A wide field-of-view scanning endoscope for whole anal canal imaging

We report a novel wide field-of-view (FOV) scanning endoscope, the AnCam, which is based on contact image sensor (CIS) technology used in commercialized business card scanners. The AnCam can capture the whole image of the anal canal within 10 seconds with a resolution of 89 μm, a maximum FOV of 100 mm × 120 mm, and a depth-of-field (DOF) of 0.65 mm at 5.9 line pairs per mm (lp/mm). We demonstrate the performance of the AnCam by imaging the entire anal canal of pigs and tracking the dynamics of acetowhite testing. We believe the AnCam can potentially be a simple and convenient solution for screening of the anal canal for dysplasia and for surveillance in patients following treatment for anal cancer

Cooperative Extension’s Capacity to Address Food Insecurity by Supporting Food Recovery Organizations

Virginia Cooperative Extension (VCE) educators are uniquely positioned to support the food recovery organizations (FROs) which address hunger-related needs resulting from food insecurity. Based on an online survey to measure how VCE educators have engaged with FROs and their experiences, respondents who previously supported FROs did so across multiple programming areas, and those who had not indicated an interest while also experiencing barriers. Respondents also reported the need for context- and audience-specific resources particular to the spectrum of food recovery. Addressing barriers and resource needs through a transdisciplinary eXtension Food Recovery Community of Practice may support educators in doing this work

BAR: Blockwise Adaptive Recoding for Batched Network Coding

Multi-hop networks become popular network topologies in various emerging Internet of things applications. Batched network coding (BNC) is a solution to reliable communications in such networks with packet loss. By grouping packets into small batches and restricting recoding to the packets belonging to the same batch, BNC has a much smaller computational and storage requirements at the intermediate nodes compared with a direct application of random linear network coding. In this paper, we propose a practical recoding scheme called blockwise adaptive recoding (BAR) which learns the latest channel knowledge from short observations so that BAR can adapt to the fluctuation of channel conditions. We focus on investigating practical concerns such as the design of efficient BAR algorithms. We also design and investigate feedback schemes for BAR under imperfect feedback systems. Our numerical evaluations show that BAR has significant throughput gain for small batch size compared with the existing baseline recoding scheme. More importantly, this gain is insensitive to inaccurate channel knowledge. This encouraging result suggests that BAR is suitable to be realized in practice as the exact channel model and its parameters could be unknown and subject to change from time to time.Comment: submitted for journal publicatio

Bloodlines: mammals, leeches, and conservation in southern Asia

Southern Asia is a biodiversity hotspot both for terrestrial mammals and for leeches. Many small-mammal groups are under-studied in this region, while other mammals are of known conservation concern. In addition to standard methods for surveying mammals, it has recently been demonstrated that residual bloodmeals within leeches can be sequenced to find mammals in a given area. While these invertebrate-parasite-derived DNA (iDNA) methods are promising, most of the leech species utilized for this type of survey remain unevaluated, notwithstanding that their diversity varies substantially. Here we examine approximately 750 individual leech specimens in the genus Haemadipsa across a large range in southern Asia (Bangladesh, Cambodia, and China), specifically reviewing the diversity of mammals they feed on and their own genetic structuring. Leeches were found to feed on a considerable variety of mammals, corroborating prior studies. Additionally, leeches were found to have fed both on bats and on birds, neither of which has previously been recorded with this method. The genetic structuring of the leeches themselves revealed 15 distinct clades of which only two precisely corresponded to previously characterized species, indicating that much work is needed to finalize classifications in this genus. Most importantly, with regards to mammal conservation, leeches in these clades appear to feed on a broad range of mammals

Epidemiologic Features and Environmental Risk Factors of Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome, Xinyang, China

Background:Severe fever with thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS) is an emerging infectious disease discovered in rural areas of Central China in 2009, caused by a novel bunyavirus, SFT

Iterative positive solutions for singular nonlinear fractional differential equation with integral boundary conditions

In this article, we study the existence of iterative positive solutions for a class of singular nonlinear fractional differential equations with Riemann-Stieltjes integral boundary conditions, where the nonlinear term may be singular both for time and space variables. By using the properties of the Green function and the fixed point theorem of mixed monotone operators in cones we obtain some results on the existence and uniqueness of positive solutions. We also construct successively some sequences for approximating the unique solution. Our results include the multipoint boundary problems and integral boundary problems as special cases, and we also extend and improve many known results including singular and non-singular cases