Determination of the miscibility gap in the solid solutions series of methylammonium lead iodide chloride

Perovskites are widely known for their enormous possibility of elemental substitution, which leads to a large variety of physical properties. Hybrid perovskites such as CH3NH3PbI3 MAPbI3 and CH3NH3PbCl3 MAPbCl3 are perovskites with an A[XII]B[VI]X[II] 3 stoichiometry, where A is an organic molecule, B is a lead II cation and X is a halide anion of iodine or chlorine. Whereas MAPbCl3 crystallizes in the cubic space group Pm3m, MAPbI3 is in the tetragonal space group I4 mcm. The substitution of I by Cl leads to an increased tolerance against humidity but is challenging or even impossible due to their large difference in ionic radii. Here, the influence of an increasing Cl content in the reaction solution on the miscibility of the solid solution members is examined systematically. Powders were synthesized by two different routes depending on the I Cl ratio. High resolution synchrotron X ray data are used to establish values for the limits of the miscibility gap which are 3.1 1.1 mol MAPbCl3 in MAPI and 1.0 1 mol MAPbI3 in MAPCl. The establishment of relations between average pseudo cubic lattice parameters for both phases allows a determination of the degree of substitution from the observed lattice parameter

Ayurvedic vs. Conventional Nutritional Therapy Including Low-FODMAP Diet for Patients With Irritable Bowel Syndrome-A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Aims: To compare the effects of Ayurvedic and conventional nutritional therapy in patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Methods: Sixty-nine patients with IBS were randomized to Ayurvedic (n = 35) or conventional nutritional therapy according to the recommendations of the German Nutrition Society including the low-FODMAP diet (n = 34). Study visits took place at baseline and after 1, 3, and 6 months. The primary outcome was IBS symptom severity (IBS-SSS) after 3 months; secondary outcomes included stress (CPSS), anxiety and depression (HADS), well-being (WHO-5) and IBS-specific quality of life (IBS-QOL). A repeated measures general linear model (GLM) for intent-to-treat-analyses was applied in this explorative study. Results: After 3 months, estimated marginal means for IBS-SSS reductions were 123.8 [95% confidence interval (95% CI) = 92.8-154.9; p < 0.001] in the Ayurvedic and 72.7 (95% CI = 38.8-106.7; p < 0.001) in the conventional group. The IBS-SSS reduction was significantly higher in the Ayurveda group compared to the conventional therapy group (estimated marginal mean = 51.1; 95% CI = 3.8-98.5; p = 0.035) and clinically meaningful. Sixty-eight percentage of the variance in IBS-SSS reduction after 3 months can be explained by treatment, 6.5% by patients' expectations for their therapies and 23.4% by IBS-SSS at pre-intervention. Both therapies are equivalent in their contribution to the outcome variance. The higher the IBS-SSS score at pre-intervention and the larger the patients' expectations, the greater the IBS-SSS reduction. There were no significant group differences in any secondary outcome measures. No serious adverse events occurred in either group. Conclusion: Patients with IBS seem to benefit significantly from Ayurvedic or conventional nutritional therapy. The results warrant further studies with longer-term follow-ups and larger sample sizes. Clinical Trial Registration:https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03019861, identifier: NCT03019861

Sex hormone-dependent host-microbiome interactions and cardiovascular risk (XCVD): design of a longitudinal multi-omics cohort study

INTRODUCTION: Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) present differently in women and men, influenced by host-microbiome interactions. The roles of sex hormones in CVD outcomes and gut microbiome in modifying these effects are poorly understood. The XCVD study examines gut microbiome mediation of sex hormone effects on CVD risk markers by observing transgender participants undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT), with findings expected to extrapolate to cisgender populations. METHODS AND ANALYSES: This observational, longitudinal cohort study includes baseline, 1- and 2-year follow-ups with transgender participants beginning GAHT. It involves comprehensive phenotyping and microbiome genotyping, integrating computational analyses of high-dimensional data. Microbial diversity will be assessed using gut, skin, and oral samples via 16S rRNA and shotgun metagenomic sequencing of gut samples. Blood measurements will include sex hormones, CVD risk markers, cardiometabolic parameters, cytokines, and immune cell counts. Hair samples will be analysed for cortisol. Participants will complete online questionnaires on physical activity, mental health, stress, quality of life, fatigue, sleep, pain, and gender dysphoria, tracking medication use and diet to control for confounders. Statistical analyses will integrate phenomic, lifestyle, and multi-omic data to model health effects, testing gut microbiome mediation of CVD risk as the endocrine environment shifts between that typical for cisgender men to women and vice versa. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: The study adheres to Good Clinical Practice and the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the Charité Ethical Committee (EA1/339/21). Signed informed consent will be obtained. Results will be published in peer-reviewed journals and conferences and shared as accessible summaries for participants, community groups, and the public, with participants able to view their data securely after public and patient involvement review for accessibility. TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER: The XCVD study was registered on ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT05334888) as 'Sex-differential host-microbiome CVD risk - a longitudinal cohort approach (XCVD)" on 4 April 2022. Data set link can be found at https://classic. CLINICALTRIALS: gov/ct2/show/NCT05334888

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A quadratic programming approach for the mosaicing of virtual slides that incorporates the positioning accuracy of the microscope stage

We describe a novel approach for creating virtual slides that incorporates the positioning accuracy of the microscope stage in the optimization step. To capture a complete slide in microscopy, a large number of fields of view have to be acquired by moving the microscope stage in a controlled way. These fields of view are aligned in such a way that a globally consistent virtual slide is formed. However, depending on the positioning repeatability of the stage and the accuracy of the stage calibration, this results in alignment errors. These errors are usually resolved by applying a mosaicing algorithm. Our algorithm extends known mosaicing approaches by analyzing the positioning accuracy of the stage and incorporating this knowledge to make the mosaicing process more robust

A uniform, raytracing-based imaging model for rigid and fiber-optic endoscopy

Modern techniques for medical diagnosis and therapy make considerable use of endoscopes. Unfortunately, the wide-angle characteristic of endoscopes introduce severe aberrations such as chromatic aberration, geometric distortion or comb-structure to the images. The aberrations hinder or at worst prevent the application of fundamental image processing techniques for an appropriate image analysis. In this paper, we propose a uniform ray-tracing based image model for rigid as well as fiber-optic endoscopes. This model enables an objective assessment of algorithms that rely on the image formation using physically correct and thus valid ground truth data

Infrared thermal imaging system as a diagnostic tool for gas turbine engine faults

With the cost of maintaining a fleet of gas turbine engines continuing to rise, there is a greater need to develop methods to diagnose engine deterioration and identify faulty engine components quickly and efficiently. The Structures, Materials and Propulsion Laboratory of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) has established a program to develop and evaluate various diagnostic techniques. The effort is aimed at investigating the effects of typical in-service faults on engine performance characteristics. An important aspect of the engine test program is the evaluation of non-intrusive sensors to accurately measure gas turbine performance. Using infrared thermography, the measurement of temperature is accomplished non-intrusively using the infrared radiation spectra. This instrumentation provides an indirect measurement of temperature and does not interfere with the flow field being leisured. The temperature patterns can be used to determine engine health, and identify possible fault conditions within the hot section of the engine. This paper describes the project objectives, the experimental installation, and the results of the performance evaluations. A description of the infrared thermography system, and the data reduction and analysis systems used to convert infrared light into temperature profile contours is given. Copyright \ua9 1994 by ASME.Peer reviewed: YesNRC publication: Ye

Implementation of an Infrared Thermal Imaging System to Measure Temperature in a Gas Turbine Engine

NRC publication: Ye