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Interaction with virtual objects is one of the essential features of Augmented Reality (AR) systems. One of its main issues is how to provide precise manipulation of distant virtual objects in AR. In this work, we explore bare-hand manipulation of distant objects in AR with DOF (degree-of-freedom) separation, motion scaling, and near-field metaphors. We developed two manipulation techniques: the distant widget-based metaphor (DWBM), and the near-field widget-based metaphor (NFWBM). We conducted a user study with 20 participants to compare the two techniques in terms of performance and user experience. We found that NFWBM has faster speed, lower mental effort, better ease-of-use, and a friendlier user experience. However, there is no significant difference in terms of precision; both techniques could manipulate distant objects precisely, with an average position error of less than 0.7 cm and an average orientational error of less than 1 degrees. We also discussed the limitations of this research and directions for future work. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The knowledge of the spatial distribution, sources, and air–soil exchange of polycyclic aromatic compounds (PACs) in an oilfield area is essential to the development of effective control practices of PAC pollution. In this study, 48 passive air samples and 24 soil samples were collected during 2018–2019 in seven functional areas (e.g., urban, oil field, suburban, industrial, agricultural, near pump units, and background) in the Yellow River Delta (YRD) where the Shengli Oilfield is located, and 18 parent polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and five alkylated-PAHs (APAHs) were analyzed from all the air and soil samples. The ΣPAHs in the air and soil ranged from 2.26 to 135.83 ng/m3 and 33.96 to 408.94 ng/g, while the ΣAPAHs in the atmosphere and soil ranged from 0.04 to 16.31 ng/m3 and 6.39 to 211.86 ng/g, respectively. There was a downward trend of atmospheric ΣPAH concentrations with increasing the distance from the urban area, while both ΣPAH and ΣAPAH concentrations in the soil decreased with distance from the oilfield area. PMF analyses show that for atmospheric PACs, coal/biomass combustion was the main contributor in urban, suburban, and agricultural areas, while crude production and processing source contributes more in the industrial and oilfield area. For PACs in soil, densely populated areas (industrial, urban, and suburban) are more affected by traffic sources, while oilfield and near-pump unit areas are under the impact of oil spills. The fugacity fraction (ff) results indicated that the soil generally emitted low-molecular-weight PAHs and APAHs and act as a sink for high-molecular-weight PAHs. The incremental lifetime cancer risk (ILCR) of Σ(PAH+APAH) in both the air and soil, were below the threshold (≤10−6) set by the US EPA.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) do hold the promise of providing Web3 with the opportunity for self-sovereignty of users' physical assets. However, existing NFT marketplaces lack a generic design that allows the value of assets to flow efficiently. In this paper, we propose a generic NFT architecture for Web3. The architecture supports the rapid development of the upper application environment and automated value mapping of the underlying physical asset environment. To connect these two environments, a generic connecter has been designed to provide flexible storage for mapping data management, and to support universal cross-chain transactions. With these features, the values of heterogeneous physical assets can coexist in a unified Web3 world, and rich value transfer services can be developed on demand. This paper discusses the background of the proposed architecture, the open problems and our initial solution, as well as our design principles and advantages, and finally validates this novel NFT architecture.

For the integrated energy system (IES) formed by a cluster of energy hubs (EHs), the outputs of EHs and system parameters, which greatly influence the security performance, should be properly adjusted. In this article, an event-triggered distributed hybrid control scheme is proposed to achieve security and economic operation for the IES. First, the EH output control is designed based on the features of energy networks as well as the containment and consensus algorithms. According to the control of outputs, the electricity and heat load power can be accurately shared without knowing the network parameters. Second, the pressure is bounded within an acceptable range, and the frequency is reverted to the reference value by implementing the proposed control method. Third, an event-triggered communication strategy is employed to design the corresponding protocols, resulting in reduced communication cost. Finally, the control of devices based on the equal incremental principle is proposed to achieve the minimal economic cost for each EH with considering energy prices. The results of numerical case studies are presented to validate the performance of the proposed control method.

To provide an overview of the current situation, challenges, and trends in online medical services from the perspective of andrology and promote the development of online medical services. Users of the Learning Alliance of Urology, who mainly worked in central regions of China, were invited to complete the questionnaire that included information on the participants and their institutions and their involvement in and concerns for online medical services. We received 875 complete responses. The percentage of online andrology patients at most institutions was less than 30%. The most common services were online appointment registration (92.7%) and online payment (81.8%). Online chat consultation (77.7%) was the most common form of consultation. Only 1 in 5 of the institutions had constructed their Internet hospital. Factors related to the percentage of online andrology patients included specialized andrology clinics and wards, sufficient time for doctors to provide online services, more diversified services, and online clinic training. The biggest challenge for online medical services was diagnosis and treatment safety. It is essential to raise awareness of online medical services for hospitals and patients and strengthen standardized management and training of online medical services, especially applicable to central regions of China. However, online medical services cannot wholly replace offline services due to insufficient diagnosis and treatment.

This study examines consumer fraud at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and provides novel evidence for the opportunity model of predatory victimization. Scammers have taken advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic shock to exploit victims who are already vulnerable and suffering. The number of fraud cases has greatly increased as COVID-19 spread across the U.S., consistent with the vulnerable-to-become-victimization hypothesis based on the opportunity model of predatory victimization. A Google Trends analysis shows that the increase in fraud and scams is attributable to victims’ increased vulnerability rather than to their awareness of fraud and increased motivation to report scams. An improvement in financial literacy is associated with the reduction of finance-related fraud and scams. Finally, we provide important policy implications to protect people from fraud victimization.

Multifunctional, integrated, and reusable operating platforms are highly sought after in biochemical analysis and detection systems. In this study, we demonstrated a novel detachable, reusable acoustic tweezer manipulation platform that is flexible and versatile. The free interchangeability of different detachable microchannel devices on the acoustic tweezer platform was achieved by adding a waveguide layer (glass) and a coupling layer (polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymer film). We designed and demonstrated the detachable multifunctional acoustic tweezer platform with three cell manipulation capabilities. In Demo I, the detachable acoustic tweezer platform is demonstrated to have the capability for parallel processing and enrichment of the sample. In Demo II, the detachable acoustic tweezer platform with capability for precise cell alignment is demonstrated. In Demo III, it was demonstrated that the detachable acoustic tweezer platform has the capability for the separation and purification of cells. Through experiments, our acoustic tweezer platform has good acoustic retention ability, reusability, and stability. More capabilities can be expanded in the future. It provides a simple, economical, and multifunctional reusable operating platform solution for biochemical analysis and detection systems.

This paper investigates a distributed adaptive dual control (DADC) that employs both consensus algorithm and improved equal incremental principle (IEIP), to guarantee the security operation while reducing the energy consumption of the Energy Internet (EI). Since the security operation is a critical factor of the EI with the energy hub (EH), it is necessary for the EI to adjust the outputs of EHs and the system parameters which have a great influence on the performance. The consensusbased control of the EI can resolve the energy-coupling issue and accurately share the electricity and heat loads power without requiring the information of the network parameters which is hard to know. Meanwhile, the variations of system parameters caused by the droop action greatly impact the security operation of the EI. It can be adaptively recovered by executing the proposed control strategy. Furthermore, in order to reduce the energy consumption, the equipment in hubs should also be managed in view of the features of EH. The minimal loss of the energy can be achieved by utilizing the control of devices via the IEIP by considering the coupling characteristics of devices. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated through numerical case studies.

Most of the Southeast Asian countries are developing economies that have large demand for maritime infrastructures. Some but not all the ports in this region could significantly benefit from and co...

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) do hold the promise of providing Web3 with the opportunity for self-sovereignty of users’ physical assets. In this paper, we propose a generic NFT architecture for Web3. The architecture supports the rapid development of the upper application environment and automated value mapping of the underlying physical asset environment. To connect these two environments, a generic connecter has been designed to provide flexible storage for mapping data management, and to support universal cross-chain transactions. With these features, the values of heterogeneous physical assets can coexist in a unified Web3 world, and rich value transfer services can be developed on demand. This paper discusses the background of the proposed architecture, the open problems and our initial solution, as well as our design principles and advantages, and finally validates this novel NFT architecture.

Time-resolved photon counting methods have a finite bandwidth that restricts the acquisition speed of techniques like fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM). To enable faster imaging, computational methods can be employed to count photons when the output of a detector is directly digitized at a high sampling rate. Here, we present computational photon counting using a hybrid photodetector in conjunction with multithreshold peak detection to count instances where one or more photons arrive at the detector within the detector response time. This method can be used to distinguish up to five photon counts per digitized point, whereas previous demonstrations of computational photon counting on data acquired with photomultiplier tubes have only counted one photon at a time. We demonstrate in both freely moving

The p-next center problem (pNCP) is an extension of the classical p-center problem. It consists of locating p centers from a set of candidate centers and allocating both a reference and a backup center to each client, to minimize the maximum cost, which is the length of the path from a client to its reference center and then to its backup center. Among them, the reference center is the closest center to a client and serves it under normal circumstances, while the backup center is the closest center to the reference center and serves the client when the reference center is out of service. In this paper, we propose a weighting-based tabu search algorithm called WTS for solving pNCP. WTS optimizes the pNCP by solving its decision subproblems with given assignment costs with an efficient swap-based neighborhood structure and a hierarchical penalty strategy for neighborhood evaluation. Extensive experimental studies on 413 benchmark instances demonstrate that WTS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the literature. Specifically, WTS improves 12 previous best known results and matches the optimal results for all remaining 401 ones in a much shorter time than other algorithms. More importantly, WTS reaches the lower bounds for 10 instances for the first time.

The relationships among the four major embryophyte lineages (mosses, liverworts, hornworts, vascular plants) and the timing of the origin of land plants are enigmatic problems in plant evolution. Here, we resolve the monophyly of bryophytes by improving taxon sampling of hornworts and eliminating the effect of synonymous substitutions. We then estimate the divergence time of crown embryophytes based on three fossil calibration strategies, and reveal that maximum calibration constraints have a major effect on estimating the time of origin of land plants. Moreover, comparison of priors and posteriors provides a guide for evaluating the optimal calibration strategy. By considering the reliability of fossil calibrations and the influences of molecular data, we estimate that land plants originated in the Precambrian (980–682 Ma), much older than widely recognized. Our study highlights the important contribution of molecular data when faced with contentious fossil evidence, and that fossil calibrations used in estimating the timescale of plant evolution require critical scrutiny.

With the rapid development of commercial credit mechanisms, credit funds have become fundamental in promoting the development of manufacturing corporations. However, large-scale, imbalanced credit application information poses a challenge to accurate bankruptcy predictions. A novel multi-stage ensemble model with fuzzy clustering and optimized classifier composition is proposed herein by combining the fuzzy clustering-based classifier selection method, the random subspace (RS)-based classifier composition method, and the genetic algorithm (GA)-based classifier compositional optimization method to achieve accuracy in predicting bankruptcy among corporates. To overcome the inherent inflexibility of traditional hard clustering methods, a new fuzzy clustering-based classifier selection method is proposed based on the mini-batch k-means algorithm to obtain the best performing base classifiers for generating classifier compositions. The RS-based classifier composition method was applied to enhance the robustness of candidate classifier compositions by randomly selecting several subspaces in the original feature space. The GA-based classifier compositional optimization method was applied to optimize the parameters of the promising classifier composition through the iterative mechanism of the GA. Finally, six datasets collected from the real world were tested with four evaluation indicators to assess the performance of the proposed model. The experimental results showed that the proposed model outperformed the benchmark models with higher predictive accuracy and efficiency.

Two sensory neurons usually display trial-by-trial spike-count correlations given the repeated representations of a stimulus. The effects of such response correlations on population-level sensory coding have been the focal contention in computational neuroscience over the past few years. In the meantime, multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) has become the leading analysis approach in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but the effects of response correlations among voxel populations remain underexplored. Here, instead of conventional MVPA analysis, we calculate linear Fisher information of population responses in human visual cortex (5 males 1 female) and hypothetically remove response correlations between voxels. We found that voxelwise response correlations generally enhance stimulus information, a result standing in stark contrast to the detrimental effects of response correlations reported in empirical neurophysiological studies. By voxel-encoding modeling, we further show that these two seemingly opposite effects actually can coexist within the primate visual system. Furthermore, we use principal component analysis to decompose stimulus information in population responses onto different principal dimensions in a high-dimensional representational space. Interestingly, response correlations simultaneously reduce and enhance information on higher- and lower-variance principal dimensions, respectively. The relative strength of the two antagonistic effects within the same computational framework produces the apparent discrepancy in the effects of response correlations in neuronal and voxel populations. Our results suggest that multivariate fMRI data contain rich statistical structures that are directly related to sensory information representation, and the general computational framework to analyze neuronal and voxel population responses can be applied in many types of neural measurements.SIGNIFICANT STATEMENT:Despite the vast research interest in the effect of spike-count noise correlations on population codes in neurophysiology, it remains unclear how the response correlations between voxels influence multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) in human imaging. We used an information-theoretic approach and showed that, unlike the detrimental effects of response correlations reported in neurophysiology, voxelwise response correlations generally improve sensory coding. We conducted a series of in-depth analyses and demonstrated that neuronal and voxel response correlations can coexist within the visual system and share some common computational mechanisms. These results shed new light on how the population codes of sensory information can be evaluated via different neural measurements.

Blackwater events are frequently reported over the world and become a serious environmental problem. However, the mechanisms of blackwater occurrence are not fully understood yet. This study simulated the process of blackwater with the combined pollution in an orthogonal experiment, which had 4 factors (TOC, TP, NH4+-N, and NO3--N) and 4 levels (None, Low, Middle, and High). Results showed that the process of water condition changes was divided into two parts, which were "exogenous" and "algae-derived" blackwater, and the influence of four different pollutants on the occurrence of the blackwater was ranked as follows: TOC > TP > NO3--N > NH4+-N. With the increase of organic matter addition, the anaerobic condition in water was prolonged and the concentration of Fe2+ had a significant increase. In addition, under the None phosphorus condition, the descent rates of DO and COD in the water were reduced, and the algae bloom was obviously deferred. Moreover, the addition of organic matter or phosphorus changed the microbial community structure and led to different water processes. Particularly, only on the condition of the high content of TOC and phosphorus, the diversity of sulfate-reducing bacteria (e.g., Pseudomonas, Paludibacter, and Bacteroides) increased significantly, which accounted for 51.4%, causing the significant production of S2- in the water. Water's lack of phosphorus showed a low rate of decomposition of organic matter, which might be the result of a considerable increase in the abundance of aerobic Trichococcus and Malikia. This study shows that organic matter and phosphorus have synergistic effect on blackwater occurrence. In the treatment of blackwater, the exogenous pollutant control should reduce the discharge of organic pollutants, and endogenous control should focus on phosphorus abatement and reduce nitrogen control.

To avoid the loss of catalytic material powder, a loaded catalytic material of TiO2 with basalt fiber as the carrier (TiO2@BF) was synthesized by an improved sol–gel method. The TiO2@BF was doped with different contents of N, Fe and Zn elements and was used to degrade rhodamine B (RhB) under ultraviolet light. The physical characterization analysis indicated that the co-doping of the N, Fe and Zn elements had the effects of reducing grain size, increasing sample surface area, and narrowing the electronic band gap. The electronic band gap of nitrogen–iron–zinc co-doped TiO2@BF (N/Fe/Zn_TiO2@BF) was 2.80 eV, which was narrower than that of TiO2@BF (3.11 eV). The degradation efficiency of RhB with N/Fe/Zn_TiO2@BF as a photocatalyst was 4.3 times that of TiO2@BF and its photocatalytic reaction was a first-order kinetic reaction. Quenching experiments suggested that the reactive species mainly include photoinduced holes (h+), superoxide radicals (˙O2−) and hydroxyl radicals (˙OH). In brief, this study provides a prospective loaded catalytic material and routine for the degradation of organic contaminants in water by a photocatalytic process.

Defocus blur detection (DBD), which has been widely applied to various fields, aims to detect the out-of-focus or in-focus pixels from a single image. Despite the fact that the deep learning based methods applied to DBD have outperformed the hand-crafted feature based methods, the performance cannot still meet our requirement. In this paper, a novel network is established for DBD. Unlike existing methods which only learn the projection from the in-focus part to the ground-truth, both in-focus and out-of-focus pixels, which are completely and symmetrically complementary, are taken into account. Specifically, two symmetric branches are designed to jointly estimate the probability of focus and defocus pixels, respectively. Due to their complementary constraint, each layer in a branch is affected by an attention obtained from another branch, effectively learning the detailed information which may be ignored in one branch. The feature maps from these two branches are then passed through a unique fusion block to simultaneously get the two-channel output measured by a complementary loss. Additionally, instead of estimating only one binary map from a specific layer, each layer is encouraged to estimate the ground truth to guide the binary map estimation in its linked shallower layer followed by a top-to-bottom combination strategy, gradually exploiting the global and local information. Experimental results on released datasets demonstrate that our proposed method remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms.

Needle biopsy (NB) procedures are important for the initial diagnosis of many types of cancer. However, the possibility of NB specimens being unable to provide diagnostic information, (i.e., non-diagnostic sampling) and the time-consuming histological evaluation process can cause delays in diagnoses that affect patient care.We aim to demonstrate the advantages of this label-free multimodal nonlinear optical imaging (NLOI) technique as a non-destructive point-of-procedure evaluation method for NB tissue cores, for the visualization and characterization of the tissue microenvironment.A portable, label-free, multimodal NLOI system combined second-harmonic generation (SHG) and third-harmonic generation and two- and three-photon autofluorescence (2PF, 3PF) microscopy. It was used for intraoperative imaging of fresh NB tissue cores acquired during canine cancer surgeries, which involved liver, lung, and mammary tumors as well as soft-tissue sarcoma; in total, eight canine patients were recruited. An added tissue culture chamber enabled the use of this NLOI system for longitudinal imaging of fresh NB tissue cores taken from an induced rat mammary tumor and healthy mouse livers.The intraoperative NLOI system was used to assess fresh canine NB specimens during veterinary cancer surgeries. Histology-like morphological features were visualized by the combination of four NLOI modalities at the point-of-procedure. The NLOI results provided quantitative information on the tissue microenvironment such as the collagen fiber orientation using Fourier-domain SHG analysis and metabolic profiling by optical redox ratio (ORR) defined by 2PF/(2PF + 3PF). The analyses showed that the canine mammary tumor had more randomly oriented collagen fibers compared to the tumor margin, and hepatocarcinoma had a wider distribution of ORR with a lower mean value compared to the liver fibrosis and the normal-appearing liver. Moreover, the loss of metabolic information during tissue degradation of fresh murine NB specimens was shown by overall intensity decreases in all channels and an increase of mean ORR from 0.94 (standard deviation 0.099) to 0.97 (standard deviation 0.077) during 1-h longitudinal imaging of a rat mammary tumor NB specimen. The tissue response to staurosporine (STS), an apoptotic inducer, from fresh murine liver NB specimens was also observed. The mean ORR decreased from 0.86 to 0.74 in the first 40 min and then increased to 0.8 during the rest of the hour of imaging, compared to the imaging results without the addition of STS, which showed a continuous increase of ORR from 0.72 to 0.75.A label-free, multimodal NLOI platform reveals microstructural and metabolic information of the fresh NB cores during intraoperative cancer imaging. This system has been demonstrated on animal models to show its potential to provide a more comprehensive histological assessment and a better understanding of the unperturbed tumor microenvironment. Considering tissue degradation, or loss of viability upon fixation, this intraoperative NLOI system has the advantage of immediate assessment of freshly excised tissue specimens at the point of procedure.

The plastid organelle is essential for many vital cellular processes and the growth and development of plants. The availability of a large number of complete plastid genomes could be effectively utilized to understand the evolution of the plastid genomes and phylogenetic relationships among plants. We comprehensively analyzed the plastid genomes of Viridiplantae comprising 3,654 taxa from 298 families and 111 orders and compared the genomic organizations in their plastid genomic DNA among major clades, which include gene gain/loss, gene copy number, GC content, and gene blocks. We discovered that some important genes that exhibit similar functions likely formed gene blocks, such as the psb family presumably showing co-occurrence and forming gene blocks in Viridiplantae. The inverted repeats (IRs) in plastid genomes have doubled in size across land plants, and their GC content is substantially higher than non-IR genes. By employing three different data sets [all nucleotide positions (nt123), only the first and second codon positions (nt12), and amino acids (AA)], our phylogenomic analyses revealed Chlorokybales + Mesostigmatales as the earliest-branching lineage of streptophytes. Hornworts, mosses, and liverworts forming a monophylum were identified as the sister lineage of tracheophytes. Based on nt12 and AA data sets, monocots, Chloranthales and magnoliids are successive sister lineages to the eudicots + Ceratophyllales clade. The comprehensive taxon sampling and analysis of different data sets from plastid genomes recovered well-supported relationships of green plants, thereby contributing to resolving some long-standing uncertainties in the plant phylogeny.

A recent theranostic approach to address Alzheimer's disease (AD) utilizes multifunctional targets that both tag and negate the toxicity of AD biomarkers. These compounds, which emit fluorescence with both an activation and a spectral shift in the presence of Aβ, were previously characterized with traditional fluorescence imaging for binary characterization. However, these multifunctional compounds have broad and dynamic emission spectra that are dependent on factors such as the local environment, presence of Aβ deposits, etc. Since quantitative multiphoton microscopy is sensitive to the binding dynamics of molecules, we characterized the performance of two such compounds, LS-4 and ZY-12-OMe, using Simultaneous Label-free Autofluorescence Multi-harmonic (SLAM) microscopy and Fast Optical Coherence, Autofluorescence Lifetime imaging and Second harmonic generation (FOCALS) microscopy. This study shows that the combination of quantitative multiphoton imaging with multifunctional tags for AD offers new insights into the interaction of these tags with AD biomarkers and the theranostic mechanisms.

Pose Guided Person Image Generation (PGPIG) is the task of transforming a person image from the source pose to a given target pose. Most of the existing methods only focus on the ill-posed source-to-target task and fail to capture reasonable texture mapping. To address this problem, we propose a novel Dual-task Pose Transformer Network (DPTN), which introduces an auxiliary task (i.e., source-to-source task) and exploits the dual-task correlation to promote the performance of PGPIG. The DPTN is of a Siamese structure, containing a source-to-source self-reconstruction branch, and a transformation branch for source-to-target generation. By sharing partial weights between them, the knowledge learned by the source-to-source task can effectively assist the source-to-target learning. Furthermore, we bridge the two branches with a proposed Pose Transformer Module (PTM) to adaptively explore the correlation between features from dual tasks. Such correlation can establish the fine-grained mapping of all the pixels between the sources and the targets, and promote the source texture transmission to enhance the details of the generated target images. Extensive experiments show that our DPTN outperforms state-of-the-arts in terms of both PSNR and LPIPS. In addition, our DPTN only contains 9.79 million parameters, which is significantly smaller than other approaches. Our code is available at: https://github.com/PangzeCheung/Dual-task-Pose-Transformer-Network., Accepted to CVPR2022

Label-free optical microscopy has matured as a noninvasive tool for biological imaging; yet, it is criticized for its lack of specificity, slow acquisition and processing times, and weak and noisy optical signals that lead to inaccuracies in quantification. We introduce FOCALS (Fast Optical Coherence, Autofluorescence Lifetime imaging, and Second harmonic generation) microscopy capable of generating NAD(P)H fluorescence lifetime, second harmonic generation (SHG), and polarization-sensitive optical coherence microscopy (OCM) images simultaneously. Multimodal imaging generates quantitative metabolic and morphological profiles of biological samples in vitro, ex vivo, and in vivo. Fast analog detection of fluorescence lifetime and real-time processing on a graphical processing unit enables longitudinal imaging of biological dynamics. We detail the effect of optical aberrations on the accuracy of FLIM beyond the context of undistorting image features. To compensate for the sample-induced aberrations, we implemented a closed-loop single-shot sensorless adaptive optics solution, which uses computational adaptive optics of OCM for wavefront estimation within 2 s and improves the quality of quantitative fluorescence imaging in thick tissues. Multimodal imaging with complementary contrasts improves the specificity and enables multidimensional quantification of the optical signatures in vitro, ex vivo, and in vivo, fast acquisition and real-time processing improve imaging speed by 4–40 × while maintaining enough signal for quantitative nonlinear microscopy, and adaptive optics improves the overall versatility, which enable FOCALS microscopy to overcome the limits of traditional label-free imaging techniques.

Port operators provide attractive port charges, and liner shipping companies make decisions on ship scheduling, in accordance with port charges. This paper proposes a liner ship scheduling problem ...

Objective To determine the diagnostic accuracy of optical coherence tomography (OCT) to assess surgical margins of canine soft tissue sarcoma (STS) and determine the influence of observer specialty and training. Study design Blinded clinical prospective study. Animals Twenty-five dogs undergoing surgical excision of STS. Methods In vivo and ex vivo surgical margins were imaged with OCT after tumor resection. Representative images and videos were used to generate a training presentation and data sets. These were completed by 16 observers of four specialties (surgery, radiology, pathology, and OCT researchers). Images and videos from data sets were classified as cancerous or noncancerous. Results The overall sensitivity and specificity were 88.2% and 92.8%, respectively, for in vivo tissues and 82.5% and 93.3%, respectively, for ex vivo specimens. The overall accurate classification for all specimens was 91.4% in vivo and 89.5% ex vivo. There was no difference in accuracy of interpretation of OCT imaging by observers of different specialties or experience levels. Conclusion Use of OCT to accurately assess surgical margins after STS excision was associated with a high sensitivity and specificity among various specialties. Personnel of all specialties and experience levels could effectively be trained to interpret OCT imaging. Clinical significance Optical coherence tomography can be used by personnel of different specialty experience levels and from various specialties to accurately identify canine STS in vivo and ex vivo after a short training session. These encouraging results provide evidence to justify further research to assess the ability of OCT to provide real-time assessments of surgical margins and its applicability to other neoplasms.

This paper proposes an innovative energy interacting unit (“We-Energy”) with the characteristic of full duplex trading mode. In order to manage all the We-Energies in an optimal way, a new integrated energy management framework based on a noncooperative game is performed so as to allocate the energy demands of each WE such that the benefit of each WE can be maximized. To overcome the impact of the randomness and inaccurate information of renewable energy sources, Nash Q-learning algorithm is applied for computation of game equilibrium under the unknown environment. The novelty of the proposed algorithms is related to the incorporation of the continuous action space into the discrete adaptive action set and combined the equilibrium transfer to improve the efficiency of the algorithm. Simulation studies of modified IMS confirm that it has a better performance with the desired equilibrium strategy and convergence speed.

Different transportation modes interrelate in intermodal transportation. Previous researches on intermodal transportation mainly investigate policy, network design, cargo routing or drayage operati...

Green plants (Viridiplantae) are ancient photosynthetic organisms that thrive both in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, greatly contributing to the changes in global climates and ecosystems. Significant progress has been made toward understanding the origin and evolution of green plants, and plant biologists have arrived at the consensus that green plants first originated in marine deep-water environments and later colonized fresh water and dry land. The origin of green plants, colonization of land by plants and rapid radiation of angiosperms are three key evolutionary events during the long history of green plants. However, the comprehensive understanding of evolutionary features and molecular innovations that enabled green plants to adapt to complex and changeable environments are still limited. Here, we review current knowledge of phylogenetic relationships and divergence times of green plants, and discuss key morphological innovations and distinct drivers in the evolution of green plants. Ultimately, we highlight fundamental questions to advance our understanding of the phenotypic novelty, environmental adaptation, and domestication of green plants.

The shortcomings of established input methods for Augmented Reality (AR) head-mounted displays (HMDs) motivate us to investigate the use of AR HMDs with smartphones and smartwatches to improve AR interaction in physical tasks. However, it is unclear whether the cross-device interaction interfaces are efficient for AR systems on physical tasks because the physical tasks can break the interaction flow. In this work, we conducted a user study to explore this. The user study consists of three subtasks, respectively requiring one of the three representative user interface (UI) controls (buttons, sliders, or text input). We implemented them with mid-air gestures, a smartphone, and a smartwatch. We compared the three interfaces and found that the smartphone and the smartwatch interaction interfaces have greater usability, provide a better user experience, and have lower workloads than the mid-air gesture interface. However, there is no significant difference in terms of efficiency for simple interactions. We discuss the limitations of this research and directions for future work. Refereed/Peer-reviewed