The Course of Psychiatric Symptoms During Remand Imprisonment

Imprisonment may pose a risk for unintended effects such as deterioration of psychiatric symptoms. Therefore, it is pivotal to understand the relation between imprisonment and the course of psychiatric symptoms, but previous studies are inconclusive. The current study followed up the psychiatric symptoms of newly admitted remand prisoners to one Dutch remand prison using the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) and also studied possible related pre-existing variables. On average we found an overall slight—yet clinically marginal—improvement of psychiatric, in particular affective symptoms. One in three prisoners deteriorated and prisoners with psychotic disorders less often deteriorated. Other variables were not related. Overall, psychiatric symptoms remain stable over time during early remand imprisonment independent of most psychiatric disorders. The context in the Dutch prison studied appears to be adequately organized in terms of handling psychiatric stability, but we notice that prison contexts may vary to a large extend.

Cycling Performance of NMC811 Anode-Free Pouch Cells with 65 Different Electrolyte Formulations

Liquid electrolytes for anode-free Li metal batteries (LMBs) provide a cost-effective path to high energy density. However, liquid electrolytes are challenging due to the reactivity of Li0 with the electrolyte and the resulting Li loss, as well as mossy Li deposits leading to inactive Li and dendrite formation. Thus, more research is needed to develop electrolytes capable of 80% capacity retention after 800 cycles to meet electric vehicle (EV) demands. Here, we report cycle life results from 65 electrolyte mixtures consisting of various additives or co-solvents added to a dual-salt base electrolyte previously reported by our group. We tested these electrolyte systems using a practical anode-free pouch cell design with a high-loading (16 mg cm-2, or 3.47 mAh cm 2) LiNi0.8Mn0.1Co0.1O2 (NMC811) cathode, with a bare Cu foil as the counter electrode. All cells in this work were cycled at 40 °C with 0.2C/0.5C charge/discharge rates between 3.55 4.40 V. Based on the total energy delivered over 140 cycles, only five electrolytes showed marginal improvement over the baseline, while the other electrolytes were uncompetitive. This data set can serve as a guide for LMB researchers investigating electrolyte systems and highlights the challenges associated with liquid electrolytes.

Haar Wavelet Pyramid-Based Melanoma Skin Cancer Identification With Ensemble of Machine Learning Algorithms

Melanoma is a mortal type of skin cancer. Early detection of melanoma significantly improves the patient’s chances of survival. Detection of melanoma at an early juncture demands expert doctors. The scarcity of such expert doctors is a major issue with healthcare systems globally. Computer-assisted diagnostics may prove helpful in this case. This paper proposes a health informatics system for melanoma identification using machine learning with dermoscopy skin images. In the proposed method, the features of dermoscopy skin images are extracted using the Haar wavelet pyramid various levels. These features are employed to train machine learning algorithms and ensembles for melanoma identification. The consideration of higher levels of Haar Wavelet Pyramid helps speed up the identification process. It is observed that the performance gradually improves from the Haar wavelet pyramid level 4x4 to 16x16, and shows marginal improvement further. The ensembles of machine learning algorithms have shown a boost in performance metrics compared to the use of individual machine learning algorithms.

Single cell Iso-Sequencing enables rapid genome annotation for scRNAseq analysis

ABSTRACTSingle cell RNA sequencing (scRNAseq) is a powerful technique that continues to expand across various biological applications. However, incomplete 3′ UTR annotations in less developed or non-model systems can impede single cell analysis resulting in genes that are partially or completely uncounted. Performing scRNAseq with incomplete 3′ UTR annotations can impede the identification of cell identities and gene expression patterns and lead to erroneous biological inferences. We demonstrate that performing single cell isoform sequencing (ScISOr-Seq) in tandem with scRNAseq can rapidly improve 3′ UTR annotations. Using threespine stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus), we show that gene models resulting from a minimal embryonic ScISOr-Seq dataset retained 26.1% greater scRNAseq reads than gene models from Ensembl alone. Furthermore, pooling our ScISOr-Seq isoforms with a previously published adult bulk Iso-Seq dataset from stickleback, and merging the annotation with the Ensembl gene models, resulted in a marginal improvement (+0.8%) over the ScISOr-Seq only dataset. In addition, isoforms identified by ScISOr-Seq included thousands of new splicing variants. The improved gene models obtained using ScISOr-Seq lead to successful identification of cell types and increased the reads identified of many genes in our scRNAseq stickleback dataset. Our work illuminates ScISOr-Seq as a cost-effective and efficient mechanism to rapidly annotate genomes for scRNAseq.

Source/Load-Pull Noise Measurements at Ka Band

This paper is focused on the extraction of the noise parameters of a linear active device by exploiting both forward and reverse noise power measurements associated with different terminations. In order for load-pull measurements to yield a significant marginal improvement (as compared to forward measurements only) it is expected that the device under test should appreciably deviate from unidirectionality. For this reason, the source/load-pull technique is applied to frequencies at which the considered devices are still usable but their reverse noise factor exhibits a measurable dependence on the output terminations. Details on the test bench set up to the purpose, covering the 20–40 GHz frequency range, are provided. A characterization campaign on a 60 nm gate length, 4×35 µm GaN-on-Si HEMT fabricated by OMMIC is illustrated.

Performance of Pure Crossflow Heat Exchanger in Sensible Heat Transfer Application

All process industries involve the usage of heat exchanger equipment and understanding its performance during the design phase is very essential. The present research work specifies the performance of a pure cross flow heat exchanger in terms of dimensionless factors such as number of transfer units, capacity rate ratio, and heat exchanger effectiveness. Steady state sensible heat transfer was considered in the analysis. The matrix approach that was established in the earlier work was used in the study. The results were depicted in the form of charts, tables, and performance equations. It was observed that indeterminately increasing the number of transfer units past a threshold limit provided very marginal improvement in the performance of a pure cross flow heat exchanger. Likewise, flow pattern in a heat exchanger is usually assumed either as mixed or unmixed. However, due to various operating conditions, partially mixed conditions do exist. This work considers partially mixed conditions in the tube side of the heat exchanger. The correction factor for heat exchanger effectiveness was developed to accommodate partially mixed flow conditions in the pure cross flow heat exchanger.

1364Predicting obesity and smoking using medication data: a machine-learning approach

Background Administrative health datasets are widely used in public health research but often lack information about common confounders. We aimed to develop and validate machine learning (ML)-based models using medication data from Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) database to predict obesity and smoking. Methods We used data from the D-Health Trial (N = 18,000) and the QSkin Study (N = 43,794). Smoking history, and height and weight were self-reported at study entry. Linkage to the PBS dataset captured 5 years of medication data after cohort entry. We used age, sex, and medication use, classified using Anatomical Therapeutic Classification codes, as potential predictors of smoking and obesity. We trained gradient-boosted machine learning models using data for the first 80% of participants enrolled; models were validated using the remaining 20%. We assessed model performance overall and by sex and age, and compared models generated using 3 and 5 years of PBS data. Results Based on the validation dataset using 3 years of PBS data, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.70 (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.68 – 0.71) for predicting obesity and 0.71 (95% CI 0.70 – 0.72) for predicting smoking. Models performed better in women than in men. Using 5 years of PBS data resulted in marginal improvement. Conclusions Medication data in combination with age and sex can be used to predict obesity and smoking. These models may be of value to researchers using data collected for administrative purposes.

Optimal allocation of reliability improvement target under dependent component failures

We study the problem of apportioning the reliability improvement target of a series system to components by considering the failure risk and improvement cost when both common cause and cascading failures exist. To solve this problem, previous research has developed different allocation weights in which every component is improved independently in proportion to the allocation weight. In practice, however, allocation weights are not independent among components because several components improve simultaneously when the occurrences of common cause failures are reduced. Therefore, in this study, we partition dependent component failures into mutually exclusive sub-failures to express the system risk in terms of the risk of component sub-failures, where the common cause failures, and cascading failures are incorporated into occurrence and severity evaluations, respectively. Then, an optimization problem is considered to maximize the effectiveness of the system improvement, which is measured as the difference between the decreased failure risk and the increased improvement cost. Finally, a numerical example is presented to illustrate that a component selected for improvement at a low budget would not necessarily be selected at a high budget if different marginal improvement costs were associated with different component failures. In other words, components are selected for improvement only if the reduction in the risk is sufficiently large to offset the improvement cost.

Nonavalent Human Papillomavirus Vaccine as a Treatment for Recalcitrant Warts in an Adult with HIV

To the Editor: Cutaneous warts are seen in as many as a quarter of immunosuppressed patients. 1 Cell-mediated immunodeficiency, as seen in HIV, is correlated with increased rates of palmoplantar warts. 2 These warts often cause discomfort, and can progress to verrucous carcinoma. As they can be resistant to traditional treatments like cryotherapy, patients must resort to more aggressive and invasive measures like intralesional bleomycin. In this case report, we present an immunocompromised patient with HIV successfully treated for his palmoplantar human papilloma virus (HPV) warts using the nonavalent HPV vaccine (Gardasil 9TM, Merck Inc, Kenilworth, NJ, USA) after only marginal improvement with six treatments of bleomycin.