The triglyceride-glucose (TyG) index has been identified as a reliable alternative biomarker of insulin resistance (IR). Recently, a considerable number of studies have provided robust statistical ...evidence suggesting that the TyG index is associated with the development and prognosis of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Nevertheless, the application of the TyG index as a marker of CVD has not systemically been evaluated, and even less information exists regarding the underlying mechanisms associated with CVD. To this end, in this review, we summarize the history of the use of the TyG index as a surrogate marker for IR. We aimed to highlight the application value of the TyG index for a variety of CVD types and to explore the potential limitations of using this index as a predictor for cardiovascular events to improve its application value for CVD and provide more extensive and precise supporting evidence.
The goal of this study was to evaluate the relationship between serum lipoprotein(a) Lp(a) levels and diabetic nephropathy (DN) among Han Chinese individuals with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). ...This retrospective analysis comprised a consecutive case series of 767 grown-up patients with T2DM (199 among them with DN) hospitalized in the Department of Endocrinology at the The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University from February 20220 to February 2021. Clinical data and other laboratory measurements, such as glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), were extracted from medical records and compared among groups. Clinical characteristics according to Lp(a) quartiles were also studied. Univariate and multivariate regression analysis were used to examine the relationship between serum Lp(a) and DN. Patients with DN had a longer disease duration, higher HbA1c, higher level of Lp(a), and were more likely to have diabetic retinopathy (DR) than those without DN (P < 0.005 for each). With regard to the Lp(a) quartile group, patients with a higher Lp(a) concentration were more likely to have DN and have higher level of HbA1c during the study (P for trend < 0.005 for each). After adjusting for several confounding factors, the development of DN was significantly associated with the serum Lp(a) level (P = 0.026, comparing the 4th vs 1st quartile of Lp(a)) according to multivariate regression analysis. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for DN development using serum Lp(a) showed that the area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) was 0.590 (P < 0.001). Findings from this study demonstrated that the DN was independently associated with the serum Lp(a) level in patients with T2DM in this retrospective study.
•An inertant metamaterial plate with two-degree-of-freedom local resonance is proposed.•The metamaterial plate can generate multiple tunable band gaps for flexural wave suppression.•Both the distance ...of the springs to the centroid of the mass and the inertance can tune the band gaps.•The effective mass density of the metamaterial plate turns into negative within band gaps.•The design of the metamaterial plate can be used for multi flexural vibration control.
This article presents an inertant metamaterial plate with two-degree-of-freedom (TDOF) local resonance. It is theoretically investigated with dispersion relation, effective density, and group velocity, and phase velocity to show the unique acoustic performance. Results show that the metamaterial plate can generate two tunable band gaps with a single mass attached by tuning the distance of springs to the centroid of mass due to the extra rotation of the mass. Simultaneously, the band gaps can also be tuned to the lower frequency range by exploiting the inerter. Effective mass density shows negative within the band gaps, and is also tuned by the attached spring-mass and inerter. Finally, within specific frequency ranges, the group velocity is negative which manifests the metamaterial plate behaves abnormal dispersion.
This paper presents an online image-based visual servoing (IBVS) controller for a 6-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) robotic system based on the robust model predictive control (RMPC) method. The controller ...is designed considering the robotic visual servoing system's input and output constraints, such as robot physical limitations and visibility constraints. The proposed IBVS controller avoids the inverse of the image Jacobian matrix and hence can solve the intractable problems for the classical IBVS controller, such as large displacements between the initial and the desired positions of the camera. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, real-time experimental results on a 6-DOF robot manipulator with eye-in-hand configuration are presented and discussed.
Depth Estimation with Occlusion Modeling Using Light-Field Cameras Ting-Chun Wang; Efros, Alexei A.; Ramamoorthi, Ravi
IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence,
2016-Nov.-1, 2016-11-00, 2016-11-1, 20161101, Volume:
38, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Light-field cameras have become widely available in both consumer and industrial applications. However, most previous approaches do not model occlusions explicitly, and therefore fail to capture ...sharp object boundaries. A common assumption is that for a Lambertian scene, a pixel will exhibit photo-consistency, which means all viewpoints converge to a single point when focused to its depth. However, in the presence of occlusions this assumption fails to hold, making most current approaches unreliable precisely where accurate depth information is most important - at depth discontinuities. In this paper, an occlusion-aware depth estimation algorithm is developed; the method also enables identification of occlusion edges, which may be useful in other applications. It can be shown that although photo-consistency is not preserved for pixels at occlusions, it still holds in approximately half the viewpoints. Moreover, the line separating the two view regions (occluded object versus occluder) has the same orientation as that of the occlusion edge in the spatial domain. By ensuring photo-consistency in only the occluded view region, depth estimation can be improved. Occlusion predictions can also be computed and used for regularization. Experimental results show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art light-field depth estimation algorithms, especially near occlusion boundaries.
With the introduction of consumer light field cameras, light field imaging has recently become widespread. However, there is an inherent trade-off between the angular and spatial resolution, and ...thus, these cameras often sparsely sample in either spatial or angular domain. In this paper, we use machine learning to mitigate this trade-off. Specifically, we propose a novel learning-based approach to synthesize new views from a sparse set of input views. We build upon existing view synthesis techniques and break down the process into disparity and color estimation components. We use two sequential convolutional neural networks to model these two components and train both networks simultaneously by minimizing the error between the synthesized and ground truth images. We show the performance of our approach using only four corner sub-aperture views from the light fields captured by the Lytro Illum camera. Experimental results show that our approach synthesizes high-quality images that are superior to the state-of-the-art techniques on a variety of challenging real-world scenes. We believe our method could potentially decrease the required angular resolution of consumer light field cameras, which allows their spatial resolution to increase.
Conjugated microporous polymers are a new class of porous materials with an extended π-conjugation in an amorphous organic framework. Owing to the wide-ranging flexibility in the choice and design of ...components and the available control of pore parameters, these polymers can be tailored for use in various applications, such as gas storage, electronics and catalysis. Here we report a class of cobalt/aluminium-coordinated conjugated microporous polymers that exhibit outstanding CO2 capture and conversion performance at atmospheric pressure and room temperature. These polymers can store CO2 with adsorption capacities comparable to metal-organic frameworks. The cobalt-coordinated conjugated microporous polymers can also simultaneously function as heterogeneous catalysts for the reaction of CO2 and propylene oxide at atmospheric pressure and room temperature, wherein the polymers demonstrate better efficiency than a homogeneous salen-cobalt catalyst. By combining the functions of gas storage and catalysts, this strategy provides a direction for cost-effective CO2 reduction processes.
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•On-going progresses and chanllenges of Transition metal compounds in SCs was reviewed.•The strategies on improving the electrochemcial behaviors of TMCs were deeply discussed.•The ...charge storage mechanisms of SCs are catagorized to solve the confusion about pseudocapacitor and battery.•The perspectives about the future directions of TMCs were subjectively present.
Supercapacitors (SCs), as an attractive energy storage device, have drawn great interests on basis of large power density, fast charging/discharging capability and good cycling performance. Transition metal compounds (TMCs) have promised as electrode materials of supercapacitors to raise the insufficient energy density by the reverse reaction among their multiple oxidation states. To further the rational design of TMCs-based electrode materials, this review looks into advances and challenges in their applications of SCs. The witnessed active TMCs including transition metal oxides, transition metal hydroxides, and their derivatives, are selectively and individually discussed in detail. To deeply illuminate the mechanistic understanding into charge storage, fundamentals of supercapacitors have been categorized into three typical types including electric double layer, pseudocapacitive and asymmetrical storage, where battery-type and pseudocapacitive electrodes are also distinguished by giving two crucial criterions. As a dynamically advancing research frontier for energy storage, we therefore provide a relatively long perspective to identify great opportunities and obstacles in the practical scale up of SCs.
The development of bifunctional electrocatalysts with high performance for both hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and oxygen evolution reaction (OER) with earth-abundant elements is still a challenge ...in electrochemical water splitting technology. Herein, we fabricated a free-standing electrocatalyst in the form of vertically oriented Fe-doped Ni3S2 nanosheet array grown on three-dimensional (3D) Ni foam (Fe-Ni3S2/NF), which presented a high activity and durability for both HER and OER in alkaline media. On the basis of systematic experiments and calculation, the Fe-doping was evidenced to increase the electrochemical surface area, improve the water adsorption ability, and optimize the hydrogen adsorption energy of Ni3S2, which resulted in the enhancement of HER activity on Fe-Ni3S2/NF. Moreover, metal sites of Fe-Ni3S2/NF were proved to play a significant role in the HER process. During the catalysis of OER, the formation of Ni–Fe (oxy)hydroxide was observed on the near-surface section of Fe-Ni3S2/NF, and the introduction of the Fe element dramatically enhanced the OER activity of Ni3S2. The overall water splitting electrolyzer assembled by Fe-Ni3S2/NF exhibited a low cell voltage (1.54 V @ 10 mA cm–2) and a high durability in 1 M KOH. This work demonstrated a promising bifunctional electrocatalyst for water electrolysis in alkaline media with potential application in the future.
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