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Berthelsen Hammer posted an update 5 months, 4 weeks ago
Further, many more evaluation indices are considered for a fair comparison. An elaborate discussion on selecting appropriate method and evaluation metric as per the kind of data is presented. This study may encourage researchers for further work in this domain.Synchronization of human vital signs, namely the cardiac cycle and respiratory excursions, is necessary during magnetic resonance imaging of the cardiovascular system and the abdominal cavity to achieve optimal image quality with minimized artifacts. This review summarizes techniques currently available in clinical practice, as well as methods under development, outlines the benefits and disadvantages of each approach, and offers some unique solutions for consideration.According to world health organization’s (WHO) report of 2016, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) accounted for mortality of an estimated 17.9 million people globally. Of these deaths 85% were due to myocardial infarction and stroke. Further, the pre-dominant atrial fibrillation (AF) arrhythmia has been the most suspected underlying cause of transient ischemic attack or stroke. Thus, the etiologies of early symptoms like syncope and palpitations in patients needs to be evaluated by employing proper diagnostic tests to make early treatment decisions. Further, the widely referred 24 to 48 hour Holter electrocardiographic (ECG) monitoring tests have not been proved to be much effective in recognizing infrequent intermittent arrhythmic episodes. These drawbacks have led to the development of long-term ambulatory ECG (AECG) monitoring devices. This review reports the state-of-the-art existing AECG monitoring devices and their role of long-term ECG recording in patients suspected with cardiac syncope and palpitations to understand the underlying arrhythmic cause, as well as in the diagnosis and management of AF. Primarily, the utility and diagnostic yield of external cardiac recorders or event loop recorders (ELRs) in capturing the symptom-rhythm correlation which constitutes a clinically useful recordings of heart’s electrical activity during infrequent arrhythmic conditions was critically reviewed. Furthermore, a brief case study on challenges involved in clinical data acquisition at a cardiac care unit using ambulatory external monitoring device has been presented. Finally, improvements in design engineering and algorithmic developments to enhance the diagnostic yield and usability of ELRs in clinical settings have been proposed.A real-time and label-free microstrip sensor capable of detecting and monitoring subsurface growth of Escherichia coli (E. coli) on solid growth media such as Luria-Bertani (LB) agar is presented. The microwave ring resonator was designed to operate at 1.76 GHz to detect variations in the dielectric properties such as permittivity and loss tangent to monitor bacterial growth. The sensor demonstrated high efficiency in monitoring subsurface dynamics of E. coli growth between two layers of LB agar. The resonant amplitude variations (Δ Amplitude (dB)) were recorded for different volumes of E. coli (3 μL and 9 μL) and compared to control without E. coli for 36 hours. The control showed a maximum amplitude variation of 0.037 dB, which was selected as a threshold to distinguish between the presence and absence of E. coli growth. The measured results by sensors were further supported by microscopic images. It is worth noticing that the amplitude variations fit well with the Gompertz growth model. The rate of amplitude change correlating bacteria growth rate was calculated as 0.08 and 0.13 dB/hr. for 3 μL and 9 μL of E. coli, respectively. This work is a proof of concept to demonstrate the capability of microwave sensors to detect and monitor subsurface bacterial growth.The inference of Boolean networks is crucial for analyzing the topology and dynamics of gene regulatory networks. Many data-driven approaches using evolutionary algorithms have been proposed based on time-series data. However, the ability to infer both network topology and dynamics is restricted by their inflexible encoding schemes. To address this problem, we propose a novel Boolean network inference algorithm for inferring both network topology and dynamics simultaneously. selleck products The main idea is that, we use a marker-based genetic algorithm to encode both regulatory nodes and logical operators in a chromosome. By using the markers and introducing more logical operators, the proposed algorithm can infer more diverse candidate Boolean functions. The proposed algorithm is applied to five networks, including two artificial Boolean networks and three real-world gene regulatory networks. Compared with other algorithms, the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm infers more accurate topology and dynamics.Loaded walking with typical rigid backpack results in a significant increase in the mechanical energy of the stance leg and a decrease in lateral stability. Allowing the load to swing, which has been applied in shoulder pole, a tool widely used in Asia for load carriage assistance, may attenuate these effects. This paper theoretically analyzes and experimentally validates the biomechanical and energetic effects of the swinging loads. When walking with a 30 kg load, allowing the load to swing reduces the fore-aft leg impulses by over 19% and further reduces the mechanical energy of the stance leg by 12.9% compared to the typical rigid backpack. The whole-body metabolic cost has no significant change, which may be attributed to the increase in the muscle work of the upper body and the leg swing. Moreover, the load movement out of phase to the human in the lateral direction reduces the lateral excursion of extrapolated center-of-mass by 27.2%, indicating an increase in the lateral margin of stability and implying an improvement in lateral stability. The results demonstrate that allowing the load to swing reduces the horizontal leg impulses and the mechanical energy of the stance leg, and improves the lateral stability of human walking.Ultrasound vascular imaging based on ultrafast plane wave imaging and singular value decomposition (SVD) clutter filtering has demonstrated superior sensitivity in blood flow detection. However, ultrafast ultrasound vascular imaging is susceptible to electronic noise due to the weak penetration of unfocused waves, leading to a lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at larger depths. In addition, incoherent clutter artifacts originating from strong and moving tissue scatterers that cannot be completely removed create a strong mask on top of the blood signal that obscures the vessels. Herein, a method that can simultaneously suppress the background noise and incoherent artifacts is proposed. The method divides the tilted plane or diverging waves into two subgroups. Coherent spatial compounding is performed within each subgroup, resulting in two compounded data sets. An SVD-based clutter filter is applied to each data set, followed by a correlation between the two data sets to produce a vascular image. Uncorrelated noise and incoherent artifacts can be effectively suppressed with the correlation process, while the coherent blood signal can be preserved.