The rate of hypo-osmotic challenge influences regulatory volume decrease (RVD) and mechanical properties of articular chondrocytes

Zhao Wang is funded on a China Scholarships PhD Studentship. Jerome Irianto was supported on a project grant from The Wellcome Trust (ref no. 084717)

Erratum for “Protective effect of quercetin on bupivacaineinduced neurotoxicity via T-type calcium channel inhibition”

Jin et al Trop J Pharm Res 2017, 16(8): 1827-1833 http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tjpr.v16i8.11The correct name of the First Author is Zhao as provided above and not Chao earlier published.Citation: Jin Z, Wu H, Tang C, Ke J, Wang Y. Protective effect of quercetin on bupivacaineinduced neurotoxicity via T-type calcium channel inhibition. Trop J Pharm Res 2017; 16(8):1827-1833 Erratum: 2017; 16(9):2051 http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tjpr.v16i9.

Essential metals at the host-pathogen interface : nutritional immunity and micronutrient assimilation by human fungal pathogens

AC and DW are supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship jointly funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society (Grant Number 102549/Z/13/Z).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Regulating stepping during fixed-speed and self-paced treadmill walking

textBackground: Treadmill walking should closely simulate overground walking for research validation and optimal skill transfer. Traditional fixed-speed treadmill (FS) walking may not simulate natural walking because of the fixed belt speed and lack of visual cues. Self-paced (SP) treadmill walking, especially feedback controlled SP treadmill walking, enables close-to-real-time belt speed changes with users' speed changes. Different sensitivity levels of SP treadmill feedback determine how fast the treadmill respond to user's speed change. Few studies have examined the differences between FS and SP treadmill walking, or the difference between sensitivity levels of SP treadmills, and their methods were questionable because of averaging kinematics and kinetics parameters, and failing to examine directly treadmill and subjects' speed data. This study compared FS with two SP modes with variation of treadmill speed and user's speed as dependent variables. Method: Thirteen young healthy subjects participated. Subjects walked on a motorized split-belt treadmill under FS, high sensitivity SP (SP-H) and low sensitivity SP (SP-L) conditions at normal walking speed. Root mean square error (RMSE) for subject's pelvis global speed (Vpg), pelvis speed with respect to treadmill speed (Vpt), and treadmill speed (Vtg) data were collected for all trials. Results: Significant condition effects were found between FS and the two SP modes in all RMSE values (p < 0.001). The two sensitivity levels of SP had similar speed patterns. Large subject × condition interaction effects were found for all variables (p < 0.001). Only small subject effects were found. Conclusions: The results of the study reveal different walking patterns between FS and SP. However, the two sensitivity levels failed to differ much. More habituation time may be needed for subjects to learn to optimally respond to the SP algorithm. Future work should include training subjects for more natural responses, applying a feed-forward algorithm, and testing the effect of optic flow on FS and SP speed variation.Kinesiology and Health Educatio

Negative sequential pattern mining

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Sequential pattern mining provides an important way to obtain special patterns from sequence data. It produces important insights on bioinformatics data, web-logs, customer transaction data, and so on. Different from traditional positive sequential pattern (PSP) mining, negative sequential pattern (NSP) mining takes negative itemsets into account besides positive ones. It would be more interesting in applications where non-occurring itemsets need to be considered. This thesis reports our previous and the latest research outcomes in this area. The contributions of the thesis are as following. • A comprehensive literature review of negative frequent pattern mining is described. • A general framework of the NSP mining is proposed. It can be used to describe the big picture of both PSP and NSP mining problems. • Three innovative algorithms are proposed to mine NSP efficiently. • Extensive experiments about the three algorithms on either synthetic or real-world datasets show that the proposed methods can find NSP efficiently. • A case study describes a real-life application on customer claims analysis in health insurance industry. Three algorithms of NSP mining are proposed in this thesis, listed as below: (1) The first algorithm Neg-GSP (Zheng, Zhao, Zuo & Cao 2009) is based on a PSP mining algorithm GSP (Srikant & Agrawal 1996). Neg-GSP deals with negative problem by introducing new methods of joining and generating candidates, which borrow ideas from GSP algorithm. And also, an effective pruning method to reduce the number of candidates is proposed as well. (2) The second one is a Genetic Algorithm based algorithm (Zheng, Zhao, Zuo & Cao 2010), which is called GA-NSP. It is proposed to find NSP with novel crossover and mutation operations, which are efficient at passing good genes on to next generations. An effective dynamic fitness function and a pruning method are also provided to improve performance. (3) The third algorithm e-NSP (Dong, Zheng, Cao, Zhao, Zhang, Li, Wei & Ou 2011) is based on the Set Theory. It mines NSP by only involving the identified PSP, without re-scanning the database. In this way, mining NSP does not require any additional database scans. It facilitates the existing PSP mining algorithms to mine NSP. It offers a new strategy for efficient mining of NSP. The results of extensive experiments about the three algorithms show that they can find NSP efficiently. They have good performance compared with some other existing NSP mining algorithms, such as PNSP (Hsueh, Lin & Chen 2008). If we compare the problem statements of the above three methods, Neg-GSP and GA-NSP share the same definitions, e-NSP uses stronger constraints since it requires clear boundary to follow the Set Theory. When comparing their performances, GA-NSP algorithm slightly outperforms Neg-GSP in terms of execution time, but it may miss some patterns in the complete result sets due to limitations of Genetic Algorithm. Apparently, e-NSP is the most efficient and effective one since it does not need to scan datasets to calculate the support of NSP. Although adding stronger constraints on e-NSP makes the search space much smaller than what it is under the normal definitions, it is still very practicable while being used in some real-life applications. Following that, NSP mining case studies coming from health insurance industry are introduced. Based on real-life customer claims datasets, we use the proposed NSP mining methods to find PSP and NSP on solving two business issues, one is in ancillary service over-service analysis, another is fraud claim detection. Both of the two case studies demonstrate the benefits gained from mining NSP

The effect of piston bowl temperature on diesel exhaust emissions

In modern, high-speed, direct injection diesel engines for passenger vehicles, there is extensive impingement of the fuel sprays on to the piston bowl walls. Recent trends towards smaller engine sizes, equipped with high-pressure common-rail fuel injection systems, have tended to increase the spray/piston wall interaction. This paper describes tests carried out in a high-speed direct injection automotive diesel engine, during which the temperature of the piston was increased in a controlled manner between 189 and 227 degrees C while being continuously monitored. The aim of the work was to quantify the effects of piston temperature on pollutant exhaust emissions. The results show a significant reduction in unburned hydrocarbon emission, a significant increase in smoke emission, and no significant change in the emission of oxides of nitrogen. The increase in smoke emission cannot be ascribed to changes in the engine volumetric efficiency or air-fuel ratio. The paper demonstrates that fuel spray deposition on the piston surface was in the form of a thin film that did not experience bulk boiling. A number of suggestions are put forward to help explain the observed changes in exhaust emissions with increasing piston temperature

Defining failed induction of labor

BACKGROUND: While there are well-accepted standards for the diagnosis of arrested active-phase labor, the definition of a "failed" induction of labor remains less certain. One approach to diagnosing a failed induction is based on the duration of the latent phase. However, a standard for the minimum duration that the latent phase of a labor induction should continue, absent acute maternal or fetal indications for cesarean delivery, remains lacking. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to determine the frequency of adverse maternal and perinatal outcomes as a function of the duration of the latent phase among nulliparous women undergoing labor induction. METHODS: This study is based on data from an obstetric cohort of women delivering at 25 U.S. hospitals from 2008-2011. Nulliparous women who had a term singleton gestation in the cephalic presentation were eligible for this analysis if they underwent a labor induction. Consistent with prior studies, the latent phase was determined to begin once cervical ripening had ended, oxytocin was initiated and rupture of membranes (ROM) had occurred, and was determined to end once 5 cm dilation was achieved. The frequencies of cesarean delivery, as well as of adverse maternal (e.g., cesarean delivery, postpartum hemorrhage, chorioamnionitis) and perinatal outcomes (e.g., a composite frequency of either seizures, sepsis, bone or nerve injury, encephalopathy, or death), were compared as a function of the duration of the latent phase (analyzed with time both as a continuous measure and categorized in 3-hour increments). RESULTS: A total of 10,677 women were available for analysis. In the vast majority (96.4%) of women, the active phase had been reached by 15 hours. The longer the duration of a woman's latent phase, the greater her chance of ultimately undergoing a cesarean delivery (P<0.001, for time both as a continuous and categorical independent variable), although more than forty percent of women whose latent phase lasted for 18 or more hours still had a vaginal delivery. Several maternal morbidities, such as postpartum hemorrhage (P < 0.001) and chorioamnionitis (P < 0.001), increased in frequency as the length of latent phase increased. Conversely, the frequencies of most adverse perinatal outcomes were statistically stable over time. CONCLUSION: The large majority of women undergoing labor induction will have entered the active phase by 15 hours after oxytocin has started and rupture of membranes has occurred. Maternal adverse outcomes become statistically more frequent with greater time in the latent phase, although the absolute increase in frequency is relatively small. These data suggest that cesarean delivery should not be undertaken during the latent phase prior to at least 15 hours after oxytocin and rupture of membranes have occurred. The decision to continue labor beyond this point should be individualized, and may take into account factors such as other evidence of labor progress

Zhao v. Atty Gen USA

Agenc

Strict singularity of a Volterra-type integral operator on H^p

We consider a Volterra-type integral operator $$T_gf(z)=\int_0^z f(\zeta)g\u27(\zeta) d\zeta,$$ acting on the Hardy spaces H^p of the unit disc. The operator T_g was introduced by Ch. Pommerenke and it has been studied systematically by several people including A. Aleman, A.G. Siskakis and R. Zhao among others. From a functional analytic point of view, one interesting notion is the strict singularity of a linear operator between Banach spaces. An operator is strictly singular if its restriction to any infinite-dimensional subspace is not an isomorphism onto its range. We discuss our recent result, which states that a non-compact T_g fixes an isomorphic copy of the sequence space l^p. In particular, the strict singularity of T_g coincides with its compactness on spaces H^p

R09. New Atractylon Derivatives Generated in Processed Rhizomes of Atractylodes macrocephala Koidz

Corresponding author (NCNPR): Jianping Zhao, [email protected]://egrove.olemiss.edu/pharm_annual_posters/1008/thumbnail.jp