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In this paper, we propose a new Multi-view Re-weighted Sparse Subspace Clustering with Intact Low-rank Space Learning (ILrS-MRSSC) method, trying to find a sparse representation of the complete space of information. Specifically, this method integrates the complementary information inherent in multiple angles of the data, learns a complete space of potential low-rank representation, and constructs a sparse information matrix to reconstruct the data. The correlation between multi-view learning and subspace clustering is strengthened to the greatest extent, so that the subspace representation is more intuitive and accurate. The optimal solution of the model is solved by the augmented lagrangian multiplier (ALM) method of alternating direction minimal. Experiments on multiple benchmark data sets verify the effec-tiveness of this method. &nbsp

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) and Transformer variants have emerged as the leading medical image segmentation backbones. Nonetheless, due to their limitations in either preserving global image context or efficiently processing irregular shapes in visual objects, these backbones struggle to effectively integrate information from diverse anatomical regions and reduce inter-individual variability, particularly for the vasculature. Motivated by the successful breakthroughs of graph neural networks (GNN) in capturing topological properties and non-Euclidean relationships across various fields, we propose NexToU, a novel hybrid architecture for medical image segmentation. NexToU comprises improved Pool GNN and Swin GNN modules from Vision GNN (ViG) for learning both global and local topological representations while minimizing computational costs. To address the containment and exclusion relationships among various anatomical structures, we reformulate the topological interaction (TI) module based on the nature of binary trees, rapidly encoding the topological constraints into NexToU. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets (including distinct imaging dimensions, disease types, and imaging modalities) demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) architectures. All the code is publicly available at https://github.com/PengchengShi1220/NexToU., 13 pages, 6 figures

In this paper we mainly discuss sharp lower and upper bounds for the length of longest consecutive switches in IID Bernoulli sequences. This work is an extension of results in Erd\H{o}s and R\'{e}v\'{e}sz (1975) for longest head-run and Hao et al. (2021) for longest consecutive switches in unbiased coin-tossing, and might be applied to reliability theory, biology, quality control, pattern recognition, finance, etc.

The ever-increasing global prevalence of obesity has trended towards a younger age. The ecological characteristics and changes of the oral and gut microbial community during childhood are poorly understood.In this study, we analyzed the salivary and fecal microbiota of 30 children with obesity and 30 normal weight children aged 3-5 years via third-generation long-range DNA sequencing,with the aim of understanding the structure of childhood microbiota and identifying specific oral and gut microbial lineages and genera in children that may be associated with obesity.The results revealed significant variation in alpha diversity indices among the four groups (Chao1: P < 0.001; observed species: P < 0.001; Shannon < 0.001). Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) and nonmetric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) revealed significant differences in oral and gut microbial community structure between obesity and controls. The Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes (F/B) abundance ratios of oral and intestinal flora among children with obesity were higher than those of controls. The most abundant phyla and genera found in oral and intestinal flora were Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Neisseria, Bacteroides, Faecalibacterium, Streptococcus, Prevotella and so on. Linear discriminant analysis effect size (LEfSe) revealed higher proportions of Filifactor (LDA= 3.98; P < 0.05) and Butyrivibrio (LDA = 2.54; P < 0.001) in the oral microbiota of children with obesity, while the fecal microbiota of children with obesity were more enriched with Faecalibacterium (LDA = 5.02; P < 0.001), Tyzzerella (LDA=3.25; P < 0.01), Klebsiella (LDA = 4.31; P < 0.05),which could be considered as dominant bacterial biomarkers for obesity groups.A total of 148 functional bacterial pathways were found to significantly differ in the oral and gut microbiota among controls and obesity using PICRUSt 2. Most predicted functional pathways were clustered in biosynthesis. In conclusion, This work suggests there were significant differences in oral and gut microbiota in controls and obesity groups, microbiota dysbiosis in childhood might have significant effect on the development of obesity.

PurposeThe sequencing of androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) with radiotherapy (RT) may affect outcomes for prostate cancer in an RT-field size-dependent manner. Herein, we investigate the impact of ADT sequencing for men receiving ADT with prostate-only RT (PORT) or whole-pelvis RT (WPRT).Materials and methodsIndividual patient data from 12 randomized trials that included patients receiving neoadjuvant/concurrent or concurrent/adjuvant short-term ADT (4-6 months) with RT for localized disease were obtained from the Meta-Analysis of Randomized trials in Cancer of the Prostate consortium. Inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) was performed with propensity scores derived from age, initial prostate-specific antigen, Gleason score, T stage, RT dose, and mid-trial enrollment year. Metastasis-free survival (primary end point) and overall survival (OS) were assessed by IPTW-adjusted Cox regression models, analyzed independently for men receiving PORT versus WPRT. IPTW-adjusted Fine and Gray competing risk models were built to evaluate distant metastasis (DM) and prostate cancer-specific mortality.ResultsOverall, 7,409 patients were included (6,325 neoadjuvant/concurrent and 1,084 concurrent/adjuvant) with a median follow-up of 10.2 years (interquartile range, 7.2-14.9 years). A significant interaction between ADT sequencing and RT field size was observed for all end points (P interaction < .02 for all) except OS. With PORT (n = 4,355), compared with neoadjuvant/concurrent ADT, concurrent/adjuvant ADT was associated with improved metastasis-free survival (10-year benefit 8.0%, hazard ratio [HR], 0.65; 95% CI, 0.54 to 0.79; P < .0001), DM (subdistribution HR, 0.52; 95% CI, 0.33 to 0.82; P = .0046), prostate cancer-specific mortality (subdistribution HR, 0.30; 95% CI, 0.16 to 0.54; P < .0001), and OS (HR, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.57 to 0.83; P = .0001). However, in patients receiving WPRT (n = 3,049), no significant difference in any end point was observed in regard to ADT sequencing except for worse DM (HR, 1.57; 95% CI, 1.20 to 2.05; P = .0009) with concurrent/adjuvant ADT.ConclusionADT sequencing exhibits a significant impact on clinical outcomes with a significant interaction with field size. Concurrent/adjuvant ADT should be the standard of care where short-term ADT is indicated in combination with PORT.

The most important difference between ultrastrong and non-ultrastrong coupling regimes is that the ground state contains excitations. We consider a qubit-plasmon-phonon ultrastrong coupling (USC) system with a three-level atom coupled to the photon and phonon via its upper two energy levels and show that spontaneous emission of the atom from its intermediate to its ground state produces photon and phonon pairs. It is shown that the current system can produce a strong photon/phonon stream and the atom-phonon coupling plays the active role, which ensures the experimental detection. The emission spectrum and various high-order correlation functions confirm the generation of the pairs of photons and phonons. Our study has important implications for future research on virtual photon and phonon pairs creation in the ground state of the USC regime., Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures

Since 2019, coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been widely spread and posed a serious threat to public health. Chest Computed Tomography (CT) holds great potential for screening and diagnosis of this disease. The segmentation of COVID-19 CT imaging can achieves quantitative evaluation of infections and tracks disease progression. COVID-19 infections are characterized by high heterogeneity and unclear boundaries, so capturing low-level features such as texture and intensity is critical for segmentation. However, segmentation networks that emphasize low-level features are still lacking. In this work, we propose a DECOR-Net capable of capturing more decorrelated low-level features. The channel re-weighting strategy is applied to obtain plenty of low-level features and the dependencies between channels are reduced by proposed decorrelation loss. Experiments show that DECOR-Net outperforms other cutting-edge methods and surpasses the baseline by 5.1% and 4.9% in terms of Dice coefficient and intersection over union. Moreover, the proposed decorrelation loss can improve the performance constantly under different settings. The Code is available at https://github.com/jiesihu/DECOR-Net.git.

Conversation model is one of the important directions of natural language processing.Today's dialogue models are mainly divided into retrieval-based methods and generation-based methods.However,the retrieval method cannot respond to questions that do not appear in the corpus,and the generation method is prone to problems with safe responses.In view of this,a compound conversation model that combines retrieval and generation is proposed,and the retrieval method and generation method are combined to make up for their shortcomings.First,K retrieval contexts and corresponding K retrieval candidate responses are obtained through the retrieval module.In the multi-response generation module,retrieval contexts are further combined to obtain several generation candidate responses.The candidate response ranking module is divided into two steps:pre-screening and post-reranking.The pre-screening part obtains the optimal retrieval response and the optimal generated response by calculating the similarity between the input question and candidate responses,and the post-reranking part further selects the most suitable answer to the input question.Experimental results show that the BLUE index increased by 6%,and the diversity index increased by 12%.

Based on the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), medical image segmentation can be described as a conditional image generation task, which allows to compute pixel-wise uncertainty maps of the segmentation and allows an implicit ensemble of segmentations to boost the segmentation performance. However, DDPM requires many iterative denoising steps to generate segmentations from Gaussian noise, resulting in extremely inefficient inference. To mitigate the issue, we propose a principled acceleration strategy, called pre-segmentation diffusion sampling DDPM (PD-DDPM), which is specially used for medical image segmentation. The key idea is to obtain pre-segmentation results based on a separately trained segmentation network, and construct noise predictions (non-Gaussian distribution) according to the forward diffusion rule. We can then start with noisy predictions and use fewer reverse steps to generate segmentation results. Experiments show that PD-DDPM yields better segmentation results over representative baseline methods even if the number of reverse steps is significantly reduced. Moreover, PD-DDPM is orthogonal to existing advanced segmentation models, which can be combined to further improve the segmentation performance.

Since the ambiguous boundary of the lesion and inter-observer variability, white matter hyperintensity segmentation annotations are inherently noisy and uncertain. On the other hand, the high capacity of deep neural networks (DNN) enables them to overfit labels with noise and uncertainty, which may lead to biased models with weak generalization ability. This challenge has been addressed by leveraging multiple annotations per image. However, multiple annotations are often not available in a real-world scenario. To mitigate the issue, this paper proposes a supervision augmentation method (SA) and combines it with ensemble learning (SA-EN) to improve the generalization ability of the model. SA can obtain diverse supervision information by estimating the uncertainty of annotation in a real-world scenario that per image have only one ambiguous annotation. Then different base learners in EN are trained with diverse supervision information. The experimental results on two white matter hyperintensity segmentation datasets demonstrate that SA-EN gets the optimal accuracy compared with other state-of-the-art ensemble methods. SA-EN is more effective on small datasets, which is more suitable for medical image segmentation with few annotations. A quantitative study is presented to show the effect of ensemble size and the effectiveness of the ensemble model. Furthermore, SA-EN can capture two types of uncertainty, aleatoric uncertainty modeled in SA and epistemic uncertainty modeled in EN.

Salt tolerance is one of the most important problems in the field of environmental governance and restoration. Among the various sources of factors, except temperature, salinity is a key factor that interrupts bacterial growth significantly. In this regard, constant efforts are made for the development of salt-tolerant strains, but few strains with salt tolerance, such as Terribacillus saccharophilus, were found, and there are still few relevant reports about their salt tolerance from complete genomic analysis. Furthermore, with the development of the economy, environmental pollution caused by oil exploitation has attracted much attention, so it is crucial to find the bacteria from T. saccharophilus which could degrade petroleum hydrocarbon even under high-salt conditions. Herein, one T. saccharophilus strain named ZY-1 with salt tolerance was isolated by increasing the salinity on LB medium step by step with reservoir water as the bacterial source. Its complete genome was sequenced, which was the first report of the complete genome for T. saccharophilus species with petroleum hydrocarbon degradation and emulsifying properties. In addition, its genome sequences were compared with the other five strains that are from the same genus level. The results indicated that there really exist some differences among them. In addition, some characteristics were studied. The salt-tolerant strain ZY-1 developed in this study and its emulsification and degradation performance of petroleum hydrocarbons were studied, which is expected to widely broaden the research scope of petroleum hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria in the oil field environment even in the extreme environment. The experiments verified that ZY-1 could significantly grow not only in the salt field but also in the oil field environment. It also demonstrated that the developed salt-tolerant strain can be applied in the petroleum hydrocarbon pollution field for bioremediation. In addition, we expect that the identified variants which occurred specifically in the high-salt strain will enhance the molecular biological understanding and be broadly applied to the biological engineering field.

Objective. To study the expression and correlation of insulin receptor (INSR), insulin receptor substrate-1 (IRS-1), and programmed cell death ligand-1 (PD-L1) in nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Methods. 45 lung cancer tissues and 30 adjacent normal tissues of NSCLC patients diagnosed in the Second Affiliated Hospital of Shandong First Medical University from June 2019 to August 2020 were selected. The expressions of INSR, IRS-1, and PD-L1 proteins in tumor tissues and adjacent tissues of NSCLC were detected by immunohistochemical staining. Results. The expression of INSR and IRS-1 in NSCLC was significantly higher than that in adjacent normal lung tissue ( P < 0.05 ). INSR expression had statistical significance with the degree of pathological differentiation of nonsmall cell carcinoma ( P = 0.031 ), but had no significant association with age, gender, pathological type, TNM stage, and lymph node metastasis status ( P > 0.05 ). There was no significant correlation between IRS-1 positive expression and NSCLC patients’ age, gender, pathological typing, degree of differentiation, TNM stage, and lymph node metastasis ( P > 0.05 ). PD-L1 positive expression was correlated with lymph node metastasis of NSCLC ( P = 0.028 ), while there was no significant correlation with gender, age, pathological type, TNM stage, and pathological differentiation degree of NSCLC patients ( P > 0.05 ). Spearman correlation analysis showed that PD-L1 protein expression had a significant positive correlation with IRS-1 protein expression ( r = 0.373 ), but was not correlated with the expression of INSR protein. Conclusion. IRS-1 may be involved in the regulation of PD-L1 expression and mediate the occurrence of tumor immune escape, which is expected to become a new target for NSCLC immunotherapy and provide new clinical evidence for immunosuppressive therapy.

This study analyzed the radiocarbon chronology, lithology, and diatom and mollusk shell assemblages obtained from the profile of the Jiefang Middle Road archeological site in Yuexiu District, Guangzhou. It is determined that the Guangzhou Old Town, which lies on the northern bank of the Pearl River, was in a river bed and an estuarine wetland or lowland during the pre-Qin period. Microfossils of organisms with a high salinity tolerance were not observed in the sediment as the inflow of fresh water reduced the estuarine salinity; only estuarine-marine diatom taxa were found, with the mollusk shell fragments being mostly those of freshwater species and a few brackish water species. Therefore, we postulate that the salinity of the water bodies within the Guangzhou region was completely different during the pre-Qin period than during the mid-Holocene. In the former period, the area along the riverbanks of the Pearl River was mainly affected by riverine freshwater discharge and upward tidal convergence. In addition, radiocarbon dating results and the absence of enclosed bivalve mollusk shells in situ suggested that most of the freshwater and brackish water mollusk shells excavated at the site were food waste discarded by the ancient Nanyue people during the period in which their fishing tradition boomed in the pre-Qin (Eastern Zhou Dynasty) period. This also suggested that the shell deposits were relocated to the later strata via constant digs by the Nanyue successors, most probably due to the expansion of the town and restoration of the river, development of agricultural irrigation, or redeposition caused by the flooding that occurred throughout the Tang Dynasty. Since the establishment of the Nanyue Kingdom, signs of frequent human activity—particularly during the Tang Dynasty—can be recognized in the study area, which was then still a wetland or lowland area influenced mainly by fluvial and tidal dynamic forces, with its soil fertility serving as a foundation for the flourishing of agriculture. This is also consistent with the human-driven shoreline reorganization of the Pearl River noted in the Tang historical records. During the period from the late Tang Dynasty to the Five Dynasties, rulers expanded the wetland in the south due to a marked growth in population. Moreover, the region was exposed above water and gradually developed into the Guangzhou Old Town during the Northern Song Dynasty, despite having been affected-to some extent-by multiple flood events, as recorded in the history of the Kaibao reign (AD 968-976) and Zhidao reign (AD 995-997). The expansion and development of the Guangzhou Old Town continued during the Song Dynasty, with the expansion of agricultural and industrial practices, and the shoreline of the Pearl River was pushed farther south. In conclusion, the environmental and urban transformation of the Pearl River Delta region since 2 cal ka BP were mainly related to the influence of Holocene sea level alterations, the quantity of river sediment being discharged, pressure from human use of the land, and the practice of river restoration. This study also suggests that the archeological records coincide with the historical records and the general course of the progressive transformation of the Pearl River Delta region, thereby providing new evidence for environmental archeological research.

Random walk is a very important Markov process and has important applications in many fields.For a one-dimensional simple symmetric random walk $(S_n)$, a site $x$ is called a favorite downcrossing site at time $n$ if its downcrossing local time at time $n$ achieves the maximum among all sites. In this paper, we study the cardinality of the favorite downcrossing site set, and will show that with probability 1 there are only finitely many times at which there are at least four favorite downcrossing sites and three favorite downcrossing sites occurs infinitely often. Some related open questions will be introduced., Comment: 19 pages

Carbon dioxide as feedstock for hydrocarbon synthesis attracts numerous efforts via the biological or chemical approaches. With the purpose of constructing a robust and highly-efficient platform for CO₂ bioconversion to fuel, we investigated a photo-driven bioprocess of directing CO₂ reduction to C₁–C₆ alkanes/alkenes discovered from the enriched microbial consortia. GC-MS analysis revealed that the maximum yield of total gaseous hydrocarbons was 169.66 μM with the average CO₂ reduction rate of 100.87 μM/day decreasing from 11573.39 μM to 5905.73 μM during 50 days culturing. The pathway of CO₂ bioconversion was proposed according to the 16S rRNA and metagenomic sequencing that rTCA and Wood-Ljungdahl were mainly contributed to CO₂ fixation, and nitrogenase was responsible for the hydrocarbon syntheses. Following these results, a versatile consortium-based platform was developed via the neural network method with the selected Pseudomonas sp., Serratia sp., Candidatus sp., Clostridium sp., Enterococcus sp., Salmonella sp., Rhodospirillum sp., Thalassospira sp., Thioclava sp., Stenotrophomonas sp. and Desulfovibrio sp., which showed the improved CO₂ reduction rate of 107.54 μM/day and the higher selectivity of C₁–C₄ alkanes than the original consortia. This study demonstrated that this artificially constructed consortium could be a promising platform for converting CO₂ to the diverse gaseous alkanes and alkenes.

Accurate medical image segmentation is crucial for diagnosis and analysis. However, the models without calibrated uncertainty estimates might lead to errors in downstream analysis and exhibit low levels of robustness. Estimating the uncertainty in the measurement is vital to making definite, informed conclusions. Especially, it is difficult to make accurate predictions on ambiguous areas and focus boundaries for both models and radiologists, even harder to reach a consensus with multiple annotations. In this work, the uncertainty under these areas is studied, which introduces significant information with anatomical structure and is as important as segmentation performance. We exploit the medical image segmentation uncertainty quantification by measuring segmentation performance with multiple annotations in a supervised learning manner and propose a U-Net based architecture with multiple decoders, where the image representation is encoded with the same encoder, and segmentation referring to each annotation is estimated with multiple decoders. Nevertheless, a cross-loss function is proposed for bridging the gap between different branches. The proposed architecture is trained in an end-to-end manner and able to improve predictive uncertainty estimates. The model achieves comparable performance with fewer parameters to the integrated training model that ranked the runner-up in the MICCAI-QUBIQ 2020 challenge., MICCAI_QUBIQ challenge, conference, Uncertainty qualification

Background and purposeStereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) has become a standard-of-care option for localized prostate cancer. While prostate SBRT has traditionally been delivered using computed-tomography-guided radiation therapy (CTgRT), MR-imaging-guided radiation therapy (MRgRT) is now available. MRgRT offers real-time soft-tissue visualization and ease of adaptive planning, obviating the need for fiducial markers, and potentially allowing for smaller planning target volume (PTV) margins. Although prior studies have focused on evaluating the cost-effectiveness of MRgRT vs CTgRT from a payor perspective, the difference in provider costs to deliver such treatments remains unknown. This study thus used time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) to determine the difference in provider resources consumed by delivering prostate SBRT via MRgRT vs CTgRT.MethodsData was collected from a single academic institution where prostate SBRT is routinely performed using both CTgRT and MRgRT. Five-fraction SBRT (40 Gy total dose) was assumed to be delivered through volumetric-modulated arc therapy for CTgRT patients, and through step-and-shoot, fixed-gantry intensity-modulated radiation therapy for MRgRT patients. Process maps were constructed for each portion of the radiation delivery process via interviews/surveys with departmental personnel and by measuring CTgRT and MRgRT treatment times. Prior to simulation, only CTgRT patients underwent placement of three gold fiducial markers. Personnel capacity cost rates were calculated by dividing total personnel costs by the annual minutes worked by a given personnel. Equipment costs included both an annualized purchase price and annual maintenance costs. Ultimately, the total costs of care encompassing personnel, space/equipment, and materials were aggregated across the entire chain of care for both CTgRT and MRgRT patients in a base case.ResultsDirect costs associated with delivering a 5-fraction course of prostate SBRT were $1,497 higher with MRgRT than with CTgRT - comprised of personnel costs ($210 higher with MRgRT), space/equipment ($1,542 higher with MRgRT), and materials ($255 higher with CTgRT). Only CTgRT patients underwent fiducial placement, which accounted for $591. MRgRT patients were assumed to undergo both CT simulation (for electron density calculation) and MRI simulation, with the former accounting for $168. Mean time spent by patients in the treatment vault per fraction was 20 minutes (range 15-26 minutes) for CTgRT, and 31 minutes (range 30-34 minutes) for MRgRT. Patient time spent during fiducial placement (CTgRT only) was 60 minutes. Modifying the number of fractions treated would result in the cost difference of $1,497 (5 fractions) changing to $441 (1 fraction) or to $2,025 (7 fractions).ConclusionThis study provides an approximate comparison of the direct resources required for a radiation oncology provider to deliver prostate SBRT with CTgRT vs MRgRT. We await findings from the currently accruing phase III MIRAGE trial, which is comparing these modalities, and will subsequently measure acute and late genitourinary/gastrointestinal (GU/GI) toxicities, temporal change in quality-of-life outcomes, and 5-year biochemical, recurrence-free survival. Results from studies comparing the efficacy and safety of MRgRT vs CTgRT will ultimately allow us to put this cost difference into context.

Willingness to Pay (WTP), Willingness to Work (WTW) and Willingness to Accept Compensation (WTA) are the three quantitative criteria for assessing local ecological asset values for the social aspects of ecosystem services and residents' willingness to contribute to and receive compensation for tourism ecology. The objectives of this study are to estimate the residents' willingness to pay, work and accept compensation for conservation at Sanjiangyuan National Park, and to analyze the relationship between residents' attitude towards tourism ecology and the ecological assets of the National Park based on a standard questionnaire survey. The dichotomous choice Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) was employed to determine the willingness. The survey conducted in 2018 collected WTP, WTW, WTA, socio-demFographical information, social trust and resident perceptions toward tourism impacts and relevant management strategies from 244 residents in two counties. Based on generalized linear modeling, income and education level are important for residents' WTP and WTA, but other social characteristics, such as gender and age, do not have significant effects. The social trust is found to be a significant factor on residents' willingness, despite the limitation on education level. Also, government funding is associated with residents' inclination to WTP, WTW and WTA, but the support levels differ among the two counties due to geographical and social heterogeneities. The estimated WTP, WTW and WTA for the Sanjiangyuan National Park in 2018 were 1.2448×107 yuan, 1.247×106 hours and 2.3232×107 yuan yr–1 based on the survey and published demographics. This study, for the first time, estimates the WTP, WTW and WTA for the Sanjiangyuan National Park and informs ecological conservation managers and policy makers. Ultimately, to maintain the long-term benefits arising from sustainable development, compensation should be specifically tailored and site-dependent, and development measures based on local resources should be adopted by governments to actively support eco-tourism activities.

In a competitive business environment, an early understanding of the dynamics of technological change is crucial to help policymakers and managers make better-informed decisions. Bibliometric analyses help in studying trends and technological evolution. Tech mining (text analyses of science and technology information resources) enhances Bibliometric analyses. However, more often than not, such analyses focus on a specific technological area, and mainly result in incremental advance forecasts. An analysis of the interconnected dynamics of technology change warrants new approaches for identifying technology emergence, technological substitution, and the influences of vital socioeconomic forces. This paper introduces a unique combination that applies a tech mining and semantic TRIZ as a case study to Dye-Sensitized Solar Cell (DSSC) technology. This methodological combination brings broader insights to the emergence of DSSC in conjunction with related technologies that affect its progress, enriching the associated technological progression's empirical characterization.

Additional file 1: Table S1. Organ-At-Risk Dose Constraints.

For a one-dimensional simple symmetric random walk $(S_n)$, an edge $x$ (between points $x-1$ and $x$) is called a favorite edge at time $n$ if its local time at $n$ achieves the maximum among all edges. In this paper, we show that with probability 1 three favorite edges occurs infinitely often. Our work is inspired by T\'{o}th and Werner [Combin. Probab. Comput. {\bf 6} (1997) 359-369], and Ding and Shen [Ann. Probab. {\bf 46} (2018) 2545-2561], disproves a conjecture mentioned in Remark 1 on page 368 of T\'{o}th and Werner [Combin. Probab. Comput. {\bf 6} (1997) 359-369]., Comment: 23 pages

Let $n\geq 2$ and $(X_i,1\leq i\leq n)$ be a centered Gaussian random vector. The Gaussian minimum conjecture says that $E\left(\min_{1\leq i\leq n}|X_i|\right)\geq E\left(\min_{1\leq i\leq n}|Y_i|\right)$, where $Y_1,\ldots,Y_n$ are independent centered Gaussian random variables with $E(X_i^2)=E(Y_i^2)$ for any $i=1,\ldots,n$. In this note, we will show that this conjecture holds if and only if $n=2$., 10 pages

Background: Gastric cancer (GC) is a common high-mortality disease, causing a serious social burden. Traditional Chinese medicine has been utilized to prevent and treat GC for many years but its effects remain unclear. The aim of our study is to elucidate the anti-tumor effects and the possible mechanism of Jianpi Yangzheng Xiaozheng decoction. Methods/design: This is a prospective, multicenter, randomized controlled trial continuing 1.5 years. Two hundred ten eligible patients will be randomly divided into 2 groups, the chemotherapy alone and the chemotherapy combined with JPYZXZ group at a ratio of 1:2. All patients will receive the treatment for 24 weeks and follow up for 1.5 years. The primary outcomes are one-year survival rate, progression-free survival, and overall survival (OS), while the secondary outcomes are immune related hematology test, objective response rate, tumor makers, traditional Chinese medicine syndrome points, fatigue scale, and quality of life scale. All of these outcomes will be analyzed at the end of the trail. Discussion: This study will provide the objective evidence for the efficacy and safety of Jianpi Yangzheng Xiaozheng decoction in advanced GC. Furthermore, it will be helpful to form a therapeutic regimen in advanced GC by the combination of traditional medicine and western medicine. Trail registration: ChiCTR1900028147

In this note, convergence of random variables will be revisited. We will give the answers to 5 questions among the 6 open questions introduced in (Convergence rates in the law of large numbers and new kinds of convergence of random variables, {\it Communication in Statistics - Theory and Methods}, DOI: 10.1080/03610926.2020.1716248), and make some related discussions., 9 pages

BackgroundJuglans sigillata, or iron walnut, belonging to the order Juglandales, is an economically important tree species in Asia, especially in the Yunnan province of China. However, little research has been conducted on J. sigillata at the molecular level, which hinders understanding of its evolution, speciation, and synthesis of secondary metabolites, as well as its wide adaptability to its plateau environment. To address these issues, a high-quality reference genome of J. sigillata would be useful.FindingsTo construct a high-quality reference genome for J. sigillata, we first generated 38.0 Gb short reads and 66.31 Gb long reads using Illumina and Nanopore sequencing platforms, respectively. The sequencing data were assembled into a 536.50-Mb genome assembly with a contig N50 length of 4.31 Mb. Additionally, we applied BioNano technology to identify contacts among contigs, which were then used to assemble contigs into scaffolds, resulting in a genome assembly with scaffold N50 length of 16.43 Mb and contig N50 length of 4.34 Mb. To obtain a chromosome-level genome assembly, we constructed 1 Hi-C library and sequenced 79.97 Gb raw reads using the Illumina HiSeq platform. We anchored ∼93% of the scaffold sequences into 16 chromosomes and evaluated the quality of our assembly using the high contact frequency heat map. Repetitive elements account for 50.06% of the genome, and 30,387 protein-coding genes were predicted from the genome, of which 99.8% have been functionally annotated. The genome-wide phylogenetic tree indicated an estimated divergence time between J. sigillata and Juglans regia of 49 million years ago on the basis of single-copy orthologous genes.ConclusionsWe provide the first chromosome-level genome for J. sigillata. It will lay a valuable foundation for future research on the genetic improvement of J. sigillata.

Additional file 1. Additional figures and tables.

Additional file 1: Figure S1. The relative fold change of genes involved in central carbon metabolic pathways under the conditions using glycerol as the sole carbon source. The expression of these genes of the sample using glucose as the carbon source were used as a control. *p

Additional file 1.

Nanostructure LiFeBO3/C composite is synthesized by sol–gel method using CH3COOLi·2H2O, Fe(NO3)3·9H2O, H3BO3 and citric acid as starting materials. The crystal structure, morphology and electrochemical properties of LiFeBO3/C composites are characterized by X-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, raman spectroscopy (Raman), cyclic voltammetry, electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and charge–discharge tests. The LiFeBO3/C is comprised of individual near spherical particles of the size range 40–60 nm, and well coated by thin carbon layer. The LiFeBO3/C can deliver an initial discharge capacity of 205.8 mAh g−1 under the current density of 10 mA g−1 in the potential range 1.8–4.5 V, and it can deliver the capacity of 159.3 mAh g−1 after 20 cycles. When the current density is increased to 20 and 40 mA g−1, the capacity of LiFeBO3/C could also be retained at 120.6 and 102.6 mAh g−1. The excellent cycling performance indicates, the materials have good application prospect. The morphology and size of the sol-gel synthetic LiFeBO3 materials are characterizedby TEM were shown in the Figure. It can illustrate that the LiFeBO3/C consists of individual near spherical particles of the size range 40∼60 nm. With further investigate by HR-TEM that LiFeBO3/C showed clear crystal lattice stripes and a uniform carbon film is coated on the particle surface.

This paper develops a unified and computationally efficient method for change-point inference in non-stationary spatio-temporal processes. By modeling a non-stationary spatio-temporal process as a piecewise stationary spatio-temporal process, we consider simultaneous estimation of the number and locations of change-points, and model parameters in each segment. A composite likelihood-based criterion is developed for change-point and parameters estimation. Under the framework of increasing domain asymptotics, theoretical results including consistency and distribution of the estimators are derived under mild conditions. In contrast to classical results in fixed dimensional time series that the localization error of change-point estimator is $O_{p}(1)$, exact recovery of true change-points can be achieved in the spatio-temporal setting. More surprisingly, the consistency of change-point estimation can be achieved without any penalty term in the criterion function. In addition, we further establish consistency of the number and locations of the change-point estimator under the infill asymptotics framework where the time domain is increasing while the spatial sampling domain is fixed. A computationally efficient pruned dynamic programming algorithm is developed for the challenging criterion optimization problem. Extensive simulation studies and an application to U.S. precipitation data are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method.

In this note, we study convergence rates in the law of large numbers for independent and identically distributed random variables under sublinear expectations. We obtain a strong $L^p$-convergence version and a strongly quasi sure convergence version of the law of large numbers., 12 pages

UPLC-Q-TOF-MS characterization data of the three glycosyltransferases catalyzing 14 substrates

Packages of the additional figures. (PDF 609 kb)

Preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) is widely used to select in vitro-fertilized embryos free of chromosomal abnormalities and to improve the clinical outcome of in vitro fertilization (IVF). A disadvantage of PGS is that it requires biopsy of the preimplantation human embryo, which can limit the clinical applicability of PGS due to the invasiveness and complexity of the process. Here, we present and validate a noninvasive chromosome screening (NICS) method based on sequencing the genomic DNA secreted into the culture medium from the human blastocyst. By using multiple annealing and looping-based amplification cycles (MALBAC) for whole-genome amplification (WGA), we performed next-generation sequencing (NGS) on the spent culture medium used to culture human blastocysts (n = 42) and obtained the ploidy information of all 24 chromosomes. We validated these results by comparing each with their corresponding whole donated embryo and obtained a high correlation for identification of chromosomal abnormalities (sensitivity, 0.882, and specificity, 0.840). With this validated NICS method, we performed chromosome screening on IVF embryos from seven couples with balanced translocation, azoospermia, or recurrent pregnancy loss. Six of them achieved successful clinical pregnancies, and five have already achieved healthy live births thus far. The NICS method avoids the need for embryo biopsy and therefore substantially increases the safety of its use. The method has the potential of much wider chromosome screening applicability in clinical IVF, due to its high accuracy and noninvasiveness.

In this paper, we investigate a detection algorithm for foreign fiber during the processing of cotton textile. By collecting a large number of samples, we determine the color model and establish its characteristic parameters of a foreign fiber. We found foreign fibers of multiple types (classes) and proposed a classification–recognition algorithm based on clustering analysis. The maximum error of the studied recognition algorithm is 0.012, which meets the requirement to recognize foreign fibers. Through many experiments, the optimal parameters for the foreign fiber detection system were determined, and the fiber recognition rates for different types were obtained. The lowest recognition rate is 85%. This is sufficiently high to reject foreign fibers and reach the standards of the textile industry. Experimental results show that foreign fiber clustering analysis algorithm is feasible, and it not only improves the quality of foreign fiber detection significantly, but also has high theoretical value ...

High back pressure heating with large-scale steam turbine units boasts preponderant heating capacity and preferable integrated utilization of energy while suffering high operation and maintenance cost and low operation flexibility. First, the high back pressure heating retrofit technology is introduced. Then, a model to analyze off-design performance of turbine and condenser for a 350MW heating unit was established using EBSILON software, by which quantitative calculation was performed of the influence of the key factors, so as to attain thermal characteristics of high back pressure heating. Finally, the paper was ended with multivariate analysis of the key factors in a combination of the theoretical analysis, the calculation results and the actual operating environment of the 350MW heating unit, in a bid to outline a change range of each factor. It thereby provided reference for selection of key parameters, feasibility analysis and operation economic analysis in high back pressure heating retrofit.

Locoweeds, which are a common name for poisonous species of the genera Astragalus and Oxytropis, are toxic leguminous plants through a symbiotic association with the fungal endophyte Alternaria section Undifilum. The fungus produces an indolizidine alkaloid, swainsonine, which causes a toxicosis of grazing animals, named locoism. By what means stress from environment or genetics of locoweed endophytes affect fungal growth and synthesis of swainsonine as well as how fungal endophyte synthesize swainsonine in locoweeds, in addition to disruption of the toxic alkaloid swainsonine in locoweed plants, have not been well identified. To answer the above questions, further research is needed as locoweed plants are most palatable to grazing animals especially when locoweed plants are at flowering stage. This review outlines the present situation on locoweed plants in China, production of swainsonine, detection and interaction of locoweed endophytes as well as their transmission within locoweed plants .

Computational efficiencies of traditional vector computing-based polygon clipping algorithms will decrease rapidly when handling polygons contain large amount of vertices. The computing flows of traditional polygon clipping algorithms are tightly coupled with special data structures, which difficult to be optimized in the underlying of them. Under the premise of meeting a certain degree of area errors, the polygon clipping problem can be solved by introducing the idea of rasterization processing. In this research, we proposed a new rasterization processing-based polygon clipping algorithm: the RaPC algorithm, on the basis of analyzing the characteristics of existing algorithms. The area errors of results of the new algorithm are also analyzed and discussed. Experimental results show that the efficiencies of the RaPC algorithm can be enhanced significantly when using large grid cells, and it shows a linear trend growth with the increase of amount of polygon vertices. Compared with the Vatti algorithm, the RaPC algorithm represents more efficiencies on dealing clipping issues between polygons with large amount of vertices, the former shows lower time costs when handling polygons with less vertices. The area error of computing results of the RaPC algorithm is closely related with the grid size, and errors can be reduced using smaller grid sizes. Therefore the RaPC algorithm showed higher efficiencies on processing polygons with large amount of vertices than the Vatti algorithm and presented practical values to some degree.

The conventional syntheses of nickel hydroxide (Ni(OH)2) produce a large amount of chemical waste because of low atom-economy reactions employed in the processes. Here, we describe a totally atom-economical synthesis of Ni(OH)2 from nickel metal, water, and oxygen gas (O2) through a newly designed, membrane-free nickel–oxygen (Ni–O2) fuel cell. Electricity is also generated as the by-product. The new synthesis method can greatly reduce the pollution to the environment. The as-prepared Ni(OH)2 has a desired nano/micro structure and exhibits excellent performance as the positive electrode material of nickel–metal hydride batteries.

Additional file 12: Figure S4. Kaplanâ Meier curves of young AML patients for OS and DFS according to genotypes.

Additional file 14: Figure S6. Risk stratification of young AML according to gene mutations and gene expression levels.

Additional file 7: Table S5. Multivariate analysis of intermediate risk group.

Additional file 1: Figure S1. Gene expression of MECOM, ERG, WT1, GATA2, BAALC, MEIS1 and SPI1 in bone marrow (BM) of de novo AML patients was normalized to ABL expression. Each median value after a log-transformation is indicated by a horizontal line.

Additional file 13: Figure S5. Comparison of OS and DFS between young AML patients with low or high gene expression with statistical significance in univariate analysis.

Additional file 2: Table S1. High-throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA gene fragments.

Additional file 11: Figure S3. Kaplanâ Meier curves for OS and DFS according to genotypes.

Additional file 1: Figure S1. Residual hexadecane contents after 421 days of incubation.