Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening and follow-up investigations in Māori and non-Māori men in New Zealand

Text. Pairwise sequence alignment between human SCN9A and homologous genes. (DOCX 34 kb

Generalizing the Wells–Riley Infection Probability: A Superstatistical Scheme for Indoor Infection Risk Estimation

Recent evidence supports that air is the main transmission pathway of the recently identified SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes COVID-19 disease. Estimating the infection risk associated with an indoor space remains an open problem due to insufficient data concerning COVID-19 outbreaks, as well as, methodological challenges arising from cases where environmental (i.e., out-of-host) and immunological (i.e., within-host) heterogeneities cannot be neglected. This work addresses these issues by introducing a generalization of the elementary Wells-Riley infection probability model. To this end, we adopted a superstatistical approach where the exposure rate parameter is gamma-distributed across subvolumes of the indoor space. This enabled us to construct a susceptible (S)–exposed (E)–infected (I) dynamics model where the Tsallis entropic index q quantifies the degree of departure from a well-mixed (i.e., homogeneous) indoor-air-environment state. A cumulative-dose mechanism is employed to describe infection activation in relation to a host’s immunological profile. We corroborate that the six-foot rule cannot guarantee the biosafety of susceptible occupants, even for exposure times as short as 15 min. Overall, our work seeks to provide a minimal (in terms of the size of the parameter space) framework for more realistic indoor SEI dynamics explorations while highlighting their Tsallisian entropic origin and the crucial yet elusive role that the innate immune system can play in shaping them. This may be useful for scientists and decision makers interested in probing different indoor biosafety protocols more thoroughly and comprehensively, thus motivating the use of nonadditive entropies in the emerging field of indoor space epidemiology

Agricultural Structure and Change: Litchfield County, Connecticut

<p>(A) Time courses of the mean synaptic weight <i>S</i>(<i>t</i>) (red curve) and standard deviation of the individual synaptic weights <i>s</i>_<i>ij</i> (cyan color) across the ensemble. The mean synaptic weight for a single-epoch CR stimulation of length <i>L</i>_CR = 40000 s (switched off at <i>t</i> = 40800 s) is depicted by the blue curve on top. (B) Time courses of the time-averaged order parameter 〈<i>R</i>〉 (red curve) and its standard deviation (cyan color) averaged in a running window of length 500 s overlapping by 90%. Vertical dashed lines separate the enumerated stimulation- and pause-epochs, where the former are indicated by red bars on top of plot (A). Stimulation intensity <i>c</i> = 0.35, and the length of stimulation- and pause-epochs <i>L</i>_stim = <i>L</i>_pause = 3600 s.</p

Distributions of the individual synaptic weights <i>s</i>_<i>ij</i> established in the neuronal ensemble (1) due to STDP.

<p>Plots (A)-(F) present the data of 6 coupling regimes illustrated in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0117205#pone.0117205.g002" target="_blank">Fig. 2A</a>. The corresponding time-averaged mean synaptic weights 〈<i>S</i>〉 are indicated in the plots.</p

Statistics of the stimulation time at the transitions to domains D1-D4.

<p>Statistics of the stimulation time at the transitions to domains D1-D4.</p

Role of stimulation- and pause-epochs in effective rewiring of the neuronal population with STDP (1) by spaced CR stimulation.

<p>Time-averaged mean synaptic weights 〈<i>S</i>〉 of the post-stimulation states are encoded in color (color bar bottom right) for four selected ranges of the lengths <i>L</i>_stim (vertical axes) and <i>L</i>_pause (horizontal axes) of the stimulation- and pause-epochs, respectively. Black dashed lines put the same values of <i>L</i>_stim from different plots in correspondence to each other. We did not scan the whole 2Dim (<i>L</i>_pause, <i>L</i>_stim)-parameter plane to reduce CPU time required and to focus on main effects.</p

Impact of the length of CR stimulation epoch on the anti-kindling effect.

<p>The time-averaged mean synaptic weight 〈<i>S</i>〉 of the post-stimulation regimes of the neuronal ensemble with STDP (1) is plotted versus the length <i>L</i>_CR of a single epoch of CR stimulation. The values of the stimulation intensity <i>c</i> are indicated in the legends. CR stimulation is administered to (A)-(C) strongly coupled and (D) intermediately coupled neurons. The horizontal black dashed lines indicate the mean coupling of the initial states.</p

Dynamics of the mean synaptic weight and the order parameter of the neuronal ensemble with STDP (1) induced by CR stimulation.

<p>(A) Time courses of the mean synaptic weight <i>S</i>(<i>t</i>) for different CR stimulation intensities as indicated in the legend. The epoch of CR stimulation of length 7500 s is indicated by a black bar at the top of the plot. (B), (C) Time-averaged mean synaptic weight 〈<i>S</i>〉 and order parameter 〈<i>R</i>〉 established by the neuronal ensemble at the end of the CR stimulation epoch (magenta circles) and after a post-stimulation transient (blue squares) versus stimulation intensity. Error bars depict standard deviation.</p

Coupling clusters induced in the neuronal ensemble with STDP (1) by CR stimulation.

<p>(A), (C), (E) 2Dim lattices of 16 × 16 neurons, where different colors depict different coupling clusters established (A) during the stimulation and (C), (E) in the post-stimulation regimes. (B), (D), (F) Individual synaptic weights <i>s</i>_<i>mk</i> evolving during CR stimulation among neurons labeled along the 1Dim section of the neuronal lattice, see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0117205#pone.0117205.g001" target="_blank">Fig. 1A</a> (dashed red curve) and text for details. Values of <i>s</i>_<i>mk</i> are encoded in color, see attached color bars. Stimulation intensity (A), (B) <i>c</i> = 0.95, (C), (D) <i>c</i> = 1.25, and (E), (F) <i>c</i> = 2.75.</p

Multistability of coupling patterns established in the neuronal ensemble (1) due to STDP.

<p>In plots (A), (B), (D), (F), (H), and (J) coupling matrices are shown where the weights <i>s</i>_<i>mk</i> of the synapses from the pre-synaptic <i>k</i> to the post-synaptic <i>m</i> neurons are encoded in color as indicated in the attached color bars. The 16 × 16 neurons arranged in 2Dim lattice [<a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0117205#pone.0117205.g001" target="_blank">Fig. 1A</a>] are labeled in plots (A) and (B) as <i>k</i> = 16(<i>i</i>-1) + <i>j</i>, where <i>i</i>, <i>j</i> = 1,…,16 are the row and column indices of the lattice, respectively. Mean synaptic weight (A) 〈<i>S</i>〉 = 0.123 (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0117205#pone.0117205.g002" target="_blank">Fig. 2A</a>, filled green squares, and <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0117205#pone.0117205.g003" target="_blank">Fig. 3A) and (B)</a> 〈<i>S</i>〉 = 1.499 (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0117205#pone.0117205.g002" target="_blank">Fig. 2A</a>, filled red circles, and <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0117205#pone.0117205.g003" target="_blank">Fig. 3F</a>). The 2Dim neuronal lattices are shown in plots (C), (E), (G), and (I), where different colors depict different coupling clusters established for the mean synaptic weight 〈<i>S</i>〉 from <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0117205#pone.0117205.g003" target="_blank">Fig. 3B, C, D, and E</a>, respectively. In the corresponding right plots (D), (F), (H), and (J) the corresponding coupling matrices are shown, where the neurons are labeled as above and sorted cluster-by-cluster (see text for details) according to the coupling clusters shown in the left plots.</p