Effects of exercise in addition to a family-based lifestyle intervention program on hepatic fat in children with overweight

ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02258126Background: Paediatric hepatic steatosis is highly prevalent and closely related to type 2 diabetes. Aims: To determine whether the addition of supervised exercise to a family-based lifestyle- and psycho-educational intervention results in greater reduction of percentage hepatic fat (HF), adiposity, and cardiometabolic risk factors in children with overweight/obesity. Methods: The study subjects of this non-randomized, two-arm, parallel design, clinical trial were 116 overweight/obese children (10.6±1.1 years, 53.4% girls) living in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain). For 22 weeks they followed either a lifestyle- and psycho-education program (control intervention [CI], N=57), consisting of two family-based education sessions/month, or the same plus supervised exercise (intensive intervention [II], N=59) focused mainly on high-intensity aerobic workouts (3 sessions/week, 90 min/session). The primary outcome was the change in percentage HF (as measured by MRI) between baseline and the end of the intervention period. Secondary outcomes included changes in body mass index (BMI), fat mass index (FMI), abdominal fat (measured by dual-X-ray-absorptiometry), blood pressure, triglycerides, high density lipoprotein, low density lipoprotein, gamma-glutammyl-transferase, glucose and insulin concentrations. Results: A total of 102 children completed the trial (N=53 and N=49 in the CI and II groups, respectively). Percentage HF decreased only in the II group (-1.20±0.31% vs. 0.04±0.30%, II and CI, respectively), regardless of baseline value and any change in adiposity (P<0.01). BMI, FMI, abdominal fat (P≤0.001) and insulin (P<0.05) were reduced in both groups. Conclusions: Multicomponent intervention programs that include exercise training may help reduce, adiposity, insulin resistance and hepatic steatosis in overweight/obese children.Spanish Ministry of Health "Fondos de Investigation Sanitaria del Institute de Salud Carlos III" PI13/01335Spanish Ministry of Industry and Competitiveness DEP2016-78377-REU Fondos Estructurales de la Union Europea (FEDER) funds ("Una manera de hacer Europa")Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports FPU14/03329Education Department of the Government of the Basque Country PRE_2016_1_0057 PRE_2017_2_0224 PRE_2018_2_0057University of Granada Plan Propio de Investigacion 2016-Excellence actions: Unit of Excellence on Exercise and Health (UCEES)Junta de Andalucia, Consejeria de Conocimiento, Investigacion y Universidades (FEDER) SOMM17/6107/UG

Use of total variation filters in SPECT medical imaging

Treballs Finals de Grau de Física, Facultat de Física, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2016, Tutors: Artur Carnicer, Ignasi JuvellsTotal variation denoising filtering is proposed as an alternative to the Butterworth filter, which is widely used in the reconstruction of SPECT medical images. Its advantages lie in the preservation of the image edges while the noise is removed, as opposed to the blurring that characterizes Butterworth filtered images. However, results show that total variation filtering application to SPECT medical images doesn’t represent an improvement in terms of similarity to the reference imag

Unraveling the Effect of Singlet Oxygen on Metal-O2 Batteries: Strategies Toward Deactivation

Aprotic metal-O(2)batteries have attracted the interest of the research community due to their high theoretical energy density that target them as potential energy storage systems for automotive applications. At present, these devices show various practical problems, which hinder the attainment of the high theoretical energy densities. Among the main limitations, we can highlight the irreversible parasitic reactions that lead to premature death of the battery. The degradation processes, mainly related to the electrolyte, lead to the formation of secondary products that accumulate throughout the cycling in the air electrode. This accumulation of predominantly insulating products results in the blocking of active sites, promoting less efficiency in system performance. Recently, it has been discovered that the superoxide intermediate radical anion is involved in the generation of the reactive oxygen singlet species (O-1(2)) in metal-O(2)batteries. The presence of singlet oxygen is intimately linked with electrolyte degradation processes and with carbon-electrode corrosion reactions. This review analyzes the nature of singlet oxygen, while clarifying its toxic role in metal-O(2)batteries. Besides, the main mechanisms of deactivation of singlet oxygen are presented, trying to inspire the research community in the development of new molecules capable of mitigating the harmful effects related to this highly reactive species.This work was supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad of Spain (under projects MAT2016-78266-P and PID2019-107468RB-C21), the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER), and the Eusko Jaurlaritza/Gobierno Vasco (under project IT1226-19). NO-V also acknowledges the Basque Government (Elkartek CICe2020, KK-2020/00078) for the financial support of this work

Nanostructured Manganese Dioxide for Hybrid Supercapacitor Electrodes

Hybrid supercapacitors, as emerging energy storage devices, have gained much attention in recent years due to their high energy density, fast charge/discharge and long cyclabilities. Among the wide range of systems covered by this topic, low cost, environmental friendliness and high power provide MnO2 with great characteristics to be a competitive candidate. The present work reports a hybrid aqueous supercapacitor system using a commercial activated carbon as the negative electrode and a synthesized manganese dioxide as the positive electrode. Two manganese dioxide polymorphs (α-MnO2 and δ-MnO2) were tested in different neutral and basic aqueous electrolytes. In this way, full cell systems that reached an energy density of 15.6 Wh kg−1 at a power density of 1 kW kg−1 were achieved. The electrode–electrolyte combination explored in this study exhibits excellent performance without losing capacity after 5000 charge/discharge cycles, leading to a promising approach towards more sustainable, high-performance energy storage systems.This research was funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PID2019-107468RB-C21 and TED2021-131517B-C21) and Gobierno Vasco/Eusko Jaurlaritza (IT1546-22)

Learning Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation from Automatic Annotations

In this work we contribute a novel pipeline to automatically generate training data, and to improve over state-of-the-art multi-object tracking and segmentation (MOTS) methods. Our proposed track mining algorithm turns raw street-level videos into high-fidelity MOTS training data, is scalable and overcomes the need of expensive and time-consuming manual annotation approaches. We leverage state-of-the-art instance segmentation results in combination with optical flow predictions, also trained on automatically harvested training data. Our second major contribution is MOTSNet - a deep learning, tracking-by-detection architecture for MOTS - deploying a novel mask-pooling layer for improved object association over time. Training MOTSNet with our automatically extracted data leads to significantly improved sMOTSA scores on the novel KITTI MOTS dataset (+1.9%/+7.5% on cars/pedestrians), and MOTSNet improves by +4.1% over previously best methods on the MOTSChallenge dataset. Our most impressive finding is that we can improve over previous best-performing works, even in complete absence of manually annotated MOTS training data