27 research outputs found
A gold nanoshell with a silica inner shell synthesized using liposome templates for doxorubicin loading and near-infrared photothermal therapy
Gold (Au) nanoshells with solid silica cores have great potential for cancer photothermal therapy. However, this nanostructure cannot carry enough drugs. Here, we report a Au nanoshell with a hollow silica core for drug loading and cancer therapy. The silica shells were synthesized using nanoliposome templates, and then Au nanoshells were grown on the outer surface of the silica shells. Transmission-electron and scanning-electron microscopy showed that the Au nanoshells were successfully fabricated, and that the liposome/SiO2/Au core-shell nanocomposites were spherical with a narrow size distribution. Images of several broken spheres, and the fact that hollow templates (liposomes) were used, suggest that the fabricated Au nanoshells were hollow. After doxorubicin (DOX) was incorporated into liposome/SiO2/Au, the DOX-loaded Au nanoshells killed cancer cells with high therapeutic efficacy when irradiated with near-infrared light, suggesting that the Au nanoshells delivered both DOX chemotherapy and photothermal therapy with a synergistic effect
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Improving Prediction of Real-Time Loneliness and Companionship Type Using Geosocial Features of Personal Smartphone Data
Loneliness is a widely affecting mental health symptom and can be mediated by and co-vary with patterns of social exposure. Using momentary survey and smartphone sensing data collected from 129 Android-using college student participants over three weeks, we (1) investigate and uncover the relations between momentary loneliness experience and companionship type and (2) propose and validate novel geosocial features of smartphone-based Bluetooth and GPS data for predicting loneliness and companionship type in real time. We base our features on intuitions characterizing the quantity and spatiotemporal predictability of an individual's Bluetooth encounters and GPS location clusters to capture personal significance of social exposure scenarios conditional on their temporal distribution and geographic patterns. We examine our features' statistical correlation with momentary loneliness through regression analyses and evaluate their predictive power using a sliding window prediction procedure. Our features achieved significant performance improvement compared to baseline for predicting both momentary loneliness and companionship type, with the effect stronger for the loneliness prediction task. As such we recommend incorporation and further evaluation of our geosocial features proposed in this study in future mental health sensing and context-aware computing applications.This work was supported by Whole Communities—Whole Health, a research
grand challenge at the University of Texas at AustinOffice of the VP for Researc
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Multi-Modal Data Collection for Measuring Health, Behavior, and Living Environment of Large-Scale Participant Cohorts: Conceptual Framework and Findings from Deployments
As mobile technologies become ever more sensor-rich, portable, and ubiquitous, data captured by smart devices are lending rich insights into users' daily lives with unprecedented comprehensiveness, unobtrusiveness, and ecological validity. A number of human-subject studies have been conducted in the past decade to examine the use of mobile sensing to uncover individual behavioral patterns and health outcomes. While understanding health and behavior is the focus for most of these studies, we find that minimal attention has been placed on measuring personal environments, especially together with other human-centric data modalities. Moreover, the participant cohort size in most existing studies falls well below a few hundred, leaving questions open about the reliability of findings on the relations between mobile sensing signals and human outcomes. To address these limitations, we developed a home environment sensor kit for continuous indoor air quality tracking and deployed it in conjunction with established mobile sensing and experience sampling techniques in a cohort study of up to 1584 student participants per data type for 3 weeks at a major research university in the United States. In this paper, we begin by proposing a conceptual framework that systematically organizes human-centric data modalities by their temporal coverage and spatial freedom. Then we report our study design and procedure, technologies and methods deployed, descriptive statistics of the collected data, and results from our extensive exploratory analyses. Our novel data, conceptual development, and analytical findings provide important guidance for data collection and hypothesis generation in future human-centric sensing studies.This work was supported by Whole Communities—Whole Health, a research
grand challenge at the University of Texas at Austin, and National Science
Foundation Award SES-1758835.Office of the VP for Researc
High-resolution myelin-water fraction and quantitative relaxation mapping using 3D ViSTa-MR fingerprinting
Purpose: This study aims to develop a high-resolution whole-brain
multi-parametric quantitative MRI approach for simultaneous mapping of
myelin-water fraction (MWF), T1, T2, and proton-density (PD), all within a
clinically feasible scan time.
Methods: We developed 3D ViSTa-MRF, which combined Visualization of Short
Transverse relaxation time component (ViSTa) technique with MR Fingerprinting
(MRF), to achieve high-fidelity whole-brain MWF and T1/T2/PD mapping on a
clinical 3T scanner. To achieve fast acquisition and memory-efficient
reconstruction, the ViSTa-MRF sequence leverages an optimized 3D
tiny-golden-angle-shuffling spiral-projection acquisition and joint
spatial-temporal subspace reconstruction with optimized preconditioning
algorithm. With the proposed ViSTa-MRF approach, high-fidelity direct MWF
mapping was achieved without a need for multi-compartment fitting that could
introduce bias and/or noise from additional assumptions or priors.
Results: The in-vivo results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
acquisition and reconstruction framework to provide fast multi-parametric
mapping with high SNR and good quality. The in-vivo results of 1mm- and
0.66mm-iso datasets indicate that the MWF values measured by the proposed
method are consistent with standard ViSTa results that are 30x slower with
lower SNR. Furthermore, we applied the proposed method to enable 5-minute
whole-brain 1mm-iso assessment of MWF and T1/T2/PD mappings for infant brain
development and for post-mortem brain samples.
Conclusions: In this work, we have developed a 3D ViSTa-MRF technique that
enables the acquisition of whole-brain MWF, quantitative T1, T2, and PD maps at
1mm and 0.66mm isotropic resolution in 5 and 15 minutes, respectively. This
advancement allows for quantitative investigations of myelination changes in
the brain.Comment: 38 pages, 12 figures and 1 tabl
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Correlates and Digital Phenotypes of College Student Loneliness: Evidence from the UT1000 Project
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Biological Applications of Graphene and Graphene Oxide
Graphene, as a steady two dimensional (2D) carbon material, possesses intriguing physical and chemical properties, which arouses great interests of scientists for its applications in enormous fields. In particular, graphene and graphene oxide have been widely used for drug delivery and DNA detection based on π-π stacking and hydrophobic interactions. Besides, graphene with fluorescent molecules or nanoparticles and graphene quantum dots have also been frequently applied as fluorescent probe. In this article, advances of graphene and graphene oxide on biomedical applications will be highlighted from the perspective of biomolecular interaction, cell imaging, drug delivery, and toxicity
Effect of out-of-school visual art activities on academic performance. The mediating role of socioeconomic status.
The application of visual art and other extracurricular activities to children's sustainable development is predominantly discussed in Western countries. Consequently, non-Western society could not cherish the benefit of visual art on their children's cognitive and non-cognitive skill development due to a lack of evidence that would revive the community, educators, and policy-makers' impressions about visual art activities, in addition to its amusement use. Thus, the present study adopted a cross-sectional study comprised of a large-scale survey (N = 1624) taken from the southwest part of China to assess the impact of out-of-school visual art activities on children's academic attainment across economically advantaged and disadvantaged children. Astonishingly, the study's findings shed light on current Chinese parents' dedication to purchasing out-of-school activities regardless of their social class difference; notwithstanding, lower-class parents ought to learn that spending time with their children during their activities is more beneficial. The study's implication calls for curriculum policy reform involving aesthetic education and expanding community youth centers for different extracurricular activities