Praterhovgaard1417

We found significant and positive relationships between tail tips and destructive tissues. In both time periods, THg concentrations varied significantly by tissue type, and destructive tissues exhibited higher but predictable THg values relative to tail tissue. Methylmercury concentrations did not differ among tissues from the 1980s but was significantly higher in muscle compared to other tissues from snakes collected in 2019. Percent MeHg of THg in N. taxispilota tissues mirrored patterns reported in other reptiles, although the range of % MeHg in liver and kidney differed between time periods. Both THg and MeHg concentrations in N. check details taxispilota declined significantly from the 1980s to 2019, with average values 1.6 to 4-fold lower in contemporary samples. Overall, our data add further evidence to the utility of watersnakes to monitor Hg pollution in aquatic environments and suggest attenuation of this contaminant in watersnakes in our study system.Nanoscale zero-valent iron (nZVI) modified by cationic polyquaternium-7 (M550-nZVI) or anionic carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC-nZVI) were freshly synthesized, and followed by the successful applicability for the stabilization of Cr(VI) in soil. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) showed that the sizes of M550-nZVI and CMC-nZVI were 42-170 nm and 66-200 nm, respectively. X-ray diffraction (XRD) confirmed the presence of Fe0 and Fe3C in the as-synthesized composites. The kinetics were well fitted with pseudo-second order model (R2 > 0.99), indicating that the process was principally chemical reduction. Additionally, we observed that M550-nZVI had better resistance to oxidation than that of CMC-nZVI. Besides, RSM experiments showed that acetate ion (AA) could promote the Cr(VI) removal but humic acid ion (HA) and carbonate ion (CA) resulted in negative effects. Moreover, the modeling predication revealed that the optimum Cr(VI) removal of 92.44% by CMC-nZVI was available, being 22.52% higher than that of M550-nZVI. In conclusion, this work demonstrated that the inoxidizability of M550-nZVI had a dominant advantage, while CMC-nZVI had the more excellent reactivity than M550-nZVI. We believe that our conducted research work will open the new avenues for effective removal of heavy metals from the soil.Arsenic (As) is a ubiquitous environmental carcinogen that enters the human food chain mainly through rice grains. In the present study, we evaluated the potential of thiourea (TU; non-physiological reactive oxygen species scavenger) in mitigating the negative effects of arsenic (As) stress in indica rice variety IR64, with the overall aim to reduce grain As accumulation. At seedling stage, As + TU treatment induced the formation of more numerous and longer crown roots compared with As alone. The As accumulation in main root, crown root, lower leaf and upper leaf was significantly reduced to 0.1-, 0.14-, 0.16-, 0.14-fold, respectively in As + TU treated seedlings compared with those of As alone. This reduced As accumulation was also coincided with light-dependent suppression in the expression levels of aquaporins and photosynthesis-related genes in As + TU treated roots. In addition, the foliar-supplemented TU under As-stress maintained reducing redox conditions which decreased the rate of As accumulation in flag leaves and, eventually grain As by 0.53-fold compared with those of As treatment. The agronomic feasibility of TU was validated under naturally As contaminated sites of Nadia (West Bengal, India). The tiller numbers and crop productivity (kg seed/ha) of TU-sprayed plants were increased by 1.5- and 1.18-fold, respectively; while, grain As accumulation was reduced by 0.36-fold compared with those of water-sprayed control. Thus, this study established TU application as a sustainable solution for cultivating rice in As-contaminated field conditions.

EHealth monitoring systems are able to save the persons' lives and track some vital physiological signs of patients, sportsmen, and soldiers for some purposes. Instant data tracking enables appropriate clinical interventions. The early warning score concept defines that specific vital human body signs that are considered together and gives the persons' health score. The patient's vital signs are periodically recorded with the Early Warning Score (EWS) system and the illness severity score of the patient is decided manually. The aim of the study is to monitor a person's health data continuously and calculate the EWS score thanks to the fuzzy logic. Therefore, the simulation as a testbed is constructed for real-time applications with ISO/IEEE 11073 Health informatics - Medical/health device communication standard.

In our paper, a fuzzy-based early warning score system in the EHealth monitoring testbed is proposed. Real-time data are obtained from Riverbed Modeler simulation software with socket programming and stored in the InfluxDB using Node-Red and monitored on the remote desktop with Grafana.

Heart rate, body temperature, systolic blood pressure, respiratory rate, and SPO2 are taken into consideration in the fuzzy-based evaluation system for EWS. The data produced in the Riverbed has been provided in a realistic manner because the real human vital sign values are considered during generating vital signs.

Using real-time Riverbed Modeler health data with fuzzy-based EWS, a more realistic testbed platform is constructed in this study.

Using real-time Riverbed Modeler health data with fuzzy-based EWS, a more realistic testbed platform is constructed in this study.

In medical imaging, the scarcity of labeled lesion data has hindered the application of many deep learning algorithms. To overcome this problem, the simulation of diverse lesions in medical images is proposed. However, synthesizing labeled mass images in mammograms is still challenging due to the lack of consistent patterns in shape, margin, and contextual information. Therefore, we aim to generate various labeled medical images based on contextual information in mammograms.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on GANs to generate various mass images and then perform contextual infilling by inserting the synthetic lesions into healthy screening mammograms. Through incorporating features of both realistic mass images and corresponding masks into the adversarial learning scheme, the generator can not only learn the distribution of the real mass images but also capture the matching shape, margin and context information.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct experiments on publicly available mammogram database of DDSM and a private database provided by Nanfang Hospital in China. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations validate the effectiveness of our approach. Additionally, through the data augmentation by image generation of the proposed method, an improvement of 5.03% in detection rate can be achieved over the same model trained on original real lesion images.

The results show that the data augmentation based on our method increases the diversity of dataset. Our method can be viewed as one of the first steps toward generating labeled breast mass images for precise detection and can be extended in other medical imaging domains to solve similar problems.

The results show that the data augmentation based on our method increases the diversity of dataset. Our method can be viewed as one of the first steps toward generating labeled breast mass images for precise detection and can be extended in other medical imaging domains to solve similar problems.The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of different vacuum impregnation (VI) conditions (Control, VI-250, VI-500, VI-750, US-VI-250, US-VI-500 and US-VI-750) on the salt gain (SG) and water gain (WG) kinetics of beef cubes. The cubes were immersed in brine solution (4 g NaCl/ 100 g solution) and salted at different levels of vacuum (250, 500 and 750 mbar) using VI method with and without ultrasound. The final moisture and salt contents of the cubes were 78.60% and 1.59%, respectively, and the samples were salted the fastest with US-VI-250. Five kinetic models were selected to evaluate the SG and WG kinetics, and Azuara model exhibited the best fit. In addition, the salt (Ds) and moisture (Dw) diffusion coefficients were in the range of 5.94-8.11 × 10-9 m2/s and 5.17-8.64 × 10-9 m2/s, respectively. It can be concluded that the ultrasound-assisted VI could shorten the brining time by improving the salt diffusion in beef cubes.The antimicrobial activity of essential oils (EO) is associated with the presence of secondary metabolites synthesized by plants. Its mechanism of action involves the interaction of its hydrophobic components with the lipids present in the cell membrane of microorganism, resulting in metabolic damages and cell death. Spoilage and pathogenic microorganisms are contaminants in meat and meat products with considerable impacts on food quality and safety. Research shows the potential of applying essential oils in the preservation of meat food systems as compounds of low toxicity, extracted from a natural source, and as an alternative to consumer demand for healthy foods with a more natural appeal. In addition, there is a great diversity of plants from which essential oils can be extracted, whose antimicrobial activity in vitro and in meat and meat products has been proven.Zinc protoporphyrin IX (ZnPP)-forming food-grade lactic acid bacteria (LAB) were screened from various sources for their ability to improve the color of meat products. The effects of salt and nitrite on the ZnPP-forming ability of these bacteria were also investigated. Finally, these bacteria were applied in salt-added minced meat to assess their ability to improve the color. Twenty-five LAB were screened for their ZnPP-forming ability in pork. Most of the strains exhibited maximum growth anaerobically in 3% salt at 30 °C and grew well at pH 5.5 and 6.5. Moreover, 3% salt slightly retarded ZnPP formation; however, nitrite completely inhibited ZnPP formation in all the ZnPP-forming LAB. Thirteen LAB (avoiding duplication and non-food-grade) could form ZnPP in salt-added minced meat, resulting in improvement of the bright red color, high ZnPP autofluorescence, and increased fluorescence intensity. Finally, considering the safety, Lactobacillus plantarum, Lactococcus lactis subsp. cremoris, and Leuconostoc lactis were suggested as promising candidates to improve the color of meat products.Combination effects of ɛ-polylysine coating (0.5 and 1%) and stinging nettle extract (3, 6 and 9%) on quality properties and shelf life of beef meat (2 × 2 × 2 cm) was evaluated at 4 °C for 12 days. The results indicated that ɛ-polylysine (ε-PL) coating with stinging nettle extract (SNE) had no significant effects on ash, fat, protein and moisture content among packaged beef samples in polyethylene bags (in atmosphere condition). At the end of storage, beef samples coated with 1% ε-PL and 9% SNE had significantly lower TBARS and TVB-N values compared to those found in control. Furthermore, 1% ε-PL coating with SNE 9% showed the highest inhibitory effects against molds and yeast, total viable counts (TVC) and coliforms during storage. However, sensory evaluation showed that samples coated with 1% ε-PL and 6% SNE had the highest scores for overall acceptability compared to the other groups. Based on the obtained results, ε-PL coating with SNE could be effectively used for extending the beef meat shelf life without negative effects on sensory attributes.