There is increasing public concern about poultry welfare; the quality of animal welfare is closely related to the quality of livestock products and the health of consumers. Good animal welfare promotes the healthy growth of poultry, which can reduce the disease rate and improve the production quality and capacity. As behaviour responses are an important expression of welfare, the study of behaviour is a simple and non-invasive method to assess animal welfare. The use of modern technology offers the possibility to monitor the behaviour of broilers and laying hens in a continuous and automated way. This paper reviews the latest technologies used for monitoring the behaviour of broilers and laying hens under both experimental conditions and commercial applications and discusses the potential of developing a precision livestock farming (PLF) system. The techniques that are presented and discussed include sound analysis, which can be an online tool to automatically monitor poultry behaviour non-invasively at the group level; wireless, wearable sensors with radio-frequency identification devices, which can automatically identify individual chickens, track the location and movement of individuals in real time and quantify some behavioural traits accordingly and image processing technology, which can be considered a direct tool for measuring behaviours, especially activity behaviours and disease early warning. All of these technologies can monitor and analyse poultry behaviour, at the group level or individual level, on commercial farms. However, the popularity and adoption of these technologies has been hampered by the logistics of applying them to thousands and tens of thousands of birds on commercial farms. This review discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques in commercial applications and presents evidence that they provide potential tools to automatically monitor the behaviours of broilers and laying hens on commercial farms. However, there still has a long way to go to develop a PLF system to detect and predict abnormal situations.

Abstract-Micromechanical radial-contour mode disk resonators featuring new self-aligned stems have been demonstrated with record resonance frequencies up to 1.14 GHz and measured Q's at this frequency >1,500 in both vacuum and air. In addition, a 733-MHz version has been demonstrated with Q's of 7,330 and 6,100 in vacuum and air, respectively. For these resonators, self-alignment of the stem to exactly the center of the disk it supports allows balancing of the resonator far superior to that achieved by previous versions (where separate masks were used to define the disk and stem), allowing the present devices to retain high Q while achieving frequencies in the GHz range for the first time. In addition to providing measured results, this paper formulates an equivalent electrical circuit model that accurately predicts the performance of this disk resonator.

No abstract

Objective:To construct a polygenic risk score (PRS) for stroke and evaluate its utility in risk stratification and primary prevention for stroke.Methods:Using meta-analytic approach and large genome-wide association results for stroke and stroke-related traits in East Asians, we generated a combined PRS (metaPRS) by incorporating 534 genetic variants in a training set of 2,872 patients with stroke and 2,494 controls. We then validated its association with incident stroke using Cox regression models in large Chinese population-based prospective cohorts comprising 41,006 individuals.Results:During a total of 367,750 person-years (mean follow-up 9.0 years), 1,227 participants developed stroke before age of 80 years. Individuals with high polygenic risk had an about 2-fold higher risk of incident stroke compared with those with low polygenic risk (HR: 1.99, 95% CI: 1.66-2.38), with the lifetime risk of stroke being 25.2% (95% CI: 22.5%-27.7%) and 13.6% (95% CI: 11.6%-15.5%), respectively. Individuals with both high polygenic risk and family history displayed the lifetime risk as high as 41.1% (95% CI: 31.4%-49.5%). Moreover, individuals with high polygenic risk achieved greater benefits in terms of absolute risk reductions from adherence to ideal fasting blood glucose and total cholesterol than those with low polygenic risk. Maintaining favorable cardiovascular health (CVH) profile could substantially mitigate the increased risk conferred by high polygenic risk to the level of the low polygenic risk (from 34.6 % to 13.2%).Conclusions:Our metaPRS has great potential for risk stratification of stroke and identification of individuals who may benefit more from maintaining ideal CVH.Classification of Evidence:This study provides Class I evidence that a meta-polygenic risk score is predictive of stroke risk.

No abstract