Influence of dietary vitamin E supplementation on cholesterol oxidation and fresh colour in beef aged for 3 and 14 days

The effects of dietary vitamin E supplementation on the susceptibility to lipid oxidation and colour of the Longissimus thoracis (LT) muscle aged in vacuum packaged conditions for 3 or 14 days were studied. For this purpose, Charolais cattle were fed on a diet providing daily 60 mg (control) or 5500 mg of vitamin E per animal (supplemented) for 30 and 60 days before slaughter. Dietary vitamin E supplementation increased the liver vitamin E content, but not in the LT muscle of treated animals. The vitamin supplementation for 30 and 60 days has shown non-consistent effects in reducing cholesterol oxidation products of vacuum-packed aged meat. However, the vitamin E supplementation for 60 days was effective on Lightness stability in LT muscle during vacuum-packed ageing. Overall, from the practical standpoint, this study suggests that supranutritional supplementation up to 60 days may not increase the vitamin E content of Charolais LT muscle giving little, if any, benefits on meat colour and cholesterol oxidation. However, the present study suggests that it would be interesting to determine in which extent specific oxysterols are related to the meat colour and whether colour parameters can be useful for predicting the formation of cholesterol oxidation products along the industrial meat production chain.The effects of dietary vitamin E supplementation on the susceptibility to lipid oxidation and colour of the Longissimus thoracis (LT) muscle aged in vacuum packaged conditions for 3 or 14 days were studied. For this purpose, Charolais cattle were fed on a diet providing daily 60mg (control) or 5500mg of vitamin E per animal (supplemented) for 30 and 60 days before slaughter. Dietary vitamin E supplementation increased the liver vitamin E content, but not in the LT muscle of treated animals. The vitamin supplementation for 30 and 60 days has shown non-consistent effects in reducing cholesterol oxidation products of vacuum-packed aged meat. However, the vitamin E supplementation for 60 days was effective on Lightness stability in LT muscle during vacuum-packed ageing. Overall, from the practical standpoint, this study suggests that supranutritional supplementation up to 60 days may not increase the vitamin E content of Charolais LT muscle giving little, if any, benefits on meat colour and cholesterol oxidation. However, the present study suggests that it would be interesting to determine in which extent specific oxysterols are related to the meat colour and whether colour parameters can be useful for predicting the formation of cholesterol oxidation products along the industrial meat production chain

ADSORÇÃO DE NAPROXENO, NORFLOXACINA E RODAMINAS EM MATERIAIS MESOPOROSOS ORDENADOS

O presente trabalho foca o estudo da influência das propriedades texturais e químicas de materiais mesoporosos, assim como, das condições operacionais do meio, nomeadamente, temperatura e pH, no processo de adsorção / imobilização de alguns compostos das classes referidas. O trabalho envolve a preparação, funcionalização e caracterização de materiais mesoporosos ordenados (incluindo do tipo MCM-41 e SBA-15) e estudos cinéticos e de equilíbrio de adsorção / imobilização de fármacos e de compostos luminescentes com dimensão molecular considerável, como por exemplo, o naproxeno (anti-inflamatório não esteroíde), a norfloxacina (antibiótico) e as rodaminas B e 6G (corantes orgânicos da família das fluoronas)

Alien Registration- Paterson, Perer (Saco, York County)

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PatientExploreR: an extensible application for dynamic visualization of patient clinical history from electronic health records in the OMOP common data model.

MotivationElectronic health records (EHRs) are quickly becoming omnipresent in healthcare, but interoperability issues and technical demands limit their use for biomedical and clinical research. Interactive and flexible software that interfaces directly with EHR data structured around a common data model (CDM) could accelerate more EHR-based research by making the data more accessible to researchers who lack computational expertise and/or domain knowledge.ResultsWe present PatientExploreR, an extensible application built on the R/Shiny framework that interfaces with a relational database of EHR data in the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership CDM format. PatientExploreR produces patient-level interactive and dynamic reports and facilitates visualization of clinical data without any programming required. It allows researchers to easily construct and export patient cohorts from the EHR for analysis with other software. This application could enable easier exploration of patient-level data for physicians and researchers. PatientExploreR can incorporate EHR data from any institution that employs the CDM for users with approved access. The software code is free and open source under the MIT license, enabling institutions to install and users to expand and modify the application for their own purposes.Availability and implementationPatientExploreR can be freely obtained from GitHub: https://github.com/BenGlicksberg/PatientExploreR. We provide instructions for how researchers with approved access to their institutional EHR can use this package. We also release an open sandbox server of synthesized patient data for users without EHR access to explore: http://patientexplorer.ucsf.edu.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online

CURRENT STATUS OF THE ADVANCED LEVEL CHEMISTRY PRACTICAL COMPONENT IN SCHOOLS OF SRI LANKA AND RELEVANT REMEDIAL CHANGES

Chemistry-practical in Advanced Level syllabus is not popular among students though it is a very practical subject which helps to understand the changes of the environment. Enforced demand arises year by year for chemistry as it is a main subject in science stream to enter medical and engineering faculties. In our evaluation system no attention has been given to conduct practical tests. Therefore much value has been given to theory-part than practical in teaching-learning process. As a result, students develop their memorizing power than improving their skills. In the new A/L syllabus there are 45 chemistry practical and every student has to complete at least 80% of the total list to be eligible to the final examination according to the circular. Teachers have much room to give individual attention to the students and can explain the lesson with good understanding of the weaknesses of them in practical classes. Thereby abstract concepts can be converted to concrete concepts very easily. Main objectives of this research are to investigate the participation of A/L students in chemistry practical sessions and to investigate the opinions of A/L students and teachers regarding practical sessions. To achieve this goal, a questionnaire was prepared and distributed among 30 chemistry-teachers in randomly selected five leading schools in Colombo who teach chemistry in both English and Sinhala media. Questionnaire prepared for students were distributed among 200 students who follow the science and mathematics streams of the most leading school in Sri Lanka. It was observed that the basic knowledge of the practical is not given properly before carrying out the practical. Laboratory-facilities also are not up to the standard level. Though teachers’ involvement for practical in every way is very satisfactory, utilizing modern technology and new methodology to teach practical is very poor. Unfortunately more than three fourth of the students do not complete chemistry practical before the examination due to various reasons. In most cases, students don’t get a chance to do the practical themselves and about 98.5% of practical are done by teacher or laboratory assistant. The survey also revealed how the language barrier affects “local-medium” students compared to English-medium students while using modern technology such as internet/ e-mail in searching for additional knowledge. The results of the initial survey clearly explain that there is a major drawback within the whole process of teaching of chemistry practical. The laboratory-facilities even in some of leading schools in Colombo also are not up to the required level. This gives us a hint of the possible situation in rural areas. Therefore these recommendations can be extended to all the schools throughout the country to conduct chemistry practical in A/L syllabus. The request from 70% of students to “Redesign the current teaching method” emphasizes the requirement of immediate solution for this issue.  Article visualizations

How Consistent are Clinicians? Evaluating the Predictability of Sepsis Disease Progression with Dynamics Models

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to generate treatment policies for sepsis patients in intensive care. While retrospective evaluation metrics show decreased mortality when these policies are followed, studies with clinicians suggest their recommendations are often spurious. We propose that these shortcomings may be due to lack of diversity in observed actions and outcomes in the training data, and we construct experiments to investigate the feasibility of predicting sepsis disease severity changes due to clinician actions. Preliminary results suggest incorporating action information does not significantly improve model performance, indicating that clinician actions may not be sufficiently variable to yield measurable effects on disease progression. We discuss the implications of these findings for optimizing sepsis treatment.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures; accepted workshop paper at Time Series for Health @ ICLR 202

Integrating Statistics and Visualization to Improve Exploratory Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis is emerging as a key technique to understanding social, cultural and economic phenomena. However, social network analysis is inherently complex since analysts must understand every individual's attributes as well as relationships between individuals. There are many statistical algorithms which reveal nodes that occupy key social positions and form cohesive social groups. However, it is difficult to find outliers and patterns in strictly quantitative output. In these situations, information visualizations can enable users to make sense of their data, but typical network visualizations are often hard to interpret because of overlapping nodes and tangled edges. My first contribution improves the process of exploratory social network analysis. I have designed and implemented a novel social network analysis tool, SocialAction (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/socialaction) , that integrates both statistics and visualizations to enable users to quickly derive the benefits of both. Statistics are used to detect important individuals, relationships, and clusters. Instead of tabular display of numbers, the results are integrated with a network visualization in which users can easily and dynamically filter nodes and edges. The visualizations simplify the statistical results, facilitating sensemaking and discovery of features such as distributions, patterns, trends, gaps and outliers. The statistics simplify the comprehension of a sometimes chaotic visualization, allowing users to focus on statistically significant nodes and edges. SocialAction was also designed to help analysts explore non-social networks, such as citation, communication, financial and biological networks. My second contribution extends lessons learned from SocialAction and provides designs guidelines for interactive techniques to improve exploratory data analysis. A taxonomy of seven interactive techniques are augmented with computed attributes from statistics and data mining to improve information visualization exploration. Furthermore, systematic yet flexible design goals are provided to help guide domain experts through complex analysis over days, weeks and months. My third contribution demonstrates the effectiveness of long term case studies with domain experts to measure creative activities of information visualization users. Evaluating information visualization tools is problematic because controlled studies may not effectively represent the workflow of analysts. Discoveries occur over weeks and months, and exploratory tasks may be poorly defined. To capture authentic insights, I designed an evaluation methodology that used structured and replicated long-term case studies. The methodology was implemented on unique domain experts that demonstrated the effectiveness of integrating statistics and visualization

Dead or Alive: Continuous Data Profiling for Interactive Data Science

Profiling data by plotting distributions and analyzing summary statistics is a critical step throughout data analysis. Currently, this process is manual and tedious since analysts must write extra code to examine their data after every transformation. This inefficiency may lead to data scientists profiling their data infrequently, rather than after each transformation, making it easy for them to miss important errors or insights. We propose continuous data profiling as a process that allows analysts to immediately see interactive visual summaries of their data throughout their data analysis to facilitate fast and thorough analysis. Our system, AutoProfiler, presents three ways to support continuous data profiling: it automatically displays data distributions and summary statistics to facilitate data comprehension; it is live, so visualizations are always accessible and update automatically as the data updates; it supports follow up analysis and documentation by authoring code for the user in the notebook. In a user study with 16 participants, we evaluate two versions of our system that integrate different levels of automation: both automatically show data profiles and facilitate code authoring, however, one version updates reactively and the other updates only on demand. We find that both tools facilitate insight discovery with 91% of user-generated insights originating from the tools rather than manual profiling code written by users. Participants found live updates intuitive and felt it helped them verify their transformations while those with on-demand profiles liked the ability to look at past visualizations. We also present a longitudinal case study on how AutoProfiler helped domain scientists find serendipitous insights about their data through automatic, live data profiles. Our results have implications for the design of future tools that offer automated data analysis support.Comment: To appear at IEEE VIS conference 202