H∞ model reduction for discrete-time Markovian jump systems with deficient mode information

This paper investigates the problem of H∞ model reduction for a class of discrete-time Markovian jump linear systems (MJLSs) with deficient mode information, which simultaneously involves the exactly known, partially unknown, and uncertain transition probabilities. By fully utilizing the properties of the transition probability matrices, together with the convexification of uncertain domains, a new H∞ performance analysis criterion for the underlying MJLSs is first derived, and then two approaches, namely, the convex linearisation approach and iterative approach, for the H∞ model reduction synthesis are proposed. Finally, a simulation example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design methods

Thermal simulation modeling of a hydrostatic machine feed platform

Hydrostatic guideways are widely applied into precision and ultra-precision machine tools. Meanwhile, the oil film heat transfer causes thermal disturbance to the machine accuracy. Therefore, it is necessary to study the mechanism of the oil film heat transfer and the heat-transfer-reducing method to improve the machine accuracy. This paper describes a comprehensive thermal finite element (FE) simulation modeling method for the hydrostatic machine feed platform to study methods of reducing machine thermal errors. First of all, the generating heat power of viscous hydraulic oil flowing between parallel planes is calculated based on the Bernoulli equation. This calculation is then employed for the simulation load calculations for the closed hydrostatic guideways, which is adopted by the hydrostatic machine feed platform. Especially, in these load calculations, the changing of oil film thickness (resulted from external loads) and the changing of oil dynamic viscosity (influenced by its temperature) are taken into account. Based on these loads, thermal FE simulation modeling of the hydrostatic machine feed platform is completed to predict and analyze its thermal characteristics. The reliability of this simulation modeling method is verified by experiments. The studies demonstrate that the hydrostatic machine thermal error degree is determined by the oil film heat transfer scale, and this scale is mainly influenced by the relative oil supply temperature to ambient temperature (quantitative comparison of oil supply temperature and ambient temperature). Furthermore, the reduction of the absolute value of this relative oil supply temperature can reduce the oil film heat transfer scale and improve the machine accuracy

Clinicopathologic features of sporadic inclusion body myositis in China

This study is to investigate the clinical and pathologic features of sporadic inclusion body myositis (sIBM) in China. We retrospectively evaluated the clinical and pathological features of consecutive patients in our department between January 1986 to May 2012. Total 28 cases of sIBM (20 males, 8 females, mean age was 56.93±8.79) were obtained by review of all 4099 muscle biopsy reports. The proportion of sIBM was 0.68% (28/4099) in China. Muscle weakness of quadriceps appeared 100% in 28 cases, while conspicuous atrophy of quadriceps appeared only in five cases (17.86%). Creatase values of 28 patients with sIBM were normal or mildly elevated. Muscle biopsies showed that atrophic fibers resembled more frequent in small angular and irregular shape (82.14%), less common in small round shape (17.86%). Rimmed vacuoles resembled crack (67.86%) and round (32.14%) shape. Mononuclear cell invasion into necrotic muscle fibers (35.71%) was more frequent than non-necrotic muscle fibers (7.14%). sIBM was still a rare disease in China compared to other countries. There were some certain specific pathological characteristics existed in Chinese sIBM patients

A differentiated multi-loops bath recirculation system for precision machine tools

Traditional bath recirculation cooler for precision machine tools always has the uniform and open-loop cooling strategy onto different heat generating parts. This causes redundant generated heat being transferred into the machine structure, and results in unsatisfactory thermal errors of precision machine tools. For the solution of this problem, this paper presents the differentiated multi-loops bath recirculation system. The developed system can accomplish differentiated and close-loop cooling strategies onto machine heat generating parts during its operation. Specially, in order to illustrate the advantages of this system, constant supply cooling powers strategy is presented with its applications onto a certain type of built-in motorized spindle. Consequently, advantages of the proposed strategy based on the differentiated multi-loops bath recirculation system are verified experimentally in the environment within consistent temperature (TR = 20 ± 0.3°C). Compared with room temperature tracing strategy based on the traditional bath recirculation cooler, the constant supply cooling powers strategy is verified to be advantageous in spindle temperature stabilization and thermal errors decrease

KidneyRegNet: A Deep Learning Method for 3DCT-2DUS Kidney Registration during Breathing

This work proposed a novel deep registration pipeline for 3D CT and 2D U/S kidney scans of free breathing, which consists of a feature network, and a 3D-2D CNN-based registration network. The feature network has handcraft texture feature layers to reduce the semantic gap. The registration network is encoder-decoder structure with loss of feature-image-motion (FIM), which enables hierarchical regression at decoder layers and avoids multiple network concatenation. It was first pretrained with retrospective datasets cum training data generation strategy, then adapted to specific patient data under unsupervised one-cycle transfer learning in onsite application. The experiment was on 132 U/S sequences, 39 multiple phase CT and 210 public single phase CT images, and 25 pairs of CT and U/S sequences. It resulted in mean contour distance (MCD) of 0.94 mm between kidneys on CT and U/S images and MCD of 1.15 mm on CT and reference CT images. For datasets with small transformations, it resulted in MCD of 0.82 and 1.02 mm respectively. For large transformations, it resulted in MCD of 1.10 and 1.28 mm respectively. This work addressed difficulties in 3DCT-2DUS kidney registration during free breathing via novel network structures and training strategy.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 9 table

The asparagus genome sheds light on the origin and evolution of a young Y chromosome

Several models have been proposed to explain the emergence of sex chromosomes. Here, through comparative genomics and mutant analysis, Harkess et al. show that linked but separate genes on the Y chromosome are responsible for sex determination in Asparagus, supporting a two-gene model for sex chromosome evolution

A genetic study and meta-analysis of the genetic predisposition of prostate cancer in a Chinese population.

Prostate cancer predisposition has been extensively investigated in European populations, but there have been few studies of other ethnic groups. To investigate prostate cancer susceptibility in the under-investigated Chinese population, we performed single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array analysis on a cohort of Chinese cases and controls and then meta-analysis with data from the existing Chinese prostate cancer genome-wide association study (GWAS). Genotyping 211,155 SNPs in 495 cases and 640 controls of Chinese ancestry identified several new suggestive Chinese prostate cancer predisposition loci. However, none of them reached genome-wide significance level either by meta-analysis or replication study. The meta-analysis with the Chinese GWAS data revealed that four 8q24 loci are the main contributors to Chinese prostate cancer risk and the risk alleles from three of them exist at much higher frequencies in Chinese than European populations. We also found that several predisposition loci reported in Western populations have different effect on Chinese men. Therefore, this first extensive single-nucleotide polymorphism study of Chinese prostate cancer in comparison with European population indicates that four loci on 8q24 contribute to a great risk of prostate cancer in a considerable large proportion of Chinese men. Based on those four loci, the top 10% of the population have six- or two-fold prostate cancer risk compared with men of the bottom 10% or median risk respectively, which may facilitate the design of prostate cancer genetic risk screening and prevention in Chinese men. These findings also provide additional insights into the etiology and pathogenesis of prostate cancer.This work was conducted on behalf of the CHIPGECS and The PRACTICAL consortia (see Supplementary Consortia). We acknowledge the contribution of doctors, nurses and postgraduate research students at the CHIPGENCS sample collecting centers. We thank Orchid and Rosetrees for funding support. This work was also supported by National Natural Science foundation of China for funding support to H Zhang (Grant No: 30671793 and 81072377), N Feng (Grant No: 81272831), X Zhang (Grant No: 30572139, 30872924 and 81072095), S Zhao (Grant No: 81072092 and 81328017), Y Yu (Grant No: 81172448) and Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University from Department of Education of China (NCET-08-0223) and the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program 2012AA021101) to X Zhang.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Impact Journals via http://dx.doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.725