Kamp Andersen (scentquail3)
Several variables and practices affect the evolution and geographic spread of COVID-19. Some of these variables pertain to policy measures such as social distancing, quarantines for specific areas, and testing availability. In this paper, I analyze the effect that lockdown and testing policies had on new contagions in Chile, especially focusing on potential heterogeneity given by population characteristics. Leveraging a natural experiment in the determination of early quarantines, I use an Augmented Synthetic Control Method to build counterfactuals for high and lower-income areas that experienced a lockdown during the first two months of the pandemic. I find substantial differences in the impact that quarantine policies had for different populations While lockdowns were effective in containing and reducing new cases of COVID-19 in higher-income municipalities, I find no significant effect of this measure for lower-income areas. To further explain these results, I test for difference in mobility during quarantine for high and lower-income municipalities, as well as delays in test results and testing availability. These findings are consistent with previous results, showing that differences in the effectiveness of lockdowns could be partially attributed to heterogeneity in quarantine compliance in terms of mobility, as well as differential testing availability for higher and lower-income areas.Accurate motion tracking of the left ventricle is critical in detecting wall motion abnormalities in the heart after an injury such as a myocardial infarction. We propose an unsupervised motion tracking framework with physiological constraints to learn dense displacement fields between sequential pairs of 2-D B-mode echocardiography images. Current deep-learning motion-tracking algorithms require large amounts of data to provide ground-truth, which is difficult to obtain for in vivo datasets (such as patient data and animal studies), or are unsuccessful in tracking motion between echocardiographic images due to inherent ultrasound properties (such as low signal-to-noise ratio and various image artifacts). buy PD-1/PD-L1 Inhibitor 3 We design a U-Net inspired convolutional neural network that uses manually traced segmentations as a guide to learn displacement estimations between a source and target image without ground-truth displacement fields by minimizing the difference between a transformed source frame and the original target frame. We then penalize divergence in the displacement field in order to enforce incompressibility within the left ventricle. We demonstrate the performance of our model on synthetic and in vivo canine 2-D echocardiography datasets by comparing it against a non-rigid registration algorithm and a shape-tracking algorithm. Our results show favorable performance of our model against both methods.Nanomedicine has seen a significant rise in the development of new research tools and clinically functional devices. In this regard, significant advances and new commercial applications are expected in the pharmaceutical and orthopedic industries. For advanced orthopedic implant technologies, appropriate nanoscale surface modifications are highly effective strategies and are widely studied in the literature for improving implant performance. It is well-established that implants with nanotubular surfaces show a drastic improvement in new bone creation and gene expression compared to implants without nanotopography. Nevertheless, the scientific and clinical understanding of mixed oxide nanotubes (MONs) and their potential applications, especially in biomedical applications are still in the early stages of development. This review aims to establish a credible platform for the current and future roles of MONs in nanomedicine, particularly in advanced orthopedic implants. We first introduce the concept of MONs and then discuss the preparation strategies. This is followed by a review of the recent advancement of MONs in biomedi