Partial lumped mass method in longitudinal deck-pier poundings of girder bridges and its test verification

Contact element methods have been widely used in the field of bridge poundings in recent years. For deck-pier poundings of girder bridges, two kinds of contact element methods are commonly used. One is the Lumped Parameter Method (LPM), which simplifies two pounding bodies to be two particles respectively, and the stress wave propagation phenomenon is disregarded. The other one is the Watanabe and Kawashima Method (WKM), whose weakness is that the pounding stiffness introduced to describe the pounding process is supposed and artificial. A new method, named as the Partial Lumped Mass Method (PLMM), was put forward for longitudinal deck-pier poundings of girder bridges and was introduced in this paper. Its applications were discussed in detail at first. Pounding force time histories with different Partial Lumped Factors were derived. The Rational Partial Lumped Factor was suggested theoretically. At last, the analysis results using the PLMM with different Partial Lumped Factors were compared, and the validity of the PLMM suggested in this paper was verified with shaking table test results

Topic-Oriented Spoken Dialogue Summarization for Customer Service with Saliency-Aware Topic Modeling

In a customer service system, dialogue summarization can boost service efficiency by automatically creating summaries for long spoken dialogues in which customers and agents try to address issues about specific topics. In this work, we focus on topic-oriented dialogue summarization, which generates highly abstractive summaries that preserve the main ideas from dialogues. In spoken dialogues, abundant dialogue noise and common semantics could obscure the underlying informative content, making the general topic modeling approaches difficult to apply. In addition, for customer service, role-specific information matters and is an indispensable part of a summary. To effectively perform topic modeling on dialogues and capture multi-role information, in this work we propose a novel topic-augmented two-stage dialogue summarizer (TDS) jointly with a saliency-aware neural topic model (SATM) for topic-oriented summarization of customer service dialogues. Comprehensive studies on a real-world Chinese customer service dataset demonstrated the superiority of our method against several strong baselines.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 2021, 9 page

Competition between ON and OFF Neural Pathways Enhancing Collision Selectivity

The LGMD1 neuron of locusts shows strong looming-sensitive property for both light and dark objects. Although a few LGMD1 models have been proposed, they are not reliable to inhibit the translating motion under certain conditions compare to the biological LGMD1 in the locust. To address this issue, we propose a bio-plausible model to enhance the collision selectivity by inhibiting the translating motion. The proposed model contains three parts, the retina to lamina layer for receiving luminance change signals, the lamina to medulla layer for extracting motion cues via ON and OFF pathways separately, the medulla to lobula layer for eliminating translational excitation with neural competition. We tested the model by synthetic stimuli and real physical stimuli. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LGMD1 model has a strong preference for objects in direct collision course-it can detect looming objects in different conditions while completely ignoring translating objects

Consecutive Slides on Axial View Is More Effective Than Transversal Diameter to Differentiate Mechanisms of Single Subcortical Infarctions in the Lenticulostriate Artery Territory

Objective: Lipohyalinosis or atherosclerosis might be responsible for single subcortical infarctions (SSIs); however, ways of differentiating between the two clinically remain uncertain. We aimed to investigate whether consecutive slides on axial view or transversal diameter is more effective to differentiate mechanisms by comparing their relationships with white matter hyperintensities (WMHs).Methods: All the participants from the Standard Medical Management in Secondary Prevention of Ischemic stroke in China (SMART) cohort who had SSIs in the lenticulostriate artery territory were included and categorized according to consecutive slides on axial view (≥4 consecutive slices or not) and transversal diameter (≥15 mm or not). The associations between the severity of WMHs and the different categories were analyzed.Results: Among the 3,821 patients of the SMART study, 281 had diffusion-weighted image-proven SSIs in the lenticulostriate artery territory. When classified by consecutive slides on axial view, SSIs on ≥4 slices were significantly associated with the severity of the WMHs, both in deep WMH (DWMH) (odds ratio [OR], 0.32; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.11–0.97; p = 0.04) and periventricular hyperintensity (PVH) (OR, 0.37; 95% CI, 0.17–0.78; p = 0.01). No such association was found on the basis of the transversal diameter (p > 0.1).Conclusion: Consecutive slides on axial view (≥4 consecutive slices) might be more effective than transversal diameter to identify the atherosclerotic mechanisms of SSIs in the lenticulostriate artery territory.Clinical Trial Registration:http://www.clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT0066484

Current evidence, clinical applications, and future directions of transcranial magnetic stimulation as a treatment for ischemic stroke

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive brain neurostimulation technique that can be used as one of the adjunctive treatment techniques for neurological recovery after stroke. Animal studies have shown that TMS treatment of rats with middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) model reduced cerebral infarct volume and improved neurological dysfunction in model rats. In addition, clinical case reports have also shown that TMS treatment has positive neuroprotective effects in stroke patients, improving a variety of post-stroke neurological deficits such as motor function, swallowing, cognitive function, speech function, central post-stroke pain, spasticity, and other post-stroke sequelae. However, even though numerous studies have shown a neuroprotective effect of TMS in stroke patients, its possible neuroprotective mechanism is not clear. Therefore, in this review, we describe the potential mechanisms of TMS to improve neurological function in terms of neurogenesis, angiogenesis, anti-inflammation, antioxidant, and anti-apoptosis, and provide insight into the current clinical application of TMS in multiple neurological dysfunctions in stroke. Finally, some of the current challenges faced by TMS are summarized and some suggestions for its future research directions are made