account of the design process we also discuss possible applications of the toolkit and its implications for a design process of tangible learning thing

Analyzing Traffic Crash Severity in Work Zones under Different Light Conditions

Previous studies have investigated various factors that contribute to the severity of work zone crashes. However, little has been done on the specific effects of light conditions. Using the data from the Enhanced Tennessee Roadway Information Management System (E-TRIMS), crashes that occurred in the Tennessee work zones during 2003–2015 are categorized into three light conditions: daylight, dark-lighted, and dark-not-lighted. One commonly used decision tree method—Classification and Regression Trees (CART)—is adopted to investigate the factors contributing to crash severity in highway work zones under these light conditions. The outcomes from the three decision trees with differing light conditions show significant differences in the ranking and importance of the factors considered in the study, thereby indicating the necessity of examining traffic crashes according to light conditions. By separately considering the crash characteristics under different light conditions, some new findings are obtained from this study. The study shows that an increase in the number of lanes increases the crash severity level in work zones during the day while decreasing the severity at night. Similarly, drugs and alcohol are found to increase the severity level significantly under the dark-not-lighted condition, while they have a limited influence under daylight and dark-lighted conditions

Predictors of student veterans progression and graduation in Veteran to Bachelor of Science in Nursing (VBSN) Programs: A multisite study

Background Capitalizing on the veteran\u27s extensive service experience, values, and norms, Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) proposed Nurse Education, Practice, Quality and Retention – Veterans\u27 Bachelor of Science (VBSN) Program grants (2016–2019). Purpose The purpose was to identify predictors of student veterans\u27 (SV) progression and graduation rates in VBSN programs. Methods A descriptive correlational retrospective design was used. Two hundred and eighty-two (282) SV records were examined. Results One hundred and forty (140) SVs graduated (49.6%) and 107 (37.9%) were still enrolled. Only program delivery mode (hybrid) was significantly associated with completion and confirmed by logistic regression modeling. An increased representation of SVs\u27 gender, race/ethnicity was present; however, gender, age, race, ethnicity, and veteran status did not significantly predict progression nor graduation. Conclusions Hybrid program delivery became the single predictor influencing VBSN progression and graduation. As non-traditional students in higher education with a history of social isolation and help-seeking stigma, this delivery mode may have assisted SV retention and persistence. With a registered nurse shortage and workforce calls for increased gender, race, and ethnic diversity, the findings suggest nursing education programs designed for veterans are a viable solution

A class imbalance loss for imbalanced object recognition

Abstract The class imbalance problem exists widely in vision data. In these imbalanced datasets, the majority classes dominate the loss and influence the gradient. Hence, these datasets have a significantly negative impact on the performance of many state-of-the-art methods. In this article, we propose a class imbalance loss (CI loss) to handle this problem. To distinguish imbalanced datasets in accordance with the extent of imbalance, we also define an imbalance degree that works as a decision index factor in the CI loss. Because the minority classes with fewer samples probably lose chances in descending the gradient in the training process, CI loss is introduced to make these minority classes descend further than the majority classes. In view of the imbalanced distribution of data in few-shot learning, a method for generating an imbalanced few-shot learning dataset is presented in this article. We conducted a large number of experiments in the MiniImageNet dataset, which showed the effectiveness of an algorithm for model-agnostic metalearning for rapid adaptation with CI loss. In the problem of detecting 15 ship categories, our loss function is transplanted to a rotational region convolutional neural network detection method and a cascade network architecture and achieves higher mean average precision than focal loss and cross-entropy loss. In addition, the Mixed National Institute of Standards and Technology dataset and the Moving and Stationary Target Acquisition and Recognition dataset are sampled to imbalance datasets to verify the effectiveness of CI loss

Low-Coverage Whole Genome Sequencing Using Laser Capture Microscopy with Combined Digital Droplet PCR: An Effective Tool to Study Copy Number and Kras Mutations in Early Lung Adenocarcinoma Development

Defining detailed genomic characterization of early tumor progression is critical to identifying key regulators and pathways in carcinogenesis as potentially druggable targets. In human lung cancer, work to characterize early cancer development has mainly focused on squamous cancer, as the earliest lesions are more proximal in the airways and often accessible by repeated bronchoscopy. Adenocarcinomas are typically located distally in the lung, limiting accessibility for biopsy of pre-malignant and early stages. Mouse lung cancer models recapitulate many human genomic features and provide a model for tumorigenesis with pre-malignant atypical adenomatous hyperplasia and in situ adenocarcinomas often developing contemporaneously within the same animal. Here, we combined tissue characterization and collection by laser capture microscopy (LCM) with digital droplet PCR (ddPCR) and low-coverage whole genome sequencing (LC-WGS). ddPCR can be used to identify specific missense mutations in Kras (Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog, here focused on Kras Q61) and estimate the percentage of mutation predominance. LC-WGS is a cost-effective method to infer localized copy number alterations (CNAs) across the genome using low-input DNA. Combining these methods, the histological stage of lung cancer can be correlated with appearance of Kras mutations and CNAs. The utility of this approach is adaptable to other mouse models of human cancer

Low-Coverage Whole Genome Sequencing Using Laser Capture Microscopy with Combined Digital Droplet PCR: An Effective Tool to Study Copy Number and Kras Mutations in Early Lung Adenocarcinoma Development

Defining detailed genomic characterization of early tumor progression is critical to identifying key regulators and pathways in carcinogenesis as potentially druggable targets. In human lung cancer, work to characterize early cancer development has mainly focused on squamous cancer, as the earliest lesions are more proximal in the airways and often accessible by repeated bronchoscopy. Adenocarcinomas are typically located distally in the lung, limiting accessibility for biopsy of pre-malignant and early stages. Mouse lung cancer models recapitulate many human genomic features and provide a model for tumorigenesis with pre-malignant atypical adenomatous hyperplasia and in situ adenocarcinomas often developing contemporaneously within the same animal. Here, we combined tissue characterization and collection by laser capture microscopy (LCM) with digital droplet PCR (ddPCR) and low-coverage whole genome sequencing (LC-WGS). ddPCR can be used to identify specific missense mutations in Kras (Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene homolog, here focused on Kras Q61) and estimate the percentage of mutation predominance. LC-WGS is a cost-effective method to infer localized copy number alterations (CNAs) across the genome using low-input DNA. Combining these methods, the histological stage of lung cancer can be correlated with appearance of Kras mutations and CNAs. The utility of this approach is adaptable to other mouse models of human cancer

Deep ladder reconstruction-classification network for unsupervised domain adaptation

Abstract Unsupervised Domain Adaptation aims to learn a classifier for an unlabeled target domain by transferring knowledge from a labeled source domain. Most existing approaches learn domain-invariant features by adapting the entire information of each image. However, forcing adaptation of domain-specific components can undermine the effectiveness of learned features. We propose a novel architecture called Deep Ladder Reconstruction-Classification Network (DLaReC) which is designed to learn cross-domain shared contents by suppressing domain-specific variations. The DLaReC adopts an encoder with cross-domain sharing and a target-domain reconstruction decoder. The encoder and decoder are connected with residual shortcuts at each intermediate layer. By this means, the domain-specific components are directly fed to the decoder for reconstruction, relieving the pressure to learn domain-specific variations at later layers of the shared encoder. Therefore, DLaReC allows the encoder to focus on learning cross-domain shared representations and ignore domain-specific variations. DLaReC is implemented by jointly learning three tasks: supervised classification of the source domain, unsupervised reconstruction of the target domain and cross-domain shared representation adaptation. Extensive experiments on Digit, Office31, ImageCLEF-DA and Office-Home datasets demonstrate the DLaReC outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the whole. The average accuracy on the Digit datasets, for instance, is improved from 95.6% to 96.9%. In addition, the result on Amazon → Webcam obtains significant improvement, i.e., from 91.1% to 94.7%