Phylogenetic network investigation as being a parsimony optimisation problem

There were outcomes recorded for 83 UKAs with at least 10-year follow-up. Twenty-four patients underwent revision of their UKA at an average of 5.84 years after the primary procedure. Kaplan-Meier analysis demonstrated survivorship of 89.1% at 10 years and the OKS, AKSS and WOMAC patient reported outcomes remained significantly improved in comparison to preoperatively. For those 70 years or older, 10-year survivorship was 92.4%, compared to 85.0% for those under 70 years old. CONCLUSION Medial fixed all-polyethylene tibial bearing UKA demonstrates acceptable long-term survivorship and patient outcomes. It appears to be a suitable option for the treatment of medial compartment OA, particularly in older patients. Growth differentiation factor 11 (GDF11), a member of the transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β) superfamily, regulates various biological processes in mammals. The effect of GDF11 in brain injury has not been fully elucidated. Our aim was to investigate the effects of GDF11 in cerebral ischemic injury. The expression level of GDF11 increased significantly in the peri-infarct cerebral cortex. Next, the effect of the intracerebroventricular injection of a GDF11 overexpression lentivirus or rGDF11 was investigated in middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) rats. The preventative effects of the GDF11 overexpression virus on stroke were observed. The delivery of the lentivirus into rats before MCAO significantly reduced the infarct volume and the percentage of apoptotic cells and improved motor function in MCAO rats. Furthermore, it elevated the expression of p-Smad2/3 and promoted neurogenesis and angiogenesis in the ipsilateral SVZ during ischemic injury. More importantly, the therapeutic effects of rGDF11 on stroke were subsequently explored. The results in MCAO rats treated with rGDF11 were found similar to that in those treated with the GDF11 overexpression lentivirus. Together, these findings indicate that GDF11 has neuroprotective and neurorestorative effects in cerebral ischemic injury and provide new insights into the function and mechanism of GDF11 in stroke models. The reachable set estimation and stabilization problems of large-scale switched systems have been investigated in this paper. To start with, a class of specific Lyapunov functions for the reachable set estimation of large-scale switched systems is proposed. Secondly, by the method of the proposed specific Lyapunov functions of the large-scale switched systems, the boundary of system state response is calculated under arbitrary switching, which might be used for the safety verification. Then, the concept of decentralized control is introduced and the decentralized state feedback controllers are developed to ensure the state trajectories of the closed-loop large-scale switched systems are limited within the estimated set and guarantee the system globally uniformly asymptotically stable. Finally, several numerical and practical examples are established to confirm the effectiveness and correctness of our results. Efficient fault diagnosis of traction control system (TCS) has always been a vital technology for high speed train. Transient fault (TF) derives in harsh operation conditions and manufacturing defect, and its timely diagnosis can prevent catastrophic consequences of TCS or provide degradation information of components. However, TF is easily swallowed by background noise, especially at early stage of failure. This problem brings hardship into feature extraction. Aiming at overcoming the noise problem confronted in weak fault feature extraction, the typical TFs of traction control system are described, and feasibility of speed-based fault diagnosis is demonstrated. see more Then, an optimal fractional-order method is proposed for TF diagnosis, which suppresses background noise and amplifies the faulty part of the signal. Afterwards, kurtosis and fault duration time are applied to locate the fault component. Three fault diagnosis cases are investigated to validate the application of this methodology. The Performance of rolling element bearings has a significant influence on reliability and safety in the various engineering fields. While heading toward the condition evaluation of rolling element bearings, the higher dimensionality of feature space became a crucial concern. Thus, to have a check on the hurdles, this paper proposes a novel approach of bearing condition assessment utilizing Local mean decomposition (LMD) and spectral clustering (SC). Spectral Clustering (SC) is an influential tool, which heals the curse of dimensionality and facilitates the model by imparting a systematized structure. SC focuses more on connectivity rather than geometrical vicinity; moreover, the provision of a similarity matrix makes SC more reliable and increases its performance. To enrich the efficiency of SC, a novel decision criterion, PI (Parting Index) aiming the optimal number of clusters based on a new similarity indicator and disorder indicator coined as Synergic Association Index (SAI) and Separation Index (SI) respectively, has been proposed. The work aims to achieve better performance degradation assessment (PDA) by the application of the new SC-PI approach with the following steps; the first step is the decomposition of vibration signal into product functions (PFs) utilizing LMD; the second step involves the extraction of proper fault features; third, the extracted features are classified with the SC-PI method; finally the feature or attribute vectors are endowed to trained model and confidence value (CV) is calculated. The proposed method is validated on two datasets of different fault types. The results so obtained indicates that the SC-PI method easily differentiates the various stages when compared to different assessment techniques i.e. time-domain features, self-organizing map (SOM), k-medoids and Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Little is known about the physiology of labour onset at term, and there is a debate about what signs and symptoms should be used to define it. In low resource settings, particularly for remote and rural communities, delay in recognising labour onset may mean a delay in seeking a skilled birth attendant. This chapter presents the most recent evidence about the physiology of labour onset, including the complex neuro-hormonal, biophysical, psychological and emotional factors that contribute. The symptoms of labour onset are explored from the perspective of both pregnant women and service providers in a range of sociocultural contexts. Early labour presents challenges for pregnant women, their families, communities and health care professionals. The chapter discusses how maternity care services should be designed, and delivered to ensure that women get the optimum advice and care at the beginning of labour.