Since the beginning of the industrial age, material performance and design have been in the midst of innovation of many disruptive technologies. Today's electronics, space, medical, transportation, ...and other industries are enriched by development, design and deployment of composite, heterogeneous and multifunctional materials. As a result, materials innovation is now considerably outpaced by other aspects from component design to product cycle. In this article, we review predictive nonlinear theories for multiscale modeling of heterogeneous materials. Deeper attention is given to multiscale modeling in space and to computational homogenization in addressing challenging materials science questions. Moreover, we discuss a state-of-the-art platform in predictive image-based, multiscale modeling with co-designed simulations and experiments that executes on the world's largest supercomputers. Such a modeling framework consists of experimental tools, computational methods, and digital data strategies. Once fully completed, this collaborative and interdisciplinary framework can be the basis of Virtual Materials Testing standards and aids in the development of new material formulations. Moreover, it will decrease the time to market of innovative products.
Severe asthma is a high-burden disease. Real-world data on mepolizumab in patients with severe eosinophilic asthma is needed to assess whether the data from randomised controlled trials are ...applicable in a broader population.The Australian Mepolizumab Registry (AMR) was established with an aim to assess the use, effectiveness and safety of mepolizumab for severe eosinophilic asthma in Australia.Patients (n=309) with severe eosinophilic asthma (median age 60 years, 58% female) commenced mepolizumab. They had poor symptom control (median Asthma Control Questionnaire (ACQ)-5 score of 3.4), frequent exacerbations (median three courses of oral corticosteroids (OCS) in the previous 12 months), and 47% required daily OCS. Median baseline peripheral blood eosinophil level was 590 cells·µL
Comorbidities were common: allergic rhinitis 63%, gastro-oesophageal reflux disease 52%, obesity 46%, nasal polyps 34%.Mepolizumab treatment reduced exacerbations requiring OCS compared with the previous year (annualised rate ratio 0.34 (95% CI 0.29-0.41); p<0.001) and hospitalisations (rate ratio 0.46 (95% CI 0.33-0.63); p<0.001). Treatment improved symptom control (median ACQ-5 reduced by 2.0 at 6 months), quality of life and lung function. Higher blood eosinophil levels (p=0.003) and later age of asthma onset (p=0.028) predicted a better ACQ-5 response to mepolizumab, whilst being male (p=0.031) or having body mass index ≥30 (p=0.043) predicted a lesser response. Super-responders (upper 25% of ACQ-5 responders, n=61, 24%) had a higher T2 disease burden and fewer comorbidities at baseline.Mepolizumab therapy effectively reduces the significant and long-standing disease burden faced by patients with severe eosinophilic asthma in a real-world setting.
Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for solving optimization problems involving expensive objective functions. Although BO has been applied across various fields, its use in structural ...optimization area is in its early stages. Origami folding structures provide a complex design space where the use of an efficient optimizer is critical. In this work for the first time we demonstrate the ability of BO to solve origami-inspired design problems. We use a Gaussian process (GP) as the surrogate model that is trained to mimic the response of the expensive finite element (FE) objective function. The ability of this BO-FE framework to find optimal designs is verified by applying it to well-known origami design problems. We compare the performance of the proposed approach to traditional gradient-based optimization techniques and genetic algorithm methods in terms of ability to discover designs and computational efficiency. BO has many user-defined components/parameters and intuitions for these for structural optimization are currently limited. In this work, we study the role of hyperparameter tuning and the sensitivity of Bayesian optimization to the quality and size of the initial training set. Taking a holistic view of the computational expense, we propose various heuristic approaches to reduce the overall cost of optimization. Our results show that Bayesian optimization is an efficient alternative to traditional methods. It allows for the discovery of optimal designs using fewer finite element solutions, which makes it an attractive choice for the non-convex design space of origami fold mechanics.
Allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) often presents with persistently uncontrolled asthma despite the use of corticosteroids and antifungal therapy. Omalizumab is a humanized anti-IgE ...monoclonal antibody currently used to treat severe asthma.
The aim was to assess the clinical and immunologic effects of omalizumab in ABPA in a randomized, placebo-controlled trial.
Patients with chronic ABPA were randomized to 4-month treatment with omalizumab (750 mg monthly) or placebo followed by a 3-month washout period in a cross-over design. The main endpoint was number of exacerbations. Other clinical endpoints included lung function, exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO), quality of life and symptoms. In vitro basophil activation to Aspergillus fumigatus extract and basophil FcεR1 and surface-bound IgE levels were assessed by flow cytometry.
Thirteen patients were recruited with mean total IgE 2314 ± 2125 IU/mL. Exacerbations occurred less frequently during the active treatment phase compared with the placebo period (2 vs 12 events, P = .048). Mean FeNO decreased from 30.5 to 17.1 ppb during omalizumab treatment (P = .03). Basophil sensitivity to A. fumigatus and surface-bound IgE and FcεR1 levels decreased significantly after omalizumab but not after placebo.
Omalizumab can be used safely to treat ABPA, despite high serum IgE levels. Clinical improvement was accompanied by decreased basophil reactivity to A. fumigatus and FcεR1 and surface-bound IgE levels.
Filtering of electromagnetic signals is key for improved signal to noise ratios for a broad class of devices. However, maintaining filter performance in systems undergoing large changes in shape can ...be challenging, due to the interdependency between element geometry, orientation and lattice spacing. To address this challenge, an origami-based, reconfigurable spatial X-band filter with consistent frequency filtering is presented. Direct-write additive manufacturing is used to print metallic Archimedean spiral elements in a lattice on the substrate. Elements in the lattice couple to one another and this results in a frequency selective surface acting as a stop-band filter at a target frequency. The lattice is designed to maintain the filtered frequency through multiple fold angles. The combined design, modeling, fabrication, and experimental characterization results of this study provide a set of guidelines for future design of physically reconfigurable filters exhibiting sustained performance.
Dielectric particles are often added to ink formulations to tailor the macro level permittivity of printed dielectric substrates and coatings. In these inks, the combined role of particle morphology, ...discrete spatial arrangement and material properties on variance is difficult to distinguish experimentally and hence poorly understood. This is primarily due to the large parameter space of processing variables as well as electrical sensitivity to local heterogeneities. We address this challenge by combining a finite element capacitor model with a neural network biased genetic algorithm (NBGA) to optimize the volume fraction, particle size, and permittivity distributions of dielectric particles to identify systems with high capacitance variance. Analysis of the database generated from the optimization process provided insights on effect of polydisperse particles on variance of the system. Design rules/strategies were also identified for achieving target variance. Unsupervised machine learning techniques were applied to the NBGA-created database to extract correlations between the spatial/material distributions of the dielectric particles and the capacitance variance. Collectively, this study provides a useful framework to correlate electrical performance with both macro- and microstructural variation sources, which is key to accelerating the development of 3-D printing materials.
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•Polydispersity of dielectric particles in printing inks challenges performance prediction in printed electrical devices.•High fidelity 3D FEM combined with a NN-biased GA enabled the discovery of macro- and micro-level variance mechanisms.•Proximity of high-contrast permittivity and larger particles to the electrodes increases variance.•Proximity mechanism can be modulated by packing constraints imposed by neighboring particles.•Unsupervised classification of the dielectric particle database produced a predictive surrogate model of performance.
The diagnosis of allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis (ABPA) in asthma is often made in patients with total serum IgE levels greater than 1,000 IU/mL in conjunction with evidence of Aspergillus ...sensitization. The specificity of total serum IgE for the diagnosis of ABPA is low even when combined with serum Aspergillus specific IgE.
To determine the prevalence of ABPA and to identify alternative clinical predictors for ABPA among asthmatic patients with a total serum IgE level greater than 1,000 IU/ml.
This study was conducted in a tertiary hospital in Melbourne, Australia, with a large asthma and allergy service. Patients with asthma and total serum IgE levels greater than 1,000 IU/ml from January 1, 2005, through December 31, 2014, were included. Patients were considered to have concomitant allergic conditions if they had atopic eczema, allergic rhinitis, or both. The diagnosis of ABPA was based on the managing physician's documented diagnosis and referenced to criteria proposed by the International Society for Human and Fungal Mycology.
The prevalence of ABPA in our cohort was 15.8%. Older age, elevated total serum IgE level, reduced lung function, and the absence of other concomitant allergic conditions increased the risk of ABPA. After multivariate logistic regression, patients without concomitant allergic conditions had an odds ratio of 4.4 (95% confidence interval, 1.9-10.1; P = .001) for ABPA when compared with patients with allergic conditions.
The absence of atopic eczema and allergic rhinitis in these patients increases the likelihood of ABPA. Eliciting an accurate allergy history may be a useful bedside clinical tool when considering the diagnosis of ABPA.
Measurement of eosinophilic airway inflammation can assist in the diagnosis of allergic asthma and in the management of exacerbations, however its clinical implementation remains difficult. ...Galectin-10 has been associated with eosinophilic inflammation and has the potential to be used as a surrogate biomarker. This study aimed to assess the relationship between galectin-10 in sputum with sputum eosinophil counts, the current gold standard of eosinophil inflammation in the lung. Thirty-eight sputum samples were processed for both eosinophil counts by cytospins and semi-quantitative measurements of galectin-10 by western blots. A strong association was observed between galectin-10 levels in sputum and sputum eosinophil measurements, and they accurately determined sputum eosinophilia. The results support the potential for galectin-10 to be used as a surrogate biomarker of eosinophilic airway inflammation.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In this paper, we use the well-known Hashin–Shtrikman–Willis variational principle to obtain the overall mechanical properties of heterogeneous polydisperse particulate composites. The emphasis is ...placed on the efficient numerical integration of complex three-dimensional integrals and on aspects of the anisotropic material response of real tomographically characterized packs. For this purpose, we numerically calculate the complete statistics of real packs, which are numerically or tomographically generated. We use the parallel adaptive sparse Smolyak integration method with hierarchical basis to integrate complex singular integrals containing the product of probability functions and the second derivative of Green's function. Selected examples illustrate both the numerical and physical facets of our work. First, we show the reduction of integral points for integration in spherical coordinates. Then, we comment on the parallel scalability of our method and on the numerical accuracy associated with the integration of a singular function. Next, we validate the solver against the experimental data and verify the results by comparing it to a closed-form expression. To investigate the ability of our scheme to capture the anisotropic nature of packs, we study a lattice type system. Finally, we report on the elastic constants computed for the modeled anisotropic particulate system that is tomographically characterized.
This work discusses the design of a microstrip patch antenna and its use as an orientation-agnostic radiator in an origami-inspired folding antenna array. The antenna is based on a perturbed circular ...patch design that is impedance matched to reside in a radial feed network for a 2 × 2 array. This 2 × 2 array can be switched to provide sum and difference pattern behaviour. Both the feed network and the ground plane are modified to enable folding of the structure according to the Miura-ori pattern. The performance of a circularly polarised array is evaluated for a comprehensive range of fold angles to evaluate the impact of physical reconfiguration. Results for a simulated and fabricated circularly polarised array are provided for a 3 GHz design.
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