An Optimal Method for Diffusion Parameters of Nonlinear Diffusion Problem of Drug Releasing in 2D-Disc Device by Separate Variable Method

An optimization control model and the corresponding computational method drawing the diffusion parameters of the nonlinear problem for the drug releasing in the 2D-disc device were given in this paper. Firstly, based on the nonlinear diffusion equation of the drug releasing in the 2D-disc device, we used the linear diffusion problem to discrete the nonlinear diffusion problem with the discrete space and the discrete time. Then, by the separate variable method, the solution of the linear problem was given. Next, the least square method based on the separate variable idea (LSMSV) was used to estimate the nonlinear appropriate diffusion parameters. Finally, a numerical example was presented to show that the control model and the numerical method were valid for computing the diffusion coefficient of the nonlinear problem for the drug releasing in the 2D-disc device

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Prevalence, associated factors and outcomes of pressure injuries in adult intensive care unit patients: the DecubICUs study

Funder: European Society of Intensive Care Medicine; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100013347Funder: Flemish Society for Critical Care NursesAbstract: Purpose: Intensive care unit (ICU) patients are particularly susceptible to developing pressure injuries. Epidemiologic data is however unavailable. We aimed to provide an international picture of the extent of pressure injuries and factors associated with ICU-acquired pressure injuries in adult ICU patients. Methods: International 1-day point-prevalence study; follow-up for outcome assessment until hospital discharge (maximum 12 weeks). Factors associated with ICU-acquired pressure injury and hospital mortality were assessed by generalised linear mixed-effects regression analysis. Results: Data from 13,254 patients in 1117 ICUs (90 countries) revealed 6747 pressure injuries; 3997 (59.2%) were ICU-acquired. Overall prevalence was 26.6% (95% confidence interval [CI] 25.9–27.3). ICU-acquired prevalence was 16.2% (95% CI 15.6–16.8). Sacrum (37%) and heels (19.5%) were most affected. Factors independently associated with ICU-acquired pressure injuries were older age, male sex, being underweight, emergency surgery, higher Simplified Acute Physiology Score II, Braden score 3 days, comorbidities (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, immunodeficiency), organ support (renal replacement, mechanical ventilation on ICU admission), and being in a low or lower-middle income-economy. Gradually increasing associations with mortality were identified for increasing severity of pressure injury: stage I (odds ratio [OR] 1.5; 95% CI 1.2–1.8), stage II (OR 1.6; 95% CI 1.4–1.9), and stage III or worse (OR 2.8; 95% CI 2.3–3.3). Conclusion: Pressure injuries are common in adult ICU patients. ICU-acquired pressure injuries are associated with mainly intrinsic factors and mortality. Optimal care standards, increased awareness, appropriate resource allocation, and further research into optimal prevention are pivotal to tackle this important patient safety threat

Correction to: Prevalence, associated factors and outcomes of pressure injuries in adult intensive care unit patients: the DecubICUs study

The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake

Prevalence, associated factors and outcomes of pressure injuries in adult intensive care unit patients: the DecubICUs study

Funder: European Society of Intensive Care Medicine; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100013347Funder: Flemish Society for Critical Care NursesAbstract: Purpose: Intensive care unit (ICU) patients are particularly susceptible to developing pressure injuries. Epidemiologic data is however unavailable. We aimed to provide an international picture of the extent of pressure injuries and factors associated with ICU-acquired pressure injuries in adult ICU patients. Methods: International 1-day point-prevalence study; follow-up for outcome assessment until hospital discharge (maximum 12 weeks). Factors associated with ICU-acquired pressure injury and hospital mortality were assessed by generalised linear mixed-effects regression analysis. Results: Data from 13,254 patients in 1117 ICUs (90 countries) revealed 6747 pressure injuries; 3997 (59.2%) were ICU-acquired. Overall prevalence was 26.6% (95% confidence interval [CI] 25.9–27.3). ICU-acquired prevalence was 16.2% (95% CI 15.6–16.8). Sacrum (37%) and heels (19.5%) were most affected. Factors independently associated with ICU-acquired pressure injuries were older age, male sex, being underweight, emergency surgery, higher Simplified Acute Physiology Score II, Braden score 3 days, comorbidities (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, immunodeficiency), organ support (renal replacement, mechanical ventilation on ICU admission), and being in a low or lower-middle income-economy. Gradually increasing associations with mortality were identified for increasing severity of pressure injury: stage I (odds ratio [OR] 1.5; 95% CI 1.2–1.8), stage II (OR 1.6; 95% CI 1.4–1.9), and stage III or worse (OR 2.8; 95% CI 2.3–3.3). Conclusion: Pressure injuries are common in adult ICU patients. ICU-acquired pressure injuries are associated with mainly intrinsic factors and mortality. Optimal care standards, increased awareness, appropriate resource allocation, and further research into optimal prevention are pivotal to tackle this important patient safety threat

Act as what you think : towards personalized EEG interaction through attentional and embedded LSTM learning

The “mind-controlling” capability has always been in mankind's fantasy. With the recent advancements in electroencephalograph (EEG) techniques, brain-computer interface (BCI) researchers have explored some solutions to allow individuals to perform various tasks using their minds. However, the commercial off-the-shelf devices to run accurate EEG signal collection are usually expensive and the comparably cheaper devices can only present coarse results, which prevents the practical application of these devices in domestic services. To tackle this challenge, we propose and develop an end-to-end solution that enables fine brain-robot interaction (BRI) through embedded learning of coarse EEG signals from low-cost devices, namely PerBCI, so that people having difficulty moving, such as the elderly, can mind command and control a robot to perform some basic household tasks. Our contributions are three folds: 1) We present a stacked long short-term memory (BiLSTM) structure, along with specific pre-processing techniques to handle the time-dependency of EEG signals and their classification. 2) We propose a personalized design to adaptively capture multiple features and achieve accurate recognition of individual EEG signals by enhancing the signal interpretation of BiLSTM with an attention mechanism. 3) We develop a low-cost, real-time and end-to-end BRI system that can run our PerBCI models and algorithms in the embedded robot platform to perform more than one type of domestic task based on the users' EEG signal inputs. Our real-world experiments with elderly participants of diverse backgrounds in a home setting and system comparison with other approaches show that the proposed end-to-end solution with low cost can achieve satisfactory run-time speed, accuracy and energy-efficiency

TPGraph : A spatial-temporal graph learning framework for accurate traffic prediction on arterial roads

The accurate prediction of traffic conditions, including speed, flow, and travel time, poses a critical challenge in urbanization that significantly impacts car owners and road administrators. However, in certain scenarios with restricted road data availability (e.g. lack of traffic light status and signal control strategies, cooperation between road administrators and third parties, etc.), it is imperative to make effective use of basic road information (e.g. historical traffic data and road connectivity) to improve both prediction accuracy and scalability on various arterial road networks against state-of-art deep learning models. In this paper, we propose a spatial-temporal learning framework TPGraph for an accurate prediction of arterial roads’ traffic data by effectively utilizing upstream and downstream road information. TPGraph is composed of three major parts: 1) A multi-scale temporal feature fusion module that utilizes a multi-head attention mechanism to integrate recently-periodic features, daily-periodic features, and weekly-periodic features; 2) A multi-graph convolution module that employs graph fusion and graph convolution networks to capture richer spatial semantics, and 3) A dynamic spatial-temporal prediction module that leverages a spatial-temporal transformer for single or multiple traffic-state predictions. Our proposed framework, TPGraph, leverages just multi-scale historical traffic conditions and readily accessible spatial factors as input to generate accurate predictions of future traffic conditions. We mainly evaluate the performance of our approach through multi-step prediction experiments conducted at hourly intervals, forecasting travel time or travel speed for each road at 15 mins, 30 mins, and 1 hour. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world arterial road datasets to demonstrate the superior predictive performance of TPGraph compared to existing methods

Preliminary results on a near-real-time rock slope damage monitoring system based on relative velocity changes following the September 5, 2022 MS 6.8 Luding, China earthquake

Relative seismic velocity change (dv/v) is important for monitoring changes in subsurface material properties and evaluating earthquake-induced rock slope damage in a geological disaster-prone region. In this paper, we present a rapid damage assessment on three slow-moving rock slopes by measuring dv/v decrease caused by the 2022 ​MS 6.8 Luding earthquake in Southwest China. By applying the stretching method to the cross-correlated seismic wavefields between sensors installed on each slope, we obtain earthquake-induced dv/v decreases of ∼2.1%, ∼0.5%, and ∼0.2% on three slopes at distances ranging from ∼86 to ∼370 ​km to the epicenter, respectively. Moreover, based on seismic data recorded by 16 sensors deployed on the rock slope at a distance of ∼370 ​km away from the epicenter, a localized dv/v decease region was observed at the crest of the slope by calculating the spatial dv/v images before and after the earthquake. We also derive an empirical in situ stress sensitivity of −7.29✕10−8/Pa by relating the dv/v change to the measured peak dynamic stresses. Our results indicate that a rapid dv/v assessment not only can help facilitate on-site emergency response to earthquake-induced secondary geological disasters but also can provide a better understanding of the subsurface geological risks under diverse seismic loadings

Performance improvement, renovation and application of RMG offtake and regulating device in gas transmission station

RMG512 self-operated monitoring regulator, a key offtake device, has been widely used in China's gas transmission pipeline offtake stations. With the promotion of "centralized monitoring" production management mode in stations, higher requirements have been proposed by the control center for remote control of offtake device, so as to ensure the "one run, one hot standby" of offtake and regulating skids. The diaphragm in the main valve of the monitoring regulator should not be subject to reverse differential pressure, which is easy to cause diaphragm damage in the hot standby mode of the pressure regulating skid. Analyzing the working principle of monitoring regulator, in combination with field operation experience, the scheme was proposed for the performance improvement and renovation of RMG regulating device: an impulse line with one-way continuity function can be introduced downstream of the operating regulator, and connected to the upstream of the monitoring regulator. In this way, it becomes possible to monitor the upstream pressure rise of the regulator with the downstream offtake pressure rise, without affecting the normal operation of the pressure regulating skid. The renovation scheme effectively reduce the operation loss of standby equipment, increase the service life of diaphragm, and has no effect on the working principle of monitoring regulator. Field test and application has demonstrated its nonpotential safety hazard, low renovation cost and considerable economic benefits