Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electrochemical Sensing in 3D Cell Culture Models: New Tools for Developing Better Cancer Diagnostics and Treatments

Simple Summary Over the last few years, there has been a scientific revolution with the appearance of organ-on-a-chip models that overcome the limitations of conventional 2D systems, while reproducing more faithfully the in vivo features of tissues and organs. The integration of sensors in these systems allows the monitoring of a variety of parameters that could be relevant for the study of diseases. Electrochemical biosensors are ideal candidates for this integration, since they can be miniaturised and are very reliable in real-time continuous measurements of a large panoply of relevant biomarkers. In the context of cancer, these electrochemical cancer-on-a-chip models have the potential to become essential tools for the study of cancer development and drug efficacy. Abstract Currently, conventional pre-clinical in vitro studies are primarily based on two-dimensional (2D) cell culture models, which are usually limited in mimicking the real three-dimensional (3D) physiological conditions, cell heterogeneity, cell to cell interaction, and extracellular matrix (ECM) present in living tissues. Traditionally, animal models are used to mimic the 3D environment of tissues and organs, but they suffer from high costs, are time consuming, bring up ethical concerns, and still present many differences when compared to the human body. The applications of microfluidic-based 3D cell culture models are advantageous and useful as they include 3D multicellular model systems (MCMS). These models have demonstrated potential to simulate the in vivo 3D microenvironment with relatively low cost and high throughput. The incorporation of monitoring capabilities in the MCMS has also been explored to evaluate in real time biophysical and chemical parameters of the system, for example temperature, oxygen, pH, and metabolites. Electrochemical sensing is considered as one of the most sensitive and commercially adapted technologies for bio-sensing applications. Amalgamation of electrochemical biosensing with cell culture in microfluidic devices with improved sensitivity and performance are the future of 3D systems. Particularly in cancer, such models with integrated sensing capabilities can be crucial to assess the multiple parameters involved in tumour formation, proliferation, and invasion. In this review, we are focusing on existing 3D cell culture systems with integrated electrochemical sensing for potential applications in cancer models to advance diagnosis and treatment. We discuss their design, sensing principle, and application in the biomedical area to understand the potential relevance of miniaturized electrochemical hybrid systems for the next generation of diagnostic platforms for precision medicine.
A new approach to jet phenomena gas entrainment and recirculation in a bidimensional spouted fluidized bed

Although gas jets injected into fluid beds fluctuate, previous models assumed that they were steady. A new model separates the bed in a zone in which the jet is never present and a zone in which the jet fluctuates (a point in this zone will alternately be in the jet and in the emulsion phase). Its predictions matched the rate of gas entrainment into the jet and the rate of gas recirculation between emulsion and jet which were observed in a large 2 dimensional bed equipped with a “V” grid and a central jet. Des modeles anterieurs ont laisse supposer que les jets de gaz injectes dans des lits fluides sont stables alors qu'ils fluctuent. Un nouveau modele separe le lit en une zone dans laquelle le jet n'est jamais present et une zone dans laquelle le jet fluctue (un point dans cette zone sera alternativement dans le jet et dans la phase d'emulsion). Les predictions du modele sont en accord avec la vitesse d'entraǐnement du gaz dans le jet et la vitesse de recirculation du gaz centre l'emulsion et le jet. Ces deux vitesses ont ete observees dans un grand lit bidimensionnel avec une grille en “V” et un jet central.
Evaluation of Contact Force between Aneurysm Model and Coil for Embolization of Intracranial Aneurysms

Abstract Objective To ensure safe coil embolization for intracranial aneurysms, it is important to investigate the contact force between the coil and the aneurysm wall. However, it is unclear how the catheter tip position and the diameter of the secondary loop of the coil influence the contact force. In this study, we measured the contact force between a coil and an aneurysm biomodel under different conditions. Methods A commercially available coil was inserted through a microcatheter into a silicone rubber aneurysm model at a constant speed (1 mm/s) using an automatic stage, and the contact force between the coil and the aneurysm wall was measured by a force sensor attached on the aneurysm model. The inner diameter of the spherical aneurysm was 5 mm. The effects of varying the position of the catheter tip (near dome, center, near neck) and the diameter of the secondary coil (4.5 mm) were evaluated. Results When the catheter tip was inserted more deeply into the aneurysm (especially near the dome), the contact force increased. The contact force also increased as the secondary coil diameter was increased with the catheter tip near and in the center of the dome. Conclusion These results suggest that the catheter tip position and the secondary coil diameter affect the contact force. In particular, the contact force should be considered large with the catheter tip near the dome to ensure safe coil deployment.
LTE Signal Propagation Model-based Fingerprint DB Generation for Positioning in Emergency Rescue Situation

Fingerprinting method is useful when estimating the location of a requestor based on LTE signals in an urban area. To do this, it is necessary to acquire location-based signals everywhere in the service area for fingerprint DB generation in advance. However, there may be signal uncollected area within a wide service area, which may cause a problem that the positioning accuracy of the requestor is low. In order to solve this problem, in this paper, signal propagation modeling is performed based on the obtained measurements, and based on this model, the signal information in the non-acquisition region is estimated. To this end, techniques for modeling signal propagation according to a method using measurements are proposed. The performance of the proposed techniques is verified based on the measurements obtained on a test bed selected as Seocho-gu, Seoul. As a result, it can be seen that signal propagation modeling performed based on multidivision segmented measurements has the most performance improvement.
FIRST ENVIRONMENTAL DNA (EDNA) RECORD OF CENTRAL AMAZON IN A FLOODPLAIN LAKE: EXTRACTION METHOD SELECTION AND VALIDATION / PRIMEIRO REGISTRO DE DNA AMBIENTAL (EDNA) DA AMAZÔNIA CENTRAL EM UM LAGO DE VÁRZEA: SELEÇÃO E VALIDAÇÃO DE MÉTODO DE EXTRAÇÃO

In recent years, environmental DNA (eDNA) has emerged as an effective method for detecting aquatic organisms. The current study tested a method of DNA extraction from water samples from Central Amazonian floodplain lake. Water collections were performed in a floodplain lake on Paciência Island, on the Solimões River (Amazon Basin, Brazil) during the high water period. Seven commercial DNA extraction methods/kits were tested with samples collected from Lake Cacau. After quantification, eDNA samples were amplified with 12S and 16S mitochondrial gene universal primers. The DNeasy Blood & Tissue kit (Qiagen), with modifications developed during the current study (adapt 03), gave the best overall result showing expected gene amplification, and intense agarose gel banding. eDNA concentrations ranged from 0.00 to 22.90 ng/µL for the other methods, with either lower intensity of the amplicon size to target gene correspondence when compared to that obtained with the DNeasy Blood & Tissue kit adapt 03 method, or there was an absence of amplification.The concentration of eDNA extracted from the lake sample was 2.68ng/µL. Prochilodus nigricans and Potamorhina altamazonica genomic DNA (gDNA) samples were extracted for use as a positive controls. The 12S and 16S genes from eDNA were amplified and sequenced with next generation Sequencing (NGS). Using a metabarcode approach, we used the 12S (12S-V5) and 16S (L2513/H2714) minibarcode universal primers to detect fish species DNA traces present in water samples from the Cacau lake. The NGS produced 18 and 492,454 12S and 16S minibarcode readings, respectively, for three taxonomic groups (Actinopterygii, Mammalia and Squamata). Adding the two genes, a total of 492,472.00 readings, with 15 readings with 12S and 4,431.082 readings with 16S for fish. Fish (Actinopterygii) represented 83.33% and 0.60% (three Orders, five families and five genus identified according to BLASTN), mammals had 11.11% and 99.40% and reptiles with 5.56% and 0.00% for the total readings of the 12S and 16S respectively, with more than 97% similarity to NCBI-available reference sequences. sets a milestone in the methodology of DNA extraction from floodplain lake, and shows the method can be used to monitor Amazon basin ichthyofauna, as it was possible to detect the presence of fish species DNA in collected water samples.
Self‐avoiding walks with span limitations. I. The mean square end‐to‐end distance

Self‐avoiding walks on the simple cubic lattice of lengths up to 11 steps were exactly enumerated. The mean square end‐to‐end distance and its mean square components were recorded as a function of the span separation along one principle Cartesian axis. The molecular weight dependence for narrow spans (thin slabs—up to two lattice spacings) obeys that of a two‐dimensional walk as conjectured by Wall et al. As the slab thickness increases, one encounters a dimensionality transition in the behavior of the mean separations which is compared with similar transitions observed for the self‐avoiding walk in the presence of one interacting barrier. For thick slabs the behavior is three dimensional.
Numerical Analysis on Heat Transfer Characteristics of Looped Minichannel Using Phase-Change VOF Method

This study develops a numerical simulation of liquid-vapor two phase flows accompanied with the phase change. In the developed simulation, the VOF (Volume of Fluid) method is adopted for tracking the liquid-vapor interface and the temperature recovery method for estimating mass transfer due to the phase change. Firstly, the numerical simulation is performed for film-boiling and film-condensation problems for validating the evaporation (boiling) and condensation calculation. The numerical result for the film-boiling problem is in good agreement with the Berenson’s semi-empirical correlation in terms of the heat transfer coefficient. Moreover, the numerical results for the film-condensation problem are also in good agreement with the theoretical analysis by Nusselt in terms of the film growth rate and the heat transfer coefficient. These have confirmed the reliability of the developed simulation. Then, the developed simulation is applied to investigate the heat transfer characteristics of the heat transport device with a pump-driven looped minichannel. The result reveals a new interesting feature of the minichannel heat device.Copyright © 2013 by ASME
Remote Heart Rate Measurement From Near-Infrared Videos Based on Joint Blind Source Separation With Delay-Coordinate Transformation

Noncontact and low-cost heart rate (HR) measurement based on imaging photoplethysmography (iPPG) technology is commonly desired for health care monitoring. However, the usually employed red–green–blue (RGB) cameras are sensitive to illumination variations and cannot work under dark situations. In this study, we propose a novel framework of applying joint blind source separation with delay-coordinate transformation (DCT-JBSS) to evaluate HR from a single-channel near-infrared (NIR) camera in dark situation. First, three facial regions of interest (ROIs) are determined by face detection technique and a single-channel signal is constructed through a frame-by-frame pixel averaging within each ROI. Second, each single-channel signal is transformed into time-delayed multichannel signal through DCT and then treated as a separate ROI signal set. Third, the three ROI signal sets are simultaneously processed by JBSS to derive the underlying shared HR source component vector (SCV), which is usually ordered the first and has the highest correlation across each signal set. Finally, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) is applied to the HR SCV and the corresponding dominant frequency (within the range from 0.7 to 2.5 Hz) with the highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is determined as the target HR frequency. The proposed framework, as well as several other typical iPPG methods, is validated on public DROZY and MR-NIRP databases. The proposed method achieves the best performance, providing a probable way to widen the application of remote and continuous HR measurement during night conditions.
State of the art preliminary literature review: Sustainability and waste reporting capabilities in management systems

Inspired by previous studies research gap findings and limitations in management system functions to produce sustainabilityrelated reporting authors set a goal to map the current academic literature in the context of waste management systems. The method chosen for the work was a systematic literature review, focusing on the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The authors found a total of 115 unique publications from the selected databases, which were filtered 28 contributing studies. With these studies, this study found that most of the publications are journals and almost half of the work has been published in the last 3 years. Additionally, sustainability and waste management reporting related literature seem to enjoy wide appreciation among the peers, indicated by a high number of references these publications had gathered. As an overall finding, the specific research area of waste management process quantified data reporting seems really young overall and needs additional research with multiple research gaps clearly waiting for follow-up research to pinpoint the specific areas to contribute in the near future.
Polarimetric SAR Decomposition by Incorporating a Rotated Dihedral Scattering Model

In this letter, we propose a new scattering model to describe the polarimetric scattering information of the real part of $T_{23}$ in the coherency matrix. To achieve this goal, by combining the dihedral corner reflector scattering model and the polarimetric orientation angle (POA), a rotated dihedral scattering model is proposed. The proposed model is embedded into Singh’s six-component decomposition model, and we further develop a seven-component decomposition model. The proposed method was validated by polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data sets acquired by the ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 and AIRSAR systems. The results show that, compared with the existing decomposition methods, the proposed method has a superior ability to distinguish oriented buildings from vegetation.
Communication-and-Computing Latency Minimization for UAV-Enabled Virtual Reality Delivery Systems

In this paper, we propose a low-latency virtual reality (VR) delivery system where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base station (U-BS) is deployed to deliver VR content from a cloud server to multiple ground VR users. Each VR input data requested by the VR users can be either projected at the U-BS before transmission or processed locally at each user. Popular VR input data is cached at the U-BS to further reduce backhaul latency from the cloud server. For this system, we design a low-complexity iterative algorithm to minimize the maximum communications and computing latency among all VR users subject to the computing, caching and transmit power constraints, which is guaranteed to converge. Numerical results indicate that our proposed algorithm can achieve a lower latency compared to other benchmark schemes. Moreover, we observe that the maximum latency mainly comes from communication latency when the bandwidth resource is limited, while it is dominated by computing latency when computing capacity is low. In addition, we find that caching is helpful to reduce latency.
Reconfigurable Bandpass Filter With Wide-Range Bandwidth and Frequency Control

In this brief, a novel reconfigurable bandpass filter with adjustable center frequency and wide bandwidth reconfiguration is presented. The proposed bandpass filter is formed by cascading tunable high-pass (HP) and low-pass (LP) filter sections directly. Both the operating frequency and bandwidth of the reconfigurable bandpass filter can be reconfigured independently by tuning the frequencies of the band edges, which are controlled by the cut-off frequency of the HP and LP filter sections. Finally, the proposed filter is designed, fabricated and measured for validation purposes. The measured results demonstrate that the bandwidth can be tuned from 180 MHz to 1390 MHz at the fixed center frequency with tuning ratio up to 7.8:1. Center-frequency agility is also verified with different constant absolute bandwidth of 400 MHz, 600 MHz, and 800 MHz The measured results show that proposed filter possesses the advantages of simple implementation, wide bandwidth tuning range, wide frequency tuning range, and compact size.
Investigation of Parallel Data Processing Using Hybrid High Performance CPU + GPU Systems and CUDA Streams

The paper investigates parallel data processing in a hybrid CPU + GPU(s) system using multiple CUDA streams for overlapping communication and computations. This is crucial for eﬃcient processing of data, in particular incoming data stream processing that would naturally be forwarded using multiple CUDA streams to GPUs. Performance is evaluated for various compute time to host-device communication time ratios, numbers of CUDA streams, for various numbers of threads managing computations on GPUs. Tests also reveal beneﬁts of using CUDA MPS for overlapping communication and computations when using multiple processes. Furthermore, using standard memory allocation on a GPU and Uniﬁed Memory versions are compared, the latter including programmer added prefetching. Performance of a hybrid CPU + GPU version as well as scaling across multiple GPUs are demonstrated showing good speed-ups of the approach. Finally, the performance per power consumption of selected conﬁgurations are presented for various numbers of streams and various relative performances of GPUs and CPUs.
Silicon dioxide films deposited by electron cyclotron resonance plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition

Thin films of silicon dioxide were deposited at low substrate temperatures (<375 °C) using electron cyclotron resonance plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition. The deposition parameters studied included substrate temperature and radio frequency substrate bias. The deposited material was compared to thermally grown SiO2, through its etch rate in a buffered hydrofluoric solution, index of refraction, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and Rutherford backscattering spectrometry. Through the application of rf substrate bias the deposited material properties approached that of thermally grown oxide. The feed to the substrate chamber was 40 sccm of a 2.0% silane in He. The large quantity of He in the chamber is credited with making the material more thermal‐like.
120-GHz Wideband I/Q Receiver Based on Baseband Equalizing Technique

In this study, we examined a 120-GHz wideband I/Q receiver based on a baseband equalizing amplifier using 40-nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. For low-power operation, the receiver chipset is integrated based on the direct conversion structure. To achieve high data-rate wireless communication, the receiver utilizes a frequency equalizing technique between the low noise amplifier (LNA)-mixer and baseband amplifier. With the proposed technique, the estimated overall bandwidth is increased as wider as 5 GHz. The 3-dB conversion gain bandwidth is 26 GHz, noise figure (NF) is 10.8 dB, and dc power consumption is 153.4 mW. For the dual-mode operation, the variable gain of the baseband amplifier is applied, and the conversion gain of the proposed receiver is 28.2 dB for the high gain mode and 14.8 dB for the low gain mode. The chip area of the receiver is 1.5 mm2. The proposed receiver exhibits a maximum data-rate of 12.5, 16, and 16 Gb/s for binary phase shift keying (BPSK), quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), and 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM), respectively.
Effects of Large-Scale Land Acquisition on the Livelihood Outcomes of Smallholder Farmers in the Pru District of Ghana

The study focuses on the effects of large-scale land acquisition on the livelihood outcomes of smallholder farmers in the Pru district. This study therefore went beyond establishing the relationship between large-scale land investment and farmers’ livelihood to provide an in-depth analysis on the effects that befalls on farming households’ livelihood outcomes as a result of large-scale land investment activities. The study employed a mixed method approach as it used both qualitative and quantitative methods and further employed multi-stage and cluster sampling procedures to select the Pru district, the study communities and the respondents. The study administered 332 questionnaires, conducted 14 Focus Group Discussions (FGD). The Pearson correlation results showed that large-scale land acquisition has a significant effect on employment, food security, income levels and healthcare but not nutrition of the smallholder farming households in the Pru district of the Bono East region. The Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.129, 0.080 and 0.128 suggested the effects of large-scale land acquisition on employment, food security and healthcare. To restore farming households to normalcy, this study strongly recommends that Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) must formulate by-laws to ensure that large-scale land investors employ people from the host communities to participate in projects. As part of the recommendations, compensation package in the form of start-up capital sufficient to guarantee the livelihood of farming households should be given to households losing farm lands as a result of largescale land acquisition.
SUGGESTIBILITY IS NOT CORRELATED WITH NORMAL PERCEPTUAL HALLUCINATIONS, BUT IS NEGATIVELY CORRELATED WITH PERCEPTUAL DISCRIMINATION

Non-veridical perception in the form of reporting the perception of objects actually not presented has been observed also in neurotypical subjects. This phenomenon of ‘normal hallucinations’ substantially depends on expectations formed by learned contextual cues and associations as priors and is interpreted as a result of the mechanisms of predictive coding. We explored whether perceptual associations formed experimentally by inter-stimulus associations are related to the suggestibility trait of the perceivers. No significant correlation was found between Gudjonsson’s Suggestibility scale total scores and subjective clarity of the hallucinatory experiences. There was a small positive correlation between shift and the level of clarity of illusory experiences. Significant negative correlation was found between the level of suggestibility and correctness of perception of the actually present stimuli.