Improving distribution system state estimation with synthetic measurements

Distribution state estimation is a desired feature of modern power systems. The availability of measurements from smart meters has opened the door to extend the application of state estimation techniques down to end customers, preferably at the secondary distribution transformer level. However, the light coupling between phases makes the estimation of certain state variables, such as voltage phase angles, a great challenge. This paper proposes the use of synthetic measurements as a means of including cross-coupled information in the available set of measurements. This possibility can be easily implemented in line supervisors located at secondary transformer stations without the need for new hardware, just by embracing a different connection of measurement devices. This work demonstrates that this costless action results in a strong reduction of the sensibility of phase angle estimation errors with respect to measurement noise, thus leading to an important improvement in the quality of the results.publishedVersio

Exploitation alternatives of olive mill wastewater: production of value-added compounds useful for industry and agriculture

Countries producing olive oil generate a considerable amount of olive mill wastewater (OMWW), one of the most harmful agro-industrial effluents with a powerful polluting capacity. In fact, owing to its high pollution load, this effluent is extremely toxic to the whole soil-air-water ecosystem as well as to the living organisms inhabiting it (i.e., plants, animals, aquatic organisms, microorganisms, etc.). Currently, OMWW is discarded but since it includes carbohydrates, organic acids and mineral nutrients, as well as elevated contents of phenolics and other natural antioxidants compounds, it could be considered as a potential source of high value-added natural products. Therefore, the valorization of different waste streams including OMWW into fine biochemicals and the recovery of valuable metabolites via biotechnological processes is probably the main challenge faced by the olive oil industry. In light of that, the aim of the present review article is to summarize the state-of-the-art in relation to the exploitation possibilities and the use of OMWW to generate added-value compounds of great significance for the biofuel, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, chemical, food, and agriculture industries. Valorization of this significant waste steam in particular through a biorefinery platform could substantially enhance the environmental sustainability aspects of the whole industry while simultaneously contributing to the improvement of its economic viability

Beef, sheep and goat food chains supplying Nairobi: Analysis of 'value chain profiles' to investigate food security and safety risks

Introduction: Beef, sheep and goat meat consumption provides essential nutrients in highly bioavailable form, and poses a zoonotic pathogen threat. In Nairobi, these luxury products are difficult to access by poor households, yet little is known on the city’s food system in terms of food safety and security risks. An understanding of the food systems is essential to assess and contextualize the chains supplying poor households and to determine population exposure to hazards. Mapping is therefore crucial to assess food security and food safety risks. The present study characterised the Nairobi beef, sheep and goat food systems using value chain analysis. Methods: Data collection targeted the different stakeholders involved in beef, sheep and goat meat food systems from: (1) urban and periurban farmers; (2) livestock and meat traders, abattoir/market owners and workers, and livestock and meat transporters in all Nairobi markets; (3) managers of the main beef, sheep and goat meat processing companies; (4) urban and periurban retailers; (5) 205 low income consumers and (6) government/regulatory officers. Data were collected through focus groups discussion and individual interviews, and complemented with secondary data. Qualitative data were obtained on people, animals, products and chains interactions to identify all the existing stakeholders and chains, and assess their organizational, spatial and temporal structure. Quantitative data were collected to assess flow of products in the different chains and their contribution to the supply of these commodities to Nairobi. Data were recorded and entered in thematic templates for analysis. Mapping analysis was done through the creation of 'Chain profiles', which groups patterns of operations/flows of commodities. Mapping of these profiles was done at 3 levels: (1) people chain profile (map interactions of actors); (2) Geographical chain profiling (map of routes of animals and products); and (3) Product profiling. Findings and interpretations: Eight chain profiles that make up the beef, sheep and goat meat food systems were identified. A critical profile was the ‘less integrated terminal markets’, composed of chains where no group or person own a large proportion of different activities. This profile represents three quarters of the city’s beef, sheep and goat meat supply and contains two significant markets (Figure 1). Large companies integrate market, product transport and distribution, and mainly export or supply to high class retailers and consumers. Six beef keeping activities were identified in the city, mainly as temporary settlements. Sheep and goat keeping was mainly small scale (1-5 animals) and their animals are mostly slaughtered in households for festive occasions. In low income households beef was obtained from butcheries (83%), while goats were obtained from butcheries (51%) and markets (40%). This study shows the importance of specific chains to the food security of a city, and describes the dimensions of urban human-livestock interactions. In combination with an understanding of chains governance and barriers, this study provides a powerful approach, missing to date, for the investigation of nutrition and food safety risks

Neuroprotection in a Novel Mouse Model of Multiple Sclerosis

The authors acknowledge the support of the Barts and the London Charity, the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, USA, notably the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement & Reduction of Animals in Research, and the Wellcome Trust (grant no. 092539 to ZA). The siRNA was provided by Quark Pharmaceuticals. The funders and Quark Pharmaceuticals had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript

Prolylcarboxypeptidase Alleviates Hypertensive Cardiac Remodeling by Regulating Myocardial Tissue Angiotensin II

Background Prolonged activation of angiotensin II is the main mediator that contributes to the development of heart diseases, so converting angiotensin II into angiotensin 1-7 has emerged as a new strategy to attenuate detrimental effects of angiotensin II. Prolylcarboxypeptidase is a lysosomal pro-X carboxypeptidase that is able to cleave angiotensin II at a preferential acidic pH optimum. However, insufficient attention has been given to the cardioprotective functions of prolylcarboxylpeptidase. Methods and Results We established a CRISPR/CRISPR-associated protein 9-mediated global prolylcarboxylpeptidase-knockout and adeno-associated virus serotype 9-mediated cardiac prolylcarboxylpeptidase overexpression mouse models, which were challenged with the angiotensin II infusion (2 mg/kg per day) for 4 weeks, aiming to investigate the cardioprotective effect of prolylcarboxylpeptidase against hypertensive cardiac hypertrophy. Prolylcarboxylpeptidase expression was upregulated after 2 weeks of angiotensin II infusion and then became downregulated afterward in wild-type mouse myocardium, suggesting its compensatory function against angiotensin II stress. Moreover, angiotensin II-treated prolylcarboxylpeptidase-knockout mice showed aggravated cardiac remodeling and dampened cardiac contractility independent of hypertension. We also found that prolylcarboxylpeptidase localizes in cardiomyocyte lysosomes, and loss of prolylcarboxylpeptidase led to excessive angiotensin II levels in myocardial tissue. Further screening demonstrated that hypertrophic prolylcarboxylpeptidase-knockout hearts showed upregulated extracellular signal-regulated kinases 1/2 and downregulated protein kinase B activities. Importantly, adeno-associated virus serotype 9-mediated restoration of prolylcarboxylpeptidase expression in prolylcarboxylpeptidase-knockout hearts alleviated angiotensin II-induced hypertrophy, fibrosis, and cell death. Interestingly, the combination of adeno-associated virus serotype 9-mediated prolylcarboxylpeptidase overexpression and an antihypertensive drug, losartan, likely conferred more effective protection than a single treatment protocol to mitigate angiotensin II-induced cardiac dysfunction. Conclusions Our data demonstrate that prolylcarboxylpeptidase protects the heart from angiotensin II-induced hypertrophic remodeling by controlling myocardial angiotensin II levels

Transformer-based Model for Oral Epithelial Dysplasia Segmentation

Oral epithelial dysplasia (OED) is a premalignant histopathological diagnosis given to lesions of the oral cavity. OED grading is subject to large inter/intra-rater variability, resulting in the under/over-treatment of patients. We developed a new Transformer-based pipeline to improve detection and segmentation of OED in haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stained whole slide images (WSIs). Our model was trained on OED cases (n = 260) and controls (n = 105) collected using three different scanners, and validated on test data from three external centres in the United Kingdom and Brazil (n = 78). Our internal experiments yield a mean F1-score of 0.81 for OED segmentation, which reduced slightly to 0.71 on external testing, showing good generalisability, and gaining state-of-the-art results. This is the first externally validated study to use Transformers for segmentation in precancerous histology images. Our publicly available model shows great promise to be the first step of a fully-integrated pipeline, allowing earlier and more efficient OED diagnosis, ultimately benefiting patient outcomes

A linguistic rule-based approach to extract drug-drug interactions from pharmacological documents

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>A drug-drug interaction (DDI) occurs when one drug influences the level or activity of another drug. The increasing volume of the scientific literature overwhelms health care professionals trying to be kept up-to-date with all published studies on DDI.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This paper describes a hybrid linguistic approach to DDI extraction that combines shallow parsing and syntactic simplification with pattern matching. Appositions and coordinate structures are interpreted based on shallow syntactic parsing provided by the UMLS MetaMap tool (MMTx). Subsequently, complex and compound sentences are broken down into clauses from which simple sentences are generated by a set of simplification rules. A pharmacist defined a set of domain-specific lexical patterns to capture the most common expressions of DDI in texts. These lexical patterns are matched with the generated sentences in order to extract DDIs.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We have performed different experiments to analyze the performance of the different processes. The lexical patterns achieve a reasonable precision (67.30%), but very low recall (14.07%). The inclusion of appositions and coordinate structures helps to improve the recall (25.70%), however, precision is lower (48.69%). The detection of clauses does not improve the performance.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Information Extraction (IE) techniques can provide an interesting way of reducing the time spent by health care professionals on reviewing the literature. Nevertheless, no approach has been carried out to extract DDI from texts. To the best of our knowledge, this work proposes the first integral solution for the automatic extraction of DDI from biomedical texts.</p

Effects of Child and Maternal Histo-Blood Group Antigen Status on Symptomatic and Asymptomatic Enteric Infections in Early Childhood

Funding Information: Financial support. This work was funded by the Etiology, Risk Factors, and Interactions of Enteric Infections and Malnutrition and the Consequences for Child Health and Development Project (MAL-ED) is carried out as a collaborative project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) (BMGF-47075), the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institutes of Health, Fogarty International Center, whereas additional support was obtained from BMGF for the examination of host innate factors on enteric disease risk and enteropathy (Grants OPP1066146 and OPP1152146; to M. N. K.). Additional funding was obtained from teh Sherrilyn and Ken Fisher Center for Environmental Infectious Diseases, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (to M. N. K) and the National Center for Research Resources and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, National Institues of health 1UL1TR001079. Acknowledgments. We thank the participants, their families, and the study community for their dedicated time and effort to better the understanding the transmission and more enduring impact of enteric infections in early childhood. We also thank the following: Jan Vinje (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) for critical input and manuscript review; Dr. Leah Jager for consultation regarding the statistical analysis; Dr. Ben Jann (University of Bern, Switzerland) for guidance in generating the figures; Christine Szymanski for insight and encouragement, particularly regarding Campylobacter infection and disease patency; Chris Damman and Anita Zaidi for input on early iterations of the analysis; and Dick Guerrant for final reflections.Peer reviewe

Telemedicine ultrasound assessment for placenta accreta spectrum: utility and interobserver reliability of asynchronous remote imaging review

Objective: Management of patients with placenta accreta spectrum (PAS) by trained multidisciplinary teams is associated with improved outcomes. Ultrasound can predict intraoperative risks, but expert ultrasound imaging of PAS is often limited. Telemedicine is used increasingly in obstetrics, permitting expert consultation when essential resources are not available locally. Our objective was to evaluate the feasibility of teleconsultation using standardized ultrasound image acquisition and reporting, and to correlate prognosis with intraoperative findings in patients at risk for PAS. Methods: A total of 12 PAS imaging experts (teleconsultants) were selected to asynchronously review deidentified standardized grayscale and color Doppler ultrasound images for five patients who had completed treatment for PAS, resulting in 60 individual teleconsultations. All patients were managed at a center using standardized imaging acquisition and intraoperative topographic classification to individualize surgical management. Teleconsultants reported the predicted topographic classification and recommended a surgical approach based on the topographic classification algorithm. Prognoses were compared with that reported by the local sonologist and with intraoperative findings. Results: In all five patients, local sonologist prognosis and antenatal topographic classification was confirmed during surgery and the final surgical approach matched that which was recommended preoperatively. Teleconsultant antenatal evaluation and management plans matched those of the local team in 71.7% of the cases. When reports differed, PAS severity was overestimated in nine reviews (16.9%) and was underestimated in six reviews (11.3%). Conclusion: Remote imaging teleconsultation provides accurate prenatal staging in most patients at risk for PAS. Teleconsultation is a feasible strategy to improve prenatal imaging, management planning, and guidance for local teams in settings with limited healthcare resources

Enhancement of Exchange Bias and Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy in CoO/Co Multilayer Thin Films by Tuning the Alumina Template Nanohole Size

The interest in magnetic nanostructures exhibiting perpendicular magnetic anisotropy and exchange bias (EB) effect has increased in recent years owing to their applications in a new generation of spintronic devices that combine several functionalities. We present a nanofabrication process used to induce a significant out-of-plane component of the magnetic easy axis and EB. In this study, 30 nm thick CoO/Co multilayers were deposited on nanostructured alumina templates with a broad range of pore diameters, 34 nm ≤ Dp ≤ 96 nm, maintaining the hexagonal lattice parameter at 107 nm. Increase of the exchange bias field (HEB) and the coercivity (HC) (12 times and 27 times, respectively) was observed in the nanostructured films compared to the non-patterned film. The marked dependence of HEB and HC with antidot hole diameters pinpoints an in-plane to out-of-plane changeover of the magnetic anisotropy at a nanohole diameter of ∼75 nm. Micromagnetic simulation shows the existence of antiferromagnetic layers that generate an exceptional magnetic configuration around the holes, named as antivortex-state. This configuration induces extra high-energy superdomain walls for edge-to-edge distance >27 nm and high-energy stripe magnetic domains below 27 nm, which could play an important role in the change of the magnetic easy axis towards the perpendicular directionEl interés por las nanoestructuras magnéticas que exhiben anisotropía magnética perpendicular y efecto de sesgo de intercambio (EB) ha aumentado en los últimos años debido a sus aplicaciones en una nueva generación de dispositivos espintrónicos que combinan varias funcionalidades. Presentamos un proceso de nanofabricación utilizado para inducir una componente significativa fuera del plano del eje magnético fácil y del EB. En este estudio, se depositaron multicapas de CoO/Co de 30 nm de espesor sobre plantillas de alúmina nanoestructurada con un amplio rango de diámetros de poro, 34 nm ≤ Dp ≤ 96 nm, manteniendo el parámetro de red hexagonal en 107 nm. Se observó un aumento del campo de polarización de intercambio (HEB) y de la coercitividad (HC) (12 veces y 27 veces, respectivamente) en las películas nanoestructuradas en comparación con la película sin patrón. La marcada dependencia de HEB y HC con los diámetros de los agujeros antidotados señala un cambio de la anisotropía magnética de dentro a fuera del plano a un diámetro de nanoagujero de ∼75 nm. La simulación micromagnética muestra la existencia de capas antiferromagnéticas que generan una configuración magnética excepcional alrededor de los agujeros, denominada estado de antivórtice. Esta configuración induce paredes de superdominio extra de alta energía para la distancia de borde a borde >27 nm y dominios magnéticos de franja de alta energía por debajo de 27 nm, que podrían desempeñar un papel importante en el cambio del eje magnético fácil hacia la dirección perpendicula