Loss of the Secretin Receptor Impairs Renal Bicarbonate Excretion and Aggravates Metabolic Alkalosis in Mice during Acute Base-Loading.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: During acute base excess, the renal collecting duct ß -intercalated cells ( ß -ICs) become activated to increase urine base excretion. This process is dependent on pendrin and cystic fibrosis transmembrane regulator (CFTR) expressed in the apical membrane of ß -ICs. The signal that leads to activation of this process was unknown. Plasma secretin levels increase during acute alkalosis, and the secretin receptor (SCTR) is functionally expressed in ß -ICs. We find that mice with global knockout for the SCTR lose their ability to acutely increase renal base excretion. This forces the mice to lower their ventilation to cope with this challenge. Our findings suggest that secretin is a systemic bicarbonate-regulating hormone, likely being released from the small intestine during alkalosis. BACKGROUND: The secretin receptor (SCTR) is functionally expressed in the basolateral membrane of the ß -intercalated cells of the kidney cortical collecting duct and stimulates urine alkalization by activating the ß -intercalated cells. Interestingly, the plasma secretin level increases during acute metabolic alkalosis, but its role in systemic acid-base homeostasis was unclear. We hypothesized that the SCTR system is essential for renal base excretion during acute metabolic alkalosis. METHODS: We conducted bladder catheterization experiments, metabolic cage studies, blood gas analysis, barometric respirometry, perfusion of isolated cortical collecting ducts, immunoblotting, and immunohistochemistry in SCTR wild-type and knockout (KO) mice. We also perfused isolated rat small intestines to study secretin release. RESULTS: In wild-type mice, secretin acutely increased urine pH and pendrin function in isolated perfused cortical collecting ducts. These effects were absent in KO mice, which also did not sufficiently increase renal base excretion during acute base loading. In line with these findings, KO mice developed prolonged metabolic alkalosis when exposed to acute oral or intraperitoneal base loading. Furthermore, KO mice exhibited transient but marked hypoventilation after acute base loading. In rats, increased blood alkalinity of the perfused upper small intestine increased venous secretin release. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that loss of SCTR impairs the appropriate increase of renal base excretion during acute base loading and that SCTR is necessary for acute correction of metabolic alkalosis. In addition, our findings suggest that blood alkalinity increases secretin release from the small intestine and that secretin action is critical for bicarbonate homeostasis.

Preparing infection detection technology for hospital at home after lower limb external fixation.

Background: Patients with severe bone fractures and complex bone deformities are treated by orthopedic surgeons with external fixation for several months. During this long treatment period, there is a high risk of inflammation and infection at the superficial skin area (pin site). This can develop into a devastating, sometimes fatal, and always costly condition of deep bone infection. Objective: For pin site infection surveillance, thermography technology could be the solution to build an objective and continuous home-based remote monitoring tool to avoid frequent nursing care and hospital visits. However, future studies of infection monitoring require a preliminary step to automate the process of locating and detecting the pin sites in thermal images reliably for temperature measurement, and this step is the aim of this study. Methods: This study presents an automatic approach for identifying and annotating pin sites on visible images using bounding boxes and transferring them to the corresponding thermal images for temperature measurement. The pin site is detected by applying deep learning-based object detection architecture YOLOv5 with a novel loss evaluation and regression method, control distance intersection over union. Furthermore, we address detecting pin sites in a practical environment (home setting) accurately through transfer learning. Results and conclusion: The proposed model offers the pin site detection in 1.8 ms with a high precision of 0.98 and enables temperature information extraction. Our work for automatic pin site annotation on thermography paves the way for future research on infection assessment on thermography.

The full phase space dynamics of a magnetically levitated electromagnetic vibration harvester.

We consider the motion of an electromagnetic vibrational energy harvester (EMVEH) as function of the initial position and velocity and show that this displays a classical chaotic dynamical behavior. The EMVEH considered consists of three coaxial cylindrical permanent magnets and two coaxial coils. The polarities of the three magnets are chosen in such a way that the central magnet floats, with its lateral motion being prevented by enclosion in a hollow plastic tube. The motion of the floating magnet, caused by e.g. environmental vibrations, induces a current in the coils allowing electrical energy to be harvested. We analyze the behavior of the system using a numerical model employing experimentally verified expressions of the force between the magnets and the damping force between the floating magnet and the coils. We map out the phase space of the motion of the system with and without gravity, and show that this displays a fractal-like behavior and that certain driving frequencies and initial conditions allow a large power to be harvested, and that more stable states than two exists. Finally, we show that at leasts fifth order polynomial approximation is necessary to approximate the magnet-magnet force and correctly predict the system behavior.

UWB Wind Turbine Blade Deflection Sensing for Wind Energy Cost Reduction.

A new application of utilizing ultra-wideband (UWB) technology to sense wind turbine blade deflections is introduced in this paper for wind energy cost reduction. The lower UWB band of 3.1-5.3 GHz is applied. On each blade, there will be one UWB blade deflection sensing system, which consists of two UWB antennas at the blade root and one UWB antenna at the blade tip. The detailed topology and challenges of this deflection sensing system are addressed. Due to the complexity of the problem, this paper will first realize the on-blade UWB radio link in the simplest case, where the tip antenna is situated outside (and on the surface of) a blade tip. To investigate this case, full-blade time-domain measurements are designed and conducted under different deflections. The detailed measurement setups and results are provided. If the root and tip antenna locations are properly selected, the first pulse is always of sufficient quality for accurate estimations under different deflections. The measured results reveal that the blade tip-root distance and blade deflection can be accurately estimated in the complicated and lossy wireless channels around a wind turbine blade. Some future research topics on this application are listed finally.