Objective:
This research aimed to provide evidence for the early identification and intervention of children at risk for auditory processing disorder (APD). Electrophysiological studies on children ...with suspected APDs were systematically reviewed to understand the different electrophysiological characteristics of children with suspected APDs.
Methods:
Computerized databases such as PubMed, Cochrane, MEDLINE, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched for retrieval of articles since the establishment of the database through May 18, 2020. Cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional studies that evaluated the literature for the electrophysiological assessment of children with suspected APD were independently reviewed by two researchers for literature screening, literature quality assessment, and data extraction. The Newcastle–Ottawa Scale and 11 entries recommended by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality were used to evaluate the quality of the literature.
Results:
In accordance with the inclusion criteria, 14 articles were included. These articles involved 7 electrophysiological testing techniques: click-evoked auditory brainstem responses, frequency-following responses, the binaural interaction component of the auditory brainstem responses, the middle-latency response, cortical auditory evoked potential, mismatch negativity, and P300. The literature quality was considered moderate.
Conclusions:
Auditory electrophysiological testing can be used for the characteristic identification of children with suspected APD; however, the value of various electrophysiological testing methods for screening children with suspected APD requires further study.
Objective
This study primarily aimed to develop an orthographic knowledge awareness scale in Mandarin for children aged 6–12 years. Related factors affecting orthographic knowledge awareness in ...children were analyzed, and a basis for individualized intervention was provided to improve reading and writing.
Methods
A conceptual framework for orthographic knowledge awareness in children aged 6–12 years was determined through a detailed reading of the literature on Chinese character orthography, combined with qualitative interviews of the target population and consultation with experts. The orthographic knowledge awareness scale initially consisted of three versions: for grades 1–2 (210 items), grades 3–4 (207 items), and grades 5–6 (220 items), accumulating a total of 637 items. The initial scale was then used for the study involving children aged 6–12 years in Maanshan City, Jiangsu Province. Various approaches to screening items were comprehensively used to determine the formal version of the orthographic knowledge awareness scale. The official scale was ultimately used to conduct the third round of surveys among 1,354 children aged 6–12 years in ordinary primary schools located in 5 cities in Jiangsu Province, namely, Changzhou, Lianyungang, Nantong, Xuzhou, and Yangzhou. The reliability, validity, and discriminating power of the formal scale were evaluated.
Results
A total of 360 items were included in the formal version of the orthographic knowledge awareness scale. The formal scale was divided into three versions for grades 1–2, 3–4, and 5–6. Each grade version consisted of 120 items. The scale was composed of the stroke awareness test, radical awareness test, and left–right reversal test. The cumulative variance contribution rates of grades 1–2, 3–4, and 5–6 were 82.47, 61.71, and 64.19%, respectively. The Cronbach's α coefficients of the three-grade version of the scale were 0.989, 0.946, and 0.938; the split-half reliability coefficients were 0.925, 0.766, and 0.847; and the test–retest reliability coefficients were 0.847, 0.895, and 0.8928, respectively.
Conclusion
The proposed orthographic knowledge awareness scale for children aged 6–12 years exhibits good reliability and validity. The formal scale consisted of two dimensions: identification of left–right reversal at the stroke and radical levels and the left–right reversal at the whole character level. The two dimensions can more comprehensively reflect the ability of children to discriminate orthographic structures.
This study aimed to suggest an attention assessment tool using a Digital Pen for measuring the temporal-spatial parameters during the Number Cancelation Test (NCT), and then to establish the ...normative data for the NCT among children in kindergartens and primary schools in China by recruiting a total of 989 children (496 males). Four measures, i.e., selective attention (SA), speed of cognitive processing (SpC), averaged time of circlings (ATC), and averaged circumference of circled curves (ACCC), were proposed to evaluate the NCT performance. They basically have a development trend with fast speed in the beginning before Grade 1 or 2 of primary schools, and then enter an extremely slow development period (with ceiling or floor effect). SA and SpC have gender and grade main effects, while ATC and ACCC have the grade main effect, only. In particular, females have higher SA scores than males in middle class of kindergarten, and Grade 2-Grade 5 of primary school, but no gender differences in other grades; females have higher SpC scores than males in middle class of kindergarten, and Grade 3-4 of primary school, but no gender differences in other grades. More importantly, in clinical practice, if SA or SpC measure of a child is below than the 5th centile (i.e., p5 level) of his/her grade-specific normative data, then this child may be predicted to have a high-risk of learning disabilities. Findings suggest that the proposed method can be used for early screening of learning disabilities by setting appropriate cut-off values.
Acetic acid and furfural (AF) are two major inhibitors of microorganisms during lignocellulosic ethanol production. In our previous study, we successfully engineered Zymomonas mobilis 532 (ZM532) ...strain by genome shuffling, but the molecular mechanisms of tolerance to inhibitors were still unknown. Therefore, this study investigated the responses of ZM532 and its wild-type Z. mobilis (ZM4) to AF using multi-omics approaches (transcriptomics, genomics, and label free quantitative proteomics). Based on RNA-Seq data, two differentially expressed genes, ZMO_RS02740 (up-regulated) and ZMO_RS06525 (down-regulated) were knocked out and over-expressed through CRISPR-Cas technology to investigate their roles in AF tolerance. Overall, we identified 1865 and 14 novel DEGs in ZM532 and wild-type ZM4. In contrast, 1532 proteins were identified in ZM532 and wild-type ZM4. Among these, we found 96 important genes in ZM532 involving acid resistance mechanisms and survival rates against stressors. Furthermore, our knockout results demonstrated that growth activity and glucose consumption of mutant strains ZM532∆ZMO_RS02740 and ZM4∆ZMO_RS02740 decreased with increased fermentation time from 42 to 55 h and ethanol production up to 58% in ZM532 than that in ZM532∆ZMO_RS02740. Hence, these findings suggest ZMO_RS02740 as a protective strategy for ZM ethanol production under stressful conditions.
Lowering cost will prompt the sustainable development of sugarcane‐based ethanol industry. In this work, we developed a low‐cost process for ethanol production from sugarcane by a genetically ...engineered Zymomonas mobilis. Fermentation media were first optimized, resulting in a 15.54% increase in ethanol fermentation efficiency as compared to control media. To further reduce the byproduct levan formation, a levansucrase‐encoding gene of Z. mobilis, sacB, was deleted through the type I‐F CRISPR‐Cas system, which resulted in a further elevation of both ethanol conversion ratio and productivity comparing with the starting strain ZMS912 (87.50% vs. 76.77%, 1.95 g/L/h vs. 1.71 g/L/h). Moreover, we conducted fed‐batch fermentation for ethanol production using sugarcane juice in 5 L bioreactors and employing the optimized media and engineered strain. The results showed that maximum ethanol titer of 81.59 g/L and productivity of 5.83 g/L/h were achieved. Finally, preliminary techno‐economic assessment demonstrated that our efforts to modify media and strain could reduce the processing cost of ethanol production from sugarcane juice, which provides the feasibility for economic ethanol production in the future.
Bioethanol is the primary force in future energy supply and carbon reduction. In this work, we developed a low‐cost process for ethanol production from sugarcane by a genetically engineered Zymomonas mobilis. The effective combination of two nitrogen sources can shorten the fermentation time and increase ethanol production. Gene mutation in Z. mobilis may further improve ethanol concentration and eliminated the formation of by‐products. Furthermore, higher ethanol titer and shorter fermentation time are achieved by fed‐batch fermentation in fermentor scale. The techno‐economic assessment demonstrated that this study provides the feasibility for the profitable production of sugarcane‐based ethanol.
Background
Early identification of children at risk of learning disorders (LD) may mitigate the adverse effects of delayed intervention by guiding children to receive preventive services at an ...earlier age. However, there is no assessment tool for the early identification of children at risk of LD in Mainland China. Therefore, this study aimed to create a Chinese version of the Preschool Learning Skills Scale and investigate its validity and reliability.
Methods
Firstly, a pilot scale was designed based on literature review and expert review. Secondly, a pre-survey of the pilot scale was conducted. In phase 3, a formal survey was carried out to test the reliability and validity of the scale by involving 2,677 preschool children from 7 kindergartens. Data were collected using a checklist for demographic characteristics, the preschool learning skills scale, the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function-Preschool Version (BRIEF-P), and Conners' Rating Scales.
Results
The final scale included 38 items under seven factors. The reliability and validity tests confirmed that the Cronbach's alpha, split-half reliability, and test–retest reliability coefficients of the scale were 0.946, 0.888, and 0.941, respectively. The Spearman correlations of factor-total score ranged from 0.685 to 0.876. The results of criterion-related validity showed a direct and significant association between the preschool learning skills scale with the BRIEF-P (
r
= 0.641,
P
< 0.001) and the cognitive problems factor of Conners' Rating Scales (
r
= 0.564,
P
< 0.001). The model had a good fit (χ
2
/df
= 3.489, RMSEA = 0.047, RMR = 0.024, CFI = 0.912, TLI = 0.900, and IFI = 0.912). Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis supported the structural and measurement invariance on the preschool learning skills scale across gender and grade.
Conclusions
The developed preschool learning skills scale has good reliability and validity, indicating that the scale can be used to identify preschool children at risk of LD and can be recommended for use in clinical research and practice.
Furfural and acetic acid are the two major inhibitors generated during lignocellulose pretreatment and hydrolysis, would severely inhibit the cell growth, metabolism, and ethanol fermentation ...efficiency of
. Effective genome shuffling mediated by protoplast electrofusion was developed and then applied to
.
After two rounds of genome shuffling, 10 different mutants with improved cell growth and ethanol yield in the presence of 5.0 g/L acetic acid and 3.0 g/L furfural were obtained. The two most prominent genome-shuffled strains, 532 and 533, were further investigated along with parental strains in the presence of 7.0 g/L acetic acid and 3.0 g/L furfural. The results showed that mutants 532 and 533 were superior to the parental strain AQ8-1 in the presence of 7.0 g/L acetic acid, with a shorter fermentation time (30 h) and higher productivity than AQ8-1. Mutant 533 exhibited subtle differences from parental strain F34 in the presence of 3.0 g/L furfural. Mutations present in 10 genome-shuffled strains were identified via whole-genome resequencing, and the source of each mutation was identified as either de novo mutation or recombination of the parent genes.
These results indicate that genome shuffling is an efficient method for enhancing stress tolerance in
. The engineered strains generated in this study could be potential cellulosic ethanol producers in the future.
Abstract
Powerful local features can be extracted from multiple body regions of a pedestrian. Early person re-identification research has focused on extracting local features by locating regions with ...specific pre-defined semantics, which is not effective and increases the complexity of the network. In this paper, we propose a multiple granularity person re-identification network based on representation learning and metric learning for learning discriminative representations of pedestrian images. Multiple granularity person re-identification network consists of a multiple granularity feature extraction part and a combined loss part. In particular, the multiple granularity feature extraction part extracts global features and local features of different granularities from the feature maps of Conv4 and Conv5 of the ResNet50 backbone network, respectively, the extracted feature information is more comprehensive and discriminative. The combined loss part employs a joint representation learning and metric learning approach for supervised learning, which enables the model to learn more optimal parameters. The experimental results show that the Rank-1 accuracy of the multiple granularity person re-identification network reaches 95.2% and 88.2% on the Market1501 dataset and DukeMTMC-reID dataset, respectively, which illustrates the effectiveness of the model.
Given a query image from a camera, person re‐identification (Re‐ID) can retrieve the images of the same identity from a gallery, the images of which are captured by the other cameras. Therefore, ...person Re‐ID has been widely used in the field of video surveillance. However, person Re‐ID still suffers from a series of challenges, such as illumination changes, pose variations, and occlusions. Although the person Re‐ID methods based on attention mechanism give an effective and feasible solution for the above challenges, attention mechanism may make a network focus too much on the most salient discriminative features and ignore other potential discriminative features. To solve this problem, we propose a two‐level salient feature complementary network (TSFC‐Net) to extract the most salient discriminative features and the secondary salient discriminative features of pedestrian images for person Re‐ID. Specifically, TSFC‐Net first extracts the most salient discriminative features of pedestrian images by embedding the spatial and channel attention modules in the backbone network, and then extracts the secondary salient discriminative features of pedestrian images by a secondary salient feature mining module (SSFM). Since the final features of pedestrian images fuse the most salient discriminative features and the secondary salient discriminative features, TSFC‐Net can significantly improve the richness and discrimination capability of pedestrian representations. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments on the Market‐1501, DukeMTMC‐reID, and CUHK03 data sets, and the experimental results indicate that our TSFC‐Net has a better performance compared with most of the state‐of‐the‐art person Re‐ID methods.
Unsupervised domain adaptive person re-identification (UDA re-ID) improves the discriminative ability and robustness of models on target domains by transferring supervised information from source ...domains to target domains. However, since the data distributions of source and target domains may be extremely distinct, it is difficult to directly transfer supervised information from source domains to target domains. In addition, most UDA re-ID methods mainly devote to weakening the differences between source and target domains, while ignoring the style differences between intra-domain samples. To solve the above issues, we propose an inter-domain fusion and intra-domain style normalization network (DFDSN-Net) for UDA re-ID. Specifically, DFDSN-Net consists of three components: the backbone network, the inter-domain fusion module (DFM) and the intra-domain style normalization module (DSNM). DFM generates the more discriminative and comprehensive representations by deeply fusing the features of source and target domains, thus alleviating the differences between source and target domains. DSNM improves the feature extraction capability of the network by eliminating the style differences between intra-domain samples while focusing on the useful information eliminated by instance normalization. Using both DFM and DSNM, DFDSN-Net can simultaneously weaken the impacts caused by inter-domain differences and style differences between intra-domain samples. We conducted several comparison experiments and ablation experiments on several UDA re-ID tasks, and the experimental results indicate that DFDSN-Net is effective and outperforms most state-of-the-art UDA re-ID methods.
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