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TUNABLE DUAL-PHASE DUAL-DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEM USING A PLGA MICROPARTICLE/PVA HYDROGEL COMPOSITE
Get PDFCurrent drug-eluting coatings have demonstrated controlled long-term, sustained release but have only tried to mitigate short-term burst release as a negative side effect. For applications like wound healing, there is a need for a drug-eluting coating which is adjustable in both short- and long-term release, independent of each other. We present a tunable dual-phase dual-drug delivery coating composed of drug-loaded polymer microparticles and drug-loaded hydrogel which can control short term and long term release individually in this study. This coating was created using lidocaine and dexamethasone encapsulated in poly(D,L-lactide-co-glycolide) particles combined with lidocaine- and dexamethasone-loaded poly(vinyl alcohol) hydrogel. Hydrogel drug concentration and microparticle mass fraction were investigated for their impact on short-term and long-term release, respectively. A two week- long drug release study was performed with formulations varying only hydrogel drug concentration and only microparticle mass fraction. The results of this study show that PVA hydrogel drug concentration can control short-term release independently and drug-loaded PLGA particle mass fraction may control long-term release. This drug-eluting composite could extend the wear time of insulin infusion sets
Use of Waste Plastics in Asphalt Mixes: Addressing the Variability of Source
Get PDFUse of waste plastics in asphalt mixtures suffers from a serious problem of significant variability with global sources; preventing proper guidelines for field applications. The aim of this study is to address the variability in source of waste plastic and its impact on asphalt mixture design. The study was designed to provide a selection criterion to evaluate the suitability of waste polyethylene (PE) for asphalt pavements. PE obtained from five sources was used as a replacement for asphalt binder. Dry mixing of plastics with asphalt and aggregate was performed at the dosage levels of 3%, 6%, and 9%. The changes in asphalt mixture volumetrics were correlated to plastic properties such as density(ρ), viscosity (η), melting point (Tm), and Degree of Crystallinity (Xc), apart from source. Construction Densification Index and Traffic Densification Index were also calculated for the workability of PE mixtures. From the calorimeter analysis, the thermal characteristics concluded that even though five PEs irrespective of sources could be categorized as PE, the plastics differed significantly in terms of melting enthalpies with varied Xc and η. The volumetric analysis of plastic modified mixtures conveyed that PE with Xc (65%) and η (\u3e5594 Pa.sec at 165°C) resulted in reduced workability of the mixtures. Such plastics were identified to have filler tendency rather than a binding material in the asphalt mixtures. Finally, PE with Xc value of 65.56% at a dosage of 6% is found to be optimum for designing PE modified mixture, irrespective of source. Overall, the study recommends to address PE in terms of core properties such as Xc and η rather than source or supplier to reduce variability and better understand its suitability in asphalt mixtures
Sense of community and belonging at Rowan University? An exploration of involvement in student-led clubs and organizations
Get PDFThis study explores concepts of community and belonging among students who are involved in clubs and organizations at Rowan University. Through the use of a qualitative survey and the option for an additional interview, participants are able to discuss their personal experiences being involved in a club or organization and if they believe it contributes to their sense of community and belonging, not only in the club or organization, but at Rowan University as an institution. Findings show that involvement in student clubs and organizations has helped some participants feel a sense of community and belonging in the clubs and organizations, as well as at Rowan University. While there were not as strong feelings when discussing a sense of community and belonging at Rowan University, participants did feel that participation in their clubs and organizations contributed to positive feelings
Sex Differences in Outcomes Among Patients Undergoing Thoracic Endovascular Aortic Repair (TEVAR) Procedure: A Retrospective Cohort Study
Get PDFIntroduction: There is limited data about sex differences in patients undergoing a thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) procedure. This study sought to examine the national inpatient sample (NIS) database to describe in-hospital outcomes by gender.
Methods: The NIS was searched for hospitalizations of adult patients who underwent TEVAR in 2019 and 2020. For this cohort, female patients were identified, and pregnant patients were excluded. The primary outcome was inpatient mortality. Secondary outcomes included hospital length of stay (LOS), and total hospital charges (TOTHCG).
Results: This study included 696 patients who underwent TEVAR. 255 (36.6%) females were identified, of which, 7 were pregnant and excluded from the study. Female patients who underwent TEVAR had higher prevalence of obesity (30.6% vs. 24.3%, p \u3c0.001), smoking (28.1% vs. 22.3%, p \u3c0.001), and CKD (5.2% vs. 4.2%, p \u3c0.001). In-hospital mortality was higher among the female cohort (6.1% vs. 4.0%, p \u3c 0.001). On multivariable regression, females who underwent TEVAR were associated with higher odds of inpatient mortality (OR 1.210, 95% CI 1.091-1.342, p \u3c0.001). Additionally, patients who underwent TEVAR and had ventricular arrythmias pay significantly more TOTHCG (462,216, P\u3c0.001) with longer LOS (23.5days vs. 15.7days, p \u3c0.001). On secondary analysis it has shown patients with ventricular arrhythmias who underwent TEVAR had higher odds of having acute kidney injury, developing shock, arrhythmias and congestive heart failure exacerbation.
Conclusion: In this nationally representative population‐based retrospective cohort study, female patients were associated with higher mortality and worse outcomes among patients undergoing TEVAR procedure
The Impact of the COVID-19 Mask Mandate on Effective Communication Between Healthcare Providers and Deaf/HoH Patients
Get PDFDuring the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries mandated the use of facial masks in public environments, especially in healthcare settings.[3] While this was beneficial in reducing the spread of the coronavirus disease, it created many challenges for the deaf/HoH community.[4] In particular, it limited effective communication between healthcare providers and deaf/HoH patients. It was found that masks limit word recognition for both deaf/HoH and non-deaf/HoH individuals. Additionally, both surgical and N95 masks hinder word recognition for deaf/HoH individuals and significantly impact communication during medical appointments
Vitamin Level Differences Across the ASD Spectrum
Get PDFBackground: In the United States, 2.7% of children are diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Environmental factors such as vitamin levels, including D, B9, and B12, may have a significant impact on the risk of development. Children conceived in winter months, with low sunlight and Vitamin D levels, have a higher risk of developing ASD. Vitamin B12 deficiency is generally linked with an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders. Additionally, vitamin B9 deficiency of a mother during gestation is linked to a higher risk of her child developing ASD.
Purpose: To assess potential differences in vitamin levels between patients of differing severities of ASD.
Methods: An analysis of vitamin level data for 295 RISN patients with ASD was conducted. Patients on vitamin supplementation at the time labs were drawn were filtered out. For each vitamin, patients were categorized based on ASD severity level. Using R-Studio, a one-way ANOVA Kruskal-Wallis test between the groups was conducted to determine statistically significant differences.
Results: On analysis, there were no statistically significant differences (p-value = 0.4309) in Vitamin D levels for patients with different severities of ASD. There were no statistically significant differences (p-value = 0.8801) in Vitamin B9 levels between these patients. Additionally, there were no statistically significant differences (p-value = 0.9744) in Vitamin D levels for patients with these different severities of ASD. This indicates, across these three vitamin types, that vitamin concentrations tend to be consistent across patients with ASD.
Conclusions: It may be important to consider repeat studies of this premise, as the sample size, among other factors, may have an influence on the outcome. The lack of notable difference in vitamin level between severities may indicate that severity is unrelated to vitamin level, or that severity is influenced by vitamins in a concentration-independent way, such as processing and receptor sensitivity. Future research should focus on obtaining thorough vitamin labs for patients longitudinally. This will allow for paired analysis of different vitamin levels. It also encourages research into vitamin level changes in patients over time and how it may be related to behavioral changes
Association of Risk Factors and Comorbidities With Chronic Pain in the Elderly Population.
Get PDFINTRODUCTION/OBJECTIVE: Chronic pain disorders affect about 20% of adults in the United States, and it disproportionately affects individuals living in the neighborhoods of extreme socioeconomic disadvantage. In many instances, chronic pain has been noted to arise from an aggregation of multiple risk factors and events. Therefore, it is of importance to recognize the modifiable risk factors. The aim of this study was to investigate the comorbid medical conditions and risk factors associated with chronic pain disorders in patients aged 65 years and older.
METHODS: Our team retrospectively reviewed medical records of elderly patients (65 years and older) who were evaluated in our outpatient medicine office between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021 for acute problems, management of chronic medical problems, or well visits. We divided our patients into a group who suffered from chronic pain disorder, and another group who did not have chronic pain disorder. The association of variables were compared between those groups.
RESULTS: Of the 2431 patients, 493 (20.3%) had a chronic pain disorder. A higher frequency of females in the group with chronic pain disorder was found compared to the group without a chronic pain disorder (60.6% vs 55.2%; P = .033). The mean ages between the two groups were similar in the group with a chronic pain disorder compared to the group without (76.35 ± 7.5 year vs 76.81 ± 7.59 year; P = .228). There were significant associations of certain comorbidities in the group with a chronic pain disorder compared to the group without a chronic pain disorder, such as depression (21.9% vs 15.2%; P \u3c .001), anxiety (27.0% vs 17.1%; P \u3c .001), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (8.7% vs 6.1%; P = .036), obstructive sleep apnea (16.8% vs 11.6%; P = .002), gastroesophageal reflux disease (40.8% vs 29.0%; P \u3c .001), osteoarthritis (49.3% vs 26.1%; P \u3c .001), other rheumatologic diseases (24.9% vs 19.4%; P = .006), and peripheral neuropathy (14.4% vs 5.3%; P \u3c .001).
CONCLUSION: Female sex, depression, anxiety, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, obstructive sleep apnea, gastroesophageal reflux disease, osteoarthritis, other rheumatologic diseases, and peripheral neuropathy were significantly associated with chronic pain disorder in elderly patients, while BMI was not associated with chronic pain disorder
Teaching librarians’ experiences of individual and shared agency: The lens of librarian relationships and workplace culture
Get PDFBrain-Inspired Continual Learning: Robust Feature Distillation and Re-Consolidation for Class Incremental Learning
Get PDFArtificial intelligence and neuroscience have a long and intertwined history. Advancements in neuroscience research have significantly influenced the development of artificial intelligence systems that have the potential to retain knowledge akin to humans. Building upon foundational insights from neuroscience and existing research in adversarial and continual learning fields, we introduce a novel framework that comprises two key concepts: feature distillation and re-consolidation. The framework distills continual learning (CL) robust features and rehearses them while learning the next task, aiming to replicate the mammalian brain\u27s process of consolidating memories through rehearsing the distilled version of the waking experiences. Furthermore, the proposed framework emulates the mammalian brain\u27s mechanism of memory re-consolidation, where novel experiences influence the assimilation of previous experiences via feature re-consolidation. This process incorporates the new understanding of the CL model after learning the current task into the CL-robust samples of the previous task(s) to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. The proposed framework, called Robust Rehearsal, circumvents the limitations of existing CL frameworks that rely on the availability of pre-trained Oracle CL models to pre-distill CL-robustified datasets for training subsequent CL models. We conducted extensive experiments on three datasets, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and real-world helicopter attitude datasets, demonstrating that CL models trained using Robust Rehearsal outperform their counterparts\u27 baseline methods. In addition, we conducted a series of experiments to assess the impact of changing memory sizes and the number of tasks, demonstrating that the baseline methods employing robust rehearsal outperform other methods trained without robust rehearsal. Lastly, to shed light on the existence of diverse features, we explore the effects of various optimization training objectives within the realms of joint, continual, and adversarial learning on feature learning in deep neural networks. Our findings indicate that the optimization objective dictates feature learning, which plays a vital role in model performance. Such observation further emphasizes the importance of rehearsing the CL-robust samples in alleviating catastrophic forgetting. In light of our experiments, closely following neuroscience insights can contribute to developing CL approaches to mitigate the long-standing challenge of catastrophic forgetting
HARDWARE ACCELERATION OF NUMERICAL METHODS FOR SOLVING ORDINARY DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS
Get PDFAlong with the advancement in technology, the role of hardware accelerators is increasing consistently, delivering advancements in scientific simulations and data analysis in scientific computing, signal processing tasks in communication systems, matrix operations, and neural network computations in artificial intelligence and machine learning models. On the other hand, several high-speed computer applications in this era of high-performance computing often depend on ordinary differential equations (ODEs); however, their nonlinear nature can present a challenge to obtaining analytic solutions. Consequently, numerical approaches prove effective in delivering only approximate solutions to these equations. This research discusses the implementation of a customized hardware accelerator for solving an ordinary differential equation (ODE) by utilizing numerical approaches while evaluating several performance metrics, including on-chip power consumption, FPGA hardware resources, and timing summary. The third-party vendor AXI4 stream Xilinx single-precision floating-point IP support has been used to develop the accelerator for solving the ordinary differential equation using those methods. The accelerator will determine the iteration approximation result of the ODE using those methods. The entire work uses VHDL hardware description language and the Xilinx Vivado Design Suite and has been deployed on the Zynq-ZC702 FPGA Evaluation Board, along with a design space exploration