Robustness

In the spirit of America's Shakespeare, August Wilson (1997), I have written this article as a testimony to the conditions under which I, and too many others, engage in scholarly discourse. I hope to make clear from the beginning that although the ideas presented here are not entirely my own-as they have been inherited from the minority of scholars who dared and managed to bring the most necessary, unpalatable, and unsettling truths about our discipline to the broader scientific community-I do not write for anyone but myself and those scholars who have felt similarly marginalized, oppressed, and silenced...

Of the 27 million surgeries performed in the United States each year, a reported 2.6% result in a surgical site infection (SSI), and Staphylococci species are commonly the culprit. Alternative therapies, such as nitric oxide (NO)-releasing biomaterials, are being developed to address this issue. NO is a potent antimicrobial agent with several modes of action, including oxidative and nitrosative damage, disruption of bacterial membranes, and dispersion of biofilms. For targeted antibacterial effects, NO is delivered by exogenous donor molecules, like S -nitroso- N -acetylpenicillamine (SNAP)...

Protonic ceramic fuel cells (PCFCs) hold potential for sustainable energy conversion, yet their widespread application is hindered by the sluggish kinetics and inferior stability of cathode materials. Here, a facile and efficient reverse atom capture technique is developed to manipulate the surface chemistry of PrBa0.5 Sr0.5 Co1.5 Fe0.5 O5+δ (PBSCF) cathode for PCFCs. This method successfully captures segregated Ba and Sr cations on the PBSCF surface using W species, creating a (Ba/Sr)(Co/Fe/W)O3-δ (BSCFW)@PBSCF heterostructure...

BACKGROUND: Central catheter bloodstream infections (CRBSI) is a major cause of healthcare-associated infections. However, few factors are generally accepted and some studies have conflicting finding about some factors, possibly caused by limitation associated with an individual study. This study was to identify risk factors for CRBSI in intensive care units. METHODS: We searched the PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of science and EMBASE databases and the 4 top Chinese-language databases, including WanFang data, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and Chinese Science and Technology Journal Database (VIP), China Biology Medicine disc (CBM) as of July 2023...

Increasing evidence indicates that terminally differentiated neurons in the brain may recommit to a cell cycle-like process during neuronal aging and under disease conditions. Because of the rare existence and random localization of these cells in the brain, their molecular profiles and disease-specific heterogeneities remain unclear. Through a bioinformatics approach that allows integrated analyses of multiple single-nucleus transcriptome datasets from human brain samples, these rare cell populations were identified and selected for further characterization...

BACKGROUND: Youth who experience homelessness engage in behaviors that place them at high risk for disease and injury. Despite their health risk behaviors, these youth display psychological capital, positive attributes of hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism that motivate them to engage in health-promoting behaviors such as safer sex. However, this array of positive psychological attributes has not been studied in this vulnerable population. OBJECTIVES: The specific aim of this analysis was to determine whether factors of psychological capital mediated the relationship between background risk factors (e...

People perceive out-groups, minorities, and novel groups more negatively than in-groups, majorities, and familiar groups. Previous research has argued that such intergroup biases may be caused by the order in which people typically encounter social groups. Groups that are relatively novel to perceivers (e.g., out-groups, minorities) are primarily associated with distinct attributes that differentiate them from familiar groups. Because distinct attributes are typically negative, attitudes toward novel groups are negatively biased...

The complex resonance of dielectric quality factor Q , combined with a capacitance tunability n higher than 3:1 without any dispersion, was achieved in the voltage-tunable interdigital capacitors (IDCs) based on epitaxial Ba0.8 Sr0.2 TiO3 ferroelectric thin films across the microwave L (1-2 GHz), S (2-4 GHz), and C (4-8 GHz) bands at room temperature. The resonant Q and n features were driven by the microwave responses of the ferroelectric nanodomains engineered in the films. To promote their application in space radiation environments, the evolutions of Q and n both as functions of frequency f (1-8 GHz) and applied electric field E (0-240 kV/cm) were systematically investigated under a series of gamma-ray irradiations up to 100 kGy...

In the field of medical imaging, the fusion of data from diverse modalities plays a pivotal role in advancing our understanding of pathological conditions. Sparse representation (SR), a robust signal modeling technique, has demonstrated noteworthy success in multi-dimensional (MD) medical image fusion. However, a fundamental limitation appearing in existing SR models is their lack of directionality, restricting their efficacy in extracting anatomical details from different imaging modalities. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel directional SR model, termed complex sparse representation (ComSR), specifically designed for medical image fusion...

As an emerging decentralized machine learning technique, federated learning organizes collaborative training and preserves the privacy and security of participants. However, untrustworthy devices, typically Byzantine attackers, pose a significant challenge to federated learning since they can upload malicious parameters to corrupt the global model. To defend against such attacks, we propose a novel robust aggregation method-maximum correntropy aggregation (MCA), which applies the maximum correntropy criterion (MCC) to derive a central value from parameters...

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to both backdoor and adversarial attacks. In the literature, these two types of attacks are commonly treated as distinct robustness problems and solved separately, since they belong to training-time and inference-time attacks respectively. However, this paper revealed that there is an intriguing connection between them: (1) planting a backdoor into a model will significantly affect the model's adversarial examples; (2) for an infected model, its adversarial examples have similar features as the triggered images...

BACKGROUND AIMS: HCV infection continues to be a major global health burden, despite effective antiviral treatments. The urgent need for a protective vaccine is hindered by the scarcity of suitable HCV permissive animal models tractable in vaccination and challenge studies. Currently, only antibody neutralization studies in infectious cell culture systems or studies of protection by passive immunization of human-liver chimeric mice offer the possibility to evaluate the effect of vaccine-induced antibodies...

BACKGROUND: Respiratory diseases, including active tuberculosis (TB), asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), constitute substantial global health challenges, necessitating timely and accurate diagnosis for effective treatment and management. OBJECTIVE: This research seeks to develop and evaluate a noninvasive user-friendly artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cough audio classifier for detecting these respiratory conditions in rural Tanzania. METHODS: This is a nonexperimental cross-sectional research with the primary objective of collection and analysis of cough sounds from patients with active TB, asthma, and COPD in outpatient clinics to generate and evaluate a noninvasive cough audio classifier...

BACKGROUND: Improving access to mental health data to accelerate research and improve mental health outcomes is a potentially achievable goal given the substantial data that can now be collected from mobile devices. Smartphones can provide a useful mechanism for collecting mental health data from young people, especially as their use is relatively ubiquitous in high-resource settings such as the United Kingdom and they have a high capacity to collect active and passive data. This raises the interesting opportunity to establish a large bank of mental health data from young people that could be accessed by researchers worldwide, but it is important to clarify how to ensure that this is done in an appropriate manner aligned with the values of young people...

STUDY OBJECTIVES: Obstructive sleep apnea hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) poses a significant health hazard, as intermittent hypoxia inflicts damage throughout the body and is considered a critical risk factor for metabolic disorders. The aim of this study was to establish a metabolic profile for patients with OSAHS using nontargeted metabolomics detection techniques, providing a basis for OSAHS diagnosis and novel biological marker identification. METHODS: Forty-five patients with OSAHS composed the OSAHS group, and 44 healthy volunteers composed the control group...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Adolescents with haematological malignancies within adult services, in the UK from 16 years old, have unique needs and require developmentally targeted services and approaches to care delivery. High-risk intensive treatments are common for this cohort and a better understanding of what individualised supportive and palliative care means in this context is required. RECENT FINDINGS: Being known and understood as an emerging adult, with particular recognition of developmental stage, is an essential component of quality measures and underpins the adolescent, and caregiver, experience when faced with an uncertain or poor cancer prognosis (UPCP)...

PURPOSE: Obtaining large volumes of medical images, required for deep learning development, can be challenging in rare pathologies. Image augmentation and preprocessing offer viable solutions. This work explores the case of necrotising enterocolitis (NEC), a rare but life-threatening condition affecting premature neonates, with challenging radiological diagnosis. We investigate data augmentation and preprocessing techniques and propose two optimised pipelines for developing reliable computer-aided diagnosis models on a limited NEC dataset...

PURPOSE: Surface reconstructions from laryngoscopic videos have the potential to assist clinicians in diagnosing, quantifying, and monitoring airway diseases using minimally invasive techniques. However, tissue movements and deformations make these reconstructions challenging using conventional pipelines. METHODS: To facilitate such reconstructions, we developed video frame pre-filtering and featureless dense matching steps to enhance the Alicevision Meshroom SfM pipeline...

Research suggests a robust link between the severity of maternal depression and children's depression risks in middle childhood. Variations among depressed mothers in terms of affective dysregulation and frequent mood changes are also observed. However, the understanding of how fluctuations in maternal depressive symptoms and negative affect influence children is limited. Guided by life history theory, the current study tested whether the degree of fluctuations in maternal depressive symptoms, anxiety, and anger contributed to depression risks among school-aged children...

Schizophrenia (SZ) has been acknowledged as a highly intricate mental disorder for a long time. In fact, individuals with SZ experience a blurred line between fantasy and reality, leading to a lack of awareness about their condition, which can pose significant challenges during the treatment process. Due to the importance of the issue, timely diagnosis of this illness can not only assist patients and their families in managing the condition but also enable early intervention, which may help prevent its advancement...