358 research outputs found
User Acceptance of E-Government Services
In order to provide more accessible, accurate, real-time information for citizens, government E-services, such as information kiosks, have been set up in many public places. Although the public sector has promoted this E-Government service for many years, its uses and achievements are few. Therefore, this paper explores the key factors of user acceptance through a research survey and by gathering empirical evidence based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and the Use of Technology (UTAUT). Data collected from 244 respondents was tested against the research model. The results lead us to make several recommendations for the public sector and policy-makers to use as guidelines for the future development of this service
Gene therapy of hypoparathyroidism with TheraCyte-encapsulated stem cells
The parathyroid hormone (PTH) (1-34) gene was inserted into a pcDNA3 promoter and E. coli competent cells were used to amplify the cDNA. C3H/10T1/2 stem cells were transfected with PTH (1-34) cDNA using Lipofectamine reagents. After G418 treatment live cells at a density of 4x107 were loaded onto a TheraCyte unit. After parathyroidectomy, rats were either the implanted with 4x107 TheraCyte-encapsulated cells (group A), subcutaneously injected with 4x107 live cells containing PTH (1-34) cDNA (group B) or injected with nothing (group C).Serum levels of calcium, phosphorus and PTH (1-34) were measured at baseline, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months and 4 months after therapy. Immunohistochemical staining and RT-PCR were performed to find PTH (1-34)-positive cells and to detect PTH (1-34) mRNA.Serum calcium and PTH (1-34) levels were significantly higher in group A than in group B or C. PTH (1-34)-positive cells were found in the TheraCyte group 4 months after implantation. PTH (1-34) mRNA was detected in stem cells 48 hr after transfection and also in stem cells after transfection and 72 hr after G418 treatment.Implantation of the TheraCyte-encapsulated stem cells, which were tranfected with PTH (1-34) cDNA can treat hypoparathyroidism
Weakly Supervised Universal Fracture Detection in Pelvic X-rays
Hip and pelvic fractures are serious injuries with life-threatening
complications. However, diagnostic errors of fractures in pelvic X-rays (PXRs)
are very common, driving the demand for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD)
solutions. A major challenge lies in the fact that fractures are localized
patterns that require localized analyses. Unfortunately, the PXRs residing in
hospital picture archiving and communication system do not typically specify
region of interests. In this paper, we propose a two-stage hip and pelvic
fracture detection method that executes localized fracture classification using
weakly supervised ROI mining. The first stage uses a large capacity
fully-convolutional network, i.e., deep with high levels of abstraction, in a
multiple instance learning setting to automatically mine probable true positive
and definite hard negative ROIs from the whole PXR in the training data. The
second stage trains a smaller capacity model, i.e., shallower and more
generalizable, with the mined ROIs to perform localized analyses to classify
fractures. During inference, our method detects hip and pelvic fractures in one
pass by chaining the probability outputs of the two stages together. We
evaluate our method on 4 410 PXRs, reporting an area under the ROC curve value
of 0.975, the highest among state-of-the-art fracture detection methods.
Moreover, we show that our two-stage approach can perform comparably to human
physicians (even outperforming emergency physicians and surgeons), in a
preliminary reader study of 23 readers.Comment: MICCAI 2019 (early accept
Probing onset of strong localization and electron-electron interactions with the presence of direct insulator-quantum Hall transition
We have performed low-temperature transport measurements on a disordered
two-dimensional electron system (2DES). Features of the strong localization
leading to the quantum Hall effect are observed after the 2DES undergoes a
direct insulator-quantum Hall transition with increasing the perpendicular
magnetic field. However, such a transition does not correspond to the onset of
strong localization. The temperature dependences of the Hall resistivity and
Hall conductivity reveal the importance of the electron-electron interaction
effects to the observed transition in our study.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure
Retroperitoneoscopic laparo-endoscopic single-site radical nephrectomy (RLESS-RN): initial experience with a homemade port
We successfully performed 6 LESS radical nephrectomy via the retroperitoneal approach (RLESS) using the Alexis wound retractor as a single access with conventional laparoscopic instruments. The results demonstrated that our RLESS technique of radical nephrectomy is a safe and feasible procedure for management of localized renal cancer
Precise dd excitations and commensurate intersite Coulomb interactions in the dissimilar cuprate YBa_2Cu_3O_(7-x) and La_(2-x)Sr_xCuO_4
Using high-resolution extreme ultraviolet resonant inelastic X-ray scattering
(EUVRIXS) spectroscopy at Cu M-edge, we observed the doping dependent spectral
shifts of inter-orbital (dd) excitations of YBa_2Cu_3O_(7-x) and
La_(2-x)Sr_xCuO_4. With increasing hole doping level from undoped to optimally
doped superconducting compositions, the leading edge of dd excitations is found
to shift towards lower energy loss in a roughly linear trend that is
irrespective to the cuprate species. The magnitude of energy shift can be
explained by including a 0.15 eV Coulomb attraction between Cu 3d_(x^2-y^2)
electrons and the doped holes on the surrounding oxygens in the atomic
multiplet calculations. The consistent energy shift between distinct cuprate
families suggests that this inter-site Coulomb interaction energy scale is
relatively material-independent, and provides an important reference point for
understanding charge density wave phenomena in the cuprate phase diagram.Comment: 29 pages; 8 figures. Physical Review B, in press. This paper reveals
a Cu 3d-O 2p intersite interaction energy for the first time experimentally.
It also explains why Tc of YBCO is higher than that of LSC
On the direct insulator-quantum Hall transition in two-dimensional electron systems in the vicinity of nanoscaled scatterers.
A direct insulator-quantum Hall (I-QH) transition corresponds to a crossover/transition from the insulating regime to a high Landau level filling factor ν > 2 QH state. Such a transition has been attracting a great deal of both experimental and theoretical interests. In this study, we present three different two-dimensional electron systems (2DESs) which are in the vicinity of nanoscaled scatterers. All these three devices exhibit a direct I-QH transition, and the transport properties under different nanaoscaled scatterers are discussed.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are
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