Realistic Virtual Human Character Design Strategy and Experience for Supporting Serious Role-Playing Simulations on Mobile Devices

Promoting awareness of social determinants of health (SDoH) among healthcare providers is important to improve the patient care experience and outcome as it helps providers understand their patients in a better way which can facilitate more efficient and effective communication about health conditions. Healthcare professionals are typically educated about SDoH through lectures, questionaries, or role-play-based approaches; but in today’s world, it is becoming increasingly possible to leverage modern technology to create more impactful and accessible tools for SDoH education. Wright LIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) is a simulation-based training tool especially created for this purpose. It is a mobile app that would be available on both Google Play and Apple Store for easy access to the providers. This highly realistic, interactive, and captivating app is essential for creating mindfulness about SDoH and generating long-lasting compassion and empathy in health care workers for their real patients and helping them to build a good clinician-patient relationship. An important aspect of this simulation is the realism of the characters and their behavior. This thesis specifically focuses on the strategy and experience of designing and developing realistic human character models and animations so that the players connect naturally and deeply with the virtual characters. This contributes to the generation of a greater level of empathy in the providers and decreases the level of biases. In addition to its contribution to creating efficient design methodologies, this effort also resulted in a portfolio of high-quality, low-memory multi-modal avatars resembling diverse people of various ethnicities, ages, body types, and gender

Effect of grain processing on nutritional and physico-chemical, functional and pasting properties of amaranth and quinoa flours

500-507Amaranth and quinoa are the ancient crops known for their excellent nutritional profile. Impact of different processing treatments including cooking, germination and roasting of grains on their flour properties was investigated in present study. Flours of raw and treated grains were analyzed for their physicochemical, functional, pasting and anti-nutritional factors. Results revealed that amaranth and quinoa flours are good source of protein and minerals. Mineral content reduced while water and oil absorption capacities of flours increased following the grain treatments. Processing of grains resulted in reduction of saponin and tannin content of grains of both the crops that improved the overall eatable quality of flours. Raw amaranth flour was whiter in color exhibiting higher values of L* and lower values of b* than quinoa flour. Germination caused significant increase in protein and decrease in fat content of flours of amaranth and quinoa. RVA curves showed that peak viscosity, trough viscosity and final viscosity of amaranth and quinoa flours were higher than the raw quinoa flour. Peak viscosity and trough viscosity of amaranth and quinoa flours decreased after processing of grains

Effect of grain processing on nutritional and physico-chemical, functional and pasting properties of amaranth and quinoa flours

Amaranth and quinoa are the ancient crops known for their excellent nutritional profile. Impact of different processing treatments including cooking, germination and roasting of grains on their flour properties was investigated in present study. Flours of raw and treated grains were analyzed for their physicochemical, functional, pasting and anti-nutritional factors. Results revealed that amaranth and quinoa flours are good source of protein and minerals. Mineral content reduced while water and oil absorption capacities of flours increased following the grain treatments. Processing of grains resulted in reduction of saponin and tannin content of grains of both the crops that improved the overall eatable quality of flours. Raw amaranth flour was whiter in color exhibiting higher values of L* and lower values of b* than quinoa flour. Germination caused significant increase in protein and decrease in fat content of flours of amaranth and quinoa. RVA curves showed that peak viscosity, trough viscosity and final viscosity of amaranth and quinoa flours were higher than the raw quinoa flour. Peak viscosity and trough viscosity of amaranth and quinoa flours decreased after processing of grains

EXOSOME NANOCARRIERS: BASIC BIOLOGY, DIAGNOSIS, NOVEL AND PERSPECTIVE APPROACH IN DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEMS: A REVIEW

Exosomes are the extracellular vesicles surrounded by a phospholipid bilayer shed from all cell varieties and plays a significant role in the communication and Transportation of materials between the cells due to their ability to transfer the proteins and nucleic acids from One cell to the another cell. Analogous in size and performance to synthetic nanoparticles, exosomes provide several Advantages, rendering them the foremost promising candidates for targeted drug or gene delivery vehicles. This review highlights the isolation techniques and delivery potential of exosomes, and equally presents research or analysis gaps for enhancing the use of natural vesicles for delivery functions. Exosome-based drug formulations can be applied to an extensive variety of diseases such as various infectious, cardiovascular, cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. Mostly, exosomes combine the benefits of both synthetic nanocarriers and cell-mediated drug delivery systems however avoiding their limitations

Beyond water homeostasis:diverse functional roles of mammalian aquaporins

Background - Aquaporin (AQP) water channels are best known as passive transporters of water that are vital for water homeostasis. Scope of review - AQP knockout studies in whole animals and cultured cells, along with naturally occurring human mutations suggest that the transport of neutral solutes through AQPs has important physiological roles. Emerging biophysical evidence suggests that AQPs may also facilitate gas (CO2) and cation transport. AQPs may be involved in cell signalling for volume regulation and controlling the subcellular localization of other proteins by forming macromolecular complexes. This review examines the evidence for these diverse functions of AQPs as well their physiological relevance. Major conclusions - As well as being crucial for water homeostasis, AQPs are involved in physiologically important transport of molecules other than water, regulation of surface expression of other membrane proteins, cell adhesion, and signalling in cell volume regulation. General significance - Elucidating the full range of functional roles of AQPs beyond the passive conduction of water will improve our understanding of mammalian physiology in health and disease. The functional variety of AQPs makes them an exciting drug target and could provide routes to a range of novel therapies

Sex-specific disruption of murine midbrain astrocytic and dopaminergic developmental trajectories following antenatal GC treatment

The mammalian midbrain dopaminergic systems arising in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) and ventral tegmental area (VTA) are critical for coping behaviours and are implicated in neuropsychiatric disorders where early life challenges comprise significant risk factors. Here, we aimed to advance our hypothesis that glucocorticoids (GCs), recognised key players in neurobiological programming, target development within these systems, with a novel focus on the astrocytic population. Mice received antenatal GC treatment (AGT) by including the synthetic GC, dexamethasone, in the mothers' drinking water on gestational days 16-19; controls received normal drinking water. Analyses of regional shapes and volumes of the adult SNc and VTA demonstrated that AGT induced long-term, dose-dependent, structural changes that were accompanied by profound effects on astrocytes (doubling/tripling of numbers and/or density). Additionally, AGT induced long-term changes in the population size and distribution of SNc/VTA dopaminergic neurons, confirming and extending our previous observations made in rats. Furthermore, glial/neuronal structural remodelling was sexually dimorphic and depended on the AGT dose and sub-region of the SNc/VTA. Investigations within the neonatal brain revealed that these long-term organisational effects of AGT depend, at least in part, on targeting perinatal processes that determine astrocyte density and programmed cell death in dopaminergic neurons. Collectively, our characterisation of enduring, AGT-induced, sex-specific cytoarchitectural disturbances suggests novel mechanistic links for the strong association between early environmental challenge (inappropriate exposure to excess GCs) and vulnerability to developing aberrant behaviours in later life, with translational implications for dopamine-associated disorders (such as schizophrenia, ADHD, autism, depression), which typically show a sex bia

Studies of new Higgs boson interactions through nonresonant HH production in the b¯bγγ fnal state in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search for nonresonant Higgs boson pair production in the b ¯bγγ fnal state is performed using 140 fb−1 of proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV recorded by the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. This analysis supersedes and expands upon the previous nonresonant ATLAS results in this fnal state based on the same data sample. The analysis strategy is optimised to probe anomalous values not only of the Higgs (H) boson self-coupling modifer κλ but also of the quartic HHV V (V = W, Z) coupling modifer κ2V . No signifcant excess above the expected background from Standard Model processes is observed. An observed upper limit µHH < 4.0 is set at 95% confdence level on the Higgs boson pair production cross-section normalised to its Standard Model prediction. The 95% confdence intervals for the coupling modifers are −1.4 < κλ < 6.9 and −0.5 < κ2V < 2.7, assuming all other Higgs boson couplings except the one under study are fxed to the Standard Model predictions. The results are interpreted in the Standard Model efective feld theory and Higgs efective feld theory frameworks in terms of constraints on the couplings of anomalous Higgs boson (self-)interactions

Model-independent search for the presence of new physics in events including H → γγ with s \sqrt{s} = 13 TeV pp data recorded by the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Abstract A model-independent search for new physics leading to final states containing a Higgs boson, with a mass of 125.09 GeV, decaying to a pair of photons is performed with 139 fb−1 of s $$\sqrt{s}$$ = 13 TeV pp collision data recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. This search examines 22 final states categorized by the objects that are produced in association with the Higgs boson. These objects include isolated electrons or muons, hadronically decaying τ-leptons, additional photons, missing transverse momentum, and hadronic jets, as well as jets that are tagged as containing a b-hadron. No significant excesses above Standard Model expectations are observed and limits on the production cross section at 95% confidence level are set. Detector efficiencies are reported for all 22 signal regions, which can be used to convert detector-level cross-section limits reported in this paper to particle-level cross-section constraints