The Medium Energy X-ray telescope (ME) is one of the three main telescopes on board the
Insight
hard X-ray modulation telescope (
Insight-
HXMT) astronomy satellite. ME contains 1728 pixels of Si-PIN ...detectors sensitive in 5–30 keV with a total geometrical area of 952 cm
2
. The application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip, VA32TA6, is used to achieve low power consumption and low readout noise. The collimators define three kinds of field of views (FOVs) for the telescope, 1°×4°, 4°×4°, and blocked ones. Combination of such FOVs can be used to estimate the in-orbit X-ray and particle background components. The energy resolution of ME is ~3 keV at 17.8 keV (FWHM) and the time resolution is 255 μs. In this paper, we introduce the design and performance of ME.
Diffusion Imaging in Python (Dipy) is a free and open source software project for the analysis of data from diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) experiments. dMRI is an application of MRI that ...can be used to measure structural features of brain white matter. Many methods have been developed to use dMRI data to model the local configuration of white matter nerve fiber bundles and infer the trajectory of bundles connecting different parts of the brain. Dipy gathers implementations of many different methods in dMRI, including: diffusion signal pre-processing; reconstruction of diffusion distributions in individual voxels; fiber tractography and fiber track post-processing, analysis and visualization. Dipy aims to provide transparent implementations for all the different steps of dMRI analysis with a uniform programming interface. We have implemented classical signal reconstruction techniques, such as the diffusion tensor model and deterministic fiber tractography. In addition, cutting edge novel reconstruction techniques are implemented, such as constrained spherical deconvolution and diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) with deconvolution, as well as methods for probabilistic tracking and original methods for tractography clustering. Many additional utility functions are provided to calculate various statistics, informative visualizations, as well as file-handling routines to assist in the development and use of novel techniques. In contrast to many other scientific software projects, Dipy is not being developed by a single research group. Rather, it is an open project that encourages contributions from any scientist/developer through GitHub and open discussions on the project mailing list. Consequently, Dipy today has an international team of contributors, spanning seven different academic institutions in five countries and three continents, which is still growing.
Extreme hydrological events such as droughts and floods have been increasingly influenced by abnormal atmospheric disturbances caused by human activity and global warming. The Dongting Lake Basin ...(DLB) has experienced challenging circumstances over the past 20 years due to complex climatic variations, leading to extreme flooding and drought. This study aims to investigate the spatiotemporal variation in terrestrial water storage anomalies (TWSA) over the DLB using data from the GRACE/GRACE-FO and GLDAS spanning the latest two decades. A significant decline trend in TWSA is unveiled from July 2019 to May 2023, with the rate of change determined as −1.94 cm/year and −1.99 cm/year based on the GRACE/GRACE-FO and GLDAS, respectively. The GRACE- Drought Severity Index (DSI) is employed to identify and evaluate the severity and spatiotemporal evolution of the 2022 drought event in the DLB. The results accurately capture the drought event, which began in July 2022 and continued until March 2023, with the most severe conditions occurring in October 2022, when the GRACE-DSI value stood at −2.06 and the TWSA decreased by 15.24 cm and 33.51 cm relative to the same month in 2021 and 2020, respectively. Additionally, the daily water level variation at the Chenglingji hydrological gauging station in 2022 broke previous records, reaching a minimum of only 19 m. Comparing the 2022 drought event with the drought events in 2006 and 2011, the impact of drought on vegetation growth conditions was relatively small, but there was still significant vegetation degradation across the DLB.
This study aimed to compare the results of the Dysphonia Severity Index (DSI) and Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (CAPE-V) between patients hospitalized with COVID-19 and healthy ...subjects, as well as to investigate the correlation between DSI and CAPE-V.
Cross-sectional survey.
Eighty subjects, 40 COVID-19 patients (with a mean age of 41.2± 5.41) and 40 healthy subjects (with a mean age of 44.50± 3.50) participated in this study. Assessments included the DSI for aerodynamic-acoustic measurement and the Persian version of Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (CAPE-V) for evaluating auditory-perceptual voice quality. Data were analyzed by means of the independent t-test and Pearson correlation at the 5% significance level.
The results showed COVID-19 patients got significantly lower score in DSI compared to healthy subjects (P < 0.05). Moreover, the patients with COVID-19 had higher scores in all categories of voice production (severity, roughness, loudness, pitch, strain and breathiness) than the healthy group (P < 0.05). Comparing the result of the two voice assessments in each group revealed that there was a greater negative significant correlation in the diseased group (r p: -0.68, P: 0.001) than in the healthy group (r p: -0.37,P: 0.049).
Hospitalized COVID-19 patients experience deviations in the voice quality and acoustic-aerodynamic features of their voice. Also, the results of this study showed the patient group had higher perceptual dysphonia and lower voice quality compared to the healthy group. Further studies are recommended to determine the relationship between objective and subjective voice evaluation in patients with COVID-19 after recovery.
The inferior temporal gyrus (ITG) is known to be involved in high-cognitive functions, including visual and language comprehensions and emotion regulation. A detailed understanding of the nature of ...association fibers could significantly improve postoperative morbidity related to declining capacity. Through diffusion spectrum imaging−based fiber tracking, we have characterized these connections on the basis of their relationships to other cortical areas.
Diffusion spectrum images from 10 healthy adults of the Human Connectome Project were randomly selected and used for tractography analysis. We evaluated the ITG as a whole based on connectivity with other regions. All ITG tracts were mapped in both hemispheres, and a lateralization index was calculated with resultant tract volumes.
We identified 5 major connections of the ITG: U-fiber, inferior longitudinal fasciculus, vertical occipital fasciculus, arcuate fasciculus, and uncinate fasciculus. There was no fiber lateralization detected.
This study highlights the principal white-matter pathways of the ITG and demonstrates key underlying connections. We present a summary of the relevant clinical anatomy for this region of the cerebrum as part of a larger effort to understand it in its entirety.
The distributed scatterer (DS) interferometry (DSI) technology is a powerful geodetic tool for measuring the deformation over abundant land covers. As a state-of-the-art DSI technology, the SqueeSAR ...approach considered the statistical behavior of the decorrelated DS and proposed the phase triangulation algorithm (PTA) as the pioneering implementation of the phase linking (PL) theory to estimate the equivalent single-reference (ESR) phases from all interferometric combinations. Subsequently, many advanced estimators of the systematic phase series have been introduced. Interestingly, this paper has demonstrated that the utilization of weakly coherent interferometric pairs is not conducive to the theoretical accuracy improvement of the PL theory in case of the fast decorrelation scenario. Moreover, the reduction of the small baseline scales will worsen the positive definite degree of the time series coherence matrix, which makes the ill-posed solution problem more serious. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel adaptive PL (AdpPL) method integrating the following two innovations for mapping surface deformation: 1) in terms of the interferometric pair selection optimization (IPSO), this paper performs the homogeneity measure-based IPSO (HoMeIPSO) method to remove the lowly coherent candidate subset progressively and select the moderate interferometric pairs adaptively; 2) in terms of the robust parameter estimation, an adaptive regularization (AdpReg) approach suggests selecting an optimal damping factor according to the minimum fitting error of all interferogram observables. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can restore the systematic phase series more clearly and detect the deformation area with spatially highly dynamic characteristics successfully.
•Small baseline configuration can improve the theoretical accuracy of the PL theory.•Small baseline configuration further worsens the ill-posed problem for the MLE.•A coherence magnitude-based statistical comparison can construct the adaptive network.•An optimal regularization factor is selected according to the minimum fitting error.•AdpPL restores the fringe clearly and reduces the deformation monitoring blind area.
Spatial and seasonal changes in benthic fluxes of dissolved silica (DSi) across the coastal zones were investigated in the southern Baltic Sea. Measurements were performed using ex situ incubations ...of sediment cores with natural benthic assemblages. Obtained benthic fluxes ranged from the uptake of −1.11 mmol m−2 d−1 in summer to a release of 6.79 mmol m−2 d−1 in autumn, while in situ concentrations in the bottom water were the lowest in autumn (1 μmol L−1) and the highest in winter (up to 58 μmol L−1). Sediments with high mud content had the highest fluxes in autumn, intermediate in spring, and the lowest in winter whereas no clear seasonal patterns were detected for sandy sediments. Generalized Linear Models indicated that in shallow enclosed areas biological factors, particularly presence of Chironomidae larvae, explained DSi fluxes variation while in open areas the environmental factors, such as organic matter quantity and quality, were key explanatory variables. In all studied environments (enclosed lagoon, open bay, and open coastal zone) DSi benthic fluxes represent an important component of the marine Si cycle. Further, the total yearly load of DSi from two major rivers (Vistula and Oder) and from the sediments, to the southern Baltic Sea reaches 258 kt y−1 of which benthic fluxes may constitute up to 34%.
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•Spatial and seasonal changes in dissolved silica benthic fluxes were investigated.•There were significant differences in fluxes rates between sands and sandy muds.•Biological factors controlled benthic fluxes in the shallow enclosed areas.•Environmental factors mainly explained flux variation in the open-sea areas.•Benthic fluxes constitute a significant part of silica budget in the coastal areas.
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