Impact of a diabetic retinal exam screening program on quality measure gaps at a family medicine practice.

Background: Diabetic retinopathy is a common complication in people with diabetes and annual screening is recommended by the American Diabetes Association. This annual exam is also a HEDIS quality measure. Barriers such as lack of access to healthcare or cost of specialist visits may impact the number of patients who receive these exams.

First-Principles Studies of the Electronic and Optical Properties of Zinc Titanium Nitride: The Role of Cation Disorder.

Cation disorder is an established feature of heterovalent ternary nitrides, a promising class of semiconductor materials. A recently synthesized wurtzite-family ternary nitride, ZnTiN, shows potential for durable photoelectrochemical applications with a measured optical absorption onset of 2 eV, which is 1.4 eV lower than previously predicted, a large difference attributed to cation disorder.

Rumination in dementia and its relationship with depression, anxiety, and attentional biases.

Rumination (self-referential and repetitive thinking), attentional biases (AB), and impaired cognitive control are theorized as being integral factors in depression and anxiety. Yet, research examining the relationship between rumination, mood, and AB for populations with reduced cognitive control, e.g.

Reducing delamination of an electron-transporting polymer from a metal oxide for electrochemical applications.

Delamination of the electron-transporting polymer N2200 from indium tin oxide (ITO) in aqueous electrolytes is mitigated by modifying ITO with an azide-functionalized phosphonic acid (PA) which, upon UV irradiation, reacts with the polymer. The optical, electrochemical, and spectroelectrochemical properties of N2200 thin films are retained in aqueous and non-aqueous media.

Soft Materials for Photoelectrochemical Fuel Production.

Polymer semiconductors are fascinating materials that could enable delivery of chemical fuels from water and sunlight, offering several potential advantages over their inorganic counterparts. These include extensive synthetic tunability of optoelectronic and redox properties and unique opportunities to tailor catalytic sites via chemical control over the nanoenvironment. Added to this is proven functionality of polymer semiconductors in solar cells, low-cost processability, and potential for large-area scalability.

Webcam-Based Eye-Tracking of Attentional Biases in Alzheimer's Disease: A Proof-Of-Concept Study.

Objectives: To measure home-based older adults' attentional biases (AB) using webcam-based eye-tracking (WBET) and examine internal consistency.

Methods: Twelve participants with and without cognitive impairment completed online self-report anxiety and depression screens, and a 96-trial dot-probe task with eye-gaze tracking. For each trial, participants fixated on a cross, free-viewed sad-neutral, sad-angry, sad-happy, angry-neutral, angry-happy, and happy-neutral facial expression pairings, and then fixated on a dot.

Understanding Iron Impurities in Australian Kaolin and Their Effect on Acid and Heat Activation Processes of Clay.

Iron impurities present in the crystal structure of kaolin minerals or in accessory species are frequently encountered in clay deposits. As knowledge of the location and states of the iron is crucial when modifying the properties of clays by activation, it is important that new deposits are well characterized in terms of the amount and location of this metal. The Western Australia Noombenberry deposit has been identified as a large resource of kaolin composed largely of halloysite and kaolinite.

Zinc Titanium Nitride Semiconductor toward Durable Photoelectrochemical Applications.

Photoelectrochemical fuel generation is a promising route to sustainable liquid fuels produced from water and captured carbon dioxide with sunlight as the energy input. Development of these technologies requires photoelectrode materials that are both photocatalytically active and operationally stable in harsh oxidative and/or reductive electrochemical environments. Such photocatalysts can be discovered based on co-design principles, wherein design for stability is based on the propensity for the photocatalyst to self-passivate under operating conditions and design for photoactivity is based on the ability to integrate the photocatalyst with established semiconductor substrates.

Resolving electron injection from singlet fission-borne triplets into mesoporous transparent conducting oxides.

Photoinduced electron transfer into mesoporous oxide substrates is well-known to occur efficiently for both singlet and triplet excited states in conventional metal-to-ligand charge transfer (MLCT) dyes. However, in all-organic dyes that have the potential for producing two triplet states from one absorbed photon, called singlet fission dyes, the dynamics of electron injection from singlet triplet excited states has not been elucidated. Using applied bias transient absorption spectroscopy with an anthradithiophene-based chromophore () adsorbed to mesoporous indium tin oxide (), we modulate the driving force and observe changes in electron injection dynamics.

Multimodal Imaging of Autofluorescent Sites Reveals Varied Chemical Speciation in SSZ-13 Crystals.

A multimodal imaging study of chabazite is used to show the distribution of and discriminate between different emissive deposits arising as a result of the detemplation process. Confocal imaging, 3D fluorescence lifetime imaging, 3D multispectral fluorescence imaging, and Raman mapping are used to show three different types of emissive behaviours each characterised by different spatial distributions, trends in lifetime, spectral signals, and Raman signatures. A notable difference is seen in the morphology of agglomerated surface deposits and larger subsurface deposits, which experience lifetime augmentation due to spatial confinement.

4D In-Situ Microscopy of Aerosol Filtration in a Wall Flow Filter.

The transient nature of the internal pore structure of particulate wall flow filters, caused by the continuous deposition of particulate matter, makes studying their flow and filtration characteristics challenging. In this article we present a new methodology and first experimental demonstration of time resolved in-situ synchrotron micro X-ray computed tomography (micro-CT) to study aerosol filtration. We directly imaged in 4D (3D plus time) pore scale deposits of TiO2 nanoparticles (nominal mean primary diameter of 25 nm) with a pixel resolution of 1.

Porous Metal-Organic Polyhedra: Morphology, Porosity, and Guest Binding.

Designing porous materials which can selectively adsorb CO or CH is an important environmental and industrial goal which requires an understanding of the host-guest interactions involved at the atomic scale. Metal-organic polyhedra (MOPs) showing permanent porosity upon desolvation are rarely observed. We report a family of MOPs , , ), which derive their permanent porosity from cavities between packed cages rather than from within the polyhedra.

Insight into the effects of confined hydrocarbon species on the lifetime of methanol conversion catalysts.

The methanol-to-hydrocarbons reaction refers collectively to a series of important industrial catalytic processes to produce either olefins or gasoline. Mechanistically, methanol conversion proceeds through a 'pool' of hydrocarbon species. For the methanol-to-olefins process, these species can be delineated broadly into 'desired' lighter olefins and 'undesired' heavier fractions that cause deactivation in a matter of hours.

Combinatorial Synthesis of Magnesium Tin Nitride Semiconductors.

Nitride materials feature strong chemical bonding character that leads to unique crystal structures, but many ternary nitride chemical spaces remain experimentally unexplored. The search for previously undiscovered ternary nitrides is also an opportunity to explore unique materials properties, such as transitions between cation-ordered and -disordered structures, as well as to identify candidate materials for optoelectronic applications. Here, we present a comprehensive experimental study of MgSnN, an emerging II-IV-N compound, for the first time mapping phase composition and crystal structure, and examining its optoelectronic properties computationally and experimentally.

Effects of crystal size on methanol to hydrocarbon conversion over single crystals of ZSM-5 studied by synchrotron infrared microspectroscopy.

Operando synchrotron infrared microspectroscopy (OIMS) was used to study the conversion of methanol over coffin-shaped HZSM-5 crystals of different sizes: large (∼250 × 80 × 85 μm3), medium (∼160 × 60 × 60 μm3) and small (∼55 × 30 × 30 μm3). The induction period, for direct alkene formation by deprotonation of surface methoxy groups, was found to decrease with decreasing crystal size and with increasing reaction temperature. Experiments with a continuous flow of dimethylether showed that evolution of the hydrocarbon pool and indirect alkene formation is also strongly dependent on crystal size.

Super-Resolution Axial Localization of Ultrasound Scatter Using Multi-Focal Imaging.

Objective: This paper aims to develop a method for achieving micrometre axial scatterer localization for medical ultrasound, surpassing the inherent, pulse length dependence limiting ultrasound imaging.

Methods: The method, directly translated from cellular microscopy, is based on multi-focal imaging and the simple, aberration-dependent, image sharpness metric of a single point scatterer. The localization of a point scatterer relies on the generation of multiple overlapping sharpness curves, created by deploying three foci during receive processing, and by assessing the sharpness values after each acquisition as a function of depth.

Reactions of Dimethylether in Single Crystals of the Silicoaluminophosphate STA-7 Studied via Synchrotron Infrared Microspectroscopy.

Abstract: Synchrotron infrared micro-spectroscopy has been applied to measure in situ the reaction of dimethylether in single crystals of the silicoaluminophosphate STA-7. The crystals are found to contain a uniform and homogeneous distribution of acidic hydroxyl groups. Dimethylether is hydrogen bonded to the hydroxyl groups at low temperatures, but evidence is found for dissociation to form surface methoxy groups above 473 K, and aromatic hydrocarbon pool species above 573 K.

Operando Spectroscopic Studies of Cu-SSZ-13 for NH-SCR deNOx Investigates the Role of NH in Observed Cu(II) Reduction at High NO Conversions.

The small pore zeolite chabazite (SSZ-13) in the copper exchanged form is a very efficient material for the selective catalytic reduction by ammonia (NH) of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from the exhaust of lean burn engines, typically diesel powered vehicles. The full mechanism occurring during the NH-SCR process is currently debated with outstanding questions including the nature and role of the catalytically active sites. Time-resolved operando spectroscopic techniques have been used to provide new level of insights in to the mechanism of NH-SCR, to show that the origin of stable Cu(I) species under SCR conditions is potentially caused by an interaction between NH and the Cu cations located in eight ring sites of the bulk of the zeolite and is independent of the NH-SCR of NOx occurring at Cu six ring sites within the zeolite.

Experimental performance assessment of the sub-band minimum variance beamformer for ultrasound imaging.

Recent progress in adaptive beamforming techniques for medical ultrasound has shown that current resolution limits can be surpassed. One method of obtaining improved lateral resolution is the Minimum Variance (MV) beamformer. The frequency domain implementation of this method effectively divides the broadband ultrasound signals into sub-bands (MVS) to conform with the narrow-band assumption of the original MV theory.

Amorphous Mixed-Metal Oxide Thin Films from Aqueous Solution Precursors with Near-Atomic Smoothness.

Thin films with tunable and homogeneous composition are required for many applications. We report the synthesis and characterization of a new class of compositionally homogeneous thin films that are amorphous solid solutions of AlO and transition metal oxides (TMO) including VO, CrO, MnO, FeO, CoO, NiO, CuO, and ZnO. The synthesis is enabled by the rapid decomposition of molecular transition-metal nitrates TM(NO) at low temperature along with precondensed oligomeric Al(OH)(NO) cluster species, both of which can be processed from aq solution.

Helicobacter pylori-Mediated Protection from Allergy Is Associated with IL-10-Secreting Peripheral Blood Regulatory T Cells.

Helicobacter pylori infections are usually established in early childhood and continuously stimulate immunity, including T-helper 1 (Th1), Th17, and regulatory T-cell (Treg) responses, throughout life. Although known to be the major cause of peptic ulcer disease and gastric cancer, disease occurs in a minority of those who are infected. Recently, there has been much interest in beneficial effects arising from infection with this pathogen.

High resolution depth-resolved imaging from multi-focal images for medical ultrasound.

An ultrasound imaging technique providing sub-diffraction limit axial resolution for point sources is proposed. It is based on simultaneously acquired multi-focal images of the same object, and on the image metric of sharpness. The sharpness is extracted by image data and presents higher values for in-focus images.