Multifunctional Amine Mesoporous Silica Spheres Modified with Multiple Amine as Carriers for Drug Release

Mesoporous silica spheres were synthesized by using Stöber theory (MSN-40). Calcination of the mesostructured phase resulted in the starting solid. Organic modification with aminopropyl groups resulted in two MSN-40 materials: named MSN-NH2 and MSN-DQ-40, respectively. These two kinds of samples with different pore sizes (obtained from 3-[2-(2-aminoethylamino)ethylamino]propyl-trimethox-ysilane (NQ-62) and modified NQ-62) showed control of the delivery rate of ibuprofen (IBU) from the siliceous matrix. The obtained sample from modified NQ-62 has an increased loading rate and shows better control of the delivery rate of IBU than the obtained sample from NQ-62. These three solids were characterized using standard solid state procedures. During tests of in vitro drug release, an interesting phenomenon was observed: at high pH (pH 7.45), IBU in all carriers was released slowly; at low pH (pH 4.5), only a part of the IBU was slowly released from this carrier within 25 hours; most IBU was effectively confined in mesoporous material, but the remaining IBU was released rapidly and completely after 25 hours

An Empirical Analysis of Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Features Affecting Cost-effective Resource Procurement

<p>This repository contains code and data for the paper "An Empirical Analysis of Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Features Affecting Cost-effective Resource Procurement", by Cheng Wang, Qianlin Liang and Bhuvan Urgaonkar.</p

Functionalized Large-Pore Mesoporous Silica Microparticles for Gefitinib and Doxorubicin Codelivery

Large-pore coralline mesoporous silica microparticles (CMS) were synthesized using the triblock polymer PEG-b-PEO-b-PEG and a hydrothermal method. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) revealed the coralline morphology of the fabricated materials. The Brunauer&ndash;Emmett&ndash;Teller (BET) method and the Barrett&ndash;Joyner&ndash;Halenda (BJH) model confirmed the existence of large pores (20 nm) and of a tremendous specific surface area (663.865 m2&middot;g&minus;1) and pore volume (0.365 cm3&middot;g&minus;1). A novel pH-sensitive multiamine-chain carboxyl-functionalized coralline mesoporous silica material (CMS&ndash;(NH)3&ndash;COOH) was obtained via a facile &ldquo;grafting-to&rdquo; approach. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) validated the effective interfacial functionalization of CMS with carboxyl and multiamine chains. The encapsulation and release behavior of the dual drug (gefitinib (GB) and doxorubicin (DOX)) was also investigated. It was found that CMS&ndash;(NH)3&ndash;COOH allows rapid encapsulation with a high loading capacity of 47.36% for GB and 26.74% for DOX. Furthermore, the release profiles reveal that CMS&ndash;(NH)3&ndash;COOH can preferably control the release of DOX and GB. The accumulative release rates of DOX and GB were 32.03% and 13.66%, respectively, at a low pH (pH 5.0), while they reduced to 8.45% and 4.83% at pH 7.4. Moreover, all of the modified silica nanoparticles exhibited a high biocompatibility with a low cytotoxicity. In particular, the cytotoxicity of both of these two drugs was remarkably reduced after being encapsulated. CMS&ndash;(NH)3&ndash;COOH@GB@DOX showed tremendously synergistic effects of the dual drug in the antiproliferation and apoptosis of A549 human cancer cells in vitro

Chinese Food Image Database for Eating and Appetite Studies

Modern people live in an environment with ubiquitous food cues, including food advertisements, videos, and smells. Do these food cues change people's eating behavior? Since diet plays a crucial role in maintaining health, it has been researched for decades. As convenient alternatives for real food, food images are widely used in diet research. To date, researchers from Germany, Spain, and other countries have established food photo databases; however, these food pictures are not completely suitable for Chinese studies because of the ingredients and characteristics of Chinese food. The main goal of this research is to create a library of Chinese food images and to provide as complete a data reference as possible for future studies that use food images as experimental material. After standardized processing, we selected 508 common Chinese food pictures with high familiarity and recognizability and attached detailed classifications concerning taste, macronutrients, calories, and participants' emotional responses to the pictures. Additionally, with food pictures as material, we conducted research on how people make dietary decisions in order to identify the variables that may affect a person's food choices. The effects of individual perceived healthiness and palatability, gender, BMI, family income, and levels of emotional and restricted eating were examined using eating decisions based on healthiness and palatability as dependent variables. The results showed that people with low household incomes are more likely to be influenced by food taste in their dietary decision-making process, while individuals with high household incomes are more likely to consider the healthy aspects of food. Moreover, parental BMI affects what children consume, with children who have parents with higher BMIs being more prone to overlook the healthiness value of food

Dělen: Enabling Flexible and Adaptive Model-serving for Multi-tenant Edge AI

Model-serving systems expose machine learning (ML) models to applications programmatically via a high-level API. Cloud platforms use these systems to mask the complexities of optimally managing resources and servicing inference requests across multiple applications. Model serving at the edge is now also becoming increasingly important to support inference workloads with tight latency requirements. However, edge model serving differs substantially from cloud model serving in its latency, energy, and accuracy constraints: these systems must support multiple applications with widely different latency and accuracy requirements on embedded edge accelerators with limited computational and energy resources. To address the problem, this paper presents Dělen,1 a flexible and adaptive model-serving system for multi-tenant edge AI. Dělen exposes a high-level API that enables individual edge applications to specify a bound at runtime on the latency, accuracy, or energy of their inference requests. We efficiently implement Dělen using conditional execution in multi-exit deep neural networks (DNNs), which enables granular control over inference requests, and evaluate it on a resource-constrained Jetson Nano edge accelerator. We evaluate Dělen flexibility by implementing state-of-the-art adaptation policies using Dělen\u27s API, and evaluate its adaptability under different workload dynamics and goals when running single and multiple applications

Electric Field–Induced Release and Measurement (EFIRM) Characterization and Technical Validation of a Novel Liquid Biopsy Platform in Plasma and Saliva

Electric field-induced release and measurement (EFIRM) is a novel, plate-based, liquid biopsy platform capable of detecting circulating tumor DNA containing EGFR mutations directly from saliva and plasma in both early- and late-stage patients with non-small-cell lung cancer. We investigated the properties of the target molecule for EFIRM and determined that the platform preferentially detects single-stranded DNA molecules. We then investigated the properties of the EFIRM assay and determined the linearity, linear range, precision, and limit of detection for six different EGFR variants (the four most common g.Exon19del variants), p.T790M, and p.L858R). The limit of detection was in single-digit copy number for the latter two mutations, and the limit of detection for Exon19del was 5000 copies. Following these investigations, technical validations were performed for four separate EFIRM liquid biopsy assays, qualitative and quantitative assays for both saliva and plasma. We conclude that EFIRM liquid biopsy is an assay platform that interrogates a biomarker not targeted by any other extant platform (namely, circulating single-stranded DNA molecules). The assay has acceptable performance characteristics in both quantitative and qualitative assays on both saliva and plasma