The study of photo-thermal lensing system and its applications

The high quality optical films in coatings with low absorption and good environmental stability are required for the development of high power lasers, because even slightest absorbing defects could lead to material\u27s breakdown. Thus, a non-destructive absorption measurement is required to measure the absorption of defects. Reflection-transmission method is the simplest measurement to measure the absorption of optical films. This indirect method is good for absorption values down to ~0.1%. However, typical high quality optical coatings have absorption values measured in parts per million (ppm). In this thesis, the photo-thermal lens setup provides another way to measure the change in the sample related to heating with sensitivity up to 10^{-6}. This technique is a pump-probe technique which depends on a change in an optical property measured by a weak probe laser that results from heating by a strong pump. The photo-thermal setup is used to measure absorption with time resolution and identify defects in optical coatings

ICT Stages and Moderating Effect of Technological Uncertainty

The impact of ICT in the supply chain has been given much attention in recent literature. Although ICT generally leads to performance gains, it is still unclear which specific aspects of ICT affect which specific aspects of supply chain performance. Therefore, this paper investigates the role of three subsequent ICT stages an organization can employ. It was expected that higher stages yield more benefits than lower stages. Moreover, the concept of technological uncertainty was expected to moderate these relationships. Industries with high uncertainty would benefit from the highest stage of ICT by attaining a competitive advantage, whilst firms performing in low technological uncertainty should employ lower stages. An empirical survey-based research was conducted amongst Chinese manufacturers. A supplier perspective was used and questions were related to the key buyer of the firm. Therefore, performance was measured on a dyadic level. The results show that all ICT stages lead to increased service performance, whilst no effect was found for cost performance. Additionally, a moderating effect was found between the highest stage of ICT and both types of performance. These findings confirm the positive impact of ICT and imply it has different effects on different types of performance. Moreover, ICT capability should be employed when the technological uncertainty is high, as it does not pay off in industries with low uncertainty

High Glucose Decreases Expression and Activity of p-glycoprotein in Cultured Human Retinal Pigment Epithelium Possibly through iNOS Induction

Inhibition of p-glycoprotein under hyperglycemic conditions has been reported in various barrier tissues including blood-brain barrier, intestine, and kidney, and has been linked to significant clinical complications. However, whether this is also true for the outer blood-retinal barrier constituted by retinal pigment epithelium, or has a role in pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy is not yet clear. In this study, using cultured human retinal pigment epithelium cell line D407, we found that high glucose exposure induced a significant decrease in p-glycoprotein expression both at mRNA and at protein levels, accompanied by an attenuated p-glycoprotein activity determined by intracellular rhodamine 123 retention. In marked contrast, the expressions of both mRNA and protein levels of inducible nitrate oxide synthase (iNOS) increased, and were accompanied by increased extracellular nitrate/nitrite production by Griess reaction. In addition, mRNA levels of nuclear receptors revealed a decreased expression of pregnane X receptor after the exposure of high glucose. However, the subsequent alterations in production of nitrate/nitrite, functional expression of p-glycoprotein, and mRNA levels of pregnane X receptor were partially blocked when pretreated with S,S′-1,3-phenylene-bis(1,2-ethanediyl)-bis-isothiourea•2HBr (PBITU), a selective iNOS inhibitor. Moreover, the effects of PBITU were antagonized with the addition of L-arginine, a substrate for NO synthesis. Our in vitro results suggest for the first time that iNOS induction plays a novel role in decreased p-glycoprotein expression and transport function at the human outer blood-retinal barrier under hyperglycemic conditions and further support the concept of inhibiting iNOS pathway as a therapeutic strategy for diabetic retinopathy

Enzymatic thiol-ene click reaction: an eco-friendly approach for MPEGMA-grafted modification of wool fibers

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The thiol–ene click reaction has been commonly used for the modification of many materials due to its high efficiency, high selectivity, and reliability. To further promote the sustainable technology for the modification of keratin-based materials, enzymatic biotechnology and thiol–ene click chemistry was integrated for the first time for grafting modification of wool fibers with methoxy polyethylene glycol methacrylate (MPEGMA). Wool fibers were reduced to create thiol groups and then grafted with MPEGMA through a horseradish peroxidase (HRP)-mediated thiol–ene click reaction. In order to understand the grafting mechanism of MPEGMA on wool, l-cysteine was used as a model compound for the thiol group of the reduced wool in the current research. The structures of MPEGMA reacted with l-cysteine and grafted on wool fabrics were investigated by FTIR, MALDI-TOF, Raman spectra, and XPS. The surface morphology, wettability, moisture penetrability, and regain of modified wool fibers were also assessed. The results showed that l-cysteine reacted with MPEGMA through the thiol–ene click reaction. The MPEGMA-grafted wool fabric had good surface wettability, and its moisture penetrability and regain were also improved when compared with untreated wool fabric. The HRP-initiated thiol–ene grafting reaction not only encouraged green and sustainable click chemistry but also provide an alternative eco-friendly approach for modification and functionalization of keratin and keratin-containing materials

Comparative proteomic analysis of exosomes derived from endothelial cells and Schwann cells

Exosomes derived from endothelial cells and Schwann cells have been employed as novel treatments of neurological diseases, including peripheral neuropathy. Exosomal cargo plays a critical role in mediating recipient cell function. In this study, we thus performed a comprehensive proteomic analysis of exosomes derived from healthy mouse dermal microvascular endothelial cells (EC-Exo) and healthy mouse Schwann cells (SC-Exo). We detected 1,817and 1,579 proteins in EC-Exo and SC-Exo, respectively. Among them, 1506 proteins were present in both EC-Exo and SC-Exo, while 311 and 73 proteins were detected only in EC-Exo and SC-Exo, respectively. Bioinformatic analysis revealed that EC-Exo enriched proteins were involved in neurovascular function, while SC-Exo enriched proteins were related to lipid metabolism. Western blot analysis of 14 enriched proteins revealed that EC-Exo contained proteins involved in mediating endothelial function such as delta-like 4 (DLL4) and endothelial NOS (NOS3), whereas SC-Exo had proteins involved in mediating glial function such as apolipoprotein A-I (APOA1) and phospholipid transfer protein (PLTP). Collectively, the present study identifies differences in the cargo protein profiles of EC-Exo and SC-Exo, thus providing new molecular insights into their biological functions for the treatment of peripheral neuropathy

Open-Vocabulary Video Anomaly Detection

Video anomaly detection (VAD) with weak supervision has achieved remarkable performance in utilizing video-level labels to discriminate whether a video frame is normal or abnormal. However, current approaches are inherently limited to a closed-set setting and may struggle in open-world applications where there can be anomaly categories in the test data unseen during training. A few recent studies attempt to tackle a more realistic setting, open-set VAD, which aims to detect unseen anomalies given seen anomalies and normal videos. However, such a setting focuses on predicting frame anomaly scores, having no ability to recognize the specific categories of anomalies, despite the fact that this ability is essential for building more informed video surveillance systems. This paper takes a step further and explores open-vocabulary video anomaly detection (OVVAD), in which we aim to leverage pre-trained large models to detect and categorize seen and unseen anomalies. To this end, we propose a model that decouples OVVAD into two mutually complementary tasks -- class-agnostic detection and class-specific classification -- and jointly optimizes both tasks. Particularly, we devise a semantic knowledge injection module to introduce semantic knowledge from large language models for the detection task, and design a novel anomaly synthesis module to generate pseudo unseen anomaly videos with the help of large vision generation models for the classification task. These semantic knowledge and synthesis anomalies substantially extend our model's capability in detecting and categorizing a variety of seen and unseen anomalies. Extensive experiments on three widely-used benchmarks demonstrate our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on OVVAD task.Comment: Submitte

VadCLIP: Adapting Vision-Language Models for Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection

The recent contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) model has shown great success in a wide range of image-level tasks, revealing remarkable ability for learning powerful visual representations with rich semantics. An open and worthwhile problem is efficiently adapting such a strong model to the video domain and designing a robust video anomaly detector. In this work, we propose VadCLIP, a new paradigm for weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WSVAD) by leveraging the frozen CLIP model directly without any pre-training and fine-tuning process. Unlike current works that directly feed extracted features into the weakly supervised classifier for frame-level binary classification, VadCLIP makes full use of fine-grained associations between vision and language on the strength of CLIP and involves dual branch. One branch simply utilizes visual features for coarse-grained binary classification, while the other fully leverages the fine-grained language-image alignment. With the benefit of dual branch, VadCLIP achieves both coarse-grained and fine-grained video anomaly detection by transferring pre-trained knowledge from CLIP to WSVAD task. We conduct extensive experiments on two commonly-used benchmarks, demonstrating that VadCLIP achieves the best performance on both coarse-grained and fine-grained WSVAD, surpassing the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Specifically, VadCLIP achieves 84.51% AP and 88.02% AUC on XD-Violence and UCF-Crime, respectively. Code and features will be released to facilitate future VAD research.Comment: Submitte

Comparative Effectiveness and Safety of Prasugrel versus Ticagrelor following Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: An Observational Study

Background: Observational studies comparing ticagrelor and prasugrel in patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) have yielded contradictory results, but these studies often did not consider differential censoring (e.g., for treatment switching or insurance disenrollment) or confounding by time‐dependent factors. Objective: Our objective was to conduct a comparative effectiveness and safety analysis of ticagrelor and prasugrel in patients who underwent PCI after being hospitalized for an ACS. Methods: This study used the Optum’s de‐identified Clinformatics® Data Mart Database and included patients aged 18 years or older with an index hospital admission between May 2012 and September 2015, a diagnosis of ACS managed with PCI, and treatment with either ticagrelor or prasugrel. The primary composite outcome was defined as the first occurrence of all‐cause death, myocardial infarction (MI), or ischemic stroke. The secondary composite outcome included the first occurrence of gastrointestinal (GI) bleed, intracranial hemorrhage (ICH), or other major bleeds requiring hospitalization. Weighted Cox proportional hazard models and robust variance estimation were implemented to adjust for baseline comorbidities, time‐varying exposure, time‐dependent confounders, and differential censoring. Results: Included in the analysis were 2,559 patients initiated on ticagrelor and 4,456 patients initiated on prasugrel following PCI. Patients initiated on ticagrelor were 10% more likely to have eligibility disenrollment (Ticagrelor: 57%, Prasugrel: 47%, P\u3c.01) and 7 percentage‐points more likely to switch medication (Ticagrelor: 35%, Prasugrel: 28%, P\u3c.01). After adjusting for multiple factors, including time‐varying exposure and censoring imbalance, ticagrelor was associated with a higher risk of all‐cause death, MI, or stroke when compared to prasugrel (Hazard ratio (HR): 1.33; 95% CI: 1.04‐1.68). Similarly, ticagrelor was associated with a higher risk in bleeding events when compared with prasugrel (HR: 1.61; 95% CI: 1.19‐2.17). Conclusion: When compared with ticagrelor, prasugrel use following PCI for ACS was associated with a lower risk of death, MI, or stroke, as well as a reduced risk of major bleeding

Selenite Foliar Application Alleviates Arsenic Uptake, Accumulation, Migration and Increases Photosynthesis of Different Upland Rice Varieties

Funding This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41471274, 41807474), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Public Welfare Research Institute (2020-jbkyywf-zsl). Also, the authors would like to thank the support from the Scottish Government’s Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Service Division (RESAS).Peer reviewedPublisher PD