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Plasma treatment of wood surfaces has shown significant effects, but different excitation methods used for different species of wood generally result in varied characteristics of wood surfaces. Secondly, plasma modification greatly enhances the absorption of liquids by wood, but the relationship between liquid absorption and surface wettability is rarely studied. Limited detailed investigation of the modification effects and mechanisms has hindered the large-scale applications of plasma treatment in the wood industry. In this study, two typical plasmas, radio frequency (RF) plasma and gliding arc discharge (GAD) plasma, were employed to treat three species of wood: poplar, black walnut, and sapele. By focusing on changes in the contact angle of the wood surface, an exponential equation fitting method is used to determine the measurement time for contact angles. The research identified that factors contributing to the decrease in contact angle after plasma modification include not only the increase in surface energy but also liquid absorption. SEM and XPS analyses demonstrate that plasma etching accelerated liquid absorption by modifying the surface topography, while the increase in surface energy was due to the addition of oxygen-containing groups. High-valence C=O and O-C=O groups serve as indicators of plasma-induced surface chemical reactions. RF modification primarily features surface etching, whereas GAD significantly increases the active surface groups. Thus, different plasmas, due to their distinct excitation modes, produce diverse modification effects on wood. Considering the various physical and chemical properties of plasma-modified wood surfaces, recommendations for adhesive use on plasma-modified wood are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

PURPOSE: Compare the association of individual comorbidities, comorbidity indices, and survival in older adults with non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), including in specific NHL subtypes. METHODS: Data source was SEER-Medicare, a population-based registry of adults age 65 years and older with cancer. We included all incident cases of NHL diagnosed during 2008-2017 who met study inclusion criteria. Comorbidities were classified using the three-factor risk estimate scale (TRES), Charlson comorbidity index (CCI), and National Cancer Institute (NCI) comorbidity index categories and weights. Overall survival (OS) and lymphoma-specific survival, with death from other causes treated as a competing risk, were estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method from time of diagnosis. Multivariable Cox models were constructed, and Harrel C-statistics were used to compare comorbidity models. A two-sided P value of <.05 was considered significant. RESULTS: A total of 40,486 patients with newly diagnosed NHL were included. Patients with aggressive NHL had higher rates of baseline comorbidity. Despite differences in baseline comorbidity between NHL subtypes, cardiovascular, pulmonary, diabetes, and renal comorbidities were frequent and consistently associated with OS in most NHL subtypes. These categories were used to construct a candidate comorbidity score, the non-Hodgkin lymphoma 5 (NHL-5). Comparing three validated comorbidity scores, TRES, CCI, NCI, and the novel NHL-5 score, we found similar associations with OS and lymphoma-specific survival, which was confirmed in sensitivity analyses by NHL subtypes. CONCLUSION: The optimal measure of comorbidity in NHL is unknown. Here, we demonstrate that the three-category TRES and five-category NHL-5 scores perform as well as the 14-16 category CCI and NCI scores in terms of association with OS and lymphoma-specific survival. These simple scores could be more easily used in clinical practice without prognostic loss. The largest study to compare lymphoma-specific comorbidity prognostic models' association with survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The energy consumption of oil collection increases rapidly after oilfield enters the stage of high water cut. Carrying out gathering and transportation at normal or low temperature can save cost and bring certain enterprise benefit. In order to judge whether the gathering and transportation can be carried out at normal or low temperature, the thermodynamic hydraulic calculation model is constructed and modified according to the field measured data. Then the thermally hydraulic coupling calculation is carried out to determine the gathering and transportation radius. The single factor sensitivity analysis method was used to rank the sensitivity of the factors influencing the gathering and transportation radius, and the radius chart is made. The results show that the modified thermo-hydraulic model can better predict the temperature and pressure drop, and the average error of the calculated and the measured value is 2.5% and 7.67%. The four most influential factors from strong to weak are starting point temperature, liquid yield, moisture content of mass and ambient temperature. The chart drawn by the factors provides the basis for the normal temperature gathering and transportation of the pipeline, so the required temperature at the start of the pipe can be determined by querying the chart.

A blind super-resolution network with dual-channel attention is proposed for images captured by the 0.37 mm diameter sub-millimeter fiberscope. The fiberscope can used in scenarios where other image acquisition devices cannot be applied based on its flexible, soft, and minimally invasive characteristics. However, the images have black reticulated noise and only 3000 pixels. To improve image quality, the Butterworth band-stop filter is used to reduce the frequency of the reticulated noise. By optimizing the blind super-resolution model, high-quality images can be reconstructed that do not require a lot of synthetic paired fiberscope image data. Perceptual loss is utilized as a loss function, and channel and spatial attention mechanisms are introduced to the model to enhance the high-frequency detail information of the reconstructed image. In the comparative experiment with other methods, our method showed improvements of 2.25 in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and 0.09 in structural similarity (SSIM) based on objective evaluation metrics. The learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) based on learning was reduced by 0.6. Furthermore, four different methods were used to enhance the resolution of the fiberscope images by a factor of four. The results of this paper improve the information entropy and Laplace clarity by 0.44 and 2.54, respectively, compared to the average of other methods. Validation results show that the approach in this paper is more applicable to sub-millimeter-diameter fiberscopes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the existing pressure sensors, it is difficult to achieve the unification of wide pressure response range and high sensitivity. Furthermore, the preparation of pressure sensors with excellent performance for sleep health monitoring has become a research difficulty. In this paper, based on material and microstructure synergistic enhancement mechanism, a hybrid pressure sensor (HPS) integrating triboelectric pressure sensor (TPS) and piezoelectric pressure sensor (PPS) is proposed. For the TPS, a simple, low-cost, and structurally controllable microstructure preparation method is proposed in order to investigate the effect of carbon nano-onions (CNOs) and hierarchical composite microstructures on the electrical properties of CNOs@Ecoflex. The PPS is used to broaden the pressure response range and reduce the pressure detection limit of HPS. It has been experimentally demonstrated that the HPS has a high sensitivity of 2.46 V/104 Pa (50–600 kPa) and a wide response range of up to 1200 kPa. Moreover, the HPS has a low detection limit (10 kPa), a high stability (over 100,000 cycles), and a fast response time. The sleep monitoring system constructed based on HPS shows remarkable performance in breathing state recognition and sleeping posture supervisory control, which will exhibit enormous potential in areas such as sleep health monitoring and potential disease prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-molar ratio UF resin was used in bonding veneers of five wood species. Significantly different bonding strengths were observed among the used wood species. Much higher bonding strengths were found for cherry, sapele mahogany and black walnut, which would be attributed to their natural roughness that allows formation of more mechanical interlockings. After 60s Gliding Arc Discharge (GAD) plasma treatment of wood surface, the wet bonding performance was significantly improved for most of the wood species. The SEM images of wood surface indicated that the roughening, micrometer-scale peeling or etching effects of GAD plasma treatment would be related to the improved bonding performance. XPS characterizations showed that plasma treatment resulted in remarkable increase of O/C ratio for all wood species. Detailed analysis of C1s spectra revealed that drastic oxidation induced by plasma generated high content of oxygen-containing groups, while degradation led to exposure of more oxygen-containing components like cellulose and hemicellulose. In contrast to untreated surface, stronger interactions can be formed between highly polar wood surface and UF resin. GAD plasma appeared to be an efficient tool in both physical and chemical modifications of wood surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frequent meteorological disasters pose more and more extensive threats to human life and property. However, the traditional meteorological sensors based on external power supply, for natural disaster monitoring and early warning, are severely limited in remote and unattended areas. Herein, a self‐powered multi‐parameter meteorological sensor (SMPM‐sensor) for various weather monitoring is proposed, which can monitor the weather through the feedback of electrical energy output while collecting natural energy. The designed 360° omnidirectional array structure facilitates efficient collection of all‐weather solar energy and rain energy in different directions and monitoring the light intensity without the influence of solar azimuth. Based on the four‐segmented disc‐shaped structure and the introduced Ecoflex transition layer, the frequency and amplitude of the wind electrical output can be effectively improved. Owing to structure and material optimizations, a good linearity of 0.9746 between the current and the solar illuminance is exhibited, a wide monitoring range of rainfall intensity changes from 0.1 to 11.9 mm min−1, and the linearity between wind speed and voltage frequency can be as high as 0.9986. Therefore, based on excellent sensing performances, good stability, and real‐time characteristic, the fabricated SMPM sensor provides a potential technological strategy for the field of meteorological disaster monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adjuvant chemotherapy of leucovorin‐modulated 5‐fluorouracil (5‐FU/LV), capecitabine, and adding oxaliplatin to 5‐FU/LV or capecitabine (FLOX/OX) have been standard regimens for high‐risk stage II or III colon cancer (CC). We aimed to evaluate their patterns of use, association with survival, and rate of emergency room visit (ER) or hospitalization during the treatment period. High‐risk stage II or III patients aged >65 years diagnosed between 2007 and 2015, underwent colectomy, and received any of these three regimens were selected from SEER and Texas Cancer Registry (TC) linked with Medicare data. Chi‐square test, Kaplan–Meier survival curves, Cox regression, and logistic regression were used in data analysis. A total of 5621 (1080 stage II and 4541 stage III) patients with median age of 72 years were included in this study. For stage II, 24.4% used 5‐FU/LV, 31.2% used capecitabine, and 44.4% used FLOX/OX; the respective numbers for stage III were 13.8%, 17.9%, and 68.3%. Patients aged <70 years, not in the West region, not in Medicare state‐buy‐in program, and with no comorbidity were more likely to use FLOX/OX. FLOX/OX was associated with improved overall survival (OS) in stage II and III patients and improved cancer‐specific survival in stage III patients compared with 5‐FU/LV. The survival benefit of FLOX/OX was sustained in stage III patients aged ≥70 years. Capecitabine had the lowest ER/hospitalization rate with 19.2% in stage II and 28.9% in III. The use of FLOX/OX was associated with improved survival compared with 5‐FU/LV among CC patients. Capecitabine was associated with the lowest ER/hospitalization rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

River discharge is an essential hydrological index of the global water cycle and is important for flood and drought forecast. Ultrahigh frequency (UHF) radar has gained much attention since it can remotely retrieve river discharge from the surface flow velocity measurement in real-time and all-weather condition. However, it becomes challenging for the mountain river case where the water level changes more significant than that of the plain river due to the deep-narrow channel, which breaks the previous empirical relationship between surface flow velocity and discharge. In this letter, an improved index-velocity method is proposed to address this issue. Through modeling the nonuniform variation of the cross-sectional area with water level, a more accurate surface flow velocity–discharge relationship is established. Experimental results show that the proposed method produces higher calculation accuracy than that of the previous methods, which enlarges the applicable scenario of UHF radar in discharge measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperspectral images (HSIs) have high spectral resolution and low spatial resolution. HSI super-resolution (SR) can enhance the spatial information of the scene. Current SR methods have generally focused on the direct utilization of image structure priors, which are often modeled in global or local lower-order image space. The spatial and spectral hidden priors, which are accessible from higher-order space, cannot be taken advantage of when using these methods. To solve this problem, we propose a higher-order Hankel space-based hyperspectral image-multispectral image (HSI-MSI) fusion method in this paper. In this method, the higher-order tensor represented in the Hankel space increases the HSI data redundancy, and the hidden relationships are revealed by the nonconvex penalized Kronecker-basis-representation-based tensor sparsity measure (KBR). Weighted 3D total variation (W3DTV) is further applied to maintain the local smoothness in the image structure, and an efficient algorithm is derived under the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework. Extensive experiments on three commonly used public HSI datasets validate the superiority of the proposed method compared with current state-of-the-art SR approaches in image detail reconstruction and spectral information restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]