Rice blast is one of the most serious plant diseases. Many rice blast management approaches require know-how of experienced farmers or agronomists. Monitoring the farm for disease detection is labor intensive and time consuming. By using the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), we are able to detect plant diseases more efficiently. Existing AI and IoT studies detect plant diseases by images or nonimage hyperspectral data, which require manual operations to obtain the photographs or data for analysis. Also, image detection typically is too late as rice blast may already spread to other plants. Based on an IoT platform for soil cultivation, we develop the RiceTalk project that utilizes nonimage IoT devices to detect rice blast. Unlike the image-based plant disease detection approaches, our agriculture sensors generate nonimage data that can be automatically trained and analyzed by the AI mechanism in real time. The beauty of RiceTalk is that the AI model is treated as an IoT device and is managed like other IoT devices. In this way, our approach significantly reduces the platform management cost to provide real-time training and predictions. We also propose an innovative spore germination mechanism as a new feature extraction model for agriculture. In the current implementation, the accuracy of the RiceTalk prediction on rice blast is 89.4%.
To evaluate clinical efficacy of suture anchors in treating acute injuries of medial collateral ligament (MCL) of knee at degree III.Twenty-seven patients with degree III acute MCL injuries of knee were treated with suture anchors from January 2007 to June 2011. There were 15 males and 12 females, aged from 19 to 56 (averaged 32.6) years old. The time from injury to operation was 3 to 10 days, averaged 6 days. Symptoms and physical signs before and after treatment were observed, Lysholm scoring were used to evluated clinical efficacy.All patients were followed up from 16 to 30 months with an average of 21.6 months. The stability of knee joints was good in all patients. Abduction stress test was negative when the knee joint was straightened at 0 degrees and flexed at 30 degrees. The average degree of flexed knee (67.00 +/- 5.80) degrees preoperatively was lower than that of postoperatively (136.50 +/- 6.30) degrees at 1 year. According to Lysholm scoring, preoperative scores ranged from 30 to 43 points, averaged 36.46 +/- 1.48; 1 year after operation ranged from 87 to 100 with an average of 91.50 +/- 3.80 and higher than postoperative. Twenty patients got an excellent results, 5 good and 2 fair.Suture anchors in treating acute injuries of medial collateral ligament of knee at degree III has following advantages: small range of tissue dissection, easy to operate, reliable fixation and less complications.
Abstract Block-pulse series analysis is applied to simultaneous first-order partial differential equations of two independent variables. A set of linear algebraic equations with recurrent form is obtained through using the Kronecker product and block-pulse functions. After solving this set of equations recurrently, the block-pulse series solution is obtained. A numerical example is given to compare the exact solution and the solution obtained by this method.
Since a cyclooxygenase 2 (COX-2) inhibitor can reduce infarct size and improve contractility in ischemic myocardium, the aim of the present study was to explore whether COX-2 inhibitor nimesulide could protect myocardial function against oxidative stress injury in rat hearts, and to investigate the underlying mechanisms. The isolated rat hearts perfused by Langendorff method were exposed to 140 mumol/L of H2O2, and the cardiac contractility was measured. Then, the responses of coronary arteries, precontracted with U-46619, to the endothelium-dependent vasodilator serotonin (5-HT) and the endothelium-independent vasodilator sodium nitroprusside (SNP) were evaluated. The results were as follows: (1) In hearts exposed to H2O2 for 20 min, the left ventricular developed pressure [LVDP, (54.8 +/- 4.0)%] and maximal rate of rise/fall of ventricular pressure [+/-dp/dt(max), (50.8 +/- 3.1)% and (46.2 +/- 2.9) %] were reduced compared with that in the control group (100%). After pretreatment with nimesulide (5 mumol/L) for 10 min before H2O2 perfusion, LVDP and +/-dp/dt(max) were enhanced to (79.9 +/- 2.8)%, (80.3 +/- 2.6)% and (81.4 +/- 2.6)%, respectively (P<0.01), and this was partially abolished by the nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitor L-NAME [(60.2 +/- 2.1)%, (63.9 +/- 2.4)% and (63.1 +/- 2.9)%, respectively, P<0.01]. (2) The vasodilatation induced by 5-HT and SNP in H2O2-treated group was significantly less than that in the control group. Pretreatment with nimesulide for 10 min antagonized the decrease of endothelium-dependent vasodilatation in H2O2-treated group [(-22.2 +/- 4.2) % vs (-6.0 +/- 2.5) %, P<0.01], but had no effect on the decline of endothelium-independent vasodilatation [(-2.0 +/- 1.8)% vs (-7.0 +/- 3.5) %, P>0.05]. (3) Pretreatment with nimesulide for 10 min increased the NO production in H2O2-treated hearts [(2.63 +/- 0.40) vs (1.36 +/- 0.23) nmol/g protein, P<0.05], and this was inhibited by L-NAME. (4) Pretreatment with the selective COX-1 inhibitor piroxicam had no effect on LVDP and +/-dp/dt(max) in isolated hearts exposed to H2O2, but the left ventricular end diastolic pressure (LVEDP) was much higher than that in the group treated with H2O2 alone. Piroxicam did not influence the coronary resistance in H2O2-treated rat hearts. These data suggest that the COX-2 inhibitor nimesulide improves myocardial function in rat hearts suffering from oxidative stress, and this may be through an improvement in endothelium-dependent arterial relaxation and an enhancement of NO production in rat heart.
The microstructure evolution and strengthening mechanism of materials after shot peening have always been the focus of research. In this paper, a novel coupled constitutive model was proposed to predict the depth of fine-grain of the 2060-T8 aluminum-lithium (Al–Li) alloy after shot peening. Besides, combining the numerical and experimental methods, the influences of shot size on yield stress, dislocation density, and crystal orientation of Al–Li alloy were systematically studied to reveal the strengthening mechanism. The results show that larger shot sizes can significantly improve the depth of the dislocation density layer and the fine-grain layer of 2060 Al–Li alloy. The depth of the refinement layer increases from 50 μm to 80 μm when the shot size grows from 0.3 mm to 0.6 mm. It is found the depth of the grain refinement layer in the experiment is consistent with the depth where is a sudden change of grain size in the simulation. Additionally, electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) shows that many sub-grains are produced in the material due to high dislocation density, and the proportion of low-angle grain boundaries (LAGB) increases significantly, from 48.3% to more than 98.4%. The crystal orientation in the grain has changed obviously and Goss texture {100}<001> obtained in the deformation band. In contrast, with the increase in shot size, the proportion of the Schmid factor with a high-level trend increases. However, the hardening effect of the material is much greater than the softening effect which results in higher yield stress and microhardness of the top surface.
This paper describes our system about multilingual syntactic and semantic dependency parsing for our participation in the joint task of CoNLL-2009 shared tasks. Our system uses rich features and incorporates various integration technologies. The system is evaluated on in-domain and out-of-domain evaluation data of closed challenge of joint task. For in-domain evaluation, our system ranks the second for the average macro labeled F1 of all seven languages, 82.52% (only about 0.1% worse than the best system), and the first for English with macro labeled F1 87.69%. And for out-of-domain evaluation, our system also achieves the second for average score of all three languages.