Solid Dynamic Models for Analysis of Stress and Strain in Human Hearts

This paper proposes a solid model based on four-dimensional trivariate B-spline for strain and stress analysis of ventricular myocardium. With a series of processing steps in the four-dimensional medical images, the feature points of ventricular inner and outer wall are obtained. A B-spline surface is then used to build the dynamic deformation model of the myocardial walls. With such a surface model, a hexahedron control mesh can be constructed by sweeping the cloud data, and the ventricular solid model is built by fitting the trivariate B-spline parameters. Based on these models, a method of isogeometric analysis can be applied to calculate the stress and strain continuously distributed in the ventricle. The model is represented smoothly in the cylindrical coordinate system and is easy to measure myocardium dynamics for finding abnormal motion. Experiments are carried out for comparing the stress and strain distribution. It is found that the solid model can determine ventricular dynamics which can well reflect the deformation distribution in the heart and imply early clues of cardiac diseases

Official long-term and short-term strategies for preventing the spread of rumors

Recently, public security incidents caused by rumor spreading have frequently occurred, leading to public panic, social chaos and even casualties. Therefore, how governments establish strategies to restrain rumor spreading is important for judging their governance capacity. Herein, we consider one long-term strategy (education) and two short-term strategies (isolation and debunking) for officials to intervene in rumor spreading. To investigate the effects of these strategies, an improved rumor-spreading model and a series of mean-field equations are proposed. Through theoretical analysis, the effective thresholds of three rumor-prevention strategies are obtained, respectively. Finally, through simulation analysis, the effectiveness of these strategies in preventing rumor spreading is investigated. The results indicate that long-term and short-term strategies are effective in suppressing rumor spreading. The greater the efforts of governments to suppress rumors, the smaller the final rumor size. The study also shows that the three strategies are the best when applied simultaneously. The government can adopt corresponding measures to suppress rumor spreading effectively

Research on Design of Program - Controlled Switches

In the 1990s, the development of program-controlled switches in our country has experienced the development process from thescratch; especially the successful development of large-scale program-controlled switches has brought great vitality to our informationindustry. This time, I mainly introduced to ZTE ZXJ10 program-controlled switchboard to design distributed modularization in programcontrolledswitch. ZXJ10 digital program-controlled switching system is distributed between modules, module classification control,centralized management of the open architecture, based on general computer platform, LAN technology as the support, client/server modeto control the basic form of structure, in order to make the system has flexible networking ability, strong call processing capability, highreliability, good compatibility and expansibility

Developing and validating a new comprehensive glucose-insulin pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics model

Type 2 diabetes has reached epidemic proportions worldwide. The resulting increase in chronic and costly diabetes related complications has potentially catastrophic implications for healthcare systems, and economics and societies as a whole. One of the key pathological factors leading to type 2 diabetes is insulin resistance (IR), which is the reduced or impaired ability of the body to make use of available insulin to maintain safe glucose concentrations in the bloodstream. It is essential to understand the physiology of glucose and insulin when investigating the underlying factors contributing to chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. For many years, clinicians and researchers have been working to develop and use model-based methods to increase understanding and aid therapeutic decision support. However, the majority of practicable tests cannot yield more than basic metrics that allow only a threshold-based assessment of the underlying disorder. This thesis gives an overview on several dynamic model-based methodologies with different clinical applications in assessing glycaemia via measuring effects of treatment or medication on insulin sensitivity. Other tests are clinically focused, designed to screen populations and diagnose or detect the risk of developing diabetes. Thus, it is very important to observe sensitivity metrics in various clinical and research settings

Transmission of new CRF07_BC Strains with 7 amino acid deletion in Gag p6

A 7 amino acid deletion in Gag p6 (P6delta7) emerged in Chinese prevalent HIV-1 strain CRF07_BC from different epidemic regions. It is important to determine whether this mutation could be transmitted and spread. In this study, HIV-1 Gag sequences from 5 different epidemic regions in China were collected to trace the transmission linkage and to analyze genetic evolution of P6delta7 strains. The sequence analysis demonstrated that P6delta7 is a CRF07_BC specific deletion, different P6delta7 strains could be originated from different parental CRF07_BC recombinants in different epidemic regions, and the transmission of P6delta7 strain has occurred in IDU populations. This is for the first time to identify the transmission linkage for P6delta7 strains and serves as a wake-up call for further monitoring in the future; In addition, P6delta7 deletion may represent an evolutionary feature which might exert influence on the fitness of CRF07_BC strain

CE-BLAST makes it possible to compute antigenic similarity for newly emerging pathogens

Major challenges in vaccine development include rapidly selecting or designing immunogens for raising cross-protective immunity against different intra-or inter-subtypic pathogens, especially for the newly emerging varieties. Here we propose a computational method, Conformational Epitope (CE)-BLAST, for calculating the antigenic similarity among different pathogens with stable and high performance, which is independent of the prior binding-assay information, unlike the currently available models that heavily rely on the historical experimental data. Tool validation incorporates influenza-related experimental data sufficient for stability and reliability determination. Application to dengue-related data demonstrates high harmonization between the computed clusters and the experimental serological data, undetectable by classical grouping. CE-BLAST identifies the potential cross-reactive epitope between the recent zika pathogen and the dengue virus, precisely corroborated by experimental data. The high performance of the pathogens without the experimental binding data suggests the potential utility of CE-BLAST to rapidly design cross-protective vaccines or promptly determine the efficacy of the currently marketed vaccine against emerging pathogens, which are the critical factors for containing emerging disease outbreaks.Peer reviewe