Serum cholesterol levels within the high normal range are associated with better cognitive performance among Chinese elderly

© 2016, Serdi and Springer-Verlag France.Objectives: The association between cognitive function and cholesterol levels is poorly understood and inconsistent results exist among the elderly. The purpose of this study is to investigate the association of cholesterol level with cognitive performance among Chinese elderly. Design: A cross-sectional study was implemented in 2012 and data were analyzed using generalized additive models, linear regression models and logistic regression models. Setting: Community-based setting in eight longevity areas in China. Subjects: A total of 2000 elderly aged 65 years and over (mean 85.8±12.0 years) participated in this study. Measurements: Total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) concentration were determined and cognitive impairment was defined as Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) score≤23. Results: There was a significant positive linear association between TC, TG, LDL-C, HDL-C and MMSE score in linear regression models. Each 1 mmol/L increase in TC, TG, LDL-C and HDL-C corresponded to a decreased risk of cognitive impairment in logistic regression models. Compared with the lowest tertile, the highest tertile of TC, LDL-C and HDL-C had a lower risk of cognitive impairment. The adjusted odds ratios and 95% CI were 0.73(0.62–0.84) for TC, 0.81(0.70–0.94) for LDL-C and 0.81(0.70–0.94) for HDL-C. There was no gender difference in the protective effects of high TC and LDL-C levels on cognitive impairment. However, for high HDL-C levels the effect was only observed in women. High TC, LDL-C and HDL-C levels were associated with lower risk of cognitive impairment in the oldest old (aged 80 and older), but not in the younger elderly (aged 65 to 79 years). Conclusions: These findings suggest that cholesterol levels within the high normal range are associated with better cognitive performance in Chinese elderly, specifically in the oldest old. With further validation, low cholesterol may serve a clinical indicator of risk for cognitive impairment in the elderly.

Variation in offspring size towards the high elevational range edge of a montane annual

Understanding the ecological determinants of species’ distribution is a fundamental goal of ecology, and is increasingly important with changing limits to species’ range. Species often reach distributional limits on gradients of resource availability, but the extent to which offspring provisioning varies towards range limits is poorly understood. Selection is generally expected to favour higher provisioning of individual offspring in environments with short growing seasons and limited moisture, nutrients, or hosts for parasitism. However, individual provisioning may decline if parent size is limited by resources. This thesis focuses on three major questions: 1) does seed size vary over an elevational gradient? 2) does this variation respond adaptively towards the range limit? and 3) is potential elevational variation environmentally or genetically controlled? I tested variation in seed investment towards the upper elevational limit of the hemiparasitic annual herb Rhinanthus minor, sampled across an elevational range of 1,000m in the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, Canada. I also used a reciprocal transplant experiment to address the heritability of seed mass. Seed mass increased marginally towards higher elevations, while seed number and plant size declined. There was a strong elevational increase in seed mass scaled by overall plant size. Therefore, investment in individual seeds was higher towards the upper range edge, indicating potential adaptation of the reproductive strategy to allow for establishment in marginal environments. Genetic, environmental, and genotype-by-environment interactions were observed in transplanted populations, but the relative proportions of these effects on seed size were unclear.

Power Efficient Dynamic-Range Utilisation for DSP On FPGA

A power and resource efficient ‘dynamic-range utilisation’ technique to increase operational capacity of DSP IP cores by exploiting redundancy in the data epresentation of sampled analogue input data, is presented. By cleverly partitioning dynamic-range into separable processing threads, several data streams are computed concurrently on the same hardware. Unlike existing techniques which act solely to reduce power consumption due to sign extension, here the dynamic range is exploited to increase operational capacity while still achieving reduced power consumption. This extends an existing system-level, power efficient framework for the design of low power DSP IP cores, which when applied to the design of an FFT IP core in a digital receiver system gives an architecture requiring 50% fewer multipliers, 12% fewer slices and 51%-56% less power.

Inexact floating-point adder for dynamic image processing

Power has become a key constraint in current nanoscale integrated circuit design due to the increasing demands for mobile computing and a low carbon economy. As an emerging technology, an inexact circuit design offers a promising approach to significantly reduce both dynamic and static power dissipation for error tolerant applications. Although fixed-point arithmetic circuits have been studied in terms of inexact computing, floating-point arithmetic circuits have not been fully considered although require more power. In this paper, the first inexact floating-point adder is designed and applied to high dynamic range (HDR) image processing. Inexact floating-point adders are proposed by approximately designing an exponent subtractor and mantissa adder. Related logic operations including normalization and rounding modules are also considered in terms of inexact computing. Two HDR images are processed using the proposed inexact floating-point adders to show the validity of the inexact design. HDR-VDP is used as a metric to measure the subjective results of the image addition. Significant improvements have been achieved in terms of area, delay and power consumption. Comparison results show that the proposed inexact floating-point adders can improve power consumption and the power-delay product by 29.98% and 39.60%, respectively.

A simplified and higher dynamic range version of the J(1) ... J(4) method for optical phase measurements

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

High precision range estimation techniques for multi-path wireless environments

Range estimation is the core of many positioning systems such as radar, and Wireless Local Positioning Systems (WLPS). The estimation of range is achieved by estimating Time-of-Arrival (TOA). TOA represents the signal propagation delay between a transmitter and a receiver. Thus, error in TOA estimation causes degradation in range estimation performance. In wireless environments, noise, multipath, and limited bandwidth reduce TOA estimation performance. TOA estimation algorithms that are designed for wireless environments aim to improve the TOA estimation performance by mitigating the effect of closely spaced paths in practical (positive) signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regions. Limited bandwidth avoids the discrimination of closely spaced paths. This reduces TOA estimation performance. TOA estimation methods are evaluated as a function of SNR, bandwidth, and the number of reflections in multipath wireless environments, as well as their complexity. In this research, a TOA estimation technique based on Blind signal Separation (BSS) is proposed. This frequency domain method estimates TOA in wireless multipath environments for a given signal bandwidth. The structure of the proposed technique is presented and its complexity and performance are theoretically evaluated. It is depicted that the proposed method is not sensitive to SNR, number of reflections, and bandwidth. In general, as bandwidth increases, TOA estimation performance improves. However, spectrum is the most valuable resource in wireless systems and usually a large portion of spectrum to support high performance TOA estimation is not available. In addition, the radio frequency (RF) components of wideband systems suffer from high cost and complexity. Thus, a novel, multiband positioning structure is proposed. The proposed technique uses the available (non-contiguous) bands to support high performance TOA estimation. This system incorporates the capabilities of cognitive radio (CR) systems to sense the available spectrum (also called white spaces) and to incorporate white spaces for high-performance localization. First, contiguous bands that are divided into several non-equal, narrow sub-bands that possess the same SNR are concatenated to attain an accuracy corresponding to the equivalent full band. Two radio architectures are proposed and investigated: the signal is transmitted over available spectrum either simultaneously (parallel concatenation) or sequentially (serial concatenation). Low complexity radio designs that handle the concatenation process sequentially and in parallel are introduced. Different TOA estimation algorithms that are applicable to multiband scenarios are studied and their performance is theoretically evaluated and compared to simulations. Next, the results are extended to non-contiguous, non-equal sub-bands with the same SNR. These are more realistic assumptions in practical systems. The performance and complexity of the proposed technique is investigated as well. This study’s results show that selecting bandwidth, center frequency, and SNR levels for each sub-band can adapt positioning accuracy.

High-Resolution Chemical Depth Profiling of Solid Material Using a Miniature Laser Ablation/Ionization Mass Spectrometer

High-resolution chemical depth profiling measurements of copper films are presented. The 10 μm thick copper test samples were electrodeposited on a Si-supported Cu seed under galvanostatic conditions in the presence of particular plating additives (SPS, Imep, PEI, and PAG) used in the semiconductor industry for the on-chip metallization of interconnects. To probe the trend of these plating additives toward inclusion into the deposit upon growth, quantitative elemental mass spectrometric measurements at trace level concentration were conducted by using a sensitive miniature laser ablation ionization mass spectrometer (LIMS), originally designed and developed for in situ space exploration. An ultrashort pulsed laser system (τ ∼ 190 fs, λ = 775 nm) was used for ablation and ionization of sample material. We show that with our LIMS system, quantitative chemical mass spectrometric analysis with an ablation rate at the subnanometer level per single laser shot can be conducted. The measurement capabilities of our instrument, including the high vertical depth resolution coupled with high detection sensitivity of ∼10 ppb, high dynamic range ≥10(8), measurement accuracy and precision, is of considerable interest in various fields of application, where investigations with high lateral and vertical resolution of the chemical composition of solid materials are required, these include, e.g., wafers from semiconductor industry or studies on space weathered samples in space research.

Towards clinical computed ultrasound tomography in echo-mode: Dynamic range artefact reduction

Computed ultrasound tomography in echo-mode (CUTE) allows imaging the speed of sound inside tissue using hand-held pulse-echo ultrasound. This technique is based on measuring the changing local phase of beamformed echoes when changing the transmit beam steering angle. Phantom results have shown a spatial resolution and contrast that could qualify CUTE as a promising novel diagnostic modality in combination with B-mode ultrasound. Unfortunately, the large intensity range of several tens of dB that is encountered in clinical images poses difficulties to echo phase tracking and results in severe artefacts. In this paper we propose a modification to the original technique by which more robust echo tracking can be achieved, and we demonstrate in phantom experiments that dynamic range artefacts are largely eliminated. Dynamic range artefact reduction also allowed for the first time a clinical implementation of CUTE with sufficient contrast to reproducibly distinguish the different speed of sound in different tissue layers of the abdominal wall and the neck.