Background: On tropical regions, phosphorus (P) fixation onto aluminum and iron oxides in soil clays restricts P diffusion from the soil to the root surface, limiting crop yields. While increased root surface area favors P uptake under low-P availability, the relationship between the three-dimensional arrangement of the root system and P efficiency remains elusive. Here, we simultaneously assessed allelic effects of loci associated with a variety of root and P efficiency traits, in addition to grain yield under low-P availability, using multi-trait genome-wide association.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Musculoskeletal pain, especially back pain, is common among health care professionals (HP). For prevention purposes, it is important to know whether HP develop their symptoms before or after entering the health care workforce. Cross-sectional studies among HP cannot answer this question.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Healthcare is facing a shortage of qualified healthcare professionals. The pandemic has brought to light the fragile balance that affects all healthcare systems. Governments have realized that these systems and the professionals working in them need support at different levels to strengthen the retention of the workforce.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDuring the past decade, sweet sorghum (Sorghum bicolor Moench L.) has shown great potential for bioenergy production, especially biofuels. In this study, 223 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from a cross between two sweet sorghum lines (Brandes × Wray) were evaluated in three trials.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Environ Res Public Health
May 2021
Quality indicators (QIs) based on the Resident Assessment Instrument-Home Care (RAI-HC) offer the opportunity to assess home care quality and compare home care organizations' (HCOs) performance. For fair comparisons, providers' QI rates must be risk-adjusted to control for different case-mix. The study's objectives were to develop a risk adjustment model for worsening or onset of urinary incontinence (UI), measured with the RAI-HC QI bladder incontinence, using the database HomeCareData and to assess the impact of risk adjustment on quality rankings of HCOs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: With the recent development of deep learning technologies, various neural networks have been proposed for fundus retinal vessel segmentation. Among them, the U-Net is regarded as one of the most successful architectures. In this work, we start with simplification of the U-Net, and explore the performance of few-parameter networks on this task.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Nursing staff were excluded from the German DRG system for somatic hospital treatment and will be funded separately in the future. In psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine, binding personnel requirements have been defined but there has been no regulation of how these personnel requirements are adequately financed.
Objective: The objective of this study was to analyze the costs of inpatient psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine and to evaluate possible effects of funding nursing staff separately.
Background: Despite an increasing importance of home care, quality assurance in this healthcare sector in Switzerland is hardly established. In 2010, Swiss home care quality indicators (QIs) based on the Resident Assessment Instrument-Home Care (RAI-HC) were developed. However, these QIs have not been revised since, although internationally new RAI-HC QIs have emerged.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe association between arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and sorghum, the fifth most cultivated cereal in the world and a staple food for many countries, is relevant to improving phosphorus (P) absorption. The importance of root exudation as a signal for the symbiosis has been shown for several species, but a complete understanding of the signaling molecules involved in the mycorrhizal symbiosis signaling pathway has not yet been elucidated. In this context, we investigated the effect of sorgoleone, one of the most studied allelochemicals and a predominant compound of root exudates in sorghum, on AMF colonization and consequently P uptake and plant growth on a sorghum genotype.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA multiparental random mating population used in sorghum breeding is amenable for the detection of QTLs related to tropical soil adaptation, fine mapping of underlying genes and genomic selection approaches. Tropical soils where low phosphorus (P) and aluminum (Al) toxicity limit sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] production are widespread in the developing world.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: One way of measuring the quality of home care are quality indicators (QIs) derived from data collected with the Resident Assessment Instrument-Home Care (RAI-HC). In order to produce meaningful results for quality improvement and quality comparisons across home care organizations (HCOs) and over time, RAI-HC QIs must be valid and reliable. The aim of this systematic review was to identify currently existing RAI-HC QIs and to summarize the scientific knowledge on the validity and reliability of these QIs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Med Imaging
October 2020
Minimally invasive procedures rely on image guidance for navigation at the operation site to avoid large surgical incisions. X-ray images are often used for guidance, but important structures may be not well visible. These structures can be overlaid from pre-operative 3-D images and accurate alignment can be established using 2-D/3-D registration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Med Imaging
January 2020
In minimally invasive procedures, the clinician relies on image guidance to observe and navigate the operation site. In order to show structures which are not visible in the live X-ray images, such as vessels or planning annotations, X-ray images can be augmented with pre-operatively acquired images. Accurate image alignment is needed and can be provided by 2-D/3-D registration.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Phosphorus (P) fixation on aluminum (Al) and iron (Fe) oxides in soil clays restricts P availability for crops cultivated on highly weathered tropical soils, which are common in developing countries. Hence, P deficiency becomes a major obstacle for global food security. We used multi-trait quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping to study the genetic architecture of P efficiency and to explore the importance of root traits on sorghum grain yield on a tropical low-P soil.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcidic soils, where aluminum (Al) toxicity is a major agricultural constraint, are globally widespread and are prevalent in developing countries. In sorghum, the root citrate transporter SbMATE confers Al tolerance by protecting root apices from toxic Al, but can exhibit reduced expression when introgressed into different lines. We show that allele-specific transactivation occurs and is caused by factors located away from Using expression-QTL mapping and expression genome-wide association mapping, we establish that transcription is controlled in a bipartite fashion, primarily in but also in Multiallelic promoter transactivation and ChIP analyses demonstrated that intermolecular effects on expression arise from a WRKY and a zinc finger-DHHC transcription factor (TF) that bind to and -activate the promoter.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Low back pain (LBP) and neck pain (NP) are of considerable socioeconomic burden. Considering the escalating demand on health services that LBP and NP have globally, they represent an arguably unsustainable drain on resources with the projected increased demand secondary to an ageing population. Identifying populations at risk for LBP and NP may inform public health prevention strategies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRoot damage due to aluminum (Al) toxicity restricts crop production on acidic soils, which are extensive in the tropics. The sorghum root Al-activated citrate transporter, SbMATE, underlies the Al tolerance locus, Alt, and increases grain yield under Al toxicity. Here, Alt loci associated with Al tolerance were converted into Amplification Refractory Mutation System (ARMS) markers, which are cost effective and easy to use.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe increasing cost of energy and finite oil and gas reserves have created a need to develop alternative fuels from renewable sources. Due to its abiotic stress tolerance and annual cultivation, high-biomass sorghum ( L. Moench) shows potential as a bioenergy crop.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Due to the multitude of therapy options, the treatment decision after diagnosis of localized prostate cancer is challenging. Compared to printed booklets, web-based information technology offers more possibilities to tailor information to patients' individual needs.
Objectives: To support the decision-making process as well as the communication with patients, we developed an online tutorial in a systematic process in the German-speaking part of Switzerland and then tested it in a pilot study.
Sweet sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] is a type of cultivated sorghum characterized by the accumulation of high levels of sugar in the stems and high biomass accumulation, making this crop an important feedstock for bioenergy production. Sweet sorghum breeding programs that focus on bioenergy have two main goals: to improve quantity and quality of sugars in the juicy stem and to increase fresh biomass productivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIEEE Trans Med Imaging
September 2017
In image-guided interventional procedures, live 2-D X-ray images can be augmented with preoperative 3-D computed tomography or MRI images to provide planning landmarks and enhanced spatial perception. An accurate alignment between the 3-D and 2-D images is a prerequisite for fusion applications. This paper presents a dynamic rigid 2-D/3-D registration framework, which measures the local 3-D-to-2-D misalignment and efficiently constrains the update of both planar and non-planar 3-D rigid transformations using a novel point-to-plane correspondence model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSorghum is a source of several minerals whose content may vary depending on the genotype and the production environment. The objective of this study was to screen sorghum genotypes for mineral content and to investigate the effect of water stress on it. A large variability was observed in the mineral content of 100 sorghum genotypes grown in environments without (WoWS) and with water stress (WthWS).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In the field of nursing in Switzerland, educations have experienced a fundamental reorganization with the implementation of the new law on Vocational and Professional Education and Training (2004). Among other things, this change affects professional images.
Purpose: To show how the different professional images in the field of nursing are being constructed in the descriptions of professions by graduates after the reshaping of the educations and the occupational field in general.
Aluminum (Al) toxicity damages plant roots and limits crop production on acid soils, which comprise up to 50% of the world's arable lands. A major Al tolerance locus on chromosome 3, AltSB, controls aluminum tolerance in sorghum [Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench] via SbMATE, an Al-activated plasma membrane transporter that mediates Al exclusion from sensitive regions in the root apex.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF