Articular cartilage is a load-bearing tissue that lines the surface of bones in diarthrodial joints. Unfortunately, this avascular tissue has a limited capacity for intrinsic repair. Treatment ...options for articular cartilage defects include microfracture and arthroplasty; however, these strategies fail to generate tissue that adequately restores damaged cartilage. Limitations of current treatments for cartilage defects have prompted the field of cartilage tissue engineering, which seeks to integrate engineering and biological principles to promote the growth of new cartilage to replace damaged tissue. To date, a wide range of scaffolds and cell sources have emerged with a focus on recapitulating the microenvironments present during development or in adult tissue, in order to induce the formation of cartilaginous constructs with biochemical and mechanical properties of native tissue. Hydrogels have emerged as a promising scaffold due to the wide range of possible properties and the ability to entrap cells within the material. Towards improving cartilage repair, hydrogel design has advanced in recent years to improve their utility. Some of these advances include the development of improved network crosslinking (e.g. double-networks), new techniques to process hydrogels (e.g. 3D printing) and better incorporation of biological signals (e.g. controlled release). This review summarises these innovative approaches to engineer hydrogels towards cartilage repair, with an eye towards eventual clinical translation.
We demonstrate high fidelity two-qubit Rydberg blockade and entanglement on a pair of sites in a large two-dimensional qubit array. The qubit array is defined by a grid of blue detuned lines of light ...with 121 sites for trapping atomic qubits. Improved experimental methods have increased the observed Bell state fidelity to F_{Bell}=0.86(2). Accounting for errors in state preparation and measurement we infer a fidelity of F_{Bell}^{-SPAM}=0.88. Accounting for errors in single qubit operations we infer that a Bell state created with the Rydberg mediated C_{Z} gate has a fidelity of F_{Bell}^{C_{Z}}=0.89. Comparison with a detailed error model based on quantum process matrices indicates that finite atom temperature and laser noise are the dominant error sources contributing to the observed gate infidelity.
Formaldehyde is one of the toxic volatile organic compounds and is known to be a carcinogen and a major cause of sick building syndrome. In this study, polystyrene (PS)/polyaniline (PANI) core-shell ...type microparticles with narrow size distributions were prepared by applying the Swelling-Diffusion-Interfacial Polymerization Method (SDIPM). The PANI shell was uniformly coated on the PS core and the PANI loading efficiency estimated by gravimetric reaction yield analysis was 98.69%. A formaldehyde sensor device was fabricated by a solution casting of the PS/PANI core-shell type microparticles on the Interdigitated Electrodes (IDEs). The PS/PANI coated IDE sensor showed an excellent sensitivity for formaldehyde in range of 1–50 ppm at room temperature as follows: −9.9% of response for 1 ppm and −37.6% of response for 50 ppm. In addition, it showed a clear reversibility indicating that the sensor could be reused at least 3 times for the detection of formaldehyde.
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•Polystyrene/polyaniline core-shell microparticles showing narrow size distribution and uniform shell thickness.•Formaldehyde sensor device via a solution casting of the PS/PANI core-shell microparticles on the interdigitated electrodes.•PS/PANI coated IDE formaldehyde sensor showing high sensitivity, practical controllability, and clear reversibility.•PS/PANI coated IDE formaldehyde sensor applicable to the application area requiring a bendable form.
This study examines the state estimation problem for neural networks with a time-varying delay. Unlike other studies, the sampled-data with stochastic sampling is used to design the state estimator ...using a novel approach that divides the bounding of the activation function into two subintervals. To fully use the sawtooth structure characteristics of the sampling input delay, a discontinuous Lyapunov functional is proposed based on the extended Wirtinger inequality. The desired estimator gain can be characterized in terms of the solution to linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Finally, the proposed method is applied to two numerical examples to show the effectiveness of our result.
It is not known how radiomics using ultrasound images contribute to the detection of BRAF mutation. This study aimed to evaluate whether a radiomics study of gray-scale ultrasound can predict the ...presence or absence of
(
) mutation in papillary thyroid cancer.
The study retrospectively included 96 thyroid nodules that were surgically confirmed papillary thyroid cancers between January 2012 and June 2013.
mutation was positive in 48 nodules and negative in 48 nodules. For analysis, ROIs from the nodules were demarcated manually on both longitudinal and transverse sonographic images. We extracted a total of 86 radiomics features derived from histogram parameters, gray-level co-occurrence matrix, intensity size zone matrix, and shape features. These features were used to build 3 different classifier models, including logistic regression, support vector machine, and random forest using 5-fold cross-validation. The performance including accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve, of the different models was evaluated.
The incidence of high-suspicion nodules diagnosed on ultrasound was higher in the
mutation-positive group than in the mutation-negative group (
= .004). The radiomics approach demonstrated that all classification models showed moderate performance for predicting the presence of
mutation in papillary thyroid cancers with an area under the curve value of 0.651, accuracy of 64.3%, sensitivity of 66.8%, and specificity of 61.8%, on average, for the 3 models.
Radiomics study using thyroid sonography is limited in predicting the
mutation status of papillary thyroid carcinoma. Further studies will be needed to validate our results using various diagnostic methods.
Respiratory sounds are expressed as nonlinear and nonstationary signals, whose unpredictability makes it difficult to extract significant features for classification. Static cepstral coefficients ...such as Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), have been used for classification of lung sound signals. However, they are modeled in high-dimensional hyperspectral space, and also lose temporal dependency information. Therefore, we propose shifted Formula: see text-cepstral coefficients in lower-subspace (SDC-L) as a novel feature for lung sound classification. It preserves temporal dependency information of multiple frames nearby same to original SDC, and improves feature extraction by reducing the hyperspectral dimension. We modified EMD algorithm by adding a stopping rule to objectively select a finite number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). The performances of SDC-L were evaluated with three machine learning techniques (support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) and random forest (RF)) and two deep learning algorithms (multilayer perceptron (MLP) and convolutional neural network (cNN)) and one hybrid deep learning algorithm combining cNN with long short term memory (LSTM) in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and F1-score. We found that the first 2 IMFs were enough to construct our feature. SVM, MLP and a hybrid deep learning algorithm (cNN plus LSTM) outperformed with SDC-L, and the other classifiers achieved equivalent results with all features. Our findings show that SDC-L is a promising feature for the classification of lung sound signals.
Infantile hemangiomas (IHs) are common neoplasms composed of proliferating endothelial-like cells. Despite the relative frequency of IH and the potential severity of complications, there are ...currently no uniform guidelines for treatment. Although propranolol has rapidly been adopted, there is significant uncertainty and divergence of opinion regarding safety monitoring, dose escalation, and its use in PHACE syndrome (PHACE = posterior fossa, hemangioma, arterial lesions, cardiac abnormalities, eye abnormalities; a cutaneous neurovascular syndrome characterized by large, segmental hemangiomas of the head and neck along with congenital anomalies of the brain, heart, eyes and/or chest wall). A consensus conference was held on December 9, 2011. The multidisciplinary team reviewed existing data on the pharmacologic properties of propranolol and all published reports pertaining to the use of propranolol in pediatric patients. Workgroups were assigned specific topics to propose protocols on the following subjects: contraindications, special populations, pretreatment evaluation, dose escalation, and monitoring. Consensus protocols were recorded during the meeting and refined after the meeting. When appropriate, protocol clarifications and revision were made and agreed upon by the group via teleconference. Because of the absence of high-quality clinical research data, evidence-based recommendations are not possible at present. However, the team agreed on a number of recommendations that arose from a review of existing evidence, including when to treat complicated IH; contraindications and pretreatment evaluation protocols; propranolol use in PHACE syndrome; formulation, target dose, and frequency of propranolol; initiation of propranolol in infants; cardiovascular monitoring; ongoing monitoring; and prevention of hypoglycemia. Where there was considerable controversy, the more conservative approach was selected. We acknowledge that the recommendations are conservative in nature and anticipate that they will be revised as more data are made available.
We demonstrate |W⟩ state encoding of multiatom ensemble qubits. Using optically trapped Rb atoms, the T_{2} coherence time is 2.6(3) ms for Nover ¯=7.6 atoms and scales approximately inversely with ...the number of atoms. Strong Rydberg blockade between two ensemble qubits is demonstrated with a fidelity of 0.89(1), and with a fidelity of ∼1.0 when postselected on a control ensemble excitation. These results are a significant step towards deterministic entanglement of atomic ensembles.
Dolichol and natural rubber are representative cis-polyisoprenoids in primary and secondary metabolism, respectively. Their biosynthesis is catalyzed by cis-prenyltransferase (CPT) by sequential ...condensations of isopentenyl diphosphates (IPPs) to a priming molecule. Although prokaryotic CPTs have been well characterized, the mechanism of eukaryotic CPTs in cis-polyisoprene biosynthesis was only recently revealed. It was shown that eukaryotes have evolved a unique protein complex, comprised of CPT and CPT-binding protein (CBP), to synthesize cis-polyisoprenoids. In the context of this new discovery, we found discrepancies in literature for CPT or CBP biochemical assays and in vivo CPT complementation using rer2 (yeast CPT) yeast mutant. Our study here shows that rer2 revertants occur at a frequency that cannot be disregarded and are likely accountable for the results that cannot be explained by the CPT/CBP heteroprotein complex model. To make a stable mutant, SRT1 gene (secondary CPT expressed at a basal level in yeast) was additionally deleted in the rer2Δ mutant background. This stable rer2Δ srt1Δ strain was then used to individually or simultaneously express Arabidopsis CPT1 (AtCPT1, At2g17570) and CBP (AtLEW1, At1G11755). We found that the simultaneous expression of Arabidopsis CPT1 and AtLEW1 effectively complements the rer2Δ srt1Δ strain, whereas the individual expression of AtCPT1 alone or AtLEW1 alone failed to rescue the yeast mutant. Microsomes from the dual expresser showed an efficient incorporation of IPPs into cis-polyisoprenoid (30% in 2h). These results showed that the CPT/CBP heteroprotein complex model is valid in Arabidopsis thaliana. Experimental details of these results are described in this methodology paper.
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