Targeted therapy of immune thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (iTTP) requires acurate and prompt diagnosis and differentiation from complement‐mediated hemolytic uremic syndrome and other causes of ...thrombotic microangiopathy. ADAMTS‐13 (A Disintegrin And Metalloprotease with ThromboSpondin‐1 Domain, member 13) evaluation (activity and inhibitors or anti‐ADAMTS‐13 IgG) is the key for diagnosis and further management of patients with suspected iTTP during acute episode and in clinical response or remission. Clinical trial results and real‐world data have demonstrated the efficacy and safety of the triple therapy consisting of therapeutic plasma exchange, caplacizumab, and immunosuppressives (e.g., corticosteroids and rituximab) for acute iTTP. Such a therapeutic strategy has significantly accelerated the normalization of platelet counts, decreased the length of stays in the intensive care unit and the hospital, but most importantly reduced the mortality rate. The present review highlights some of the important advancements for the diagnosis and management of iTTP and proposes triple therapy as the standard of care for acute iTTP today.
Calcium‐ion batteries (CIBs) are considered to be promising next‐generation energy storage systems because of the natural abundance of calcium and the multivalent calcium ions with low redox ...potential close to that of lithium. However, the practical realization of high‐energy and high‐power CIBs is elusive owing to the lack of suitable electrodes and the sluggish diffusion of calcium ions in most intercalation hosts. Herein, it is demonstrated that calcium‐ion intercalation can be remarkably fast and reversible in natural graphite, constituting the first step toward the realization of high‐power calcium electrodes. It is shown that a graphite electrode exhibits an exceptionally high rate capability up to 2 A g−1, delivering ≈75% of the specific capacity at 50 mA g−1 with full calcium intercalation in graphite corresponding to ≈97 mAh g−1. Moreover, the capacity stably maintains over 200 cycles without notable cycle degradation. It is found that the calcium ions are intercalated into graphite galleries with a staging process. The intercalation mechanisms of the “calciated” graphite are elucidated using a suite of techniques including synchrotron in situ X‐ray diffraction, nuclear magnetic resonance, and first‐principles calculations. The versatile intercalation chemistry of graphite observed here is expected to spur the development of high‐power CIBs.
Graphite as a reliable anode material for calcium‐ion batteries is realized. By selecting a proper dimethylacetamide‐based electrolyte, reversible Ca (de)insertion is enabled in graphite at room temperature with large Ca‐storage capacities, remarkable reversibility, and exceptionally high power capability (≈75% capacity retention at 2 A g−1 to that at 50 mA g−1).
The emergence of flexible and wearable electronic devices with shape amenability and high mobility has stimulated the development of flexible power sources to bring revolutionary changes to daily ...lives. The conventional rechargeable batteries with fixed geometries and sizes have limited their functionalities in wearable applications. The first‐ever graphene‐based fibrous rechargeable batteries are reported in this work. Ultralight composite fibers consisting of reduced graphene oxide/carbon nanotube filled with a large amount of sulfur (rGO/CNT/S) are prepared by a facile, one‐pot wet‐spinning method. The liquid crystalline behavior of high concentration GO sheets facilitates the alignment of rGO/CNT/S composites, enabling rational assembly into flexible and conductive fibers as lithium–sulfur battery electrodes. The ultralight fiber electrodes with scalable linear densities ranging from 0.028 to 0.13 mg cm−1 deliver a high initial capacity of 1255 mAh g−1 and an areal capacity of 2.49 mAh cm−2 at C/20. A shape‐conformable cable battery prototype demonstrates a stable discharge characteristic after 30 bending cycles.
A freestanding and ultralight reduced graphene oxide (rGO)/carbon nanotube (CNT)/sulfur composite fibers are prepared by wet‐spinning as the cathode for lithium–sulfur batteries (LSBs). The liquid crystallinity of high concentration GO sheets enables rational assembly of rGO/CNT/S as flexible, conductive fibers. A cable LSB prototype comprising rGO/CNT/S cathode and lithium wire anode demonstrates excellent flexibility and stable static discharge performance.
To investigate critical frequency bands and channels, this paper introduces deep belief networks (DBNs) to constructing EEG-based emotion recognition models for three emotions: positive, neutral and ...negative. We develop an EEG dataset acquired from 15 subjects. Each subject performs the experiments twice at the interval of a few days. DBNs are trained with differential entropy features extracted from multichannel EEG data. We examine the weights of the trained DBNs and investigate the critical frequency bands and channels. Four different profiles of 4, 6, 9, and 12 channels are selected. The recognition accuracies of these four profiles are relatively stable with the best accuracy of 86.65%, which is even better than that of the original 62 channels. The critical frequency bands and channels determined by using the weights of trained DBNs are consistent with the existing observations. In addition, our experiment results show that neural signatures associated with different emotions do exist and they share commonality across sessions and individuals. We compare the performance of deep models with shallow models. The average accuracies of DBN, SVM, LR, and KNN are 86.08%, 83.99%, 82.70%, and 72.60%, respectively.
In this paper, we investigate stable patterns of electroencephalogram (EEG) over time for emotion recognition using a machine learning approach. Up to now, various findings of activated patterns ...associated with different emotions have been reported. However, their stability over time has not been fully investigated yet. In this paper, we focus on identifying EEG stability in emotion recognition. We systematically evaluate the performance of various popular feature extraction, feature selection, feature smoothing and pattern classification methods with the DEAP dataset and a newly developed dataset called SEED for this study. Discriminative Graph regularized Extreme Learning Machine with differential entropy features achieves the best average accuracies of 69.67 and 91.07 percent on the DEAP and SEED datasets, respectively. The experimental results indicate that stable patterns exhibit consistency across sessions; the lateral temporal areas activate more for positive emotions than negative emotions in beta and gamma bands; the neural patterns of neutral emotions have higher alpha responses at parietal and occipital sites; and for negative emotions, the neural patterns have significant higher delta responses at parietal and occipital sites and higher gamma responses at prefrontal sites. The performance of our emotion recognition models shows that the neural patterns are relatively stable within and between sessions.
Background
Despite an increase in our understandings of pathogenesis of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP), the approaches for initial diagnosis and management of TTP vary significantly.
...Objective
The evidence‐based guidelines of the International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH) are intended to support patients, clinicians, and other health care professionals in their decisions about the initial diagnosis and management of acute TTP.
Methods
In June 2018, ISTH formed a multidisciplinary panel that included hematologists, an intensive care physician, nephrologist, clinical pathologist, biostatistician, and patient representatives, as well as a methodology team from McMaster University. The panel composition was designed to minimize the potential conflicts of interests. The panel used the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation approach and the Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome framework to develop and grade their recommendations. Public comments were sought and incorporated in the final document.
Results
The panel agreed on three recommendations covering the initial diagnosis with emphasis on the importance of ADAMTS13 testing (eg, activity, anti‐ADAMTS13 IgG or inhibitor) and assessment of the pretest probability of TTP by clinical assessment and/or the risk assessment models like the PLASMIC or French score. The panel noted how availability and turnaround time of ADAMTS13 test results might affect early diagnosis and management, in particular the use of caplacizumab.
Conclusions
There is a lack of high‐quality evidence to support strong recommendations for the initial diagnosis and management of a suspected TTP. The panel emphasized the importance of obtaining ADAMTS13 testing in a proper clinical context. Future research should focus on how to monitor and act on ADAMTS13 levels during remission.
In this paper, we investigate the quantum correction on thermodynamics of the Reissner-Nordström black hole in the presence of the quintessence matter associated with dark energy. To this end, the ...modified Hawking temperature, heat capacity, and entropy functions of the black hole are derived. Investigation reveals that the modified uncertainty principles and normalization factor α restrict the lower bound value of horizon radius to affect the Hawking temperature and the parameter η0 has a non-negligible effect on the heat capacity threshold. Furthermore, the correction of entropy does not depend on the quintessence matter. It is also examined the equation of state associated with the pressure and the volume in this framework. In addition, we employ graphical methods to compare and discuss the findings within the generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) and extended uncertainty principle (EUP).
Severe deficiency of plasma ADAMTS13 activity is the primary cause of thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) whereas overwhelming activation of complement via an alternative pathway results in ...atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome (aHUS), the prototypes of thrombotic microangiopathy (TMA). However, clinical and pathogenic distinctions between TTP and aHUS are often quite challenging. Clinical reports have suggested that complement activation may play a role in the development of TTP, which is caused by severe deficiency of plasma ADAMTS13 activity. However, the experimental evidence to support this hypothesis is still lacking. Here, we show that mice with either Adamts13−/− or a heterozygous mutation of complement factor H (cfh) at amino acid residue of 1206 (ie, cfhW/R) alone remain asymptomatic despite the presence of occasional microvascular thrombi in various organ tissues. However, mice carrying both Adamts13−/− and cfhW/R exhibit thrombocytopenia, low haptoglobin, increased fragmentation of erythrocytes in peripheral blood smear, increased plasma levels of lactate dehydrogenase activity, blood urea nitrogen, and creatinine, as well as an increased mortality rate, consistent with the development of TMA. Moreover, mice with a homozygous mutation of cfh (ie, cfhR/R) with or without Adamts13−/− developed severe TMA. The mortality rate in mice with Adamts13−/−cfhR/R was significantly higher than that in mice with cfhR/R alone. Histological and immunohistochemical analyses demonstrated the presence of disseminated platelet-rich thrombi in terminal arterioles and capillaries of major organ tissues in these mice that were either euthanized or died. Together, our results support a synergistic effect of severe ADAMTS13 deficiency and complement activation in pathogenesis of TMA in mice.
•Mice with Adamts13−/− or a heterozygous cfh mutation (ie, chfW1206R) do not develop spontaneous TMA.•However, mice carrying Adamts13−/−cfhW1206R or cfhR1206R develop TMA with a significantly increased mortality rate.
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Calcium (Ca)-based rechargeable batteries (CRBs) have been considered one of the most promising post-lithium ion battery technologies because of the natural abundance of Ca, high volumetric capacity ...compared to monovalent metal batteries, and the low reduction potential of Ca
2+
/Ca. Recently, a breakthrough of Ca reversible plating and stripping at the Ca metal anode in carbonate electrolytes has induced the study of Ca rechargeable batteries. This critical review presents the state-of-the-art progress made in exploring potential electrode materials including Ca metal anodes, alternative graphite and alloy-type anodes, and cathode materials undergoing interaction or conversion reactions. Suitable electrolytes are also required to ensure the compatibility of each cell component, which is essential toward high-performance Ca full batteries. The performance assessment and mechanism analysis are further discussed to evaluate the current progress and existing challenges regarding the performance promise and insufficient understanding of the Ca battery technology. To conclude, this review provides a comprehensive understanding of the underlying mechanisms and challenges that need to be addressed to promote the commercialization of CRBs.
The recent advances in anode and cathode materials combined with the compatibility of electrolytes are systematically reviewed for calcium (Ca)-based rechargeable batteries, focusing on their cell design, battery performance, characterization and future opportunities.
Cross-coupling reactions to form biaryls and π bond addition reactions to prepare substituted carbonyls or alcohols represent two of the most frequently performed families of chemical reactions. ...Recent progress in catalysis has uncovered substantial overlap between these two seemingly distinct topics. In particular, esters, aldehydes, and alcohols have been shown to act as carbon-based coupling partners in a range of Ni- and Pd-catalyzed reactions to prepare amides, ketones, substituted alcohols, alkanes, and more. These reactions provide promising alternatives to commonly used stoichiometric or multi-step reaction sequences. In this feature article, a selection of these transformations will be discussed with an emphasis on the key mechanistic steps that allow these non-traditional substrates to be incorporated into cross-coupling-like catalytic cycles.
This feature article describes how diverse oxygen-containing functional groups such as esters, aldehydes, and alcohols can participate in cross-coupling reactions to prepare amides, ketones, alcohols, and beyond.
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