Maize in Vietnam: Production Systems, Constraints, and Research Priorities

Crop Production/Industries,

Investigation of the local environment of SnO2 in an applied magnetic field

This paper presents the results of time-differential perturbed gamma–gamma angular correlation measurements of SnO2 thin films carried out in an applied magnetic field. The measurements were performed upon the implantation of Fe at 80 keV and 111In (111Cd) at 160 keV. The samples were further characterized by energydispersive X-ray spectroscopy. The hyperfine parameters were studied at room temperature with and without an applied magnetic field. The results indicate the presence of two distinct local environments for the probe nuclei. Both occupy a paramagnetic state and correspond to a substitutional Sn site in the rutile phase of SnO2 with different numbers of electrons added to SnO2:Cd0. In addition, the crystal homogeneity of the site 1 increases upon applying the magnetic field

Assessment of the Effectiveness of Ich Tam Khang as a Supportive Therapy for Chronic Heart Failure

Background: Heart failure is a chronic disease needing lifelong management. Despite the advances that have been made in the treatment of the disease, both the longevity and quality of life for those with chronic heart failure remain impaired. A more effective therapeutic approach with less negative side effects is still needed. In this study, we evaluate Ich Tam Khang (ITK), the poly-ingredient herbal and nutritional preparation with multiple physiological actions, as a supportive therapy for patients with chronic heart failure.Aims of Study: To evaluate the effectiveness and safety of Ich Tam Khang as an adjunctive treatment of chronic heart failure.Methods: A total of 60 patients with chronic congestive heart failure were enrolled in this open label, cross-sectional and prospective study. All patients were treated with a conventional regimen (digoxin, diuretics, angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) inhibitors or angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs), beta blockers) for at least 4 weeks before being divided into two equal groups. In the treated patients with ITK, patients received conventional therapy plus 4 tablets ITK per day added in two divided doses. In the control patients, all patients kept the same conventional regimen without ITK. All patients were followed up for 3 months for clinical and para-clinical outcomes.Result: The symptoms of heart failure (dyspnea, palpitation, peripheral edema, neck vein distention, heptojugular reflex) decreased. Heart rate and blood pressure stabilized during treatment in the treated patients with ITK. Additionally, total cholesterol and HDL-cholesterol normalized in the patients treated with ITK. Most of echocardiography parameters in the ITK treated patients were superior to the control patients. ITK is safe and it has no side effects.Conclusion: ITK as a combination of herbal and nutritional preparation is effective in reducing heart failure symptoms, improving patient's quality of life for the patients with decompensated heart failure and reducing total cholesterol and LDL-C

Investigation of sorption of Cu₂₊, Zn₂₊ and Cd₂₊ ions by a composite adsorbent obtained from bentonite-like clay and hydroxyapatite

The article analyses the results of the measuring of pHpzc (point zero charge) of the surface of adsorbents by potentiometric titration are presente

A Two-Stage Filter for High Density Salt and Pepper Denoising

Image restoration is an important and interesting problem in the field of image processing because it improves the quality of input images, which facilitates postprocessing tasks. The salt-and-pepper noise has a simpler structure than other noises, such as Gaussian and Poisson noises, but is a very common type of noise caused by many electronic devices. In this article, we propose a two-stage filter to remove high-density salt-and-pepper noise on images. The range of application of the proposed denoising method goes from low-density to high-density corrupted images. In the experiments, we assessed the image quality after denoising using the peak signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity metric. We also compared our method against other similar state-of-the-art denoising methods to prove its effectiveness for salt and pepper noise removal. From the findings, one can conclude that the proposed method can successfully remove super-high-density noise with noise level above 90%. (c) 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

Class based Influence Functions for Error Detection

Influence functions (IFs) are a powerful tool for detecting anomalous examples in large scale datasets. However, they are unstable when applied to deep networks. In this paper, we provide an explanation for the instability of IFs and develop a solution to this problem. We show that IFs are unreliable when the two data points belong to two different classes. Our solution leverages class information to improve the stability of IFs. Extensive experiments show that our modification significantly improves the performance and stability of IFs while incurring no additional computational cost.Comment: Thang Nguyen-Duc, Hoang Thanh-Tung, and Quan Hung Tran are co-first authors of this paper. 12 pages, 12 figures. Accepted to ACL 202

20-Hydroxyecdysone from Dacrycarpus imbricatus bark inhibits the proliferation of acute myeloid leukemia cells

Abstract Objective To investigate the anti-proliferative effects of 20-hydroxyecdysone isolated from the bark of Dacrycarpus imbricatus (Blume) de Laub. Methods Column chromatography was used for isolation of compounds from plant material. The structure of the isolated compound was identified by mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance techniques, including HSQC, HMBC, NOE-difference experiments. The isolated compound was tested for its anti-proliferative activity in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and OCI-AML cells. Results Compound 1 was isolated from the ethyl acetate fraction of Dacrycarpus imbricatus barks by column chromatography. Its chemical structure was identified as 20-hydroxyecdysone (20HE), a cholestane-type ecdysteroid, by a combination of mass spectrometry and nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometric analyses. Our goal was to test the anti-proliferative activity of 20HE using the OCI-AML cell line. 20HE significantly decreased OCI cell number at a concentration of 1 mg/mL, whereas lower concentrations were ineffective. Moreover, this decrease was due to partial blockage of the G 1 /S phase of the cell cycle, with a reduction of cells in the G 2 M phase, not due to increased apoptosis. Conclusions This indicates that 20HE significantly decreases the number of cells in the G 1 /S phase of the cell cycle in human AML cells. This is the first time that the anti-proliferative activity of 20HE against a human tumor cell line has been reported

From Selective Deep Convolutional Features to Compact Binary Representations for Image Retrieval

In the large-scale image retrieval task, the two most important requirements are the discriminability of image representations and the efficiency in computation and storage of representations. Regarding the former requirement, Convolutional Neural Network is proven to be a very powerful tool to extract highly discriminative local descriptors for effective image search. Additionally, to further improve the discriminative power of the descriptors, recent works adopt fine-tuned strategies. In this article, taking a different approach, we propose a novel, computationally efficient, and competitive framework. Specifically, we first propose various strategies to compute masks, namely, SIFT-masks , SUM-mask , and MAX-mask , to select a representative subset of local convolutional features and eliminate redundant features. Our in-depth analyses demonstrate that proposed masking schemes are effective to address the burstiness drawback and improve retrieval accuracy. Second, we propose to employ recent embedding and aggregating methods that can significantly boost the feature discriminability. Regarding the computation and storage efficiency, we include a hashing module to produce very compact binary image representations. Extensive experiments on six image retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed framework achieves the state-of-the-art retrieval performances. </jats:p

Effectiveness of cervical pessary compared to cervical cerclage with or without vaginal progesterone for the prevention of preterm birth in women with twin pregnancies and a short cervix : Study protocol for a two-by-two factorial randomised clinical trial

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