Noninvasive Two-Dimensional Strain Imaging of Atherosclerosis: A Preliminary Study in Carotid Arteries In Vivo

AbstractAtherosclerosis remains a major cause of mortality all over the world and the sudden rupture of atherosclerotic plaque is the most important assassin. Vascular ultrasound elastography has shown promise in estimating the elastic properties to evaluate the plaque vulnerability. Contrary to intravascular elastography, noninvasive applications use a transcutaneous ultrasound transducer that is inexpensive, re-useable and convenient. To estimate the strain map, we employ a cross-correlation method in complex field to extract both the magnitude and phase messages of the ultrasound RF-echo signal. Two-dimension noninvasive carotid elastography was studied in atherosclerotic rats and New Zealand Rabbits and also in healthy volunteer, and the results indicate huge potential for diagnosis of the vulnerability of atheromatous plaques

Fungicide application effects on diversity components of chickpea rhizospheric bacterial community

Non-Peer ReviewedMolecular (polymerase chain reaction – denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis) methods and correspondent analysis have been used in order to test changes of the diversity of bacterial communities in chickpea rhizospheric soil under different cultivars and fungicide treatments. Results showed that chickpea genotypes influence their microbial environment differently. Besides, fungicide applications could negatively affect the diversity of dominant bacterial DNA sequences, and this effect increased with the number of fungicide application on chickpea aerial parts

Coordinated regulatory efforts needed to strengthen travel related immunization requirements against importation of infectious diseases

Along with increases in international travel come increased opportunities for importation of infectious disease to the United States (U.S.). Many infectious diseases can lead to severe negative health outcomes for those infected, including disability and death, as seen recently through the importation of Ebola from West Africa and Zika from South America. Additionally, disease importation is a key contributing factor to the potential threat of emerging pathogens, such as novel strains of influenza, and the reemergence of vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles. In the U.S., most of the recent measles outbreaks originated from international travel, where the disease was brought into the U.S. by unvaccinated persons who were infected in other countries

Calibration of RGB-D sensors for Robot SLAM

[[abstract]]This paper presents a calibration procedure for a Kinect RGB-D sensor and its application to robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). The calibration procedure consists of two stages: in the first stage, the RGB image is aligned with the depth image by using the bilinear interpolation. The distorted RGB image is further corrected in the second stage. The calibrated RGB-D sensor is used as the sensing device for robot navigation in unknown environment. In SLAM tasks, the speeded-up robust features (SURF) are detected from the RGB image and used as landmarks for the environment map. The depth image could provide the stereo information of each landmark. Meanwhile, the robot estimates its own state and landmark locations by mean of the extended Kalman filter (EKF). The EKF SLAM has been carried out in the paper and the experimental results showed that the Kinect sensors could provide reliable measurement information for mobile robots when navigating in unknown environment.[[notice]]補正完畢[[journaltype]]國外[[incitationindex]]EI[[ispeerreviewed]]Y[[booktype]]電子版[[countrycodes]]CH

Establishment of an arabinose-inducible system in Stenotrophomonas maltophilia

A pBBad22T-derived conditioned arabinose (Ara)-inducible expression system was evaluated in Stenotrophomonas maltophilia (an opportunistic pathogen and has gained increasing attention as a cause of healthcare-associated infection). S. maltophilia cannot grow well when Ara is the sole available carbon source. The induction kinetic study, optimal inducer concentration determination, and depletion experiment were performed by using a xylE gene fusion construct, pBxylE, to monitor the expression of pBBad22T in S. maltophilia. For induction survey, the expression of catechol 2,3-dioxygenase (C23O), encoded by xylE gene, continuously increases during an 8-h induced course and can be modulated by different inducer concentrations. The applied induction condition of pBBad22T in S. maltophilia is the inducer concentration ranging from 0.1% to 0.5% for an induction time of 4 h. For repression evaluation, the C23O expression is rapidly turned off within 30 min after the removal of Ara. Accordingly, the established Ara-inducible system can provide a convenient tool for the study of S. maltophilia

Time series irreversibility: a visibility graph approach

We propose a method to measure real-valued time series irreversibility which combines two differ- ent tools: the horizontal visibility algorithm and the Kullback-Leibler divergence. This method maps a time series to a directed network according to a geometric criterion. The degree of irreversibility of the series is then estimated by the Kullback-Leibler divergence (i.e. the distinguishability) between the in and out degree distributions of the associated graph. The method is computationally effi- cient, does not require any ad hoc symbolization process, and naturally takes into account multiple scales. We find that the method correctly distinguishes between reversible and irreversible station- ary time series, including analytical and numerical studies of its performance for: (i) reversible stochastic processes (uncorrelated and Gaussian linearly correlated), (ii) irreversible stochastic pro- cesses (a discrete flashing ratchet in an asymmetric potential), (iii) reversible (conservative) and irreversible (dissipative) chaotic maps, and (iv) dissipative chaotic maps in the presence of noise. Two alternative graph functionals, the degree and the degree-degree distributions, can be used as the Kullback-Leibler divergence argument. The former is simpler and more intuitive and can be used as a benchmark, but in the case of an irreversible process with null net current, the degree-degree distribution has to be considered to identifiy the irreversible nature of the series.Comment: submitted for publicatio

Superconducting transition in Pb/Co nanocomposites: effect of Co volume fraction and external magnetic field

Pb films embedded with homogeneously distributed cobalt (Co) nanoparticles (mean size 4.5 nm) have been prepared. Previous transport investigations have shown that Co particles induce spontaneous vortices below the superconducting transition temperature (T$_{c}$) in zero external magnetic field. In this paper we study in detail the influence of the Co volume franction and an external magnetic field on the superconducting transition in such composites. The large difference in T$_c$-reduction between the as-prepared and annealed samples can be attributed to the different superconducting coherence lengths and the resulting different diameters of the spontaneous vortices in these samples.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure