Search

Objective: To observe the anti-aging effects of moxibustion on age-related alterations in middle-aged mice. Methods: Thirty, 9-month-old, male ICR mice were randomly divided into the moxibustion and control groups (N = 15). Mice in the moxibustion group were given mild moxibustion at the Guanyuan acupoint for 20 minutes every other day. After 30 treatments, neurobehavior tests, lifespan, gut microbiota composition and splenic gene expression were observed in the mice. Results: Moxibustion improved the locomotor activity as well as motor function, activated the SIRT1-PPARα signaling pathway, ameliorated age-related alterations in gut microbiota, and affected the expression of genes related to energy metabolism in spleen. Conclusion: Moxibustion ameliorated age-related alterations in neurobehavior and gut microbiota in middle-aged mice.

Purpose: Prognostic markers discovery is a strategy for early diagnosis and individualization therapy for human cancer. In this study, we focus to integrate different methods to identify specific biomarker and elucidate its clinical significance.Experimental Design: A powerful tool named Digital Gene Expression Display online was applied to isolate differentially expressed genes correlated with gastric cancer. Matrix metalloproteinase 11 (MMP11) was selected and confirmed at both mRNA and protein level in 10 cell lines, 123 cases of tumor tissues, and 305 cases of gastric cancer serum specimen by semiquantitative PCR, immunohistochemistry staining, and ELISA techniques, respectively.Results: Our data showed that overexpression of MMP11 at mRNA and protein level was consistently detected in cell lines and primary tumors compared with matched normal tissues. Importantly, serum MMP11 levels were also significantly elevated in gastric cancer patients compared with those of the control subjects (P < 0.001), and the positive expression was well correlated with metastasis in gastric cancer patients (P = 0.009). Furthermore, we have shown that overexpression of MMP11 was associated with the malignant proliferation of AGS cells.Conclusions: Combination of gene expression profiling and specific clinical resource is a promising approach to validate gene expression patterns associated with malignant phenotype. As a secreted protein, MMP11 may play an important role in carcinogenesis and has potential implication as a biomarker for the diagnosis and prognosis of human cancers including gastric cancer.

Supplementary Data from Identification of Matrix Metalloproteinase 11 as a Predictive Tumor Marker in Serum Based on Gene Expression Profiling

Peer reviewed: True, Emerging RNA virus infections are a growing concern among domestic poultry industries due to the severe impact they can have on flock health and economic livelihoods. Avian paramyxoviruses (APMV; avulaviruses, AaV) are pathogenic, negative-sense RNA viruses that cause serious infections in the respiratory and central nervous systems. APMV was detected in multiple avian species during the 2017 wild bird migration season in Ukraine and studied using PCR, virus isolation, and sequencing. Of 4090 wild bird samples collected, mostly from southern Ukraine, eleven isolates were grown in ovo and identified for APMV serotype by hemagglutinin inhibition test as: APMV-1, APMV-4, APMV-6, and APMV-7. To build One Health's capacity to characterize APMV virulence and analyze the potential risks of spillover to immunologically naïve populations, we sequenced virus genomes in veterinary research labs in Ukraine using a nanopore (MinION) platform. RNA was extracted and amplified using a multiplex tiling primer approach to specifically capture full-length APMV-1 (n = 5) and APMV-6 (n = 2) genomes at high read depth. All APMV-1 and APMV-6 fusion (F) proteins possessed a monobasic cleavage site, suggesting these APMVs were likely low virulence, annually circulating strains. Utilization of this low-cost method will identify gaps in viral evolution and circulation in this understudied but important critical region for Eurasia.

Additional file 3: Sup. Table 1. Intraoperative medication for complications. Sup. Table 2. Modified Rankin Scale.

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) focuses on classifying samples of unseen classes with only their side semantic information presented during training. It cannot handle real-life, open-world scenarios where there are test samples of unknown classes for which neither samples (e.g., images) nor their side semantic information is known during training. Open-Set Recognition (OSR) is dedicated to addressing the unknown class issue, but existing OSR methods are not designed to model the semantic information of the unseen classes. To tackle this combined ZSL and OSR problem, we consider the case of "Zero-Shot Open-Set Recognition" (ZS-OSR), where a model is trained under the ZSL setting but it is required to accurately classify samples from the unseen classes while being able to reject samples from the unknown classes during inference. We perform large experiments on combining existing state-of-the-art ZSL and OSR models for the ZS-OSR task on four widely used datasets adapted from the ZSL task, and reveal that ZS-OSR is a non-trivial task as the simply combined solutions perform badly in distinguishing the unseen-class and unknown-class samples. We further introduce a novel approach specifically designed for ZS-OSR, in which our model learns to generate adversarial semantic embeddings of the unknown classes to train an unknowns-informed ZS-OSR classifier. Extensive empirical results show that our method 1) substantially outperforms the combined solutions in detecting the unknown classes while retaining the classification accuracy on the unseen classes and 2) achieves similar superiority under generalized ZS-OSR settings.

Background: Metatarsalgia refers to localized or generalized forefoot pain in the region of the metatarsal heads. Often this pain is plantar, beneath the metatarsal heads, and arises from either mechanical or iatrogenic causes. The treatment of metatarsalgia remains controversial. A thorough understanding of the biomechanics of the forefoot and the underlying pathology of the particular type of metatarsalgia affecting the patient is a prerequisite to selecting the proper treatment. In recent years, massage therapy has been increasingly accepted by patients due to its lower costs, fewer unwanted side effects and safety for clinical use. In this systematic review, we aim to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of massage therapy for patients with metatarsal pain. Methods: We will search the following electronic databases for randomized controlled trials to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of massage therapy in treating metatarsal pain: Wanfang and Pubmed Database, CNKI, CENTRAL, CINAHL and EMBASE. Each database will be searched from inception to October 2020. The entire process will include study selection, data extraction, risk of bias assessment and meta-analyses. Results: This proposed study will evaluate the effectiveness and safety of massage therapy for patients with metatarsal pain. The outcomes will include changes in metatarsal pain relief and adverse effect. Conclusions: This proposed systematic review will evaluate the existing evidence on the effectiveness and safety of massage therapy for patients with metatarsalgia.

Using the philological method, the comparison was conducted between the internal canals of human body, meaning the four pairs of "phleps" in the ancient Greek medicine, and the eleven "mai" (meridians, vessels, channels) of Mawangdui silk manuscripts. It is believed that they refer to the initial understanding on the connecting passages of the human body in Western medicine and Chinese medicine respectively. Although they have their own unique characteristics, there are many similarities in running courses, related indications, diagnosis and treatment, as well as theoretic foundation. Both of them represent the duality of tangible blood vessels and intangible pathways, reflecting the common cognitive mode of human body and diseases in early human medicine, with the similar characteristics, e.g.analogy, examining the exterior to deduce the conditions in the interior, holistic connection and natural balance. The four pairs of "phleps" of ancient Greek medicine, with the preliminary features of meridians, were substituted by the blood circulation theory afterwards; whereas, the eleven "mai" of Mawangdui silk manuscripts were developed into a twelve-meridian system. These different evolution paths and outcomes may be associated with the distinct medical philosophies and cultural backgrounds between ancient Greek medicine and Chinese medicine. This summary provides a new approach and new perspectives for the study on the regularity of the early human medical origin, especially the origin of meridians.本文通过文献学方法将古希腊医学中人体内管道——4对“phleps”与马王堆帛书十一脉进行比较, 认为二者分别是西医学和中医学在起源阶段对人体内联络通道的认识, 虽各有特点, 但在循行、相关病候、诊治和理论等方面有诸多相似性；二者都具有实体血管与抽象通道的二重性, 反映了人类早期医学对人体和疾病共同的认知模式, 都有取象比类、司外揣内、整体联系和自然平衡等特点；古希腊医学中具有经络萌芽特点的4对“phleps”后来被血液循环理论代替, 而马王堆帛书十一脉发展成为十二脉体系。二者不同变迁道路和结局可能与其不同的医学哲学和文化背景有关。本研究为人类早期医学起源的规律性认识尤其是经络起源研究提供了新思路和新视角。.

Despite recent stereo matching networks achieving impressive performance given sufficient training data, they suffer from domain shifts and generalize poorly to unseen domains. We argue that maintaining feature consistency between matching pixels is a vital factor for promoting the generalization capability of stereo matching networks, which has not been adequately considered. Here we address this issue by proposing a simple pixel-wise contrastive learning across the viewpoints. The stereo contrastive feature loss function explicitly constrains the consistency between learned features of matching pixel pairs which are observations of the same 3D points. A stereo selective whitening loss is further introduced to better preserve the stereo feature consistency across domains, which decorrelates stereo features from stereo viewpoint-specific style information. Counter-intuitively, the generalization of feature consistency between two viewpoints in the same scene translates to the generalization of stereo matching performance to unseen domains. Our method is generic in nature as it can be easily embedded into existing stereo networks and does not require access to the samples in the target domain. When trained on synthetic data and generalized to four real-world testing sets, our method achieves superior performance over several state-of-the-art networks., Accepted to CVPR2022

Recent studies have made significant development in path planning for ships. However some studies blindly obey rules of COLREGS (International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea) or only adopt turning to starboard ignoring actual practice, like, turning to port and considering deviation from the planned route when taking actions for collision avoidance. In view of the COLREGS and ordinary seamen practice, this paper proposes collision avoidance actions before encounter situation and collision avoidance actions in an encounter situation. Based on the different stages of the encounter situation, it will add more choices for ships when taking action. To specify different stages of encounter situation clearly and take proper collision avoidance actions, this paper makes a quantitative analysis of three primary encounter situations; velocity obstacles (VO) is employed to find allowed velocity space for own ship (OS); by making further analysis of the relationship among distance at the closest point of approach, bow cross, and COLREGS, the method gives a clear direction for OS to search the best velocity in allowed velocity space for three primary encounter situations; VO utility function is applied to search specific value of the best velocity and is useful for different encounter situations. Simulations show that the results are effective and deterministic for collision avoidance. This method not only prevents blindly obeying rules of COLREGS but also promotes reducing deviation from the planned route.

To understand the correlation between the evolution of rocky desertification and land use changes in the Wanshan Karst area, this study used the supervised classification method to interpret the land use map of Wanshan District, Tongren City, Guizhou Province, China in 2000, 2010, and 2015, as well as the lithology and the contemporaneous rock desert. The superposition analysis aimed to determine the distribution characteristics of each lithology land use, and the percentage of each type of land use that is experiencing rocky desertification, in order to reveal the degree of response of every land use type to rocky desertification. The results showed that from the lithological space, the forest land(as well as shrub land)had the widest distribution area on non-carbonate rocks. The forest land area was up to 142.89 km2. In contrast, limestone and dolomite mixed areas were the least, with an area of at least 13.37 km2. Rocky desertification had the largest change in the mixed limestone and dolomite areas in 2005-2010, and the rate of change was -1.87 km2·a-1. Of these, the proportion of mild and moderate rocky desertification in limestone and dolomite areas was the highest, and the rocky desertification that developed on the dolomite clastic rock was the most severe example. Rocky desertification was more likely to occur in carbonate rock areas (Graystone mixed with dolomite, dolomite clastic rock). Analysis of the composition of land that had undergone rocky desertification:Based on the classification of typical rocky desertification and the distribution of rocky desertification in various areas, it was concluded that the land types that had experienced rocky desertification in the study area are mainly dry land and forest land(as well as shrub land). These two types of land had the greatest contribution and response to rocky desertification. The highest occurrence ratio of rocky desertification in these two land types was 20.87% and 4.32%, respectively, whereas the dry land was mainly caused by mild rocky desertification. Additionally, the probability of occurrence was as high as 93.61%, which would provide a reference value for the regionalization of rocky desertification in the study area and better and faster management.

Additional file 2. Fig. S2: PGE1 increases SDF-1α-induced MSC migration in the Transwell migration assay; this effect was blocked by YC-1 treatment.

Additional file 1. Fig. S1: Results of the flow cytometry experiment showing that MSC apoptosis increases in response to treatment with H2O2. PGE1 treatment reduces MSC apoptosis, whereas YC-1 blocks the protective effect of PGE1.

Additional file 3. Fig. S3: PGE1 increases VEGF secretion from MSCs, which was blocked by YC-1 treatment.

π-Extended pyrene compounds possess remarkable luminescent and semiconducting properties and are being intensively investigated as electroluminescent materials for potential uses in organic light-emitting diodes, transistors, and solar cells. Here, the synthesis of two sets of pyrene-containing π-conjugated polyaromatic regioisomers, namely 2,3,10,11,14,15,20,21-octaalkyloxypentabenzo[a,c,m,o,rst]pentaphene (BBPn) and 2,3,6,7,13,14,17,18-octaalkyloxydibenzo[j,tuv]phenanthro [9,10-b]picene (DBPn), is reported. They were obtained using the Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling in tandem with Scholl oxidative cyclodehydrogenation reactions from the easily accessible precursors 1,8- and 1,6-dibromopyrene, respectively. Both sets of compounds, equipped with eight peripheral aliphatic chains, self-assemble into a single hexagonal columnar mesophase, with one short-chain BBPn homolog also exhibiting another columnar mesophase at a lower temperature, with a rectangular symmetry; BBPn isomers also possess wider mesophase ranges and higher mesophases’ stability than their DBPn homologs. These polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons all show a strong tendency of face-on orientation on the substrate and could be controlled to edge-on alignment through mechanical shearing of interest for their implementation in photoelectronic devices. In addition, both series BBPn and DBPn display green-yellow luminescence, with high fluorescence quantum yields, around 30%. In particular, BBPn exhibit a blue shift phenomenon in both absorption and emission with respect to their DBPn isomers. DFT results were in good agreement with the optical properties and with the stability ranges of the mesophases by confirming the higher divergence from the flatness of DBPn compared with BBPn. Based on these interesting properties, these isomers could be potentially applied not only in the field of fluorescent dyes but also in the field of organic photoelectric semiconductor materials as electron transport materials.

With the advent of the Industry 4.0 era, information technology has been widely developed and applied in the construction engineering field. Text mining techniques can extract interesting and important data hidden in plain text, potentially allowing problems in the construction field to be addressed. Although text mining techniques have been used in the construction field for many years, there is a lack of recent reviews focused on their development and application from a literature analysis perspective; therefore, we conducted a review with the aim of filling this gap. We use a combination of bibliometric and manual literature analyses to systematically review the text mining-based literature related to the construction field from 1997 to 2022. Specifically, publication analysis, collaboration analysis, co-citation analysis, and keyword analysis were conducted on 185 articles collected from the SCOPUS database. Based on a read-through of the 185 papers, the current research topics in text mining were manually determined and sorted, including tasks and methods, application areas, and core methods and algorithms. The presented results provide a comprehensive understanding of the current state of TM techniques, thereby contributing to the further development of TM techniques in the construction industry.

To assess the effectiveness and safety of moxibustion for post-stroke depression (PSD).A search was conducted in the following English and Chinese databases: Medline, Embase, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Biomedical Literature (CBM), VIP and Wanfang. The outcomes included Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD), effective rate, and Modified Edinburgh-Scandinavian Stroke Scale (MESSS) scale. The formulation of search strategy, data extraction, and quality evaluation of involved studies was performed according to Cochrane handbook guidelines. The software RevMan 5.4 and Stata 16 were used for data analysis. The evidence quality of each outcome was evaluated by GRADEpro guideline development tool (GDT).A total of 14 trials with 863 participants were included. A certain risk of bias of unclear or high was detected in the included studies. Compared with the control group, adding moxibustion could change the value of HAMD [standardized mean difference (SMD) =-1.17; 95% confidence interval (CI): -1.55 to -0.79; I2=85.5%; P0.01] and the effective rate [risk ratio (RR) =1.22; 95% CI: 1.13 to 1.32; I2=0.0%; P=0.56], and the differences in the MESSS scale (SMD =-0.72; 95% CI: -1.06 to -0.38; I2=0.0%; P=0.80) had statistical differences. The certainty was low in effective rate, and very low in HAMD and MESSS. Besides, moxibustion was shown to be generally safe.This review found that moxibustion may be an effective intervention for PSD. However, the results of this study have a certain limitation. The benefits of moxibustion for PSD need to be confirmed in the future by more high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs).

We present the influences of electronic and magnetic correlations and doping evolution on the groundstate properties of recently discovered superconductor Ba$_{2}$CuO$_{4-\delta}$ by utilizing the Kotliar-Ruckenstein slave boson method. Starting with an effective two-orbital Hubbard model (Scalapino {\it et al.} Phys. Rev. {\bf B 99}, 224515 (2019)), we demonstrate that with increasing doping concentration, the paramagnetic (PM) system evolves from two-band character to single-band ones around the electron filling n=2.5, with the band nature of the $d_{3z^{2}-r^{2}}$ and $d_{x^{2}-y^{2}}$ orbitals to the $d_{x^{2}-y^{2}}$ orbital, slightly affected when the electronic correlation U varies from 2 to 4 eV. Considering the magnetic correlations, the system displays one antiferromagnetically metallic (AFM) phase in $22.16$ at U=2 eV, or two AFM phases in $2$2 eV, and crosses over to d-wave when U$>$2.2 eV., Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures

Gathering experience and organizing knowledge from a large number of engineering construction projects is conducive to more effective and efficient safety risk management in construction projects. Metro construction practitioners often find it difficult to determine what professional knowledge is needed to establish better management. By constructing the knowledge structure of safety risk management, which is composed of domain knowledge entities (DKEs) and their hierarchical relations, practitioners can systematically master the knowledge of safety management, enhance safety management levels, and reduce the occurrence of accidents. Traditionally, domain knowledge structure was determined by experts, the mistakes occur due to the limitations of individual knowledge, and high time costs are unavoidable due to the massive amount of data. Therefore, in this study, we used a rule-based Chinese-language natural language processing (C-NLP) method to automatically extract the hierarchical relations between DKEs from a large dataset of unstructured text documents; we aimed to clarify the affiliation relationship and parallel relationship between DKEs. First, 68,817 sources of literature written in Chinese were collected. Next, the specific syntactic structures of relations of the DKEs were analyzed. Hierarchical extraction rules, including 16 hyponymic indicators and 8 appositive indicators, were revealed based on the linguistic characteristics. Then, the relations were extracted from test dataset. The precision and recall values were used to verify the model. Finally, the hierarchical relations of all the DKEs were extracted, and the knowledge structure was formed. The proposed method of hierarchical relation extraction contributes to the quick automatic construction of knowledge structures and minimizes expert bias. The knowledge structures can be used to guide safety training and can assist practitioners in safety risk management.

In this study, the effects of slag on the properties of lightweight cement-treated soils (LCS) immersed in sodium sulfate solutions were studied. The mechanical properties of the samples after immersions were evaluated by unconfined compressive strength. Microstructural properties were investigated by using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electronic microscopy (SEM). The results show the LCS can resist sodium sulfate corrosion, and the content of slag affects the internal pore structure of the material, thus affecting the strength and thermal conductivity after corrosion. When the slag content is 10% by weight of cement, the mechanical and thermal property of the LCS after corrosion was the best.

In order to accurately diagnose the health of high-order statically indeterminate structures, most existing structural health monitoring (SHM) methods require multiple sensors to collect enough information. However, comprehensive data collection from multiple sensors for high degree-of-freedom structures is not typically available in practice. We propose a method that reconciles the two seemingly conflicting difficulties. Takens’ embedding theorem is used to augment the dimensions of data collected from a single sensor. Taking advantage of the success of machine learning in image classification, high-dimensional reconstructed attractors were converted into images and fed into a convolutional neural network (CNN). Attractor classification was performed for 10 damage cases of a 3-story shear frame structure. Numerical results show that the inherently high dimension of the CNN model allows the handling of higher dimensional data. Information on both the level and the location of damage was successfully embedded. The same methodology will allow the extraction of data with unsupervised CNN classification to be consistent with real use cases.

Since the Silk Road Economic Belt initiative was put forward in 2013, the industrial structure of Xinjiang has become increasingly rationalized, and Xinjiang’s economic development has entered a stage of rapid development. Based on the Solow residual value method, this paper uses the gray correlation model to estimate the elastic coefficient of capital and labor input and calculates the contribution rate of technological progress in 25 industrial sectors in Xinjiang. The research results show that more than 50% of the industrial sector in Xinjiang contributes more than 50% to technological progress, and Xinjiang’s economy has entered a period of intensive rapid development.

Jujube planting in Xinjiang, China began in 1985, and then entered the rapid development stage of planting. By 2012, Xinjiang became the main jujube producing area in China. Due to its geographical advantage, jujube in Xinjiang, China is of high quality and has become another agricultural product with Chinese Xinjiang characteristics. However, jujube production in China has declined since 2013.Although China’s Xinjiang planting area is still expanding, the price of jujube has been affected by a significant decline, and has been maintained at a low level in recent years. Farmers’ income has decreased, and the bottleneck of jujube industry development has become prominent. Therefore, industrial transformation and upgrading is imminent. This paper combines in-depth analysis of jujube related data from 2007 to 2016, finds out the existing problems, and proposes the path for the transformation and upgrading of the jujube industry in Xinjiang, China. It aims to break through the bottleneck of jujube industry development and promote the healthy development of the industry.

Additional file 1: Figure S1. SEM image of nanofibers obtained by traditional electrospinning device. Figure S2. A light, small in size and portable electrospinning device powered by battery is developed for outdoor use (160 g in total weight), and its structure diagram. Figure S3. Schematic illustration of energy transfer and pathway from NaYF4:Yb/Tm@NaYF4:Nd shell to NaYF4:Yb/Tm core under 808-nm laser excitation. Figure S4. Structural formula of curcumin, oleic acid, and PEI. Figure S5. Tensile test of curcumin composite nanofibers prepared by different method.

We present the influences of electronic and magnetic correlations and doping evolution on the groundstate properties of recently discovered superconductor Ba$_{2}$CuO$_{4-δ}$ by utilizing the Kotliar-Ruckenstein slave boson method. Starting with an effective two-orbital Hubbard model (Scalapino {\it et al.} Phys. Rev. {\bf B 99}, 224515 (2019)), we demonstrate that with increasing doping concentration, the paramagnetic (PM) system evolves from two-band character to single-band ones around the electron filling n=2.5, with the band nature of the $d_{3z^{2}-r^{2}}$ and $d_{x^{2}-y^{2}}$ orbitals to the $d_{x^{2}-y^{2}}$ orbital, slightly affected when the electronic correlation U varies from 2 to 4 eV. Considering the magnetic correlations, the system displays one antiferromagnetically metallic (AFM) phase in $22.16$ at U=2 eV, or two AFM phases in $2$2 eV, and crosses over to d-wave when U$>$2.2 eV., 9 pages, 10 figures

Additional file 1: Figure S1. (A) Relative expression levels of miR-152 in normal and breast tumor tissues from human patients. miR-152 expression levels were obtained from the TCGA database containing 775 breast tumors and 74 normal adjacent tissues, analyzed and presented as the means±SEM. * Indicates significant difference of the data at P

Additional file 2: Figure S2. (A) Venn diagram showing the intersection of genes identified in TCGA in breast cancer, and from potential target genes identified in the Targetscan database. Co-expression analysis between miR-152 and the intersection genes identified using the Spearman’s correlation analysis method. The red dots indicate positive correlation and the blue dots indicate the negative correlation. (B) Spearman’s correlation analysis of miR-152 and KIF2C expression breast cancer dataset GSE22220 in the GEO database. (C) Kaplan Meier plot showing predicted overall survival (OS) of breast cancer patients with high or low expression of KIF2C. (D) Bioinformatics analysis identified three domains (Domain-1, Domain-2, and Domain-3) in the human KIF2C protein ( http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/Q99661 ).

Additional file 1.

Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) clinically and genetically heterogeneous group of inherited retinal disorders (IRD) that result in retinal degeneration. This study aimed to identify the genetic findings of patients with autosomal recessive retinitis pigmentosa (arRP). Whole exome sequencing (WES) was performed in two unrelated Pakistani families underlying arRP. Data analysis and mutation screening was performed for all the known RP genes following bi-directional Sanger sequencing to determine whether any of the candidate variants co-segregated with the disease phenotype in the families. WES data analysis revealed a novel homozygous missense variant (c.1274T>C) in the in Tubby like Protein 1 (TULP1 NM_003322.6) gene in family 1 and a novel homozygous frameshift variant (c.351delC) in the retinoid isomerohydrolase 65 (RPE65 NM_000329.3) gene in family 2. The identified variants perfectly co-segregated with the disease phenotype within the families. Our results strongly suggest that mutations in TULP1 and RPE65 are responsible for the retinal phenotype in the affected individuals. These mutations will increase the mutation spectrum of these genes; furthermore, it will enhance our knowledge and understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms of retinitis pigmentosa.

Moxa floss is the primary material used in moxibustion, an important traditional Chinese medicine therapy that uses ignited moxa floss to apply heat to the body for disease treatment. Till date, there is no available data regarding quality control of different grades of moxa floss. The objectives of this study were to explore the probative value of the electronic nose (e-nose) in differentiating different quality grades of commercial moxa floss sold in China, and to investigate if data mining techniques could be used to optimize the sensor array while retaining classification accuracy of the samples. The e-nose with 12 metal oxide semiconductor type sensors was used to analyze the odor profiles of 15 commercial moxa floss samples of different quality grades. Feature selection algorithms using principal component analysis (PCA) and BestFirst (BC) coupled with correlation-based feature subset selection (CfsSubsetEval) method were used to obtain the most efficient feature subsets. Results for the BC feature selection method identified 3 optimized sensors (S2, S6, and S11), suggesting that aromatic compounds relate more to the identification of the samples. Radial basis function (RBF), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and random forests (RF) performed well in discriminating the samples, retaining prediction accuracies above 85%, which achieved cost-effectiveness and operational simplicity, while retaining prediction accuracy. The e-nose could be a rapid and nondestructive method for objective preliminary classification of quality grades of moxa floss and may be used for future studies related to moxa products safety and quality.

Most of the traditional remote sensing image change detection adopts the band ratio method and the image difference method. This type of method is simple to operate, and only the image pixel difference value and the band ratio value are used for calculation, and the detection accuracy cannot be guaranteed. Aiming at this problem, this paper proposes a kind of spectral product-based fusion algorithm based on algebraic weighting. The algorithm combines the ratio image and the difference image, and then selects the Ostu algorithm to iteratively calculate the fusion to extract the image change region. The experimental results show that the detection accuracy of this method is better than the traditional change detection method, and it has certain stability and intelligence.

Taking national professional training at Xinjiang Vocational and Technical College of Communications as an example, this paper explores and analyzes the five-level linkage structure of the base through schools, bases, courses, trainers, and students. Combining the basic operating unit of the "8-character Diagnosis Spiral" and relying on the intelligent technology platform, the "Internet +" continuing education platform quality assurance system based on the concept of quality diagnosis and improvement is established. And through the big data statistics and platform diagnosis and improvement report analysis during the operation of the platform, the platform's service functions can be improved in a targeted manner, and the ideas, methods and results of improving the training quality of the base effectively.

Based on the systematic teaching mode of work process, this paper analyzes and studies the characteristics of classroom teaching, blended learning and network teaching, and it also demonstrates the hypothesis that traditional teaching methods are transformed to interactive teaching under the systematic teaching mode of work process. Taking the "Purchasing Practice" course as an example, this paper proposes an online + offline mixed learning and step-wise classroom interactive teaching mode and uses online learning platforms for teaching in the classroom, which not only actively mobilizes the enthusiasm, creativity and initiative of students but also gives full play to the guiding role of teachers, effectively improves teaching results and students' autonomous learning ability and promotes classroom teaching reform.

The National New Urbanization Plan (2014-2020) clearly states: "Promote the development of the city circle with Lhasa as the center and Kashgar as the center". The state has listed the construction of Kashgar central city circle in The 13th Five-Year Plan and is closely linked with the national "The Belt and Road" and "China-Pakistan Economic Corridor" strategies. The selection of regional leading industries is directly related to the development of regional economy. In this paper, 18 industries in Kashgar City Circles are taken as objectives, and four indexes, namely, demand income elasticity index, growth rate index, labor productivity growth rate index and contribution rate of output value, are selected to construct an evaluation system for leading industry selection in Kashgar City Circles. Grey incidence degree method is used to determine the decision-making power of each decision-making objective. Multi-attribute weighted intelligent grey target decision-making evaluation model is used to measure the comprehensive effect of the objective system of leading industries in Kashgar City Circles. According to the results of comprehensive effect measurement, various industrial sectors are ranked and then leading industries are selected.

Additional file 2. Questionnaire on cardiovascular risk factors of female physicians.

Additional file 1. The 52 participating centers of this study.

Pairwise ranking models have been widely used to address recommendation problems. The basic idea is to learn the rank of users' preferred items through separating items into \emph{positive} samples if user-item interactions exist, and \emph{negative} samples otherwise. Due to the limited number of observable interactions, pairwise ranking models face serious \emph{class-imbalance} issues. Our theoretical analysis shows that current sampling-based methods cause the vertex-level imbalance problem, which makes the norm of learned item embeddings towards infinite after a certain training iterations, and consequently results in vanishing gradient and affects the model inference results. We thus propose an efficient \emph{\underline{Vi}tal \underline{N}egative \underline{S}ampler} (VINS) to alleviate the class-imbalance issue for pairwise ranking model, in particular for deep learning models optimized by gradient methods. The core of VINS is a bias sampler with reject probability that will tend to accept a negative candidate with a larger degree weight than the given positive item. Evaluation results on several real datasets demonstrate that the proposed sampling method speeds up the training procedure 30\% to 50\% for ranking models ranging from shallow to deep, while maintaining and even improving the quality of ranking results in top-N item recommendation., Comment: Preprint

The grid connection of high proportion of renewable energy generation increases the uncertainty of power system. Therefor the flexibility margin of different energy sources needs to be quantified to cope with the uncertainty change and maintain the dynamic balance of power system flexibility. In this paper, firstly, the flexibility characteristics of source, net, load and power and load community (PLC) are analyzed. The dynamic equilibrium relationship among them is briefly introduced. Secondly, taking into full consideration the complex output characteristics of different energy sources and combining their respective flexibility characteristics, a quantitative model of the power source flexibility margin for thermal power, hydro-power, gas power and concentrating solar power was established. A quantitative model of the power source flexibility margin of PV and wind power based on blind number theory was established. Furthermore, the calculation method of theoretical power generation capacity which can reflect different characteristics of output power of various energy sources is presented. The actual output power of each power source in each period is predicted. Finally, a case study shows that the model and method can consider the operating characteristics of different types of power sources, and quickly and accurately quantify the adjustable range of flexibility margins of each power source at different periods of time, which can provide an important basis for evaluating the capacity of renewable energy consumption and the optimal operation of multi-energy power system (MEPS).

Person Re-IDentification (ReID) aims at re-identifying persons from different viewpoints across multiple cameras. Capturing the fine-grained appearance differences is often the key to accurate person ReID, because many identities can be differentiated only when looking into these fine-grained differences. However, most state-of-the-art person ReID approaches, typically driven by a triplet loss, fail to effectively learn the fine-grained features as they are focused more on differentiating large appearance differences. To address this issue, we introduce a novel pairwise loss function that enables ReID models to learn the fine-grained features by adaptively enforcing an exponential penalization on the images of small differences and a bounded penalization on the images of large differences. The proposed loss is generic and can be used as a plugin to replace the triplet loss to significantly enhance different types of state-of-the-art approaches. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets show that the proposed loss substantially outperforms a number of popular loss functions by large margins; and it also enables significantly improved data efficiency.

BACKGROUND Multiparameter, multimodality 18 F-FDG PET/MRI holds great potential for the diagnosis of cervical cancer based on the correlation between tumor glucose metabolism and imaging parameters. PURPOSE To characterize the heterogeneity of tumor glucose metabolism by evaluating the correlation between 18 F-FDG uptake parameters and multiparametric functional MRI metrics in cervical carcinoma. STUDY TYPE Retrospective. POPULATION Fifty-four patients with cervical carcinoma. FIELD STRENGTH/SEQUENCE Hybrid PET/MR (3T), multi-b DWI, and R2* mapping. ASSESSMENT The maximum and mean standardized uptake values (SUVmax and SUVmean , respectively) from PET and functional MRI metrics (D, D*, f, and R2*) were obtained. Cervical carcinoma tissues also underwent HIF-1α, VEGF, and GLUT-1 immunohistochemical staining. STATISTICAL TESTS Single-factor Spearman rank and Pearson correlation analysis and multiple linear regression (MLR) analysis were applied. RESULTS R2*, D, and f have different degrees of correlation (moderate, weak, moderately strong correlation, respectively) with SUVmax and SUVmean (r = 0.530 and 0.527, and P

In nature, Orchidaceae seeds establish a relationship with orchid mycorrhizal fungi to obtain essential nutrients for germination. The orchids, Cymbidium mannii and Epidendrum radicans, have significant ornamental and economic value. We isolated and cultured mycorrhizal fungi from C. mannii, E. radicans, and C. goeringii roots. Three strains of fungi, Tulasnella calospora (Tca), T. asymmetrica (Tas), and T. bifrons (Tbi), were identified using ITS-rDNA sequencing. Their mycorrhizal compatibility, germination-promoting effects, and symbiosis with the seeds of C. mannii and E. radicans were studied in vitro using various concentrations of oatmeal agar (OA) medium. Tca exhibited significant seed-germination-promoting effects on C. mannii (92.1%) and E. radicans (84.7%) on 2.0 and 4.0 g/L OA, respectively. For Tbi and Tas, the highest germination percentages were observed on 4.0 g/L OA in E. radicans (73.60% and 76.49%, respectively). Seed germination in C. mannii was enhanced by high oatmeal concentrations (8.0 and 12.0 g/L) during symbiosis with Tas, whereas Tbi had no effect regardless of OA concentration. Tca exhibited high compatibility with C. mannii and E. radicans, and the oatmeal concentration of the medium affected this compatibility. The findings of this study will aid in the propagation of endangered orchid species for conservation and commercial purposes using mycorrhizal technology.