An air-filled substrate integrated waveguide (AFSIW) slot array antenna based on multilayer PCB process is proposed. For comparison and demonstration purposes, 1 × 4 slot array antennas based on both ...AFSIW and conventional dielectric-filled SIW (DFSIW) operating at 30.5 GHz are designed, fabricated and measured. The exampled AFSIW 1 × 4 slot array antenna achieves 44 and 18% narrower measured H-plane and E-plane half-power beamwidth, respectively, and simulated radiation efficiency improved by 1.6%, resulting in an overall measured gain improvement of 3.5 dB compared with its DFSIW counterpart. This antenna is of high interest for the design of efficient arrays based on high-performance AFSIW feeding network.
The use of conductive inks and direct writing techniques for the fabrication of electronic circuits on complex substrates is attracting ever increasing interest. However, the existing knowledge is ...only focused on the electrical performances of the produced smart objects with no direct correlation with the conductive paths morphology and printing conditions. In order to evaluate the printing quality of a direct writing process using an eccentric screw dispenser, a printing device for the deposition of silver paste on 3D objects was developed. Lines of different widths were printed on flat PC + ABS substrates by means of the developed printing device and a conventional screen printing process. The developed process permitted printing lines as thin as possible with screen printing but with a better regularity of their edges. However unlike screen printed lines, the thickness of the lines was dependent on their width. Finally, the possibility to print on 3D objects was demonstrated.
Evaluation of the printing quality of a direct writing process developed for the fabrication of 3D conductive circuits.
A large quantity of bananas is produced annually and its peel, which accounts for about one third of the fruit weight, is mostly discarded as waste. The peel has been traditionally used for the ...treatment of various ailments. This by-product is rich in phenolics with over 40 individual compounds identified. However, composition and levels of these compounds are influenced by various factors, including varieties, maturity, cultivation conditions, and pre-treatments. Phenolics within banana peels have been found to possess potent antioxidant and antimicrobial properties, and linked with various health benefits. Therefore, it is worthwhile to recover phenolics from this by-product for further utilisation in food and pharmaceutical industries. This review comprehensively highlights the phenolic compounds as well as major factors affecting their presence within the banana peel, reviews the current applications of this by-product, outlines its potential uses in food and pharmaceutical industries and finally proposes a trend for future studies.
We present a computational model for the interaction of surface- and volume-bound scalar transport and reaction processes with a deformable porous medium. The application in mind is pericellular ...proteolysis, i.e. the dissolution of the solid phase of the extracellular matrix (ECM) as a response to the activation of certain chemical species at the cell membrane and in the vicinity of the cell. A poroelastic medium model represents the extra cellular scaffold and the interstitial fluid flow, while a surface-bound transport model accounts for the diffusion and reaction of membrane-bound chemical species. By further modelling the volume-bound transport, we consider the advection, diffusion and reaction of sequestered chemical species within the extracellular scaffold. The chemo-mechanical coupling is established by introducing a continuum formulation for the interplay of reaction rates and the mechanical state of the ECM. It is based on known experimental insights and theoretical work on the thermodynamics of porous media and degradation kinetics of collagen fibres on the one hand and a damage-like effect of the fibre dissolution on the mechanical integrity of the ECM on the other hand. The resulting system of partial differential equations is solved via the finite-element method. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first computational model including contemporaneously the coupling between (i) advection–diffusion–reaction processes, (ii) interstitial flow and deformation of a porous medium, and (iii) the chemo-mechanical interaction impelled by the dissolution of the ECM. Our numerical examples show good agreement with experimental data. Furthermore, we outline the capability of the methodology to extend existing numerical approaches towards a more comprehensive model for cellular biochemo-mechanics.
STUDY QUESTION
Does luteinizing hormone (LH) supplementation improve live birth rate after in vitro fertilization (IVF) in patients aged ≥35 years receiving a gonadotrophin-releasing hormone (GnRH) ...antagonist protocol?
SUMMARY ANSWER
There was no difference in live birth rate with use of LH during IVF in patients aged ≥35 years undergoing IVF treatment using a GnRH antagonist protocol.
WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY
Use of GnRH analogues as part of a controlled ovarian hyperstimulation protocol during IVF treatment cycles decreases the amount of LH available to developing follicles. The role of LH supplementation for improving outcomes in patients undergoing controlled ovarian hyperstimulation as part of assisted reproduction treatments, particularly those involving a GnRH antagonist protocol, is unclear. It has been suggested that higher risk patients (e.g. age ≥35 years, poor ovarian reserve) may benefit from LH supplementation.
STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION
This single-centre, randomized controlled trial was conducted from 1 October 2012 to 30 June 2014. A total of 240 women aged ≥35 years undergoing IVF received ovarian stimulation using a GnRH antagonist protocol, with recombinant follicle-stimulating hormone (r-FSH; Gonal-F®) starting from cycle day 2 or 3. GnRH antagonist (Cetrotide®) was administered on Day 5 of r-FSH administration. On Day 6, patients in the LH supplementation group were switched to r-FSH/r-LH (Pergoveris®) 150/75 IU/day. Randomization to study treatments was performed in blocks of 4 via a computer-generated random number list.
PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING, METHODS
Of the 240 patients randomized to treatment, 120 received r-FSH/r-LH and 120 received r-FSH. Patients were recruited from the IVFAS, An Sinh Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE
Live birth rate did not differ significantly (P > 0.05) between r-FSH/r-LH and r-FSH recipients (16.7 versus 17.5%; between-group difference 0.8, 95% confidence interval CI −9.5, 11.2). In addition, there were no significant differences between the r-FSH/r-LH and r-FSH groups with respect to the number of oocytes retrieved, implantation rate, miscarriage rate and clinical pregnancy rate.
LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION
The open-label design could have introduced bias, and the relatively small sample size may have allowed detection of only the most common adverse events. In addition, the study was likely to be underpowered based on differences between the response rate assumptions used in the sample size calculation and the actual response rate during the study.
WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS
The results of this study found no additional benefit from adding LH supplementation to ovarian stimulation with a GnRH antagonist protocol in women aged ≥35 years, and add to the body of evidence in this area. However, findings across studies are still inconsistent and additional research is needed before any clear recommendations for clinical practice can be made.
STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTERESTS
This study was supported by the Research Center for Genetics and Reproductive Health, School of Medicine, Vietnam National University HCMC. The authors state that they have no financial or commercial conflicts of interest.
TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER
The trial was registered with clinicaltrials.gov (NCT02244866).
This review paper presents a framework to evaluate the artificial intelligence (AI) readiness for the healthcare sector in developing countries: a combination of adequate technical or technological ...expertise, financial sustainability, and socio-political commitment embedded in a healthy psycho-cultural context could bring about the smooth transitioning toward an AI-powered healthcare sector. Taking the Vietnamese healthcare sector as a case study, this paper attempts to clarify the negative and positive influencers. With only about 1500 publications about AI from 1998 to 2017 according to the latest Elsevier AI report, Vietnamese physicians are still capable of applying the state-of-the-art AI techniques in their research. However, a deeper look at the funding sources suggests a lack of socio-political commitment, hence the financial sustainability, to advance the field. The AI readiness in Vietnam's healthcare also suffers from the unprepared information infrastructure-using text mining for the official annual reports from 2012 to 2016 of the Ministry of Health
the paper found that the frequency of the word "database" actually decreases from 2012 to 2016, and the word has a high probability to accompany words such as "lacking", "standardizing", "inefficient", and "inaccurate." Finally, manifestations of psycho-cultural elements such as the public's mistaken views on AI or the non-transparent, inflexible and redundant of Vietnamese organizational structures can impede the transition to an AI-powered healthcare sector.
A social network is one of the efficient tools for information propagation. The content is the bridge between the product and its customers. Evaluating the user’s content creation is a valuable ...feature to improve information spreading on the social network. This paper proposes a method for extracting brand value with influencers by combining the user’s amplification and content creation in influencer marketing. The amplification factors are studied based on the propagation of the posts on the social network in a duration time. Those factors are more valuable than before when using influencer marketing at a determined time. Moreover, the content creation score is also studied to measure content creation based on the passion point with a brand and its quality. The amplification factors and content creation score are combined to analyze posts’ interest in detecting the emerging influent users for a product in the influencer marketing campaign. Using the amplification factors, the passion points, and the content creation score, a system to manage the influencer marketing on Facebook has been constructed and tested in the real-world campaign. The experimental results show that the proposed method’s influencers bring the conversion rate’s efficiency and revenue in the influencer marketing campaign.
The first case of CWD in Europe was detected in a Norwegian reindeer in 2016, followed later by two CWD cases in Norwegian moose. To prevent the potential spread of CWD to the EU, the European ...Commission (Regulation EU 2017_1972) implemented a CWD surveillance programme in cervids in the six countries having reindeer and or moose (Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden). Each country had to test a minimum of 3000 cervids for CWD using diagnostic rapid tests approved by the EC Regulation. Experimental transmission studies in rodents have demonstrated that the CWD strains found in Norwegian reindeer are different from those found in moose and that these European strains are all different from the North American ones. Data on the performances of authorised rapid tests are limited for CWD (from North America) and are currently minimal for CWD from Europe, due to the paucity of positive material. The aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic performances of three of the so-called “rapid” tests, commercially available and approved for TSE diagnosis in cattle and small ruminants, to detect the CWD strains circulating in Europe. The performances of these three tests were also compared to two different confirmatory western blot methods. Using parallel testing on the same panel of available samples, we evaluated here the analytical sensitivity of these methods for TSE diagnosis of CWD in Norwegian cervids tissues. Our results show that all the methods applied were able to detect the CWD positive samples even if differences in analytical sensitivity were clearly observed. Although this study could not assess the test accuracy, due to the small number of samples available, it is conceivable that the rapid and confirmatory diagnostic systems applied for CWD surveillance in Northern Europe are reliable tools.
The topic of sustainability has mostly been tied to economic development and environmental protection, yet not much attention has been paid to the need for high problem-solving capacity as this ...underlines both issues. One of the most straightforward ways to improve problem-solving capacity is to nurture ‘productive and enduring’, i.e., sustainable, scientific communities. The study examines the co-authoring behaviors of 412 Vietnamese social scientists over the 2008–2017 period via social network analysis to determine if these researchers have formed sustainable scientific communities, using Scopus data. The dataset provides an insightful look into the predominant form of collaboration, i.e., co-authorship, within the Vietnamese social science research communities. Through basic network metrics such as density and clustering coefficient, the study hypothesizes that the socially sustainable research communities are those with low clustering and high density. As any scholar's position in a network can be specified by three quantities: the number of publications, connections, and years in research, the distance metrics from the most productive to the rest are computed and compared. The study hypothesizes that if the distance is too large; it reflects the socially unsustainable situation in the network. The results indicate that certain level of social unsustainability exists in social sciences groups in Vietnam. Though the results are only indicative, it has opened up a fertile space for future inquiry into this matter.
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