Respiratory rate (RR) is an important physiological parameter whose abnormality has been regarded as an important indicator of serious illness. In order to make RR monitoring simple to perform, ...reliable and accurate, many different methods have been proposed for such automatic monitoring. According to the theory of respiratory rate extraction, methods are categorized into three modalities: extracting RR from other physiological signals, RR measurement based on respiratory movements, and RR measurement based on airflow. The merits and limitations of each method are highlighted and discussed. In addition, current works are summarized to suggest key directions for the development of future RR monitoring methodologies.
The efficiency performance of multi-motor-driven system highly depends on the power management. Three aspects of contribution have been made in this study. 1) A predictive power management for a DMPS ...is developed. To improve the performance of the predictive power management, an adaptive velocity predictor is proposed and the coefficients of proposed predictor can update its parameters according to identified driving patterns. Simulation results show that the new velocity predictor have best prediction performance compared with traditional predictors. 2) A neural network based power management is proposed. According to the optimization results of dynamic programming, radial-basis-function neural network is trained. The input dimensions and the number of hidden layer neurons of the neural network are optimized. 3) The performance of proposed control strategies are compared with three different drive cycles including MANHATTAN cycle, Japanese 1015 cycle, and UDDSHDV cycle. Simulation results indicate that compared with original control strategy, the predictive control strategy and neural network based control strategy show better efficiency performance. The neural network based strategy is verified by hardware-in-loop experiment and experiment results indicate that the control performance in real hardware shows similar property with simulation results.
The numerous interconnected biochemical pathways that make up the metabolism of a living cell comprise a fuzzy logic system because of its high level of complexity and our inability to fully ...understand, predict, and model the many activities, how they interact, and their regulation. Each cell contains thousands of proteins with changing levels of expression, levels of activity, and patterns of interactions. Adding more layers of complexity is the number of proteins that have multiple functions. Moonlighting proteins include a wide variety of proteins where two or more functions are performed by one polypeptide chain. In this article, we discuss examples of proteins with variable functions that contribute to the fuzziness of cellular metabolism.
In cancer patients, visual identification of sentinel lymph nodes (LNs) is achieved by the injection of dyes that bind avidly to endogenous albumin, targeting these compounds to LNs, where they are ...efficiently filtered by resident phagocytes. Here we translate this 'albumin hitchhiking' approach to molecular vaccines, through the synthesis of amphiphiles (amph-vaccines) comprising an antigen or adjuvant cargo linked to a lipophilic albumin-binding tail by a solubility-promoting polar polymer chain. Administration of structurally optimized CpG-DNA/peptide amph-vaccines in mice resulted in marked increases in LN accumulation and decreased systemic dissemination relative to their parent compounds, leading to 30-fold increases in T-cell priming and enhanced anti-tumour efficacy while greatly reducing systemic toxicity. Amph-vaccines provide a simple, broadly applicable strategy to simultaneously increase the potency and safety of subunit vaccines.
Photoplethysmography (PPG) has been widely used to assess cardiovascular function. However, few studies have comprehensively investigated the effect of measurement site on PPG waveform ...characteristics. This study aimed to provide a quantitative comparison on this.
Thirty six healthy subjects participated in this study. For each subject, PPG signals were sequentially recorded for 1 min from six different body sites (finger, wrist under (anatomically volar), wrist upper (dorsal), arm, earlobe, and forehead) under both normal and deep breathing patterns. For each body site under a certain breathing pattern, the mean amplitude was firstly derived from recorded PPG waveform which was then normalized to derive several waveform characteristics including the pulse peak time (Tp), dicrotic notch time (Tn), and the reflection index (RI). The effects of breathing pattern and measurement site on the waveform characteristics were finally investigated by the analysis of variance (ANOVA) with
multiple comparisons.
Under both breathing patterns, the PPG measurements from the finger achieved the highest percentage of analyzable waveforms for extracting waveform characteristics. There were significant effects of breathing pattern on Tn and RI (larger Tn and smaller RI with deep breathing on average, both
< 0.03). The effects of measurement site on mean amplitude, Tp, Tn, and RI were significant (all
< 0.001). The key results were that, under both breathing patterns, the mean amplitude from finger PPG was significantly larger and its Tp and RI were significantly smaller than those from the other five sites (all
< 0.001, except
= 0.04 for the Tp of "wrist under"), and Tn was only significantly larger than that from the earlobe (both
< 0.05).
This study has quantitatively confirmed the effect of PPG measurement site on PPG waveform characteristics (including mean amplitude, Tp, Tn, and RI), providing scientific evidence for a better understanding of the PPG waveform variations between different body sites.
•Applied a pulsed magnetic field to the 20Cr2Ni4A steel to reduce residual stress.•Applied a better statistical analysis method to the change in material residual stress.•Utilized a qualitative ...analysis method to determine dislocation density.•Studied the change of the magnetic domain structure under the pulsed magnetic field.
To study the effect of a pulsed magnetic field on the residual stress of 20Cr2Ni4A steel, the material was treated for 120 s with a 1 T pulsed magnetic field. The microstructure of the materials was studied using residual stress measurement, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) observations, X-ray diffraction analysis, and magnetic domain observations. Experimental results revealed that the residual stress of the 1 T sample was reduced by 14.26% compared with that of the 0 T sample. The results show that the residual stress is effectively reduced by the pulsed magnetic field. The mechanism of magnetic field action involves improving the flexibility of dislocation movement, proliferating and entangling the dislocation structure, and inducing slippage. During the pulsed magnetic treatment, the labyrinth domain with larger stress changes to a lamellar domain with less stress and the residual stress decreases.
Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) principally obtains pseudo-labels based on the class activation maps (CAM) to handle expensive annotation resources. However, CAM easily involves false ...and local activation due to the the lack of annotation information. This paper suggests weakly supervised learning as semantic information mining to extend object mask. We proposes a novel architecture to mining semantic information by modeling through long-range dependencies from in-sample and inter-sample. Considering the confusion caused by the long-range dependencies, the images are divided into blocks and carried out self-attention operation on the premise of fewer classes to obtain long-range dependencies, to reduce false predictions. Moreover, we perform global to local weighted self-supervised contrastive learning among image blocks, and the local activation of CAM is transferred to different foreground area. Experiments verified that superior semantic details and more reliable pseudo-labels are captured through these suggested modules. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 demonstrated the proposed model achieves 76.6% and 77.4% mIoU in val and test sets, which is superior to the comparison baselines.
Abstract Immunostimulatory therapies that activate immune response pathways are of great interest for overcoming the immunosuppression present in advanced tumors. Agonistic anti-CD40 antibodies and ...CpG oligonucleotides have previously demonstrated potent, synergistic anti-tumor effects, but their clinical use even as monotherapies is hampered by dose-limiting inflammatory toxicity provoked upon systemic exposure. We hypothesized that by anchoring immuno-agonist compounds to lipid nanoparticles we could retain the bioactivity of therapeutics in the local tumor tissue and tumor-draining lymph node, but limit systemic exposure to these potent molecules. We prepared PEGylated liposomes bearing surface-conjugated anti-CD40 and CpG and assessed their therapeutic efficacy and systemic toxicity compared to soluble versions of the same immuno-agonists, injected intratumorally in the B16F10 murine model of melanoma. Anti-CD40/CpG-liposomes significantly inhibited tumor growth and induced a survival benefit similar to locally injected soluble anti-CD40 + CpG. Biodistribution analyses following local delivery showed that the liposomal carriers successfully sequestered anti-CD40 and CpG in vivo , reducing leakage into systemic circulation while allowing draining to the tumor-proximal lymph node. Contrary to locally-administered soluble immunotherapy, anti-CD40/CpG-liposomes did not elicit significant increases in serum levels of ALT enzyme, systemic inflammatory cytokines, or overall weight loss, confirming that off-target inflammatory effects had been minimized. The development of a delivery strategy capable of inducing robust anti-tumor responses concurrent with minimal systemic side effects is crucial for the continued progress of potent immunotherapies toward widespread clinical translation.
Tuberculosis (TB) caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) kills millions every year, and there is urgent need to develop novel anti-TB agents due to the fast-growing of drug-resistant TB. Although ...autophagy regulates the intracellular survival of Mtb, the role of calcium (Ca
) signaling in modulating autophagy during Mtb infection remains largely unknown. Here, we show that microRNA miR-27a is abundantly expressed in active TB patients, Mtb-infected mice and macrophages. The target of miR-27a is the ER-located Ca
transporter CACNA2D3. Targeting of this transporter leads to the downregulation of Ca
signaling, thus inhibiting autophagosome formation and promoting the intracellular survival of Mtb. Mice lacking of miR-27a and mice treated with an antagomir to miR-27a are more resistant to Mtb infection. Our findings reveal a strategy for Mtb to increase intracellular survival by manipulating the Ca
-associated autophagy, and may also support the development of host-directed anti-TB therapeutic approaches.
Schistosomiasis, which is caused by infection with Schistosoma spp., is characterized by granuloma and fibrosis in response to egg deposition. Pattern recognition receptors are important to sense ...invading Schistosoma, triggering an innate immune response, and subsequently shaping adaptive immunity. Cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS) was identified as a major cytosolic DNA sensor, which catalyzes the formation of cyclic GMP-AMP (cGAMP), a critical second messenger for the activation of the adaptor protein stimulator of interferon genes (STING). The engagement of STING by cGAMP leads to the activation of TANK-binding kinase 1 (TBK1), interferon regulatory factor 3 (IRF3), and the subsequent type I interferon (IFN) response. cGAS is suggested to regulate infectious diseases, autoimmune diseases, and cancer. However, the function of cGAS in helminth infection is unclear. In this study, we found that Cgas deficiency enhanced the survival of mice infected with S. japonicum markedly, without affecting the egg load in the liver. Consistently, Cgas deletion alleviated liver pathological impairment, reduced egg granuloma formation, and decreased fibrosis severity. In contrast, Sting deletion reduced the formation of egg granulomas markedly, but not liver fibrosis. Notably, Cgas or Sting deficiency reduced the production of IFNβ drastically in mice infected with S. japonicum. Intriguingly, intravenous administration of recombinant IFNβ exacerbated liver damage and promoted egg granuloma formation, without affecting liver fibrosis. Clodronate liposome-mediated depletion of macrophages indicated that macrophages are the major type of cells contributing to the induction of the type I IFN response during schistosome infection. Moreover, cGAS is important for type I IFN production and phosphorylation of TBK1 and IRF3 in response to stimulation with S. japonicum egg- or adult worm-derived DNA in macrophages. Our results clarified the immunomodulatory effect of cGAS in the regulation of liver granuloma formation during S. japonicum infection, involving sensing schistosome-derived DNA and producing type I IFN. Additionally, we showed that cGAS regulates liver fibrosis in a STING-type I-IFN-independent manner.
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