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Owing to their excellent photo-electron conversion efficiency and sub-nanosecond scintillation decay time at low temperatures, all-inorganic halide perovskite CsPbCl3 single crystals demonstrate potential for application in ultrafast scintillation. However, sub-nanosecond scintillation from CsPbCl3 single crystals at room temperature has not been achieved to date. To address this issue, the strategy of Br over-doping was proposed to realize sub-nanosecond scintillation. In this work, high-quality, Br overdoped CsPbCl3:Brx (x = 0.006, 0.014, and 0.020) single crystalline ingots with a diameter of 16 mm were grown using the vertical Bridgman method. Compared to the undoped CsPbCl3 single crystal, the scintillation decay time of CsPbCl3:Br0.020 decreases from 6.011 to 0.630 ns, reduced by one order of magnitude. The trap state density decreases from 1.421 108 to 1.381 107 cm3, indicating that Br over-doping passivates trap states leading to a slow decay component. Second, Br over-doping causes a great increase in the exciton binding energy from 60.11 to 77.53 meV, indicating a much higher exciton recombination rate. The two mechanisms could synergistically result in sub-nanosecond scintillation at room temperature. The ultrafast scintillation decay time suggests that CsPbCl3:Brx crystals have great potential in fields such as positron emission computed tomography, clinical medical imaging and fast X-ray imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The pathological mechanism of heat stroke (HS) involves the acute phase response, unbalanced immunological/inflammatory reactions, and coagulation initiation, especially platelet activation. Although exosomes contain proteins involved in these biological processes, their protein cargo levels and potential roles in HS remain unknown. This study explored the serum exosome protein expression patterns after HS and their potential roles in the pathogenesis of HS. Methods: Blood samples were collected from ten patients diagnosed with HS upon admission to the intensive care unit (six with severe HS and four with mild HS). Samples from six healthy volunteers were included as control. Using ultracentrifugation, exosomes were prudently isolated, and their protein contents were profiled using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry analysis with isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantification-based proteomics. Results: Compared with healthy volunteers, patients with HS showed significant changes in the levels of 33 exosomal proteins (23 upregulated and 10 downregulated). The most upregulated proteins included serum amyloid A-1 (SAA-1), von Willebrand factor (vWF), S100A8, and histone H3. In addition, SAA-1, vWF, platelet membrane glycoprotein, S100A8, and histone H3 were more enriched in the exosomes from patients with severe HS than from those with mild HS. Gene ontology analysis revealed that the HS-modulated exosomal proteins were mostly related to inflammatory response, including the acute-phase response, platelet activation/degranulation, and innate immune response. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway analysis revealed significant enrichment of proteins in the IL-17 signaling pathway, platelet activation, neutrophil extracellular trap formation, Fc epsilon RI signaling pathway, chemokine signaling pathway, and NOD-like receptor signaling pathway, among others. Several serum exosomal proteins, including SAA-1, vWF, and S100A8, which are related to the acute phase, inflammatory response, and platelet activation, were confirmed to be elevated in patients with HS, and were significantly correlated with disease severity, organ dysfunction, and death. Conclusion: Overall, this study explores the potential role of the serum exosomal proteome in the inflammatory response and platelet activation in HS, suggests the pathological mechanisms underlying HS-induced injuries, and recommends reliable exosomal biomarkers for predicting HS prognosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the continuous growth of the world's population, the development and utilization of marine resources have received great attention. At present, marine fishing relies heavily on divers for underwater operations, which have the disadvantages of high risk, low efficiency, and high cost. Therefore, the development of underwater capture robot which can automatically detect, locate, and capture targets is of great significance for the development of marine economy. Underwater robot is an indispensable equipment for deep-sea operation and plays an irreplaceable role in the development of the ocean. When autonomous underwater vehicles perform underwater operations, they can use computer vision system to obtain clear underwater images and accurate target category information, which can help the manipulator select different grasping parts for different shapes and categories and improve work efficiency. The current underwater vision technology includes "acoustic vision" and "light vision." Due to the influence of multichannel effect and blind area, the acoustic vision research in detecting and tracking underwater targets is not deep enough. Compared with the acoustic image processing system, the underwater optical vision system has the advantages of image and video capture and has higher real-time performance, which can aim at the target faster and more conveniently. Underwater vision optical system plays an important leading role in the detailed research of underwater vehicle sensing system, which can further improve the autonomous performance of underwater vehicle. In addition, considering the nature of underwater image imaging, we are developing an underwater image segmentation and recognition system based on image processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The immunoscore, which is used to quantify immune infiltrates, has greater relative prognostic value than tumor, node, and metastasis (TNM) stage and might serve as a new system for classification of colorectal cancer. However, a comparable immunoscore for predicting lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) prognosis is currently lacking. Methods: We analyzed the expression of 18 immune features by immunohistochemistry in 171 specimens. The relationship of immune marker expression and clinicopathologic factors to the overall survival (OS) was analyzed with the Kaplan-Meier method. A nomogram was developed by using the optimal features selected by least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression in the training cohort (n = 111) and evaluated in the validation cohort (n = 60). Results: The indicators integrated in the nomogram were TNM stage, neuron-specific enolase, carcino-embryonic antigen, CD8center of tumor (CT), CD8invasive margin (IM), FoxP3CT, and CD45ROCT. The calibration curve showed prominent agreement between the observed 2- and 5-year OS and that predicted by the nomogram. To simplify the nomogram, we developed a new immune-serum scoring system (I-SSS) based on the points awarded for each factor in the nomogram. Our I-SSS was able to stratify same-stage patients into different risk subgroups. The combination of I-SSS and TNM stage had better prognostic value than the TNM stage alone. Conclusions: Our new I-SSS can accurately and individually predict LUAD prognosis and may be used to supplement prognostication based on the TNM stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angiogenesis is a hallmark of cancer. However, most malignant solid tumors exhibit robust resistance to current anti-angiogenic therapies that primarily target VEGF pathways. Here we report that endothelial-mesenchymal transformation induces glioblastoma (GBM) resistance to anti-angiogenic therapy by downregulating VEGFR-2 expression in tumor-associated endothelial cells (ECs). We show that VEGFR-2 expression is markedly reduced in human and mouse GBM ECs. Transcriptome analysis verifies reduced VEGFR-2 expression in ECs under GBM conditions and shows increased mesenchymal gene expression in these cells. Furthermore, we identify a PDGF/NF-κB/Snail axis that induces mesenchymal transformation and reduces VEGFR-2 expression in ECs. Finally, dual inhibition of VEGFR and PDGFR eliminates tumor-associated ECs and improves animal survival in GBM-bearing mice. Notably, EC-specific knockout of PDGFR-β sensitizes tumors to VEGF-neutralizing treatment. These findings reveal an endothelial plasticity-mediated mechanism that controls antiangiogenic therapy resistance, and suggest that vascular de-transformation may offer promising opportunities for anti-vascular therapy in cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: A recent study has demonstrated that the long non-coding RNA VPS9D1-AS1 is highly expressed in colorectal cancer and predicts poor prognosis. However, roles of VPS9D1-AS1 in gastric cancer remained poorly understood. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to decipher the expression of VPS9D1-AS1 in gastric cancer (GC) patients, so as to assess whether or not it could be used as a novel biomarker for prognosis in gastric cancer patients. METHODS: The expression of VPS9D1-AS1 was examined in cancer tissues and paired adjacent non-tumorous tissues from 126 gastric cancer patients using qRT-PCR. Correlations between the expression of VPS9D1-AS1 and clinicopathological parameters and patients' survival were analyzed. RESULTS: VPS9D1-AS1 expression was downregulated in gastric cancer tissues than that in adjacent non-tumorous tissues (P < 0.001). VPS9D1-AS1 expression level was markedly correlated with tumor size and TNM stage in gastric cancer. Kaplan- Meier analysis showed low expression of VPS9D1-AS1 were correlated with poor overall and disease free survival. On multivariate analysis, the hazard ratio of VPS9D1-AS expression was 0.30 (95% CI = 0.13-0.66, P = 0.003) for overall survival. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, our data suggest that downregulated VPS9D1-AS1 may be used as a novel prognosis predictor of gastric cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: NORAD (non-coding RNA-activated by DNA damage) is a conserved, abundant, and broadly expressed long non-coding RNA, which functions to preserve genome stability. However, its prognostic significance in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) remains unclear. Material and Methods: The expression of NORAD was detected by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction in pairs of tumorous and adjacent normal tissues derived from 106 ESCC patients. We analyzed the potential relationship between NORAD expression levels in tumor tissues and clinicopathological features of ESCC patients and clinical outcome. Results: The relative expression levels of NORAD were significantly upregulated in tumor tissues (p < 0.001) compared to adjacent normal tissues. In addition, high expression of NORAD was correlated with larger tumor size (p = 0.021) and T stage (p = 0.045). Kaplan-Meier analysis indicated that patients with high NORAD expression had poor overall and disease-free survival (p < 0.001). Moreover, multivariate analysis showed that increased expression of NORAD was an independent predictor of overall survival (p = 0.001). Conclusion: Our data indicate that increased NORAD expression might serve as a novel molecular predictor of poor prognosis in ESCC patients and maybe a potential target for diagnosis and gene therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In diffuse optical tomography (DOT), the image reconstruction is often an ill-posed inverse problem, which is even more severe for breast DOT since there are considerably increasing unknowns to reconstruct with regard to the achievable number of measurements. One common way to address this ill-posedness is to introduce various regularization methods. There has been extensive research regarding constructing and optimizing objective functions. However, although these algorithms dramatically improved reconstruction images, few of them have designed an essentially differentiable objective function whose full gradient is easy to obtain to accelerate the optimization process.Methods: This paper introduces a new kind of non-negative prior information, designing differentiable objective functions for cases of L1-norm, Lp (0 < p < 1)-norm and L0-norm. Incorporating this non-negative prior information, it is easy to obtain the gradient of these differentiable objective functions, which is useful to guide the optimization process.Results: Performance analyses are conducted using both numerical and phantom experiments. In terms of spatial resolution, quantitativeness, gray resolution and execution time, the proposed methods perform better than the conventional regularization methods without this non-negative prior information.Conclusions: The proposed methods improves the reconstruction images using the introduced non-negative prior information. Furthermore, the non-negative constraint facilitates the gradient computation, accelerating the minimization of the objective functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The progression of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) leads to anemia in patients, adversely affecting prognosis. The diverse causes of anemia may include excessive eryptosis or premature suicidal erythrocyte death characterized by cell shrinkage and phosphatidylserine (PS) exposure on the cell surface. The present study explored if SLE enhances eryptosis and the underlying mechanisms. Materials and Methods: Eryptosis was assessed using flow cytometry in healthy volunteers (n = 20) and anemic patients hospitalized for SLE (n = 22), for parameters including PS exposure, cell volume, cytosolic calcium ion (Ca2+) levels and reactive oxygen species (ROS) and ceramide abundance. These indicators were measured in erythrocytes of experimental subjects and erythrocytes treated with plasma from healthy volunteers or SLE patients. Results: The hemoglobin and hematocrit levels were significantly lower in anemic SLE patients than in healthy volunteers (***p<0.001, p<0.001, respectively). The percentage of PS-exposing erythrocytes was significantly higher in SLE patients than in healthy volunteers (p<0.001), accompanied by an increase in cytosolic Ca2+ levels, oxidative stress. The measurements of PS and Ca2+ levels were significantly higher in the erythrocytes of healthy volunteers following incubation in plasma of SLE patients than in plasma of healthy volunteers for 24h (***p<0.001, *p<0.05 respectively). Conclusion: Eryptosis is enhanced in SLE and may contribute to anemia. The probable underlying mechanisms may be an excessive formation of ROS in erythrocytes. Also, some plasma components may trigger eryptosis by increasing the cytosolic Ca2+ concentration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To evaluate the effects of molecular adsorbent recirculating system (MARS) and therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE) on patients with amanita phalloides-induced fulminant liver failure. Material and Methods: We retrospectively analyzed nine cases of amanita phalloides poisoning where MARS and/or TPE was applied. Results: The survival rate for the nine patients in this study was 66.7%. Patients who received both MARS and TPE therapies experienced higher survival rates than those who received MARS or TPE alone (100% vs 0%, 50%). A single session of TPE produced greater improvements in ALT (-58.6% vs -12.5%), AST (-44.2% vs -26.9%), total bilirubin (-44.4% vs -12.5%), and PT (-51.2% vs -4.89%) compared to a single session of MARS (all p<0.05). Conclusion: The results suggest that TPE has better efficacy in removing toxins and improving liver functions. There is a trend that combined use of MARS and TPE may be more effective than either therapy alone, and early intervention may be more effective than delayed therapy. Additionally, the presence of severe hypoglycemia, severe liver failure, and renal failure indicated a worse outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The chemical abundances of metal-poor stars provide important clues to explore stellar formation history and set significant constraints on models of the r-process. In this work, we find that the abundance patterns of the light and iron group elements of the main r-process stars are very close to those of the weak r-process stars. Based on a detailed abundance comparison, we find that the weak r-process occurs in supernovae with a progenitor mass range of ˜11-26 M⊙. Using the SN yields given by Heger & Woosley and the abundances of the weak r-process stars, the weak r-process yields are derived. The SNe with a progenitor mass range of 15 M⊙

We present a method for recovering 3-D nonrigid structure from an image pair taken with a stereo rig. More specifically, we dedicate to recover shapes of nearly inextensible deformable surfaces. In our approach, we represent the surface as a 3-D triangulated mesh and formulate the reconstruction problem as an optimization problem consisting of data terms and shape terms. The data terms are model to image keypoint correspondences which can be formulated as second-order cone programming (SOCP) constraints using norm. The shape terms are designed to retaining original lengths of mesh edges which are typically nonconvex constraints. We will show that this optimization problem can be turned into a sequence of SOCP feasibility problems in which the nonconvex constraints are approximated as a set of convex constraints. Thanks to the efficient SOCP solver, the reconstruction problem can then be solved reliably and efficiently. As opposed to previous methods, ours neither involves smoothness constraints nor need an initial estimation, which enables us to recover shapes of surfaces with smooth, sharp and other complex deformations from a single image pair. The robustness and accuracy of our approach are evaluated quantitatively on synthetic data and qualitatively on real data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new algorithm for camera calibration using two concentric circles, which is a linear approach. In the calibration, a pinhole camera model is used. Different from previous methods, we take the projective equations of 3-D circles, which include the intrinsic parameter matrix of the camera, as the basis of our calibration approach. According to the special structure of the projective equations in algebra, we can get a linear equation system about the intrinsic parameters. After enough equations are constructed, the calibration can be easily finished. With at least three images of the two concentric circles, all five intrinsic parameters can be recovered. Experiments using computer simulated data and real data demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]