This paper presents progress in the field of adaptive civil-engineering structures. Self-diagnosis, multi-objective shape control and reinforcement-learning processes are implemented within a control ...framework on an active tensegrity structure. Self-diagnosis extends active structural control to situations of partially defined loads. Multi-objective search is useful for computing commands that control shape while minimizing active strut stroke and stress, and maximizing stiffness. Reinforcement learning improves the control by memorizing, retrieving and adapting previous control events. The control framework is validated experimentally on an active tensegrity structure. This provides an example of an adaptive civil-engineering structure.
The Polarized Instrument for Long-wavelength Observation of the Tenuous interstellar medium (
PILOT
) is a balloon-borne experiment that aims to measure the polarized emission of thermal dust at a ...wavelength of 240µm (1.2 THz). The
PILOT
experiment flew from Timmins, Ontario, Canada in 2015 and 2019 and from Alice Springs, Australia in April 2017. The in-flight performance of the instrument during the second flight was described in
1
. In this paper, we present data processing steps that were not presented in
1
and that we have recently implemented to correct for several remaining instrumental effects. The additional data processing concerns corrections related to detector cross-talk and readout circuit memory effects, and leakage from total intensity to polarization. We illustrate the above effects and the performance of our corrections using data obtained during the third flight of
PILOT
, but the methods used to assess the impact of these effects on the final science-ready data, and our strategies for correcting them will be applied to all
PILOT
data. We show that the above corrections, and in particular that for the intensity to polarization leakage, which is most critical for accurate polarization measurements with
PILOT
, are accurate to better than 0.4% as measured on Jupiter during flight#3.
Abstract
Motivation
Significant effort has been spent by curators to create coding systems for phenotypes such as the Human Phenotype Ontology, as well as disease–phenotype annotations. We aim to ...support the discovery of literature-based phenotypes and integrate them into the knowledge discovery process.
Results
PheneBank is a Web-portal for retrieving human phenotype–disease associations that have been text-mined from the whole of Medline. Our approach exploits state-of-the-art machine learning for concept identification by utilizing an expert annotated rare disease corpus from the PMC Text Mining subset. Evaluation of the system for entities is conducted on a gold-standard corpus of rare disease sentences and for associations against the Monarch initiative data.
Availability and implementation
The PheneBank Web-portal freely available at http://www.phenebank.org. Annotated Medline data is available from Zenodo at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.1408800. Semantic annotation software is freely available for non-commercial use at GitHub: https://github.com/pilehvar/phenebank.
Supplementary information
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
The purpose of this quasi-experimental quantitative study was to analyze the effect of a literacy program on general music students in the fourth grade within an urban public school district in ...Northeastern Illinois. Two fourth grade classes, instructed by two different licensed music teachers, received the treatment program of one Lyrics2Learn lesson in each music class and two additional courses, instructed by the same two music teachers, served as the control. Music classes occurred at a frequency of once every nine instructional days. Lyrics2Learn provides cross-curricular written English language lyrics in paragraphical texts displayed during songs of various styles. Following each presentation of the lesson, students completed the internal assessment tool to gauge fluency and comprehension progress across each instructional class. Through the use of the Lyrics2Learn program, student data on the Star360 assessment was evaluated to determine potential growth among all fourth grade students as well as potential growth of English Learners notated as Parent Refusal. Research questions were analyzed using a t-test analysis at the α=.05 level of confidence.
Background
A renewed National Cervical Screening Program (NCSP) was introduced in Australia in December 2017. Under the renewed NCSP, there are limited data to guide the management of discordant ...colposcopy and biopsy results after a liquid‐based cytology (LBC) finding of ‘possible high‐grade squamous intraepithelial lesion’ (pHSIL).
Aims
This study aims to determine the proportion of women referred with pHSIL who are found to have HSIL, identify influencing factors of women most at risk, and examine the role that cytopathology review plays in management decisions.
Materials and Methods
Two‐hundred and thirty‐two women presenting to a tertiary women’s hospital in Australia with pHSIL since December 2017 were identified. Women with HSIL following colposcopy directed biopsy were referred for treatment. When HSIL was not identified, these patients were referred for multidisciplinary clinicopathological review. Pathological outcomes and treatment recommendations are included.
Main outcome measures
The primary outcome of the study was histological confirmation of HSIL.
Results
Primary outcome data were available for 182 women (78.5%); 62 (34.1%) had HSIL on histology, three (1.7%) had adenocarcinoma in situ (AIS) and one (1%) had cervical squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). There was no association between age and the presence of HSIL. The presence of human papillomavirus 16 and/or 18 increased the likelihood of HSIL on histology (relative risk 1.9; 95% CI 1.27–2.80, P = 0.002). Fifty‐nine (25.4%) women were referred for observation who had low‐grade squamous intraepithelial lesion/no dysplasia.
Conclusions
Clinicopathological review optimises management and triage of patients with pHSIL on referral cytology. Understanding outcomes in these patients informs counselling and management.
This paper focuses on the study of tensegrity active control in situations of partially defined loading and damage events. Self-diagnosis and self-repair methodologies are proposed and validated ...experimentally on a full-scale active tensegrity structure. Self-diagnosis involves load identification and damage location. The response of the structure to a load and damage is measured and compared with the response of the structure to candidate solutions for load and damage. Self-diagnosis solutions result in sets of candidate solutions for loads and damage. These solutions are employed to compute control commands of shape control and self-repair for the structure. Self-repairing control commands increase stiffness and decrease stresses with respect to the damaged state. Self-repairing control commands are computed using a multiobjective approach. The application of a control command results in self-stress modifications by changing the length of active struts. The proposed methodologies are attractive for tensegrity active control in situations of partially defined loading and damage events.
This study focuses on improving structural control through reinforcement learning. For the purposes of this study, structural control involves controlling the shape of an active tensegrity structure. ...Although the learning methodology employs case-based reasoning, which is often classified as supervised learning, it has evolved into reinforcement learning, since it learns from errors. Simple retrieval and adaptation functions are proposed. The retrieval function compares the response of the structure subjected to the current loading event and the attributes of cases. When the response of the structure and the case attributes are similar, this case is retrieved and adapted to the current control task. The adaptation function takes into account the control quality that has been achieved by the retrieved command in order to improve subsequent commands. The algorithm provides two types of learning: reduction of control command computation time and increase of control command quality over retrieved cases. Results from experimental testing on a full-scale active tensegrity structure are presented to validate performance.
BACKGROUND: Process‐induced platelet (PLT) activation occurs with all production methods, including apheresis. Recent studies have highlighted the range and consistence of interindividual variation ...in the PLT response, but little is known about the contribution of a donors' inherent PLT responsiveness to the activation state of the apheresis PLTs or the effect of frequent apheresis on donors' PLTs.
STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: The relationship between the donors' PLT response on the apheresis PLTs was studied in 47 individuals selected as having PLTs with inherently low, intermediate, or high responsiveness. Whole‐blood flow cytometry was used to measure PLT activation (levels of bound fibrinogen) before donation and in the apheresis PLTs. The effects of regular apheresis on the activation status of donors' PLTs were studied by comparing the in vivo activation status of PLTs from apheresis (n = 349) and whole‐blood donors (n = 157), before donation. The effect of apheresis per se on PLT activation was measured in 10 apheresis donors before and after donation.
RESULTS: The level of PLT activation in the apheresis packs was generally higher than in the donor, and the most activated PLTs were from high‐responder donors. There was no significant difference in PLT activation before donation between the apheresis and whole‐blood donors (p = 0.697), and there was no consistent evidence of activation in the donors immediately after apheresis.
CONCLUSION: The most activated apheresis PLTs were obtained from donors with more responsive PLTs. Regular apheresis, however, does not lead to PLT activation in the donors.
ATP-binding cassette（ABC） transporters ABCC1（MRP1）,ABCB1（P-gp）,and ABCG2（BCRP） contribute to chemotherapy failure.The primary goals of this study were to characterize the efficacy and mechanism of ...the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug（NSAID）,sulindac sulfide,to reverse ABCC1 mediated resistance to chemotherapeutic drugs and to determine if sulindac sulfide can influence sensitivity to chemotherapeutic drugs independently of drug efflux.Cytotoxicity assays were performed to measure resistance of ABC-expressing cell lines to doxorubicin and other chemotherapeutic drugs.NSAIDs were tested for the ability to restore sensitivity to resistance selected tumor cell lines,as well as a large panel of standard tumor cell lines.Other experiments characterized the mechanism by which sulindac sulfide inhibits ABCC1 substrate and co-substrate（GSH） transport in isolated membrane vesicles and intact cells.Selective reversal of multi-drug resistance（MDR）,decreased efflux of doxorubicin,and fluorescent substrates were demonstrated by sulindac sulfide and a related NSAID,indomethacin,in resistance selected and engineered cell lines expressing ABCC 1,but not ABCB 1 or ABCG2.Sulindac sulfide also inhibited transport of leukotriene C_4 into membrane vesicles.Sulindac sulfide enhanced the sensitivity to doxorubicin in 24 of 47 tumor cell lines,including all melanoma lines tested（7-7）.Sulindac sulfide also decreased intracellular GSH in ABCC1 expressing cells,while the glutathione synthesis inhibitor,BSO,selectively increased sensitivity to sulindac sulfide induced cytotoxicity.Sulindac sulfide potently and selectively reverses ABCC1-mediated MDR at clinically achievable concentrations.ABCC1 expressing tumors may be highly sensitive to the direct cytotoxicity of sulindac sulfide,and in combination with chemotherapeutic drugs that induce oxidative stress.
A multiobjective search method is adapted for supporting structural control of an active tensegrity structure. Structural control is carried out by modifying the self-stress state of the structure in ...order to satisfy a serviceability objective and additional robustness objectives. Control commands are defined as sequences of contractions and elongations of active struts to modify the self-stress state of the structure. A two step multiobjective optimization method involving Pareto filtering with hierarchical selection is implemented to determine control commands. Experimental testing on a full-scale active tensegrity structure demonstrates validity of the method. In most cases, control commands are more robust when identified by a multiobjective optimization method as compared to a single objective one. This robustness leads to better control over successive loading events. Evaluation of multiple objectives provides a more global understanding of tensegrity structure behavior than any single objective. Finally, results reveal opportunities for self-adaptive structures that evolve in unknown environments.
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