Two component systems

OBJECTIVE: To estimate dietary intake of pregnant women who are overweight, assess their omega-3 docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) status, and compare results between Black and White women. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study with a longitudinal component (dietary assessment). SETTING: Outpatient clinics at Woman's Hospital, Baton Rouge, Louisiana and telephone calls. PARTICIPANTS: Pregnant women (N = 21) who were overweight (body mass index = 25...

Motivation: Images convey essential information in biomedical publications. As such, there is a growing interest within the bio-curation and the bio-databases communities, to store images within publications as evidence for biomedical processes and for experimental results. However, many of the images in biomedical publications are compound images consisting of multiple panels, where each individual panel potentially conveys a different type of information. Segmenting such images into constituent panels is an essential first step toward utilizing images...

Flotation is an important part of coal preparation, and the flotation column is widely applied as efficient flotation equipment. This process is complex and affected by many factors, with the froth depth and reagent dosage being two of the most important and frequently manipulated variables. This paper proposes a new method of switching and optimizing control for the coal flotation process. A hybrid model is built and evaluated using industrial data. First, wavelet analysis and principal component analysis (PCA) are applied for signal pre-processing...

Objective: Few studies have examined relations between one important aspect of spiritual/religious functioning-spiritual distress-and pain-related outcomes, and none has examined how spiritual distress and depression conjointly relate to chronic pain. The goal of the present study, then, was to examine veterans' spiritual distress as a predictor of two aspects of chronic pain, catastrophizing and interference, testing a mediational model of depression. Design: Four hundred thirty-six patients seeking treatment in a chronic pain management clinic responded to a mailed survey assessing demographics, spiritual distress, depression, pain catastrophizing, and pain interference...

Motivation: In recent years, there has been great progress in the field of automated curation of biomedical networks and models, aided by text mining methods that provide evidence from literature. Such methods must not only extract snippets of text that relate to model interactions, but also be able to contextualize the evidence and provide additional confidence scores for the interaction in question. Although various approaches calculating confidence scores have focused primarily on the quality of the extracted information, there has been little work on exploring the textual uncertainty conveyed by the author...

We describe a multichannel magnetoencephalography (MEG) system that uses optically pumped magnetometers (OPMs) to sense the magnetic fields of the human brain. The system consists of an array of 20 OPM channels conforming to the human subject's head, a person-sized magnetic shield containing the array and the human subject, a laser system to drive the OPM array, and various control and data acquisitions systems. We conducted two MEG experiments: auditory evoked magnetic field (AEF) and somatosensory evoked magnetic field (SEF), on three healthy male subjects, using both our OPM array and a 306-channel Elekta-Neuromag superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) MEG system...

BACKGROUND: A key component of the delirium management is prevention and early detection. OBJECTIVE: To develop an automated delirium risk assessment system (Auto-DelRAS) that automatically alerts health care providers of an intensive care unit (ICU) patient's delirium risk based only on data collected in an electronic health record (EHR) system, and to evaluate the clinical validity of this system. DESIGN: Cohort and system development designs were used...

The ability to efficiently sample structurally diverse protein conformations allows one to gain a high-level view of a protein's energy landscape. Algorithms from robot motion planning have been used for conformational sampling, and several of these algorithms promote diversity by keeping track of "coverage" in conformational space based on the local sampling density. However, large proteins present special challenges. In particular, larger systems require running many concurrent instances of these algorithms, but these algorithms can quickly become memory intensive because they typically keep previously sampled conformations in memory to maintain coverage estimates...

Selective localization of graphene in cocontinuous polymer blends is an attractive method for preparing conductive polymer composites. Localization of graphene at the interface between the two polymer phases produces conductivity at the lowest concentration. Although graphene localization ultimately depends on thermodynamic factors such as the surface energy of graphene and the two polymer components, kinetics also strongly affects the migration and localization of graphene in polymer blends during melt compounding...

PURPOSE: To investigate deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based on historical treatment plans for developing automated radiation adaptation protocols for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients that aim to maximize tumor local control at reduced rates of radiation pneumonitis grade 2 (RP2). METHODS: In a retrospective population of 114 NSCLC patients who received radiotherapy, a 3-component neural networks framework was developed for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) of dose fractionation adaptation...

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) couples protein synthesis to mRNA turnover. It eliminates defective transcripts and controls the abundance of certain normal mRNAs. Our study establishes a connection between NMD and the translation factor eIF5A (eukaryotic initiation factor 5A) in human cells. eIF5A modulates the synthesis of groups of proteins (the eIF5A regulon), and undergoes a distinctive two-step post-translational modification (hypusination) catalyzed by deoxyhypusine synthase and deoxyhypusine hydroxylase...

As the major determinant for nutrient uptake, root system architecture (RSA) has a massive impact on nitrogen use efficiency (NUE). However, little is known the molecular control of RSA as related to NUE in rapeseed. Here, a rapeseed recombinant inbred line population (BnaZNRIL) was used to investigate root morphology (RM, an important component for RSA) and NUE-related traits under high-nitrogen (HN) and low-nitrogen (LN) conditions by hydroponics. Data analysis suggested that RM-related traits, particularly root size had significantly phenotypic correlations with plant dry biomass and N uptake irrespective of N levels, but no or little correlation with N utilization efficiency (NUtE), providing the potential to identify QTLs with pleiotropy or specificity for RM- and NUE-related traits...

Carbapenems are major antibiotics reserved to human medicine. This study aimed to investigate the mechanisms of carbapenem resistance of a selection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa veterinary strains from the French network Resapath. Thirty (5.7%) imipenem and/or meropenem non-susceptible P. aeruginosa of canine (n = 24), feline (n = 5), or bovine (n = 1) origin were identified in a large collection of 527 veterinary strains gathered by the Resapath. These resistant isolates belonged to 25 MultiLocus Sequence Types (MLST), of which 17 (68%) are shared with clinical (human) strains, such as high risk clones ST233 and ST395...

BACKGROUND: Primary bone tumors of the femur are commonly reconstructed using an endoprosthesis. Different modes of implant failure have been described, including structural failure; although uncommon, this may be an under-reported complication. The purpose of this study is to examine the rates and risk factors for implant fracture of the Kotz Modular Femoral Tibial Reconstruction system (KMFTR). METHODS: Two hundred twenty-one patients (95 women and 126 men) who underwent a KMFTR reconstruction were reviewed...

BACKGROUND: Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems are increasingly becoming essential components in type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) management. Current CGM technology requires frequent calibration to ensure accurate sensor performance. The accuracy of these systems is of great importance since medical decisions are made based on monitored glucose values and trends. METHODS: In this work, we introduce a calibration strategy that is augmented with a weekly updating feature...

BACKGROUND: In order to provide adequate care for the growing group of persons with multi-morbidity, innovative integrated care programmes are appearing. The aims of the current scoping review were to i) identify relevant models and elements of integrated care for multi-morbidity and ii) to subsequently identify which of these models and elements are applied in integrated care programmes for multi-morbidity. METHODS: A scoping review was conducted in the following scientific databases: Cochrane, Embase, PubMed, PsycInfo, Scopus, Sociological Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts, and Web of Science...

When reorientation of a vibrational chromophore is faster than the relaxation of its local environment, the frequency fluctuation correlation function (FFCF) measured by two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy (2D-IR) spectroscopy is an interplay of scalar structural spectral diffusion and vectorial reorientation-induced spectral diffusion (RISD). Theory has been established to calculate the RISD component of different polarization configurations with the assumption that the molecule orients randomly in a local electric field...

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the impacts of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) from straw burning on the acute exacerbation of lung fibrosis in mice and the preventive effects of N-acetylcysteine (NAC). METHODS: The composition, particle size, and 30-min concentration change in an exposure system of the PM2.5 from straw-burning were determined. Forty C57BL male mice were equally randomized to two groups: bleomycin (BLM)-induced lung fibrosis with an exposure to air (BLM+air) and BLM+PM2...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a common chronic degenerative disease of the central nervous system. Although the cause remains unknown, several pathological processes and central factors such as oxidative stress, mitochondrial injury, inflammatory reactions, abnormal deposition of α-synuclein, and cell apoptosis have been reported. Currently, anti-PD drugs are classified into two major groups: drugs that affect dopaminergic neurons and anti-cholinergic drugs. Unfortunately, the existing conventional strategies against PD are with numerous side effects, and cannot fundamentally improve the degenerative process of dopaminergic neurons...

Femtosecond transient absorption was used to study excitation decay in monomeric and trimeric cyanobacterial Photosystem I (PSI) being prepared in three states: (1) in aqueous solution, (2) deposited and dried on glass surface (either conducting or non-conducting), and (3) deposited on glass (conducting) surface but being in contact with aqueous solvent. The main goal of this contribution was to determine the reason of the acceleration of the excitation decay in dried PSI deposited on the conducting surface relative to PSI in solution observed previously using time-resolved fluorescence (Szewczyk et al...