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Eggshell Membrane (ESM) has been used as an alternative natural bandage to cure wounds and is available in large quantities from egg industries. This study is based on the use of natural resources for skin tissue reconstruction. It needs to understand regeneration of tissue with Extracellular Matrix (ECM). Wound healing is a complicated and continuous recovery process of damaged tissues by replacing dysfunctional injured cellular structures. The wound healing process recruits some different phases: the first phase for hemostasis, the second phase for inflammation, the third phase for proliferation, and last phases for maturation/tissue remodeling. Each process needs an appropriate surrounding to achieve accelerated healing. Because the skin is in contact with the outside, injuries occur and therefore the surface is often injured. Due to the different types of wounds, as well as the advancement in medical technology, various products have been developed to repair different skin lesions. We investigate the wound healing effects which are measured by dividing into the Exture® group, the commercially available wound dressing group (positive control), and the untreated group (negative control). We induced wounds and measured the healing process for 20 days for a comparison experiment of collagen membrane wound healing. As for the wound, the decrease in wound area using external photographs, the healing process within the tissue, and the immune response were measured through hematology analysis. We confirmed some differences through comparison of blood cell analysis and wound healing process but did not find statistical significance. There was no significant difference between treated collagen wound dressing film and commercial wound dressing film. Thus, this study reveals that the possibility of use natural source-based wound healing products brings sufficient wound healing results.

Issues like why students felt far from physics and did not choose physics as their prime learning option are familiar in education. This paper aims to study the effectiveness of the STEM-Project-Based learning module in physics on students' personal interest and sense-making and effort. This research used the quasi-experimental model, employing a two-group pre-survey-post-survey design. Quantitative data were collected using the Colorado Learning Attitude about Science Survey (CLASS) instrument at two selected schools in Sabah, Malaysia, and Seoul, Korea. The sample size was 88 Form 4 students in Malaysia and 66 second-year high school students in Korea who learned classical mechanics. The students were divided into two groups, respectively, i.e., the experimental group (Malaysia=44, Korea=33) and the control group (Malaysia=44, Korea=33). Participants in the experimental group were intervened with the integrated STEM-PBL physics module, whilst participants in the control group learned physics through a conventional approach for eight weeks. Participants in both groups were then administered a pre-survey before and post-survey after the intervention. This research showed that the integrated STEM-PBL physics module significantly improved students' personal interest, and sense-making and effort after the intervention. The paper also highlighted the research's implications and suggestions. Keywords: integrated STEM, project-based learning, physics module, classical mechanics, personal interest, sense-making and effort

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common cancers in the world. While colonoscopy is an effective screening technique, navigating an endoscope through the colon to detect polyps is challenging. A 3D map of the observed surfaces could enhance the identification of unscreened colon tissue and serve as a training platform. However, reconstructing the colon from video footage remains unsolved due to numerous factors such as self-occlusion, reflective surfaces, lack of texture, and tissue deformation that limit feature-based methods. Learning-based approaches hold promise as robust alternatives, but necessitate extensive datasets. By establishing a benchmark, the 2022 EndoVis sub-challenge SimCol3D aimed to facilitate data-driven depth and pose prediction during colonoscopy. The challenge was hosted as part of MICCAI 2022 in Singapore. Six teams from around the world and representatives from academia and industry participated in the three sub-challenges: synthetic depth prediction, synthetic pose prediction, and real pose prediction. This paper describes the challenge, the submitted methods, and their results. We show that depth prediction in virtual colonoscopy is robustly solvable, while pose estimation remains an open research question.

BACKGROUND: Whether the presenting symptom of pain vs mass impacts survival of early-stage synovial sarcoma is not known. PATIENTS AND METHODS: The authors investigated patients with early-stage extremity/trunk synovial sarcoma diagnosed from 2005 to 2017 at Kaiser Permanente Northern California for associations between the presenting symptom and survival. RESULTS: Among 56 patients with early-stage extremity/trunk synovial sarcoma, median disease-free survival (DFS) was 20.3 months for the pain-only group (n = 19) vs 50.5 months for the mass ± pain group (n = 37) (p = 0.004), and median overall survival (OS) was 35.7 months vs 53.9 months (p = 0.009), respectively. Median DFS was 26.9 months for the pain ± mass group (n = 32) vs 48.6 months for the mass-only group (n = 24) (p = 0.047), whereas OS was not significantly different (49.6 vs. 53.6 months, p = 0.282). Pain at presentation was associated with a higher incidence of deep tumors and a higher risk of relapse. Cox regression model adjusting for age, sex, race, tumor location, tumor size, and wait-time to seek medical attention showed that pain at presentation was associated with 3-fold worse DFS and OS. CONCLUSION: Pain at presentation was an adverse risk factor for patients with early-stage extremity/trunk synovial sarcoma.

This panel is about a DH education project in Korea. The goal is to collaborate in developing DH classes that cross individual universities and are open to participating institutes. We will present the overall design of this project, outline four subjects to be developed, and seek advice from overseas experts

Structure-based models in the molecular sciences can be highly sensitive to input geometries and give predictions with large variance under subtle coordinate perturbations. We present an approach to mitigate this failure mode by generating conformations that explicitly minimize uncertainty in a predictive model. To achieve this, we compute differentiable estimates of aleatoric \textit{and} epistemic uncertainties directly from learned embeddings. We then train an optimizer that iteratively samples embeddings to reduce these uncertainties according to their gradients. As our predictive model is constructed as a variational autoencoder, the new embeddings can be decoded to their corresponding inputs, which we call \textit{MoleCLUEs}, or (molecular) counterfactual latent uncertainty explanations \citep{antoran2020getting}. We provide results of our algorithm for the task of predicting drug properties with maximum confidence as well as analysis of the differentiable structure simulations., Submitted to the Differentiable Almost Everything Workshop, ICML 2023

This study focuses on the flapping mechanisms found in recently developed biometric flapping-wing air vehicles (FWAVs). FWAVs mimic the flight characteristics of flying animals, providing advantages such as maneuverability, inconspicuousness, and excellent flight efficiency in the low Reynolds number region. The flapping mechanism is a critical part of determining the aerodynamic performance of an FWAV since it is directly related to the wing motion. In this study, the flight characteristics of birds and bats are introduced, the incorporation of these flight characteristics into the development of FWAVs is elucidated, and the utilization of these flight characteristics in the development of FWAVs is explained. Next, the classification and analysis of flapping mechanisms are conducted based on wing motion and the strategy for improving aerodynamic performance. Lastly, the current research gap is elucidated, and potential future directions for further research are proposed. This review can serve as a guide during the early development stage of FWAVs.

Observations of the kilonova from a neutron star merger event GW170817 opened a way to directly study r-process nucleosynthesis by neutron star mergers. It is, however, challenging to identify the individual elements in the kilonova spectra due to lack of complete atomic data, in particular, at near-infrared wavelengths. In this paper, we demonstrate that spectra of chemically peculiar stars with enhanced heavy element abundances can provide us with an excellent astrophysical laboratory for kilonova spectra. We show that the photosphere of a late B-type chemically peculiar star HR 465 has similar lanthanide abundances and ionization degrees with those in the line forming region in a kilonova at $\sim 2.5$ days after the merger. The near-infrared spectrum of HR 465 taken with Subaru/IRD indicates that Ce III lines give the strongest absorption features around 16,000 A and there are no other comparably strong transitions around these lines. The Ce III lines nicely match with the broad absorption features at 14,500 A observed in GW170817 with a blueshift of v=0.1c, which supports recent identification of this feature as Ce III by Domoto et al. (2022)., 12 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

Optimization of equipment structure and process conditions is essential to obtain thin films with the required properties, such as film thickness, trapped charge density, leakage current, and memory characteristics, that ensure reliability of the corresponding device. In this study, we fabricated metal–insulator–semiconductor (MIS) structure capacitors using HfO2 thin films separately deposited by remote plasma (RP) atomic layer deposition (ALD) and direct-plasma (DP) ALD and determined the optimal process temperature by measuring the leakage current and breakdown strength as functions of process temperature. Additionally, we analyzed the effects of the plasma application method on the charge trapping properties of HfO2 thin films and properties of the interface between Si and HfO2. Subsequently, we synthesized charge-trapping memory (CTM) devices utilizing the deposited thin films as charge-trapping layers (CTLs) and evaluated their memory properties. The results indicated excellent memory window characteristics of the RP-HfO2 MIS capacitors compared to those of the DP-HfO2 MIS capacitors. Moreover, the memory characteristics of the RP-HfO2 CTM devices were outstanding as compared to those of the DP-HfO2 CTM devices. In conclusion, the methodology proposed herein can be useful for future implementations of multiple levels of charge-storage nonvolatile memories or synaptic devices that require many states.

Background: Rapid advancements in research and development related to nanomedical technology raise various ethical and legal challenges in areas relevant to disease detection, diagnosis, and treatment. This study aims to outline the existing literature, covering issues associated with emerging nanomedicine and related clinical research, and identify implications for the responsible advancement and integration of nanomedicine and nanomedical technology throughout medical networks in the future.Methods: A scoping review, designed to cover scientific, ethical, and legal literature associated with nanomedical technology, was conducted, generating and analyzing 27 peer-reviewed articles published between 2007–2020.Results: Results indicate that articles referencing ethical and legal issues related to nanomedical technology were concerned with six key areas: 1) harm exposure and potential risks to health, 2) consent to nano-research, 3) privacy, 4) access to nanomedical technology and potential nanomedical therapies, 5) classification of nanomedical products in relation to the research and development of nanomedical technology, and 6) the precautionary principle as it relates to the research and development of nanomedical technology.Conclusion: This review of the literature suggests that few practical solutions are comprehensive enough to allay the ethical and legal concerns surrounding research and development in fields related to nanomedical technology, especially as it continues to evolve and contribute to future innovations in medicine. It is also clearly apparent that a more coordinated approach is required to ensure global standards of practice governing the study and development of nanomedical technology, especially as discussions surrounding the regulation of nanomedical research throughout the literature are mainly confined to systems of governance in the United States.

Our goal for this project was to work on recreating the CTE website in order to improve the maintenance capabilities for the administrator and to fix the flaws of the site. The CTE program at Virginia Tech stands for Computational Tissue Engineering, which is an interdisciplinary graduate education program focused on the convergence of multiple scientific disciplines, with the goal of driving advances in tissue engineering. The site is split into sections that cover the Research, News, and Events of the program as well as an archive of the Faculty, Students, and Alumni of the program. The site was created with a CMS called Basecamp over 10 years ago. Because so much time had passed, it became difficult to do maintenance on the underlying code. This was mainly due to the fact that Basecamp was developed with PHP, and the specific version of PHP that the CMS was originally developed on had become outdated. This was the reason our client, Dr. Murali, who is the Associate Program Director of the CTE program, tasked us with recreating the site, as it had become too difficult to maintain the site. The new site was built with many of the deliverables that had been discussed with Dr. Murali. In the completed site, the admin has the ability to dictate permissions to other users, including the ability to grant editing privileges. Student profiles that were entered into the site can easily be changed to alumni profiles. Although pages for the site cannot be toggled on and off, they can be functionally disabled and enabled within the WordPress Dashboard. New entries of profiles, such as students, would automatically be displayed on the site. The site could recognize different categories of data including “people” entries. The admin has the ability to preview pages when making changes. Fields can be changed to be a list of data types within certain editors. The admin also has the ability to create forms on the site. CTEwebsiteReport.pdf PDF version of final report CTEwebsiteReport.docx Word version of final report CTEwebsitePresentation.pdf PDF version of final presentation CTEwebsitePresentation.pptx PowerPoint version of final presentation

The Cassiopeia A supernova remnant has a complex structure, manifesting the multidimensional nature of core-collapse supernova explosions. To further understand this, we carried out near-infrared multi-object spectroscopy on the ejecta knots located in the "northeastern (NE) jet" and the "Fe K plume" regions, which are two distinct features in the outer eastern area of the remnant. Our study reveals that the knots exhibit varying ratios of [S II] 1.03 $\mu$m, [P II] 1.189 $\mu$m, and [Fe II] 1.257 $\mu$m lines depending on their locations within the remnant, suggesting regional differences in elemental composition. Notably, the knots in the NE jet are mostly 'S-rich' with weak or no [P II] lines, implying that they originated below the explosive Ne burning layer, consistent with the results of previous studies. We detected no ejecta knots exhibiting only [Fe II] lines in the NE jet area that are expected in the jet-driven SN explosion model. Instead, we discovered a dozen 'Fe-rich' knots in the Fe K plume area. We propose that they are dense knots produced by a complete Si burning with $\alpha$-rich freezeout in the innermost region of the progenitor and ejected with the diffuse X-ray emitting Fe ejecta but decoupled after crossing the reverse shock. In addition to these metal-rich ejecta knots, several knots emitting only He I 1.083 $\mu$m lines were detected, and their origin remains unclear. We also detected three extended H emission features of circumstellar or interstellar origin in this area and discuss its association with the supernova remnant., Comment: 30 pages, 16 figures, submitted to ApJ

The drone has been used for various purposes, including military applications, aerial photography, and pesticide spraying. However, the drone is vulnerable to external disturbances, and malfunction in propellers and motors can easily occur. To improve the safety of drone operations, one should detect the mechanical faults of drones in real-time. This paper proposes a sound-based deep neural network (DNN) fault classifier and drone sound dataset. The dataset was constructed by collecting the operating sounds of drones from microphones mounted on three different drones in an anechoic chamber. The dataset includes various operating conditions of drones, such as flight directions (front, back, right, left, clockwise, counterclockwise) and faults on propellers and motors. The drone sounds were then mixed with noises recorded in five different spots on the university campus, with a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) varying from 10 dB to 15 dB. Using the acquired dataset, we train a DNN classifier, 1DCNN-ResNet, that classifies the types of mechanical faults and their locations from short-time input waveforms. We employ multitask learning (MTL) and incorporate the direction classification task as an auxiliary task to make the classifier learn more general audio features. The test over unseen data reveals that the proposed multitask model can successfully classify faults in drones and outperforms single-task models even with less training data., Accepted at 29th International Congress on Sound and Vibration (ICSV29). Dataset available: https://zenodo.org/record/7779574#.ZEVncnZBwQ

We present a systematic Raman spectroscopy study on a series of pyrochlore ruthenates, a system which is not yet clearly settled on its magnetic origin and structure. Apart from the Raman-active phonon modes, new peaks that appear in the energy range of 15 - 35 meV below the N\'{e}el temperature are assigned as one-magnon modes. The temperature evolution of one-magnon modes displays no significant thermal dependence in mode frequencies while the intensities decrease monotonically. Remarkably, one-magnons from all compounds show similar characteristics with a single dominant peak at lower energy and weaker side peaks at a couple of meV higher energy. Most importantly, we uncover a striking proportionality between the dominant magnon mode energies and the N\'{e}el temperatures. Our results suggest the Ru ions may have similar or the same magnetic phase in all pyrochlore ruthenates of our study. We have thus found an avenue for directly tuning the magnetic exchange interaction by the selection of the $A$-site ion.

Background The application and feasibility of minimally invasive liver resection (MILR) for huge liver tumours (≥10 cm) has not been well documented. Methods Retrospective analysis of data on 6,617 patients who had MILR for liver tumours were gathered from 21 international centers between 2009-2019. Huge tumors and large tumors were defined as tumors with a size ≥10.0 cm and 3.0-9.9 cm based on histology, respectively. 1:1 coarsened exact-matching (CEM) and 1:2 Mahalanobis distance-matching (MDM) was performed according to clinically-selected variables. Regression discontinuity analyses were performed as an additional line of sensitivity analysis to estimate local treatment effects at the 10-cm tumor size cutoff. Results Of 2,890 patients with tumours ≥3 cm, there were 205 huge tumors. After 1:1 CEM, 174 huge tumors were matched to 174 large tumors; and after 1:2 MDM, 190 huge tumours were matched to 380 large tumours. There was significantly and consistently increased intraoperative blood loss, frequency in the application of Pringle maneuver, major morbidity and postoperative stay in the huge tumour group compared to the large tumour group after both 1:1 CEM and 1:2 MDM. These findings were reinforced in RD analyses. Intraoperative blood transfusion rate and open conversion rate were significantly higher in the huge tumor group after only 1:2 MDM but not 1:1 CEM. Conclusions MILR for huge tumours can be safely performed in expert centers It is an operation with substantial complexity and high technical requirement, with worse perioperative outcomes compared to MILR for large tumors, therefore judicious patient selection is pivotal.

We study the toric degeneration of Weyl group translated Schubert divisors of a partial flag variety of Lie type A via Gelfand-Cetlin polytopes. We propose a conjecture that Schubert varieties of appropriate dimensions intersect transversally up to translation by Weyl group elements, and verify it in various cases, including complex Grassmannian Gr(2, n) and complete flag variety Fl_4., Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in SCIENCE CHINA Mathematics

A typical monocular depth estimator is trained for a single camera, so its performance drops severely on images taken with different cameras. To address this issue, we propose a versatile depth estimator (VDE), composed of a common relative depth estimator (CRDE) and multiple relative-to-metric converters (R2MCs). The CRDE extracts relative depth information, and each R2MC converts the relative information to predict metric depths for a specific camera. The proposed VDE can cope with diverse scenes, including both indoor and outdoor scenes, with only a 1.12\% parameter increase per camera. Experimental results demonstrate that VDE supports multiple cameras effectively and efficiently and also achieves state-of-the-art performance in the conventional single-camera scenario.

Recent studies show strong generative performance in domain translation especially by using transfer learning techniques on the unconditional generator. However, the control between different domain features using a single model is still challenging. Existing methods often require additional models, which is computationally demanding and leads to unsatisfactory visual quality. In addition, they have restricted control steps, which prevents a smooth transition. In this paper, we propose a new approach for high-quality domain translation with better controllability. The key idea is to preserve source features within a disentangled subspace of a target feature space. This allows our method to smoothly control the degree to which it preserves source features while generating images from an entirely new domain using only a single model. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed method can produce more consistent and realistic images than previous works and maintain precise controllability over different levels of transformation. The code is available at https://github.com/LeeDongYeun/FixNoise., Accepted by CVPR 2023. The code is available at https://github.com/LeeDongYeun/FixNoise. Extended from arXiv:2204.14079 (AICC workshop at CVPR 2022)

A graph $H$ is said to be "common" if the number of monochromatic labelled copies of $H$ in a $2$-colouring of the edges of a large complete graph is asymptotically minimized by a random colouring. It is well known that the disjoint union of two common graphs may be uncommon; e.g., $K_2$ and $K_3$ are common, but their disjoint union is not. We find the first examples of a pair of uncommon graphs whose disjoint union is common and a common graph and an uncommon graph whose disjoint union is common. Our approach is to reduce the problem of showing that certain disconnected graphs are common to a constrained optimization problem in which the constraints are derived from supersaturation bounds related to Razborov's Triangle Density Theorem. We also improve bounds on the Ramsey multiplicity constant of a triangle with a pendant edge and the disjoint union of $K_3$ and $K_2$., 30 pages

We present a method for constructing covariantly constant endomorphisms for the mod $p$ equivariant quantum connection, using the quantum Steenrod power operations of Fukaya and Wilkins. The example of the cotangent bundle of the projective line is fully computed, and we discuss the relationship with the mod $p$ solutions of trigonometric KZ equation recently constructed by Varchenko. As a byproduct, we compute the first examples of quantum Steenrod operations that are not a priori determined by ordinary Gromov--Witten theory and classical Steenrod operations, which may be of independent interest., 68 pages, comments welcome! v2: added discussion of mod p solutions of quantum differential equation

The phase transition between water and ice is ubiquitous and one of the most important phenomena in nature. Here, we performed time-resolved x-ray scattering experiments capturing the melting and recrystallization dynamics of ice. The ultrafast heating of ice I is induced by an IR laser pulse and probed with an intense x-ray pulse, which provided us with direct structural information on different length scales. From the wide-angle x-ray scattering (WAXS) patterns, the molten fraction, as well as the corresponding temperature at each delay, were determined. The small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) patterns, together with the information extracted from the WAXS analysis, provided the time-dependent change of the size and the number of the liquid domains. The results show partial melting (~13 %) and superheating of ice occurring at around 20 ns. After 100 ns, the average size of the liquid domains grows from about 2.5 nm to 4.5 nm by the coalescence of approximately six adjacent domains. Subsequently, we capture the recrystallization of the liquid domains, which occurs on microsecond timescales due to the cooling by heat dissipation and results to a decrease of the average liquid domain size.

Bacteria communicate and coordinate their behaviour at the intra- and interspecies levels by producing and sensing diverse extracellular small molecules called autoinducers. Autoinducer 2 (AI-2) is produced and detected by a variety of bacteria and thus plays an important role in interspecies communication and chemotaxis. Although AI-2 is a major autoinducer molecule present in the mammalian gut and can influence the composition of the murine gut microbiota, its role in bacteria-bacteria and bacteria-host interactions during gut colonization remains unclear. Combining competitive infections in C57BL/6 mice with microscopy and bioinformatic approaches, we show that chemotaxis (cheY) and AI-2 signalling (via lsrB) promote gut colonization by Escherichia coli, which is in turn connected to the ability of the bacteria to utilize fructoselysine (frl operon). We further show that the genomic diversity of E. coli strains with respect to AI-2 signalling allows ecological niche segregation and stable co-existence of different E. coli strains in the mammalian gut., Nature Microbiology, 8 (2), ISSN:2058-5276

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a progressive muscle wasting disease caused by the absence of dystrophin, a membrane-stabilizing protein encoded by the DMD gene. Although mouse models of DMD provide insight into the potential of a corrective therapy, data from genetically homologous large animals, such as the dystrophin-deficient golden retriever muscular dystrophy (GRMD) model, may more readily translate to humans. To evaluate the clinical translatability of an adeno-associated virus serotype 9 vector (AAV9)–microdystrophin (μDys5) construct, we performed a blinded, placebo-controlled study in which 12 GRMD dogs were divided among four dose groups [control, 1 × 10 13 vector genomes per kilogram (vg/kg), 1 × 10 14 vg/kg, and 2 × 10 14 vg/kg; n = 3 each], treated intravenously at 3 months of age with a canine codon-optimized microdystrophin construct, rAAV9-CK8e-c-μDys5, and followed for 90 days after dosing. All dogs received prednisone (1 milligram/kilogram) for a total of 5 weeks from day −7 through day 28. We observed dose-dependent increases in tissue vector genome copy numbers; μDys5 protein in multiple appendicular muscles, the diaphragm, and heart; limb and respiratory muscle functional improvement; and reduction of histopathologic lesions. As expected, given that a truncated dystrophin protein was generated, phenotypic test results and histopathologic lesions did not fully normalize. All administrations were well tolerated, and adverse events were not seen. These data suggest that systemically administered AAV-microdystrophin may be dosed safely and could provide therapeutic benefit for patients with DMD.

Saengmaeksan (SMS) is a traditional drink that consists of three natural herbs, Lirio platyphlla, Panax ginseng, and Schisandra chinensis, and improves fatigue, liver function, and immunity. Moderate-intensity exercise has a positive effect on fatigue, liver function, and immune function, whereas long-term high-intensity training has a negative effect on these aspects. We hypothesized that SMS intake will improve fatigue (ammonia, lactic acid), liver function (aspartate transaminidase (AST) and alanine aminotransferase (ALT)), and immunity (IgA, IgG, IgM) with high-intensity training. To investigate this hypothesis, 17 male college tennis players were randomly assigned to SMS and placebo groups with high-intensity training. SMS and placebo were consumed in 110 mL doses for a total of 770 mL. High-intensity training was performed at 70%–90% of heart rate reserve, conducted five times weekly for 4 weeks. A significant interaction effect was observed between the SMS and control (CON) groups regarding ammonia, ALT, and IgA levels. Ammonia levels significantly decreased in the SMS group, but there was no difference in the lactic acid levels. AST significantly decreased in the SMS group. IgA significantly increased in the SMS group, IgM significantly decreased in both groups, but there was no change in IgG. The correlation analysis revealed positive correlation in ΔAST vs. ΔALT, ΔALT vs. ΔIgG, and ΔIgA vs. ΔIgG in the SMS group. These findings demonstrate that SMS intake can reduce ammonia, AST, ALT, and IgM levels, while causing an increase in IgA, which has a positive effect on fatigue reduction, liver function, and immunoglobulins in a high-intensity training or related environment.

Supplementary Figures 1 - 5

Most patients with pancreatic cancer present with advanced stage, incurable disease. However, patients with high-grade precancerous lesions and many patients with low-stage disease can be cured with surgery, suggesting that early detection has the potential to improve survival. While serum CA19.9 has been a long-standing biomarker used for pancreatic cancer disease monitoring, its low sensitivity and poor specificity have driven investigators to hunt for better diagnostic markers. This review will cover recent advances in genetics, proteomics, imaging, and artificial intelligence, which offer opportunities for the early detection of curable pancreatic neoplasms. From exosomes, to circulating tumor DNA, to subtle changes on imaging, we know much more now about the biology and clinical manifestations of early pancreatic neoplasia than we did just five years ago. The overriding challenge, however, remains the development of a practical approach to screen for a relatively rare, but deadly, disease that is often treated with complex surgery. It is our hope that future advances will bring us closer to an effective and financially sound approach for the early detection of pancreatic cancer and its precursors.

Deep western boundary current (DWBC) can play important role on the global climate through its contribution on heat and mass balance. From 2-year-long in-situ measurements, a DWBC was discovered in the deep western boundary of the Philippine Basin. The current was flowing southeastward with a mean speed of ~4 cm/s along the bottom topography. The observed DWBC was dominated by evident seasonal variability - stronger southward current in winter and vice versa in summer. The seasonal variability was explained from further analyses using data-assimilated numerical simulation (GLORYS12V1), which reproduced DWBC agreeing well with the observation. In the GLORYS12V1 outputs, a significant coherence (> 0.9) was obtained in the seasonal period between North Equatorial Current bifurcation latitude (NECBL) and along-slope velocity of DWBC. Near the DWBC, upper pycnocline depth becomes ~13.5 m deeper (shallower) in summer (winter) following the seasonal variation of NECBL with a phase lag of ~2 months. The resultant thickness change in deep layer then induce a seasonal variability of bottom trapped deep anticyclonic eddy to satisfy the potential vorticity conservation. The seasonal variability in the DWBC was generated by the intensity change in the anticyclonic eddy that controls opening and closing in the adjacent DWBC path. Since an expected relative vorticity anomaly, estimated from a linear potential vorticity conservation equation, had a comparable value compared with that of deep anticyclonic eddy, thus a capacity of layer thickness change (~27 m) for variability in the deep anticyclonic eddy was confirmed., The 28th IUGG General Assembly (IUGG2023) (Berlin 2023)

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-tar-10.1177_17534666231162244 for A prospective study on the long-term storage of sputum and the recovery of nontuberculous mycobacteria by Byoung Soo Kwon, Jeong Su Park, Jung-A Shin, Eun Sun Kim, Sung Yoon Lim, Myung Jin Song, Yeon-Wook Kim, Hyung-Jun Kim, Yeon Joo Lee, Jong Sun Park, Young-Jae Cho, Ho Yoon, Choon-Taek Lee and Jae Ho Lee in Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease

Identifying cerebrospinal fluid measures of the microtubule binding region of tau (MTBR-tau) species that reflect tau aggregation could provide fluid biomarkers that track Alzheimer disease related neurofibrillary tau pathological changes. We examined CSF MTBR-tau species in dominantly inherited Alzheimer disease (DIAD) mutation carriers to assess the association with AD biomarkers and clinical symptoms.Cross-sectional and longitudinal CSF from 229 DIAD mutation and 130 mutation non-carriers had sequential characterization of N-terminal/mid-domain phosphorylated tau (p-tau) followed by MTBR-tau species and tau-PET, other soluble tau and amyloid biomarkers, comprehensive clinical and cognitive assessments, and brain magnetic resonance imaging of atrophy.CSF MTBR-tau species located within the putative 'border' region and one species corresponding to the 'core' region of aggregates in neurofibrillary tangles increased during the presymptomatic stage and decreased during the symptomatic stage. The 'border' MTBR-tau species were associated with amyloid pathology and CSF p-tau; while the 'core' MTBR-tau species were associated stronger with tau-PET and CSF measures of neurodegeneration. The ratio of the border to the core species provided a continuous measure of increasing amounts that tracked clinical progression and NFT.Changes in CSF soluble MTBR-tau species preceded the onset of dementia, tau tangle increase, and atrophy in DIAD. The ratio of 4R-specific MTBR-tau (border) to the NFT (core) MTBR-tau species corresponds to the pathology of NFT in DIAD and change with disease progression. The dynamics between different MTBR-tau species in the CSF may serve as a marker of tau-related disease progression and target engagement of anti-tau therapeutics. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Supplementary Figures 1 - 5

Supplemental Material for AJP Submission

Additional file 1: Table S1. Comparison of the baseline characteristics among patients with IPF according to participating centers. Table S2. Comparison of the baseline characteristics among patients with IPF according to baseline KL-6 levels. Table S3. Comparison of the baseline characteristics between the DP and no-DP groups among patients with IPF with high baseline KL-6 levels (≥ 500 U/mL).

We study a class of reinforcement learning problems where the reward signals for policy learning are generated by a discriminator that is dependent on and jointly optimized with the policy. This interdependence between the policy and the discriminator leads to an unstable learning process because reward signals from an immature discriminator are noisy and impede policy learning, and conversely, an under-optimized policy impedes discriminator learning. We call this learning setting \textit{Internally Rewarded Reinforcement Learning} (IRRL) as the reward is not provided directly by the environment but \textit{internally} by the discriminator. In this paper, we formally formulate IRRL and present a class of problems that belong to IRRL. We theoretically derive and empirically analyze the effect of the reward function in IRRL and based on these analyses propose the clipped linear reward function. Experimental results show that the proposed reward function can consistently stabilize the training process by reducing the impact of reward noise, which leads to faster convergence and higher performance compared with baselines in diverse tasks., Comment: Accepted at ICML 2023. Project webpage at https://ir-rl.github.io

Deep learning-based 3D object reconstruction has achieved unprecedented results. Among those, the transformer deep neural model showed outstanding performance in many applications of computer vision. We introduce SnakeVoxFormer, a novel, 3D object reconstruction in voxel space from a single image using the transformer. The input to SnakeVoxFormer is a 2D image, and the result is a 3D voxel model. The key novelty of our approach is in using the run-length encoding that traverses (like a snake) the voxel space and encodes wide spatial differences into a 1D structure that is suitable for transformer encoding. We then use dictionary encoding to convert the discovered RLE blocks into tokens that are used for the transformer. The 1D representation is a lossless 3D shape data compression method that converts to 1D data that use only about 1% of the original data size. We show how different voxel traversing strategies affect the effect of encoding and reconstruction. We compare our method with the state-of-the-art for 3D voxel reconstruction from images and our method improves the state-of-the-art methods by at least 2.8% and up to 19.8%.

Because implicit user feedback for the collaborative filtering (CF) models is biased toward popular items, CF models tend to yield recommendation lists with popularity bias. Previous studies have utilized inverse propensity weighting (IPW) or causal inference to mitigate this problem. However, they solely employ pointwise or pairwise loss functions and neglect to adopt a contrastive loss function for learning meaningful user and item representations. In this paper, we propose Unbiased ConTrastive Representation Learning (uCTRL), optimizing alignment and uniformity functions derived from the InfoNCE loss function for CF models. Specifically, we formulate an unbiased alignment function used in uCTRL. We also devise a novel IPW estimation method that removes the bias of both users and items. Despite its simplicity, uCTRL equipped with existing CF models consistently outperforms state-of-the-art unbiased recommender models, up to 12.22% for Recall@20 and 16.33% for NDCG@20 gains, on four benchmark datasets., Comment: SIGIR 2023

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-tar-10.1177_17534666231162244 for A prospective study on the long-term storage of sputum and the recovery of nontuberculous mycobacteria by Byoung Soo Kwon, Jeong Su Park, Jung-A Shin, Eun Sun Kim, Sung Yoon Lim, Myung Jin Song, Yeon-Wook Kim, Hyung-Jun Kim, Yeon Joo Lee, Jong Sun Park, Young-Jae Cho, Ho Yoon, Choon-Taek Lee and Jae Ho Lee in Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease

Linear probing (LP) (and $k$-NN) on the upstream dataset with labels (e.g., ImageNet) and transfer learning (TL) to various downstream datasets are commonly employed to evaluate the quality of visual representations learned via self-supervised learning (SSL). Although existing SSL methods have shown good performances under those evaluation protocols, we observe that the performances are very sensitive to the hyperparameters involved in LP and TL. We argue that this is an undesirable behavior since truly generic representations should be easily adapted to any other visual recognition task, i.e., the learned representations should be robust to the settings of LP and TL hyperparameters. In this work, we try to figure out the cause of performance sensitivity by conducting extensive experiments with state-of-the-art SSL methods. First, we find that input normalization for LP is crucial to eliminate performance variations according to the hyperparameters. Specifically, batch normalization before feeding inputs to a linear classifier considerably improves the stability of evaluation, and also resolves inconsistency of $k$-NN and LP metrics. Second, for TL, we demonstrate that a weight decay parameter in SSL significantly affects the transferability of learned representations, which cannot be identified by LP or $k$-NN evaluations on the upstream dataset. We believe that the findings of this study will be beneficial for the community by drawing attention to the shortcomings in the current SSL evaluation schemes and underscoring the need to reconsider them.

This paper firstly presents old photo modernization using multiple references by performing stylization and enhancement in a unified manner. In order to modernize old photos, we propose a novel multi-reference-based old photo modernization (MROPM) framework consisting of a network MROPM-Net and a novel synthetic data generation scheme. MROPM-Net stylizes old photos using multiple references via photorealistic style transfer (PST) and further enhances the results to produce modern-looking images. Meanwhile, the synthetic data generation scheme trains the network to effectively utilize multiple references to perform modernization. To evaluate the performance, we propose a new old photos benchmark dataset (CHD) consisting of diverse natural indoor and outdoor scenes. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms other baselines in performing modernization on real old photos, even though no old photos were used during training. Moreover, our method can appropriately select styles from multiple references for each semantic region in the old photo to further improve the modernization performance., Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2023. Website: https://kaist-viclab.github.io/old-photo-modernization

Supplementary Material 1

Additional file 1: Supplementary Fig. 1. Comparison of proliferation, viability and cytotoxicity according to NK92 cell density cultured in two-dimensions. (a) Cell number of NK92 cell according to density. The higher the cell density, the higher the rate of increase. (b) Cell proliferation folds of NK92 cell. (c) Cell apoptosis and death on the day 5. (d) NK92 cell lytic activity based on Calcein-AM cytotoxicity assay on day 3 and 5 at and E:T ratio of 2:1 and 1:1. Supplementary Fig. 2. Printing conditions of ALG and ALG/GEL-2 groups related to pressure and printing feed rate. ALG groups were printed at 300 mm/min at 60 kPa of pressure and ALG/GEL-2 group were printed at 300 mm/min at 70 kPa. Scale bar = 400 µm. Supplementary Fig. 3. EDTA concentration test for cell viability and alginate degradation. (a) Representative microscopic image of formation of NK92 cell clusters and viability related to cell condition according to EDTA concentrations. NK92 cells tend not to maintain cell clusters over 8mM. Scale bar = 100 µm. (b) Degradation of 3% alginate hydrogel for 3D encapsulated NK92 cells preparation. 8 mM EDTA concentration were used for hydrogel degradation. Scale bar = 1mm. Supplementary Fig. 4. Concentration of calcium chloride for alginate crosslinking. When ALG and ALG/GEL-2 groups were crosslinked by 3% CaCl2, NK92 cells were released out by hydrogel degradation on day 5. Scale bar = 500 µm. Supplementary Fig. 5. Expression of activating receptors at 3D cultured zEGFR-CAR NK cells. Supplementary Table 1. Gene specific primer sequences for qRT-PCR.

International audience; IIn this study, we designed a new structure based on Pd-decorated TiN-coated SnO2 nanowires (NWs) for the selective detection of H2 gas. Initially, SnO2 NWs were prepared by a simple vapor-liquid-solid growth method. Then, atomic layer deposition (ALD) was used to grow a continuous TiN layer and, subsequently, Pd nanoparticles on the NW networks. The TiN thickness was precisely set to 0.5, 1, 2, and 5 nm, while the Pd loading was adjusted by varying the number of ALD cycles (25 to 200 cycles). Various characterization techniques revealed the amorphous nature of TiN, a homogeneous dispersion of Pd NPs and the uniform morphology and single crystallinity of the SnO2 NWs. H2 gas sensing studies revealed that the sensor with a TiN thickness of 1 nm exhibited the highest response. Pd decoration further improved the response to H2 gas. Hence, the Pd-decorated gas sensor with a 1 nm-thick TiN layer showed the highest H2 sensing performance at 250 °C among all gas sensors. Due to the unique chemical reaction between Pd and hydrogen, the fabricated sensor shows excellent performance in detecting hydrogen gas. The underlying sensing mechanism is discussed in detail. The optimized sensor has a sensitivity of 8.18 for hydrogen gas, which is four times higher than that of other gas species, showing that it is suitable for detecting hydrogen gas. We believe that this new design is a highly valuable gas sensor for the real application of H2 monitoring with high selectivity.

Additional file 1: Figure S1. Trends of P/F ratio, urine output, creatinine, platelet, total bilirubin and albumin levels of 12 pigs in the ESBL-producing E. coli-induced porcine bacteremia model. Data are presented as the means and standard error of the mean. P/F ratio: ratio of partial pressure of oxygen to the fraction of inspired oxygen.