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Background: This study aimed to analyze the distribution of pathogens and antimicrobial resistance in bone and joint infections (BJIs) among children under four years old. Methods: A retrospective analysis was conducted on the clinical data of children under four years old who received inpatient treatment for BJIs at the Children's Hospital of Soochow University between January 2016 and December 2022. Results of bacterial culture and antimicrobial resistance were analyzed. Results: Among the 131 patients, 52 (39.7%) showed positive bacterial culture results. There were Gram-positive (G+) bacteria detected in 38 strains (73.07%), Gram-negative (G-) bacteria in 12 strains (23.08%), and fungi in 2 strains (3.85%). Thirty-one strains of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) were detected (59.62%), including 7 MRSA strains (22.58%). The resistance rate of G+ bacteria to penicillin was 72.97%, while resistance to erythromycin and clindamycin was approximately 50%. No resistance was found against linezolid, vancomycin, and teicoplanin. G- bacteria showed a sensitivity of 100% to carbapenems, including meropenem, ertapenem, and imipenem, a resistance rate of 91.67% to ampicillin-sulbactam, and relatively high resistance rates to compound sulfamethoxazole, ampicillin/sulbactam, and piperacillin. Conclusions: Regional variations existed in the distribution of pathogens and antimicrobial resistance in children under four years old with BJIs. In our hospital, the most common pathogen is S. aureus, with MRSA accounting for approximately one-fourth of all S. aureus patients. Additionally, extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL)-producing G- bacteria have been identified, underscoring the importance of careful consideration during empirical antibiotic therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Platinum‐based chemotherapy drugs play a very important role in the treatment of patients with advanced colorectal cancer, but the drug resistance of platinum‐based chemotherapy drugs is an important topic that puzzles us. If we can find mechanisms of resistance, it will be revolutionary for us. We analysed the differential genes, core genes and their enrichment pathways in platinum‐resistant and non‐resistant patients through a public database. Platinum‐resistant cell lines were cultured in vitro for in vitro colony and Transwell analysis. Tumorigenesis analysis of nude mice in vivo. Verify the function of core genes. Through differential gene and enrichment analysis, we found that CUL4B was the main factor affecting platinum drug resistance and EMT. Our hypothesis was further verified by in vitro drug‐resistant and wild‐type cell lines and in vivo tumorigenesis analysis of nude mice. CUL4B leads to platinum drug resistance in colorectal cancer by affecting tumour EMT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Breast cancer causes the No.1 women cancer prevalence and the No.2 women cancer mortality worldwide. Nuclear receptor/transcriptional factor signaling is aberrant and plays important roles in breast cancer pathogenesis and evolution, such as estrogen receptor α (ERα/ESR1), tumor protein p53 (p53/TP53) and Nuclear factor kappa B (NFκB). About 60-70 % of breast tumors are ERα positive, while approximate 70 % of breast tumors are P53 wild type. Recent studies indicate that nuclear receptors/transcriptional factors could be tightly controlled through protein post-translational modification.The nuclear receptors/transcriptional factors could endure several types of modifications, including phosphorylation, acetylation and ubiquitination. Compared with the other two types of modifications, ubiquitination was mostly linked to protein degradation process, while few researches focused on the functional changes of the target proteins. Until recent years, ubiquitination process is no longer regarded as merely a protein degradation process, but aslo treated as one kind of modification signal.As an atypical E3 ubiquitin ligase, RNF31 was previously found to facilitate NFκB signaling transduction through linear ubiquitination on IKKγ(IκB kinase γ). Our previous studies showed important regulatory functions of RNF31 in controlling important oncogenic pathways in breast cancer, such as ERα and p53. This review highlights recent discoveries on RNF31 functions in nuclear factor modifications, breast cancer progression and possible therapeutic inhibitors targeting RNF31. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the problem of multimedia document (MMD) semantics understanding and content-based cross-media retrieval. An MMD is a set of media objects of different modalities but carrying the same semantics and the content-based cross-media retrieval is a new kind of retrieval method by which the query examples and search results can be of different modalities. Two levels of manifolds are learned to explore the relationships among all the data in the level of MMD and in the level of media object respectively. We first construct a Laplacian media object space for media object representation of each modality and an MMD semantic graph to learn the MMD semantic correlations. The characteristics of media objects propagate along the MMD semantic graph and an MMD semantic space is constructed to perform cross-media retrieval. Different methods are proposed to utilize relevance feedback and experiment shows that the proposed approaches are effective. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the results of a study which developed a strategy to reduce the harmful effects and pollution caused by smoking. The strategy used zeolite sieving for N-nitrosamines in smoke to demonstrate the performance characteristics of zeolite for the reduction of the concentration of N-nitrosamines in the cigarette smoke. Lower mutagenic activity and higher CHO cell livability were found for the test cigarette containing zeolite in comparison with the control and no significant damage was detectedin 30-day animal experiments when exposed to the cigarette smoke.

Although multimedia objects such as images, audios and texts are of different modalities, there are a great amount of semantic correlations among them. In this paper, we propose a method of transductive learning to mine the semantic correlations among media objects of different modalities so that to achieve the cross-media retrieval. Cross-media retrieval is a new kind of searching technology by which the query examples and the returned results can be of different modalities, e.g., to query images by an example of audio. First, according to the media objects features and their co-existence information, we construct a uniform cross-media correlation graph, in which media objects of different modalities are represented uniformly. To perform the cross-media retrieval, a positive score is assigned to the query example; the score spreads along the graph and media objects of target modality or MMDs with the highest scores are returned. To boost the retrieval performance, we also propose different approaches of long-term and short-term relevance feedback to mine the information contained in the positive and negative examples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract  As historical Chinese calligraphy works are being digitized, the problem of retrieval becomes a new challenge. But, currently no OCR technique can convert calligraphy character images into text, nor can the existing Handwriting Character Recognition approach does not work for it. This paper proposes a novel approach to efficiently retrieving Chinese calligraphy characters on the basis of similarity: calligraphy character image is represented by a collection of discriminative features, and high retrieval speed with reasonable effectiveness is achieved. First, calligraphy characters that have no possibility similar to the query are filtered out step by step by comparing the character complexity, stroke density and stroke protrusion. Then, similar calligraphy characters are retrieved and ranked according to their matching cost produced by approximate shape match. In order to speed up the retrieval, we employed high dimensional data structure — PK-tree. Finally, the efficiency of the algorithm is demonstrated by a preliminary experiment with 3012 calligraphy character images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract  Due to the famous dimensionality curse problem, search in a high-dimensional space is considered as a “hard” problem. In this paper, a novel composite distance transformation method, which is called CDT, is proposed to support a fast k-nearest-neighbor (k-NN) search in high-dimensional spaces. In CDT, all (n) data points are first grouped into some clusters by a k-Means clustering algorithm. Then a composite distance key of each data point is computed. Finally, these index keys of such n data points are inserted by a partition-based B-tree. Thus, given a query point, its k-NN search in high-dimensional spaces is transformed into the search in the single dimensional space with the aid of CDT index. Extensive performance studies are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme. Our results show that this method outperforms the state-of-the-art high-dimensional search techniques, such as the X-Tree, VA-file, iDistance and NB-Tree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The latest progresses of the series of research on the trapper of nitrosamines are reported in this paper, involving the attempts to elevate the selective adsorption of zeolites through enhancing adsorbent-adsorbate interaction, in order to prepare the new functional nanoporous materials with high efficiency to eliminate the carcinogenic pollutants in environment and to protect public health. Incorporation of metal oxide such as copper oxide in NaY accelerated adsorption of volatile nitrosamines and anthracene, and moreover, coating zirconia onto the zeolite could dramatically suppress the release of nitrogen oxides in the decomposition of N-nitrosopyrrolidine (NPYR) during temperature-programmed surface reaction (TPSR) process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China-America Digital Academic Library Project (CADAL) is a collaborative project between universities and institutes in China and the USA, which aims to provide universal access to large scale digital resources and explore the ways of applying multimedia and virtual reality technologies to digital library. The distinct characteristic of the resources in CADAL is that it not only contains one million digital books of different languages, but also contains Terabyte level multimedia resources (image, video, and so on), which are utilized for education and research purposes. So, in the Portal to CADAL, both the traditional services of browsing and searching of digital books, and the services of quickly retrieving and structurally browsing of multimedia documents should be provided. In addition, the services of visual presentation of retrieved results are required too. In this paper, the underlying novel multimedia retrieval methods as well as visualization techniques, which are used in the CADAL portal, are investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new iris feature extraction approach using both spatial and frequency domain is presented. Steerable pyramid is adopted to get the orientation information on iris images. The feature sequence is extracted on each sub-image and used to train Support Vector Machine (SVM) as iris classifiers. SVM has drawn great interest recently as one of the best classifiers in machine learning, although there is a problem in the use of traditional SVM for iris recognition. It cannot treat False Accept and False Reject differently with different security requirements. Therefore, a new kind of SVM called Non-symmetrical SVM is presented to classify the iris features. Experimental data shows that Non-symmetrical SVM can satisfy various security requirements in iris recognition applications. Feature sequence combined with spatial and frequency domain represents the variation details of the iris patterns properly. The results in this study demonstrate the potential of our new approach, and show that it performs more satisfactorily when compared to former algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer vision has very wide application in human motion capture research. This paper proposes a new approach to do motion capture in video. It is composed of image sequence based tracking of human feature points and the reconstruction of the three-dimension(3D) motion skeleton. First, every part of the human body from top to bottom is tracked on the basis of a human model. The image difference and a morph-block similarity algorithm based on subpixels are used. Then camera calibration is done using the line correspondences between the 3D model and the image. Finally the 3D motion skeleton is established by use of the model knowledge. This approach does not aim at a given mode of human motion. Rather, it analyzes large scale motion from frame to frame in complex, variational background, and sets up a 3D motion skeleton in the perspective projection. The experiment results are presented at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distinguishing feature of a digital library is that it has Terabyte volumes of multimedia resources. One challenge for researchers in the field of multimedia is to find a testbed for showing the potentials of multimedia technologies such as video summarization, semantic annotation, multimedia cross indexing and retrieval, and etc. Deeper research and wider applications of digital libraries revealed their indispensable role as testbed for multimedia technologies. This paper presents challenging issues of some key techniques used in digital libraries and their specific needs for multimedia technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]