Effects of an antiarrhythmic drug A-2545 on canine ventricular arrhythmia models; comparison with mexiletine and flecainide

OBJECTIVE: To identify nutritional risk factors for growth failure in infants with bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) after initial hospital discharge, and to describe growth in and feeding concerns about these infants after discharge to the community. DESIGN: A cohort of 40 infants with BPD was followed up for 7 monthly visits after initial hospital discharge. Data on potential risk factors were gathered prospectively. SUBJECTS/SETTING: Forty infants with BPD were recruited from all 4 tertiary-level neonatal intensive care units in the Puget Sound area of Washington. Exclusionary criteria included congenital or chromosomal anomalies, grade IV intraventricular hemorrhage, and drug or alcohol exposure in utero. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Growth failure defined as weight less than the 5th percentile on National Center for Health Statistics growth curves at 2 or more points in time and a decrease in weight-for-age z score during the study period. STATISTICAL ANALYSES PERFORMED: Relative risk of growth failure with exposure to each risk factor was determined. The chi 2 test was used to measure association between growth and development, and change in z scores was used to examine growth patterns. RESULTS: Growth failure occurred in 8 of 40 infants. Twenty-nine of the infants experienced a drop in weight-for-age z score from the initial to the final study visit. Growth failure was associated with low socioeconomic status (relative risk = 4.0, 95% confidence interval = 1.3, 12.6), postdischarge days of illness (relative risk = 10.5, 95% confidence interval = 1.4, 77.4) and "suspect" development (chi 2 = 7.12, P = .014). APPLICATIONS: Infants with BPD may benefit from comprehensive postdischarge nutrition and feeding therapy that includes ensuring adequate energy intake, parental support and education, and feeding evaluation and therapy.     

Transferring pose and augmenting background for deep human-image parsing and its applications

Computational Visual Media - Parsing of human images is a fundamental task for determining semantic parts such as the face, arms, and legs, as well as a hat or a dress. Recent deep-learning-based...     

Designing an algorithm for swarm behavior using the concept of Umwelt

In this study, we propose a methodology for designing a swarm behavior. The difficulty in designing the swarm behavior is a gap between the object of evaluation and that of design. The former is the performance of a group, but the latter is the action of each individual. We utilize the concept “Umwelt” in ethology for bridging the gap. The advantage of this concept is that all actions necessary for the swarm behavior can he derived from the purpose of each individual. Using this concept, the swarm behavior can he built into the action algorithm of the individuals. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we construct the swarm algorithm for a search and collection task. Using a computer simulation, we confirmed that the swarm successfully achieved the task with flexibility and parallelism, and also robustness in part. These results support the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.     

Compilation of an idiom example database for supervised idiom identification

Some phrases can be interpreted in their context either idiomatically (figuratively) or literally. The precise identification of idioms is essential in order to achieve full-fledged natural language processing. Because of this, the authors of this paper have created an idiom corpus for Japanese. This paper reports on the corpus itself and the results of an idiom identification experiment conducted using the corpus. The corpus targeted 146 ambiguous idioms, and consists of 102,856 examples, each of which is annotated with a literal/idiomatic label. All sentences were collected from the World Wide Web. For idiom identification, 90 out of the 146 idioms were targeted and a word sense disambiguation (WSD) method was adopted using both common WSD features and idiom-specific features. The corpus and the experiment are both, as far as can be determined, the largest of their kinds. It was discovered that a standard supervised WSD method works well for idiom identification and it achieved accuracy levels of 89.25 and 88.86%, with and without idiom-specific features, respectively. It was also found that the most effective idiom-specific feature is the one that involves the adjacency of idiom constituents.     

High‐contrast driving method for advanced CEL structure with magnesium oxide single‐crystal powder in ACPDP

Abstract— A new driving method for an advanced‐CEL‐structure panel has been developed. Picture qualities have been upgraded. Discharge time lags are drastically shortened by priming electron emission from magnesium oxide (MgO) single‐crystal powder, refered to as a crystal emissive layer (CEL). The advanced‐CEL‐structure panel has CEL material on the surface of not only the surface‐discharge‐electrode side but also on the address‐electrode side. This panel structure enables a stable opposed discharge when the address electrode functions as a cathode. By utilizing the opposed discharges in the reset and LSB‐SF sustain periods, the dark‐room contrast ratio has been drastically increased to over 20,000:1, which is higher than five times that of the conventional method, and the luminance of the least‐significant‐bit sub‐field (LSB‐SF) is as low as 0.1 cd/m², which is one‐fourth that of the conventional method. The high‐picture‐quality PDP TVs refered to as “KURO” that employs these technologies have been introduced into the marketplace.     

Numerical simulation of conventional capillary flow and no-flow underfill in flip-chip packaging

We developed a numerical method for simulating the underfill flow of conventional capillary flow and no-flow types in flip-chip packaging. The analytical models for the two types of underfill encapsulation processes are proposed. In the capillary flow type, the underfill material is driven into the cavity with solder bump by the surface tension with an effect of contact angle as the capillary action. In the no-flow type, the movement of IC chip during the reflow attachment is controlled by an appropriate loading to get the proper interconnect between IC chip and substrate. In both types, the flow behavior and filling time of underfill material in underfilling encapsulation process are investigated, taking the fluid dynamic force acting on the solder bump into account. It is found that the proposed analytical models have a considerable potential for predicting the underfill flow.     

Saliency and spatial information-based landmark selection for mobile robot navigation in natural environments

In this paper, a landmark selection and tracking approach is presented for mobile robot navigation in natural environments, using textural distinctiveness-based saliency detection and spatial information acquired from stereo data. The presented method focuses on achieving high robustness of tracking rather than self-positioning accuracy. The landmark selection method is designed to select a small amount of the most salient feature points in a wide variety of sparse unknown environments to ensure successful matching. Landmarks are selected by an iterative algorithm from a textural distinctiveness-based saliency map extended with spatial information, where a repulsive potential field is created around the position of each already selected landmark for better distribution in order to increase robustness. The template matching of landmarks is aided with visual odometry-based motion estimation. Other robustness increasing strategies includes estimating landmark positions by unscented Kalman filters as well as from surrounding landmarks. Experimental results show that the introduced method is robust and suitable for natural environments.     

Multilens system design with an athermal chart

We have introduced an athermal chart that plots chromatic dispersive power and thermal dispersive power on a Cartesian coordinate, and we give the design method of a multilens system in contact that satisfies achromatism and athermalization. The advantages of this chart are (1) that the condition of achromatism and athermalization is clear and (2) that the approximate power of the lenses that compose the multilens system is easily found on the chart. Design indices are given through a few design examples with an athermal chart.     

Semi-automatic documentation of an implemented linguistic grammar augmented with a treebank

We have constructed a large scale and detailed database of lexical types in Japanese from a treebank that includes detailed linguistic information. The database helps treebank annotators and grammar developers to share precise knowledge about the grammatical status of words that constitute the treebank, allowing for consistent large-scale treebanking and grammar development. In addition, it clarifies what lexical types are needed for precise Japanese NLP on the basis of the treebank. In this paper, we report on the motivation and methodology of the database construction.

Anodic characteristics of amorphous nickel-value metal alloys containing small amounts of platinum group elements in 0.5 M NaCl

By utilizing the characteristics of amorphous alloys capable of possessing specific electrocatalytic activity and corrosion resistance by alloying and surface activation treatment, an attempt was made to find amorphous alloys which are active as the anode material for production of sodium hypochlorite by electrolysis of seawater. Amorphous Ni-Nb and Ni-Ta alloys containing only 0.5–2.0 at % palladium and other platinum group metals showed a very high activity for chlorine production by electrolysis of 0.5M NaCl at 30°C when they were previously immersed in 46% HF for surface activation. The current efficiency of these surface-activated alloys for chlorine evolution considerably exceeded that of the currently used, most active Pt-Ir/Ti electrode for electrolysis of seawater. The surface activation treatment resulted in preferential dissolution of alloy constituents unnecessary for the electrocatalytic activity, i.e. nickel and valve metals, with a consequent enrichment of electrocatalytically active platinum group elements in the surface-activated layer. The corrosion weight loss of the surface-activated amorphous alloys under the steady state conditions for chlorine production was undetectable by a microbalance.