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Abstract Purpose The study aimed to investigate the potential influence of COVID-19 infection on embryo implantation and early development in women undergoing frozen embryo transfer (FET), with a specific focus on infections occurring at different periods around FET. Methods A retrospective analysis was performed on women who had undergone FET during a period marked by a significant surge in COVID-19 infection in Shanghai. All enrolled women experienced their first documented COVID-19 infection around the time of FET, ensuring that infections did not occur prior to oocyte retrieval. Participants were categorized into six groups based on the timing of infection: uninfected, ≥ 60 days,

BackgroundHereditary leiomyomatosis and renal cell cancer (HLRCC) is a rare autosomal dominant inheritable disease caused by Fumarate hydratase (FH) gene germline mutation. It is speculated that for HRLCC infertility women with multiple uterine leiomyomas, preimplantation genetic testing may help block transmission of mutated FH gene during pregnancy.Case presentationWe present the case of a 26-year-old nulligravida with a history of early-onset uterine leiomyomatosis had a heterozygous nonsense mutation [NM_000143.4 (FH): c.1027C > T(p.Arg343Ter)] in the HRLLC gene. After ovulation induction and in vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic testing for monogenic disorders (PGT-M) on embryos revealed the absence of the pathogenic allele in two blastomeres. Uterine fibroids were identified before embryo transfer, leading to a submucosal myomectomy and long period of pituitary suppression by Gonadotropin-releasing hormone analog (GnRHa). The patient achieved a healthy live birth after the second cycle of frozen–thawed embryo transfer.ConclusionThis case details the successful treatment of an infertile patient with an HRLLC family history, resulting in a healthy birth through myomectomy and PGT-M selected embryo transplantation. Our literature search indicates the first reported live birth after HRLLC-PGT-M.

Abstract Background Significant lower genital tract (LGT) dysbiosis and an associated lower rate of clinical pregnancy after in vitro fertilization–frozen embryo transfer (IVF-FET) among polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) patients have been previously reported by our group. We aimed to assess whether transvaginal Lactobacillus supplementation can reverse LGT dysbiosis and further improve perinatal outcomes in PCOS patients after IVF-FET. Methods/design This is a protocol for a multicenter, open-label, randomized controlled trial in China. Women diagnosed with PCOS who are undergoing IVF-FET treatment will be recruited. Allocation to the intervention/control arms at a ratio of 1:1 will be executed by an electronic randomization system. Participants in the intervention arm will receive the live Lactobacillus capsule vaginally for 10 consecutive days before embryo transfer, while those in the control arm will receive standard individualized care. The primary outcomes will be the clinical pregnancy rate, implantation rate, and live birth rate. 16S rRNA sequencing and liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry will be conducted to evaluate the LGT microbiome and systemic metabonomics before and after the intervention. A sample of 260 participants will provide 95% power to detect a 20% increase in the rate of clinical pregnancy (α = 0.025, one-tailed test, 15% dropout rate). A total of 300 participants will be recruited. Discussion This is the first large and multicenter randomized controlled trial aimed at assessing the efficacy of transvaginal Lactobacillus supplementation on restoring the LGT microbiome and improving perinatal outcomes in PCOS patients after IVF-FET. This pragmatic trial is promising for increasing the rates of clinical pregnancy and live birth in PCOS patients after IVF-FET. Ethics and dissemination Ethical review approval was obtained from the Medical Research Ethics Committees of the International Peace Maternity and Child Health Hospital of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (15 October 2020, GKLW 2020-29). To maximize dissemination, these findings will be reported in open access publications in journals with high impact, and oral and poster conference presentations will be performed. Trial registration ChiCTR ChiCTR2000036460. Registered on 13 September 2020, https://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.html?proj=59549 .

Abstract Background Type 1 gastric neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) are relatively rare to the extent that some physicians have little experience in diagnosing and treating them. The purpose of this study was to increase the understanding of the disease by analyzing and summarizing the management and prognoses of patients with type 1 gastric NETs at our center. Methods The data of 229 patients (59.4% female) with type 1 gastric NETs who were treated at our center during 2011–2022 were retrospectively analyzed. Results The average patient age was 50.5 ± 10.8 years. Multiple tumors affected 72.5% of the patients; 66.4% of the tumors were

ResNet-based correlation models excel in age recognition algorithms, but specific age recognition research is currently limited and often plagued by substantial errors. We introduce an enhanced portrait age recognition algorithm based on ResNet, using CORAL (consistent rank logits) rank consistent ordered regression instead of traditional classification to predict precise ages. We further improve this approach by incorporating DCN (deformable convolution), resulting in the DCN-R model. DCN dynamically adjusts convolution kernels for diverse faces, improving accuracy and robustness. We tested DCN-R34 and DCN-R50 against the SOTA model, achieving better results with the same complexity. This reduces the computational load while maintaining or enhancing performance.

When people tell lies, they often exhibit tension and emotional fluctuations, reflecting a complex psychological state. However, the scarcity of labeled data in datasets and the complexity of deception information pose significant challenges in extracting effective lie features, which severely restrict the accuracy of lie detection systems. To address this, this paper proposes a semi-supervised lie detection algorithm based on integrating multiple speech emotional features. Firstly, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Auto Encoder (AE) network process log Mel spectrogram features and acoustic statistical features, respectively, to capture the contextual links between similar features. Secondly, the joint attention model is used to learn the complementary relationship among different features to obtain feature representations with richer details. Lastly, the model combines the unsupervised loss Local Maximum Mean Discrepancy (LMMD) and supervised loss Jefferys multi-loss optimization to enhance the classification performance. Experimental results show that the algorithm proposed in this paper achieves better performance.

Abstract Operating the China Railway Express (CRE) is a primary strategy for promoting international trade and investment between China and Europe. Since the inception of the CRE in 2011, the [...]

Simple Summary: Spermatogenesis is a highly efficient process that depends on the self-renewal and regulated differentiation of spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) within the seminiferous tubules of the male mammalian testis. Male fertility requires the production of millions of gametes through the meiotic division of spermatocytes. We discovered that knocking out Etv5 in mice alters the expression of Wdr17, a gene crucial for spermatocyte development, by integrating bulk transcriptome sequencing data from the testes of Etv5 knockout mice with previously published single-cell transcriptome sequencing results. The levels of Wdr17 are strongly linked to cell survival and proliferation in mouse spermatocyte cell line GC-2spd(ts). Wdr17 could be a valuable gene target for investigating and controlling the processes of meiosis and spermatogenesis. We identified Wdr17 as a highly expressed gene in pachytene spermatocytes by transcriptomic analysis of mouse testis. Germ cell-deficient infertile mouse models had significantly reduced Wdr17 expression. We performed gene interference and overexpression in the mouse spermatocyte cell line GC-2spd(ts) and investigated how Wdr17 affects spermatocyte growth and development. Our results showed that Wdr17 suppression significantly decreased cell growth rate and increased cell apoptosis in GC-2spd(ts) cells. Wdr17 suppression also arrested the cell cycle at the G1 phase. On the contrary, Wdr17 overexpression significantly promoted cell proliferation and inhibited cell apoptosis in GC-2spd(ts) cells. More cells were enriched at the S stage with a concomitant reduction of cells at the G1 stage. Wdr17 promotes mouse spermatocyte proliferation by advancing cell cycle progression and inhibiting cell apoptosis, indicating its potential role in regulating spermatogenesis in the mouse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to effectively extract features with high representation ability has always been a research topic and a challenge for classification tasks. Most of the existing methods mainly solve the problem by using deep convolutional neural networks as feature extractors. Although a series of excellent network structures have been successful in the field of Chinese ink-wash painting classification, but most of them adopted the methods of only simple augmentation of the network structures and direct fusion of different scale features, which limit the network to further extract semantically rich and scale-invariant feature information, thus hindering the improvement of classification performance. In this paper, a novel model based on multi-level attention and multi-scale feature fusion is proposed. The model extracts three types of feature maps from the low-level, middle-level and high-level layers of the pretrained deep neural network firstly. Then, the low-level and middle-level feature maps are processed by the spatial attention module, nevertheless the high-level feature maps are processed by the scale invariance module to increase the scale-invariance properties. Moreover, the conditional random field module is adopted to fuse the optimized three-scale feature maps, and the channel attention module is followed to refine the features. Finally, the multi-level deep supervision strategy is utilized to optimize the model for better performance. To verify the effectiveness of the model, extensive experimental results on the Chinese ink-wash painting dataset created in this work show that the classification performance of the model is better than other mainstream research methods.

Under the influence of international trade, labor flow not only exists in the waves of international labor migration but is also embodied in international products and services. This paper focused on members of the China–Africa Cooperation Forum (FOCAC). We computed and analyzed the sectoral embodied labor transfer between China and Africa from 2000 to 2015 based on the Multiregional Input-Output Method. Our results are as follows: (1) Both China and Africa play roles as labor suppliers in the global supply chain. By ameliorating the trade structure, both China and Africa can better utilize their labor surplus. (2) China and Africa share complementarity in sectoral labor allocation. In short, the embodied labor transfer via international trade between China and Africa has, to some extent, relieved the labor shortage on both sides. (3) Africa has transformed into a net exporter of industrial labor since 2011. By analyzing the embodied labor flow from the global perspective, this paper beats a new path in depicting the effect of international trade on labor allocation, enriches the evaluation of embodied labor transfer between China and Africa, and also provides a beneficial supplement to Multiregional Input-Output analysis in the field of factor flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) often have a history of infertility and poor pregnancy outcome. The character of the lower genital tract (LGT) microbiome of these patients is still unknown. We collected both vaginal and cervical canal swabs from 47 PCOS patients (diagnosed by the Rotterdam Criteria) and 50 healthy reproductive-aged controls in this study. Variable regions 3–4 (V3–4) were sequenced and analyzed. Operational taxonomic unit (OTU) abundance was noted for all samples. Taxa that discriminated between PCOS and healthy women was calculated by linear discriminant analysis effect size (LEFSe). Results from 97 paired vaginal and cervical canal samples collected from 97 women [mean age 30 (±4 years)] were available for analysis. Using the Rotterdam Criteria, 47 women were diagnosed with PCOS (PCOS, n = 47; control, n = 50). There was no significant difference between cervical canal microbiome and vaginal microbiome from the same individual, however, Lactobacillus spp. was less abundant in both vaginal and cervical canal microbiome of PCOS patients. Several non-Lactobacillus taxa including Gardnerella_vaginalis_00703mash, Prevotella_9_other, and Mycoplasma hominis, were more abundant in the LGT microbiota of PCOS patients. There is a difference between the microorganism in the LGT of patients with PCOS and healthy reproductive-aged women.

To investigate the clinical efficacy of dexamethasone vitreous cavity implants (Ozurdex) for the treatment of macular edema (Irvine-Gass Syndrome) after cataract surgery. Eight patients (eight eyes) with Irvine-Gass syndrome were enrolled for vitreous injections with Ozurdex. The patients included six men (six eyes) and two women (two eyes) with a mean age of 67.12 ± 11.92 years. Changes in the patients best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA), central macular thickness (CMT), and intraocular pressure were compared before and after treatment. The mean visual acuity BCVA of the patients was 0.81 ± 0.26 before implantation, which improved to 0.20 ± 0.12, 0.13 ± 0.09, and 0.15 ± 0.13 at 2 weeks, 1 month, and 3 months after implantation, respectively (P < 0.001). The patient's mean CMT before implantation was 703.00 ± 148.88 μm, and it reduced to 258.87 ± 37.40 μm, 236.25 ± 28.74 μm, and 278.00 ± 76.82 μm at 2 weeks, 1 month, and 3 months after implantation, respectively (P < 0.001). The dexamethasone vitreous cavity implant (Ozurdex) is a safe and effective treatment, which can effectively improve patient's visual acuity and reduce macular edema associated with cataract surgery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]