Towards materials with enhanced electro-mechanical response: CaCu3Ti4O12-polydimethylsiloxane composites

We describe a straightforward production pathway of polymer matrix composites with increased dielectric constant for dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs). Up to date, the approach of using composites made of high dielectric constant ceramics and insulating polymers has not evidenced any improvement in the performance of DEA devices, mainly as a consequence of the ferroelectric nature of the employed ceramics. We propose here an unexplored alternative to these traditional fillers, introducing calcium copper titanate (CCTO) CaCu3Ti4O12, which has a giant dielectric constant making it very suitable for capacitive applications. All CCTO-polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) composites developed display an improved electro-mechanical performance. The largest actuation improvement was achieved for the composite with 5.1 vol% of CCTO, having an increment in the actuation strain of about 100% together with a reduction of 25% in the electric field compared to the raw PDMS matrix

Studies on immunocytochemical localization of inhibin-like material in human prostatic tissue: comparison of its distribution in normal, benign and malignant prostates.

A specific antiserum has been generated against inhibin-like material (ILM) of prostatic origin. Using the immunoperoxidase technique, localization of ILM has been examined in a total of 114 prostates including normal (4 specimens), malignant (46) and hyperplastic (55) tissues. ILM positive immunocytochemical reactions were confined to the cytoplasm and not the nucleus of the prostatic acinar cells in the three categories of prostate, whereas the stroma showed negative reactions. The intensity of positive reactions decreased in the following order: Hyperplasia, incidental and moderately differentiated carcinomas, poorly differentiated carcinomas, whereas metaplasia and granulomatous prostatitis gave negative reactions for ILM. Using this experimental protocol, 200 non-prostatic tissue were found to be completely negative, demonstrating the specificity of the test for prostatic epithelium. These findings indicate a potential use of ILM as a marker of prostatic tissue

Inhibin - an updated review

This article does not have an abstract

Inhibitory effect of centchroman (a non stroidal compound) on LH & FSH secretion in the castrated male & female rats

This article does not have an abstract

New High-Dielectric-Constant Polymer-Ceramic Composites

ABSTRACTA ceramic-powder polymer composite, making use of a newly developed ceramics - CaCu3Ti4O12 (CCTO) - that has a giant dielectric constant as the filler, is developed. In this work, poly(vinylidene fluoride - trifluoroethylene) [P(VDF-TrFE)] 55/45 mol% copolymer was used as matrix. It is found that the wettability between the copolymer and CCTO is poor, which makes the solution cast composites have a poor uniformity. The uniformity and thus the dielectric constant of the composites can be significantly improved by using hot-press technology to form “sandwich” structure. It is also found that the thermal annealing process can improve the dielectric constant of the composite. The experimental data show that for the flexible composites the dielectric constant at 1 kHz can reach more than 300 at room temperature and more than 700 at ∼70 °C.</jats:p

What Do Patients Say About Their Disease Symptoms? Deep Multilabel Text Classification With Human-in-the-Loop Curation for Automatic Labeling of Patient Self Reports of Problems

The USA Food and Drug Administration has accorded increasing importance to patient-reported problems in clinical and research settings. In this paper, we explore one of the largest online datasets comprising 170,141 open-ended self-reported responses (called "verbatims") from patients with Parkinson's (PwPs) to questions about what bothers them about their Parkinson's Disease and how it affects their daily functioning, also known as the Parkinson's Disease Patient Report of Problems. Classifying such verbatims into multiple clinically relevant symptom categories is an important problem and requires multiple steps - expert curation, a multi-label text classification (MLTC) approach and large amounts of labelled training data. Further, human annotation of such large datasets is tedious and expensive. We present a novel solution to this problem where we build a baseline dataset using 2,341 (of the 170,141) verbatims annotated by nine curators including clinical experts and PwPs. We develop a rules based linguistic-dictionary using NLP techniques and graph database-based expert phrase-query system to scale the annotation to the remaining cohort generating the machine annotated dataset, and finally build a Keras-Tensorflow based MLTC model for both datasets. The machine annotated model significantly outperforms the baseline model with a F1-score of 95% across 65 symptom categories on a held-out test set

Complete amino acid sequence of human seminal plasma β-inhibin Prediction of post Gln-Arg cleavage as a maturation site

AbstractThe complete sequence of a 94 amino acid human seminal plasma polypeptide exhibiting inhibin-like activity is presented. This molecule, called β-inhibin, selectively and specifically suppresses the release of pituitary FSH in vivo as well as in vitro. It does not affect the secretion of LH. Such a novel acidic protein contains a very basic C-terminal segment which is easily cleaved by mild tryptic digestion. It is predicted that the FSH inhibiting activity may reside within this region of the molecule. This would imply a post Gin-Arg cleavage to release the basic C-terminal active moiety