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Guojun Zhang,1 Chuan Yang,2 Caixia Zhao,1 Feng Xian,3 Dong Qing,1 Qiyu Guo,1 Junmei Song,1 Xilin Liu,1 Jun Bie1 1Department of Oncology, Nanchong Central Hospital and The Second Clinical Medical College of North Sichuan Medical College, Nanchong, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Oncology, Guangyuan Central Hospital, Guangyuan, People’s Republic of China; 3School of Medicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Jun Bie, Department of Oncology, Nanchong Central Hospital and The Second Clinical Medical College of North Sichuan Medical College, Hongguang Road, Shunqing District, Nanchong, People’s Republic of China, Email 78593860@qq.comBackground: The neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) has been shown to have prognostic value in several common cancers. This study aimed to investigate the prognostic value of NLR in patients with advanced oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) after definitive chemoradiotherapy (dCRT).Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed on 158 patients with advanced ESCC who received dCRT from January 2012 to December 2018. The NLR for different treatment stages was calculated based on laboratory test results. The Kaplan–Meier (KM) method and Cox proportional regression model were used to analyse the relationship between NLR and overall survival (OS).Results: The mean NLR of 158 patients with ESCC was 3.403 ± 2.479. The pre-treatment NLR cut-off was 4.839, and patients were divided into the low NLR group (NLR < 4.839) and the high NLR group (NLR ≥ 4.839). NLR in patients with ESCC was related to N stage (P < 0.05). The KM analysis showed that the median OS of all enrolled patients was 29.3 months, the median OS periods of patients in the high and low NLR groups were 15.6 and 35.8 months, respectively, and the OS of the low NLR group was better than that of the high NLR group (P < 0.001). In the multivariate analysis, NLR was an independent prognostic factor that affects the prognosis of patients with ESCC receiving dCRT. Furthermore, patients who maintained a high NLR before and after treatment showed worse clinical outcomes than the other groups.Conclusion: Our findings suggest that NLR can effectively assess the prognosis of patients with advanced ESCC undergoing dCRT.Graphical Abstract: Keywords: oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma, radiochemotherapy, neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio

We consider an inverse spectral problem on a quantum graph associated with the square lattice. Assuming that the potentials on the edges are compactly supported and symmetric, we show that the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for a boundary value problem on a finite part of the graph uniquely determines the potentials. We obtain a reconstruction procedure, which is based on the reduction of the differential Schr\"odinger operator to a discrete one. As a corollary of the main results, it is proved that the S-matrix for all energies in any given open set in the continuous spectrum uniquely specifies the potentials on the square lattice.

We consider the Sturm-Liouville operator on the lasso graph with a segment and a loop joined at one point, which has arbitrary length. The Ambarzumyan's theorem for the operator is proved, which says that if the eigenvalues of the operator coincide with those of the zero potential, then the potential is zero.

We consider the vector-impulsive Sturm-Liouville problem with Neumann conditions. The Ambarzumyan$^{\textbf{,}}$s theorem for the problem is proved, which states that if the eigenvalues of the problem coincide with those of the zero potential, then the potential is zero.

In this work, we consider Dirac-type operators with a constant delay less than two-fifths of the interval and not less than one-third of the interval. For our considered Dirac-type operators, an incomplete inverse spectral problem is studied. Specifically, when two complex potentials are known a priori on a certain subinterval, reconstruction of the two potentials on the entire interval is studied from complete spectra of two boundary value problems with one common boundary condition. The uniqueness of the solution of the inverse problem is proved. A constructive method is developed for the solution of the inverse problem., arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2305.10752

In this work, we consider Dirac-type operators with a constant delay less than half of the interval and not less than two-fifths of the interval. For our considered Dirac-type operators, two inverse spectral problems are studied. Specifically, reconstruction of two complex $L_{2}$-potentials is studied from complete spectra of two boundary value problems with one common Dirichlet boundary condition and Neumann boundary condition, respectively. We give answers to the full range of questions usually raised in the inverse spectral theory. That is, we give uniqueness, necessary and sufficient conditions of the solvability, reconstruction algorithm and uniform stability for our considered inverse problems., arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2204.08259 by other authors

BackgroundEndoscopically visible gastric neoplastic lesions (GNLs), including early gastric cancer and intraepithelial neoplasia, should be accurately diagnosed and promptly treated. However, a high rate of missed diagnosis of GNLs contributes to the potential risk of the progression of gastric cancer. The aim of this study was to develop a deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for the diagnosis and segmentation of GNLs under magnifying endoscopy with narrow-band imaging (ME-NBI) in patients with suspected superficial lesions.MethodsME-NBI images of patients with GNLs in two centers were retrospectively analysed. Two convolutional neural network (CNN) modules were developed and trained on these images. CNN1 was trained to diagnose GNLs, and CNN2 was trained for segmentation. An additional internal test set and an external test set from another center were used to evaluate the diagnosis and segmentation performance.ResultsCNN1 showed a diagnostic performance with an accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) of 90.8%, 92.5%, 89.0%, 89.4% and 92.2%, respectively, and an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.928 in the internal test set. With CNN1 assistance, all endoscopists had a higher accuracy than for an independent diagnosis. The average intersection over union (IOU) between CNN2 and the ground truth was 0.5837, with a precision, recall and the Dice coefficient of 0.776, 0.983 and 0.867, respectively.ConclusionsThis CAD system can be used as an auxiliary tool to diagnose and segment GNLs, assisting endoscopists in more accurately diagnosing GNLs and delineating their extent to improve the positive rate of lesion biopsy and ensure the integrity of endoscopic resection.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-3-cll-10.1177_09636897231154574 for Hypermethylation-Mediated lncRNA MAGI2-AS3 Downregulation Facilitates Malignant Progression of Laryngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma via Interacting With SPT6 by Jiantao Wang, Chuan Yang, Huan Cao, Jianwang Yang, Wenxia Meng, Miaomiao Yu, Lei Yu and Baoshan Wang in Cell Transplantation

We consider an inverse spectral problem on a quantum graph associated with the square lattice. Assuming that the potentials on the edges are compactly supported and symmetric, we show that the Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for a boundary value problem on a finite part of the graph uniquely determines the potentials. We obtain a reconstruction procedure, which is based on the reduction of the differential Schrödinger operator to a discrete one. As a corollary of the main results, it is proved that the S-matrix for all energies in any given open set in the continuous spectrum uniquely specifies the potentials on the square lattice.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-cll-10.1177_09636897231154574 for Hypermethylation-Mediated lncRNA MAGI2-AS3 Downregulation Facilitates Malignant Progression of Laryngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma via Interacting With SPT6 by Jiantao Wang, Chuan Yang, Huan Cao, Jianwang Yang, Wenxia Meng, Miaomiao Yu, Lei Yu and Baoshan Wang in Cell Transplantation

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-cll-10.1177_09636897231154574 for Hypermethylation-Mediated lncRNA MAGI2-AS3 Downregulation Facilitates Malignant Progression of Laryngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma via Interacting With SPT6 by Jiantao Wang, Chuan Yang, Huan Cao, Jianwang Yang, Wenxia Meng, Miaomiao Yu, Lei Yu and Baoshan Wang in Cell Transplantation

The continuous eddy current pulse treatment (ECPT) combined with heat treatment was employed to heal the microcracks in spin formed Mg alloy tubes and improve their mechanical properties in this study. The results show that all the microcracks in different tube specimens were almost healed after different continuous ECPT schemes up to 15 cycles. The schemes with less cooling intervals exhibited better healing effect and increased the strength and elongation of Mg alloy tubes more obviously. After aging treatment, the strength improvement of the specimens with ECPT was more remarkable than that of the specimens without ECPT, and the elongation decrease of the specimens with ECPT was less evident than that of specimens without ECPT due to the segregation of RE elements on the crack surface. Besides, after solution treatment, the strength reduction and ductility improvement of the specimens with ECPT were more pronounced than that of the specimens without ECPT owing to the notable decrease of dislocation density of the specimens with ECPT. Both narrowed cracks induced by ECPT and the segregation of precipitates in the vicinity of microcrack surface during aging treatment contributed to the maximum strength in the as-spun specimens with ECPT followed by aging treatment.

Jingjing Jiang &ast;, Yujuan Chen &ast;, Qi He, Jiao Yang, Zhengzhong Zhang, Hao Yang, Huan Zhang, Chuan Yang Department of Dermatology, Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College, Nanchong, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Zhengzhong Zhang, Department of Dermatology, Affiliated Hospital of North Sichuan Medical College, No. 1 Maoyuan South Road, Shunqing District, Nanchong City, Sichuan Province, 637000, People’s Republic of China, Tel +8618080339898, Email laowaiaeo@163.comAbstract: Nevus sebaceous (NS) is a benign congenital hamartoma with the potential to develop into a secondary benign or malignant skin tumors. Two or more skin tumors rarely arise simultaneously from a single NS lesion. Herein, we report a case of syringocystadenoma papilliferum and basal cell carcinoma arising in an NS, based on dermoscopic, reflectance confocal microscopic, and histopathological findings.Keywords: nevus sebaceous, syringocystadenoma papilliferum, basal cell carcinoma, dermoscopy, reflectance confocal microscopy

Chicken feather (CF) has been deemed as one of the main poultry byproducts with a large amount produced globally. However, the robust chemical nature of chicken feathers has been limiting in its wide-scale utilization and valorization. The study proposed a strategy of keratin regeneration from chicken feather combining ultrasound and Cysteine (Cys)-reduction for keratin regeneration. First, the ultrasonic effect on feather degradation and keratin properties was systematically explored based on Cys-reduction. Results showed that the feather dissolution was significantly improved by increasing both ultrasonic time and power, and the former had a greater impact on keratin yield. However, the treatment time over 4 h led to a decrease of keratin yield, producing more soluble peptides, > 9.7 % of which were < 0.5 kDa. Meanwhile, prolonging time decreased the thermal stability with weight loss at a lower temperature and amino acids content (e.g., Ser, Pro and Gly) of keratin. Conversely, no remarkable damage in chemical structure and thermal stability of regenerated keratin was observed by only increasing ultrasonic power, while the keratin solubility was notably promoted and reached 745.72 mg·g−1 in NaOH (0.1 M) solution (400 W, 4 h). The regenerated keratin under optimal conditions (130 W, 2.7 h, and 15 % of Cys) possessed better solubility while without obvious damage in chemical structure, thermal stability, and amino acids composition. The study illustrated that ultrasound physically improved CF degradation and keratin solubility without nature damage and provided an alternative for keratin regeneration involving no toxic reagent, probably holding promise in the utilization and valorization of feather waste.

BackgroundThe histamine type 1 receptor antagonist (H1RA) has been commonly used. This study aimed to examine the association between the usage of H1RA and the risk of dementia.MethodsA total of 8,986 H1RA users aged ≥50 and 26,958 controls matched a ratio of 1:3 for age, sex, and comorbidity, were selected between January 1, and December 31, 2000, from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database. Fine and Gray’s survival analysis (competing with mortality) was used to compare the risk of developing dementia during a 15-year follow-up period (2000–2015).ResultsIn general, the H1RA usage was not significantly associated with dementia (adjusted subdistribution hazard ratio [SHR] = 1.025, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.883–1.297, p = 0.274) for the H1RA cohort. However, a differential risk was found among the groups at risk. The patients with the usage of H1RA aged ≥65 years (adjusted SHR: 1.782, 95% CI = 1.368–2.168, p < 0.001) were associated with a higher risk of dementia, in comparison to the control groups. Furthermore, the patients with the usage of H1RA that were male, or had more comorbidities, were also associated with an increased risk of dementia.ConclusionThe usage of H1RA was associated with the risk of developing dementia in the patients aged ≥ 65 years.

application/pdf, This study explains how the demand for composite goods depends not only on the prices of those goods and those of software products but also on the variety of compatible software products. We show that the demand for hardware relies on the availability of compatible software. This means that software products are expected to play an essential role in hardware standardization competition.

In solving large scale optimization problems, CMA-ES has the disadvantages of high complexity and premature stagnation. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an improved CMA-ES, called GI-ES, for large-scale optimization problems. GI-ES uses all the historical information of the previous generation of individuals to evaluate the parameters of the distribution of the next generation. These estimates can be considered as approximate gradient information, which complete covariance information is not required. Thus GI-ES is friendly to large scale optimization problems. Comparative experiments have been done on state-of-the-art algorithms. The results proved the effectiveness and efficiency of GI-ES for large scale optimization problems.

For iteration of six power sum of digits there are two fixed points, one 2-circle, one 3-circle, one 4-circle, one 10-circles and one 30-circle. The probabilities for natural numers falling into each fixed point or circle by several times iterating of six power sum are unbalanced. In it about 48.7% fall into 30-circle, about 39.3% into 10-circle, about 11.4% into 3-circle, the probability of falling into other circles and two fixed points is less than 6‰.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-ijl-10.1177_15347346221132673 for Effects of Chlorhexidine-Iodophor Composite Solution on the Viability and Proliferation of Human Skin Fibroblasts Infected by S. aureus – An in Vitro Experiment by Yixin Luo, Xiaocui Wei, Lifang Mai, Xingzhou Liu and Chuan Yang in The International Journal of Lower Extremity Wounds

Based on the principle of moment balance, this paper designs a fertilizer application amount online detection device, which is mainly composed of two major parts: the fertilizer guide mechanism and the fertilizer metering and discharging mechanism.Under the electromagnetic reversing and buffering of the fertilizer guide mechanism, the fertilizer discharged into the device falls alternately into the storage box of the two metering units of the metering and discharging mechanism. Once the gravity of the fertilizer in the storage box is greater than the suction of the electromagnetic sucker, the fertilizer discharging board is automatically opened for fertilizer discharge, and the metering pulse signal is accumulated once. Meanwhile, the fertilizer guide plate is driven by the electromagnetic commutator to reverse the material, and then another storage box is started for fertilizer storage and metering. In this approach, online detection of fertilizer flow can be realized by repeatedly guiding and reversing and metering the incoming fertilizer. According to the single metering fertilizer quality and the number of metering pulse signals, the fertilization amount can be calculated in real-time.The performance of the device was verified by bench test. The test results indicated that: The established fertilizer application detection model is a quadratic function (R2>0.98), and the verification error was less than 3.73% in the detection of alternating cycle fertilizer discharge; the coefficient of determination (R2) and the root mean square error (RMSE) reached 0.992 and 9.858 respectively, indicating high detection accuracy of the device is.

Experiments overall suggested that dilute solid solution of manganese in body-centered cubic iron transforms from antiferromagnetic coupling into a ferromagnetic coupling at about 2 at.% Mn. Despite long-term theoretical studies, this phase transition is poorly understood, and the transition mechanism is still open. Based on DFT calculations with dense k-point meshes, we reveal that this "iso-structural" phase transition (IPT) occurs at 1.85 at.% Mn, originating from the shifting of 3d eg level of Mn across the Fermi level and consequent intra-atomic electron transfer within 3d states of Mn. The IPT involves a sudden change of the bulk modulus accompanied by a small yet detectable change of the lattice constant, an inversion of magnetic coupling between solute Mn and Fe matrix, and a change in bonding strength between Mn and the first-nearest neighboring Fe atoms. Our interpretation of this IPT plays an enlightening role in understanding similar IPTs in other materials.

To some extent, pore throat structures of the rock can be characterized by NMR T2 distribution and capillary pressure curve. Theoretical analysis showed that NMR T2 distribution of a rock could potentially be used to derive its capillary pressure curve, providing a quick and non-destructive way to obtain the pore structure distribution data of the reservoir. In this study, the capillary pressure curves of typical cores were constructed from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) T2 distributions using a piecewise power function method. T2 cutoff values were introduced as piecewise points for the power function. Then the capillary pressure curves constructed with the piecewise power function method and those constructed with the non-piecewise power function method were compared. The results showed that the proposed method had improved precision, with an averaged fitting degree of 0.943 1. Introducing of T2 cutoff values was proven to be useful in constructing NMR capillary curves by the piecewise power function method.

Improving health-related physical fitness plays an important role in enhancing the comprehensive physical fitness of college students. The traditional test of health-related physical fitness is characterized by complicated operations and low efficiency. A set of test methods for health-related physical fitness of college students based on an intelligent mobile terminal is designed in this work. The intelligent test method calculates the health-related physical fitness level of users through image acquisition and analysis by combining intelligent terminal software and test items of key elements. To verify the validity of the proposed method, a total of 116 college students (59 males and 57 females) aged between 18 and 22 are chosen as test respondents. The health-related physical fitness of respondents is tested and compared by using the traditional and proposed methods. The traditional test method reports the cardiorespiratory fitness scores of 69.6 ± 9.5 (M) and 77.1 ± 9.9 (F), and the proposed method reports 70.9 ± 9.7 (M) and 77.7 ± 9.8 (F). Twenty samples are chosen randomly to calculate the correlation coefficients r = 0.944 (M) and 0.965 (F) and significance p = 0.145 (M) and 0.489 (F). The flexibility fitness scores in the traditional method are 74.6 ± 11.9 (M) and 73.3 ± 11.5 (F), and the scores of the proposed method are 74.8 ± 11.5 (M) and 75.0 ± 11.2 (F). Twenty samples are chosen randomly to calculate r = 0.944 (M) and 0.938 (F) and p = 0.941 (M) and 0.098 (F). In the proposed method, muscle strength/muscular endurance fitness and a body composition module are tested by the traditional method, and test data are input into an artificial input system. The experimental results verify the accuracy of the proposed method in evaluating the health-related physical fitness of college students. Application of the proposed method can effectively reduce the cost of physical fitness testing, increase the convenience of testing, and direct substantial attention to the health-related physical fitness of college students.

As a judicious correspondence to the classical maxcut, the anti-Cheeger cut has more balanced structure, but few numerical results on it have been reported so far. In this paper, we propose a continuous iterative algorithm for the anti-Cheeger cut problem through fully using an equivalent continuous formulation. It does not need rounding at all and has advantages that all subproblems have explicit analytic solutions, the objection function values are monotonically updated and the iteration points converge to a local optima in finite steps via an appropriate subgradient selection. It can also be easily combined with the maxcut iterations for breaking out of local optima and improving the solution quality thanks to the similarity between the anti-Cheeger cut problem and the maxcut problem. Numerical experiments on G-set demonstrate the performance., 18 pages, 3 figures

Additional file 1: Fig. S1. In vitro degradation of PM(GT/siMMP-910) hydrogel in PBS at 37 °C. Fig. S2 (a) The measurement of tissue-adhesive ability. (b) Adhesive strength of PM(GT/siMMP-910) hydrogel, ethyl cyanoacrylate or PBS. *P < 0.05. Fig. S3. Fluorescence images of blood of rats collected at Day-1, Day-4 and Day-7 after treatments of PBS, GT/siCy510 or PM1(GT/siCy510). Fig. S4. Histological section of the major organs after respective treatments (from top to bottom, PBS in non-diabetic rats, PBS in diabetic rats, PM1, GT/siMMP-910 or PM1(GT/siMMP-910) (scale bars = 100 μm). Table S1. Different siRNA used in the experiments. Table S2. Primer sequence for qRT-PCR. Table S3. DLS of GT/siMMP-9 complexes at different weight ratio. Table S4. H-SCORE of MMP-9 in rat skin. Table S5. Parameters of liver function and kidney function of rats.

Additional file 3: Table S1. International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification codes in this study

Athletics complicated attitude, attitude tracking conventional athletics stadium method applies only to the museum, the presence of gesture recognition rate is lower, the problem of poor posture correction effect, for this purpose, incorporated herein projection pursuit method, the posture effectively enhance athletics coordinate tracking correction. The track and field sports posture is decomposed according to the characteristics of the human gravity center deviation, and the sports posture characteristics of the human bones and muscles are obtained; based on the projection tracking technology, the tracking model is constructed, and the fast tracking method is designed to realize the sports posture correction. The results show that the tracking correction method based on projection tracking is suitable for indoor and outdoor venues. Compared with the traditional method, the posture coordination recognition rate after tracking correction has increased by 9.17% and 8.23%.

There are different periodic and fixed points under the iteration of biquadratic sum of digits of positive integer in different carry systems. There are one fixed point and two 2-circles in ternary; four fixed points and three 4-circles in quinary; seven fixed points, two 2-circles, one 3-circle, one 9-circle and one 63-circle in quindenary.

There are different periodic and fixed points under the iteration of biquadratic sum of digits of positive integer in different carry systems. There are one fixed point, one 3-circle, one 9-circle and one 11-circle in senary; three fixed point, one 9-circle and one 22-circle in novenary; one fixed points, one 3-circle, one 8-circle and one 14-circle in duodecimal system.

There are different periodic and fixed points under the iteration of biquadratic sum of digits of positive integer in different carry systems. There are three fixed points and one 2-circle in quanternary, seven fixed points in octonary, two fixed points, one 2-circle and one 6-circle in hexadecimal system.

There are different periodic and fixed points under the iteration of biquadratic sum of digits of positive integer in different carry systems. There are one fixed point, one 3-circle, one 4-circle, one 6-circle, one 8-circle and one 12-circle in base 7; three fixed points, one 2-circle, one 7-circle and one 18-circle in base 11; two fixed pointsk, two 2-circles, one 5-circle, one 7-circle and one 11-circle in base 13; one fixed point, one 2-circle and one 13-circle in base 14.

An integrated look-ahead DFS scheme relies on having a dedicated low-cost receiver that constantly scans the WiFi band for radar existence. A table of radar-occupied WiFi channels is constructed as a result. When it is time to switch channels upon radar in-channel detection, the WiFi transceiver can directly jump to an empty channel without having to sniff for 60s, as required by FCC/ETSI regulations. The scheme results in zero-wait time and zero impact to WiFi throughput. Circuit implementation relies on reusing some readily existing hardware in a 55nm CMOS n×n MIMO WiFi transceiver to reduce die cost.

Land use (LU) is an important information source commonly stored in geospatial databases. Most current work on automatic LU classification for updating topographic databases considers only one category level (e.g. residential or agricultural) consisting of a small number of classes. However, LU databases frequently contain very detailed information, using a hierarchical object catalogue where the number of categories differs depending on the hierarchy level. This paper presents a method for the classification of LU on the basis of aerial images that differentiates a fine-grained class structure, exploiting the hierarchical relationship between categories at different levels of the class catalogue. Starting from a convolutional neural network (CNN) for classifying the categories of all levels, we propose a strategy to simultaneously learn the semantic dependencies between different category levels explicitly. The input to the CNN consists of aerial images and derived data as well as land cover information derived from semantic segmentation. Its output is the class scores at three different semantic levels, based on which predictions that are consistent with the class hierarchy are made. We evaluate our method using two test sites and show how the classification accuracy depends on the semantic category level. While at the coarsest level, an overall accuracy in the order of 90% can be achieved, at the finest level, this accuracy is reduced to around 65%. Our experiments also show which classes are particularly hard to differentiate. © 2020 Copernicus GmbH. All rights reserved.

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text, Background: This study aimed to investigate the effects of supervised and home-based exercise programs on older people with frailty or pre-frailty. Methods: A total of 146 community-dwelling participants aged 65 and older who were prefrail or frail were randomly allocated into supervised exercise (N = 74) and home exercise (N = 72) groups. The 3-month supervised exercise training consisted of 3 exercise sessions per week, was performed at a hospital and supervised by a physical therapist. Home exercise participants took instructions on exercise and illustrated exercise handouts. The baseline and 3-month follow-up measurements included body composition, strength of selected upper and lower limb muscle groups, grip and leg press strengths, and five physical performance tests. Mixed-model repeated-measures analysis was applied to determine whether two groups differ in terms of changes before and after the intervention and to compare within-group improvements. Results: After 3 months of supervised or home-based exercise, the average number of frailty criteria met and fat percentage decreased significantly. Strength of knee extensors, knee flexors and leg press improved significantly in supervised exercise group. In home-based exercise group, the strength of all muscle groups tested improved significantly, except for leg press strength. Walking speed improved in both groups, and timed-up-and-go and timed chair rise tests improved significantly only in supervised exercise group. Conclusions: Three-month supervised or home-based exercise improved walking speed and strength of the limb muscles. Supervised group showed more improvements in the physical performance tests compared with home-based exercise group.

The new WiFi 11ax standard carries several improvements compared to its 11g/ac predecessor. It supports multi-user MIMO and uses OFDMA modulation, which enables users to share the same channel via allocated Resource Units (RU). In addition, it provides transmit power adjustments for better operation in a dense environment. Furthermore, the standard calls for the support of MCS11 1024-QAM modulation with target transmit (TX) EVM of −35dB, which results in nearly 25% higher throughput compared to MCS9 256QAM. In order to improve user experience to guarantee signal quality between walls and obstacles, a

Pixel-based land cover classification of aerial images is a standard task in remote sensing, whose goal is to identify the physical material of the earth’s surface. Recently, most of the well-performing methods rely on encoder-decoder structure based convolutional neural networks (CNN). In the encoder part, many successive convolution and pooling operations are applied to obtain features at a lower spatial resolution, and in the decoder part these features are up-sampled gradually and layer by layer, in order to make predictions in the original spatial resolution. However, the loss of spatial resolution caused by pooling affects the final classification performance negatively, which is compensated by skip-connections between corresponding features in the encoder and the decoder. The most popular ways to combine features are element-wise addition of feature maps and 1x1 convolution. In this work, we investigate skip-connections. We argue that not every skip-connections are equally important. Therefore, we conducted experiments designed to find out which skip-connections are important. Moreover, we propose a new cosine similarity loss function to utilize the relationship of the features of the pixels belonging to the same category inside one mini-batch, i.e. these features should be close in feature space. Our experiments show that the new cosine similarity loss does help the classification. We evaluated our methods using the Vaihingen and Potsdam dataset of the ISPRS 2D semantic labelling challenge and achieved an overall accuracy of 91.1% for both test sites.

This study aims to fill the gap in our understanding about exposure to particulate matters with diameter less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5) and attributable risks and economic costs of mental disorders (MDs). We identify the relationship between PM2.5 and risk of hospital admissions (HAs) for MDs in Beijing and measure the attributable risk and economic cost. We apply a generalized additive model (GAM) with controls for time trend, meteorological conditions, holidays and day of the week. Stratified analyses are performed by age, gender and season. We further estimate health and economic burden of HAs for MDs attributable to PM2.5. A total of 17,252 HAs for MDs are collected. We show that PM2.5 accounts for substantial morbidity and economic burden of MDs. Specifically, a 10 μg/m3 daily increase in PM2.5 is associated with a 3.55% increase in the risk of HAs for MDs, and the effect is more pronounced for older males in colder weather. According to the WHO's air quality guidelines, 15.12 percent of HAs and 16.19 percent of related medical expenses for MDs are respectively attributable to PM2.5.

This study aims to detect genuine suspicious events and false alarms within a dataset of network traffic alerts. The rapid development of cloud computing and artificial intelligence-oriented automatic services have enabled a large amount of data and information to be transmitted among network nodes. However, the amount of cyber-threats, cyberattacks, and network intrusions have increased in various domains of network environments. Based on the fields of data science and machine learning, this paper proposes a series of solutions involving data preprocessing, exploratory data analysis, new features creation, features selection, ensemble learning, models construction, and verification to identify suspicious network events. This paper proposes a modified form of stacking ensemble machine learning which includes AdaBoost, Neural Networks, Random Forest, LightGBM, and Extremely Randomised Trees (Extra Trees) to realise a high-performance classification. A suspicious network event recognition dataset for a security operations centre, which uses real network log observations from the 2019 IEEE BigData Cup Challenge, is used as an experimental dataset. This paper investigates the possibility of integrating big-data analytics, machine learning, and data science to improve intelligent cybersecurity.

Chuan-Chi Yang,1,2 Wu-Chien Chien,3–5 Chi-Hsiang Chung,3,4,6Yia-Ping Liu,2,7–9 Chin-Bin Yeh,2 Kuang-Huei Chen,1 Szu-Nian Yang,1,9,10 Hsin-An Chang,2,11 Yu-Chen Kao,2,12 Wan-Chun Lu,2 Nian-Sheng Tzeng2,11 1Department of Psychiatry, Taoyuan Armed Forces General Hospital, Taoyuan, Taiwan, ROC; 2Department of Psychiatry, Tri-Service General Hospital, School of Medicine, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC; 3Department of Medical Research, Tri-Service General Hospital, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC; 4School of Public Health, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC; 5Graduate Institute of Life Sciences, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC; 6Taiwanese Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion Association, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC; 7Department of Psychiatry, Chen-Hsin General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC; 8Institute of Physiology and Biophysics, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC; 9Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC; 10Headquarters, Tri-Service General Hospital, Beitou Branch, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC; 11Student Counseling Center, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC; 12Department of Psychiatry, Tri-Service General Hospital, Song-Shan Branch, National Defense Medical Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROCCorrespondence: Nian-Sheng TzengDepartment of Psychiatry, Tri-Service General Hospital, National Defense Medical Center, 325, Chung-Gung Road, Sec 2, Nei-Hu District 114, Taipei, Taiwan, ROCTel +886-2-87927299 ext 13674Email pierrens@mail.ndmctsgh.edu.twBackground: The associations between the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and dementias are as yet to be studied in Taiwan. The aim of this study is to clarify as to whether HIV infections are associated with the risk of dementia.Methods: A total of 1,261 HIV-infected patients and 3,783 controls (1:3) matched for age and sex were selected between January 1 and December 31, 2000 from Taiwan’s National Health Insurance Research Database (NHIRD). Fine and Gray’s survival analysis (competing with mortality) analyzed the risk of dementias during the 15-year follow up. The association between the highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) and dementia was analyzed by stratifying the HAART status among the HIV subjects.Results: During the follow-up period, 25 in the HIV group (N= 1,261) and 227 in the control group (N= 3,783) developed dementia (656.25 vs 913.15 per 100,000 person-years). Fine and Gray’s survival analysis revealed that the HIV patients were not associated with an increased risk of dementia, with the adjusted hazard ratio (HR) as 0.852 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.189–2.886, p=0.415) after adjusting for sex, age, comorbidities, geographical region, and the urbanization level of residence. There was no significant difference between the two groups of HIV-infected patients with or without HAART in the risk of dementia.Conclusion: This study found that HIV infections, either with or without HAART, were not associated with increased diagnoses of neurodegenerative dementias in patients older than 50 in Taiwan.Keywords: human immunodeficiency virus, highly active antiretroviral therapy, dementia, National Health Insurance Research Database, cohort study

In the present research, the double FeCoCrNiCux medium-entropy alloy coatings were manufactured on Cr12MoV die steel by laser cladding technology. The cross-section, microstructure, phase, micro-hardness, and tribological behaviour of the coatings were investigated systemically. The dilution effect of the substrate had the weaker effect on the second layer compared to the first layer. The double FeCoCrNiCux cladding layers only had a single face-centred cubic phase led to the lower micro-hardness and wear resistance. The different atomic radius of the alloying elements in the coatings generated a large lattice dislocation. The face-centred cubic structure of coatings had a higher hardness than that of the traditional face-centred cubic structure. The Cu element is easy to segregate at the grain boundaries to form the Cu-rich solid solution.

The carboxyl terminated poly (L-lactic acid) (PLLA) prepolymers were prepared via polycondensation of L-lactic acid and 1,6-adipic acid (end capping agent) under the catalyst of stannous octoate. The effects of synthetic condition, such as reaction temperature, amount of catalyst, content of the end capping agent, etc, on the molecular weight of PLLA were discussed. Fourier transform infrared and 1H nuclear magnetic resonance were used to characterize the PLLA prepolymers. The results indicated that the polycondensation was performed under an optimum reaction condition as following: the amount of the catalyst was 500 ppm based on the mass of lactic acid, the amount of the end capping agent was 1% (the molar amount of the lactic acid), and the polymerization temperature was 170 °C. The viscosity-average molecular weight of the product reached 2.826×104 at this polymerization temperature and the yield was 73.34%.