THE DIFFERENCE OF ELECTROMYOGRAPHIC ACTIVITIES OF VASTUS MUSCLE IN OPEN AND CLOSED KINETIC CHAIN EXERCISES BETWEEN SUBJECTS WITH AND WITHOUT PATELLOFEMORAL PAIN SYNDROME

In this study, ten normal subjects and ten patients with patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) were enrolled for knee isokinetic exercise test and closed kinetic chain exercise by squatting-standing respectively. Surface electromyography was applied to vastus medialis obliquus (VMO) and vastus lateralis (VL) muscles during exercise. According to the integrated electromyography, VMO/VL ratio was calculated by dividing normalized EMG of VMO by those of VL. The statistic results revealed that the VMO/VL ratio of patients with PFPS was significantly lower than those of normal subjects during knee isokinetic exercise (p=0.047). However, there is no statistic difference in VMO/VL ratio between the subjects with and without PFPS during closed kinetic chain exercise (p=0.623)

Increased risk of endometriosis in patients with endometritis — a nationwide cohort study involving 84,150 individuals

Objectives: To evaluate the incidence of endometriosis among endometritis patients and its association with confoundingcomorbidities.Material and methods: A population-based, retrospective cohort study of women aged between 20 to 55 years, who werenewly diagnosed with endometritis between 2000 to 2013. A total of 16,830 endometritis patients and 67,230 non-endometritisindividuals were enrolled by accessing data from the National Health Insurance Research Database of Taiwan.The comorbidities accessed were uterine leiomyoma, rheumatoid arthritis, ovarian cancer, infertility and allergic diseases.Results: The mean follow-up period was 9.15 years for the non-endometritis cohort and 9.13 years for the endometritiscohort. There were significantly higher percentages of uterine leiomyoma, rheumatoid arthritis, infertility, ovarian cancerand allergic diseases in the endometritis cohort than in the non-endometritis cohort. Patients with endometritis hada 1.5-fold increased risk of their condition advancing to endometriosis (HR 1.58, 95% CI 1.48–1.68).Conclusions: Our results suggest that patients with endometritis exhibited a positive correlation in developing endometriosis

ERP Post-Implementation Learning, ERP Usage And Individual Performance Impact

In recent years, an increasing number of companies that have implemented ERP systems have expressed disappointment over a failure to reach anticipated goals. A major reason for this failure is the inefficient use of the ERP system by employees. Therefore, the critical issue is how users can most effectively take advantage of an ERP system. Post-implementation learning plays an important role in facilitating ERP usage and thus promotes individual performance. Particularly, the integrated and sophistic natures of ERP systems force users to learn continuously after ERP implementation. This study employed a survey method to examine the perceptions of a dataset of 659 ERP users. We found that ERP usage facilitates individual performance, including individual productivity, customer satisfaction and management control, and post-implementation learning contributes to all three types of ERP usage, including decision support, work integration and customer service. Our findings can provide academics and practitioners with knowledge of how to improve ERP usage and ensure individual performance impacts

Influence of Stress on Electronic and Optical Properties of Rocksalt and Wurtzite MgO–ZnO Nanocomposites with Varying Concentrations of Magnesium and Zinc

The financial support of M-ERA.NET project “ZnMgO materials with tunable band gap for solar-blind UV sensors” (ZMOMUVS) is greatly acknowledged. The Institute of Solid State Physics, University of Latvia, as the Center of Excellence, has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Program H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017-TeamingPhase2 under grant agreement no. 739508, project CAMART2. The calculations were performed at the Latvian SuperCluster (LASC) located at the Institute of Solid State Physics, University of Latvia.The structural, electronic and optical properties of stressed MgO–ZnO nanocomposite alloys with concentrations of Zn and Mg varying from 0.125 to 0.875 were studied using ab initio simulations. Two crystal structures are considered for the initial MgO–ZnO alloys: the rocksalt Mg (Formula presented.) Zn (Formula presented.) O and wurtzite Zn (Formula presented.) Mg (Formula presented.) O phases. For rocksalt Mg (Formula presented.) Zn (Formula presented.) O, the optimized structures are stable at pressures below 10 GPa. The larger the Mg concentration and pressure, the wider the (Formula presented.) of the rocksalt phase. In contrast, the optimal geometries of wurtzite Zn (Formula presented.) Mg (Formula presented.) O reveal a diversity of possibilities, including rocksalt, wurtzite and mixed phases. These effects lead to the fact that the optical properties of wurtzite Zn (Formula presented.) Mg (Formula presented.) O not only demonstrate the properties of the wurtzite phase but also indicate the optical features of the rocksalt phase. In addition, mixed phases of Zn (Formula presented.) Mg (Formula presented.) O simultaneously provide the characteristics of both wurtzite and rocksalt phases with the same structures in different dielectric matrices. © 2022 by the authors. --//-- This is an open access publication Lin Y.-P., Piskunov S., Trinkler L., Chou M.M.-C., Chang L. "Influence of Stress on Electronic and Optical Properties of Rocksalt and Wurtzite MgO–ZnO Nanocomposites with Varying Concentrations of Magnesium and Zinc" (2022) Nanomaterials, 12 (19), art. no. 3408, DOI: 10.3390/nano12193408 published under the CC BY 4.0 licence.M-ERA.NET project “ZnMgO materials with tunable band gap for solar-blind UV sensors” (ZMOMUVS); the Institute of Solid State Physics, University of Latvia as the Center of Excellence has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Program H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017-TeamingPhase2 under grant agreement no. 739508, project CAMART2

Electronic and Optical Properties of Rocksalt Mg1−xZnxO and Wurtzite Zn1−xMgxO with Varied Concentrations of Magnesium and Zinc

The financial support of M-ERA.NET project “ZnMgO materials with tunable band gap for solar-blind UV sensors” (ZMOMUVS) is acknowledged. Institute of Solid State Physics, University of Latvia as the Center of Excellence has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Program H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017-TeamingPhase2 under Grant Agreement No. 739508, project CAMART2. The calculations were performed at the Latvian SuperCluster (LASC) located in Institute of Solid State Physics, University of Latvia.The structural, electronic and optical properties of rocksalt Mg (Formula presented.) Zn (Formula presented.) O and wurtzite Zn (Formula presented.) Mg (Formula presented.) O with the concentration of Zn and Mg varying from 0.125 to 0.875 were investigated using density functional theory (DFT), DFT+U, linear response theory and the Bethe–Salpeter equation. According to the experimental band gap for varied concentrations of magnesium and zinc, modeling the supercell was utilized for the varied concentrations of Mg/Zn/O compounds in order to not only avoid constructing the complicated interface systems that are observed in the experiments but also take into account the excitonic effects that usually require huge computational resources. From the calculated density of states, the Zn states are highly related to the edge of the conduction band minimum and responsible for the width of bandgap. In addition, the contribution of Zn–d states is below expectations as they are located away from the VBM. As for the optical response, an increase in Zn concentration would cause a red-shifted spectrum, on the whole. In contrast, the higher concentration of Mg also triggers the blue-shift of the optical spectrum. In addition, anisotropic properties could be found in the spectrum with consideration of the excitonic effects, whereas there is no apparent difference in optical response based on linear response theory. In addition, the optical features of this work reflect the characteristic peaks of the literature around the absorption onset. © 2022 by the authors.--//-- This is an open access article in Y.-P., Piskunov S., Trinkler L., Ming-Chi Chou M., Chang L. "Electronic and Optical Properties of Rocksalt Mg1−xZnxO and Wurtzite Zn1−xMgxO with Varied Concentrations of Magnesium and Zinc" (2022) Materials, 15 (21), art. no. 7689, DOI: 10.3390/ma15217689 published under the CC BY 4.0 licence.M-ERA.NET project ZMOMUVS; Institute of Solid-State Physics, University of Latvia has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017-Teaming Phase 2 under grant agreement No. 739508, project CAMART2

Ultrasound sonication with microbubbles disrupts blood vessels and enhances tumor treatments of anticancer nanodrug

Ultrasound (US) sonication with microbubbles (MBs) has the potential to disrupt blood vessels and enhance the delivery of drugs into the sonicated tissues. In this study, mouse ear tumors were employed to investigate the therapeutic effects of US, MBs, and pegylated liposomal doxorubicin (PLD) on tumors. Tumors started to receive treatments when they grew up to about 15 mm3 (early stage) with injection of PLD 10 mg/kg, or up to 50 mm3 (medium stage) with PLD 6 (or 4) mg/kg. Experiments included the control, PLD alone, PLD + MBs + US, US alone, and MBs + US groups. The procedure for the PLD + MBs + US group was that PLD was injected first, MB (SonoVue) injection followed, and then US was immediately sonicated on the tumor. The results showed that: (1) US sonication with MBs was always able to produce a further hindrance to tumor growth for both early and medium-stage tumors; (2) for the medium-stage tumors, 6 mg/kg PLD alone was able to inhibit their growth, while it did not work for 4 mg/kg PLD alone; (3) with the application of MBs + US, 4 mg/kg PLD was able to inhibit the growth of medium-stage tumors; (4) for early stage tumors after the first treatment with a high dose of PLD alone (10 mg/kg), the tumor size still increased for several days and then decreased (a biphasic pattern); (5) MBs + US alone was able to hinder the growth of early stage tumors, but unable to hinder that of medium stage tumors. The results of histological examinations and blood perfusion measurements indicated that the application of MBs + US disrupts the tumor blood vessels and enhances the delivery of PLD into tumors to significantly inhibit tumor growth

Using Support Vector Machine and Evolutionary Profiles to Predict Antifreeze Protein Sequences

Antifreeze proteins (AFPs) are ice-binding proteins. Accurate identification of new AFPs is important in understanding ice-protein interactions and creating novel ice-binding domains in other proteins. In this paper, an accurate method, called AFP_PSSM, has been developed for predicting antifreeze proteins using a support vector machine (SVM) and position specific scoring matrix (PSSM) profiles. This is the first study in which evolutionary information in the form of PSSM profiles has been successfully used for predicting antifreeze proteins. Tested by 10-fold cross validation and independent test, the accuracy of the proposed method reaches 82.67% for the training dataset and 93.01% for the testing dataset, respectively. These results indicate that our predictor is a useful tool for predicting antifreeze proteins. A web server (AFP_PSSM) that implements the proposed predictor is freely available