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Invasiveness of pituitary adenoma is the main cause of its poor prognosis, mechanism of which remains largely unknown. In this study, the differential proteins between invasive and non-invasive pituitary tumors (IPA and NIPA) were identified by TMT labeled quantitative proteomics. The differential metabolites in venous bloods from patients with IPA and NIPA were analyzed by untargeted metabolomics. Proteomic data showed that the top five up-regulated proteins were AD021, C2orf15, PLCXD3, HIST3H2BB and POU1F1, and the top five down-regulated proteins were AIPL1, CALB2, GLUD2, SLC4A10 and GTF2I. Metabolomic data showed that phosphatidylinositol (PI) was most remarkably up-regulated and melibiose was most obviously down-regulated. Further investigation demonstrated that PI stimulation increased the expression of PITPNM1, POU1F1, C2orf15 and LDHA as well as the phosphorylation of AKT and ERK, and promoted the proliferation, migration and invasion of GH3 cells, which were blocked by PITPNM1knockdown. Inhibiting AKT phosphorylation reduced the expression of POU1F1, C2orf15 and LDHA in PI-stimulated cells while activating AKT increased their expression in PITPNM1-silencing cells, which was similar to the function of ERK. POU1F1 silence suppressed the expression of LDHA and C2orf15. Luciferase report assay and ChIP assay demonstrated that POU1F1 positively regulated the transcription of LDHA and C2orf15. In addition, PI propelled the metastasis of GH3 cells in vivo, and elevated the expression of PITPNM1, POU1F1, C2orf15 and LDHA. These results suggested that elevated serum PI might contribute to the proliferation and invasion of pituitary adenoma by regulating the expression of PITPNM1/AKT/ERK/POU1F1 axis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Considering the existence of time delay and interval uncertainty, a set‐membership state estimation problem based on zonotopes is studied for discrete‐time switched systems subject to unknown but bounded noises. To conform the actual situation, a state observer asynchronous with the subsystem is designed. The L∞$$ {L}_{\infty } $$ performance is introduced to attenuate the effect of noises in the observer design. By dealing with the interval uncertainty, the design approach of L∞$$ {L}_{\infty } $$ observer is given and transformed into a convex optimization problem which can be solved off‐line. The zonotope and the estimation interval containing state are provided based on the L∞$$ {L}_{\infty } $$ observer. Finally, a numerical example is given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the influence of interval uncertainty, a set‐membership state estimation algorithm based on zonotope is proposed for discrete‐time delayed switched systems subject to unknown but bounded noises. To economize on communication resources, an event‐triggered mechanism is introduced to ensure the efficient transmission of the required observation information. For the channel fading phenomenon during data transmission, an interval channel fading model applicable to the zonotope set‐emmbership state estimation is proposed. The asynchronous state observer is constructed by considering the inconsistency between event‐triggered instant and subsystem switched instant. The sufficient conditions for the existence of the L∞$$ {L}_{\infty } $$ state observer are given using the average dwell time method. The optimal L∞$$ {L}_{\infty } $$ observer gain matrix is derived by solving convex optimization. On this basis, the zonotope and the state estimation interval containing states are given by the zonotopic method. Finally, the validity and feasibility of the proposed algorithm are demonstrated by a numerical example with the comparison result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The health‐related quality of life (HRQoL) of patients with localized prostate cancer (LPCa) after treatment mainly surgery and radiotherapy (RT) has received increasing attention. The aim of this study is to compare the HRQoL of LPCa after surgery and RT. Methods: Web of Science, Embase, PubMed and Cochrane databases were searched after January 2000 to observe the HRQoL scores after surgery and RT at different treatment time points. Results: A total of 28 studies were included in this study, and the results showed that LPCa received surgery had better bowel scores than RT at ≤3 (weighted mean differences [WMD] = 4.18; p = 0.03), 3–6 (WMD = 4.16; p < 0.001), 6–12 (WMD = 2.99; p = 0.004), 24–60 (WMD = 1.87; p = 0.06), and ≥60 (WMD = 4.54; p = 0.02) months. However, LPCa received RT had higher urinary scores at ≤3 (WMD = −7.39; p = 0.02), 3–6 (WMD = −6.03; p = 0.02), 6–12 (WMD = −4.90; p < 0.001), 24–60 (WMD = −3.96; p < 0.001), ≥60 (WMD = −2.95; p < 0.001) months and had better sexual scores at ≤3 (WMD = −13.58; p = 0.09), 3–6 (WMD = −12.32; p = 0.06), 6–12 (WMD = −12.03; p = 0.002), 24–60 (WMD = −11.29; p < 0.001), and ≥60 (WMD = −3.10; p = 0.46) months than surgery. The scores difference between surgery and RT decreased over time. Conclusion: Overall, for LPCa, surgery was associated with better HRQoL in the bowel domain, whereas RT was associated with better HRQoL in the urinary and sexual domains, with the difference between surgery and RT narrowing over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this essay is to improve computer‐aided diagnosis of lung diseases by the removal of bone structures imagery such as ribs and clavicles, which may shadow a clinical view of lesions. This paper aims to develop an algorithm to suppress the imaging of bone structures within clinical x‐ray images, leaving a residual portrayal of lung tissue; such that these images can be used to better serve applications, such as lung nodule detection or pathology based on the radiological reading of chest x rays. Methods: We propose a conditional Adversarial Generative Network (cGAN) (Mirza and Osindero, Conditional generative adversarial nets, 2014.) model, consisting of a generator and a discriminator, for the task of bone shadow suppression. The proposed model utilizes convolutional operations to expand the size of the receptive field of the generator without losing contextual information while downsampling the image. It is trained by enforcing both the pixel‐wise intensity similarity and the semantic‐level visual similarity between the generated x‐ray images and the ground truth, via optimizing an L‐1 loss of the pixel intensity values on the generator side and a feature matching loss on the discriminator side, respectively. Results: The framework we propose is trained and tested on an open‐access chest radiograph dataset for benchmark. Results show that our model is capable of generating bone‐suppressed images of outstanding quality with a limited number of training samples (N = 272). Conclusions: Our approach outperforms current state‐of‐the‐art bone suppression methods using x‐ray images. Instead of simply downsampling images at different scales, our proposed method mitigates the loss of contextual information by utilizing dilated convolutions, which gains a noticeable quality improvement for the outputs. On the other hand, our experiment shows that enforcing the semantic similarity between the generated and the ground truth images assists the adversarial training process and achieves better perceptual quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The PandaX-4T liquid xenon detector at the China Jinping Underground Laboratory is used to measure the solar ^{8}B neutrino flux by detecting neutrinos through coherent scattering with xenon nuclei. Data samples requiring the coincidence of scintillation and ionization signals (paired), as well as unpaired ionization-only signals (US2), are selected with energy threshold of approximately 1.1 keV (0.33 keV) nuclear recoil energy. Combining the commissioning run and the first science run of PandaX-4T, a total exposure of 1.20 and 1.04  tonne·year are collected for the paired and US2, respectively. After unblinding, 3 and 332 events are observed with an expectation of 2.8±0.5 and 251±32 background events, for the paired and US2 data, respectively. A combined analysis yields a best-fit ^{8}B neutrino signal of 3.5 (75) events from the paired (US2) data sample, with ∼37% uncertainty, and the background-only hypothesis is disfavored at 2.64σ significance. This gives a solar ^{8}B neutrino flux of (8.4±3.1)×10^{6}  cm^{-2} s^{-1}, consistent with the standard solar model prediction. It is also the first indication of solar ^{8}B neutrino "fog" in a dark matter direct detection experiment.

We report the first search for the elastic scatterings between cosmic-ray boosted sub-MeV dark matter (DM) and electrons in the PandaX-4T liquid xenon experiment. Sub-MeV DM particles can be accelerated by scattering with electrons in the cosmic rays and produce detectable electron recoil signals in the detector. Using the commissioning data from PandaX-4T of 0.63  tonne·year exposure, we set new constraints on DM-electron scattering cross sections for DM masses ranging from 10  eV/c^{2} to 3  keV/c^{2}.

Atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumor (AT/RT) of the central nervous system is a highly malignant tumor that mainly occurs in children under the age of 3 and has only been rarely described in adults. The fact that AT/RT patients have such a terrible prognosis is even more regrettable. Herein, we reported two special cases of AT/RT, both of which were under 3 years. Symptoms at presentation included increased intracranial pressure and cerebellar symptoms such as headache, altered gait, and ataxia. As for the tumor location, one was infratentorial in the posterior fossa, and the other was the right lateral ventricle. Preoperative magnetic resonance imaging scans showed calcification and heterogeneous contrast enhancement in the lesions. The mass was excised surgically for the progression of symptoms. Postoperative pathologies of the tumors, combined with immunohistochemistry, revealed AT/RT. AT/RTs are often misdiagnosed as other types of brain tumors due to the lack of specific radiological features and other key characteristics. To improve awareness of AT/RT on the differential diagnosis of intracranial lesions among clinicians, we present this report and briefly summarize previous cases., Competing Interests: ZZha was employed by the company Jiangsu Simcere Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Guo, Zhuang, Zhang, Zhou, Wang and Zhang.)