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Based on signal amplification strategy of dendritic mesoporous silica nanospheres loaded with CdSe/ZnS quantum dots (DMSN@QDs), an ultrasensitive electrochemiluminescence (ECL) immunosensor with magnetic separation was constructed for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein (NP). DMSN, a mesoporous material with abundant radial pores, large specific surface area and high porosity, can increase the loading capacity of QDs and hinder their aggregation as the nanocarrier. DMSN@QDs with good ECL efficiency were used as signal labels to construct a sandwich immunosensor. The designed ECL immunosensor displayed a good linear relationship for NP concentrations ranging from 0.005 ng mL(-1) to 50 ng mL(-1), with a limit of detection of 3.33 pg mL(-1). The ECL immunosensor was successfully applied to detect NP in human serum samples with satisfactory recovery. This strategy provided a new method for detecting NP and expanded the application field of DMSN.
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Purpose of Study The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported in 2017 that only 50.4% of pregnant women received the Tdap vaccination to protect their newborns from pertussis;21.7% were unaware they needed it and 18.3% were concerned about adverse effects on their baby. This study investigated common concerns women expressed online regarding Tdap in pregnancy and assessed accuracy of online content using Reddit, a popular discussion website. Methods Used We used Reddit's built-in search engine to find user-generated posts by searching key words related to Tdap vaccination in pregnancy. Using the same keywords, we also searched commonly appearing subreddits, which are online communities within Reddit dedicated to topics. Working backwards from February 29, 2020 (to avoid COVID issues), we evaluated posts and comments that met the following inclusion criteria: posts from U.S. users with at least 10 comments;posts and comments focused on Tdap in pregnancy. Comments from automated bots or users outside the U.S. were excluded. Using the idea of saturation, Reddit posts with over 50 comments were analyzed until the 50th comment or until 4 subthemes were found. The CDC guidelines were used to judge accuracy. Summary of Results 100 Reddit posts with 2872 comments between February 2020 to October 2018 were included in the study. 74 Reddit posts sought advice on Tdap vaccination, safety/side effects, and who need Tdap. Out of the 2872 comments, 115 contained inaccurate content;96% of those related to the recommended frequency of the pertussis vaccination. Common themes within the comments included: cocooning (a strategy to protect infants by vaccinating close contacts);why and when pregnant women should get Tdap;and side effects. The most prevalent subtheme pertained to visitation rules for those who declined Tdap. Few comments reflected more extreme opinions, such as 'only illegal immigrants have pertussis.' Conclusions Although most pregnant women on Reddit support the recommendation for Tdap in pregnancy, some users report inconsistent information received from their clinicians. Confusion still remains about who should receive Tdap. There is potential for improved patient education provided by clinicians to ensure their pregnant patients have accurate and complete information about Tdap.
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With the outbreak of COVID-19, disinfection protection has become a necessary measure to prevent infection. As a new type of disinfectant, potassium peroxymonosulfate compound salt (PMS) has the advantages of good bactericidal effect, non-toxicity, high safety and stability. However, the current PMS products with irregular particle shapes lead to poor flowability, high hygroscopicity, poor stability of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and serious caking problems. In this work, an agglomeration-dissolution mechanism was designed to prepare spherical PMS particles with large size (>300 mm) and high sphericity (up to 90%), effectively addressing the above problems. Shaping (dissolution and abrasion) is the key to improving sphericity, which is mainly controlled by the design of the heating mode, residence time and stirring rate. Compared with the irregular PMS particles, the large spherical particles present better flowability (angle of repose decreased by 35.80%, Carr's index decreased by 64.29%, Hausner's ratio decreased by 19.14%), lower hygroscopicity (decreased by 38.0%), lower caking ratio (decreased by 84.50%), and higher stability (the monthly loss of ROS was reduced by 61.68%). The agglomeration -dissolution mechanism demonstrates the crystallization, agglomeration, dissolution and abrasion pro-cess of inorganic salt crystals, providing an opportunity to prepare high-end inorganic crystal materials with high-quality morphologies.(c) 2022 Chinese Society of Particuology and Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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The massive spread of COVID-19 and the crash of China Eastern Airlines MU5735 have negatively impacted the public's perception of civil aviation safety, which further affects the progress of the civil aviation industry and economic growth. The aim of research is to investigate the public's perception of China's civil aviation safety and give the authorities corresponding suggestions. First, we use online comment collection and sentiment analysis techniques to construct a novel evaluation index system reflecting the public's greatest concern for civil aviation safety. Then, we propose two novel large-scale group decision-making (LSGDM) models for aggregating evaluation: (1) K-means clustering with a novel distance measure for evaluators combined with unsupervised K-means clustering in two-stage, (2) unsupervised K-means clustering for evaluators combined with unsupervised K-means clustering for processing evaluation in two-stage. Finally, we compare the characteristics of different models and use the average of the two models as the final evaluation results. © 2023, The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Taiwan Fuzzy Systems Association.
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Objective: To investigate if remote Pilates exercises for older patients with low back pain(LBP) in the post-COVID-19 era may be successfully performed using a pressure biofeedback unit (PBU)-based information visualization training feedback technology. Design: A total of 40 older patients with LBP were randomly allocated to a control group ($\mathrm{n}=20$) receiving clinical Pilates training instruction via video link or an experimental group ($\mathrm{n}=20$)) with tele-Pilates exercise based on information visualization training feedback. The program had two 60-minute sessions per week for the whole eight-week duration. Pain was assessed by a visual analogue scale(VAS), the Oswestry Disability Index(ODI) was used to evaluate physical function, the modified Schober test was used to measure lumbar range of flexion and extension, and core strength was assessed by the PBU. Results: Between-group analysis showed significant variations in the degree of disability in the intervention group compared to the control group ($\mathrm{p} < 0.001$), lumbar flexibility ($\mathrm{p}=0.02$) and core muscle activation capacity ($\mathrm{p} < 0.001$). And level of pain was significantly decreased in both two groups. Conclusions: In elderly patients with LBP, an 8-week remote Pilates exercise based on information visualization training feedback is beneficial in reducing disability, pain, and enhancing flexibility and core muscle strength. © 2022 IEEE.
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With the outbreak of COVID-19, disinfection protection has become a necessary measure to prevent infection. As a new type of disinfectant, potassium peroxymonosulfate compound salt (PMS) has the advantages of good bactericidal effect, non-toxicity, high safety and stability. However, the current PMS products with irregular particle shapes lead to poor flowability, high hygroscopicity, poor stability of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and serious caking problems. In this work, an agglomeration-dissolution mechanism was designed to prepare spherical PMS particles with large size (>300 μm) and high sphericity (up to 90%), effectively addressing the above problems. Shaping (dissolution and abrasion) is the key to improving sphericity, which is mainly controlled by the design of the heating mode, residence time and stirring rate. Compared with the irregular PMS particles, the large spherical particles present better flowability (angle of repose decreased by 35.80%, Carr's index decreased by 64.29%, Hausner's ratio decreased by 19.14%), lower hygroscopicity (decreased by 38.0%), lower caking ratio (decreased by 84.50%), and higher stability (the monthly loss of ROS was reduced by 61.68%). The agglomeration-dissolution mechanism demonstrates the crystallization, agglomeration, dissolution and abrasion process of inorganic salt crystals, providing an opportunity to prepare high-end inorganic crystal materials with high-quality morphologies. © 2022 Chinese Society of Particuology and Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences
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Nucleic acid amplification detection is one of the most widely used molecular diagnostic techniques in recent years, which can rapidly and efficiently amplify the characteristic nucleotide sequences of pathogenic bacteria in the diagnosis of infectious diseases, it has been widely used in clinical diagnosis, disease screening and other fields. In this work, we report a micro-cavity digital PCR for rapid detection of pathogens on a silicon-based microfluidic chip. The device has the advantages of high flux, no pumping, rapid reaction, quantification and high sensitivity. © 2021 MicroTAS 2021 - 25th International Conference on Miniaturized Systems for Chemistry and Life Sciences. All rights reserved.
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We carry out a structural and algorithmic study of a mobile sensor coverage optimization problem targeting 2D surfaces embedded in a 3D workspace. The investigated settings model multiple important applications including camera network deployment for surveillance, geological monitoring/survey of 3D terrains, and UVC-based surface disinfection for the prevention of the spread of disease agents (e.g., SARS-CoV-2). Under a unified general "sensor coverage" problem, three concrete formulations are examined, focusing on optimizing visibility, single-best coverage quality, and cumulative quality, respectively. After demonstrating the computational intractability of all these formulations, we describe approximation schemes and mathematical programming models for near-optimally solving them. The effectiveness of our methods is thoroughly evaluated under realistic and practical scenarios.
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Under the influence of the COVID-19, people can effectively prevent New Coronavirus infection by wearing masks in public places. However, the mask obscuration causes some face recognition systems to fail to recognize properly. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Multi-Residual Attention Network(MRANet) based on deep convolutional neural network for recognizing faces obscured by masks and improve a loss function. In our model, an attention mechanism and multiple residual layers skip connections are introduced, which allow the model to focus more on the unobscured facial information and contribute to increase the efficiency of information flow and gradient flow between each network layers. A dynamic addictive angular margin loss function, a more reasonable decision boundary function, is also proposed to improve the model’s discriminative power and convergence speed. Our algorithm can effectively identify and verify not only normal unobstructed faces, but also faces obscured by masks. We achieved a accuracy rate of 96.7% on the widely used Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset (LFW), a accuracy rate of 84.837% on the Real-world Masked Face Recognition Dataset (RMFRD), and the false accepted rate in the simulated face recognition system is as low as 0.944%. © 2021 IEEE.
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Many cities in China have adopted a series of Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) and rapidly suppressed the 1 st wave of COVID-19 epidemic in 2020. It is critical to evaluate the effectiveness of these NPIs for future epidemic control. However, as a variety of NPIs were applied together in practice, it is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of a single type of intervention by epidemiological observation. Taking Shenzhen city as an example, this study used a spatially explicit agent-based model by integrating mobile phone location data, travel survey data, building survey data and other multi-source spatiotemporal big data to evaluate the effectiveness of different types of NPIs in the suppression of the 1 st wave of COVID-19 epidemic in Shenzhen. The simulation results show that the peak of the epidemic would have appeared on the 127 th day since Jan 1st of 2020, resulting in an average of 72.26% of the population to be infected without any interventions. In the 1 st wave of Shenzhen epidemic, except for the hospitalization of confirmed cases and intercity traffic restrictions, the stay-at-home order was the most effective one, followed by comprehensive isolation and quarantine measures (for close contacts, imported population and suspected cases), mask wearing, and orderly resumption of work. The stay-at-home order and comprehensive isolation and quarantine measures can effectively control the large-scale outbreak of the COVID-19, which are identified as the core measures;Mask wearing and orderly resumption of work can only reduce the overall infection size and delay the epidemic peak, which are identified as secondary measures. Considering the socioeconomic costs and the receding compliance to interventions in the post-epidemic period, this study suggests that the core measures and secondary measures should be combined to control the sporadic cases. Specifically, the local government can give the highest priority to isolation and quarantine measures for confirmed cases and high-risk individuals, complemented by mask wearing. In addition, our model can reveal the high-risk infection areas at a community level, which can help deploy control measures within an urban environment. In summary, this study demonstrated the advantages of integrating spatiotemporal big data and agent-based models to simulate the spread processes of infectious diseases in an urban environment: it can not only simulate the evolving processes of an epidemic at a fine-grained scale, but also evaluate the effectiveness of the NPIs at an individual level and for activity-travel behaviors, which can be useful for precise intervention. 2021, Science Press. All right reserved.
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Emotion Cause Extraction (ECE) is an emerging hot topic in the field of sentiment analysis. The purpose of the ECE task is to extract the causes of emotions in the text according to the text and given emotions. Emotional Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) is a brand-new research problem on ECE, whose main purpose is to extract the emotion clauses and emotion cause clauses in texts at the same time. At present, the ECPE task has received extensive attentions from both academia and industry communities. The existing ECPE researches are mainly carried out on online news report corpus. However, this kind of corpus has several limitations, such as the small scale and rough tagging granularity. In this paper, we construct an emotion cause extraction dataset containing 5,195 COVID-19 pandemic-related discussion posts collected from Sina Weibo, and leverage 10 state-of-the-art models to perform ECE and ECPE tasks on this new dataset. We find that the performances of most existing models on our newly constructed dataset decrease dramatically compared with the reported results in the online news dataset. We further analyze the causes of this phenomenon. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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As the backdrop for contemporary international relations, globalization reflects the way economic and political power are distributed, and provides the grand context for China's strategic planning. The history and logic of globalization have shown that underpinned by a system of nation-states, globalization proceeds according to an inescapable cyclical pattern. Globalization suffered major setbacks in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and is likely to further lose steam amid an evolving Covid-19 pandemic. A low-ebb phase of globalization will present an increasingly complicated strategic environment featuring intensifying great power rivalry, regionalized supply chains, and growing technology competition. Beijing remains determined to integrate further into the world, but to adapt to a new strategic environment, will vigorously implement the newly unveiled dual circulation strategy. As China sees it, despite all the major setbacks, globalization is an irreversible mega-trend but it will be driven by a new underlying logic. © 2020 World Century Publishing Corporation.
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Purpose : The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted surgical resident education. We sought to assess the impact of COVID-19 on ophthalmology resident training and wellness at the University of Washington through observing changes in volume of overnight on-call consults, resident clinics, and resident surgical cases, in addition to studying changes in sleep, activity, and resident wellness survey results. Methods : A retrospective cohort study of ophthalmology residents at the University of Washington comparing clinical volumes, sleep and activity data recorded by a wrist actigrapher, and wellness surveys during a pre-COVID period from February 1 , 2020 to March 15 to the period of initial COVID response (COVID period) from March 16 to May 1 , 2020. Results : The initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a 64% decrease in resident clinic volume, 64% decrease in resident-surgical cases, and 50% decrease in oncall consult volume, see figure 1. The fraction of consults involving an open globe injury increased more than four-fold. Resident depersonalization as measured by Maslach Burnout Inventory decreased during the pandemic (p=0.038), see figure 2. Most residents experienced decrease emotional exhaustion and increased anxiety during the pandemic. There was no statistically significant change in recorded sleep or activity among residents before and during the pandemic. Conclusions : The initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic at the University of Washington resulted in a large decrease in clinical, surgical, and on call volumes with mixed effect on ophthalmology resident well-being.
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Wastewater surveillance for SARS-CoV-2 provides an approach for assessing the infection burden across a sewer service area. For these data to be useful for public health, measurement variability and the relationship to case data need to be established. We determined SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations in the influent of 12 wastewater treatment plants from August 2020 to January 2021. Technical replicates for N1 gene concentrations showed a relative standard deviation of 24%, suggesting it is possible to track relatively small (similar to 30%) changes in SARS-CoV-2 concentrations over time. COVID-19 cases were correlated significantly (rho >= 0.70) to wastewater SARS-CoV-2 RNA concentrations across large and small service areas, with weaker relationships (rho >= 0.59) in two communities. SARS-CoV-2 concentrations normalized to per capita slightly improved correlations to COVID-19 incidence, but normalizing to a spiked recovery control (BCoV) or a fecal marker (PMMoV or HF183) reduced correlations for a number of plants. Daily sampling demonstrated that a minimum of two samples collected per week were needed to maintain accuracy in trend analysis. The differences in the strength of SARS-CoV-2 relationships to COVID-19 incidence and the effect of normalization on these data among communities demonstrate that rigorous validation should be performed at individual sites where wastewater surveillance programs are implemented.
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How to adopt channel strategy is one of the important issues in fresh supply chain management. Aiming at the main ways for consumers to purchase fresh products, this paper uses supply chain management theory to study the channel strategies of retailers under COVID-19 and its impact on fresh supply chain. Firstly, three channels for consumers to purchase fresh products under COVID-19 and their characteristics are analyzed. Secondly, the main problems existing in each channel under COVID-19 are studied. Finally, some countermeasures and suggestions are put forward to solve the main problems of fresh supply chain. © 2021 ACM.
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Due to COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease - 19), most schools have adopted remote or mixed methods to teach;therefore, students need new types of educational products to achieve a high-quality learning experience. There are many difficulties and obstacles to taking classes online. More interactions and formats need to be explored for students to absorb as much classroom knowledge as possible. The research team conducted a design workshop. Thirty-eight psychology and applied psychology students participated in this workshop using different user research methods, such as user journey maps and how-to methods. They explored educational products in five scenarios: taking physical education classes, giving online learning feedback, conducting teamwork, taking an online examination, and studying in the dormitory. Each group proposed design solutions to solve design problems in a particular context. For the 56 design problems, the participants identified 548 design solutions. The facilitator helped the group select six or seven design challenges with higher priorities. All the research data were collected, and the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) theory was used to analyze users’ needs for future educational products. The users’ needs were summarized into user need clusters. This study has identified seven primary user needs and 20 sub-needs in five scenarios. The insights gained from this study may be of assistance to UX designers and UX researchers to obtain a new perspective on scenarios. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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During the rapid and forced move to online teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic, university courses that never would have been considered suitable for online teaching under normal circumstances, were moved online. While challenging, this also opened opportunities for developing innovative strategies for teaching and learning. We report on the experiences of moving online a course in embodied interaction, which due to its focus on situated and embodied design faced extensive challenges in moving online. We highlight in particular the way in which the course brought forward innovative methods for bodystorming and user-assisted trialling. This paper has been written jointly by students and teachers from the course. © 2021 ACM.
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Objective: To explore the difference in the expression profile of circular RNA in peripheral blood mononuclear cells between patients with mild and severe influenza pneumonia. Methods: From December 2018 to March 2019, 10 inpatients with mild and 10 inpatients with severe influenza pneumonia admitted to the Department of Infection and Clinical Microbiology of Beijing Chaoyang Hospital were included. Clariom™ D gene chip was used to explore the circRNA expression profiles of peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) isolated from the patients. The absolute value of the fold change (FC value)>2 and P<0.05 were used as the criteria to screen the differentially expressed circRNA, and the gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis and the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Gene and Genome database (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes, KEGG) signal pathway enrichment analysis were also performed. Results: The age of mild patients [M (P25, P75)] was 62.0 (34.5, 69.8) years old, including 4 males; the age of severe patients [M (P25, P75)] was 50.0 (37.0, 60.0) years old, all were males. A total of 137 differentially expressed circRNAs in PBMCs of mild and severe patients were screened. The numbers of up-regulated and down-regulated circRNAs in mild patients were 101 and 36, respectively. Among them, hsa_circ_0091073 (FC value=160.898, P<0.05) was the most significantly up-regulated circRNA and hsa_circ_0092219 (FC value =-17.630, P<0.05) was the most significantly down-regulated circRNA. GO enrichment analysis showed that a total of 111 secondary GO items were significantly associated with related differential expression of circRNA (P<0.05). The GO terms associated with upregulated circRNAs included DNA-templated transcription, regulation of DNA-templated transcription, regulation of transcription from RNA polymerase â ¡ promoter, etc.; The GO terms associated with downregulated circRNAs included neutrophil degranulation, killing of cells of other organism, defense response to fungus, etc. KEGG signaling pathway analysis showed that there were 37 metabolic pathways related to differentially expressed circRNAs (P<0.05). Signaling pathways related to up-regulated circRNAs included nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) signaling pathway, mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling pathway, tumor necrosis factor (TNF) signaling pathway, etc. Signaling pathways related to down-regulation of circRNAs included cancer transcription disorders, folate carbon pool, and other types of O-glycan biosynthesis. Conclusion: The expression of circRNA in PBMC of mild and severe influenza pneumonia patients is significantly different, and it may play a role in the pathogenic mechanism of influenza pneumonia through multiple signal pathways.