Spatial analysis

The present study predicts a spatial distribution of lung cancer morbidity in Chinese males due to exposure to PM2.5 concentration from 2010 to 2015. A spatial autocorrelation method was used to evaluate the spatial relationship between the lung cancer morbidities from 2006 to 2009 and satellite-derived PM2.5 atmospheric levels. A comprehensive grey correlation degree analysis was carried out to assess the simultaneous and lag associations between the lung cancer morbidity and PM2.5 concentration. These relationships were subsequently applied to predict male lung cancer morbidity in a specific year...

BACKGROUND: Disasters have substantial consequences for population mental health. Social media data present an opportunity for mental health surveillance after disasters to help identify areas of mental health needs. We aimed to 1) identify specific basic emotions from Twitter for the greater New York City area during Hurricane Sandy, which made landfall on October 29, 2012, and to 2) detect and map spatial temporal clusters representing excess risk of these emotions. METHODS: We applied an advanced sentiment analysis on 344,957 Twitter tweets in the study area over eleven days, from October 22 to November 1, 2012, to extract basic emotions, a space-time scan statistic (SaTScan) and a geographic information system (QGIS) to detect and map excess risk of these emotions...

Cells sense and respond to nanoscale variations in the distribution of ligands to adhesion receptors. This makes single molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) an attractive tool to map the distribution of ligands on nanopatterned surfaces. We explore the use of SMLM spatial cluster analysis to detect nanodomains of the cell adhesion-stimulating tripeptide arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (RGD). These domains were formed by the phase separation of block copolymers with controllable spacing on the scale of tens of nanometers...

A number of recent studies showed that digital footprints around built environments, such as geo-located tweets, are promising data sources for characterizing urban land use. However, challenges for achieving this purpose exist due to the volume and unstructured nature of geo-located social media. Previous studies focused on analyzing Twitter data collectively resulting in coarse resolution maps of urban land use. We argue that the complex spatial structure of a large collection of tweets, when viewed through the lens of individual-level human mobility patterns, can be simplified to a series of key locations for each user, which could be used to characterize urban land use at a higher spatial resolution...

The sequence of a genome is insufficient to understand all genomic processes carried out in the cell nucleus. To achieve this, the knowledge of its three-dimensional architecture is necessary. Advances in genomic technologies and the development of new analytical methods, such as Chromosome Conformation Capture (3C) and its derivatives, provide unprecedented insights in the spatial organization of genomes. Here we present TADbit, a computational framework to analyze and model the chromatin fiber in three dimensions...

Global biodiversity loss is a critical environmental crisis, yet the lack of spatial data on biodiversity threats has hindered conservation strategies. Theory predicts that abrupt biodiversity declines are most likely to occur when habitat availability is reduced to very low levels in the landscape (10-30%). Alternatively, recent evidence indicates that biodiversity is best conserved by minimizing human intrusion into intact and relatively unfragmented landscapes. Here we use recently available forest loss data to test deforestation effects on International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List categories of extinction risk for 19,432 vertebrate species worldwide...

The Hungarian Childhood Cancer Registry, a population-based national registry of the Hungarian Paediatric Haemato-Oncology Network founded in 1971, monitors the incidence and mortality of childhood cancer. Our aims were to carry out a longitudinal study to investigate the trends and spatial inequalities of incidence and survival of leukaemia, and the association between survival and deprivation in Hungary. All cases of childhood leukaemia and myelodysplasia were analysed (3157 cases, 1971-2015, age: 0-14 years)...

Selective and efficient preconcentration is indispensable for low concentration of phosphopeptides in phosphorylated protein-related samples prior to MS-based analysis. Herein, an on-chip system coupled magnetic SPE with MALDI-TOF MS was designed. A metal oxide affinity chromatography (MOAC) material, indium oxide, was coated on the surface of Fe3 O4 magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) to prepare the adsorbent, spatially confined with an applied magnetic field. The adsorbent exhibited high selectivity for phosphopeptides in tryptic digests of the mixture of β-casein and BSA (1:1000) and the mixture of β-casein, BSA, and ovalbumin (1:100:100)...

Human behaviors are increasingly recognized to play a key role in the spread of infectious diseases. Although a set of social and cognitive determinants has been consistently found to affect the adoption of health protective behaviors aiming to control and prevent a variety of infections, little is currently known about the ecological drivers of these behaviors in epidemic settings. In this article, we took advantage of the outbreak of chikungunya, a reemerging mosquito-borne disease, that occurred in French Guiana in 2014-15 to test empirically the assumption proposed by Zielinski-Gutierrez and Hayden that the proximity of the disease and perceptions of the natural environment may considerably shape public response to an emerging health threat...

A spatially varying effective refractive index gradient using chalcogenide glass layers is printed on a silicon wafer using an optimized electrospray (ES) deposition process. Using solution-derived glass precursors, infrared transparent Ge23Sb7S70 and As40S60 glass films of programmed thickness are fabricated to yield a bilayer structure resulting in an effective gradient refractive index (GRIN) film. Optical and compositional analysis tools confirm the optical and physical nature of the gradient in the resulting high optical quality films, demonstrating the power of direct printing of multi-material structures compatible with planar photonic fabrication protocols...

BACKGROUND: Numerous small and medium-sized mammal pests cause widespread and economically significant damage to crops all over the globe. However, most research on pest species has focused on accounts of the level of damage. There are fewer studies concentrating on the description of crop damage caused by pests at large geographical scales, or on analysing the ecological and anthropogenic factors correlated with these observed patterns. We investigated the relationship between agricultural damage by the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) and environmental and anthropogenic variables throughout Spain...

Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a convenient and safe brain-mapping tool. However, its inevitable confounding with hemodynamic responses outside the brain, especially in the frontotemporal head, has questioned its validity. Some researchers attempted to validate NIRS signals through concurrent measurements with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but, counterintuitively, NIRS signals rarely correlate with local fMRI signals in NIRS channels, although both mapping techniques should measure the same hemoglobin concentration...

Immature astrocytes and blood vessels enter the developing mammalian retina at the optic nerve head and migrate peripherally to colonize the entire retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL). Retinal vascularization is arrested in retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), a major cause of bilateral blindness in children. Despite their importance in normal development and ROP, the factors that control vascularization of the retina remain poorly understood. Because astrocytes form a reticular network that appears to provide a substrate for migrating endothelial cells, they have long been proposed to guide angiogenesis...

BACKGROUND: Dengue cases are increasing in Kerala since 2010. Information on clustering of cases across locations and time periods is vital for disease surveillance and timely control. OBJECTIVES: The objective is to study spatiotemporal clustering of dengue cases and their climatic and physioenvironmental correlates in Thiruvananthapuram district during 2010-2014. METHODS: Health department data on reported cases of dengue were obtained from January 2011 to June 2014...

BACKGROUND: Little is known regarding interhemispheric functional connectivity (FC) abnormalities via the corpus callosum in subjects with bipolar disorder (BD), which might be a key pathophysiological basis of emotional processing alterations in BD. METHODS: We performed tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) in 24 healthy control (HC) and 22 BD subjects. Next, we analyzed the neural networks with independent component analysis (ICA) in 32HC and 25 BD subjects using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging...

Typhoid and paratyphoid are two common enteric infectious diseases with serious gastrointestinal symptoms. Data was collected of the registered cases in Zhejiang Province from 2005 to 2015. The epidemiological characteristics were investigated and high-risk regions were detected with descriptive epidemiological methods and in-depth spatio-temporal statistics. A sharp decline in the incidences of both diseases was observed. The seasonal patterns were identified with typhoid and paratyphoid, one in summer from May to September was observed from 2005 to 2010 and the other lesser one in spring from January to March only observed from 2005 to 2007...

The central channel of the nuclear pore complex (NPC) is occupied by non-structured polypeptides with a high content of Phe-Gly (FG) motifs. This protein-rich environment functions as an entropic barrier that prevents the passage of molecules, as well as the binding sites for karyopherins, to regulate macromolecular traffic between the nucleoplasm and the cytoplasm. In this study, we expressed individual Nups fused with a crowding-sensitive probe (GimRET) to determine the spatial distribution of protein-rich domains within the central channel in vivo, and characterize the properties of the entropic barrier...

The limited information about the sludge quality has made its management a top environmental challenge. In the present study, occurrence and the spatiotemporal variations of 52 inorganic elements were investigated in the sludge samples from three wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in Xiamen city, China. The results showed, the occurrence of 49 elements with the concentrations in the range of >125-53500 mg kg(-1) dry sludge (DS) for commonly used industrial metals, 1.22-14.0 mg kg(-1) DS for precious metals, and 1...

Twin-screw wet granulation is gaining increasing interest within the pharmaceutical industry for the continuous manufacturing of solid oral dosage forms. However, limited prior fundamental physical understanding has been generated relating to the granule formation mechanisms and kinetics along the internal compartmental length of a twin-screw granulator barrel, and about how process settings, barrel screw configuration and formulation properties such as particle size, density and surface properties influence these mechanisms...

Analyzing medical volume datasets requires interactive visualization so that users can extract anatomo-physiological information in real-time. Conventional volume rendering systems rely on 2D input devices, such as mice and keyboards, which are known to hamper 3D analysis as users often struggle to obtain the desired orientation that is only achieved after several attempts. In this paper, we address which 3D analysis tools are better performed with 3D hand cursors operating on a touchless interface comparatively to a 2D input devices running on a conventional WIMP interface...