1,741 research outputs found
Planning Skip-Stop Transit Service under Heterogeneous Demands
Transit vehicles operating under skip-stop service visit only a subset of the
stops residing along a corridor. It is a strategy commonly used to increase
vehicle speeds and reduce patron travel times. The present paper develops a
continuous approximation model to optimally design a select form of skip-stop
service, termed AB-type service. The model accounts for spatially-heterogeneous
demand patterns. An efficient heuristic is developed to obtain solutions. These
are shown to be near-optimal for a variety of numerical examples. Results also
indicate that optimal AB-type designs outperform optimized all-stop service in
a variety of cases. The AB-type service is found to be especially competitive
when travel demands are high, trip origins are unevenly distributed along a
corridor, and patrons have relatively high values of time. In these cases,
AB-type service is found to reduce system costs by as much as 8%.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 2 table
Urinary proteomics pilot study for biomarker discovery and diagnosis in heart failure with reduced ejection fraction
Background
Biomarker discovery and new insights into the pathophysiology of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) may emerge from recent advances in high-throughput urinary proteomics. This could lead to improved diagnosis, risk stratification and management of HFrEF.
Methods and Results
Urine samples were analyzed by on-line capillary electrophoresis coupled to electrospray ionization micro time-of-flight mass spectrometry (CE-MS) to generate individual urinary proteome profiles. In an initial biomarker discovery cohort, analysis of urinary proteome profiles from 33 HFrEF patients and 29 age- and sex-matched individuals without HFrEF resulted in identification of 103 peptides that were significantly differentially excreted in HFrEF. These 103 peptides were used to establish the support vector machine-based HFrEF classifier HFrEF103. In a subsequent validation cohort, HFrEF103 very accurately (area under the curve, AUC = 0.972) discriminated between HFrEF patients (N = 94, sensitivity = 93.6%) and control individuals with and without impaired renal function and hypertension (N = 552, specificity = 92.9%). Interestingly, HFrEF103 showed low sensitivity (12.6%) in individuals with diastolic left ventricular dysfunction (N = 176). The HFrEF-related peptide biomarkers mainly included fragments of fibrillar type I and III collagen but also, e.g., of fibrinogen beta and alpha-1-antitrypsin.
Conclusion
CE-MS based urine proteome analysis served as a sensitive tool to determine a vast array of HFrEF-related urinary peptide biomarkers which might help improving our understanding and diagnosis of heart failure
Unlock Multi-Modal Capability of Dense Retrieval via Visual Module Plugin
This paper proposes Multi-modAl Retrieval model via Visual modulE pLugin
(MARVEL) to learn an embedding space for queries and multi-modal documents to
conduct retrieval. MARVEL encodes queries and multi-modal documents with a
unified encoder model, which helps to alleviate the modality gap between images
and texts. Specifically, we enable the image understanding ability of a
well-trained dense retriever, T5-ANCE, by incorporating the image features
encoded by the visual module as its inputs. To facilitate the multi-modal
retrieval tasks, we build the ClueWeb22-MM dataset based on the ClueWeb22
dataset, which regards anchor texts as queries, and exact the related texts and
image documents from anchor linked web pages. Our experiments show that MARVEL
significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the multi-modal
retrieval dataset WebQA and ClueWeb22-MM. Our further analyses show that the
visual module plugin method is tailored to enable the image understanding
ability for an existing dense retrieval model. Besides, we also show that the
language model has the ability to extract image semantics from image encoders
and adapt the image features in the input space of language models. All codes
are available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/MARVEL
Heritability of The Retinal Microcirculation in Flemish Families
BACKGROUND Few population studies have described the heritability and intrafamilial concordance of the retinal microvessels, or the genetic or environmental correlations of the phenotypes of these vessels. METHODS We randomly selected 413 participants from 70 families (mean age, 51.5 years; 50.1% women) from a Flemish population. We postprocessed retinal images using IVAN software to generate the central retinal arteriole equivalent (CRAE), central retinal venule equivalent (CRVE), and arteriole-to-venule-ratio (AVR) from these images. We used SAGE version 6.2 and SAS version 9.2 to compute multivariate-adjusted estimates of heritability and intrafamilial correlations of the CRAE, CRVE, and AVR of the retinal microvessels in the images. RESULTS Sex, age, mean arterial pressure, and smoking explained up to 12.7% of the variance of the phenotypes of the retinal microvessels of the study participants. With adjustments applied for these covariates, the heritability estimates of CRAE, CRVE, and AVR were 0.213 (P = 0.044), 0.339 (P = 0.010), and 0.272 (P = 0.004), respectively. The parent-offspring correlations for CRAE, CRVE, and AVR were 0.118 (NS), 0.225 (P < 0.01), and 0.215 (P < 0.05), respectively. The corresponding values were 0.222 (P < 0.05), 0.213 (P < 0.05), and 0.390 (P < 0.001) for sib-sib correlations, respectively. The genetic and environmental correlations between CRAE and CRVE were 0.360 and 0.545 (P < 0.001 for both). CONCLUSION Our study showed moderate heritability for CRAE, CRVE, and AVR, and a significant genetic correlation of CRAE with CRVE in the Flemish population of our study. These findings suggest that genetic factors influence the diameter of the retinal microvessels, and that CRAE and CRVE share some genetic determinant
Peptidomic Analysis of Amniotic Fluid for Identification of Putative Bioactive Peptides in Ventricular Septal Defect
Phase-Matching Quantum Key Distribution without Intensity Modulation
Quantum key distribution provides a promising solution for sharing secure
keys between two distant parties with unconditional security. Nevertheless,
quantum key distribution is still severely threatened by the imperfections of
devices. In particular, the classical pulse correlation threatens security when
sending decoy states. To address this problem and simplify experimental
requirements, we propose a phase-matching quantum key distribution protocol
without intensity modulation. Instead of using decoy states, we propose a novel
method to estimate the theoretical upper bound on the phase error rate
contributed by even-photon-number components. Simulation results show that the
transmission distance of our protocol could reach 305 km in telecommunication
fiber. Furthermore, we perform a proof-of-principle experiment to demonstrate
the feasibility of our protocol, and the key rate reaches 22.5 bps under a 45
dB channel loss. Addressing the security loophole of pulse intensity
correlation and replacing continuous random phase with 6 or 8 slices random
phase, our protocol provides a promising solution for constructing quantum
networks.Comment: Comments are welcome! 12 pages, 6 figure
Morphology-related foot function analysis:implications for jumping and running
Barefoot and shod running has received increased attention in recent years, however, the influence of morphology-related foot function has not been explored. This study aimed to investigate morphology-related jumping and running biomechanical functions in habitually barefoot and shod males. A total of 90 barefoot males (Indians) and 130 shod males (Chinese), with significant forefoot and toe morphology differences, participated in a vertical jump and running test to enable the collection of kinematic and kinetic data. The difference of pressure distribution in the hallux and forefoot was shown while jumping and running. The unrestricted forefoot and toes of the barefoot group presented flexible movement and leverage functions to expand the forefoot loading area during performance of the two tasks. Findings related to morphology functions, especially in the forefoot and toe may provide useful information for footwear design
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