Incidence Rates of Enterovirus 71 Infections in Young Children during a Nationwide Epidemic in Taiwan, 2008–09

Enterovirus 71 (EV71) was first isolated in California, USA, in 1969. Since then, EV71 has been identified globally. Recently, EV71 caused several life-threatening outbreaks in young children in tropical Asia. Development of EV71 vaccines becomes national priority in several Asia countries including Taiwan. To design clinical trials of EV71 vaccines, age-specific incidence rates of EV71 infections are required to identify target populations, estimate disease burdens, select endpoints of clinical efficacy, and estimate sample size. In Taiwan, nationwide EV71 epidemics occurred every 3–4 years but age-specific incidences of EV71 infection are not available. In 2006, we initiated a prospective cohort study in northern Taiwan to recruit neonates and follow up them. In 2008–09, a nationwide EV71 epidemic occurred and we found that age-specific incidence rates of EV71 infection increased from 1.71 per 100 person-years at 0–6 months of age to 4.09, 5.74, and 4.97 per 100 person-years at 7–12, 13–24, and 25–36 months of age, respectively. The cumulative incidence rate was 15% by 36 months of age, and 29% of EV71 infections were asymptomatic in young children. These findings would be helpful to development of EV71 vaccines in Taiwan and other Asian tropical countries

VoiceBank-2023: A Multi-Speaker Mandarin Speech Corpus for Constructing Personalized TTS Systems for the Speech Impaired

Services of personalized TTS systems for the Mandarin-speaking speech impaired are rarely mentioned. Taiwan started the VoiceBanking project in 2020, aiming to build a complete set of services to deliver personalized Mandarin TTS systems to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. This paper reports the corpus design, corpus recording, data purging and correction for the corpus, and evaluations of the developed personalized TTS systems, for the VoiceBanking project. The developed corpus is named after the VoiceBank-2023 speech corpus because of its release year. The corpus contains 29.78 hours of utterances with prompts of short paragraphs and common phrases spoken by 111 native Mandarin speakers. The corpus is labeled with information about gender, degree of speech impairment, types of users, transcription, SNRs, and speaking rates. The VoiceBank-2023 is available by request for non-commercial use and welcomes all parties to join the VoiceBanking project to improve the services for the speech impaired.Comment: submitted to 26th International Conference of the ORIENTAL-COCOSD

Enterovirus 71 Maternal Antibodies in Infants, Taiwan

Enterovirus 71 (EV71) causes life-threatening disease outbreaks in young children in Asia. This cohort study was conducted to understand the dynamics of maternal EV71 antibodies in Taiwanese young infants. Approximately 50% of neonates had detectable EV71 neutralizing antibodies, which declined to almost undetectable levels by 6 months of age

A multi-epoch algorithm for GPS/BDS single frequency precise point positioning

隨著物聯網（Internet of Things, IoT）的快速佈局與蓬勃發展，未來IoT的各式應用中，將對衛星定位產生更高的依賴度，因此僅使用單系統並無法提供更佳的導航服務，本研究整合全球定位系統(Global Positioning System, GPS)與北斗衛星導航系統(Beidou Satellite Navigation System, BDS)進行單頻精密單點定位，並希望達到即時定位之目的。 為了完善地整合GPS與BDS，本研究使用Helmert方差分量估計調整兩系統的系統權重以求達到最佳估測。觀測量誤差部分，使用IGS提供的Ultra-Rapid精密星曆修正GPS的衛星軌道誤差與衛星鐘差，使用IGS提供的廣播星曆修正BDS的衛星軌道誤差與衛星鐘差，使用IGS提供的全球電離層地圖修正電離層延遲誤差，對流層延遲誤差則是使用UNB3m模型進行修正。 定位演算法部分，本研究提出適應性多時刻演算法的概念，並進行了定位精度提升效率與程式計算時間的分析，其實驗結果與單時刻演算法進行比較後發現，在合理的時間成本增加下，適應性多時刻演算法確實能夠大幅地提升靜態單點定位精度。With the rapid and vigorous development of Internet of Things (IoT), many kinds of IoT applications will more highly depend on satellite positioning system in the future. Merely single system cannot provide better navigation service, so we integrate Global Positioning System (GPS) with Beidou Satellite Navigation System (BDS) for single frequency precise point positioning, and hope to achieve the purpose of real-time positioning. To integrate GPS with BDS well, we use Helmert variance component estimation to adjust the weighting of GPS and BDS. About the elimination of measurement errors, we use the Ultra-Rapid ephemeris provided by International GNSS Service (IGS) for correcting satellite orbit errors and satellite clock errors of GPS. IGS also provide broadcast ephemeris for BDS and was used here for correcting satellite orbit errors and satellite clock errors. The Global Ionospheric Map provided by IGS was adopted for correcting ionospheric delay errors. Moreover, UNB3m model was chosen for correcting tropospheric delay errors. On the positioning algorithm, the concept of adaptive multi-epoch algorithm was proposed. The positioning accuracy and the operation time were investigated. Comparing with the single-epoch algorithm, the experimental results show that adaptive multi-epoch algorithm can substantially enhance the precision of static positioning with reasonable cost of the operation time

A Wirelessly Powered Smart Contact Lens with Reconfigurable Wide Range and Tunable Sensitivity Sensor Readout Circuitry

This study presented a wireless smart contact lens system that was composed of a reconfigurable capacitive sensor interface circuitry and wirelessly powered radio-frequency identification (RFID) addressable system for sensor control and data communication. In order to improve compliance and reduce user discomfort, a capacitive sensor was embedded on a soft contact lens of 200 μm thickness using commercially available bio-compatible lens material and a standard manufacturing process. The results indicated that the reconfigurable sensor interface achieved sensitivity and baseline tuning up to 120 pF while consuming only 110 μW power. The range and sensitivity tuning of the readout circuitry ensured a reliable operation with respect to sensor fabrication variations and independent calibration of the sensor baseline for individuals. The on-chip voltage scaling allowed the further extension of the detection range and prevented the implementation of large on-chip elements. The on-lens system enabled the detection of capacitive variation caused by pressure changes in the range of 2.25 to 30 mmHg and hydration level variation from a distance of 1 cm using incident power from an RFID reader at 26.5 dBm

Isocitrate dehydrogenase 1–snail axis dysfunction significantly correlates with breast cancer prognosis and regulates cell invasion ability

Abstract Background The isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) gene family expresses key functional metabolic enzymes in the Krebs cycle and mediates the epigenetic reprogramming, which serves as an important biomarker of breast cancer. However, the expression levels of the IDH protein and their biological function in human breast cancer remain largely unknown. Methods In this study, the clinical impact of IDH1 expression on the progression and prognosis of breast cancer was evaluated using immunohistochemistry assay (IHC) of the corresponding tumor-adjacent normal, ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), and invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC) tissues from 309 patients with breast ductal carcinoma. The relationship between microRNA (miRNA) and IDH1 were examined by a bioinformatics approach, western blot and reporter assay. The biological functions of IDH1 were examined in breast cancer cells with IDH1 knockdown, including proliferation, migration and invasion. Results The present findings revealed that the mRNA and protein expression levels of IDH1 were both significantly lower in breast cancer tissues than in adjacent normal tissues. A low expression level of IDH1 in breast cancer significantly correlated with advanced stage (p = 0.012), lymph node metastasis (p = 0.018), and poor disease-specific survival (DSS) (adjusted hazard ratio (AHR), 1.57, 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.08–2.30; p = 0.02). Furthermore, oncogenic miR-32 and miR-92b were identified to suppress IDH1 expression, leading to the inhibition of cell migration and invasion. We further explored whether reduced expression of IDH1 significantly increases snail expression by activating HIFα (hypoxia-inducible factor-1 alpha) and NFκB (nuclear factor kappa B) signaling. Multivariate Cox regression analysis revealed that the combination of low IDH1 and high snail expression could be an independent risk factor for shorter DSS (AHR, 2.34; 95% CI, 1.32–4.16; p = 0.004) and shorter disease-free survival (AHR, 2.50; 95% CI, 1.39–4.50; p = 0.002) in patients with breast cancer. Conclusion Our findings revealed that a IDH1low/Snailhigh molecular signature could serve as an independent biomarker for poor prognosis in breast cance

Cumulative incidence rates of enterovirus 71 infection in northern Taiwan, 2008–09.

<p>*per 100 persons.</p>#<p>95% confidence interval was calculated based on the binominal exact distribution.</p

Laboratory diagnosis of symptomatic EV71 infections in young children, northern Taiwan, 2008–2009.

<p>HFMD: hand-foot-mouth disease.</p><p>*Including febrile illness, upper respiratory illness, and viral exanthema.</p

Age-specific incidence rates of enterovirus 71 infection in northern Taiwan, 2008–09.

<p>*Asymptomatic infection is identified based on seroconversion of EV71 neutralizing antibody in scheduled blood samples.</p>#<p>per 100 person-years.</p>$<p>95% confidence interval calculated based on the Poisson distribution.</p