bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Modeling and Simulation of Shoulder-Humerus Complex via Multibody Dynamics for a Walking Elder Using a Cane
Authors: Duan Shanzhong (Shawn) 
Published: February 2017

The shoulder is a very mobile joint. Because of the mobility, the shoulder is considered to have an inherent weakness. The joint consists of three major bones, the clavicle, scapula and humerus. These bones are more commonly called the collarbone, shoulder blade, and upper arm bone, respectively. Collectively, the shoulder is referred to as the scapula-humeral-clavicle complex. The joint between the humerus and scapula is a ball-socket joint. The joint between the scapula and acromial process allows for some movement but is primarily fixed. The ligaments, tendons, and muscles surround the shoulder to provide stability, movement, and limit the amount of rotation.
In this paper, a multibody dynamics model of the shoulder-upper arm complex is presented. Three major bones clavicle, scapula, and Humerus in the shoulder-upper arm complex are represented by rigid bodies. The soft tissues such as tendons, ligaments, and muscles are modeled as springs and actuators respectively attached to the rigid bodies. The joints between the bones are expressed as ideal kinematic joints. Kane’s equations are then used to derive equations of motion of this multibody system. Based on the model, an elder who uses a cane with his or her shoulder-upper arm complex force to support his or her upper body weight during walking is analyzed. Commercial computer software is used to create the multibody shoulder-upper arm complex computational model and then carry out simulation. The model may be utilized in motion analysis of elderly people and sports medicine to study fatigue mechanism and prevent injuries of the shoulder-upper arm complex.
Development of an Active Biomimetic-Controlled Transfemoral Knee Prosthesis
Authors: Bernal-Torres Mario G. , Medellín-Castillo Hugo I. , Arellano-González Juan C. 
Published: February 2017

Commercial available knee prostheses are still limited because most of them comprise passive elements that store and deliver energy during the gait cycle, but without providing additional energy. This inability to provide additional energy affects the performance of passive prostheses, which in some cases demands up to 60% of additional metabolic energy to perform a gait cycle. Recent research works have focused on the design of active knee prostheses, including the development and implementation of control strategies such as electromyographic (EMG) signals. However, the results of such implementations reveal that these control strategies are still limited because of the relatively long time response and inaccurate movements.
This paper presents the design of a new biomimetic-controlled knee prosthesis for transfemoral amputation. The aim is to contribute to the development of simple and effective active knee prostheses. The proposed prosthesis consists of a polycentric mechanism obtained from the body-guidance kinematics synthesis of a four bar linkage. This synthesis is based on the natural movements of the human knee, taking into account the shortening effect of the leg during the walking process to avoid trips. The prosthetic knee mimics the human motion of the healthy leg by means of an echo-control strategy. An experimental prototype has been implemented and tested on a workbench. The experimental results have demonstrated the usability of the proposed biomimetic active knee prosthesis.
Electrically Addressable Hierarchical Carbon Nanotube Forests
Authors: Davis Benjamin , Muralidharan Nitin , Pint Cary , Maschmann Matthew R. 
Published: February 2017

Hierarchical, branched carbon nanotube (CNT) forest assemblies were created by synthesizing a second generation of CNTs directly from the alumina-coated surface of a parent CNT forest. First, a parent CNT forest generation was synthesized using floating catalyst chemical vapor deposition (CVD) in which gaseous argon and hydrogen are flowed into a tube furnace, along with a controlled flow rate of ferrocene nanoparticles suspended in xylene solvent. Next, a thin alumina coating was applied to the parent CNT forest using atomic layer deposition (ALD). The ALD process pulses alternating gases of water vapor and trimethylaluminum (TMA) and is repeated for 100 cycles, yielding a 10nm coating. This coating adheres to the outer walls of the larger CNTs and serves as a supportive surface to enable the growth of a second CNT generation. Finally, a second CNT generation was synthesized from the parent CNT forest using a floating-catalyst CVD method similar to that used for the parent generation. The relatively low areal density of the parent CNT generation allows for gas-phase additive processing (i.e. ALD and floating catalyst CVD) to occur deep within the volume of the original parent CNT forest.
Transmission electron microscopy analysis of the hierarchical CNT forests shows that second-generation CNTs nucleate and grow from the alumina-coated walls of the parent generation rather than nucleating from the original growth substrate, as has been previously reported. Further, physical confinement of the second-generation catalyst particle on the external surface of the parent generation CNTs (28 nm average diameter) leads to small-diameter CNTs (8 nm average) for the second generation. Further, radial breathing modes are detected by Raman spectroscopy, indicating single-walled or few-walled CNTs are synthesized in the second generation.
The hierarchical forests exhibit many desirable properties compared to single generation forests. Because the second generation CNTs within the interstitial regions of the parent CNT forest, they increase the structural rigidity of the cellular CNT forest morphology, increasing in mechanical stiffness by ten-fold, relative to the parent CNT forest. Further, we demonstrate that electrical continuity between the CNT generations is retained. Because a thin alumina buffer layer exists between CNT generations, electrical continuity is not guaranteed. Cyclic voltammetry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy are used to characterize the electrical resistance elements within the hierarchical forest. This hierarchical structure offers a new avenue to tailor the performance of CNT forests and offers performance enhancements for applications in thermal interfaces, electrical interconnects, dry adhesives and energy generation and storage.
Comparative Study of Analytical Expressions to Estimate the Deep Drawing Force of Cylindrical and Rectangular Parts
Authors: Rivas Menchi Aarón , Medellín Castillo Hugo I. , de Lange Dirk F. , García Zugasti Pedro de J. 
Published: February 2017

The deep drawing process has been widely used in the industry because it eliminates costly operations such as welding and machining. However, there are many parameters involved that affect the quality of the final products. One of the main parameters of the deep drawing process is the maximum deep drawing force (DDF) or drawing load, which is the maximum force required to perform a particular deep drawing operation. This maximum DDF is needed to define the required capacity of the press, and to calculate the deep drawing work and the process efficiency. Several analytical expressions to estimate the maximum DDF have been proposed in the literature, particularly for cylindrical parts. However, few research works have focused on analyzing the prediction performance of these expressions.
In this paper, the performance of different analytical expressions to estimate the maximum DDF of cylindrical and rectangular parts, is evaluated and compared. Initially, several expressions proposed by different researches for the maximum DDF of cylindrical parts are presented. Then, these expressions are transformed into new expressions for the maximum DDF of rectangular parts by using different concepts of equivalency, such as the equivalent diameter concept. Finally, the prediction performance of all the expressions for both cylindrical and rectangular deep drawing is analysed and compared using experimental data from the literature. The performance is evaluated in terms of the prediction error. The results have suggested that the analytical expressions involving the largest number of parameters have a superior prediction performance than the analytical expressions involving less parameters.
A Correlative CFD Study Between Recirculation Area and FPM in VHC Design
Authors: Oliveira Ricardo F. , Teixeira Senhorinha F. , Marques Helena Maria Cabral , Teixeira José Carlos 
Published: February 2017

A major part of asthma treatment is made by the use of preventive inhalation drugs. The Pressurized Metered-Dose Inhalator (pMDI) has been the backbone device for this treatment, due to its simplicity, portability and widely acceptance. But no device comes without its limitations, and pMDI is hard to handle properly by elders and children < 5 years old, resulting in reduced amount of drug to the patient lungs. Add-on devices (e.g. spacers) were developed to mitigate the need for coordination and reduce the oral/throat deposition, namely the Valved Holding Chambers (VHC). These devices are incorporated with a one-way valve and a chamber that allows the spray droplets to rapidly reduce their size upon release on a stagnated and confined flow. The VHC main ability, in terms of efficiency, is to reduce the coarse fraction (i.e. particles with diameter > 4.7μm) of the plume by impaction and allow the fine fraction to be inhaled by the patient.
The VHC geometry will play a very importance role in the entrapment of small drug particles (i.e. fine fraction). The hypothesis proposed by this study is that a small particle has more probability to be trapped in geometries with higher recirculation areas (and stagnation zones). These macro vortices will cause a particle with small Stokes number to be entrapped; to assess this hypothesis a numerical study was modelled.
The numerical study was carried out on an idealized geometry of a VHC device, using a 2D axisymmetric approach. Different coordinates for a “corner” point, were tested. FLUENT® was used to obtain the unsteady numerical solution, meshes were generated using Meshing® software from ANSYS®. Once the flow field is stabilized (around 0.6s), a pMDI spray was injected into the domain during 0.1 seconds and the simulation continued until perform 4 seconds. The simulation takes into account the vaporization of the HFA-134a propellant present in the droplets of spray and a User Defined Function (UDF) for modeling the particle -wall interaction.
The post-processing of the results included the calculation of the recirculation area and the Fine Particle Mass (FPM) that exits the domain.
Results show that the percentage of recirculation area decreases linearly with the increase of axial position of the corner point, and rapidly increases with the radial displacement. FPM results are not so linear; nevertheless they show opposite behavior to the recirculation area.
Additionally, results show that high recirculation area reduces the amount of FPM emitted. Data can be correlated through a power function (FPM = 101.805*Area−0.244; R2 = 0.460). Results are more strongly correlated for lower values of radial displacement.
The results seem to corroborate the hypothesis that smaller particles tend to be entrapped by recirculation areas.
Investigation of Hydrophobic Nanoporous Particle Liquids for Impact Protection
Authors: Hsu Yi , Liu Yingtao 
Published: February 2017

Recently, the development of hydrophobic nanoporous liquids has drawn increased attention, especially for the applications of energy absorption and impact protection. Although significant amount of research has been conducted to synthesis and characterize materials to protect structures from impact damage, the tradition methods needed to convert kinetic energy to other forms, such as heat and cell bulking, during impact protection. Due to their high energy absorption efficiency, hydrophobic nanoporous particle liquids are one of the most attractive impact mitigation materials. When impacted, such particles directly trap liquid molecules inside the non-wetting surface of nanopores in the particles. The captured impact energy is simply stored temporarily and isolated from the original energy transmission path.
In this paper we investigate the energy absorption efficiency of multiple nanoporous particles and liquids. Inorganic nanoporous silica nanoparticles are investigated as the hydrophobic materials. Nanoporous particle liquids are prepared by dispersing the nano-materials in deionized water. The effects of small molecular promoters, such as methanol and ethanol, on energy absorption efficiency, are studied in this paper. The energy absorption efficiency of these liquids is experimentally characterized using an Instron mechanical testing frame and in-house develop stainless steel hydraulic cylinder system under quasi-static load conditions.
A Sensitivity Study of the Porcine Head Subjected to Bump Impact
Authors: Thompson Kimberly A. , Sokolow Adam C. , Ivancik Juliana , Zhang Timothy G. , Mermagen William H. , Satapathy Sikhanda S. 
Published: February 2017

Understanding load transfer to the human brain is a complex problem that has been a key subject of recent investigations [4–6]. Because the porcine is a gyrencephalic species, having greater structural and functional similarities to the human brain than other lower species outlined in the literature, it is commonly chosen as a surrogate for human brain studies [7]. Consequently, we have chosen to use a porcine model in this work. To understand stress wave transfer to and through the brain, it is important to fully characterize the nature of the impact (i.e. source, location, and speed) as well as the response of the constituent tissues under such impact. We suspect the material and topology of these tissues play an important role in their response.
In this paper, we report on a numerical study assessing the sensitivity of model parameters for a 6-month old Gottingen mini-pig model, under bump loading. In this study, 2D models are used for computational simplicity. While a 3D model is more realistic in nature, a 2D representation is still valuable in that it can provide trends on parameter sensitivity that can help steer the development of the 3D model. In this work, we investigate the variation of skull and skin thickness, evaluate material variability of the skull, and consider the effects of nasal cavities on load transfer. Eighty simulations are computed in LS-DYNA and analyzed in MATLAB. The results of this study will provide useful knowledge on the necessary components and parameters of the porcine model and therefore provide more confidence in the analysis. This is an essential first step as we look toward bridging the gap between correlates of injury in animal and human models.
Clonal Complexity in Mycobacterium tuberculosis Can Hamper Diagnostic Procedures
Authors: Pérez-Lago Laura , Herranz Marta , Navarro Yurena , Ruiz Serrano María Jesús , Miralles Pilar , Bouza Emilio , García-de-Viedma Darío 
Published: February 2017

ABSTRACTClonal complexity is increasingly accepted inMycobacterium tuberculosisinfection, including mixed infections by ≥2 strains, which usually occur in settings with a high burden of tuberculosis and/or a high risk of overexposure to infected patients. Mixed infections can hamper diagnostic procedures; obtaining an accurate antibiogram is difficult when the susceptibility patterns of the strains differ. Here, we show how mixed infections can also prove challenging for other diagnostic procedures, even outside settings where mixed infections are traditionally expected. We show how an unnoticed mixed infection in an HIV-positive patient diagnosed in Madrid, Spain, with differences in the representativeness of the coinfecting strains in different sputum samples, markedly complicated the resolution of a laboratory cross-contamination false positivity alert.
Establishment and Use of Epidemiological Cutoff Values for Molds and Yeasts by Use of the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute M57 Standard
Authors: Lockhart Shawn R. , Ghannoum Mahmoud A. , Alexander Barbara D. 
Published: February 2017

ABSTRACT
Breakpoints are used to predict whether an antifungal agent will be clinically effective against a particular fungal isolate. They are based on a combination of MIC values, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic values, and clinical outcome data. For many fungus-antifungal combinations, these data might never be available. For these combinations, epidemiological cutoff values (ECVs) provide a methodology for categorizing isolates as either wild type (WT) or non-WT. In this review, we define ECVs, explain how they are generated using the CLSI methodology in standard M57, and describe how they can be used in clinical practice.
The Long Noncoding RNA NEAT1 Exerts Antihantaviral Effects by Acting as Positive Feedback for RIG-I Signaling
Authors: Ma Hongwei , Han Peijun , Ye Wei , Chen Hesong , Zheng Xuyang , Cheng Linfeng , Zhang Liang , Yu Lan , Wu Xing'an , Xu Zhikai , Lei Yingfeng , Zhang Fanglin 
Published: February 2017

ABSTRACT

Hantavirus infection, which causes zoonotic diseases with a high mortality rate in humans, has long been a global public health concern. Over the past decades, accumulating evidence suggests that long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) play key regulatory roles in innate immunity. However, the involvement of host lncRNAs in hantaviral control remains uncharacterized. In this study, we identified the lncRNA NEAT1 as a vital antiviral modulator. NEAT1 was dramatically upregulated after Hantaan virus (HTNV) infection, whereas its downregulation
in vitro
or
in vivo
delayed host innate immune responses and aggravated HTNV replication. Ectopic expression of NEAT1 enhanced beta interferon (IFN-β) production and suppressed HTNV infection. Further investigation suggested that NEAT1 served as positive feedback for RIG-I signaling. HTNV infection activated NEAT1 transcription through the RIG-I–IRF7 pathway, whereas NEAT1 removed the transcriptional inhibitory effects of the splicing factor proline- and glutamine-rich protein (SFPQ) by relocating SFPQ to paraspeckles, thus promoting the expression of RIG-I and DDX60. RIG-I and DDX60 had synergic effects on IFN production. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that NEAT1 modulates the innate immune response against HTNV infection, providing another layer of information about the role of lncRNAs in controlling viral infections.

IMPORTANCE
Hantaviruses have attracted worldwide attention as archetypal emerging pathogens. Recently, increasing evidence has highlighted long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) as key regulators of innate immunity; however, their roles in hantavirus infection remain unknown. In the present work, a new unexplored function of lncRNA NEAT1 in controlling HTNV replication was found. NEAT1 promoted interferon (IFN) responses by acting as positive feedback for RIG-I signaling. This lncRNA was induced by HTNV through the RIG-I–IRF7 pathway in a time- and dose-dependent manner and promoted HTNV-induced IFN production by facilitating RIG-I and DDX60 expression. Intriguingly, NEAT1 relocated SFPQ and formed paraspeckles after HTNV infection, which might reverse inhibitive effects of SFPQ on the transcription of RIG-I and DDX60. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to address the regulatory role of the lncRNA NEAT1 in host innate immunity after HTNV infection. In summary, our findings provide additional insights regarding the role of lncRNAs in controlling viral infections.
Risk stratification of individuals with low-risk colorectal adenomas using clinical characteristics: a pooled analysis
Authors: Gupta Samir , Jacobs Elizabeth T , Baron John A , Lieberman David A , Murphy Gwen , Ladabaum Uri , Cross Amanda J , Jover Rodrigo , Liu Lin , Martinez Maria Elena 
Published: February 2017

ObjectiveFor individuals with 1–2 small (<1 cm) low-risk colorectal adenomas, international guidelines range from no surveillance to offering surveillance colonoscopy in 5–10 years. We hypothesised that the risks for metachronous advanced neoplasia (AN) among patients with low-risk adenomas differ based on clinical factors distinct from those currently used.DesignWe pooled data from seven prospective studies to assess the risk of metachronous AN. Two groups with 1–2 small adenomas were defined based on guidelines from the UK (n=4516) or the European Union (EU)/US (n=2477).ResultsAbsolute risk of metachronous AN ranged from a low of 2.9% to a high of 12.2%, depending on specific risk factor and guideline used. For the UK group, the highest absolute risks for metachronous AN were found among individuals with a history of prior polyp (12.2%), villous histology (12.2%), age ≥70 years (10.9%), high-grade dysplasia (10.9%), any proximal adenoma (10.2%), distal and proximal adenoma (10.8%) or two adenomas (10.1%). For the EU/US group, the highest absolute risks for metachronous AN were among individuals with a history of prior polyp (11.5%) or the presence of both proximal and distal adenomas (11.0%). In multivariate analyses, strong associations for increasing age and history of prior polyps and odds of metachronous AN were observed, whereas more modest associations were shown for baseline proximal adenomas and those with villous features.ConclusionsRisks of metachronous AN among individuals with 1–2 small adenomas vary according to readily available clinical characteristics. These characteristics may be considered for recommending colonoscopy surveillance and require further investigation.
Identification of flavour additives in tobacco products to develop a flavour library
Authors: Krüsemann Erna JZ , Visser Wouter F , Cremers Johannes WJM , Pennings Jeroen LA , Talhout Reinskje 
Published: February 2017

ObjectivesThis study combines chemical analysis and flavour descriptions of flavour additives used in tobacco products, and provides a starting point to build an extensive library of flavour components, useful for product surveillance.MethodsHeadspace gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was used to compare 22 commercially available tobacco products (cigarettes and roll-your-own) expected to have a characterising flavour and 6 commercially available products not expected to have a characterising flavour with 5 reference products (natural tobacco leaves and research cigarettes containing no flavour additives). The flavour components naturally present in the reference products were excluded from components present in commercially available products containing flavour additives. A description of the remaining flavour additives was used for categorisation.ResultsGC-MS measurements of the 33 tobacco products resulted in an overview of 186 chemical compounds. Of these, 144 were solely present in commercially available products. These 144 flavour additives were described using 62 different flavour descriptors extracted from flavour databases, which were categorised into eight groups largely based on the definition of characterising flavours from the European Tobacco Product Directive: fruit, spice, herb, alcohol, menthol, sweet, floral and miscellaneous.ConclusionsWe developed a method to identify and describe flavour additives in tobacco products. Flavour additives consist of single flavour compounds or mixtures of multiple flavour compounds, and different combinations of flavour compounds can cause a certain flavour. A flavour library helps to detect flavour additives that are characteristic for a certain flavour, and thus can be useful for regulation of flavours in tobacco and related products.