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Objective: We performed a case-control study to investigate the correlation between DNA methylation and mRNA expression of the glutathione S-transferase alpha 4 (GSTA4) gene and the risk of intracranial aneurysm (IA) in the Chinese Han population.Methods: After propensity score matching, 44 pairs of cases and controls were collected in this study. Fasting blood samples were collected for DNA and RNA extraction within 24 h of admission. Nine CpG dinucleotides were selected from the GSTA4 promoter region for DNA methylation pyrosequencing. mRNA expression of GSTA4 was measured by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR). In vitro cell experiments were conducted to verify the association between 5-aza-2′-deoxycytidine induced DNA hypomethylation and GSTA4 mRNA expression.Results: The mean methylation level of GSTA4 was much lower in IA patients, especially in IA patients, especially in unruptured IA (UIA), than that in controls (IA vs. Control, p < .001; ruptured IA (RIA) vs. Control, p = .005; UIA vs. Control, p < .001). With sex stratification, we further found that the association between GSTA4 methylation and IA risk presented only in women (mean methylation level: IA vs. Control, p < .001; RIA vs. Control, p = .009; UIA vs. Control, p < .001). GSTA4 mRNA expression was significantly higher in the IA group than in the control group (p < .01) and negatively correlated with DNA methylation in all individuals (r = −.746, p < .001). DNA hypomethylation can increase GSTA4 mRNA expression in human primary artery smooth muscle cells. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve showed that GSTA4 mean methylation (AUC = .80, p < .001) was a reliable predictor of women intracranial aneurysm, among which CpG 1 exhibited the best predictive value (AUC = .89, p < .001). In addition, GSTA4 expression levels could also predict the risk of IA in women (AUC = .87, p = .005).Conclusion: Decreased DNA methylation and increased mRNA expression of the GSTA4 gene are associated with the risk of IA in women.

Additional file 1: Figure 1. The pedigree structures with SUD for WES.

Additional file 3: Table 1. Information of the persons from SUD families for WES.

Additional file 4: Table 2. WES results of susceptible SNVs with a focus on cardiac disease-associated genes in SUD families.

Additional file 1: Table S1. Patient characteristics before rituximab therapy. Illustrating the age, immunosuppressive therapy, relapse rate, serum creatinine, serum albumin, urinary protein excretion, CD19+ B cell count of each patient before rituximab therapy. Showing rituximab courses and prednisone dosage of each participant receiving this therapy. Table S2. Baseline characteristics and outcome of rituximab therapy between patients with childhood-onset (

Additional file 2. Protocol of steroids tapering in the study.

Table S1. Risk of AKI among pregnant and non-pregnant women. Compared with the non-pregnant group, pregnant women had a 51% increased risk of AKI after adjusting for age, baseline SCr, length of stay in hospital, division, hospital, need for intensive care, and clinical comorbidities. Table S2. Incidence of death in different AKI stage. The incidence of in-hospital death was 1.0, 2.1, and 7.4% in patients with AKI stage 1, 2, and 3, respectively. (DOCX 15 kb)

The ICESat-2/ATLAS employed a micro-pulse multi-beam photon-counting laser altimeter system for the first time. ICESat-2/ALTAS was significantly different from ICESat-1/GLAS in terms of detection mechanism, data processing methods and the breadth and depth of data applications. Firstly, the key configuration parameters, data and products of ICESat-2/ATLAS were introduced. Secondly, the key technologies of noise removal and classification algorithms for ICESat-2/ATLAS data as well as the adaptability and problems of each algorithm were elaborated. Thirdly, the applications of ICESat-2/ATLAS data in ice sheet and sea ice elevation measurement and change monitoring, ground elevation and forest height extraction, forest biomass estimation, lake level and storage change monitoring were summarized. Finally, the development trend and prospect of photon-counting LiDAR data processing methods and applications were expected.

Filtering of vessel structures with the second order information is a fundamental basis for vascular tree enhancement. Traditional Hessian-related methods often suffer from noise pollution and variance of grey level. In this paper an improved shock diffusion filter is proposed to enhance vascular structures. By using multi-scale vesselness measurement as a regulation factor in the diffusion process, this filter expresses a high response to vesselness and robust anti-noise ability. The proposed filtering method is validated with both synthetic data and pulmonary CT data. The results show that the proposed method is robust with noisy image and effective in enhancing vessel bifurcations.

Computer-Aided Detection(CAD) for pulmonary nodules on CT images can help radiologist find pulmonary nodules efficiently and decrease the rate of missed diagnosis, which provides a way for lung cancer diagnosis in early stage. Compared with the solid pulmonary nodules which have regular shape, clear edge and high density, the detection of the nonsolid pulmonary nodules with irregular shape, blurry edge and low contrast to lung parenchyma is more difficult. In order to detect the nonsolid pulmonary nodules using CAD systems, the image enhancement for nonsolid pulmonary nodules' contrast to lung parenchyma is necessary. Therefore, we performed an experimental investigation of fuzzy enhancement algorithms for nonsolid pulmonary nodules in this paper. Experimental results show that the proposed method is valid in the enhancement of nonsolid pulmonary nodules' contrast to lung parenchyma, meanwhile, it decreases the disturbance of the blood vessels.

As a complex nonlinear system, modeling analysis is an important method to the research of the static and dynamic characters of the locomotive diesel engines. Also the model facing the control behavior verification can be used in the electronic control unit's HIL(hardware-in-the-loop) simulation which can lessen the cost and uncertain factors in the later platform experiments. With the mode of system identification, this paper builds the dynamic model of the diesel with neural network. Aiming at the nonlinear character of the diesel with large inertia, the paper uses NARMAX(Nonlinear Auto-Regressive Moving Average with eXogenous inputs) as the main structure and uses LM(Levenberg-Marquardt) algorithm to train the network. In order to overcome the redundancy of the network structure caused by the artificial experience, this paper puts forward the Time Cycle Comparison method to determine the ranks of the input signals and uses the Optimal Brain Surgeon strategy to optimize the network structure. The simulation results proves that this method can eliminate the redundancy and improve the generalization capability of the network commendably under the same output error scopes. Comparison between the train results and the measured results shows that the dynamic model has the good real-time performances and little output error. So the model can meet the need of the system character analysis and technology application.

Due to abdominal CT images' specific characteristics, a novel automatic liver segmentation method is introduced in this paper based on a Gaussian blurring technique for binary images. This paper utilizes a simple line search method for plane domain segmentation at first to extract binary image composed of isolated white pixel clusters mainly from the liver part based on the histogram distribution and spatial characteristics of the liver region in obtained CT images; In the following step, a Gaussian blurring technique is introduced to connect the isolated pixel clusters; Threshold the blurred image and after the post-processing step of mending holes and size filter, the liver part can be finally extracted from the original CT images. The validity of the method has been proved by the experiment results presented at the end of the paper.

In order to enhance the utilization rate of the existing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiment instruments and to allocate the existing experimental resources fully and reasonably, we constructed the experiment framework with remote experiment ability for MRI imaging technology by means of the desktop magnetic resonance imaging apparatus which are developed by Shanghai Niumag Cooperation. This modern experimental teaching mode will fundamentally change the traditional experimental teaching idea. Meanwhile, it plays an important role in enhancing the teaching quality of the medical imaging technology, training students' comprehensive quality as well as easing the guidance of teachers' arduous work .And it also provides good teaching reform ideas for medical imaging technology.