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Qi-Xing Tian,1,* Zhi-Hui Zhang,1,* Qing-Lin Ye,1 Shen Xu,1 Qian Hong,1 Wei-Yang Xing,1 Lei Chen,1 De-Xin Yu,1 De-Xiang Xu,2,3 Dong-Dong Xie1 1Department of Urology, Second Affiliated Hospital, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, 230601, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Toxicology, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, 230032, People’s Republic of China; 3Laboratory of Environmental Toxicology, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, 230032, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: De-Xiang XuDepartment of Toxicology, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, 230032, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 138 6674 1832Email xudex@126.comDong-Dong XieDepartment of Urology, Second Affiliated Hospital, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, 230601, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 138 6670 0010Email xiedd_urology@163.comPurpose: Gram-negative bacteria are usually found in prostate cancer (PCa) tissues. This study aims to investigate the role of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a glycolipid compound found in the outer membrane of gram-negative bacteria, on the migration and invasion of PCa cells, and to evaluate the protective effect of melatonin.Materials and Methods: DU145, PC-3 and LNCaP cells were incubated with LPS in the presence or absence of melatonin. Wound healing and Transwell assays were used to analyze migration and invasion of PCa cells. RT-PCR and Western blotting were used to assess the mRNA and protein levels, respectively. Co-IP was used to analyze β-catenin ubiquitination.Results: Our results showed that LPS promoted migration and invasion of PCa cells. In addition, LPS stimulated inflammatory reaction and induced epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) in PCa cells by activating several TLR4 downstream pathways. Specifically, LPS promoted NF-κB/IL-6/STAT3 signal transduction. In addition, LPS upregulated phosphorylation levels of cytoplasmic AKTSer473 and GSK-3βSer9. Moreover, LPS induced phosphorylation of GSK-3βSer9 in the “disruption complex”, and then inhibited phosphorylation and ubiquitination of cytoplasmic β-catenin, leading to β-catenin nuclear translocation. Interestingly, melatonin inhibited invasion and migration not only in LPS-stimulated but also in LPS-unstimulated PCa cells. Melatonin suppressed PCa cells migration and invasion by blocking EMT mediated by IL-6/STAT3, AKT/GSK-3β and β-catenin pathways.Conclusion: This study provides evidence that melatonin inhibits migration and invasion through blocking multiple TLR4 downstream EMT-associated pathways both in LPS-stimulated and -unstimulated PCa cells. Our results provide new insights into the role of bacterial infection in PCa metastasis and a potential therapeutic agent.Keywords: β-catenin, EMT, lipopolysaccharide, melatonin, prostate cancer

The article established a modelling that predicted and measured the quenching and pre-stretching stress in 7050 aluminum alloy thick plate in order to make the alloy suitable enough for manufacturing in the aerospace industries. The results show that both the rolling direction component stress and the transverse direction component stress have a “M” distribution along the plate thickness of 7050 aluminum alloy thick plate, but the level is slightly different, but the level is slightly different. The maximum value of quenching residual stress is about 187MPa in the 80mm thick of 7050 plate. Pre-stretching of the heat treated and quenched alloy to 0.5%, 1.0%, 1.5%, 2.0%, 2.5%, 3.0% and 3.5% to reduce the residual stresses. It has been recorded that more than 90% reduction of residual stresses were observed in a pre-stretching rage of 2-3%. Measuring the surface residual stresses of the alloy by ultrasonic methods and measuring the internal residual stresses of the alloy by crack compliance methods. The two methods are used to verify the model. The difference between the measurement and the simulation is within 40MPa. The experimental data of the ultrasonic and the crack compliance methods were found to correspond well with the simulated models. This shows that the simulation model can effectively predict the evolution of residual stress in 7050 aluminum alloy thick plate, and the simulation model can also be reconstructed and inspected through the experimentally measurement.

A series of novel 1,3,4-oxadiazole-artemisinin hybrids have been designed and synthesized. An MTT assay revealed that most of tested hybrids showed more enhanced anti-proliferative activities than artemisinin, among which A8 had the superior potency with IC50 values ranging from 4.07 μM to 9.71 μM against five tested cancer cell lines. Cell colony formation assays showed that A8 could inhibit significantly more cell proliferation than artemisinin and 5-fluorouracil. Further mechanism studies reveal that A8 induces apoptosis and ferroptosis in MCF-7 cells in a dose-dependent manner, and CYPs inhibition assays reveal that A8 has a moderate inhibitory effect on CYP1A2 and CYP3A4 in the human body at 10 μM. The present work indicates that hybrid A8 may merit further investigation as a potential therapeutic agent.

Predictions are constantly generated from diverse sources to optimize cognitive functions in the ever-changing environment. However, the neural origin and generation process of top-down induced prediction remain elusive. We hypothesized that motor-based and memory-based predictions are mediated by distinct feedback networks from motor and memory systems to the sensory cortices. Using fMRI and a dual imagery paradigm, we showed that motor and memory upstream systems excited the auditory cortex in a content-specific manner. Moreover, the inferior and posterior parts of the parietal lobe differentially relayed predictive signals in motor-to-sensory and memory-to-sensory networks. Our results reveal the functionally distinct neural networks that mediate top-down sensory prediction and ground the neurocomputational basis of predictive processing.

Heat transfer in gravity-driven granular flow has been encountered in many industrial processes, such as waste heat recovery and concentrated solar power. To understand more about Moving Bed Heat Exchanger (MBHE) applied in this field, numerical simulation was carried out for the characteristics of granular flow near different surfaces through discrete element method (DEM). In this paper, both the performances of particles motion and heat transfer were investigated. It’s found that, even though the macroscopic granular flow is similar to fluid, there is still obvious discrete nature partly. The fluctuations of parameters in granular flow are inevitable which is more obvious in the circular tube cases. A special phenomenon, where competition motion is found, is resulted from discrete nature of particles. In terms of heat transfer, overall heat transfer coefficients for plate are higher than that of tube owing to better contact between particles and wall. However, due to competition motion, particles in high temperature tend to contact the tube, which is beneficial to heat transfer in some local zones. The heat transfer characteristics above will also affect the temperature distribution near the outlet of different geometries.

A simplified finite volume method (SFVM) was developed for effective thermal conductivity in discrete particles. The solid granular was simplified as equivalent porous medium in control volumes, and local effective thermal conductivities were calculated to establish thermal resistance network. Finally, the overall effective thermal conductivity was obtained by the Kirchhoff's law. In SFVM, the heavy mesh work can be avoided, and particles are easily divided by regular grids, of which mesh size should go down to 1/11 of particle diameter. The local thermal resistance can be built based on the existing equivalent models, which are determined by the solid-to-gas ratio of thermal conductivity (ks/kg). As ks/kg

The motor and sensory systems work collaboratively to fulfill cognitive tasks, such as speech. For example, it has been hypothesized that neural signals generated in the motor system can transfer directly to the sensory system along a neural pathway (termed as motor-to-sensory transformation). Previous studies have demonstrated that the motor-to-sensory transformation is crucial for speech production. However, it is still unclear how neural representation dynamically evolves among distinct neural systems and how such representational transformation depends on task demand and the degrees of motor involvement. Using three speech tasks - overt articulation, silent articulation, and imagined articulation, the present fMRI study systematically investigated the representational formats and their dynamics in the motor-to-sensory transformation. Frontal-parietal-temporal neural pathways were observed in all three speech tasks in univariate analyses. The extent of the motor-to-sensory transformation network differed when the degrees of motor engagement varied among tasks. The representational similarity analysis (RSA) revealed that articulatory and acoustic information was represented in motor and auditory regions, respectively, in all three tasks. Moreover, articulatory information was cross-represented in the somatosensory and auditory regions in overt and silent articulation tasks. These results provided evidence for the dynamics and task-dependent transformation between representational formats in the motor-to-sensory transformation.

Image hashing based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNN), deep hashing, has acquired breakthrough in image retrieval. Although deep features from various CNN layers have various levels of information, most of the existing deep hashing methods extract the feature vector only from the output of the penultimate fully-connected layer, focusing primarily on semantic information whilst ignoring detailed structure information. This calls for research on multi-level hashing, utilizing multi-level features to exploit different levels of CNN characteristics. To fill this gap, a novel image hashing method, Multi-Level Supervised Hashing with deep feature (MLSH), is proposed in this paper to further exploit multiple levels of deep image features. It uses a multiple-hash-table mechanism to integrate multi-level features extracted from an individual deep convolutional neural network. It takes advantage of the complementarity among multi-level features from various layers of a single deep network. High-level features reveal the semantic content of the image, while low-level features provide the structural information that is missing in high-level features. Instead of simple concatenation, several hash tables are trained individually using different levels of features from different layers, which are then integrated for efficient image retrieval. The method has been systematically evaluated through experiments on three image databases, including CIFAR-10, MNIST and NUSWIDE, and has thus been demonstrated to set a new state of the art in image hashing, outperforming several state-of-the-art hashing methods. Furthermore, the recall and precision can be balanced and improved simultaneously.

In the present paper, the heat transfer of gravity-driven dense particle flow around a hexagonal tube is numerically studied. The velocity vector, time-averaged particle contacting number, particle contacting time and heat transfer coefficient of particle flow are carfully analyzed. Furthermore, the heat transfer performances of particle flow around a hexagonal tube, circular tube and elliptical tube are also compared. The results show that, the effect of top angle (Θ) on the particle flow around a hexagonal tube is noticeable. When Θ decreases from 120° to 60° (vout = 2 mm/s), the averaged heat transfer coefficient of particle flow would increase by 29.7%. The heat transfer performances of particle flow around different shape tubes are quite different. When Θ equals 60° (vout = 2 mm/s), as compared with circular tube, the averaged heat transfer coefficient of particle flow around an elliptical tube and a hexagonal tube increases by 17.2% and 20.5%, respectively.

Ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecological malignancy worldwide with high metastasis and poor prognosis rates. Cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs), a heterogeneous population of cells that constitutes a major component of the tumor microenvironment, secrete extracellular vesicles (EVs) loading with proteins, lipids, and RNAs to promote tumorigenesis. However, the specific roles of CAF-derived proteins contained in EVs in ovarian cancer remain poorly understood at present. Using the gene expression microarray analysis, we identified a list of dysregulated genes between the α-SMA

Relations among chords ("harmonic syntax") lie at the heart of music listening. Notably, harmonic function, a chord’s standing within a key, modulates expectations emerging as a piece unfolds. But how are such relations parsed when music is merely heard in our minds, i.e. during musical imagery? We used fMRI to uncover neural signatures underlying the internal generation of (audible or silenced) musical phrase closures, in an "active listening" paradigm. In different chord sequences, harmonic contexts established strong expectations for target chords that fulfilled either tonic or dominant harmonic functions, within a given musical key. Controlling for acoustic content, classifiers decoded the key of the chord sequence in both Perception and Imagery conditions; the key matched the target's harmonic function. Representational Similarity Analysis further suggested "key" was saliently encoded, which supports an interpretation of the chord sequence being processed holistically, i.e., in its full harmonic context. We propose harmonic function as the manifestation of a generative model transforming acoustic representations into abstracted representations along the imagery–perception continuum, governed by key as a long-distance harmonic property. Framed this way, our results address the previously unanswered theoretical question of how harmonic expectation affords mental representations usable to inwardly or outwardly generate music.

The planetary gear transmission is widely used because of its advantages such as large transmission ratio and high transmission efficiency. But at the moment of starting, there is a speed difference between driving gear and driven wheel due to the backlash between the teeth, this will easily cause the initial collision and impact force, which seriously affect the life of gear transmission, even lead to tooth surface pitting and root fracture failure, therefore, it is necessary to conduct a quantitative analysis of the initial collision. Based on the gear meshing principle and the system dynamics theory, the analytical calculation formula of initial impact force for the internal and external meshing gear pair was derived. The impact simulation analysis model of planetary helical gear transmission was established based on the finite element LS-DYNA, and the simulation analysis results were compared with the analytical calculation results, which verified the correctness of the analytical calculation model. This paper reveals the impact collision mechanism and studies the influence law of the speed and temperature on the impact force, thus laying a good theoretical foundation for the dynamic modification design of the planetary gear transmission and preventing the failure of the gear teeth from impact collision.

Background: Breast cancer (BC) is the most common cancer affecting women and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Compelling evidence indicates that pyroptosis, a newly discovered form of programmed cell death accompanied by inflammation and immune response, is inextricably involved in the development of cancer, and may activate tumor-specific immunity and/or enhance the effectiveness of existing therapies.Methods: We constructed a novel pyroptosis-related model, based on RNA-seq and clinical data downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Data from a total of 1025 patients were included in this study, and the relationships among their clinicopathological features, survival, immune cell infiltration and RNA-seq expression levels were analyzed.Results: Two pyroptosis clusters were determined according to 38 pyroptosis-related genes. The proportions of tumor-infiltrating immune cells differed significantly in the two pyroptosis clusters. The GO and KEGG enrichment analysis of the differential gene expressions (DGEs) implicated that the immune-related pathways were activated. Then, a 56 pyroptosis-related genes signature, constructed by using univariate and multivariate Cox regression, was significantly associated with progression free interval (PFI), disease specific survival (DSS), and overall survival (OS) of patients with BC. Kaplan-Meier (KM) and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analyses were conducted to confirm the clinical significance of the signature. Finally, a nomogram was constructed based on the signature to evaluate its clinical value. Cox analysis revealed that the signature was significantly associated with PFI and DSS of patients with BC. KM analysis demonstrated that the signature could efficiently distinguish high and low risk patients. Moreover, ROC analysis showed that the signature exhibited high sensitivity and specificity in predicting the prognosis of patients with BC. Patients in both gene and clinical low risk subgroup (G-C-) who received adjuvant chemotherapy had a significantly lower incidence of the clinical event than those who did not. A nomogram constructed based on the signature was effective in predicting 5- and 10-year PFI and DSS. Conclusion: This study presents a novel 56 pyroptosis-related genes signature prognostic signature significantly associated with PFI, DSS, and OS in patients with BC, and combining with TNM stage might be a potential therapeutic strategy for individualized clinical decision-making.

The spontaneous muonium to antimuonium conversion is one of the interesting charged lepton flavor violation processes. It serves as a clear indication of new physics and plays an important role in constraining the parameter space beyond Standard Model. MACE is a proposed experiment to probe such a phenomenon and expected to enhance the sensitivity to the conversion probability by more than two orders of magnitude from the current best upper constraint obtained by the PSI experiment two decades ago. Recent developments in the theoretical and experimental aspects to search for such a rare process are summarized., 13 pages, 10 figures, 3 tables, contribution to Snowmass 2021

This paper focuses on the domain generalization task where domain knowledge is unavailable, and even worse, only samples from a single domain can be utilized during training. Our motivation originates from the recent progresses in deep neural network (DNN) testing, which has shown that maximizing neuron coverage of DNN can help to explore possible defects of DNN (i.e., misclassification). More specifically, by treating the DNN as a program and each neuron as a functional point of the code, during the network training we aim to improve the generalization capability by maximizing the neuron coverage of DNN with the gradient similarity regularization between the original and augmented samples. As such, the decision behavior of the DNN is optimized, avoiding the arbitrary neurons that are deleterious for the unseen samples, and leading to the trained DNN that can be better generalized to out-of-distribution samples. Extensive studies on various domain generalization tasks based on both single and multiple domain(s) setting demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach compared with state-of-the-art baseline methods. We also analyze our method by conducting visualization based on network dissection. The results further provide useful evidence on the rationality and effectiveness of our approach., ACCEPTED TO TPAMI

ObjectiveSeveral studies have reported conflicting results regarding the association between sarcopenia and outcomes in patients with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL). This meta-analysis aimed to evaluate the prognostic value of sarcopenia in patients with DLBCL.MethodsPubMed, Embase, and Cochrane Library databases were searched to identify trials exploring the association between sarcopenia and prognosis in patients with DLBCL treated with chemotherapy. A meta-analysis of overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), treatment completion, and rate of complete response (CR) was performed.ResultsTwelve studies that involved 2,324 patients with DLBCL were included. Sarcopenia was associated with poor OS and PFS in patients with DLBCL, even after adjusting for confounders. Patients with sarcopenia had lower rates of CR and treatment completion than patients without sarcopenia.ConclusionsSarcopenia is a negative predictor of prognosis in patients with DLBCL. Additional and prospective studies investigating the diagnostic criteria for sarcopenia are warranted.

Members of the tripartite motif (TRIM) protein family strongly induced by interferons (IFNs) are parts of the innate immune system with antiviral activity. However, it is still unclear which TRIMs could play important roles in hepatitis B virus (HBV) inhibition. Here, we identified that TRIM56 expression responded in IFN-treated HepG2-NTCP cells and HBV-infected liver tissues, which was a potent IFN-inducible inhibitor of HBV replication. Mechanistically, TRIM56 suppressed HBV replication via its Ring and C-terminal domain. C-terminal domain was essential for TRIM56 translocating from cytoplasm to nucleus during HBV infection. Further analysis revealed that TRIM56's Ring domain targeted IκBα for ubiquitination. This modification induced phosphorylation of p65, which subsequently inhibited HBV core promoter activity, resulting in the inhibition of HBV replication. The p65 was found to be necessary for NF-κB signal pathway to inhibit HBV replication. We verified our findings using HepG2-NTCP and primary human hepatocytes. Our findings reveal that TRIM56 is a critical antiviral immune effector and exerts an anti-HBV activity via NF-κB signal pathway, which is essential for inhibiting transcription of HBV covalently closed circular DNA.

Reconstructing intended speech from neural activity using brain-computer interfaces holds great promises for people with severe speech production deficits. While decoding overt speech has progressed, decoding imagined speech has met limited success, mainly because the associated neural signals are weak and variable compared to overt speech, hence difficult to decode by learning algorithms. We obtained three electrocorticography datasets from 13 patients, with electrodes implanted for epilepsy evaluation, who performed overt and imagined speech production tasks. Based on recent theories of speech neural processing, we extracted consistent and specific neural features usable for future brain computer interfaces, and assessed their performance to discriminate speech items in articulatory, phonetic, and vocalic representation spaces. While high-frequency activity provided the best signal for overt speech, both low- and higher-frequency power and local cross-frequency contributed to imagined speech decoding, in particular in phonetic and vocalic, i.e. perceptual, spaces. These findings show that low-frequency power and cross-frequency dynamics contain key information for imagined speech decoding., Reconstructing imagined speech from neural activity holds great promises for people with severe speech production deficits. Here, the authors demonstrate using human intracranial recordings that both low- and higher-frequency power and local cross-frequency contribute to imagined speech decoding.

Ligament injury is a ligament injury caused by excessive or improper exercise. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the optimal recovery time of patients after anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction and to provide some reference guidance for clinical rehabilitation after ACL reconstruction. Ligament injury not only directly affects the stability of joints but also causes motor dysfunction, thus directly affecting the normal life of patients. A ligament injury occurs when the ligament site is cut or subjected to violent or prolonged stress, and the ligament is stretched beyond its capacity. At present, the treatment cycle of motor ligament injury is relatively long, and the treatment effect needs to be further improved. Rehabilitation training is a kind of functional exercise, also known as functional exercise. For the damaged ankle joint, progressive functional rehabilitation training is one of the irreplaceable treatment and rehabilitation methods in the rehabilitation process, which can effectively improve the sports performance of athletes. Therefore, it is of great significance to explore scientific and efficient treatment methods for motor ligament injury. The purpose of this study is to explore the application value of nanoligaments combined with rehabilitation training of athletes in the treatment of patients with ligament injuries. In this paper, 82 patients with motor ligament injuries treated in our hospital from January 2019 to January 2020 were selected as the final study subjects and randomly divided into control group and observation group, with 41 patients in each group. The control group received a single treatment with nanoligament implantation, while the observation group received a comprehensive treatment with nanoligament implantation combined with rehabilitation training of athletes. Changes in HSS, Lysholm, Lkss, daily life ability, and complications of the two groups of patients before and after treatment were compared. It was found that HSS (The HSS knee scoring criteria involves pain, function, range of motion, muscle strength, flexion deformity, stability, and deduction items.), Lysholm, Lkss, and daily life ability scores of patients in the two groups were increased after treatment compared with before treatment, but the increase was larger in the observation group. All experiments and subjects in the article were conducted under the condition of knowing and signing the agreement. In addition, the probability of complications and ligament injury recurrence in the observation group was 3.12% and 0.97%, respectively, far lower than that in the control group. In order to make the patient recover as soon as possible and return to work as soon as possible, it is necessary to carry out rehabilitation treatment as soon as possible after the operation of the patient, instead of continuously delaying the timing of rehabilitation treatment. Conclusion. Nanoligaments combined with rehabilitation training of athletes can improve the therapeutic effect of sports ligament injuries and effectively improve the knee joint function and daily life ability of patients. The timing of rehabilitation intervention is not the sooner the better. Within one to two weeks, such rehabilitation intervention will produce better therapeutic effects.

Recently, advanced oxidation processes (AOPs) based upon peracetic acid (PAA) with high efficiency for degrading aqueous organic contaminants have attracted extensive attention. Herein, a novel metal-free N-doped carbonaceous catalyst, namely, carbonized polyaniline (CPANI), was applied to activate PAA to degrade phenolic and pharmaceutical pollutants. The results showed that the CPANI/PAA system could effectively degrade 10 μM phenol in 60 min with low concentrations of PAA (0.1 mM) and catalyst (25 mg L

More and more evidences proved that deltamethrin (Del) exposure induced adverse effects and damaged immune function to the aquatic animals in the parasite killing process with increasing insecticide application. However, little is currently known of the negative effect on mucosal immunity, especially in gills tissue. Therefore, this study was aimed to reveal the tissue injury and immunotoxicity in the gill of gibel carp following acute deltamethrin exposure. The LC50 of deltamethrin on gibel carp at 96 h was determined to be 6.194 μg/L, and then juvenile gibel carp (Carassius auratus gibelio) (8.8 ± 1.0 g) were exposed to four Del exposure groups (0.61, 1.22, 2.44, and 4.88 μg/L) for 12 h and 24 h. We measured the lysozyme (LYZ) contents and myeloperoxidase (MPO) activities and found that with increased concentration of Del exposure, the LYZ contents were found to increase in the 1.22 μg/L Del group initially significantly and then gradually significantly decrease in the 4.88 μg/L Del group. And the activities of MPO were significantly lifted in a dose-dependent manner. The histological analysis showed that Del exposure caused serious desquamation and necrosis in the surface of epithelial cells, accompanied by interlamellar cellular mass degenerative. In addition, the mucous cells were significantly decreased in the high Del concentration group (2.44 μg/L and 4.88 μg/L Del group) by AB-PAS staining. Additionally, totally 2857 DEGs (including 1624 up-regulated and 1233 down-regulated genes) were identified between the control group and 4.88 μg/L Del exposure group using transcriptional analysis. Among these, some genes involved in innate immune molecules, complement activation, apoptosis-related molecules, cytokine, and adaptive immune molecules, were also down-regulated. Importantly, we found immune system process and tumor necrosis factor receptor (superfamily) binding pathways were downregulated based on the GO and KEGG enrichment analysis. Meanwhile, we detected the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IFN-γ, IL-1β, and IL-8), anti-inflammatory cytokines (TGF-β), LYZ, IgM, and Hsp70 in the gills tissue at 12 h and 24 h after Del exposure, which were consistent with our sequencing results. Collectively, these results demonstrated that the gills injury and immunotoxicity were induced by Del exposure and provided novel insight for explaining to some extent why Del-exposure fish are more susceptible to concurrent or secondary viral or bacterial infections.

With the rapid growth of multimedia data on the Internet, content-based image retrieval becomes a key technique for the Internet development. Hashing methods are efficient and effective for image retrieval. Dual Complementary Hashing (DCH) is one such method, which uses multiple hash tables and has good performance. However, DCH utilizes wrongly hashed image pairs to train the following hash table and discards correctly hashed image pairs. Therefore, the number of image pairs utilized for training the following hash tables will decrease rapidly. Moreover, each hash function in a hash table of DCH is trained by correcting the errors caused by its preceding one instead of holistically considering errors made by all previous hash functions. These restrictions significantly reduce the training efficiency and the overall performance of DCH. In this paper, we propose a new hashing method for image retrieval, Bootstrap Dual Complementary Hashing with semi-supervised Re-ranking (BDCHR). It is a semi-supervised multi-hashing method consisting of two parts: bootstrap DCH and semi-supervised re-ranking. The first part relieves the restrictions of DCH while the second part further enhances the image retrieval performance. Experimental results show that BDCHR yields better performance than other state-of-the-art multi-hashing methods.

Deep hashing has proven to be efficient and effective for large-scale image retrieval due to the strong representation capability of deep networks. Existing deep hashing methods only utilize a single deep hash table. In order to achieve both higher retrieval recall and precision, longer hash codes can be used but at the expense of higher space usage. To address this issue, a novel deep hashing method is proposed in this paper, weighted multi-deep ranking supervised hashing (WMDRH), which employs multiple weighted deep hash tables to improve precision/recall without increasing space usage. The hash table is constructed as an additional layer in a deep network. Hash codes are generated by minimizing the loss function that contains two terms: (1) the ranking pairwise loss and (2) the classification loss. The ranking pairwise loss ensures to generate discriminative hash codes by penalizing more for the (dis)similar image pairs with (small)large Hamming distances. The classification loss guarantees the hash codes to be effective for category prediction. Different hash bits in each individual hash table are treated differently by assigning corresponding weights based on information preservation and bit diversity. Moreover, multiple hash tables are integrated by assigning the appropriate weight to each table according to its mean average precision (MAP) score for image retrieval. Experiments on three widely-used image databases show the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods.

Images are uploaded to the Internet over time which makes concept drifting and distribution change in semantic classes unavoidable. Current hashing methods being trained using a given static database may not be suitable for nonstationary semantic image retrieval problems. Moreover, directly retraining a whole hash table to update knowledge coming from new arriving image data may not be efficient. Therefore, this paper proposes a new incremental hash-bit learning method. At the arrival of new data, hash bits are selected from both existing and newly trained hash bits by an iterative maximization of a 3-component objective function. This objective function is also used to weight selected hash bits to re-rank retrieved images for better semantic image retrieval results. The three components evaluate a hash bit in three different angles: 1) information preservation; 2) partition balancing; and 3) bit angular difference. The proposed method combines knowledge retained from previously trained hash bits and new semantic knowledge learned from the new data by training new hash bits. In comparison to table-based incremental hashing, the proposed method automatically adjusts the number of bits from old data and new data according to the concept drifting in the given data via the maximization of the objective function. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing stationary hashing methods, table-based incremental hashing, and online hashing methods in 15 different simulated nonstationary data environments.

Purpose Metadherin (MTDH), as an oncogene, is associated with metastasis and poor prognosis. This study investigated MTDH expressions and development of gastric cancer (GC) cell phenotypes and the contribution of MTDH to epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT). Patients and methods MTDH expression was assayed in human GC cell lines and tumor tissue from 92 GC patients. Functional experiments were performed to characterize MTDH activity. Expressions of EMT-related proteins (vimentin and E-cadherin), phosphorylated β-catenin and β-catenin were assayed by immunohistochemistry, Western blotting, immunofluorescence, and co-immunoprecipitation, respectively. Results MTDH expressions were higher in GC tissue than that in gastric mucosa from the same patient. MTDH overexpression was correlated with metastasis and enhanced malignant GC phenotypes, i.e., proliferation, migration, invasiveness, and chemoresistance. MTDH overexpression was associated with expressions of vimentin, E-cadherin and cancer stem-cell biomarkers including CD44, CD133, and Oct4. MTDH complexed with β-catenin and decreased phosphorylated β-catenin levels to facilitate β-catenin translocation into the nucleus and expressions of downstream genes. Conclusion MTDH overexpression in GC cells is associated with EMT and development of cancer stem cell malignant phenotypes and affects the subcellular translocation of β-catenin. The results warrant investigation of the prognostic value of MTDH in GC and as a therapeutic target.

Background Anorectal melanoma (AM) is an extremely rare malignant tumor originating from anorectal melanocytes with a poor prognosis. AM has been reported to have a much lower incidence than cutaneous or choroid melanoma, accounting for 0.4%-1.6% of all melanomas. Case summary We report a 76-year-old female patient diagnosed with anorectal malignant melanoma by colonoscopy and biopsy. Intraoperative examination revealed two distinct anorectal tumors, one melanotic and another amelanotic, as well as two pigmented mucosal zones at the dentate line level. Abdominal perineal resection was performed. A pathological report confirmed all four lesions to be melanomas. Postoperatively, we followed an immunotherapy protocol targeting PD-1 (nivolumab). The patient had 24 mo of disease-free follow-up upon completion of nivolumab treatment. Conclusion This is the first reported case presenting coexistence of pigmented and unpigmented AMs in the same patient.

The importance of action–perception loops necessitates efficient computations linking motor and sensory systems. Corollary discharge (CD), a concept in motor-to-sensory transformation, has been proposed to predict the sensory consequences of actions for efficient motor and cognitive control. The predictive computation has been assumed to realize via inhibiting sensory reafference when actions are executed. Continuous control throughout the course of action demands inhibitory function ubiquitously on all potential reafference when sensory consequences are not available before execution. However, the temporal and functional characteristics of CD are unclear. When does CD begin to operate? To what extent does CD inhibit sensory processes? How is the inhibitory function implemented in neural computation? Using a delayed articulation paradigm with three types of auditory probes (speech, nonspeech, and nonhuman sounds) in an electroencephalography experiment with 20 human participants (7 males), we found that preparing to speak without knowing what to say (general preparation) suppressed neural responses to each type of auditory probe, suggesting a generic inhibitory function of CD in motor intention. Moreover, power and phase coherence in low-frequency bands (1–8 Hz) were both suppressed, indicating that inhibition was mediated by dampening response amplitude and adding temporal variance to sensory processes. Furthermore, inhibition was stronger for sounds that humans can produce than nonhuman sounds, hinting that the generic inhibitory function of CD is regulated by the established motor–sensory associations. These results suggest a functional and temporal granularity of corollary discharge that mediates multifaceted computations in motor and cognitive control.

How different sensory modalities interact to shape perception is a fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience. Previous studies in audiovisual interaction have focused on abstract levels such as categorical representation (e.g., McGurk effect). It is unclear whether the cross-modal modulation can extend to low-level perceptual attributes. This study used motional manual gestures to test whether and how the loudness perception can be modulated by visual-motion information. Specifically, we implemented a novel paradigm in which participants compared the loudness of two consecutive sounds whose intensity changes around the just noticeable difference (JND), with manual gestures concurrently presented with the second sound. In two behavioral experiments and two EEG experiments, we investigated our hypothesis that the visual-motor information in gestures would modulate loudness perception. Behavioral results showed that the gestural information biased the judgment of loudness. More importantly, the EEG results demonstrated that early auditory responses around 100 ms after sound onset (N100) were modulated by the gestures. These consistent results in four behavioral and EEG experiments suggest that visual-motor processing can integrate with auditory processing at an early perceptual stage to shape the perception of a low-level perceptual attribute such as loudness, at least under challenging listening conditions.

In order to overcome the shortcoming that the dual distributed sub-gradient optimization methods need to construct a feasible solution, a novel distributed sub-gradient optimization method based on primal decomposition is proposed in this paper and used to solve the joint dynamic economic dispatch (JDED) problem of multi-area interconnected power systems (MAIPSs). Firstly, the centralized optimization model is established and decomposed into multiple independent local areas' optimization and a global coordinator's optimization by splitting area power grids and cross-area tie-lines. Moreover, the slack variables and corresponding penalties are introduced into the local optimization to ensure feasibility and optimality. Secondly, a distributed sub-gradient optimization method is proposed to solve the decomposed model, in which the sub-gradient is calculated by using the dual multipliers from local optimization. Furthermore, in order to get better convergence, the heuristic updating rules for step size and penalty factor are designed. Finally, the numerical tests are carried out on two interconnected systems of different scales, and results show that the proposed method can obtain a good feasible solution directly and has high computational efficiency.

Existence of cantharidin (CTD) in blister beetles is a significant ecological adaptive mechanism that defends against predators and regulates courtship and mating behaviors. To better understand CTD biosynthetic information as well as its biology and pharmacology, we assembled a genome of 151.88 Mb for Epicauta chinensis using PacBio sequencing technology. Gene annotation yielded 249,238 repeats, 527 non-coding RNAs and 12,520 protein-coding genes. Compared to other 11 insects, expansions of gene families in E. chinensis for most core gene families likely associated with environmental adaptation, such as chemoreception, immunity, and detoxification. We further annotated P450s and immune-related genes, a total of 117 putative P450s comprising 7 CYP2, 67 CYP3, 36 CYP4, and 7 mitochondrial P450s and 281 immune-related genes were identified. Comparative analysis of the insect immune repertoires indicated presence of immune genes detected only from Coleopteran insects such as MD2-like. This suggested a lineage-specific gene evolution for Coleopteran insects. Based on the gene family evolution analysis, we identified two probable candidate genes including CYP4TT1 and phytanoyl-CoA dioxygenase for CTD biosynthesis. The high-quality reference genome of E. chinensis provides the genetic basis for further investigation of CTD biosynthesis and in-depth studies of the development and evolution of blister beetles.

The Songliao Basin (SLB) is a large terrestrial petroliferous basin located in northeastern China. The Nenjiang Formation represents excellent hydrocarbon source rocks for the Daqing oil field. Previous studies have indicated that the oil shale intervals from the first (K2n1) and second (K2n2) members of the Nenjiang Formation were formed in different depositional settings. In this study, we provide a new high-resolution (1 m interval) record from SK-1s core and compile three sets of published datasets from two drilling holes (Zk3389 and LY-1) and a composite outcrop section. According to the total organic carbon (TOC) chemostratigraphy, we have divided three variation cycles spanning from K2n1 to K2n2 and detected three potential oil shale intervals in the Nenjiang Formation. Combined with the productivity, salinity, and oxygenation proxies, we discuss the paleolimnological environmental changes during deposition of the Nenjiang Formation. Our new and compiled records support the model that excellent preservation conditions were associated with the formation of organic-rich sediments in the K2n1, while the productivity was the major controlling factor for organic matter enrichment in the K2n2.

Cognitive impairments are core aspects of schizophrenia and are highly related to poor outcomes. However, the effect of therapy on cognitive impairments remains unsatisfactory as its biological mechanisms are not fully understood. The purpose of this study was to investigate the disrupted intrinsic neural activity of the frontal areas and to further examine the functional connectivity of frontal areas related to cognitive impairments in schizophrenia. We collected brain imaging data using a 3T Siemens Prisma MRI system in 32 patients with schizophrenia and 34 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. The mean fractional amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (mfALFF) in the frontal regions was calculated and analyzed to evaluate regional neural activity alterations in schizophrenia. Seed regions were generated from clusters showing significant changes in mfALFF in schizophrenia, and its resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) with other brain regions were estimated to detect possible aberrant rs-FC indicating cognitive impairments in schizophrenia. We found that mfALFF in the bilateral frontal cortices was increased in schizophrenia. mfALFF-based rs-FC revealed that decreased rs-FC between left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and left medial superior frontal gyrus (MFSG) was associated with poor delayed memory (r = 0.566, Bonferroni-corrected p = 0.012). These findings demonstrate increased neural activity in the frontal cortices in schizophrenia. FC analysis revealed a diminished rs-FC pattern between the left MFG and left MSFG that was associated with cognitive impairments. These findings have provided deeper insight into the alterations in brain function related to specific domains of cognitive impairment and may provide evidence for precise interventions for cognitive deficits in schizophrenia.

F0 variation is a crucial feature in speech prosody, which can convey linguistic information such as focus and paralinguistic meanings such as surprise. How can multiple layers of information be represented with F0 in speech: are they divided into discrete layers of pitch or overlapped without clear divisions? We investigated this question by assessing pitch perception of focus and surprise in Mandarin Chinese. Seventeen native Mandarin listeners rated the strength of focus and surprise conveyed by the same set of synthetically manipulated sentences. An fMRI experiment was conducted to assess neural correlates of the listeners' perceptual response to the stimuli. The results showed that behaviourally, the perceptual threshold for focus was 3 semitones and that for surprise was 5 semitones above the baseline. Moreover, the pitch range of 5-12 semitones above the baseline signalled both focus and surprise, suggesting a considerable overlap between the two types of prosodic information within this range. The neuroimaging data positively correlated with the variations in behavioural data. Also, a ceiling effect was found as no significant behavioural differences or neural activities were shown after reaching a certain pitch level for the perception of focus and surprise respectively. Together, the results suggest that different layers of prosodic information are represented in F0 through different pitch ranges: paralinguistic information is represented at a pitch range beyond that used by linguistic information. Meanwhile, the representation of paralinguistic information is achieved without obscuring linguistic prosody, thus allowing F0 to represent the two layers of information in parallel.

Genetic variability has significant impacts on biological characteristics and pathogenicity of hepatitis B virus (HBV), in which the N-terminal sequence of the presurface 1 (preS1) region of HBV large surface protein (LHBs) displays genotype (GT) dependent genetic heterogeneity. However, the influence of this heterogeneity on its biological roles is largely unknown. By analyzing 6560 full-length genome sequences of GTA-GTH downloaded from HBVdb database, the preS1 N-terminal sequences were divided into four representative types, namely C-type (representative of GTA, GTB, and GTC), H-type (GTF and GTH), E-type (GTE and GTG), and D-type (GTD), respectively. We artificially substituted the preS1 N-termini of GTC and GTD plasmids or viral strains with each sequence of the four representative types. The roles of preS1 N-terminus on HBV replication, secretion and infectivity were investigated using HepG2 or HepG2-NTCP cells. In the transfection experiments, the results showed that the extracellular HBsAg levels and HBsAg secretion coefficients in D- and E-type strains were significantly higher than those in C- and H-type strains. D-type strain produced more extracellular HBV DNA than C-type strain. We further observed that D-, H-, and E-type strains increased the levels of intracellular replicative HBV DNAs, comparing with C-type strain. In the infection experiments, the levels of extracellular HBeAg, intracellular HBV total RNA and pgRNA/preC mRNA in D- and E-type strains were markedly higher than C and H-type ones. Our data suggest that the preS1 N-termini affect HBV replication, secretion and infectivity in a genotype dependent manner. The C- and H-type strains prefer to attenuate HBsAg secretion, while the strains of D- and E-type promoted infectivity. The existence and function of the intergenotypic shift of preS1 in naturally occurring recombination requires further investigation, as the data we acquired are mostly related to recombinant preS1 region between N-terminus of preS1 from genotypes A-H and the remaining preS1 portion of GTC or GTD.