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Development and validation of the International Classification for Orofacial Pain Algorithm
No full textOrofacial pain (OFP) encompasses a complex spectrum of conditions that present significant diagnostic challenges. The International Classification of Orofacial Pain (ICOP), introduced in 2020, offers a comprehensive diagnostic framework encompassing nearly 200 distinct OFP conditions. However, its detailed structure can impede practical use in clinical settings. To address this, we developed the International Classification of Orofacial Pain Algorithm (ICOP-AL), a flowchart-based tool designed to simplify the diagnostic process by methodically guiding users through ICOP's hierarchical criteria. International Classification of Orofacial Pain Algorithm integrates well-established diagnostic standards, including those from the International Classification of Headache Disorders, 3rd edition and Diagnostic Criteria for Temporomandibular Disorders, to enhance clinical applicability and diagnostic precision. The algorithm's validity was assessed in a study with 100 anonymized patient cases and further evaluated by clinicians across varied experience levels. The results demonstrated substantial agreement between ICOP-AL-derived diagnoses and expert clinician diagnoses (Cohen's Kappa κ = 0.688, P < 0.001), with ICOP-AL outperforming nonexpert evaluators, thereby underscoring its reliability and potential to standardize diagnostic outcomes across clinical environments. International Classification of Orofacial Pain Algorithm represents a promising step toward improving OFP diagnosis, providing a structured and accessible approach for integrating ICOP into routine clinical practice. Although early results are encouraging, further refinement and real-world validation, particularly for more detailed diagnoses, are necessary to determine its full potential as a diagnostic and educational tool.status: Accepte
Current State of Knowledge Regarding Cochlear Implantation in Children With Single-Sided Deafness.
No full textstatus: Publishe
A minute can only be spent once: Validating a behavioral paradigm to study societally relevant time allocation conflicts
No full textSocietally beneficial behaviors often have to compete with alternative behaviors for limited resources (e.g., time). Every minute invested in helping others, the community, or the natural environment cannot be invested in the pursuit of hedonic pleasure or economic profit. Yet existing behavioral paradigms and experimental models rarely consider the activities competing with the societally beneficial behavior of interest. Here, we developed the Behavioral Allocation Task (BAT) to explicitly model the opportunity costs of pro-environmental behavior. On each BAT trial, participants can decide whether they want to use the next 30 s to generate environmental benefits, to work for their own financial benefit, or to engage in a potentially more hedonic activity (i.e., watching videos). A preregistered experiment (N = 228) showed BAT choice behavior to systematically track the value of those behavioral options. Pro-environmental choices became more likely when they led to larger environmental benefits, but also when the competing behaviors decreased in value. Individual differences in BAT behavior were also found to be moderately correlated with self-report measures of pro-environmental propensity. These findings support the suitability of the BAT for studying how people allocate their time between pro-environmental behavior and valued competing behaviors. More generally, they illustrate that behavior change interventions may benefit from targeting the behaviors that compete with societally beneficial behaviors.sponsorship: Florian Lange was supported by a FWO postdoctoral fellowship (No. 12U1221N), and Alex Rieger received support from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. (FWO|12U1221N, German Academic Scholarship Foundation)status: Publishe
Africa's Christian Zionist Frontiers
No full textsponsorship: Nathan Devir, David Ngong, and one anonymous reviewer provided useful comments on earlier versions of this text. All errors are mine alone.status: Publishe
De dynamica van clustergroei en het verhogen van de flux van een clusterbron die magnetron sputtering combineert met gasaggregatie
No full textThis thesis advances the physical synthesis of catalysts for CO₂ conversion using cluster beam deposition via a magnetron sputtering gas aggregation source. By redesigning the magnetron's magnetic field to a Central Strong configuration and systematically studying the effects of temperature, sputtering power, and aggregation length, the work uncovers key mechanisms that enhance nucleation, cluster growth, and overall yield. These improvements enable the scalable production of size-controlled, well-defined clusters. Catalytic tests on Pd/ZnO and Cu-Ag systems reveal strong support-cluster interactions that govern selectivity in CO₂ hydrogenation and electrochemical reduction. The findings establish a foundation for designing next-generation cluster-based catalysts for sustainable CO₂ utilisation.status: Publishe
Van pure culturen naar vlokken: een bottom-up benadering voor microbiële ecologiestudies van biologische waterzuivering
No full textThe scale of human activities requires a well-engineered system to mitigate the impact of discharging the vast amount of wastewater produced every day. When discharged untreated, the high nutrient content of this waste stream contributes to soil and water eutrophication problems, promoting algal blooms, loss of biodiversity, and other ecological issues. In essence, excessive nutrient availability disturbs the natural C/N/P balance of our ecosystems. By leveraging the natural removal activities that occur in the environment, the activated sludge process has become the foundation of engineered systems in biological wastewater treatment (and resource recovery). The process is based on a mixed microbial community (bacteria/fungi/protists/...) that aggregates into flocs, which can be separated from the treated water.
Biological aggregation (into flocs or granules) not only yields a clear effluent, it can intensify sludge separation, and retains functional microorganisms in the system. However, the sludge aggregates are mostly still treated as a black box (in terms of community and biopolymer composition). Pinpointing the dominant players for this aggregation in the dynamic mixed microbial community is not straightforward. Especially the matrix of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) in which the microorganisms are embedded, is a complex structure that should be more elaborately investigated to be able to link it to functionality. As a result of this lack of insight, flocculation problems are usually still remediated without knowledge of the exact causes. By extension, flocculation itself is mainly approached in a kind of trial-and-error way, because mechanistically controlled flocculation (or granulation) is not (yet) possible.
In this work, we show that it is feasible to establish a model consortium of activated sludge with reduced complexity to fundamentally study bioflocculation. By avoiding shifts in the microbial community, the applied experimental conditions have a more direct effect on the observations, because community shifts cannot easily be decoupled from the functional result. Five key microbial species are selected based on their functional or structural roles, as well as their relevance in wastewater treatment: Nitrosomonas europaea, Nitrobacter winogradskyi, Azoarcus communis, Tetrasphaera japonica, and Sphaerotilus montanus. The research combines microscopy, metabolite measurements and molecular quantification of the community to study their interactions and response in axenic and coculture conditions.
First, the axenic growth of each member is established and their main functional activities are investigated using multiple approaches. Alginate entrapment enables robust cell retention of nitrifiers and promotes the formation of strong, spherical microcolonies similar to those found in full-scale sludge. Cryosectioning showed a homogeneous biomass distribution in beads, while FISH revealed that not all N-cycle species were present in every microcolony. Flow cytometric fingerprints also indicated a lower phenotypic diversity in entrapped nitrifiers in coculture compared to axenic cultures, suggesting that close proximity within beads is sufficient for interspecies interactions.
The characterisation of \textit{Tetrasphaera japonica} revealed that this (alleged) phosphate accumulating organism did not cycle polyphosphate in all tested conditions. This observation highlights the effect of the microbial community and environment factors on expressed functionality, because \textit{Tetrasphaera} has been described to perform this process in mixed communities. The EPS-producing denitrifier (\textit{Azoarcus communis}) facilitated attachment of nitrifier microcolonies and binding to filamentous networks. Quantitatively, multiplex qPCR provided reproducible measurements of community composition in both entrapped and planktonic biomass, supporting detailed monitoring of species dynamics and the effects of operational parameters like shear stress.
In parallel, an open-source sequencing batch reactor (SBR) platform was developed for controlled, long-term feast-famine experiments as a stress condition to induce flocculation. Detailed build and operation instructions ensure versatility and transferability.
Finally, coculture experiments in the SBR setup showed that the consortium could be reproducibly grown in anaerobic/aerobic/anoxic cycles. With the established model consortium of activated sludge and the developed tools for its characterisation and growth, this work hopes to provide a foundation for mechanistic studies of bioflocculation and interspecies interactions. The open-source reactor platform developed here is also readily transferable to other systems and research questions.
Future work should focus on fluorescently labelling additional species (notably the filament) to overcome FISH limitations, further investigating the conditions required for phosphate cycling in \textit{Tetrasphaera japonica}, and addressing oxygen limitation issues caused by biofilm-induced aerator clogging. In-depth characterisation of nitrifier microcolonies is recommended, as well as assessing their survival in microcolony state compared to planktonic precultures.
In summary, a five-species consortium was established and monitored in pure and coculture conditions. Nitrifier microcolonies were formed using alginate entrapment, and a stable five-species SBR experiment showed that it was feasible to maintain the model consortium over time. In this way, the thesis contributes to synthetic community research by providing the tools and approaches needed to move towards bottom-up flocculation.status: Publishe
Exploring the Challenges for Artificial Intelligence Adoption and Implementation in EU Public Administrations. Results from a Case Study Analysis
No full textstatus: Published onlin
Stereogecontroleerde synthese en karakterisering van nieuwe suiker-fosfaat-gemodificeerde nucleotiden
No full textNucleic acids have evolved over billions of years into molecules that combine chemical simplicity with exceptional functional complexity to support all life on earth. Expanding this natural repertoire through chemical modification has greatly increased their structural diversity and enabled novel applications beyond their biological roles. In this thesis, we investigate novel sugar-backbone modified nucleic acids with application potential in medicine and biotechnology, characterized by either a chiral phosphorus atom or a chiral acyclic pseudosugar moiety. Given the current limitations in stereocontrolled synthesis methods for many chiral unnatural nucleic acids and the scarcity of structural information available for these polymers, we developed stereocontrolled synthetic strategies to access the corresponding building blocks in enantiomerically pure form and investigated how their stereochemistry influences nucleic acid structure and function.status: Accepte
Designing and Personalising Hybrid Health Explanations for Lay Users
No full textRecommender systems are increasingly used in mobile health interventions, such as managing chronic musculoskeletal pain (CMP). While researchers have highlighted the importance of explaining health-related recommendations to lay users, with benefits such as increased trust and a higher tendency to follow up on these recommendations, how to design explanations for lay users in critical contexts such as health remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we develop a mobile health application to support users with CMP through coaching and personalised health recommendations delivered via a conversational rule-based recommender system. This paper describes the three-phase iterative development of the RS, involving health experts and end users. In the first iteration, we conduct a preliminary validation study with N=282 participants to ensure the app's validity and improve the initial set of health recommendations. Next, two user studies are conducted centred around designing effective and understandable explanations for these recommendations. First, we design six explanation modalities tailored towards lay users, and through a qualitative study (N=11), extract initial design guidelines for explaining health recommendations, finding a strong preference towards feature importance explanations and identifying issues with modalities that highlight negative emotions. Given these results, we explore whether extending feature importance explanations with textual information into a ‘hybrid’ explanation could benefit end users, and whether these benefits depend on a user's personal characteristics (need for cognition and ease-of-satisfaction). Through a mixed-methods study with N=262 participants, we find that the hybrid modality significantly increased user trust, transparency, persuasiveness, usefulness, and satisfaction compared to unimodal explanations. However, users with a higher need for cognition rate unimodal explanations more positively than hybrid ones.sponsorship: Research Foundation (Flanders)|G067721N, Research Foundation (Flanders)|G0A4923Nstatus: Published onlin
