Dilatation of Lateral Ventricles with Brain Volumes in Infants with 3D Transfontanelle US

Ultrasound (US) can be used to assess brain development in newborns, as MRI is challenging due to immobilization issues, and may require sedation. Dilatation of the lateral ventricles in the brain is a risk factor for poorer neurodevelopment outcomes in infants. Hence, 3D US has the ability to assess the volume of the lateral ventricles similar to clinically standard MRI, but manual segmentation is time consuming. The objective of this study is to develop an approach quantifying the ratio of lateral ventricular dilatation with respect to total brain volume using 3D US, which can assess the severity of macrocephaly. Automatic segmentation of the lateral ventricles is achieved with a multi-atlas deformable registration approach using locally linear correlation metrics for US-MRI fusion, followed by a refinement step using deformable mesh models. Total brain volume is estimated using a 3D ellipsoid modeling approach. Validation was performed on a cohort of 12 infants, ranging from 2 to 8.5 months old, where 3D US and MRI were used to compare brain volumes and segmented lateral ventricles. Automatically extracted volumes from 3D US show a high correlation and no statistically significant difference when compared to ground truth measurements. Differences in volume ratios was 6.0 +/- 4.8% compared to MRI, while lateral ventricular segmentation yielded a mean Dice coefficient of 70.8 +/- 3.6% and a mean absolute distance (MAD) of 0.88 +/- 0.2mm, demonstrating the clinical benefit of this tool in paediatric ultrasound

Effect of Silicon Content on Carbide Precipitation and Low-Temperature Toughness of Pressure Vessel Steels

Cr – Mn – Mo – Ni pressure vessel steels containing 0.54 and 1.55% Si are studied. Metallographic and fractographic analyses of the steels after tempering at 650 and 700°C are performed. The impact toughness at – 30°C and the hardness of the steels are determined. The mass fraction of the carbide phase in the steels is computed with the help of the J-MatPro 4.0 software

Design optimization of an interior-type permanent magnet BLDC motor using PSO and improved MEC

In this paper, an improved magnetic equivalent circuit (MEC) is applied to calculate the nonlinear magnetic field in an interior-type permanent-magnet (IPM) brushless DC (BLDC) motor. Compared with the finite element method, the MEC method is much more time efficient, whereas compared with the conventional MEC method, the improved MEC is more accurate since it takes the complicate topological structure of the motor into account. A rough design of the IPM BLDC motor was firstly conducted by the improved MEC method. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is then employed to refine the design for optimal structural parameters that result in the lowest cost and highest performance

Oldest known pantherine skull and evolution of the tiger

The tiger is one of the most iconic extant animals, and its origin and evolution have been intensely debated. Fossils attributable to extant pantherine species-lineages are less than 2 MYA and the earliest tiger fossils are from the Calabrian, Lower Pleistocene. Molecular studies predict a much younger age for the divergence of modern tiger subspecies at <100 KYA, although their cranial morphology is readily distinguishable, indicating that early Pleistocene tigers would likely have differed markedly anatomically from extant tigers. Such inferences are hampered by the fact that well-known fossil tiger material is middle to late Pleistocene in age. Here we describe a new species of pantherine cat from Longdan, Gansu Province, China, Panthera zdanskyi sp. nov. With an estimated age of 2.55–2.16 MYA it represents the oldest complete skull of a pantherine cat hitherto found. Although smaller, it appears morphologically to be surprisingly similar to modern tigers considering its age. Morphological, morphometric, and cladistic analyses are congruent in confirming its very close affinity to the tiger, and it may be regarded as the most primitive species of the tiger lineage, demonstrating the first unequivocal presence of a modern pantherine species-lineage in the basal stage of the Pleistocene (Gelasian; traditionally considered to be Late Pliocene). This find supports a north-central Chinese origin of the tiger lineage, and demonstrates that various parts of the cranium, mandible, and dentition evolved at different rates. An increase in size and a reduction in the relative size of parts of the dentition appear to have been prominent features of tiger evolution, whereas the distinctive cranial morphology of modern tigers was established very early in their evolutionary history. The evolutionary trend of increasing size in the tiger lineage is likely coupled to the evolution of its primary prey species

Cross-protection against European swine influenza viruses in the context of infection immunity against the 2009 pandemic H1N1 virus : studies in the pig model of influenza

Pigs are natural hosts for the same influenza virus subtypes as humans and are a valuable model for cross-protection studies with influenza. In this study, we have used the pig model to examine the extent of virological protection between a) the 2009 pandemic H1N1 (pH1N1) virus and three different European H1 swine influenza virus (SIV) lineages, and b) these H1 viruses and a European H3N2 SIV. Pigs were inoculated intranasally with representative strains of each virus lineage with 6- and 17-week intervals between H1 inoculations and between H1 and H3 inoculations, respectively. Virus titers in nasal swabs and/or tissues of the respiratory tract were determined after each inoculation. There was substantial though differing cross-protection between pH1N1 and other H1 viruses, which was directly correlated with the relatedness in the viral hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) proteins. Cross-protection against H3N2 was almost complete in pigs with immunity against H1N2, but was weak in H1N1/pH1N1-immune pigs. In conclusion, infection with a live, wild type influenza virus may offer substantial cross-lineage protection against viruses of the same HA and/or NA subtype. True heterosubtypic protection, in contrast, appears to be minimal in natural influenza virus hosts. We discuss our findings in the light of the zoonotic and pandemic risks of SIVs

Composition of gut microbiota in infants in China and global comparison

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Enhanced broadband near-infrared luminescence in Bi-doped glasses by co-doping with Ag

Author name used in this publication: Hao, Jianhua2012-2013 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe

Testing for Network and Spatial Autocorrelation

Testing for dependence has been a well-established component of spatial statistical analyses for decades. In particular, several popular test statistics have desirable properties for testing for the presence of spatial autocorrelation in continuous variables. In this paper we propose two contributions to the literature on tests for autocorrelation. First, we propose a new test for autocorrelation in categorical variables. While some methods currently exist for assessing spatial autocorrelation in categorical variables, the most popular method is unwieldy, somewhat ad hoc, and fails to provide grounds for a single omnibus test. Second, we discuss the importance of testing for autocorrelation in data sampled from the nodes of a network, motivated by social network applications. We demonstrate that our proposed statistic for categorical variables can both be used in the spatial and network setting

Multifunctional tunable ultra-broadband visible and near-infrared luminescence from bismuth-doped germanate glasses

Author name used in this publication: Hao, Jianhua.2012-2013 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalVersion of RecordPublishe