Parylene membrane slot filter for the capture, analysis and culture of viable circulating tumor cells

This paper presents a method of capturing viable circulating tumor cells (CTC) from human whole blood using constant-pressure-driven filtration through a specially designed parylene-C membrane “slot” filter. More than 90% viable cancer cells could be recovered from whole blood using the slot filter, with minimal non-cancer blood cells left on the filter. The feasibility of the telomerase activity measurement of a single cancer cell taken from the filter after capture was proven. The on-filter and off-filter cultures of the captured cancer cells were also demonstrated

Non-Markovian Quantum Gate Set Tomography

Engineering quantum devices requires reliable characterization of the quantum system including qubits, quantum operations (aka instruments) and the quantum noise. Recently, quantum gate set tomography (GST) has emerged as a promissing technique to self-consistently describe the quantum states, gates and measurements. However, non-Markovian correlations between the quantum system and environment cause the reliability regression of GST. It is essential to simultaneously describe the gate set and non-Markovian correlations. To this end, we first propose a self-consistent operational method, named instrument set tomography (IST), for non-Markovian GST. Based on the stochastic quantum process, the instrument set is defined to describe instruments, the initial state, and non-Markovian system-environment (SE) correlations. First, we propose a linear inversion IST (LIST) to detect and describe the disharmony of linear relationship of instruments and SE correlations with gauge freedom. However, LIST cannot always determine physical implementable instrument set because of the absence of constraints. Then, a physically constrained statistical method based on the miximum likelihood estimation for IST (MLE-IST) is proposed with polynomial number of parameters with respect to the Markovian order. It shows significant flexibility that suit for different types of device, e.g. noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices, by adjusting the model and constraints. The experimental results show the effectiveness of describing instruments and the non-Markovian quantum system. As a result, the IST provides an essential method for benchmarking and developing quantum devices in the aspect of instrument set

Comparative study on the broadening of exciton luminescence linewidth due to phonon in zinc-blende and wurtzite GaN epilayers

The broadening of exciton luminescence linewidth due to phonon in zinc-blende and wurtzite GaN epilayers was discussed. The coupling parameters between exciton and acoustic and longitudinal optical phonons were obtained for both structures. The analysis showed that the coupling constants of both exciton-acoustic optial phonon coupling and exciton-longitudinal optical phonon coupling for zinc-blende GaN were almost twice as much as the corresponding values of wurtzite GaN.published_or_final_versio

Effect of bandage lens after pterygium excision combined with corneal stem cell transplantation

AIM: To evaluate the clinical effect of wearing bandage lens after pterygium excision combined with corneal stem cell transplantation. METHODS: This study was a prospective analysis. Totally 110 cases 110 eyes of pterygium excision combined with corneal stem cell transplantation admitted to our hospital from August 2015 to February 2018 were randomly divided into control group and observation group with 55 cases in each group. Patients in observation group wore bandage lens after operation. Visual analogue scale(VAS)was used to evaluated the pain 1, 3d and 1wk after operation. Fluorescein staining(FL)was used to evaluate the corneal epithelial healing and the incidence of complications. RESULTS: The VAS score and corneal epithelial healing score of the observation group were significantly lower than those of the control group at 1, 3d and 1wk after operation(PP>0.05). CONCLUSION: It is safe and effective to wear bandage lens after pterygium excision combined with corneal stem cell transplantation. It can relieve pain and promote epithelial healing after pterygium operation

Evidence for a Type-II band alignment between cubic and hexagonal phases of GaN

The study of photoluminescence spectra of a series of thin, undoped, hexagonal GaN films containing cubic GaN inclusions grown by molecular-beam epitaxy on 6H-SiC was presented. It was shown that an emission peak at ∼3.17 eV in thin, hexagonal GaN films exhibits behaviors typical of a spatially indirect transition. The values of the band offsets extracted from the data were in good agreement with theoretical predictions.published_or_final_versio

FairGen: Towards Fair Graph Generation

There have been tremendous efforts over the past decades dedicated to the generation of realistic graphs in a variety of domains, ranging from social networks to computer networks, from gene regulatory networks to online transaction networks. Despite the remarkable success, the vast majority of these works are unsupervised in nature and are typically trained to minimize the expected graph reconstruction loss, which would result in the representation disparity issue in the generated graphs, i.e., the protected groups (often minorities) contribute less to the objective and thus suffer from systematically higher errors. In this paper, we aim to tailor graph generation to downstream mining tasks by leveraging label information and user-preferred parity constraint. In particular, we start from the investigation of representation disparity in the context of graph generative models. To mitigate the disparity, we propose a fairness-aware graph generative model named FairGen. Our model jointly trains a label-informed graph generation module and a fair representation learning module by progressively learning the behaviors of the protected and unprotected groups, from the `easy' concepts to the `hard' ones. In addition, we propose a generic context sampling strategy for graph generative models, which is proven to be capable of fairly capturing the contextual information of each group with a high probability. Experimental results on seven real-world data sets, including web-based graphs, demonstrate that FairGen (1) obtains performance on par with state-of-the-art graph generative models across six network properties, (2) mitigates the representation disparity issues in the generated graphs, and (3) substantially boosts the model performance by up to 17% in downstream tasks via data augmentation

Cover-Crop Usage in South Dakota: Farmer Perceived Profitability and Future Adoption Decisions

Using bivariate ordered logit models, we investigate factors that determine farmers’ perceptions of cover-crop profitability and likelihood of future usage in the climate transition zone of the Northern Great Plains. Our results indicate that approximately 40% of long-term (10+ years) users perceived a profit increase of more than 5%. Additionally, future adoption decisions are positively affected by environment-oriented attitudes and negatively affected by prioritizing short-term profitability. More efforts can be directed toward educational programs that enhance understanding of the short- versus long-term economic benefits of cover crops