What landscape elements are needed for hospital healing spaces? Evidence from an empirical study of 10 compact hospitals

BackgroundModern medical research shows that a rationally planned landscape environment helps patients recover. With the growing number of hospital patients and the tightening of per capita medical landscape land, the use of limited landscape resources to serve patients has become challenging.MethodsThis study focused on the landscape environment of 10 hospitals in Guangdong Province, China. Based on the KANO theoretical model, a survey questionnaire was designed and administered to 410 participants. The data were analyzed based on demand attributes, importance, sensitivity, and group differences.ResultsThe maintenance requirements were the most important item in the sensitivity ranking. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that the users need a safe, quiet, and private environment, owing to their higher requirements, including visual healing, rehabilitation activities, shading and heat preservation, and medical escort. Moreover, adolescents and older adult patients have common and contradictory environmental needs. For example, the landscape environment should provide both an active space and a quiet rehabilitation environment.ConclusionThis study evaluates how landscape resources can be better utilized from the perspective of the user and expands the theory of healing landscapes, which has practical implications for hospital renovation and landscape environment strategies

A comparative analysis of near-infrared image colorization methods for low-power NVIDIA Jetson embedded systems

The near-infrared (NIR) image obtained by an NIR camera is a grayscale image that is inconsistent with the human visual spectrum. It can be difficult to perceive the details of a scene from an NIR scene; thus, a method is required to convert them to visible images, providing color and texture information. In addition, a camera produces so much video data that it increases the pressure on the cloud server. Image processing can be done on an edge device, but the computing resources of edge devices are limited, and their power consumption constraints need to be considered. Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)-based NVIDIA Jetson embedded systems offer a considerable advantage over Central Processing Unit (CPU)-based embedded devices in inference speed. For this study, we designed an evaluation system that uses image quality, resource occupancy, and energy consumption metrics to verify the performance of different NIR image colorization methods on low-power NVIDIA Jetson embedded systems for practical applications. The performance of 11 image colorization methods on NIR image datasets was tested on three different configurations of NVIDIA Jetson boards. The experimental results indicate that the Pix2Pix method performs best, with a rate of 27 frames per second on the Jetson Xavier NX. This performance is sufficient to meet the requirements of real-time NIR image colorization

In silico Experimentation of Glioma Microenvironment Development and Anti-tumor Therapy

Tumor cells do not develop in isolation, but co-evolve with stromal cells and tumor-associated immune cells in a tumor microenvironment mediated by an array of soluble factors, forming a complex intercellular signaling network. Herein, we report an unbiased, generic model to integrate prior biochemical data and the constructed brain tumor microenvironment in silico as characterized by an intercellular signaling network comprising 5 types of cells, 15 cytokines, and 69 signaling pathways. The results show that glioma develops through three distinct phases: pre-tumor, rapid expansion, and saturation. We designed a microglia depletion therapy and observed significant benefit for virtual patients treated at the early stages but strikingly no therapeutic efficacy at all when therapy was given at a slightly later stage. Cytokine combination therapy exhibits more focused and enhanced therapeutic response even when microglia depletion therapy already fails. It was further revealed that the optimal combination depends on the molecular profile of individual patients, suggesting the need for patient stratification and personalized treatment. These results, obtained solely by observing the in silico dynamics of the glioma microenvironment with no fitting to experimental/clinical data, reflect many characteristics of human glioma development and imply new venues for treating tumors via selective targeting of microenvironmental components

Statistical Modeling of Traffic Flow in Commercial Clusters Based on a Street Network

Traffic flow characterizes vitality in commercial clusters, and the accurate prediction of traffic flow based on the street network has significant implications for street planning and vitality regulation in commercial clusters. However, existing studies are limited by certain problems, such as difficulty in obtaining traffic flow data and carrying out technical methods. The purpose of this study is to use urban physical data to study traffic flow so as to quickly and effectively estimate the traffic flow in commercial clusters. This study takes the street networks of 100 commercial clusters in China as the research objects and classifies them into three forms according to the theory of “A city is not a tree”. Taking typical commercial clusters in these three forms as the research unit, space syntax was used to study five metrics of street network connectivity, and integration (Dn) was selected as a proxy variable for street network connectivity. The results show that the traffic flow in the three forms of commercial clusters can be predicted using the multiple regression models established based on the three metrics of integration, the traffic level, and the operation cycle. This study establishes the connection between the street network form and the traffic flow, which enables the possibility of obtaining the traffic flow of commercial clusters quickly and effectively. For areas with poorly structured urban data, the results can help urban planning administrators to predict the potential economic attributes using easily accessible street network data in commercial clusters