Frequency-domain instrument with custom ASIC for dual-slope near-infrared spectroscopy.

Real-time and non-invasive measurements of tissue concentrations of oxyhemoglobin (HbO2) and deoxyhemoglobin (HbR) are invaluable for research and clinical use. Frequency-domain near-infrared spectroscopy (FD-NIRS) enables non-invasive measurement of these chromophore concentrations in human tissue. We present a small form factor, dual-wavelength, miniaturized FD-NIRS instrument for absolute optical measurements, built around a custom application-specific integrated circuit and a dual-slope/self-calibrating (DS/SC) probe.

The gamification of nutrition labels to encourage healthier food selection in online grocery shopping: A randomized controlled trial.

Food purchase choices, one of the main determinants of food consumption, is highly influenced by food environments. Given the surge in online grocery shopping because of the COVID-19 pandemic, interventions in digital environments present more than ever an opportunity to improve the nutritional quality of food purchase choices. One such opportunity can be found in gamification.

A review on 3D printing functional brain model.

Modern neuroscience increasingly relies on 3D models to study neural circuitry, nerve regeneration, and neural disease. Several different biofabrication approaches have been explored to create 3D neural tissue model structures. Among them, 3D bioprinting has shown to have great potential to emerge as a high-throughput/high precision biofabrication strategy that can address the growing need for 3D neural models.

Impacts of Aviation Emissions on Near-Airport Residential Air Quality.

Impacts of aviation emissions on air quality in and around residences near airports remain underexamined. We measured gases (CO, CO, NO, and NO) and particles (black carbon, particle-bound aromatic hydrocarbons, fine particulate matter (PM), and ultrafine particles (reported using particle number concentrations (PNC) as a proxy)) continuously for 1 month at a residence near the Logan International Airport, Boston. The residence was located under a flight trajectory of the most utilized runway configuration.

Anomalous Stranski-Krastanov growth of (111)-oriented quantum dots with tunable wetting layer thickness.

Driven by tensile strain, GaAs quantum dots (QDs) self-assemble on InAlAs(111)A surfaces lattice-matched to InP substrates. In this study, we show that the tensile-strained self-assembly process for these GaAs(111)A QDs unexpectedly deviates from the well-known Stranski-Krastanov (SK) growth mode. Traditionally, QDs formed via the SK growth mode form on top of a flat wetting layer (WL) whose thickness is fixed.

Wave Propagation in Composites of Plasma and Metamaterials with Negative Permittivity and Permeability.

Wave propagation is observed through a negative permeability metamaterial immersed in gaseous plasma. A 3D array of split ring resonators (SRR) is enveloped by an inductively heated argon plasma with a nominal plasma frequency of 2.65 GHz.

Inflammation and glucose homeostasis are associated with specific structural features among adults without knee osteoarthritis: a cross-sectional study from the osteoarthritis initiative.

Background: Greater age and body mass index are strong risk factors for osteoarthritis (OA). Older and overweight individuals may be more susceptible to OA because these factors alter tissue turnover in menisci, articular cartilage, and bone via altered glucose homeostasis and inflammation. Understanding the role of inflammation and glucose homeostasis on structural features of early-stage OA may help identify therapeutic targets to delay or prevent the onset of OA among subsets of adults with these features.

Towards a more molecular taxonomy of disease.

Background: Disease taxonomies have been designed for many applications, but they tend not to fully incorporate the growing amount of molecular-level knowledge of disease processes, inhibiting research efforts. Understanding the degree to which we can infer disease relationships from molecular data alone may yield insights into how to ultimately construct more modern taxonomies that integrate both physiological and molecular information.

Results: We introduce a new technique we call Parent Promotion to infer hierarchical relationships between disease terms using disease-gene data.

Time domain reconstruction of sound speed and attenuation in ultrasound computed tomography using full wave inversion.

Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) is a non-invasive imaging technique that provides information about the acoustic properties of soft tissues in the body, such as the speed of sound (SS) and acoustic attenuation (AA). Knowledge of these properties can improve the discrimination between benign and malignant masses, especially in breast cancer studies. Full wave inversion (FWI) methods for image reconstruction in USCT provide the best image quality compared to more approximate methods.

Time is Money: Designing Cost-Effective Time Series Experiments.

A new theoretical model helps to evaluate the tradeoffs between running technical replicates in high-throughput experiments and sampling at more time points.

Removing confounding factors via constraint-based clustering: An application to finding homogeneous groups of multiple sclerosis patients.

Objectives: Confounding factors in unsupervised data can lead to undesirable clustering results. For example in medical datasets, age is often a confounding factor in tests designed to judge the severity of a patient's disease through measures of mobility, eyesight and hearing. In such cases, removing age from each instance will not remove its effect from the data as other features will be correlated with age.

Discovery of substrate cycles in large scale metabolic networks using hierarchical modularity.

Background: A substrate cycle is a set of metabolic reactions, arranged in a loop, which does not result in net consumption or production of the metabolites. The cycle operates by transforming a cofactor, e.g.

Membrane potential depolarization causes alterations in neuron arrangement and connectivity in cocultures.

Background: The disruption of neuron arrangement is associated with several pathologies. In contrast to action potentials, the role of resting potential (Vmem) in regulating connectivity remains unknown.

Methods: Neuron assemblies were quantified when their Vmem was depolarized using ivermectin (Ivm), a drug that opens chloride channels, for 24 h in cocultures with astrocytes.

Utilization of graphene electrode in transparent microwell arrays for high throughput cell trapping and lysis.

Here we present a high-throughput, transparent microfluidic device with embedded microwell arrays sandwiched between transparent electrodes made from graphene (at the bottom) and indium tin oxide (at the top) for dielectrophoretic cell trapping and electrical lysis. Graphene suppresses unwanted faradaic reaction effects on the cells and the medium that is typically observed in ITO based electrodes from application of DC field for electrical lysis. This is because graphene is more electrochemically inert than indium tin oxide (ITO) where ITO undergoes reduction-oxidation (redox) reaction in the presence of electrolyte in most standard cell media.

All electronic approach for high-throughput cell trapping and lysis with electrical impedance monitoring.

We present a portable lab-on-chip device for high-throughput trapping and lysis of single cells with in-situ impedance monitoring in an all-electronic approach. The lab-on-chip device consists of microwell arrays between transparent conducting electrodes within a microfluidic channel to deliver and extract cells using alternating current (AC) dielectrophoresis. Cells are lysed with high efficiency using direct current (DC) electric fields between the electrodes.

High throughput interaction data reveals degree conservation of hub proteins.

Research in model organisms relies on unspoken assumptions about the conservation of protein-protein interactions across species, yet several analyses suggest such conservation is limited. Fortunately, for many purposes the crucial issue is not global conservation of interactions, but preferential conservation of functionally important ones. An observed bias towards essentiality in highly-connected proteins implies the functional importance of such "hubs".

Prediction of siRNA knockdown efficiency using artificial neural network models.

Selective knockdown of gene expression by short interference RNAs (siRNAs) has allowed rapid validation of gene functions and made possible a high throughput, genome scale approach to interrogate gene function. However, randomly designed siRNAs display different knockdown efficiencies of target genes. Hence, various prediction algorithms based on siRNA functionality have recently been constructed to increase the likelihood of selecting effective siRNAs, thereby reducing the experimental cost.