Reliability model of organization management chain of South-to-North Water Diversion Project during construction period

AbstractIn order to analyze the indispensability of the organization management chain of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (SNWDP), two basic forms (series connection state and mixed state of both series connection and parallel connection) of the organization management chain can be abstracted. The indispensability of each form has been studied and is described in this paper. Through analysis of the reliability of the two basic forms, reliability models of the organization management chain in the series connection state and the mixed state of both series connection and parallel connection have been set up

Robust Average Formation Tracking for Multi-Agent Systems With Multiple Leaders

In this paper, the formation tracking problem of the multi-agent system under disturbances and unmodeled uncertainties has been studied. An identifier-based robust control algorithm using the neighboring relative information has been proposed to ensure the followers to maintain a given, and time-varying formation and track the average state of the leaders at the same time. Some sufficient conditions for the second-order multi-agent system with multiple leaders in the presence of disturbances and unmodeled uncertainties have been proposed based on the graph theory and the Lyapunov method. Numerical simulations are provided to testify the validity of the algorithm

A Decoupled Calibration Method for Camera Intrinsic Parameters and Distortion Coefficients

Camera calibration is a necessary process in the field of vision measurement. In this paper, we propose a flexible and high-accuracy method to calibrate a camera. Firstly, we compute the center of radial distortion, which is important to obtain optimal results. Then, based on the radial distortion of the division model, the camera intrinsic parameters and distortion coefficients are solved in a linear way independently. Finally, the intrinsic parameters of the camera are optimized via the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. In the proposed method, the distortion coefficients and intrinsic parameters are successfully decoupled; calibration accuracy is further improved through the subsequent optimization process. Moreover, whether it is for relatively small image distortion or distortion larger image, utilizing our method can get a good result. Both simulation and real data experiment demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method can be obtaining a higher accuracy than the classical methods

Prevention of omalizumab for seasonal allergic rhinoconjunctivitis: a retrospective cohort study

BackgroundAllergic rhinoconjunctivitis (ARC) is an allergic disease that is characterized by conjunctival and nasal symptoms such as edema and congestion of conjunctiva, rhinorrhea, sneezing, and blocked nose. Seasonal ARC (SARC) is usually induced by seasonal allergens and often occurs at specific times during the year. Traditional treatments of SARC include nasal corticosteroids, antihistamines, and mast cell membrane stabilizers. Biological agents such as omalizumab have also been proved effective in the treatment of SARC.ObjectivesWe aim to certify the preventative efficacy of omalizumab for SARC and explore its influence factors.MethodsMedical records of 64 SARC patients were retrospectively analyzed, and generalized linear models were used to analyze influence factors of efficacy of omalizumab.ResultsCompared with forepassed pollen season without omalizumab treatment, the combined symptom and medication score (CSMS) of ARC with pre-seasonal omalizumab was significantly lower (with omalizumab: 0.67[0.00,1.83], without omalizumab: 4.00[2.83,4.96], p<0.001, max score=6). Subgroup analysis was conducted to explore the influence factor of preventative efficacy of omalizumab. The CSMS with omalizumab treatment were not significantly different among different age, gender, dosage, number of injections, and injection date subgroups (p>0.05).ConclusionPre-seasonal omalizumab treatment could significantly relieve SARC related symptoms and reduce medication use. This preventative efficacy would not be influenced by the dosage and number of injections of omalizumab. A single dose of 150mg omalizumab could achieve a satisfactory outcome

Leukadherin-1-Mediated Activation of CD11b Inhibits LPS-Induced Pro-inflammatory Response in Macrophages and Protects Mice Against Endotoxic Shock by Blocking LPS-TLR4 Interaction

Dysregulation of macrophage has been demonstrated to contribute to aberrant immune responses and inflammatory diseases. CD11b, expressed on macrophages, plays a critical role in regulating pathogen recognition, phagocytosis, and cell survival. In the present study, we explored the effect of leukadherin-1 (LA1), an agonist of CD11b, on regulating LPS-induced pro-inflammatory response in macrophages and endotoxic shock. Intriguingly, we found that LA1 could significantly reduce mortalities of mice and alleviated pathological injury of liver and lung in endotoxic shock. In vivo studies showed that LA1-induced activation of CD11b significantly inhibited the LPS-induced pro-inflammatory response in macrophages of mice. Moreover, LA1-induced activation of CD11b significantly inhibited LPS/IFN-γ-induced pro-inflammatory response in macrophages by inhibiting MAPKs and NF-κB signaling pathways in vitro. Furthermore, the mice injected with LA1-treated BMDMs showed fewer pathological lesions than those injected with vehicle-treated BMDMs in endotoxic shock. In addition, we found that activation of TLR4 by LPS could endocytose CD11b and activation of CD11b by LA1 could endocytose TLR4 in vitro and in vivo, subsequently blocking the binding of LPS with TLR4. Based on these findings, we concluded that LA1-induced activation of CD11b negatively regulates LPS-induced pro-inflammatory response in macrophages and subsequently protects mice from endotoxin shock by partially blocking LPS-TLR4 interaction. Our study provides a new insight into the role of CD11b in the pathogenesis of inflammatory diseases

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Diffusion Bonding of Ti₂AlNb Alloy and High-Nb-Containing TiAl Alloy: Interfacial Microstructure and Mechanical Properties

In this study, reliable Ti2AlNb/high-Nb-containing TiAl alloy (TAN) joints were achieved by diffusion bonding. The effects of bonding temperature and holding time on the interfacial microstructure and mechanical properties were fully investigated. The interfacial structure of joints bonded at various temperatures and holding times was characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectrometer (EDS) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The results show that the typical microstructure of the Ti2AlNb substrate/O phase/Al(Nb,Ti)2 + Ti3Al/Ti3Al/TAN substrate was obtained at 970 °C for 60 min under a pressure of 5 MPa. The formation of the O phase was earlier than the Al(Nb,Ti)2 phase when bonding temperature was relatively low. When bonding temperature was high enough, the Al(Nb,Ti)2 phase appeared earlier than the O phase. With the increase of bonding temperature and holding time, the Al(Nb,Ti)2 phase decomposed gradually. As the same time, continuous O phase layers became discontinuous and the Ti3Al phase coarsened. The maximum bonding strength of 66.1 MPa was achieved at 970 °C for 120 min

Evaluation of Biomedical Ti/ZrO2 Joint Brazed with Pure Au Filler: Microstructure and Mechanical Properties

Titanium and zirconia (ZrO2) ceramics are widely used in biomedical fields. This study aims to achieve reliable brazed joints of titanium/ZrO2 using biocompatible Au filler for implantable medical products. The effects of brazing temperature and holding time on the interfacial microstructures and mechanical properties of titanium/Au/ZrO2 joints were fully investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy-dispersive spectrometry (EDS) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The results indicated that the typical interfacial microstructure of the titanium/Au/ZrO2 joint was titanium/Ti3Au layer/TiAu layer/TiAu2 layer/TiAu4 layer/TiO layer/ZrO2 ceramic. With an increasing brazing temperature or holding time, the thickness of the Ti3Au + TiAu + TiAu2 layer increased gradually. The growth of the TiO layer was observed, which promoted metallurgical bonding between the filler metal and ZrO2 ceramic. The optimal shear strength of ~35.0 MPa was obtained at 1150 °C for 10 min. SEM characterization revealed that cracks initiated and propagated along the interface of TiAu2 and TiAu4 reaction layers