Search

Thyroid dysfunction is well recognized to be associated with an increased risk of various psychiatric disorders. Recently, there is growing evidence that the immune system plays a role in this relationship, the thyroid being one of the most common organs affected by autoimmunity [1][2]. The objective of the proposed study is to investigate the involvement of inflammatory mechanisms in psychiatric disorders, and whether it can explain the relationship with thyroid diseases as previously pointed out [1]. It seeks to explore how plasma immune markers (i.e. IL-1β, IL1-RA, IL-6, IL-12p40, IL-12p70, TNFα) along with thyroid markers (i.e. TSH, T3, T4) are linked to continuous symptom profiles in a cohort of psychiatric patients with different psychiatric comorbidities. Herein, considering the co-occurrence of disorders is crucial to follow the quest for understanding transdiagnostic mechanisms and challenge discrete diagnostic frameworks [3].

Previous neuroimaging studies have demonstrated variations in brain structure and function in association with ADHD, most prominently observed in regions underlying cognitive processes, i.e. prefrontal, fronto-striatal, fronto-limbic, and temporo-parietal regions. Notably, neuroanatomical gray matter reductions are more consistently found in children with ADHD, whereas results for adult patients show high heterogeneity. The human brain develops dynamically throughout the lifespan. Three main theories regarding brain maturation in ADHD have been proposed: Developmental delay, compensation, and scar/fixed anomaly. For each of them, at least partial support has been provided by previous studies. However, most studies to date have been conducted within cross-sectional samples, which do not allow conclusions on developmental trajectories of ADHD. Longitudinal studies investigating the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the course of ADHD over the lifespan are still rare, and partly revealed divergent results in different samples. The aim of the proposed project is to gain new insights into the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the developmental course of ADHD within an independent, closely monitored, and well-characterized longitudinal sample, including the full range of ADHD symptom trajectories into adulthood. We will investigate development of cortical (vertex-wise cortical thickness and surface area) and subcortical brain structural measures of individuals with ADHD, unaffected siblings, and healthy control participants over three waves of the Dutch NeuroIMAGE study (from childhood/adolescence to adulthood), with a particular focus on individual differences in brain maturation in relation to clinical outcomes (i.e., course of ADHD symptom scores).

Strong scattering media bring difficulties to imaging in many fields such as medicine and astronomy. The deep learning method has a powerful fitting ability, which can be better applied in reconstructing the target behind the scattering medium. But the detail of the reconstructed target is often inaccurate. In this paper, the skip connection is added in the neural network to improve the accuracy of the reconstructed detail. This network can combine pixel-level information with high-level semantic information, and the information missed during the encoding process can be more involved in the final reconstruction process. 1100 handwritten characters are used as the targets hidden behind the ground glass. It is found that the quality of the reconstructed target is different when the skip connection is added to the network at different scales. The feature map visualization method is used to help us analyze the role of the skip connection. Meanwhile, PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) is also used as an objective evaluation standard to evaluate the quality of reconstructed targets. According to subjective and objective evaluation criteria, conclusions can be drawn that the detail of targets can be better retained when the skip connection is added between the convolutional layer corresponding to the feature map of the size 64*64, and the average PSNR can be enhanced 1 dB compared with the network without skip connections. This work provides a reference for the fusion methods of different scale features in the computational optical imaging.

Additional file 1: Supplementary Table 1. Recommended gestational weight gain of different criteria.

A distributed parallel database resource management method based on directed graph is proposed. By using content distributor based on distributed unstructured P2P network association, the high performance and stability of distributed parallel database system in dynamic changing environment are guaranteed. The problem of network congestion caused by too many redundant messages and the “barrel effect” caused by resource imbalance due to differential configuration is solved, through resource search algorithm based on directed graph lookahead, and the query node cached the resource information of two-level neighbor nodes. By adopting the Linux cgroups resource management mechanism, fully considering the multi tenant and multi factor based resource scheduling strategy, reduce resource fragments and better meet the problem of distributed parallel database storage or hot spot processing.

The rapid growth of data volume brings big challenges to the data center computing, and energy efficiency is one of the most concerned problems. Researchers from various fields are now proposing solutions to green the data center operations. Power usage effectiveness metric plays an important role in the energy saving research. However, the exising usage effectiveness metrics focus on measuring the relationship between the total facility energy consumed and the IT equipment energy consumed, without reflecting the energy efficiency of applications. In this paper, we analyze the requirements of application-level metrics for power usage efficiency of the data centers, and propose two novel energy efficiency metrics to provide strong guidance and useful insight to data center design and optimization. We conduct comprehensive experiments in the practical data centers using BigDataBench, a big data benchmark suite, and the results demonstrate the rationality and efficiency of AxPUE in measuring the actual computation energy consumption in data centers., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, The First Workshop on Big Data Benchmarks, Performance Optimization, and Emerging hardware (BPOE 2013) In conjunction with 2013 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE Big Data 2013)

Impact of sea-level change on coastal areas has long been a concern of the world, especially the coastal countries. It is an important part in the research of the marine environment. Sea-level change is caused by various social and environmental reasons, among which the contribution of the Antarctic ice caps mass change is a significant factor. In order to investigate the correlation between sea-level change of Chinese coastal areas and the Antarctic ice caps mass change, several geo-statistical methods were involved in this paper. The Antarctic equivalent water height and sea level anomaly datasets were applied. First, the periods of the two datasets above-mentioned are found though the spectrum analysis and a further analysis of these periods is made. Then the correlation analysis is carried out using the time series which span from January 2004 to March 2010. Through the rapid inverse Fourier transform we obtained the cross-correlation function, drew cross-correlation function diagram and analyzed correlation degree and the lag time of these two time series. Research shows that (1) the sea level change has a year cycle as the leading period, meanwhile equivalent water height change has a half year cycle as the leading factor and display a complicated multi-scale coupling fluctuation characteristic; (2) The cross-correlation function diagram indicates that these two time series highly positive correlated when the lag time is 8 month and highly negative correlated when the lag time is 26 month. There is a teleconnection between these two events. Sea level change has become more and more important part of the global change and closely related to people's life. Tiny sea level rise will cause aggravating flooding in large tracts of land and coastal erosion and consequence is unimaginable. China's mainland coastline is about 18, 000 km long. About more than 70% of the big cities and more than 50% of the population is concentrated in the eastern coastal areas, which are the most economically developed areas in China. But they are also the most serious vulnerable regions affected by sea level change that will aggravate natural disasters and influence the social economic development in the coastal areas. The fluctuation of the global sea-level change is mainly caused by the global sea water density and mass change. The former factor is mainly caused by the temperature and salinity changes and the latter is influenced by snow and ice ablation and cumulative, precipitation, evaporation, overland runoff and sea-air-land water circulating. With the aggravation of the greenhouse effect, thermal expansion caused by the snow and ice melting and temperature rising has become an important reason of global sea-level change. According to the results of ocean general circulation models (OGCMs) simulation, the thermal expansion is the largest contribution to the sea-level rise in the recent fifty years, which is about 0.3~0.7mm/yr. While the sea-level rise aroused by non polar glacier melting and by Greenland and Antarctic ice mass changes is 0.2~0.4mm/yr and 0.2~0.6mm/yr respectively (1). It's pointed that in the past decade sea-level change due to thermal expansion and non polar glacier change is totally 2.37mm/yr. Compared to the observation of 3.1mm/yr, there still is a discrepancy of 0.73mm/yr, which is the contribution of the polar ice caps changes (2).The polar ice areas are universally recognized to be sensitive and key areas in the research of global change. Investigating the mass balance of Antarctic ice caps plays a key role to make a further know about the global mean sea level changes and other related problems. Therefore, within the framework of a global change research project, the study of the correlation between sea-level change and the Antarctic ice caps melt, as a sub subject, is of great significance to the global climate and marine environment research, which can reduce the uncertainty of evaluating the contribution of the polar ice caps melt to the sea- level rise.

The performance analysis of manufacturing system originates from enterprise financial analysis, its purpose is to objectively analyze and evaluate the factors that can reflect the whole circumstance of the system by gathering all kinds of data in manufacturing system. This thesis mainly studies on the cash flow, which can reflect the managing and operating ability of modern manufacturing system, makes mapping between business indexes and manufacturing process indexes, builds evaluation model based on management accounting, which has the advantages of convenience, promptness and exactness. In the end, this thesis demonstrates the effectiveness of the model through example analysis.

Based on market-structure theory, targeted at the real estate industry in Tianjin, and adopted the data from 1996 till 2006, analyze the real estate market structure and the relationship between its performances. The results show that: the higher the degree of industrial concentration, the higher of the profit margin.

Resource-based cities have to optimize their industry structures to fulfill sustainable development. During this procedure, they should supervise the developing efficiency of those dominant industries, it helps to judge whether the structure adjustment is on the right way. The beyond-efficiency DEA (BE-DEA)model is perfect to such evaluation, it can trace the dynamic efficiency, avoid the passiveness and waste of afterward evaluation. This paper applies this BE-DEA model to an oil resource city, evaluates its dominant industries' developing efficiency both horizontal and vertical. The result offers quantitative proof to adjust the target or policy, and demonstrates BE-DEA model's superiority.