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Background Advanced glycation end-products are proteins that become glycated after contact with sugars and are implicated in endothelial dysfunction and arterial stiffening. We aimed to investigate the relationships between advanced glycation end-products, measured as skin autofluorescence, and vascular stiffness in various glycemic strata. Methods We performed a cross-sectional analysis within the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Potsdam cohort, comprising n = 3535 participants (median age 67 years, 60% women). Advanced glycation end-products were measured as skin autofluorescence with AGE-Reader (TM), vascular stiffness was measured as pulse wave velocity, augmentation index and ankle-brachial index with Vascular Explorer (TM). A subset of 1348 participants underwent an oral glucose tolerance test. Participants were sub-phenotyped into normoglycemic, prediabetes and diabetes groups. Associations between skin autofluorescence and various indices of vascular stiffness were assessed by multivariable regression analyses and were adjusted for age, sex, measures of adiposity and lifestyle, blood pressure, prevalent conditions, medication use and blood biomarkers. Results Skin autofluorescence associated with pulse wave velocity, augmentation index and ankle-brachial index, adjusted beta coefficients (95% CI) per unit skin autofluorescence increase: 0.38 (0.21; 0.55) for carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity, 0.25 (0.14; 0.37) for aortic pulse wave velocity, 1.00 (0.29; 1.70) for aortic augmentation index, 4.12 (2.24; 6.00) for brachial augmentation index and - 0.04 (- 0.05; - 0.02) for ankle-brachial index. The associations were strongest in men, younger individuals and were consistent across all glycemic strata: for carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity 0.36 (0.12; 0.60) in normoglycemic, 0.33 (- 0.01; 0.67) in prediabetes and 0.45 (0.09; 0.80) in diabetes groups; with similar estimates for aortic pulse wave velocity. Augmentation index was associated with skin autofluorescence only in normoglycemic and diabetes groups. Ankle-brachial index inversely associated with skin autofluorescence across all sex, age and glycemic strata. Conclusions Our findings indicate that advanced glycation end-products measured as skin autofluorescence might be involved in vascular stiffening independent of age and other cardiometabolic risk factors not only in individuals with diabetes but also in normoglycemic and prediabetic conditions. Skin autofluorescence might prove as a rapid and non-invasive method for assessment of macrovascular disease progression across all glycemic strata.
Throughfall, that is, the fraction of rainfall that passes through the forest canopy, is strongly influenced by rainfall and forest stand characteristics which are in turn both subject to seasonal dynamics. Disentangling the complex interplay of these controls is challenging, and only possible with long-term monitoring and a large number of throughfall events measured in parallel at different forest stands. We therefore based our analysis on 346 rainfall events across six different forest stands at the long-term terrestrial environmental observatory TERENO Northeast Germany. These forest stands included pure stands of beech, pine and young pine, and mixed stands of oak-beech, pine-beech and pine-oak-beech. Throughfall was overall relatively low, with 54-68% of incident rainfall in summer. Based on the large number of events it was possible to not only investigate mean or cumulative throughfall but also its statistical distribution. The distributions of throughfall fractions show distinct differences between the three types of forest stands (deciduous, mixed and pine). The distributions of the deciduous stands have a pronounced peak at low throughfall fractions and a secondary peak at high fractions in summer, as well as a pronounced peak at higher throughfall fractions in winter. Interestingly, the mixed stands behave like deciduous stands in summer and like pine stands in winter: their summer distributions are similar to the deciduous stands but the winter peak at high throughfall fractions is much less pronounced. The seasonal comparison further revealed that the wooden components and the leaves behaved differently in their throughfall response to incident rainfall, especially at higher rainfall intensities. These results are of interest for estimating forest water budgets and in the context of hydrological and land surface modelling where poor simulation of throughfall would adversely impact estimates of evaporative recycling and water availability for vegetation and runoff.
The aim of this paper is to bring together two areas which are of great importance for the study of overdetermined boundary value problems. The first area is homological algebra which is the main tool in constructing the formal theory of overdetermined problems. And the second area is the global calculus of pseudodifferential operators which allows one to develop explicit analysis.
We describe a natural construction of deformation quantisation on a compact symplectic manifold with boundary. On the algebra of quantum observables a trace functional is defined which as usual annihilates the commutators. This gives rise to an index as the trace of the unity element. We formulate the index theorem as a conjecture and examine it by the classical harmonic oscillator.
Business processes are fundamental to the operations of a company. Each product manufactured and every service provided is the result of a series of actions that constitute a business process. Business process management is an organizational principle that makes the processes of a company explicit and offers capabilities to implement procedures, control their execution, analyze their performance, and improve them. Therefore, business processes are documented as process models that capture these actions and their execution ordering, and make them accessible to stakeholders. As these models are an essential knowledge asset, they need to be managed effectively. In particular, the discovery and reuse of existing knowledge becomes challenging in the light of companies maintaining hundreds and thousands of process models. In practice, searching process models has been solved only superficially by means of free-text search of process names and their descriptions. Scientific contributions are limited in their scope, as they either present measures for process similarity or elaborate on query languages to search for particular aspects. However, they fall short in addressing efficient search, the presentation of search results, and the support to reuse discovered models. This thesis presents a novel search method, where a query is expressed by an exemplary business process model that describes the behavior of a possible answer. This method builds upon a formal framework that captures and compares the behavior of process models by the execution ordering of actions. The framework contributes a conceptual notion of behavioral distance that quantifies commonalities and differences of a pair of process models, and enables process model search. Based on behavioral distances, a set of measures is proposed that evaluate the quality of a particular search result to guide the user in assessing the returned matches. A projection of behavioral aspects to a process model enables highlighting relevant fragments that led to a match and facilitates its reuse. The thesis further elaborates on two search techniques that provide concrete behavioral distance functions as an instantiation of the formal framework. Querying enables search with a notion of behavioral inclusion with regard to the query. In contrast, similarity search obtains process models that are similar to a query, even if the query is not precisely matched. For both techniques, indexes are presented that enable efficient search. Methods to evaluate the quality and performance of process model search are introduced and applied to the techniques of this thesis. They show good results with regard to human assessment and scalability in a practical setting.
We show that the residue density of the logarithm of a generalized Laplacian on a closed manifold definesan invariant polynomial-valued differential form. We express it in terms of a finite sum of residues ofclassical pseudodifferential symbols. In the case of the square of a Dirac operator, these formulas providea pedestrian proof of the Atiyah–Singer formula for a pure Dirac operator in four dimensions and for atwisted Dirac operator on a flat space of any dimension. These correspond to special cases of a moregeneral formula by Scott and Zagier. In our approach, which is of perturbative nature, we use either aCampbell–Hausdorff formula derived by Okikiolu or a noncommutative Taylor-type formula.
We show that the residue density of the logarithm of a generalized Laplacian on a closed manifold defines an invariant polynomial-valued differential form. We express it in terms of a finite sum of residues of
classical pseudodifferential symbols. In the case of the square of a Dirac operator, these formulas provide a pedestrian proof of the Atiyah–Singer formula for a pure Dirac operator in four dimensions and for a
twisted Dirac operator on a flat space of any dimension. These correspond to special cases of a more general formula by Scott and Zagier. In our approach, which is of perturbative nature, we use either a Campbell–Hausdorff formula derived by Okikiolu or a noncommutative Taylor-type formula.