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Background: In 2022, icaritin a Traditional Chinese Medicine with estrogen-like activities was recommended by the CSCO guidelines as a systematic treatment for patients with advanced HCC due to its clinical safety and efficacy. However the mechanism and targets of icaritin are unclear. In this study we aimed to reveal the target of icaritin in HCC.Methods: First literature related to icaritin was downloaded from the Web of Science. The software programs "Rstudio" "VOSviewer" and "Mendeley Desktop" were used to analyze the distribution of icaritin publications and research hotspots. Meanwhile icaritin-related genes were obtained by combining them with the PubChem database. Second transcriptome data of HCC patients were obtained from the TCGA database. The proteinprotein interaction (PPI) analysis of icaritin-related genes was performed using the String data platform and the visualization and network topology analysis were performed using Cytoscape. Cox regression analyses were combined to screen the hub target and verified it through cell experiments.Results: A total of 239 icaritin-related articles were obtained HCC is a new hotspot in the icaritin field. 292 icaritin-related genes were obtained and a core module containing 34 genes was obtained by module division. Among them ESR1 was an independent prognostic factor. Molecular docking showed that ESR1 and icaritin had a high affinity. Functional studies revealed that ESR1 inhibits HCC cell malignant proliferation and improves the sensitivity of HCC cells to icaritin.Conclusion: We propose that ESR1 as a target of icaritin may be conducive to improving icaritin therapy.

Inductive power transfer (IPT) systems are playing an increasingly important role in electric vehicles, rail transit, industrial production and daily life. In the above practical applications, the misalignment of coupling coils is a very common phenomenon. To achieve high efficiency and a stable output under coil misalignment, a novel hybrid IPT system with a four-coil coupler is presented in this paper. The presented IPT system only uses a single mode switch to satisfy the battery charging requirements. When compared with existing typical IPT systems, the presented IPT system has fewer compensation components, and does not need complex control, a communication link between the transmitter and the receiver, and frequency switching. Moreover, to ameliorate the misalignment tolerance of the system, a Double-D/Bipolar (DD/BP) four-coil coupler is applied to the presented IPT topology. A 680 W experimental prototype with a 94.7% peak efficiency is built to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme. Experimental results indicate that the presented IPT system can cope with simultaneous variations of the load and coupling coefficient within a ± 150 mm misalignment in the Y-axis and a ± 15 mm in the X-axis.

To enhance the efficiency and soft-switching stability of the battery wireless charger within the full load range, a soft-switching battery wireless charger (SS-BWC) is presented. The presented SS-BWC can achieve smooth switching from constant current mode to constant voltage mode under the condition of uncomplicated control. The high-frequency inverter (HFI) can operate with zero switching loss in the whole charging process by adopting a novel auxiliary resonant network, which can effectively reduce the switching loss in the HFI and refrain from soft-switching loss due to the compensation element parameter perturbation. Besides, the HFI adopts a new modulation method, and only one power switch tube is in the high-frequency switching state in a switching cycle, which is also conducive to enhancing efficiency. The operating principle of the presented SS-BWC is elaborated in detail, and the realization conditions for soft-switching are also designed. Finally, an experimental device is built to verify the feasibility and superiority of the proposal.

To solve the problems of output voltage and system efficiency sharply decreasing in the case of misalignment for the electric vehicle inductive power transfer (IPT) charging system, a universal hybrid coupler with high misalignment tolerance is proposed. The hybrid coupler consists of a four-coil bipolar (BP) coupler, the T-type network and a compensation capacitor, which effectively achieves high anti-misalignment for any compensation networks. The introduction of the T-type network makes the two overlapping coils in the same side of the BP coupler transmitter decouple effectively and simplifies the design. Although the two overlapping coils in the receiver side are still coupled with each other, the parameter design only needs to consider the cross-coupling to be small enough, which significantly reduces the design difficulty of the coupler without iteration and repetition. Finally, a 2-kW misalignment-tolerance hybrid IPT system is constructed based on the proposed hybrid IPT coupler. A configurable series-series (SS) and series/inductor-capacitor- capacitor(S/LCC) compensation topologies are used to implement constant current (CC) and constant voltage (CV) load-independent outputs in the face of conditions where the coupling coefficient and load change simultaneously. The experimental results validate the correctness of the theoretical analysis.

The battery is mostly adopted as the load in current wireless charge applications. The wireless charger should provide configurable constant current (CC) and constant voltage (CV) outputs for the batteries. The implementation of configurable CC and CV outputs mostly rely on the additional dc–dc converter, hybrid topology, or high-order networks, resulting in complex control and poor reliability. Moreover, the battery wireless charger should also have anti-misalignment ability. To attack the above problems, a hybrid battery wireless charger is proposed for self-adapting battery charging curve and antimisalignment. A double-solenoid quadrature coupler (DSQC) consisting of square quadrature coil and double-solenoid coil is designed, which combines the coupler with clamp circuit to switch between the two coils automatically, ensuring that the output voltage has small fluctuation within a large lateral misalignment range and inherent CC-to-CV output. The control means is relatively simple, the output threshold is not limited by the parameters of DSQC. Eventually, an experimental prototype with 100 V/4.1A output is built to verify the correctness of the proposed scheme.

Aiming at the problems of large switching loss and large output power fluctuation in the existing omnidirectional wireless power transfer (OWPT) system, a novel OWPT system with zero-switching-loss inverter and cylindrical transmitter coil is proposed. By introducing an auxiliary resonant network with simple structure and low-loss on each phase arm of the three-phase inverter, zero-voltage switching turn-on and zero-current switching turn-off within the full power range can be acquired. The switching loss in the main circuit of inverter is reliably eliminated. The transmitter coil is a cylindrical coil composed of the three curved rectangular coils, whose excitation current amplitude is equal and the phase difference is 120°. It can arise a spatial rotating magnetic field around the transmitter coil and provide an omnidirectional energy transmission channel. The operating principle of soft-switching is analyzed in detail, and the design rules of soft-switching in full power range and the parameter design method of coupler to reduce the fluctuation of output power are given. Ultimately, an experimental prototype is used to verify the feasibility of the proposed OWPT system. The experimental results indicate that the system output power is retained at 93.4–104.7 W and transfer efficiency is retained at 71.2%–78.1% under arbitrary angular misalignment of receiver.

Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) are receiving increasing attention for their flexibility and low cost, showing potential to replace the well-studied lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Compared to lithium ion, sodium ion possesses larger radius, leading to the volume expansion during insertion/extraction. Therefore, amorphous anode materials with low volume expansion and fast ion diffusion are more suitable for the SIBs. Among them, vanadium-based oxides are regarded as promising alternatives according to their advantages of high theoretical capacity, abundance, and low cost. However, the shortcomings such as poor conductivity, aggregation, and pulverization restrict their development as the anode of SIBs. Herein, the vanadium oxide is modified by graphene sheets, and a VOx/rGO-5 % composite is reported as the anode material for SIBs, which has promising electrochemical performance. The VOx/rGO-5 % anode remains a discharge specific capacity of 185 mAh g−1over 400 cycles under 0.5 A g−1. Meanwhile, VOx/rGO-5 % anode also exhibits a rate capability of 189 mAh g−1at 2 A g−1. Moreover, the sodium ion storage kinetics in VOx/rGO-5 % is investigated. This work affirms the possibility of vanadium-based oxides being the anode materials of SIBs.

The Brain Age Gap (BAG), which refers to the difference between chronological age and predicted neuroimaging age, is proposed as a potential biomarker for age-related brain degeneration. However, existing brain age prediction models usually rely on a single marker and can not discover meaningful hidden information in radiographic images. This study focuses on the application of radiomics, an advanced imaging analysis technique, combined with automated machine learning to predict BAG. Our methods achieve a promising result with a mean absolute error of 1.509 using the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative dataset. Furthermore, we find that the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus play a significant role in predicting age with interpretable method called SHapley Additive exPlanations. Additionally, our investigation of age prediction discrepancies between patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and those with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) reveals a notable correlation with clinical cognitive assessment scale scores. This suggests that BAG has the potential to serve as a biomarker to support the diagnosis of AD and MCI. Overall, this study presents valuable insights into the application of neuroimaging models in the diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases.

When following catheter-directed thrombolysis (CDT) for deep vein thrombosis (DVT), the stenosed iliac veins is controversy. To evaluate the mid-term outcomes of CDT with or without stent implantation for DVT in the presence of iliac vein compression.