What's the best approach to diagnosing food allergies in infants?

A well-designed oral food challenge (OFC) is the most reliable diagnostic test for infants whose clinical history and physical examination suggest a specific food allergy (strength of recommendation [SOR]: C, consensus guidelines)

Fitting in a complex chi^2 landscape using an optimized hypersurface sampling

Fitting a data set with a parametrized model can be seen geometrically as finding the global minimum of the chi^2 hypersurface, depending on a set of parameters {P_i}. This is usually done using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. The main drawback of this algorithm is that despite of its fast convergence, it can get stuck if the parameters are not initialized close to the final solution. We propose a modification of the Metropolis algorithm introducing a parameter step tuning that optimizes the sampling of parameter space. The ability of the parameter tuning algorithm together with simulated annealing to find the global chi^2 hypersurface minimum, jumping across chi^2{P_i} barriers when necessary, is demonstrated with synthetic functions and with real data

REVIEW: 25 years of Sea Level Records from the Arctic Ocean Using Radar Altimetry

In recent years, there has been a large focus of the Arctic due the rapid changes of the region. The sea level of the Arctic Ocean is an important climate indicator. The Arctic sea ice is decreasing and has since 1997 experienced a steepening in the decrease. The Arctic sea level determination is challenging due to the seasonal to permanent sea ice cover, the lack of regional coverage of satellites, the satellite instruments ability to measure ice, insufficient geophysical models, residual orbit errors, challenging retracking of satellite altimeter data. We present the DTU/TUM 25-year sea level record based on satellite altimetry data in the Arctic Ocean from the ERS1 (1991) to CryoSat-2 (present) satellites. The sea level record is compared with several tide gauges and other available partial sea level records contributing to the ESA CCI Sea level initiative. We use updated geophysical corrections and a combination of altimeter data: REAPER (ERS1), ALES+ retracker (ERS2, Envisat), combined Rads and DTUs in-house retracker LARS (CryoSat-2). The ALES+ is an upgraded version of the Adaptive Leading Edge Subwaveform Retracker that has been developed to improve data quality and quantity in the coastal ocean, without degrading the results in the open ocean. ALES+ aims at retracking peaky waveforms typical of lead reflections without modifying the fitting model used in the open ocean. Finally, we discuss the seasonal and regional variations over the past 25 years in the Arctic sea level.<br/

Mapping the X-Ray Emission Region in a Laser-Plasma Accelerator

The x-ray emission in laser-plasma accelerators can be a powerful tool to understand the physics of relativistic laser-plasma interaction. It is shown here that the mapping of betatron x-ray radiation can be obtained from the x-ray beam profile when an aperture mask is positioned just beyond the end of the emission region. The influence of the plasma density on the position and the longitudinal profile of the x-ray emission is investigated and compared to particle-in-cell simulations. The measurement of the x-ray emission position and length provides insight on the dynamics of the interaction, including the electron self-injection region, possible multiple injection, and the role of the electron beam driven wakefield.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Interface-aware signal temporal logic

Safety and security are major concerns in the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Signal temporal logic (STL) was proposedas a language to specify and monitor the correctness of CPS relativeto formalized requirements. Incorporating STL into a developmentprocess enables designers to automatically monitor and diagnosetraces, compute robustness estimates based on requirements, andperform requirement falsification, leading to productivity gains inverification and validation activities; however, in its current formSTL is agnostic to the input/output classification of signals, andthis negatively impacts the relevance of the analysis results.In this paper we propose to make the interface explicit in theSTL language by introducing input/output signal declarations. Wethen define new measures of input vacuity and output robustnessthat better reflect the nature of the system and the specification in-tent. The resulting framework, which we call interface-aware signaltemporal logic (IA-STL), aids verification and validation activities.We demonstrate the benefits of IA-STL on several CPS analysisactivities: (1) robustness-driven sensitivity analysis, (2) falsificationand (3) fault localization. We describe an implementation of our en-hancement to STL and associated notions of robustness and vacuityin a prototype extension of Breach, a MATLAB®/Simulink®toolboxfor CPS verification and validation. We explore these methodologi-cal improvements and evaluate our results on two examples fromthe automotive domain: a benchmark powertrain control systemand a hydrogen fuel cell system

A Novel Transgenic Rat Model of Robust Cerebral Microvascular Amyloid with Prominent Vasculopathy

Accumulation of fibrillar amyloid β protein in blood vessels of the brain, a condition known as cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), is a common pathology of elderly individuals, a prominent comorbidity of Alzheimer disease, and a driver of vascular cognitive impairment and dementia. Although several transgenic mouse strains have been generated that develop varying levels of CAA, consistent models of associated cerebral microhemorrhage and vasculopathy observed clinically have been lacking. Reliable preclinical animal models of CAA and microhemorrhage are needed to investigate the molecular pathogenesis of this condition. Herein, we describe the generation and characterization of a novel transgenic rat (rTg-DI) that produces low levels of human familial CAA Dutch/Iowa E22Q/D23N mutant amyloid β protein in brain and faithfully recapitulates many of the pathologic aspects of human small-vessel CAA. rTg-DI rats exhibit early-onset and progressive accumulation of cerebral microvascular fibrillar amyloid accompanied by early-onset and sustained behavioral deficits. Comparable to CAA in humans, the cerebral microvascular amyloid in rTg-DI rats causes capillary structural alterations, promotes prominent perivascular neuroinflammation, and produces consistent, robust microhemorrhages and small-vessel occlusions that are readily detected by magnetic resonance imaging. The rTg-DI rats provide a new model to investigate the pathogenesis of small-vessel CAA and microhemorrhages, to develop effective biomarkers for this condition and to test therapeutic interventions

An Improved and Homogeneous Altimeter Sea Level Record from the ESA Climate Change Initiative

Sea Level is a very sensitive index of climate change since it integrates the impacts of ocean warming and ice mass loss from glaciers and the ice sheets. Sea Level has been listed as an Essential Climate Variable (ECV) by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). During the past 25 years, the sea level ECV has been measured from space by different altimetry missions that have provided global and regional observations of sea level variations. As part of the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) program of the European Space Agency (ESA) (established in 2010), the Sea Level project (SL_cci) aimed at providing an accurate and homogeneous long-term satellite-based sea level record. At the end of the first phase of the project (2010-2013), an initial version (v1.1) of the sea level ECV has been made available to users (Ablain et al., 2015). During the second phase (2014-2017), improved altimeter standards have been selected to produce new sea level products (called SL_cci v2.0) based on 9 altimeter missions for the period 1993-2015 (https://doi.org/10.5270/esa-sea_level_cci-1993_2015-v_2.0-201612). Corresponding orbit solutions, geophysical corrections and altimeter standards used in this v2.0 dataset are described in details in Quartly et al. (2017). The present paper focuses on the description of the SL_cci v2.0 ECV and associated uncertainty and discusses how it has been validated. Various approaches have been used for the quality assessment such as internal validation, comparisons with sea level records from other groups and with in-situ measurements, sea level budget closure analyses and comparisons with model outputs. Compared to the previous version of the sea level ECV, we show that use of improved geophysical corrections, careful bias reduction between missions and inclusion of new altimeter missions lead to improved sea level products with reduced uncertainties at different spatial and temporal scales. However, there is still room for improvement since the uncertainties remain larger than the GCOS requirements. Perspectives for subsequent evolutions are also discussed