A system is t-diagnosable if all faulty nodes can be identified without replacement when the number of faults does not exceed t, where t is some positive integer. Furthermore, a system is strongly ...t-diagnosable if it is t-diagnosable and can achieve (t+1)-diagnosable except for the case where a node's neighbors are all faulty. In this paper, we propose some conditions for verifying whether a class of interconnection networks, called matching composition networks (MCNs), are strongly diagnosable under the comparison diagnosis model.
Bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3) thin films with Bi2O3 buffer layers were prepared on Si/SiO2/TiO2/Pt substrates by sol–gel‐derived spin‐coating method. The structural and electrical properties of BiFeO3 was ...effectively improved by adding a Bi2O3 buffer layers either at Pt/BiFeO3 interface or on BiFeO3 surface, also strongly depending on the positions and the annealing conditions of buffer layers. A 500°C‐annealed Bi2O3 buffer layer could act as a Bi source for compensating Bi volatilization and a diffusion barrier for species from BiFeO3. A near stoichiometric BiFeO3 with less defects and substrate contamination was obtained by employing a 500°C‐annealed Bi2O3 buffer layer in between Pt substrate and BiFeO3. The structure change in BiFeO3 led by such a buffer layer should result from the interfacial constraint between buffer layer and BiFeO3. Furthermore, this crystalline BiFeO3 specimen exhibited a highly (100)‐textured, where this preferred orientation was attributed to the accumulation of Bi at Pt/BFO interface. Therefore, the Pt/500°C‐annealed Bi2O3/BiFeO3/Pt thin film exhibited the good ferroelectric and magnetic properties. As compared to the usual method for controlling BiFeO3 composition by adding excess Bi, this study indicates the more advantages using a Bi2O3 buffer layer.
Comparisons of the common methods for obtaining the periodic responses show that the harmonic balance method with alternating frequency/time （HB-AFT） do- main technique has some advantages in dealing ...with nonlinear problems of fractional exponential models. By the HB-AFT method, a rigid rotor supported by ball bearings with nonlinearity of Hertz contact and ball passage vibrations is considered. With the aid of the Floquet theory, the movement characteristics of interval stability are deeply studied. Besides, a simple strategy to determine the monodromy matrix is proposed for the stability analysis.
Purpose:
In recent years, ultrasound imaging has become an attractive modality for noninvasive temperature monitoring. Temperature variations that occur during tissue heating could induce changes in ...various acoustic parameters that may affect the echo interference so as to make ultrasound backscattering a random process. In this study, we assumed that the degree of variation in the probability distribution of the backscattered signals is temperature dependent. The feasibility of using the variation in the backscatter statistics for ultrasound temperature estimation was investigated in this study.
Methods:
We tested this hypothesis by carrying out experiments on agar phantoms and tissue samples using a temperature-regulated water tank and a microwave ablation system. During heating, raw images of the backscattered-signal envelope of each phantom and tissue at temperatures ranging between 37 °C and 45 °C were acquired to construct the parametric matrix based on the ratio of the change in the Nakagami parameter (RCN), which was used as a quantitative measure of the backscatter statistics. The absolute value of the RCN (ARCN) matrix was obtained, to which a polynomial approximation was applied to obtain the ARCNpa image.
Results:
The results showed that the RCN matrix locally increased or decreased with increasing temperature, indicating bidirectional changes in the backscatter statistics. We also found that the ARCN significantly increased with the temperature, demonstrating that the magnitude of the variation in the probability distribution of the backscattered-signal envelope is a monotonic function of temperature. Unlike the phantom, tissues tended to exhibit a nonlinear dependency of the ARCN on the temperature that may be attributable to tissue denaturation. Especially, the ARCNpa image is highly suitable for visualizing the contour of the temperature distribution during microwave ablation of tissue samples.
Conclusions:
This study has demonstrated that temperature changes are reflected in variations in the envelope statistics. This novel approach makes it possible to develop an ultrasound temperature imaging method for simultaneously estimating the thermal dose and the tissue properties.
Hepatic dysfunction and coagulopathy are common in acute dengue illness. We analyzed the trajectories of the above parameters in the survivors and fatal patients in the outbreak in Tainan, 2015.
A ...retrospective study was conducted using data from a tertiary hospital between January and December 2015. Multilevel modeling (MLM) was used to identify the changes in aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT), and platelet counts from Day 0 to Day 7 of the onset of dengue infection. The machine-learning algorithm was used by purity measure assumption to calculate the accuracy of serum transaminases and coagulation variables to discriminate between the fatal and survival groups.
There were 4,069 dengue patients, of which 0.9% died in one week after illness onset (i.e., early mortality). Case fatality rate was the highest for those aged ≥70 years. Both AST and ALT values of the fatal group were significantly higher than those of the survivor group from Day 3 (AST median, 624 U/L vs. 60 U/L, p < 0.001; ALT median, 116 U/L vs. 29 U/L, p = 0.01) of illness onset and peaked on Day 6 (AST median, 9805 U/L vs. 90 U/L, p < 0.001; ALT median, 1504 U/L vs. 49 U/L, p < 0.001). AST ≥ 203 U/L, ALT ≥ 55 U/L, AST2/ALT criteria ≥337.35, or AST/platelet count ratio index (APRI) ≥ 19.18 on Day 3 of dengue infection had a high true positive rate, 90%, 78%, 100%, or 100%, respectively, of early mortality. The platelet counts of the fatal group declined significantly than those of the survivor group since Day 3 of illness onset (median, 19 x103/μl vs. 91 x103/μl, p < 0.01), and aPTT values of the fatal group significantly prolonged longer since Day 5 (median, 68.7 seconds vs. 40.1 seconds, p < 0.001).
AST, ALT, and platelet counts should be monitored closely from Day 0 to Day 3 of dengue infection, and aPTT be followed up on Day 5 of infection to identify the individuals at risk for early mortality.
γ-Secretase is an aspartyl intramembrane protease that cleaves the amyloid precursor protein (APP) involved in Alzheimer's disease pathology and other transmembrane proteins. Substrate-bound ...structures reveal a stable hybrid β-sheet immediately following the substrate scissile bond consisting of β1 and β2 from the enzyme and β3 from the substrate. Molecular dynamics simulations and enhanced sampling simulations demonstrate that the hybrid β-sheet stability is strongly correlated with the formation of a stable cleavage-compatible active geometry and it also controls water access to the active site. The hybrid β-sheet is only stable for substrates with 3 or more C-terminal residues beyond the scissile bond. The simulation model allowed us to predict the effect of Pro and Phe mutations that weaken the formation of the hybrid β-sheet which were confirmed by experimental testing. Our study provides a direct explanation why γ-secretase preferentially cleaves APP in steps of 3 residues and how the hybrid β-sheet facilitates γ-secretase proteolysis.
The research topic of sketch-to-portrait generation has witnessed a boost of progress with deep learning techniques. The recently proposed StyleGAN architectures achieve state-of-the-art generation ...ability but the original StyleGAN is not friendly for sketch-based creation due to its unconditional generation nature. To address this issue, we propose a direct conditioning strategy to better preserve the spatial information under the StyleGAN framework. Specifically, we introduce Spatially Conditioned StyleGAN ( SC-StyleGAN for short), which explicitly injects spatial constraints to the original StyleGAN generation process. We explore two input modalities, sketches and semantic maps, which together allow users to express desired generation results more precisely and easily. Based on SC-StyleGAN , we present DrawingInStyles , a novel drawing interface for non-professional users to easily produce high-quality, photo-realistic face images with precise control, either from scratch or editing existing ones. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show the superior generation ability of our method to existing and alternative solutions. The usability and expressiveness of our system are confirmed by a user study.
To investigate the effects of an individualized, home-based caregiver-training program for caregivers of elderly patients with dementia and behavioral problems.
Using a randomized clinical trial in ...the neurologic clinics of two hospitals and a community care management center in northern Taiwan, we tested an individualized home-based caregiver-training program for managing behavioral problems, with referrals to community services and telephone consultation. Participants were patients with dementia and their caregivers (N = 129): 63 in the intervention group and 66 in the control group. The control group received only written instructions and social telephone follow-ups. Behavioral problems of elderly dementia patients were assessed by the Chinese version of the Cohen-Mansfield Agitation Inventory, community form. Family caregivers' outcomes were measured by the Agitation Management Self-efficacy Scale and the Preparedness and Competence Scales. These instruments were administered before the program and 2 weeks, 3 months, and 6 months afterward.
Family caregivers who received the individualized home-based training program had better preparedness (t = 2.72, df = 127, p <0.01), competence (t = 4.77, df = 126, p <0.001), and overall self-efficacy (t = 3.81, df = 127, p <0.001) at 3 months than those in the control group. Moreover, the growth rate by treatment interaction effect was significant for caregiver competence (t = 2.25, df = 127, p <0.05) and overall self-efficacy for managing behavioral problems (t = 2.16, df = 127, p <0.05). The probability of physically aggressive behavior for patients in the intervention group decreased from 0.27 to 0.12.
Our individualized home-based caregiver-training program improved caregivers' preparedness, competence, and self-efficacy for managing problematic behaviors and decreased physical aggressiveness of elderly patients with dementia.
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of various techniques proposed for text-based human face generation and manipulation. Such methods, targeting bridging the semantic gap between text and ...visual contents, provide users with a deft hand to turn ideas into visuals via text interface and enable more diversified multimedia applications. However, due to the flexibility of linguistic expressiveness, the mapping from sentences to desired facial images is clearly many-to-many, causing ambiguities during text-to-face generation. To alleviate these ambiguities, we introduce a local-to-global framework with two graph neural networks (one for geometry and the other for appearance) embedded to model the inter-dependency among facial parts. This is based upon our key observation that the geometry and appearance attributes among different facial components are not mutually independent, i.e., the combinations of part-level facial features are not arbitrary and thus do not conform to a uniform distribution. By learning from the dataset distribution and enabling recommendations given partial descriptions of human faces, these networks are highly suitable for our text-to-face task. Our method is capable of generating high-quality attribute-conditioned facial images from text. Extensive experiments have confirmed the superiority and usability of our method over the prior art.
3D-aware portrait lighting control is an emerging and promising domain, thanks to the recent advance of generative adversarial networks and neural radiance fields. Existing solutions typically try to ...decouple the lighting from the geometry and appearance for disentangled control with an explicit lighting representation (e.g., Lambertian or Phong). However, they either are limited to a constrained lighting condition (e.g., directional light) or demand a tricky-to-fetch dataset as supervision for the intrinsic compositions (e.g., the albedo). We propose NeRFFaceLighting to explore an implicit representation for portrait lighting based on the pretrained tri-plane representation to address the above limitations. We approach this disentangled lighting-control problem by distilling the shading from the original fused representation of both appearance and lighting (i.e., one tri-plane) to their disentangled representations (i.e., two tri-planes) with the conditional discriminator to supervise the lighting effects. We further carefully design the regularization to reduce the ambiguity of such decomposition and enhance the ability of generalization to unseen lighting conditions. Moreover, our method can be extended to enable 3D-aware real portrait relighting. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate the superior 3D-aware lighting control ability of our model compared to alternative and existing solutions.
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