The effects of ECMO on neurological function recovery of critical patients: A double-edged sword

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) played an important role in the treatment of patients with critical care such as cardiac arrest (CA) and acute respiratory distress syndrome. ECMO is gradually showing its advantages in terms of speed and effectiveness of circulatory support, as it provides adequate cerebral blood flow (CBF) to the patient and ensures the perfusion of organs. ECMO enhances patient survival and improves their neurological prognosis. However, ECMO-related brain complications are also important because of the high risk of death and the associated poor outcomes. We summarized the reported complications related to ECMO for patients with CA, such as north–south syndrome, hypoxic–ischemic brain injury, cerebral ischemia–reperfusion injury, impaired intracranial vascular autoregulation, embolic stroke, intracranial hemorrhage, and brain death. The exact mechanism of ECMO on the role of brain function is unclear. Here we review the pathophysiological mechanisms associated with ECMO in the protection of neurologic function in recent years, as well as the ECMO-related complications in brain and the means to improve it, to provide ideas for the treatment of brain function protection in CA patients

Long-term functional maintenance of primary human hepatocytes in vitro

The maintenance of terminally differentiated cells, especially hepatocytes, in vitro has proven challenging. Here we demonstrated the long-term in vitro maintenance of primary human hepatocytes (PHHs) by modulating cell signaling pathways with a combination of five chemicals (5C). 5C-cultured PHHs showed global gene expression profiles and hepatocyte-specific functions resembling those of freshly isolated counterparts. Furthermore, these cells efficiently recapitulated the entire course of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection over 4 weeks with the production of infectious viral particles and formation of HBV covalently closed circular DNA. Our study demonstrates that, with a chemical approach, functional maintenance of PHHs supports long-term HBV infection in vitro, providing an efficient platform for investigating HBV cell biology and antiviral drug screening.</p

A Sintering Kinetics Model for Ceramic Dual-Phase Composite

An analytical model is developed for the sintering kinetics of ceramic dual-phase composites of the cathodes in solid oxide fuel cells (SOCFs). The model simulates the isothermal and pressureless sintering processes and formulates volumetric three-phase boundary (TPB) length and porosity as a function of sintering time, surface/interface energies, grain-boundary diffusivities, particle sizes, and dual-phase composition. Lanthanum strontium manganite (LSM)-yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) composite is used as an example to develop and validate the model. LSM-YSZ composites are sintered at 1100 degrees C for various sintering time, and the TPB length and porosity are estimated from SEM images by using stereological analysis to validate the model. Parametric studies are performed at various conditions, illustrating novel insights into the sintering kinetics. This analytical model is generic and applicable to the sintering kinetics of ceramic dual-phase composites for use in solid-state electrochemical devices, such as SOCFs, electrolyzers, and gas separation membranes. This analytical model can also be easily extended to the sintering processes of other ceramic dual-phase and triple-phase composites.Department of Building and Real Estat

Area and energy efficient 802.11ad LDPC decoding processor

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015. The design of multi-Gbit/s low-density parity-check code (LDPC) decoders has become a hot topic in recent years to meet the growing demand of the transformation towards 4G. An area and energy efficient multi-Gbit/s LDPC decoder engine with a fully paralleled layered architecture based on an application-specific instruction set processor (ASIP) using Synopsys IP designer is presented. When the ASIP core is instantiated for 802.11ad, it achieved a throughput of up to 7 Gbit/s at three iterations with a latency of 95 ns, a record energy efficiency of 2.5 pJ/bit/iteration and an area efficiency of 54.5 Gbit/s/sq-m in CMOS 28 nm technology for the 1/2 rate, showing it to be competitive against published ASIC solutions.status: publishe

Audio Matters in Visual Attention

There is a dearth of information on how perceived auditory information guides image-viewing behavior. To investigate auditory-driven visual attention, we first generated a human eye-fixation database from a pool of 200 static images and 400 image-audio pairs viewed by 48 subjects. The eye tracking data for the image-audio pairs were captured while participants viewed images, which took place immediately after exposure to coherent/incoherent audio samples. The database was analyzed in terms of time to first fixation, fixation durations on the target object, entropy, AUC, and saliency ratio. It was found that coherent audio information is an important cue for enhancing the feature-specific response to the target object. Conversely, incoherent audio information attenuates this response. Finally, a system predicting the image-viewing with the influence of different audio sources was developed. The detailedly discussed top-down module in the system is composed of auditory estimation based on Gaussian mixture model-maximum a posteriori algorithm-universal background model structure, as well as visual estimation based on the conditional random field model and sparse latent variables. The evaluation experiments show that the proposed models in the system exhibit strong consistency with eye fixations

Audio Matters in Visual Attention

There is a dearth of information on how perceived auditory information guides image-viewing behavior. To investigate auditory-driven visual attention, we first generated a human eye-fixation database from a pool of 200 static images and 400 image-audio pairs viewed by 48 subjects. The eye tracking data for the image-audio pairs were captured while participants viewed images, which took place immediately after exposure to coherent/incoherent audio samples. The database was analyzed in terms of time to first fixation, fixation durations on the target object, entropy, AUC, and saliency ratio. It was found that coherent audio information is an important cue for enhancing the feature-specific response to the target object. Conversely, incoherent audio information attenuates this response. Finally, a system predicting the image-viewing with the influence of different audio sources was developed. The detailedly discussed top-down module in the system is composed of auditory estimation based on Gaussian mixture model-maximum a posteriori algorithm-universal background model structure, as well as visual estimation based on the conditional random field model and sparse latent variables. The evaluation experiments show that the proposed models in the system exhibit strong consistency with eye fixations

Computation-skip error resilient scheme for recursive CORDIC

Aggressive voltage and frequency scaling are widely utilized to exploit the design margin introduced by the process, voltage and environment variations. However, scaling beyond the critical voltage or frequency results to numerous timing errors, and hence unacceptable output quality. In this paper, a computation-skip (CS) scheme is proposed for recursive digital signal processors with a fixed cycles per instruction (CPI) to correct timing errors. A CORDIC processor with the proposed CS scheme still functions when scaling beyond the sub-critical voltage or frequency. It improves EVM by 47.9 dB at its most critical frequency or supply voltage, and extends the voltage scaling limit by 90 mV w.r.t the conventional CORDIC. Besides, it is more than 1.7X energy efficient w.r.t. the conventional highspeed CORDIC, which is designed for a more aggressive scaling.status: publishe

A highly efficient composite cathode for proton-conducting solid oxide fuel cells

To develop highly efficient cathode materials can accelerate the commercial application of proton conducting solid oxide fuel cells (PCFCs). In this study, we fabricated highly efficient triple-conducting composite oxides using single- and double-layered perovskites. Compared to the cell performance of single- and double-layered perovskites, these triple-conducting composite oxides have better oxygen reduction capabilities and a robust structure showing a peak power density of 1.57 W cm(-2) and an ASR of 0.021 Omega cm(2) at 750 degrees C. No phase reactions or structural changes were found between the Sm0.5Sr0.5CoO3-delta (SSC) and the SmBaCo2O5+delta (SBC) composites, as detected through in-situ high temperature X-ray diffraction (XRD) and high resolution transmission electron microscopy (HR-TEM) techniques. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations revealed that the interfacial electron transfers and redistributions between SSC and SBC were beneficial for electron-hole separation. Therefore, such bond destabilization inevitably increased the energy of the occupied pi* orbitals originating from the surface-peroxo species in the tensile-strained interface, enhancing the bulk and surface diffusivities of the oxide ions to improve oxygen reduction reactions. This work provides a simple yet easily replicable method for designing more efficient and stable catalysts for use in PCFC applications