Microbiota and Serum Metabolic Profile Changes in Korean Native Hanwoo Steer in Response to Diet Feeding Systems

The diversity of bacteria and their function in cattle gastrointestinal tracts can influence animal welfare. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) was used to investigate microbial diversity in the feces of Hanwoo steers reared under natural grazing (GS) and housing (HS) systems. Additionally, serum metabolic parameters, such as liver and kidney markers and mineral and lipid content changes, as well as their correlation with pyrotags, were studied. A total of 6468 ± 87.86 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified in both steer groups, of which 3538 ± 38.17 OTUs were from grazing steer and 2930 ± 94.06 OTUs were from GS. Chao1 index analysis revealed a higher bacterial richness in GS. The dominant bacterial taxa were Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes. GS showed lower Bacteroidetes and higher Firmicutes abundance than HS. The serum of HS showed consistent increases in gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase (γGTP), glucose (GLU), total cholesterol (T-CHO), and triglyceride (TG) levels. The impact of GS on animal health and serum metabolic markers was strongly correlated with microbiota. As shown in this study, grazing has a significant impact on the fecal microbiota at the phylum and family levels, as well as the serum biochemical metabolites of Hanwoo steers.     

Monitoring skin condition using life activities on the SNS user documents

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Social networks are not new to the IT landscape. Starting from bulletin boards and chat rooms, they have evolved to include desktop and mobile device...     

A computer-aided diagnostic system for liver tumor detection using modified U-Net architecture

The Journal of Supercomputing - A multimedia-based medical decision-making system is an ultimate requirement in the medical imaging domain. In the healthcare sector, achieving quick and efficient...     

Saliency-weighted graphs for efficient visual content description and their applications in real-time image retrieval systems

The exponential growth in the volume of digital image databases is making it increasingly difficult to retrieve relevant information from them. Efficient retrieval systems require distinctive features extracted from visually rich contents, represented semantically in a human perception-oriented manner. This paper presents an efficient framework to model image contents as an undirected attributed relational graph, exploiting color, texture, layout, and saliency information. The proposed method encodes salient features into this rich representative model without requiring any segmentation or clustering procedures, reducing the computational complexity. In addition, an efficient graph-matching procedure implemented on specialized hardware makes it more suitable for real-time retrieval applications. The proposed framework has been tested on three publicly available datasets, and the results prove its superiority in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency in comparison with other state-of-the-art schemes.     

Bridging the semantic gap in multimedia emotion/mood recognition for ubiquitous computing environment

With the advent of the ubiquitous era, multimedia emotion/mood could be used as an important clue in multimedia understanding, retrieval, recommendation, and some other multimedia applications. Many issues for multimedia emotion recognition have been addressed by different disciplines such as physiology, psychology, cognitive science, and musicology. Recently, many researchers have tried to uncover the relationship between multimedia contents such as image or music and emotion in many applications. In this paper, we introduce the existing emotion models and acoustic features. We also present a comparison of different emotion/mood recognition methods.     

Effect of Wet Pretreatment on Interfacial Adhesion Energy of Cu-Cu Thermocompression Bond for 3D IC Packages

Quantitative analysis of the interfacial adhesion energy of Cu-Cu thermocompression bonds was performed using the four-point bending method with various wet pretreatment conditions. The evaluated interfacial adhesion energies for 1-μm-thick Cu bonding layers were 0.29 J/m², 1.28 J/m², 1.64 J/m², 1.17 J/m², and 0.43 J/m² for different acetic acid pretreatment times of 0 min, 1 min, 5 min, 10 min, and 15 min, respectively. There exists an optimum wet etch time for maximum adhesion strength. The change of surface properties with increasing wet etch time was believed to result in the variation of the interfacial adhesion energy. The decrease in interfacial adhesion energy after 5 min seems to result from a decrease in the plastic dissipation energy during interfacial crack propagation with thinner Cu film thickness caused by overetching.     

High-flexibility piezoelectric ribbon fiber fabrication through multi-material thermal drawing

In this study, an amorphous poly(vinylidene fluoride-hexafluoropropylene) (P(VDF-HFP)) copolymer with a high yield strain (approximately 18 %) is proposed as a cladding material for highly flexible and reliable piezoelectric ribbon fibers. Macro preforms are fabricated for thermal drawing (TD) processes, in which a poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) (P(VDF-TrFE)) film is sandwiched between two electrically conductive composite sheets (carbon black (CB)/polypropylene (PP)). The piezoelectric device is cladded with the P(VDF-HFP) copolymer. The preform geometries and TD parameters are optimized to overcome the incompatibility of flow characteristics among P(VDF-HFP), P(VDF-TrFE), and CB/PP composite at the drawing temperature, yielding fibers of length more than 80 m through TD. After annealing and poling, the fiber produces approximately 5 V (peak-to-peak) under 2.5 % tensile strain and 0.5 V (peak-to-peak) under bending deformation, with a 5-mm radius of curvature. Furthermore, the piezoelectric fiber shows no severe degradation in the output voltage after 10000 cycles of bending deformation with 1-mm radius of curvature. The piezoelectric ribbon fiber developed herein has potential as a flexible tensile, pressure, or bending sensor fiber for wearable applications.