2,890 research outputs found
A Public Health Framework for Screening Mammography: Evidence-Based Versus Politically Mandated Care
This Viewpoint highlights the societal risks of politically motivated mandates relating to public health guidelines. Although the Affordable Care Act mandated insurance coverage for U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF)-recommended preventive services, it went further for mammography screening. Instead of relying on the most recent USPSTF guidelines, Congress amended the ACA to require the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to use its 2002 guidelines, which recommended screening every 1-2 years starting at age 40. The FY 2016 Consolidated Appropriations Act instructs DHHS to interpret any reference to “current” USPSTF breast cancer screening recommendations to mean those issued “before 2009” — in other words, its 2002 recommendations. Essentially, Congress is requiring health insurers to ignore modern scientific assessments, and instead use 14-year-old guidance.
The ACA improved the public’s health by guaranteeing that insurers provide uniform, cost-free access to preventive services based on modern evidence of effectiveness. The public’s health is best served when women’s personal decisions about screening are informed by evidence rather than political considerations. The Congress’s paternalistic response to USPSTF mammography-screening recommendations vividly illuminate the social costs of politically mandated care. Rather than benefiting women, political interference with science can discourage shared decision-making, increase harms from screening, and sow public doubt about the value and integrity of science
Object segmentation in depth maps with one user click and a synthetically trained fully convolutional network
With more and more household objects built on planned obsolescence and
consumed by a fast-growing population, hazardous waste recycling has become a
critical challenge. Given the large variability of household waste, current
recycling platforms mostly rely on human operators to analyze the scene,
typically composed of many object instances piled up in bulk. Helping them by
robotizing the unitary extraction is a key challenge to speed up this tedious
process. Whereas supervised deep learning has proven very efficient for such
object-level scene understanding, e.g., generic object detection and
segmentation in everyday scenes, it however requires large sets of per-pixel
labeled images, that are hardly available for numerous application contexts,
including industrial robotics. We thus propose a step towards a practical
interactive application for generating an object-oriented robotic grasp,
requiring as inputs only one depth map of the scene and one user click on the
next object to extract. More precisely, we address in this paper the middle
issue of object seg-mentation in top views of piles of bulk objects given a
pixel location, namely seed, provided interactively by a human operator. We
propose a twofold framework for generating edge-driven instance segments.
First, we repurpose a state-of-the-art fully convolutional object contour
detector for seed-based instance segmentation by introducing the notion of
edge-mask duality with a novel patch-free and contour-oriented loss function.
Second, we train one model using only synthetic scenes, instead of manually
labeled training data. Our experimental results show that considering edge-mask
duality for training an encoder-decoder network, as we suggest, outperforms a
state-of-the-art patch-based network in the present application context.Comment: This is a pre-print of an article published in Human Friendly
Robotics, 10th International Workshop, Springer Proceedings in Advanced
Robotics, vol 7. The final authenticated version is available online at:
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89327-3\_16, Springer Proceedings in
Advanced Robotics, Siciliano Bruno, Khatib Oussama, In press, Human Friendly
Robotics, 10th International Workshop,
Novel APC promoter and exon 1B deletion and allelic silencing in three mutation-negative classic familial adenomatous polyposis families
BACKGROUND: The overwhelming majority (approximately 80%) of individuals with classic familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) exhibit mutations in the coding sequence of the adenomatous polyposis coli (APC) tumor suppressor gene. Families without detectable APC mutations are unable to benefit from the use of genetic testing for clinical management of this autosomal dominant syndrome. METHODS: We used exome sequencing and linkage analysis, coupled with second-generation sequencing of the APC locus including non-coding regions to investigate three APC mutation-negative classical FAP families. RESULTS: We identified a novel ~11 kb deletion localized 44 kb upstream of the transcription start site of APC that encompasses the APC 1B promoter and exon. This deletion was present only in affected family members of one kindred with classical FAP. Furthermore, this same deletion with identical breakpoints was found in the probands of two additional APC mutation-negative classical FAP kindreds. Phasing analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) around the deletion site in the three probands showed evidence of a shared haplotype, suggesting a common founder deletion in the three kindreds. SNP analysis within the coding sequence of APC, revealed that this ~11 kb deletion was accompanied by silencing of one of the APC alleles in blood-derived RNA of affected individuals. CONCLUSIONS: These results support the causal role of a novel promoter deletion in FAP and suggest that non-coding deletions, identifiable using second-generation sequencing methods, may account for a significant fraction of APC mutation-negative classical FAP families
Phase dynamics of inductively coupled intrinsic Josephson junctions and terahertz electromagnetic radiation
The Josephson effects associated with quantum tunneling of Cooper pairs
manifest as nonlinear relations between the superconductivity phase difference
and the bias current and voltage. Many novel phenomena appear, such as Shapiro
steps in dc cuurent-voltage (IV) characteristics of a Josephson junction under
microwave shining, which can be used as a voltage standard. Inversely, the
Josephson effects provide a unique way to generate high-frequency
electromagnetic (EM) radiation by dc bias voltage. The discovery of cuprate
high-Tc superconductors accelerated the effort to develop novel source of EM
waves based on a stack of atomically dense-packed intrinsic Josephson junctions
(IJJs), since the large superconductivity gap covers the whole terahertz
frequency band. Very recently, strong and coherent terahertz radiations have
been successfully generated from a mesa structure of
single crystal which works both as the source
of energy gain and as the cavity for resonance. It is then found theoretically
that, due to huge inductive coupling of IJJs produced by the nanometer junction
separation and the large London penetration depth of order of of
the material, a novel dynamic state is stabilized in the coupled sine-Gordon
system, in which kinks in phase differences are developed responding
to the standing wave of Josephson plasma and are stacked alternatively in the
c-axis. This novel solution of the inductively coupled sine-Gordon equations
captures the important features of experimental observations. The theory
predicts an optimal radiation power larger than the one available to date by
orders of magnitude, and thus suggests the technological relevance of the
phenomena.Comment: review article (69 pages, 30 figures
Ab Initio Calculation of Crystalline Electric Fields and Kondo Temperatures in Ce-Compounds
We have calculated the band- hybridizations for CeLaM
compounds ( and ; M=Pb, In, Sn, Pd) within the local
density approximation and fed this into a non-crossing approximation for the
Anderson impurity model applied to both dilute and concentrated limits. Our
calculations produce crystalline electric field splittings and Kondo
temperatures with trends in good agreement with experiment and demonstrate the
need for detailed electronic structure information on hybridization to describe
the diverse behaviors of these Ce compounds.Comment: 13 pages(RevTeX), 3 Postscript figure
Upregulation of Haploinsufficient Gene Expression in the Brain by Targeting a Long Non-coding RNA Improves Seizure Phenotype in a Model of Dravet Syndrome
AbstractDravet syndrome is a devastating genetic brain disorder caused by heterozygous loss-of-function mutation in the voltage-gated sodium channel gene SCN1A. There are currently no treatments, but the upregulation of SCN1A healthy allele represents an appealing therapeutic strategy. In this study we identified a novel, evolutionary conserved mechanism controlling the expression of SCN1A that is mediated by an antisense non-coding RNA (SCN1ANAT). Using oligonucleotide-based compounds (AntagoNATs) targeting SCN1ANAT we were able to induce specific upregulation of SCN1A both in vitro and in vivo, in the brain of Dravet knock-in mouse model and a non-human primate. AntagoNAT-mediated upregulation of Scn1a in postnatal Dravet mice led to significant improvements in seizure phenotype and excitability of hippocampal interneurons. These results further elucidate the pathophysiology of Dravet syndrome and outline a possible new approach for the treatment of this and other genetic disorders with similar etiology
Decomposing Star Formation and Active Galactic Nucleus with Spitzer Mid-Infrared Spectra: Luminosity Functions and Co-Evolution
We present Spitzer 7-38um spectra for a 24um flux limited sample of galaxies
at z~0.7 in the COSMOS field. The detailed high-quality spectra allow us to
cleanly separate star formation (SF) and active galactic nucleus (AGN) in
individual galaxies. We first decompose mid-infrared Luminosity Functions
(LFs). We find that the SF 8um and 15um LFs are well described by Schechter
functions. AGNs dominate the space density at high luminosities, which leads to
the shallow bright-end slope of the overall mid-infrared LFs. The total
infrared (8-1000um) LF from 70um selected galaxies shows a shallower bright-end
slope than the bolometrically corrected SF 15um LF, owing to the intrinsic
dispersion in the mid-to-far-infrared spectral energy distributions. We then
study the contemporary growth of galaxies and their supermassive black holes
(BHs). Seven of the 31 Luminous Infrared Galaxies with Spitzer spectra host
luminous AGNs, implying an AGN duty cycle of 23+/-9%. The time-averaged ratio
of BH accretion rate and SF rate matches the local M_BH-M_bulge relation and
the M_BH-M_host relation at z ~ 1. These results favor co-evolution scenarios
in which BH growth and intense SF happen in the same event but the former spans
a shorter lifetime than the latter. Finally, we compare our mid-infrared
spectroscopic selection with other AGN identification methods and discuss
candidate Compton-thick AGNs in the sample. While only half of the mid-infrared
spectroscopically selected AGNs are detected in X-ray, ~90% of them can be
identified with their near-infrared spectral indices.Comment: ApJ Accepted. emulateapj style. 16 pages, 9 figures, 4 table
Challenges for String Cosmology
We critically assess the twin prospects of describing the observed universe
in string theory, and using cosmological experiments to probe string theory.
For the purposes of this short review, we focus on the limitations imposed by
our incomplete understanding of string theory. After presenting an array of
significant obstacles, we indicate a few areas that may admit theoretical
progress in the near future.Comment: 18 pages; contribution to a focus issue on string cosmology for
Classical and Quantum Gravit
Small-scale solar magnetic fields
As we resolve ever smaller structures in the solar atmosphere, it has become
clear that magnetism is an important component of those small structures.
Small-scale magnetism holds the key to many poorly understood facets of solar
magnetism on all scales, such as the existence of a local dynamo, chromospheric
heating, and flux emergence, to name a few. Here, we review our knowledge of
small-scale photospheric fields, with particular emphasis on quiet-sun field,
and discuss the implications of several results obtained recently using new
instruments, as well as future prospects in this field of research.Comment: 43 pages, 18 figure
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