A High-Precision Micropipette Sensor for Cellular-Level Real-Time Thermal Characterization

We report herein development of a novel glass micropipette thermal sensor fabricated in a cost-effective manner, which is capable of measuring steady thermal fluctuation at spatial resolution of similar to 2 mu m with an accuracy of +/- 0.01 degrees C. We produced and tested various micrometer-sized sensors, ranging from 2 mu m to 30 mu m. The sensor comprises unleaded low-melting-point solder alloy (Sn-based) as a core metal inside a pulled borosilicate glass pipette and a thin film of nickel coating outside, creating a thermocouple junction at the tip. The sensor was calibrated using a thermally insulated calibration chamber, the temperature of which can be controlled with an accuracy of +/- 0.01 degrees C, and the thermoelectric power (Seebeck coefficient) of the sensor was recorded from 8.46 to 8.86 mu V/degrees C. We have demonstrated the capability of measuring temperatures at a cellular level by inserting our temperature sensor into the membrane of a live retinal pigment epithelium cell subjected to a laser beam with a focal spot of 6 mu m. We measured transient temperature profiles and the maximum temperatures were in the range of 38-55 +/- 0.5 degrees C.open111212sciescopu

Many-shot from Low-shot: Learning to Annotate using Mixed Supervision for Object Detection

Object detection has witnessed significant progress by relying on large, manually annotated datasets. Annotating such datasets is highly time consuming and expensive, which motivates the development of weakly supervised and few-shot object detection methods. However, these methods largely underperform with respect to their strongly supervised counterpart, as weak training signals \emph{often} result in partial or oversized detections. Towards solving this problem we introduce, for the first time, an online annotation module (OAM) that learns to generate a many-shot set of \emph{reliable} annotations from a larger volume of weakly labelled images. Our OAM can be jointly trained with any fully supervised two-stage object detection method, providing additional training annotations on the fly. This results in a fully end-to-end strategy that only requires a low-shot set of fully annotated images. The integration of the OAM with Fast(er) R-CNN improves their performance by $17\%$ mAP, $9\%$ AP50 on PASCAL VOC 2007 and MS-COCO benchmarks, and significantly outperforms competing methods using mixed supervision.Comment: Accepted at ECCV 2020. Camera-ready version and Appendice

CLNet: A Compact Latent Network for Fast Adjusting Siamese Trackers

© 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. In this paper, we provide a deep analysis for Siamese-based trackers and find that the one core reason for their failure on challenging cases can be attributed to the problem of decisive samples missing during offline training. Furthermore, we notice that the samples given in the first frame can be viewed as the decisive samples for the sequence since they contain rich sequence-specific information. To make full use of these sequence-specific samples, we propose a compact latent network to quickly adjust the tracking model to adapt to new scenes. A statistic-based compact latent feature is proposed to efficiently capture the sequence-specific information for the fast adjustment. In addition, we design a new training approach based on a diverse sample mining strategy to further improve the discrimination ability of our compact latent network. To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we apply it to adjust a recent state-of-the-art tracker, SiamRPN++. Extensive experimental results on five recent benchmarks demonstrate that the adjusted tracker achieves promising improvement in terms of tracking accuracy, with almost the same speed. The code and models are available at https://github.com/xingpingdong/CLNet-tracking

Construction of large-volume tissue mimics with 3D functional vascular networks

We used indirect stereolithography (SL) to form inner-layered fluidic networks in a porous scaffold by introducing a hydrogel barrier on the luminal surface, then seeded the networks separately with human umbilical vein endothelial cells and human lung fibroblasts to form a tissue mimic containing vascular networks. The artificial vascular networks provided channels for oxygen transport, thus reducing the hypoxic volume and preventing cell death. The endothelium of the vascular networks significantly retarded the occlusion of channels during whole-blood circulation. The tissue mimics have the potential to be used as an in vitro platform to examine the physiologic and pathologic phenomena through vascular architecture.ope

Curlometer technique and applications

We review the range of applications and use of the curlometer, initially developed to analyze Cluster multi-spacecraft magnetic field data; but more recently adapted to other arrays of spacecraft flying in formation, such as MMS small-scale, 4-spacecraft configurations; THEMIS close constellations of 3–5 spacecraft, and Swarm 2–3 spacecraft configurations. Although magnetic gradients require knowledge of spacecraft separations and the magnetic field, the structure of the electric current density (for example, its relative spatial scale), and any temporal evolution, limits measurement accuracy. Nevertheless, in many magnetospheric regions the curlometer is reliable (within certain limits), particularly under conditions of time stationarity, or with supporting information on morphology (for example, when the geometry of the large scale structure is expected). A number of large-scale regions have been covered, such as: the cross-tail current sheet, ring current, the current layer at the magnetopause and field-aligned currents. Transient and smaller scale current structures (e.g., reconnected flux tube or dipolarisation fronts) and energy transfer processes. The method is able to provide estimates of single components of the vector current density, even if there are only two or three satellites flying in formation, within the current region, as can be the case when there is a highly irregular spacecraft configuration. The computation of magnetic field gradients and topology in general includes magnetic rotation analysis and various least squares approaches, as well as the curlometer, and indeed the added inclusion of plasma measurements and the extension to larger arrays of spacecraft have recently been considered

Evaluation of the Luminex xTAG Respiratory Viral Panel FAST v2 assay for detection of multiple respiratory viral pathogens in nasal and throat swabs in Vietnam.

BACKGROUND: Acute respiratory infections (ARI) are among the leading causes of hospitalization in children ≤5 years old. Rapid diagnostics of viral pathogens is essential to avoid unnecessary antibiotic treatment, thereby slowing down antibiotic-resistance. We evaluated the diagnostic performance of the Luminex xTAG Respiratory Viral Panel FAST v2 against viral specific PCR as reference assays for ARI in Vietnam. METHODS: Four hundred and forty two nose and throat swabs were collected in viral transport medium, and were tested with Luminex xTAG Respiratory Viral Panel FAST v2. Multiplex RT-PCR and single RT-PCR were used as references.    Results: Overall, viral pathogens were detected in a total count of 270/294 (91.8%, 95% CI 88.1-94.7) by the Luminex among reference assays, whilst 112/6336 (1.8%, 95% CI, 1.4-2.1) of pathogens were detected by the Luminex, but not by reference assays. Frequency of pathogens detected by Luminex and reference assays was 379 and 292, respectively. The diagnostic yield was 66.7% (295/442, 95%CI 62.1-71.1%) for the Luminex assay and 54.1% (239/442, 95% CI, 49.3-58.8%) for reference assays. The Luminex kit had higher yields for all viruses except influenza B virus, respiratory syncytial virus, and human bocavirus. High agreements between both methods [mean (range): 0.91 (0.83-1.00)] were found for 10/15 viral agents. CONCLUSIONS: The Luminex assay is a high throughput multiplex platform for rapid detection of common viral pathogens causing ARI. Although the current high cost may prevent Luminex assays from being widely used, especially in limited resource settings where ARI are felt most, its introduction in clinical diagnostics may help reduce unnecessary use of antibiotic prescription

A new XRD method to quantify plate and lath martensites of hardened medium-carbon steel

This paper introduces a new technique to separately measure the volume fraction and tetragonal ratio of co-existing lath and plate martensites in ultrahigh strength steel, and to calculate their different carbon contents. First of all, the two martensites are assumed to have body centre tetragonal lattice structures of different tetragonal ratios. X-ray diffraction is then applied to obtain the overlapping (200) diffraction peak, which is subsequently separated as four sub-peaks using a self-made multiple Gaussian peak-fitting method to allow the measurement of the individual lattice parameters c and a. Finally a modified equation is applied to calculate the carbon contents from the obtained tetragonal ratios. The new technique is then applied to investigate the effect of subsequent tempering on the decarbonisation of the as-quenched martensites. Keywords: Gaussian peak-fitting, martensite carbon content, martensite tetragonal ratio, medium-carbon steels, Xray diffractio

Assessing the Quality of Reports about Randomized Controlled Trials of Acupuncture Treatment on Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy

BACKGROUND: To evaluate the reports' qualities which are about randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of acupuncture treatment on Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy (DPN). METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Eight databases including The Cochrane Library(1993-Sept.,2011), PubMed (1980-Sept., 2011), EMbase (1980-Sept.,2011), SCI Expanded (1998-Sept.,2011), China Biomedicine Database Disc (CBMdisc, 1978-Sept., 2011), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI, 1979-Sept., 2011 ), VIP (a full text issues database of China, 1989-Sept., 2011), Wan Fang (another full text issues database of China 1998-Sept., 2011) were searched systematically. Hand search for further references was conducted. Language was limited to Chinese and English. We identified 75 RCTs that used acupuncture as an intervention and assessed the quality of these reports with the Consolidated Standards for Reporting of Trials statement 2010 (CONSORT2010) and Standards for Reporting Interventions Controlled Trials of Acupuncture 2010(STRICTA2010). 24 articles (32%) applied the method of random allocation of sequences. No article gave the description of the mechanism of allocation concealment, no experiment applied the method of blinding. Only one article (1.47%) could be identified directly from its title as about the Randomized Controlled Trials, and only 4 articles gave description of the experimental design. No article mentioned the number of cases lost or eliminated. During one experiment, acupuncture syncope led to temporal interruption of the therapy. Two articles (2.94%) recorded the number of needles, and 8 articles (11.76%) mentioned the depth of needle insertion. None of articles reported the base of calculation of sample size, or has any analysis about the metaphase of an experiment or an explanation of its interruption. One (1.47%) mentioned intentional analysis (ITT). CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The quality of the reports on RCTs of acupuncture for Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy is moderate to low. The CONSORT2010 and STRICTA2010 should be used to standardize the reporting of RCTs of acupuncture in future

Flux-sum analysis: a metabolite-centric approach for understanding the metabolic network

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Constraint-based flux analysis of metabolic network model quantifies the reaction flux distribution to characterize the state of cellular metabolism. However, metabolites are key players in the metabolic network and the current reaction-centric approach may not account for the effect of metabolite perturbation on the cellular physiology due to the inherent limitation in model formulation. Thus, it would be practical to incorporate the metabolite states into the model for the analysis of the network.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Presented herein is a metabolite-centric approach of analyzing the metabolic network by including the turnover rate of metabolite, known as flux-sum, as key descriptive variable within the model formulation. By doing so, the effect of varying metabolite flux-sum on physiological change can be simulated by resorting to mixed integer linear programming. From the results, we could classify various metabolite types based on the flux-sum profile. Using the <it>i</it>AF1260 <it>in silico </it>metabolic model of <it>Escherichia coli</it>, we demonstrated that this novel concept complements the conventional reaction-centric analysis.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Metabolite flux-sum analysis elucidates the roles of metabolites in the network. In addition, this metabolite perturbation analysis identifies the key metabolites, implicating practical application which is achievable through metabolite flux-sum manipulation in the areas of biotechnology and biomedical research.</p