Design And Fabrication of Condenser Microphone Using Wafer Transfer And Micro-electroplating Technique

A novel fabrication process, which uses wafer transfer and micro-electroplating technique, has been proposed and tested. In this paper, the effects of the diaphragm thickness and stress, the air-gap thickness, and the area ratio of acoustic holes to backplate on the sensitivity of the condenser microphone have been demonstrated since the performance of the microphone depends on these parameters. The microphone diaphragm has been designed with a diameter and thickness of 1.9 mm and 0.6 $\mu$m, respectively, an air-gap thickness of 10 $\mu$m, and a 24% area ratio of acoustic holes to backplate. To obtain a lower initial stress, the material used for the diaphragm is polyimide. The measured sensitivities of the microphone at the bias voltages of 24 V and 12 V are -45.3 and -50.2 dB/Pa (at 1 kHz), respectively. The fabricated microphone shows a flat frequency response extending to 20 kHz.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDA Publishing Association (http://irevues.inist.fr/handle/2042/16838

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

Gabapentin治療帶狀皰疹後神經痛的起始劑量－一個藥物劑 量反應研究

背景：許多研究顯示，gabapentin可用於治療帶狀皰疹後神經痛，在每天1200 mg至 2400 mg的劑量下，可以提供最大的止痛效果，然而起始劑量的使用，並沒有相關的 研究。本篇的研究目的，在於建立治療帶狀皰疹後神經痛的起始劑量。方法：這是一 個臨床隨機時序性的研究，將病人隨機分成三組，分別接受每天200 mg、400 mg或 600 mg的gabapentin連續三天。分別在第0天與第3天評估止痛效果以及眩暈、欲睡和 疲倦等副作用。結果：總共有61位病人參與研究計畫，32位男性29位女性。在三天的 治療後，三組病人的疼痛都有獲得改善(P＜0. 05)。副作用方面，接受不同劑量的三 組病人，眩暈、欲睡和疲倦的程度並沒有差異(P＞0.05)。結論：研究結果顯示在前 三天的治療，接受gabapentin 200 mg、400 mg或600 mg的病人，疼痛都有相當的減 緩與最少的副作用。所以，每天200 mg的最低起始劑量，並不能提供減少副作用的效 果時，我們建議以gabepentin每天600 mg的起始劑量，可以安全有效的使用於病人上 。 Background: Gabapentin has been shown to provide pain relief for post- herpetic neuralgia at dosage of 1,200 to 2,400 mg/day. However, the initial dosing strategy has not been thoroughly investigated . The purpose of this study was to establish the initial dosing strategy in the treatment of the gabapentin-naive patients with post-herpetic neuralgia. Methods: This clinical study was an open-label, randomized, time-sequence and controlled trial. Each gabapentin-naive subject was allocated to receive either 200 mg (100 mg, twice daily), 400 mg (100 mg, four times daily), or 600 mg (200 mg, three times daily) of gabapentin for three days . The analgesic effect and occurrence of dizziness, drowsiness, and fatigue were assessed at day 0 and day 3. Results: A total of 61 subjects (32 male/29 female) were enrolled in this study. The intensity of pain was greatly improved in all three groups after three days of treatment ( visual analog scale decreased from 6.5±1.6 to 4.5±2.1, P<0.05). There was no statistically significant difference among subjects taking 200 mg, 400 mg, or 600 mg with respect to dizziness, drowsiness or fatigue. Conclusions: This study shows that elderly gabapentin-naive subjects no matter whether receiving 200, 400 or 600 mg/day of gabapentin benefited a moderate pain relief with minimal side effects at the first three days of treatment Since starting with a minimal dose of 200 mg/day did not offer a better reduction of side effects, we suggest that 600 mg/day gabapentin could be a safe and effective starting dose for patients with post- herpetic neuralgia

Magnesium sulfate enhances lipopolysaccharide tolerance

Introduction Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) tolerance is the downregulation of LPS signaling after pre-exposure to LPS, and it provides protection against hyperactive inflammation. Cytokine production decreases during LPS tolerance, and the phenotype of LPS-tolerant monocytes shifts toward M2 (anti-inflammatory) type. Magnesium sulfate (MgSO 4 ) is a widely used anti-inflammatory agent. Although MgSO 4 inhibits LPS signaling, the effect of MgSO 4 on LPS tolerance is unknown. In the present study, we investigated the in vitro effects of MgSO 4 on LPS tolerance. Methods To induce LPS tolerance, THP-1 cells were stimulated with LPS (200 ng/mL, 2 h) after pre-exposure to LPS (200 ng/mL, 24 h) with or without pre-treatment of MgSO 4 (20 mM, 24 h). Results Our results revealed that MgSO 4 enhanced LPS tolerance by downregulating nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB)-induced tumor necrosis factor-α or interleukin-6, and upregulating cluster of differentiation 163 (a M2-associated marker). Furthermore, the LPS-triggered upregulation of phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) was significantly increased during LPS tolerance. MgSO 4 activated PI3K, but inhibited NF-κB in LPS-stimulated cells. Notably, MgSO 4 mitigated the signaling of both PI3K and NF-κB in LPS-tolerant cells, suggesting the effect of MgSO 4 on LPS tolerance relies on the modulation of the crosstalk between PI3K and NF-κB. Conclusion MgSO 4 enhanced LSP tolerance, thus providing evidence for a novel underlying mechanism of the anti-inflammatory effects of MgSO 4

Lycopene depresses glutamate release through inhibition of voltage-dependent Ca 2+ entry and protein kinase C in rat cerebrocortical nerve terminals

Lycopene is a natural dietary carotenoid which was reported to exhibit neuroprotective profile. Considering that excitotoxicity and cell death induced by glutamate are involved in many brain disorders, the effect of lycopene on glutamate release in rat cerebrocortical nerve terminals and the possible mechanism involved in such effect was investigated. We observed here that lycopene inhibited 4-aminopyridine (4-AP)-evoked glutamate release and intrasynaptosomal CaThe accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author

Comparison of Deep Learning Algorithms in Predicting Expert Assessments of Pain Scores during Surgical Operations Using Analgesia Nociception Index

There are many surgical operations performed daily in operation rooms worldwide. Adequate anesthesia is needed during an operation. Besides hypnosis, adequate analgesia is critical to prevent autonomic reactions. Clinical experience and vital signs are usually used to adjust the dosage of analgesics. Analgesia nociception index (ANI), which ranges from 0 to 100, is derived from heart rate variability (HRV) via electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, for pain evaluation in a non-invasive manner. It represents parasympathetic activity. In this study, we compared the performance of multilayer perceptron (MLP) and long short-term memory (LSTM) algorithms in predicting expert assessment of pain score (EAPS) based on patient&prime;s HRV during surgery. The objective of this study was to analyze how deep learning models differed from the medical doctors&prime; predictions of EAPS. As the input and output features of the deep learning models, the opposites of ANI and EAPS were used. This study included 80 patients who underwent operations at National Taiwan University Hospital. Using MLP and LSTM, a holdout method was first applied to 60 training patients, 10 validation patients, and 10 testing patients. As compared to the LSTM model, which had a testing mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.633 &plusmn; 0.542, the MLP model had a testing MAE of 2.490 &plusmn; 0.522, with a more appropriate shape of its prediction curves. The model based on MLP was selected as the best. Using MLP, a seven-fold cross validation method was then applied. The first fold had the lowest testing MAE of 2.460 &plusmn; 0.634, while the overall MAE for the seven-fold cross validation method was 2.848 &plusmn; 0.308. In conclusion, HRV analysis using MLP algorithm had a good correlation with EAPS; therefore, it can play role as a continuous monitor to predict intraoperative pain levels, to assist physicians in adjusting analgesic agent dosage. Further studies may consider obtaining more input features, such as photoplethysmography (PPG) and other kinds of continuous variable, to improve the prediction performance

Effective Epidural Blood Patch Volumes for Postdural Puncture Headache in Taiwanese Women

Background/purposeEpidural blood patch (EDBP) is the most commonly used method to treat postdural puncture headache (PDPH). The optimal or effective blood volume for epidural injection is still controversial and under debated. This study compared the therapeutic efficacy of 7.5 mL blood vs. 15 mL blood for EDBP via epidural catheter injection.MethodsThirty-three patients who suffered from severe PDPH due to accidental dural puncture during epidural anesthesia for cesarean section or epidural analgesia for labor pain control were randomly allocated into two groups. EDBP was conducted and autologous blood 7.5 mL or 15 mL was injected via an epidural catheter in the semi-sitting position in Group I (n = 17) and II (n = 16), respectively. For all patients in both groups, the severity of PDPH was registered on a 4-point scale (none, mild, moderate, severe) and assessed 1 hour, 24 hours and 3 days after EDBP.ResultsThere was no significant difference between the two groups of patients at all time points with respect to the severity of PDPH. Two patients in Group I and nine in Group II developed nerve root irritating pain during blood injection (p < 0.05). No systemic complications were noted in both groups of patients throughout EDBP injection.ConclusionWe conclude that injection of 7.5 mL autologous blood into the epidural space is comparable to 15 mL blood in its analgesic effect on PDPH, but with less nerve root irritating pain during injection. [J Formos Med Assoc 2007;106(2):134-140

Comparison of the Current Diagnostic Criterion of HbA1c with Fasting and 2-Hour Plasma Glucose Concentration

To determine the effectiveness of hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) ≥ 6.5% in diagnosing diabetes compared to fasting plasma glucose (FPG) ≥ 126 mg/dL and 2-hour plasma glucose (2hPG) ≥ 200 mg/dL in a previously undiagnosed diabetic cohort, we included 5,764 adult subjects without established diabetes for whom HbA1c, FPG, 2hPG, and BMI measurements were collected. Compared to the FPG criterion, the sensitivity of HbA1c ≥ 6.5% was only 43.3% (106 subjects). Compared to the 2hPG criterion, the sensitivity of HbA1c ≥ 6.5% was only 28.1% (110 subjects). Patients who were diabetic using 2hPG criterion but had HbA1c < 6.5% were more likely to be older (64±15 versus 60±15 years old, P=0.01, mean ± STD), female (53.2% versus 38.2%, P=0.008), leaner (29.7±6.1 versus 33.0±6.6 kg/m2, P=0.000005), and less likely to be current smokers (18.1% versus 29.1%, P=0.02) as compared to those with HbA1c ≥ 6.5%. The diagnostic agreement in the clinical setting revealed the current HbA1c ≥ 6.5% is less likely to detect diabetes than those defined by FPG and 2hPG. HbA1c ≥ 6.5% detects less than 50% of diabetic patients defined by FPG and less than 30% of diabetic patients defined by 2hPG. When the diagnosis of diabetes is in doubt by HbA1c, FPG and/or 2hPG should be obtained