3,224 research outputs found
Development and initial testing of a GDM information website for multi-ethnic women with GDM
BACKGROUND: Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) affects approximately 5–15 % of pregnant women in Australia. Highest rates are seen among women who are obese, from specific ethnic backgrounds and low socio-economic circumstance. These features also impact on uptake of self-management recommendations. GDM that is not well managed can give rise to serious pregnancy complications. The aim of this project was to develop and test an intervention to improve knowledge of GDM and GDM self-management principles. METHODS: A web-based intervention, consisting of resources aimed at a low level of literacy, was developed and tested among multi-ethnic women at a metropolitan hospital in Melbourne Australia. A basic one-group pre-test/post-test design was used to explore the impact of the intervention on knowledge, in 3 domains: (1) Knowledge of GDM; (2) food values, and;(3) GDM self-management principles. Questionnaire data was analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), version 21.0. Fisher’s exact test was used to test for an improvement in each knowledge scale. RESULTS: Twenty-one women with GDM, from multi-ethnic backgrounds, participated in the testing of the intervention. Results indicated that the intervention was effective at improving knowledge scores and this effect was greatest in the first domain, knowledge of GDM. Although some improvement of knowledge scores occurred in the other two domains, food values and self-management principles, these improvements were less than expected. This finding may relate to a number of misunderstandings in the interpretation of the web resource and survey questions. These issues will need to be resolved prior to proceeding to a clinical trial. CONCLUSION: Initial results from this study look promising and suggest that with some improvements, the intervention could prove a useful adjunct support for women with GDM from multi-ethnic and low socio-economic backgrounds. Conducting a randomised controlled trial is feasible in the future and will provide a useful means of examining efficacy of the intervention
Arene oxidation with malonoyl peroxides
Malonoyl peroxide 7, prepared in a single step from the commercially available diacid, is an effective reagent for the
oxidation of aromatics. Reaction of an arene with peroxide 7 at room temperature leads to the corresponding protected phenol
which can be unmasked by aminolysis. An ionic mechanism consistent with the experimental findings and supported by isotopic
labeling, Hammett analysis, EPR investigations and reactivity profile studies is proposed
Online conferences – Towards a new (virtual) reality
The recent article: Nature 579, 327–328 (2020), ending with the phrase: “You can’t just suddenly make a conference be online.”, has motivated us to write about the practicalities and philosophy of running online events, drawing on our extensive experience running an annual online computational chemistry conference. Our goals for this online conference series have always been: (1) Availability; (2) Community building and (3) Supporting young scientists. In this article, we highlight the motivations behind our initiative, how this has influenced the organisation of our online meeting, and discuss the benefits as well as the drawbacks of virtual meetings. Virtual conferences may not fully replace in-person meetings, but they are rapidly becoming an accepted alternative format. We discuss the hybrid online/in-person conference format as a future possibility that may offer an opportunity to reduce the environmental impact and accessibility barriers associate with in-person meetings without comprising networking and community-building opportunities
Investigating Ca II emission in the RS CVn binary ER Vulpeculae using the Broadening Function Formalism
The synchronously rotating G stars in the detached, short-period (0.7 d),
partially eclipsing binary, ER Vul, are the most chromospherically active
solar-type stars known. We have monitored activity in the Ca II H & K reversals
for almost an entire orbit. Rucinski's Broadening Function Formalism allows the
photospheric contribution to be objectively subtracted from the highly blended
spectra. The power of the BF technique is also demonstrated by the good
agreement of radial velocities with those measured by others from less crowded
spectral regions. In addition to strong Ca II emission from the primary and
secondary, there appears to be a high-velocity stream flowing onto the
secondary where it stimulates a large active region on the surface 30 - 40
degrees in advance of the sub-binary longitude. A model light curve with a spot
centered on the same longitude also gives the best fit to the observed light
curve. A flare with approximately 13% more power than at other phases was
detected in one spectrum. We suggest ER Vul may offer a magnified view of the
more subtle chromospheric effects synchronized to planetary revolution seen in
certain `51 Peg'-type systems.Comment: Accepted to AJ; 17 pages and 16 figure
Methanol-to-Olefins Catalysis with Hydrothermally Treated Zeolite SSZ-39
Zeolite SSZ-39 is evaluated for catalyzing the methanol-to-olefins (MTO) reaction. By steaming NH_4–SSZ-39, Al can be removed from framework positions, resulting in an increase in framework-Si/AlT and thus a lowered active acid site density. The Si/Al_T ratios can be controlled by the steaming temperatures. SSZ-39 steamed at 750 °C, with preserved pore volume and morphology, is an excellent MTO catalyst, as high, stable olefin selectivities, long time-on-stream activity, and low alkane production are observed. Moreover, interesting propylene/ethylene/butylene ratios of 2.8/1/1.1 are obtained, likely related to the shape of the AEI cage. By Cu^(2+)-exchanging SSZ-39, evidence is provided to show that Al_T sites in close proximity (high AlT density) produce the unwanted effects (higher alkane-make and carbonaceous deposits) in nonsteamed materials during MTO
First-principles study on the intermediate compounds of LiBH
We report the results of the first-principles calculation on the intermediate
compounds of LiBH. The stability of LiBH and LiBH has been examined with the ultrasoft pseudopotential method based on
the density functional theory. Theoretical prediction has suggested that
monoclinic LiBH is the most stable among the candidate
materials. We propose the following hydriding/dehydriding process of LiBH
via this intermediate compound : LiBHLiBH LiH HLiH B H. The hydrogen content and enthalpy of the first
reaction are estimated to be 10 mass% and 56 kJ/mol H, respectively, and
those of the second reaction are 4 mass% and 125 kJ/mol H. They are in good
agreement with experimental results of the thermal desorption spectra of
LiBH. Our calculation has predicted that the bending modes for the
-phonon frequencies of monoclinic LiBH are lower than
that of LiBH, while stretching modes are higher. These results are very
useful for the experimental search and identification of possible intermediate
compounds.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, submitted to PR
Improving Interpretability for Computer-aided Diagnosis tools on Whole Slide Imaging with Multiple Instance Learning and Gradient-based Explanations
Deep learning methods are widely used for medical applications to assist
medical doctors in their daily routines. While performances reach expert's
level, interpretability (highlight how and what a trained model learned and why
it makes a specific decision) is the next important challenge that deep
learning methods need to answer to be fully integrated in the medical field. In
this paper, we address the question of interpretability in the context of whole
slide images (WSI) classification. We formalize the design of WSI
classification architectures and propose a piece-wise interpretability
approach, relying on gradient-based methods, feature visualization and multiple
instance learning context. We aim at explaining how the decision is made based
on tile level scoring, how these tile scores are decided and which features are
used and relevant for the task. After training two WSI classification
architectures on Camelyon-16 WSI dataset, highlighting discriminative features
learned, and validating our approach with pathologists, we propose a novel
manner of computing interpretability slide-level heat-maps, based on the
extracted features, that improves tile-level classification performances by
more than 29% for AUC.Comment: 8 pages (references excluded), 3 figures, presented in iMIMIC
Workshop at MICCAI 202
The design of organic catalysis for epoxidation by hydrogen peroxide
The potential of various organic species to catalyze epoxidation of ethene by hydrogen peroxide is explored with B3LYP/6-31G* DFT calculations
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