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Summary High-resolution manometry (HRM) with the Chicago Classification (CC) is the standard paradigm to define esophageal motility disorders. Functional lumen imaging probe (FLIP) panometry utilizes impedance planimetry to characterize esophageal compliance and secondary peristalsis. The aim of this study was to explore the clinical impact of FLIP panometry in addition to HRM. A retrospective chart review was performed on FLIP panometry cases utilizing the 322N catheter. Cases with prior foregut surgeries or botulinum injection within 6 months of FLIP panometry were excluded. EGJ-diameter and distensibility index (DI) and secondary contraction patterns at increasing balloon volumes were recorded. An EGJ-DI of ≥2.8 mm2/mm Hg at 60 mL was considered as a normal EGJ distensibility. CC diagnosis, Eckhardt score, Brief Esophageal Dysphagia Questionnaire, and clinical outcomes were obtained for each FLIP case. A total of 186 cases were included. Absent contractility and achalasia types 1 and 2 showed predominantly absent secondary contraction patterns, while type 3 had a variety of secondary contractile patterns on FLIP panometry. Among 77 cases with EGJ outflow obstruction (EGJOO), 60% had a low EGJ-DI. Among those with no motility disorder or ineffective esophageal motility on HRM, 27% had a low DI and 47% had sustained contractions on FLIP, raising concern for an esophageal dysmotility process along the achalasia and/or spastic spectrum. FLIP panometry often confirmed findings on HRM in achalasia and absent contractility. FLIP panometry is useful in characterizing EGJOO cases. Spastic features on FLIP panometry may raise concern for a motility disorder on the spastic spectrum not captured by HRM. Further studies are needed on FLIP panometry to determine how to proceed with discrepancy with HRM and explore diagnoses beyond the CC.

Frailty is a significant risk factor for poor outcomes among older patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). We present an automatically derived electronic frailty screening tool (FRAIL score) as a predictor of patient outcomes.Patients aged 70 or over who received R-CHOP (rituximab, cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, vincristine, prednisone) chemotherapy for DLBCL between 2010 and ` were retrospectively assessed for their FRAIL scores. Measured treatment outcomes included overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), and treatment-limiting toxicity from chemotherapy.A total of 96 patients were analysed. When stratified by FRAIL score, the estimated 5-year PFS was 58%, 48% and, 0% for those with scores of 0-1, 2, and 3-5, respectively (p = 0.012). Similarly, the estimated 5-year OS for these respective groups was 60%, 60% and 0% (p = 0.010). Patients with a FRAIL score of 3-5 were also more likely than those with a score of 0-1 to need dose reduction or treatment delay due to toxicity (odds ratio [OR] 12.5, 95% confidence interval [CI] 10.42-109.72) and less likely to complete the six planned cycles of treatment (OR 0.14, 95% CI 0.03-0.77).The FRAIL score is independently predictive of OS, PFS, and treatment-related toxicity in older patients with DLBCL receiving R-CHOP chemotherapy. Once implemented, it provides a quick and accessible method to stratify disease and treatment-related risk among these patients.

Demand for enterprise data warehouse solutions to support real-time Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) queries as well as long-running Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) workloads is growing. Greenplum database is traditionally known as an OLAP data warehouse system with limited ability to process OLTP workloads. In this paper, we augment Greenplum into a hybrid system to serve both OLTP and OLAP workloads. The challenge we address here is to achieve this goal while maintaining the ACID properties with minimal performance overhead. In this effort, we identify the engineering and performance bottlenecks such as the under-performing restrictive locking and the two-phase commit protocol. Next we solve the resource contention issues between transactional and analytical queries. We propose a global deadlock detector to increase the concurrency of query processing. When transactions that update data are guaranteed to reside on exactly one segment we introduce one-phase commit to speed up query processing. Our resource group model introduces the capability to separate OLAP and OLTP workloads into more suitable query processing mode. Our experimental evaluation on the TPC-B and CH-benCHmark benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in boosting the OLTP performance without sacrificing the OLAP performance.

This paper presents a summary and results for the ActEV’20 SDL (Activities in Extended Video Sequestered Data Leaderboard) challenge that was held under the CVPR’20 ActivityNet workshop [38]. The primary goal of the challenge was to provide an impetus for advancing research and capabilities in the field of human activity detection in untrimmed multi-camera videos. Advancements in activity detection will help with a wide range of public safety applications. The challenge was administered by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where anyone could submit their system which run on sequestered data with the resulting score posted to a public leaderboard. Ten teams submitted their systems for the ActEV’20 SDL competition on the Multiview Extended Video with Activities (MEVA) test set with 37 target activities. The performance metric for the leaderboard ranking is the partial, normalized Area Under the Detection Error Tradeoff (DET) curve (nAUDC). The top rank on activity detection was by UCF at 37%, followed by CMU at 39% and OPPO at 41%.

We demonstrate the superior performance of fluoride coated versus oxide coated mirrors in long term vacuum operation of a high power deep-ultraviolet enhancement cavity. In high vacuum ($10^{-8}$ mbar), the fluoride optics can maintain up to a record-high 10 w of stable intracavity power on one hour time scales, whereas for the oxide optics, we observe rapid degradation at lower intracavity powers with a rate that increases with power. After observing degradation in high vacuum, we can recover the fluoride and oxide optics with oxygen; however, this recovery process becomes ineffective after several applications. For fluoride coatings, we see that initial UV conditioning in an oxygen environment helps to improve the performances of the optics. In oxygen-rich environments from $\sim 10^{-4}$ mbar to 1 mbar, the fluoride optics can stably maintain up to 20 W of intracavity power on several-hour time scales whereas for the oxide optics there is immediate degradation with a rate that increases with decreasing oxygen pressure., Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures

To combat climate change, we need to change user transportation behavior to be less carbon intensive. Prior work on motivating this behavior change has been predominantly qualitative and lacks comparison. This makes it challenging to determine which interventions should be deployed at scale. The behavior change community needs a process to compare interventions against each other in pilot studies before committing deployment resources. We perform the first quantitative comparison, to our knowledge, of behavior change strategies in the transportation behavior domain. Since this is a pilot with a limited recruitment budget, we design a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) using an open source platform. We assign 41 users to three mobile applications: Emotion, Information, Control. The RCT allows us to draw statistically valid inferences that can suggest future avenues for larger-scale studies. We found that Emotion resulted in greater engagement with the application (p=0.006, 0.035, 0.031, 0.040) while Information improved the sustainability of travel behavior (p = 0.043). These exploratory statistical results can motivate the design of future studies to further explore combinations of these approaches for sustainable transportation behavior.

Standardized evaluation measures have aided in the progress of machine learning approaches in disciplines such as computer vision and machine translation. In this paper, we make the case that robotic learning would also benefit from benchmarking, and present a template for a vision-based manipulation benchmark. Our benchmark is built on “REPLAB,” a reproducible and self-contained hardware stack (robot arm, camera, and workspace) that costs about 2000 USD and occupies a cuboid of size 70x40x60 cm. Each REPLAB cell may be assembled within a few hours. Through this low-cost, compact design, REPLAB aims to drive wide participation by lowering the barrier to entry into robotics and to enable easy scaling to many robots. We envision REPLAB as a framework for reproducible research across manipulation tasks, and as a step in this direction, we define a grasping benchmark consisting of a task definition, evaluation protocol, performance measures, and a dataset of over 50,000 grasp attempts. We implement, evaluate, and analyze several previously proposed grasping approaches to establish baselines for this benchmark. Project page with assembly instructions, additional details, and videos: https://goo.gl/5F9dP4.

Niemann-Pick type C1 (NPC1) disease is a fatal neurovisceral disease for which there are no FDA approved treatments, though cyclodextrin (HPβCD) slows disease progression in preclinical models and in an early phase clinical trial. Our goal was to evaluate the mechanism of action of a previously described combination-therapy, Triple Combination Formulation (TCF) - comprised of the histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi) vorinostat/HPβCD/PEG - shown to prolong survival in Npc1 mice. In these studies, TCF's benefit was attributed to enhanced vorinostat pharmacokinetics (PK). Here, we show that TCF reduced lipid storage, extended lifespan, and preserved neurological function in Npc1 mice. Unexpectedly, substitution of an inactive analog for vorinostat in TCF revealed similar efficacy. We demonstrate that the efficacy of TCF was attributable to enhanced HPβCD PK and independent of NPC1 protein expression. We conclude that although HDACi effectively reduce cholesterol storage in NPC1-deficient cells, HDACi are ineffective in vivo in Npc1 mice.

Biomaterial scaffolds are central to many regenerative strategies as they create a space for infiltration of host tissue and provide a platform to deliver growth factors and progenitor cells. However, biomaterial implantation results in an unavoidable inflammatory response, which can impair tissue regeneration and promote loss or dysfunction of transplanted cells. We investigated localized TGF-β1 delivery to modulate this immunological environment around scaffolds and transplanted cells. TGF-β1 was delivered from layered scaffolds, with protein entrapped within an inner layer and outer layers designed for cell seeding and host tissue integration. Scaffolds were implanted into the epididymal fat pad, a site frequently used for cell transplantation. Expression of cytokines TNF-α, IL-12, and MCP-1 were decreased by at least 40% for scaffolds releasing TGF-β1 relative to control scaffolds. This decrease in inflammatory cytokine production corresponded to a 60% decrease in leukocyte infiltration. Transplantation of islets into diabetic mice on TGF-β1 scaffolds significantly improved the ability of syngeneic islets to control blood glucose levels within the first week of transplant and delayed rejection of allogeneic islets. Together, these studies emphasize the ability of localized TGF-β1 delivery to modulate the immune response to biomaterial implants and enhance cell function in cell-based therapies.

Mice are extensively used for gene modification research and isolated cardiomyocytes are essential for evaluation of cardiac function without interference from non-myocyte contribution. This study was designed to characterize cardiomyocyte excitation–contraction coupling in FVB/N-C57BL/6 intercrossed brown mice. Mechanical and intracellular Ca 2+ properties were evaluated using an IonOptix softedge system including peak shortening (PS), time-to-PS (TPS), time-to-90% relengthening (TR 90 ), maximal velocity of shortening and relengthening (± d L / d t ), intracellular Ca 2+ rise and decay rate. Resting cell length was longer in age- and gender-matched C57BL/6 and brown mice compared to FVB strain. PS and ± d L / d t were significantly lower in brown mice compared to FVB/N and C57BL/6 groups. TPS was shortened in C57BL/6 mice and TR 90 was prolonged in brown mice compared to other groups. Resting intracellular Ca 2+ level and single exponential intracellular Ca 2+ decay constant were comparable among all three mouse lines. Rise in intracellular Ca 2+ in response to electrical stimulus was higher in C57BL/6 mouse myocytes whereas bi-exponential intracellular Ca 2+ decay was faster in brown mice. Myocytes from all three groups exhibited similar fashion of reduction in PS in response to increased stimulus frequency. These data suggest that inherent differences in cardiomyocyte excitation–contraction coupling exist between strains, which may warrant caution when comparing data from these mouse lines.

This paper discussed some requirements and issues for connection management in an optical wavelength routing switch in the context of a dynamically configurable wavelength management network environment. The wavelength connection management in the optical routing switch provides and manages the data path in the switch core for the configured end-to-end light path. Through a unique approach in design of the switching fabrics control and management, it is believed that a more scalable, flexible, and manageable optical wavelength routing switch architecture can be achieved. For editing purpose it is focused more on O-E-O model throughout this paper, although the contents would serve the same purpose to all optical model.