Side Differences of Thigh Muscle Cross-Sectional Areas and Maximal Isometric Muscle Force in Bilateral Knees with the Same Radiographic Disease Stage, but Unilateral Frequent Pain – Data from the Osteoarthritis Initiative

Objective To determine whether anatomical thigh muscle cross-sectional areas (MCSAs) and strength differ between osteoarthritis (OA) knees with frequent pain compared with contra-lateral knees without pain, and to examine the correlation between MCSAs and strength in painful vs painless knees. Methods Forty-eight subjects (31 women; 17 men; age 45–78 years) were drawn from 4,796 Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) participants, in whom both knees displayed the same radiographic stage (KLG2 or 3), one with frequent pain (most days of the month within the past 12 months) and the contra-lateral one without pain. Axial MR images were used to determine MCSAs of extensors, flexors and adductors at 35% femoral length (distal to proximal) and in two adjacent 5 mm images. Maximal isometric extensor and flexor forces were used as provided from the OAI database. Results Painful knees showed 5.2% lower extensor MCSAs (P = 0.00003; paired t-test), and 7.8% lower maximal extensor muscle forces (P = 0.003) than contra-lateral painless knees. There were no significant differences in flexor forces, or flexor and adductor MCSAs (P > 0.39). Correlations between force and MCSAs were similar in painful and painless OA knees (0.44 < r < 0.66). Conclusions Knees with frequent pain demonstrate lower MCSAs and force of the quadriceps (but not of other thigh muscles) compared with contra-lateral knees without knee pain with the same radiographic stage. Frequent pain does not appear to affect the correlations between MCSAs and strength in OA knees. The findings suggest that quadriceps strengthening exercise may be useful in treating symptomatic knee OA

Chemical-protein relation extraction with ensembles of carefully tuned pretrained language models

The identification of chemical-protein interactions described in the literature is an important task with applications in drug design, precision medicine and biotechnology. Manual extraction of such relationships from the biomedical literature is costly and often prohibitively time-consuming. The BioCreative VII DrugProt shared task provides a benchmark for methods for the automated extraction of chemical-protein relations from scientific text. Here we describe our contribution to the shared task and report on the achieved results. We define the task as a relation classification problem, which we approach with pretrained transformer language models. Upon this basic architecture, we experiment with utilizing textual and embedded side information from knowledge bases as well as additional training data to improve extraction performance. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed model and the individual extensions including an extensive hyperparameter search leading to 2647 different runs. We find that ensembling and choosing the right pretrained language model are crucial for optimal performance, whereas adding additional data and embedded side information did not improve results. Our best model is based on an ensemble of 10 pretrained transformers and additional textual descriptions of chemicals taken from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database. The model reaches an F1 score of 79.73% on the hidden DrugProt test set and achieves the first rank out of 107 submitted runs in the official evaluation. Database URL: https://github.com/leonweber/drugprot

Vectorial Control of Magnetization by Light

Coherent light-matter interactions have recently extended their applications to the ultrafast control of magnetization in solids. An important but unrealized technique is the manipulation of magnetization vector motion to make it follow an arbitrarily designed multi-dimensional trajectory. Furthermore, for its realization, the phase and amplitude of degenerate modes need to be steered independently. A promising method is to employ Raman-type nonlinear optical processes induced by femtosecond laser pulses, where magnetic oscillations are induced impulsively with a controlled initial phase and an azimuthal angle that follows well defined selection rules determined by the materials' symmetries. Here, we emphasize the fact that temporal variation of the polarization angle of the laser pulses enables us to distinguish between the two degenerate modes. A full manipulation of two-dimensional magnetic oscillations is demonstrated in antiferromagnetic NiO by employing a pair of polarization-twisted optical pulses. These results have lead to a new concept of vectorial control of magnetization by light

Oscillatory Shear Flow-Induced Alignment of Lamellar Melts of Hydrogen-Bonded Comb Copolymer Supramolecules

In this work we present the orientational behavior of comb copolymer-like supramolecules P4VP(PDP)1.0, obtained by hydrogen bonding between poly(4-vinylpyridine) and pentadecylphenol, during large-amplitude oscillatory shear flow experiments over a broad range of frequencies (0.001-10 Hz). The alignment diagram, presenting the macroscopic alignment in T/TODT vs ω/ωc, contains three regions of parallel alignment separated by a region of perpendicular alignment. For our material, the order-disorder temperature TODT = 67 °C and ωc, the frequency above which the distortion of the chain conformation dominates the materials’ viscoelasticity, is around 0.1 Hz at 61 °C. For the first time flipping from a pure transverse alignment via biaxial transverse/perpendicular alignment to a perpendicular alignment as a function of the strain amplitude was found.

Sicherung von Dämmen, Deichen und Stauanlagen : Handbuch für Theorie und Praxis ; Vol. V - 2015

Die Universität Siegen beschäftigt sich seit über 15 Jahren wissenschaftlich und im Bereich der anwendungsorientierten Forschung mit diesem Thema und hat dazu mittlerweile fünf Symposien durchgeführt. Mit der Veröffentlichung soll die langjährige Tradition als etablierte wissenschaftliche Plattform mit einem Wissensaustausch auf europäischer Ebene fortgesetzt werden. Die Bearbeitung dieser Thematik erfolgt auf der Basis der bewährten Kooperation zwischen Geotechnik und Wasserbau an der Universität Siegen. Aktuelle Ereignisse, wie z.B. die aus England oder Australien im Februar des Jahres 2014, machen uns aber auch deutlich, dass ein absoluter Schutz gegen Extremereignisse nicht möglich ist. Sie zeigen aber auch, dass dort wo technischer Hochwasserschutz konsequent umgesetzt wurde Schäden vermieden werden konnten. Wir sind nach den Ereignissen in den vergangenen Jahren aufgefordert wissenschaftlich noch leistungsfähigere und duktilere Systeme zu entwickeln. Weiter ist die Wissenschaft in der Pflicht, die Zivile Sicherheit im Hochwasser-schutz permanent zu bewerten, zu bearbeiten und ganzheitliche-interdisziplinäre und länderübergreifende Lösungen für die Zivilgesellschaft einzufordern

The Effectiveness of Contract Farming for Raising Income of Smallholder Farmers in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: a Systematic Review

Contract farming is used by an increasing number of firms as a preferred modality to source products from smallholder farmers in low and middle-income countries. Quality requirements of consumers, economies of scale in production or land ownership rights are common incentives for firms to offer contractual arrangements to farmers. Prices and access to key technology, key inputs or support services are the main incentives for farmers to enter into these contracts. There is great heterogeneity in contract farming, with differences in contracts, farmers, products, buyers, and institutional environments. The last decade shows a rapid increase in studies that use quasi-experimental research designs to assess the effects of specific empirical instances of contract farming on smallholders. The objective of this systematic review was to distill generalised inferences from this rapidly growing body of evidence. The review synthesised the studies in order to answer two questions: 1: What is known about the effect size of contract farming on income and food security of smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries? 2: Under which enabling or limiting conditions are contract farming arrangements effective for improving income and food security of smallholders

Ethical issues in autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) in advanced breast cancer: A systematic literature review

BACKGROUND: An effectiveness assessment on ASCT in locally advanced and metastatic breast cancer identified serious ethical issues associated with this intervention. Our objective was to systematically review these aspects by means of a literature analysis. METHODS: We chose the reflexive Socratic approach as the review method using Hofmann's question list, conducted a comprehensive literature search in biomedical, psychological and ethics bibliographic databases and screened the resulting hits in a 2-step selection process. Relevant arguments were assembled from the included articles, and were assessed and assigned to the question list. Hofmann's questions were addressed by synthesizing these arguments. RESULTS: Of the identified 879 documents 102 included arguments related to one or more questions from Hofmann's question list. The most important ethical issues were the implementation of ASCT in clinical practice on the basis of phase-II trials in the 1990s and the publication of falsified data in the first randomized controlled trials (Bezwoda fraud), which caused significant negative effects on recruiting patients for further clinical trials and the doctor-patient relationship. Recent meta-analyses report a marginal effect in prolonging disease-free survival, accompanied by severe harms, including death. ASCT in breast cancer remains a stigmatized technology. Reported health-related-quality-of-life data are often at high risk of bias in favor of the survivors. Furthermore little attention has been paid to those patients who were dying. CONCLUSIONS: The questions were addressed in different degrees of completeness. All arguments were assignable to the questions. The central ethical dimensions of ASCT could be discussed by reviewing the published literature

Coordination Cost and Super-Efficiency in Teamwork: The Role of Communication, Psychological States, Cardiovascular Responses, and Brain Rhythms

To advance knowledge on the psychophysiological markers of “coordination cost” in team settings, we explored differences in meta-communication patterns (i.e., silence, speaking, listening, and overlap), perceived psychological states (i.e., core affect, attention, efficacy beliefs), heart rate variability (i.e., RMSSD), and brain rhythms (i.e., alpha, beta and theta absolute power) across three studies involving 48 male dyads (Mage = 21.30; SD = 2.03). Skilled participants cooperatively played three consecutive FIFA-17 (Xbox) games in a dyad against the computer, or competed against the computer in a solo condition and a dyad condition. We observed that playing in a team, in contrast to playing alone, was associated with higher alpha peak and global efficiency in the brain and, at the same time, led to an increase in focused attention as evidenced by participants’ higher theta activity in the frontal lobe. Moreover, we observed that overtime participants’ brain dynamics moved towards a state of “neural-efficiency” or “flow”, characterized by increased theta and beta activity in the frontal lobe, and high alpha activity across the whole brain. Our findings advance the literature by demonstrating that (1) the notion of coordination cost can be captured at the neural level in the initial stages of team development; (2) by decreasing the costs of switching between tasks, teamwork increases both individuals’ attentional focus and global neural efficiency; and (3) communication dynamics become more proficient and individuals’ brain patterns change towards neural efficiency over time, likely due to team learning and decreases in intra-team conflict