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Scientific Reports Jun 2024Removing a limited number of large debris can significantly reduce space debris risks. These bodies are generally exposed to extreme environmental disturbance torques or...
Removing a limited number of large debris can significantly reduce space debris risks. These bodies are generally exposed to extreme environmental disturbance torques or consecutive accidents due to their large wet area, which causes them to experience accelerated high-rate tumbling motion. The existing literature has adequately explored the approximation operations with non-cooperative targets exhibiting 3-axis tumbling motion. However, the research gap lies in the lack of attention given to addressing this approximation for targets undergoing accelerated motion. Agile, accurate, and large-angle maneuvers are three common necessities for safely capturing such targets. Changes in the moment of inertia brought on by fuel slushing cannot be disregarded during such a maneuver. To deal with nonlinearities, adverse coupling effects, actuator saturation constraints, time-varying moment of inertia, and external disturbances that worsen during accelerated agile large-angle maneuvers, a novel adaptive control approach is developed in this paper. The controller's main advantage is its adjustable desired acceleration, which maintains its performance even when dealing with accelerated motion. The control law is directly synthesized from the nonlinear relative equations of motion, without any linearization or simplification of the system dynamics, making it robust to a variety of orbital elements and target behaviors. Adaptation laws are extracted from the Lyapunov stability theorem in a way that guarantees asymptotic stability. Moreover, control actuator roles (delay, saturation, and allocation) are accounted for in modeling and simulation. Finally, a comprehensive numerical simulation based on three different realistic and strict scenarios is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the proposed control approach. The controller's robustness against time-varying dynamic parameters (sharp and sudden change, smooth and slow change, and periodic change) is extensively demonstrated through simulation.
PubMed: 38942822
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-65807-6 -
Scientific Reports Jun 2024This study utilized arterial spin labeling-magnetic resonance imaging (ASL-MRI) to explore the developmental trajectory of brain activity associated with attention... (Comparative Study)
Comparative Study
This study utilized arterial spin labeling-magnetic resonance imaging (ASL-MRI) to explore the developmental trajectory of brain activity associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Pulsed arterial spin labeling (ASL) data were acquired from 157 children with ADHD and 109 children in a control group, all aged 6-12 years old. Participants were categorized into the age groups of 6-7, 8-9, and 10-12, after which comparisons were performed between each age group for ASL analysis of cerebral blood flow (CBF). In total, the ADHD group exhibited significantly lower CBF in the left superior temporal gyrus and right middle frontal gyrus regions than the control group. Further analysis revealed: (1) The comparison between the ADHD group (N = 70) aged 6-7 and the age-matched control group (N = 33) showed no statistically significant difference between. (2) However, compared with the control group aged 8-9 (N = 39), the ADHD group of the same age (N = 53) showed significantly lower CBF in the left postcentral gyrus and left middle frontal gyrus regions. (3) Further, the ADHD group aged 10-12 (N = 34) demonstrated significantly lower CBF in the left superior occipital region than the age-matched control group (N = 37). These age-specific differences suggest variations in ADHD-related domains during brain development post age 6-7.
Topics: Humans; Attention Deficit Disorder with Hyperactivity; Child; Male; Female; Spin Labels; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Cerebrovascular Circulation; Case-Control Studies; Brain
PubMed: 38942754
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-63658-9 -
Scientific Reports Jun 2024HIV/AIDS is one of the most devastating infectious diseases affecting humankind all over the world and its impact goes beyond public health problems. This study was...
Determinants of hemoglobin level and time to default from Highly Active Antiretroviral Therapy (HAART) for adult clients living with HIV under treatment; a retrospective cohort study design.
HIV/AIDS is one of the most devastating infectious diseases affecting humankind all over the world and its impact goes beyond public health problems. This study was conducted to investigate the joint predictors of hemoglobin level and time to default from treatment for adult clients living with HIV/AIDS under HAART at the University of Gondar Comprehensive and Specialized Hospital, North-west Ethiopia. The study was conducted using a retrospective cohort design from the medical records of 403 randomly selected adult clients living with HIV whose follow-ups were from September 2015 to March 2022. Hemoglobin level was projected using Sahli's acid-hematin method. Hence, the hemoglobin tube was filled with N/10 hydrochloric acid up to 2 g % marking and the graduated tube was placed in Sahli's hemoglobin meter. The blood samples were collected using the finger-pick method, considering 22 G disposable needles. The health staff did this. From a total of 403 adult patients living with HIV/AIDS included in the current study, about 44.2% defaulted from therapy. The overall mean and median estimated survival time of adult clients under study were 44.3 and 42 months respectively. The patient's lymphocyte count (AHR = 0.7498, 95% CI: (0.7411: 0.7587), p-value < 0.01), The weight of adult patients living with HIV/AIDS (AHR = 0.9741, 95% CI: (0.9736: 0.9747), p-value = 0.012), sex of adult clients (AHR = 0.6019, 95% CI: (0.5979, 0.6059), p-value < 0.01), WHO stages III compared to Stage I (AHR = 1.4073, 95% CI: (1.3262, 1.5078), p-value < 0.01), poor adherence level (AHR = 0.2796, 95% CI: (0.2082, 0.3705) and p-value < 0.01), bedridden patients (AHR = 1.5346, 95% CI: (1.4199, 1.6495), p-value = 0.008), and opportunistic infections (AHR = 0.2237, 95% CI: (0.0248, 0.4740), p-value = 0.004) had significant effect on both hemoglobin level and time to default from treatment. Similarly, other co-morbidity conditions, disclosure status of the HIV disease, and tobacco and alcohol addiction had a significant effect on the variables of interest. The estimate of the association parameter in the slope value of Hgb level and time default was negative, indicating that the Hgb level increased as the hazard of defaulting from treatment decreased. A patient with abnormal BMI like underweight, overweight, or obese was negatively associated with the risk of anemia (lower hemoglobin level). As a recommendation, more attention should be given to those patients with abnormal BMI, patients with other co-morbidity conditions, patients with opportunistic infections, and low lymphocytes, and bedridden and ambulatory patients. Health-related education should be given to adult clients living with HIV/AIDS to be good adherents for medical treatment.
Topics: Humans; Male; Adult; Female; Retrospective Studies; HIV Infections; Antiretroviral Therapy, Highly Active; Hemoglobins; Middle Aged; Ethiopia; Young Adult; Anti-HIV Agents; Undertreatment
PubMed: 38942753
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-62952-w -
World Journal of Surgery Jun 2024The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 has significantly impacted the country's healthcare system including surgical education. To assess the current state...
BACKGROUND
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 has significantly impacted the country's healthcare system including surgical education. To assess the current state and identify the strengths and opportunities for the improvement of Ukraine's surgical education system during the peri-war period, this study is one of the first to explore the state of surgical education across Ukraine in peri-war, providing essential insights for current and postwar healthcare reconstruction.
METHODS
This qualitative study involved semi-structured interviews with 24 Ukrainian surgical residents, surgeons, and program leadership from various regions. The study focused on clinical training, didactics, mentorship, autonomy, resident evaluation, the impact of war, and gender disparities in surgical education. Data analysis was conducted using a rapid qualitative analysis technique.
RESULTS
Interviews revealed strengths in surgical education such as adaptability to war conditions and international collaborations. However, opportunities for improvement were identified including a lack of structured clinical and didactic experiences, limited autonomy and access to simulators, gender discrimination, and war-time challenges. These issues highlight a need for more comprehensive training and support systems for surgical trainees in Ukraine.
CONCLUSIONS
The study underscores the resilience and adaptability of Ukrainian surgical education in the face of war while also emphasizing the need for significant improvements. It calls for implementing structured training programs, enhanced mentorship, and attention to gender equality. These findings are crucial for improving surgical education in Ukraine and can be used as an example for other lower-middle-income countries, especially in conflict settings.
PubMed: 38942738
DOI: 10.1002/wjs.12262 -
Briefings in Bioinformatics May 2024Accurate understanding of the biological functions of enzymes is vital for various tasks in both pathologies and industrial biotechnology. However, the existing methods...
Accurate understanding of the biological functions of enzymes is vital for various tasks in both pathologies and industrial biotechnology. However, the existing methods are usually not fast enough and lack explanations on the prediction results, which severely limits their real-world applications. Following our previous work, DEEPre, we propose a new interpretable and fast version (ifDEEPre) by designing novel self-guided attention and incorporating biological knowledge learned via large protein language models to accurately predict the commission numbers of enzymes and confirm their functions. Novel self-guided attention is designed to optimize the unique contributions of representations, automatically detecting key protein motifs to provide meaningful interpretations. Representations learned from raw protein sequences are strictly screened to improve the running speed of the framework, 50 times faster than DEEPre while requiring 12.89 times smaller storage space. Large language modules are incorporated to learn physical properties from hundreds of millions of proteins, extending biological knowledge of the whole network. Extensive experiments indicate that ifDEEPre outperforms all the current methods, achieving more than 14.22% larger F1-score on the NEW dataset. Furthermore, the trained ifDEEPre models accurately capture multi-level protein biological patterns and infer evolutionary trends of enzymes by taking only raw sequences without label information. Meanwhile, ifDEEPre predicts the evolutionary relationships between different yeast sub-species, which are highly consistent with the ground truth. Case studies indicate that ifDEEPre can detect key amino acid motifs, which have important implications for designing novel enzymes. A web server running ifDEEPre is available at https://proj.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/aihlab/ifdeepre/ to provide convenient services to the public. Meanwhile, ifDEEPre is freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/ml4bio/ifDEEPre/.
Topics: Deep Learning; Enzymes; Computational Biology; Software; Proteins; Databases, Protein; Algorithms
PubMed: 38942594
DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae225 -
RMD Open Jun 2024Fibromyalgia (FM) is a complex disorder with widespread pain and emotional distress, posing diagnostic challenges. FM patients show altered cognitive and emotional...
BACKGROUND
Fibromyalgia (FM) is a complex disorder with widespread pain and emotional distress, posing diagnostic challenges. FM patients show altered cognitive and emotional processing, with a preferential allocation of attention to pain-related information. This attentional bias towards pain cues can impair cognitive functions such as inhibitory control, affecting patients' ability to manage and express emotions. Sentiment analysis using large language models (LLMs) can provide insights by detecting nuances in pain expression. This study investigated whether open-source LLM-driven sentiment analysis could aid FM diagnosis.
METHODS
40 patients with FM, according to the 2016 American College of Rheumatology Criteria and 40 non-FM chronic pain controls referred to rheumatology clinics, were enrolled. Transcribed responses to questions on pain and sleep were machine translated to English and analysed by the LLM Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2 using prompt engineering targeting FM-associated language nuances for pain expression ('prompt-engineered') or an approach without this targeting ('ablated'). Accuracy, precision, recall, specificity and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) were calculated using rheumatologist diagnosis as ground truth.
RESULTS
The prompt-engineered approach demonstrated accuracy of 0.87, precision of 0.92, recall of 0.84, specificity of 0.82 and AUROC of 0.86 for distinguishing FM. In comparison, the ablated approach had an accuracy of 0.76, precision of 0.75, recall of 0.77, specificity of 0.75 and AUROC of 0.76. The accuracy was superior to the ablated approach (McNemar's test p<0.001).
CONCLUSION
This proof-of-concept study suggests LLM-driven sentiment analysis, especially with prompt engineering, may facilitate FM diagnosis by detecting subtle differences in pain expression. Further validation is warranted, particularly the inclusion of secondary FM patients.
Topics: Humans; Fibromyalgia; Female; Middle Aged; Male; Adult; ROC Curve; Natural Language Processing; Language; Emotions; Aged; Chronic Pain
PubMed: 38942593
DOI: 10.1136/rmdopen-2024-004367 -
Integrative and Comparative Biology Jun 2024To humans, the diverse array of display behaviors that animals use for communication can easily seem peculiar or bizarre. While ample research delves into the...
To humans, the diverse array of display behaviors that animals use for communication can easily seem peculiar or bizarre. While ample research delves into the evolutionary principles that shape these signals' effectiveness, little attention is paid to evolutionary patterning of signal design across taxa, particularly when it comes to the potential convergent evolution of many elaborate behavioral displays. By taking a mechanistic perspective, we explore the physiological and neurobiological mechanisms that likely influence the evolution of communication signals, emphasizing the utilization of pre-existing structures over novel adaptations. Central to this investigation are the concepts of perceptual bias and ritualization, which we propose contribute to the convergence of elaborate display designs across species. Perceptual bias explains a phenomenon where pre-existing perceptual systems of receivers, used for innate behaviors such as food and predator recognition, select for certain traits of a communication signal from a signaler. Ritualization occurs when traits with no functional role in communication are co-opted through selection and transformed into a new communicative signal. Importantly, susceptibility for ritualization can be brought about through physiological modifications that occurred early in evolutionary time. In this way, perceptual bias can be a selective force that causes the co-option of non-communicative traits into a new communication signal through ritualization involving pre-existing modifications to physiological systems. If the perceptual bias, non-communicative signal, and physiological modifications that increase susceptibility to ritualization are highly conserved, then we may see the convergent evolution of the new communication signal with unrelated taxa facing similar sensory constraints. We explore this idea here using the foot-flagging frog system as a theoretical case study.
PubMed: 38942486
DOI: 10.1093/icb/icae091 -
ENeuro Jun 2024Acetylcholine (ACh) neurons in the central nervous system are required for the coordination of neural network activity during higher brain functions, such as attention,...
Acetylcholine (ACh) neurons in the central nervous system are required for the coordination of neural network activity during higher brain functions, such as attention, learning, and memory, as well as locomotion. Disturbed cholinergic signaling has been described in many neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders. Furthermore, co-transmission of other signaling molecules, such as glutamate and GABA, with ACh has been associated with essential roles in brain function or disease. However, it is unknown when ACh neurons become cholinergic during development. Thus, understanding the timeline of how the cholinergic system develops and becomes active in the healthy brain is a crucial part of understanding brain development. To study this, we used transgenic mice to selectively label ACh neurons with tdTomato. We imaged serial sectioned brains and generated whole-brain reconstructions at different time points during pre- and postnatal development. We found three crucial time windows - two in the prenatal and one in the postnatal brain - during which most ACh neuron populations become cholinergic in the brain. We also found that cholinergic gene expression is initiated in cortical ACh interneurons, while the cerebral cortex is innervated by cholinergic projection neurons from the basal forebrain. Taken together, we show that ACh neuron populations are present and become cholinergic before postnatal day 12, which is the onset of major sensory processes, such as hearing and vision. We conclude that birth of ACh neurons and initiation of cholinergic gene expression are temporally separated during development but highly coordinated by brain anatomical structure. Acetylcholine (ACh) neurons are required for higher brain functions and locomotion. Disturbed cholinergic signaling was observed in neurodevelopmental disorders and intellectual disability. While the role of ACh release in neural circuit function is well understood, it is unknown when ACh neurons become cholinergic. We labelled ACh neurons to investigate when ACh neurons become cholinergic in the developing brain and performed reconstructions of serial sectioned brains. Here, we show that ACh neuron populations become cholinergic during three time windows pre- and postnatally. ACh neurons become cholinergic following the caudorostral direction of brain formation. In cortex and hippocampus, activation of cholinergic gene expression in ACh interneurons coincides with cholinergic innervation from the basal forebrain. We highlight that brain ACh neurons are cholinergic before P12, the onset of major sensory functions, such as hearing and vision.
PubMed: 38942474
DOI: 10.1523/ENEURO.0542-23.2024 -
Journal of the American Board of Family... Jun 2024The 2022 Centers for Disease Control's "Clinical Practice Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids for Pain in United States" called for attention and action toward reducing...
BACKGROUND
The 2022 Centers for Disease Control's "Clinical Practice Guidelines for Prescribing Opioids for Pain in United States" called for attention and action toward reducing disparities in untreated and undertreated pain among Black and Latino patients. There is growing evidence for controlled substance safety committees (CSSC) to change prescribing culture, but few have been examined through the lens of health equity. We examined the impact of a primary care CSSC on opioid prescribing, including by patients' race and sex.
METHODS
We conducted a retrospective cohort study. Our primary outcome was a change in prescribed morphine milligram equivalents (MME) at baseline (2017) and follow-up (2021). We compared the differences in MME by race and sex. We also examined potential intersectional disparities. We used paired test to compare changes in mean MME's and logistic regression to determine associations between patient characteristics and MME changes.
RESULTS
Our cohort included 93 patients. The mean opioid dose decreased from nearly 200 MME to 136.1 MME, . Thirty percent of patients had their dose reduced to under 90 MME by follow-up. The reduction rates by race or sex alone were not statistically significant. There was evidence of intersectional disparities at baseline. Black women were prescribed 88.5 fewer MME's at baseline compared with their White men counterparts, .
DISCUSSION
Our findings add to the previously documented success of CSSCs in reducing opioid doses for chronic nonmalignant pain to safer levels. We highlight an opportunity for primary care based CSSCs to lead the efforts to identify and address chronic pain management inequities.
PubMed: 38942449
DOI: 10.3122/jabfm.2023.230220R2 -
Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly :... Jun 2024Little is known about how adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience exercise, resulting in a lack of recommendations for supporting this...
Little is known about how adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) experience exercise, resulting in a lack of recommendations for supporting this population. We aimed to explore how adults with ADHD experience exercise as a management tool before and after diagnosis and how and why individuals experience issues related to exercise dependence. Fifteen active adults with a diagnosis of ADHD participated in semistructured interviews. Three overarching themes were identified: (a) exercise as a necessity for ADHD, reflecting the need to exercise before a formal ADHD diagnosis, and use of exercise as a management tool postdiagnosis; (b) goals and achievements to live by, reflecting how exercise patterns revolved around a need to make progress toward targets; and (c) activity or exercise: a roller coaster journey, covering the ups and downs of exercise journeys. This article highlights the importance of exercise for adults to manage ADHD and how this can be encouraged and supported.
PubMed: 38942419
DOI: 10.1123/apaq.2023-0175