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Background: Sensory symptoms linked to tic disorder (TD) are challenging to quantify via self- or parent-reported measures. The current study aimed to develop a novel observer-rated semi-structured interview, namely, the Sensory Phenomenon Assessment Scale (SPAS), to aid clinical evaluation on symptoms of TD among children. Methods: To test its psychometric properties, tic, premonitory urge (PU), and obsessive-compulsive symptoms (OCS) were also assessed in 223 children via the Yale Global Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS), the Premonitory Urge for Tic Scale (PUTS), and the Children's Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (CYBOCS). Factor analysis and internal consistency test were carried out using data from TD-diagnosed individuals. Results: Good internal consistency and test-retest reliability were observed. Criterion validity was established by significant correlations between the PUTS, the YGTSS, the CY-BOCS, and scores of the SPAS. Factor analyses supported a single-factor model of the SPAS, in which the five items each showed a factor loading above 0.6. Conclusion: This study demonstrated that the SPAS is reliable and valid and, thus, can serve as a good and concise measure of clinical symptoms among children and adolescents with TD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pulmonary fibrosis (PF) is a chronic and progressive disease characterized by fibrosis and interstitial pneumonia. It has similar clinical symptoms to "Fei Bi" and "Fei Wei" as described in the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) classic Jingui Yaolue written by Zhang Zhongjing in the Han Dynasty. This study explored the potential of Maimendong Decoction (MMDD). MMDD consists of Ophiopogon japonicus (L.f) (ophiopogonis), Pinellia ternata (Thunb.) Breit. (pinellia), Panax ginseng C. A. Mey. (ginseng), Glycyrrhiza uralensis Fisch. (glycyrrhiza), Zizi phus jujuba Mill. (jujuba), and Oryza sativa L. (oryza sativa), with the function of nourishing the lung and stomach, and reducing the effect of reverse qi. It has been used clinically for over two thousand years to treat conditions like "Fei Bi" and "Fei Wei". Previous research suggests that MMDD and its individual herbal extracts have anti-fibrotic effects. The main focus of MMDD in treating PF is to reduce inflammatory cytokines, inhibit pro-fibrotic factors and oxidative stress, promote differentiation and homing of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells, and enhance cell autophagy activity. This review summarized the clinical applications, mechanisms, and pharmacological effects of MMDD in treating PF based on existing clinical applications and experimental research. It also discussed current issues and prospects, aiming to provide a reference for further research on the mechanism of PF, drug development, and clinical trials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Vocal features have been exploited to distinguish depression from healthy controls. While there have been some claims for success, the degree to which changes in vocal features are specific to depression has not been systematically studied. Hence, we examined the performances of vocal features in differentiating depression from bipolar disorder (BD), schizophrenia and healthy controls, as well as pairwise classifications for the three disorders. Methods: We sampled 32 bipolar disorder patients, 106 depression patients, 114 healthy controls, and 20 schizophrenia patients. We extracted i-vectors from Mel-frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCCs), and built logistic regression models with ridge regularization and 5-fold cross-validation on the training set, then applied models to the test set. There were seven classification tasks: any disorder versus healthy controls; depression versus healthy controls; BD versus healthy controls; schizophrenia versus healthy controls; depression versus BD; depression versus schizophrenia; BD versus schizophrenia. Results: The area under curve (AUC) score for classifying depression and bipolar disorder was 0.5 (F-score = 0.44). For other comparisons, the AUC scores ranged from 0.75 to 0.92, and the F-scores ranged from 0.73 to 0.91. The model performance (AUC) of classifying depression and bipolar disorder was significantly worse than that of classifying bipolar disorder and schizophrenia (corrected p < 0.05). While there were no significant differences in the remaining pairwise comparisons of the 7 classification tasks. Conclusion: Vocal features showed discriminatory potential in classifying depression and the healthy controls, as well as between depression and other mental disorders. Future research should systematically examine the mechanisms of voice features in distinguishing depression with other mental disorders and develop more sophisticated machine learning models so that voice can assist clinical diagnosis better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Tourette syndrome (TS) is a developmental neuropsychiatric disorder. Behavior therapy, especially habit reversal training (HRT), has gradually become regarded as one of the core therapies for TS. Mindfulness approaches can improve psychological adjustment and reduce stress and anxiety, suggesting potential benefits when incorporated into behavior therapy. To improve the efficacy of HRT, we combined it with mindfulness, an approach named mindfulness-based habitual reversal training (MHRT). The aim of this protocol is to investigate the efficacy and neural mechanisms of MHRT for TS. Methods/design: We will performa randomized control trial (RCT) to evaluate the efficacy and neural mechanisms of MHRT. The sample will include 160 participants (including 120 patients with TS and 40 healthy controls). The patient sample will be randomly divided into three groups exposed to three different types of training: MHRT, HRT, and psychoeducation and supportive therapy (PST). Participants will be assessed and undergo resting-state fMRI scans at baseline and at the end of the 12-week training. The Yale Global Tic Severity Scale (YGTSS) and Premonitory Urge for Tic Scale (PUTS) will be used to assess the severity of tic symptoms and premonitory urges. The primary outcomes are change scores on the YGTSS and other assessments from baseline and the end of the training. The secondary outcomes are the neural correlates of these trainings among these groups based on graph theory, which is used to characterize brain functional connectivity networks. The default mode network (DMN) and the salience network (SN) will be assessed (which have been associated with mindfulness as well as the generation of tic symptoms) by network parameters, including clustering coefficients and shortest path lengths. Changes in these network parameters will be regarded as the neural correlates of the behavioral training. Discussion: MHRT was newly developed for the treatment of TS. MHRT may lead to greater reductions in tic severity than traditional HRT. Changes in the network parameters of the DMN and SN may show associations with the efficacy of MHRT. Clinical trial registration: http://www.chictr.org.cn, ChiCTR2100053077, China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Layered-division-multiplexing (LDM) is a physical-layer non-orthogonal multiplexing technology, which has been accepted as a baseline technology by the next generation terrestrial digital TV (DTV) broadcasting standard, advanced television systems committee (ATSC) 3.0. The typical scenario for an LDM-based ATSC 3.0 system is to deliver a robust high-definition TV (HDTV) service in the higher-power core-layer (CL) for mobile reception and a 4k ultra high definition TV or multiple enhanced full HDTV (1080p) services in the lower-power enhanced layer (EL) for fixed reception. So far, the capability of using the EL of an LDM system to deliver mobile services has not been investigated and well-understood. In this paper, we investigate the potential of using both layers of an LDM-based ATSC 3.0 system to delivery multiple mobile services that target different types of mobile devices. The mobile performance of the LDM system is then compared to its time-division-multiplexing and frequency-division-multiplexing counterparts, which will reveal the application scenarios for which using LDM would provide performance advantages. In addition, the availability of high-throughput fixed services carried in the LDM-EL to mobile receivers is also investigated by computer simulations. An advanced detection algorithm is proposed based on the LDM-CL inter-carrier-interference cancellation, which is shown to provide significantly better mobile performance. Finally, we show by simulation that using receive antenna diversity combining techniques can significantly improve the service detection performance of LDM mobile receivers, especially for services carried in the LDM EL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performance of the existing physical layer authentication schemes could be severely affected by the imperfect estimates and variations of the communication link attributes used. The commonly adopted static hypothesis testing for physical layer authentication faces significant challenges in time-varying communication channels due to the changing propagation and interference conditions, which are typically unknown at the design stage. To circumvent this impediment, we propose an adaptive physical layer authentication scheme based on machine-learning as an intelligent process to learn and utilize the complex time-varying environment, and hence to improve the reliability and robustness of physical layer authentication. Explicitly, a physical layer attribute fusion model based on a kernel machine is designed for dealing with multiple attributes without requiring the knowledge of their statistical properties. By modeling the physical layer authentication as a linear system, the proposed technique directly reduces the authentication scope from a combined $N$ -dimensional feature space to a single-dimensional (scalar) space, hence leading to reduced authentication complexity. By formulating the learning (training) objective of the physical layer authentication as a convex problem, an adaptive algorithm based on kernel least mean square is then proposed as an intelligent process to learn and track the variations of multiple attributes, and therefore to enhance the authentication performance. Both the convergence and the authentication performance of the proposed intelligent authentication process are theoretically analyzed. Our simulations demonstrate that our solution significantly improves the authentication performance in time-varying environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fields of photovoltaics, photodetection and light emission have seen tremendous activity in recent years with the advent of hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites. Yet, there have been far fewer reports of perovskite-based field-effect transistors. The lateral and interfacial transport requirements of transistors make them particularly vulnerable to surface contamination and defects rife in polycrystalline films and bulk single crystals. Here, we demonstrate a spatially-confined inverse temperature crystallization strategy which synthesizes micrometre-thin single crystals of methylammonium lead halide perovskites MAPbX3 (X = Cl, Br, I) with sub-nanometer surface roughness and very low surface contamination. These benefit the integration of MAPbX3 crystals into ambipolar transistors and yield record, room-temperature field-effect mobility up to 4.7 and 1.5 cm2 V−1 s−1 in p and n channel devices respectively, with 104 to 105 on-off ratio and low turn-on voltages. This work paves the way for integrating hybrid perovskite crystals into printed, flexible and transparent electronics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a dual-hop relaying system without a direct link between the source and the destination, the source broadcasts information signal to the relay and relay broadcasts it to the destination, thus it uses two phases to transmit one symbol. This study proposes a novel scheme to incorporate signal space diversity into a dual-hop relaying system with multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays to enhance its spectral efficiency. The proposed dual-hop signal space cooperative relaying scheme transmits two symbols in three phases while the conventional dual-hop DF relaying system uses four phases to transmit the same two symbols. Therefore, the proposed scheme improves the spectral efficiency without additional complexity, bandwidth or transmit power. The proposed scheme is analysed over Rayleigh fading channel and error probability performance is derived. Moreover, an asymptotic approximation for the error probability is obtained to illustrate the impact of different system parameters and diversity gain. In addition, this study discusses the power allocation optimisation, relay position optimisation and the joint optimisation of both. Furthermore, closed-form expression for the average channel capacity is derived. In the end, analytical results are compared and validated through Monte Carlo simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of information bits and frozen bits on the decoder graph can be exploited to simplify the successive-cancellation (SC) decoding of polar codes. In this study, the authors establish a general simplified SC decoding framework for polar codes with arbitrary block-length, which is independent of any specific or explicit generator matrices and considerably reduces decoding complexity while retaining the same error performance. Then, based on the fact that the complexity reduction depends on the distribution of information bits, a so-called m-radius reselection scheme is proposed to construct multiple feasible information sets which are different from the original one defined by Arıkan. In this way, flexible tradeoffs between performance and complexity could be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To obtain a rail-type electromagnetic launcher with large electrodynamic force, low temperature rise, and high structure strength, this paper investigates the performance of a pulsed current electromagnetic rail launcher (EMRL). According to the investigation, the inductance gradient and current-carrying capacity are determined. Based on the analysis of mechanical properties of the EMRL, armature, and bolt, the corresponding conclusions are achieved. These conclusions will establish the foundation for further research on the mechanism of the rail-type electromagnetic launcher. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]