Search

With the advancements in information and communication technologies, our world is now a global village. Efficient and novel technologies are now available for the effective transmission of different kinds of data, along with future challenges for making these transmissions more and more effective. Various joint training procedures have been developed to improve the performance delay and throughput of communication systems. These architectures can make the communication persistent in different scenarios and enhance the capacity of a channel. A study was conducted to show the advantages of various joint training procedures for the overcoming of different transmission defects. With the implementation of these procedures, different issues in transmission like power and resource allocation, channel capacity, adaptability, and many more can be resolved very efficiently. After the thorough revision of the existing literature, the present study has identified some of the most valuable features from it. From these features, the most prominent ones are selected and their weights are computed with the use of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). To help people choose the best training methods, the MCDM procedure called TOPSIS was used to rank the available options with the help of the weights from AHP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Oral microbiota reported to be associated with pancreatic diseases, including pancreatic cancer. However, the association of oral microbiome and pancreatic cancer has not been reviewed systematically. Objectives: To systematically investigate the association between the oral microbiome and pancreatic cancer risk. Design: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Data Sources and Methods: Systemic searches were conducted using PubMed, Medline, Cochrane Library, and Embase databases without any language restriction from conception to August 29, 2020. The studies that evaluated the association of oral microbiome and pancreatic cancer risk were included in this meta-analysis. Results: The six included studies encompassed a total of 863 pancreatic cancer cases and 906 controls. Four studies reported the overall oral microbiome in pancreatic cancer cases. A total of 12-17 species/clusters were correlated with pancreatic cancer. Three studies reported the odds ratios (ORs) or relative abundance of several oral microbiomes pieces/clusters, and the majority were associated with pancreatic cancer. Conclusions: Overall, this study supports the hypothesis of associations of variations of patients' oral microbiota to pancreatic cancer. Nonetheless, due to all included studies were conducted in USA or Europe, additional original studies and meta-analysis particular studies from other countries are essential for an in-depth investigation into the role of oral bacteria in pancreatic cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benefit from the high resolution, penetrating and all-weather advantages of millimeter-wave (MMW) imaging, MMW imaging plays an important role in remote sensing, security inspection, navigation, etc. Among the MMW imaging systems, synthetic aperture imaging radiometer (SAIR) utilizes aperture synthetic technology to achieve higher imaging resolution, but the perception information is insufficient, resulting in poor image quality. To improve the image quality of passive SAIR MMW images effectively, we propose a novel multichannel depth convolutional neural network (MDCNN) in this paper. Aiming at the characteristics of original MMW images with more noise in low-frequency information and fewer features in high-frequency information, wavelet transform is incorporated into the MDCNN to obtain the high- and low-frequency components first. Then, dense residual block and skip connection technology are adopted to denoise and enhance target information in the four independent channels respectively. Finally, high-quality MMW images are synthesized by inverse wavelet transform. The simulation results show that the reconstructed images of MDCNN have better image quality (such as image contour and texture details) than other deep learning-based methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preconditioning of coal tailings with flocculants is a useful technology to improve filtration performance. In this study, anionic and cationic polyacrylamides were used for the pretreatment coal tailings before filtration. Nondestructive and rapid measurement of the filter cakes of coal tailings at different filtration stages was conducted using a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The transverse relaxation time (T2) results of NMR provided the information concerned the state of water in filter cake, showing that free water entrapped in larger pores was removed mainly during coal tailings filtration, and the pressure in this study cannot remove the inherent moisture of filter cake of coal tailings. The significant increase in the amplitude of T2 value between 0.1 and 1.0 ms revealed that the flocs collapsed into smaller ones with water entrapped in them during filtration. Comparing the NMR results with different flocculants shows that anionic polyacrylamide of 800 g/Mg produced a larger structure in the initial stage of filter cake formation. The final filter cake entrapped more water. The NMR results well validated the filtration experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface roughness of particles plays an important role in bubble-particle interaction process. However, the continuous attachment and detachment process have rarely been characterized between the surface of different roughness and air bubble. In this study, the continuous attachment and detachment processes between the surface of different roughness and air bubble were investigated by a highly sensitive microbalance. The bubble-surface interaction process was monitored by a high-speed camera to analyze the geometry parameters, including distance, adhesion diameter, and contact angle. It was found that the bubble-particle attachment time increased with the increase of surface roughness. The magnitude of the repulsive force in the bubble-surface approaching process increased with the increase of surface roughness, while the attractive force in the bubble-particle retracting process decreased monotonically with the surface roughness. The force measured by microbalance was finally compared with the calculated one. The calculated force at the biggest force point also increased with the decrease of surface roughness. These results indicate that coal particles with lower surface roughness, which have less water-filled pores and pillars, is more conducive to flotation due to the lower repulsive force in the bubble-particle attachment process and higher adhesive force in the bubble-particle detachment process, and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterococcus faecalis is becoming an increasingly important opportunistic pathogen worldwide, especially because it can cause life-threatening nosocomial infections. Treating E. faecalis infections has become increasingly difficult because of the prevalence of multidrug-resistant E. faecalis strains. Because bacteriophages show specificity for their bacterial hosts, there has been a growth in interest in using phage therapies to combat the rising incidence of multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. In this study, we isolated a new lytic phage, EF-P29, which showed high efficiency and a broad host range against E. faecalis strains, including vancomycin-resistant strains. The EF-P29 genome contains 58,984 bp (39.97% GCC), including 101 open reading frames, and lacks known putative virulence factors, integration-related proteins or antibiotic resistance determinants. In murine experiments, the administration of a single intraperitoneal injection of EF-P29 (4 × 105 PFU) at 1 h after challenge was sufficient to protect all mice against bacteremia caused by infection with a vancomycin-resistant E. faecalis strain (2 × 109 CFU/mouse). E. faecalis colony counts were more quickly eliminated in the blood of EF-P29-protected mice than in unprotected mice. We also found that exogenous E. faecalis challenge resulted in enrichment of members of the genus Enterococcus (family Enterococcaceae) in the guts of the mice, suggesting that it can enter the gut and colonize there. The phage EF-P29 reduced the number of colonies of genus Enterococcus and alleviated the gut microbiota imbalance that was caused by E. faecalis challenge. These data indicate that the phage EF-P29 shows great potentialas a therapeutic treatment for systemic VREF infection. Thus, phage therapies that are aimed at treating opportunistic pathogens are also feasible. The dose of phage should be controlled and used at the appropriate level to avoid causing imbalance in the gut microbiota. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic hepatitis delta virus infection (CHD) is a condition arising from super-infection of hepatitis B virus (HBV)-infected patients, resulting in a more rapid advance in liver pathology and hepatocellular carcinoma than is observed for HBV mono-infection. Although hepatitis delta virus (HDV) is structurally simple, its life cycle involves the complex participation of host enzymes, HBV-derived surface antigen (HBsAg), and HDV-auto-ribozyme and hepatitis delta antigen (HDAg) activities. Unsatisfactory clinical trial results with interferon-based therapies are motivating researchers to adjust and redirect the approach to CHD drug development. This new effort will likely require additional structural and functional studies of the viral and cellular/host components involved in the HDV replication cycle. This review highlights recent work aimed at new drug interventions for CHD, with interpretation of key pre-clinical- and clinical trial outcomes and a discussion of promising new technological approaches to antiviral drug design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]