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Background: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the common malignancies worldwide. Slit-Robo GTPase-activating proteins (SRGAPs) have been shown to regulate the occurrence and development of various tumors. However, their specific role in HCC remains elusive.Methods: The expression pattern, genetic alteration and prognostic value of SRGAPs in HCC are analyzed by bioinformatics tools. The biological functions of SRGAP2 in HCC cells are demonstrated by in vitro experiments. The high-throughput RNA sequencing is conducted to explore the underlying molecular mechanisms of SRGAP2 in HCC cells.Results: The expression levels of SRGAP1 and SRGAP2 are significantly elevated in HCC tissues compared to the normal both in Oncomine and TCGA datasets, and SRGAP2 are dramatically upregulated both in mRNA and protein levels. Moreover, higher SRGAP2 is significantly related to the clinical stages of HCC. Meanwhile, SRGAP2 might be an independent prognostic indicator, as it correlates negatively with the clinical outcomes of HCC patients. Further SRGAP2-silencing experiments imply that SRGAP2 might remarkably promote the migration and invasion of HCC cells in EMT-independent manners. Based on the high-throughput RNA sequencing of SRGAP2-knockdown HCC cells, enrichment and network analyses demonstrate that SRGAP2 is closely associated with cellular metabolic signaling.Conclusions: Our study firstly illustrates the crucial role of SRGAP2 in the metastasis of HCC and explores its underlying molecular mechanisms. We identify SRGAP2 as a promising prognostic biomarker and a novel therapeutic target for HCC patients.

© 2018 Elsevier Inc. Among various traditional art forms, brush stroke drawing is one of the widely used styles in modern computer graphic tools such as GIMP, Photoshop and Painter. In this paper, we develop an AI-aided art authoring (A4) system of non-photorealistic rendering that allows users to automatically generate brush stroke paintings in a specific artist's style. Within the reinforcement learning framework of brush stroke generation proposed by Xie et al. (2012), the first contribution in this paper is the application of regularized policy gradient method, which is more suitable for the stroke generation task; the other contribution is to learn artists’ drawing styles from video-captured stroke data by inverse reinforcement learning. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our system can successfully learn artists’ styles and render pictures with consistent and smooth brush strokes.

© 2017 Association for Computing Machinery. Subspace representations have been widely applied for videos in many tasks. In particular, the subspace-based query-by-image video retrieval (QBIVR), facing high challenges on similarity-preserving measurements and efficient retrieval schemes, urgently needs considerable research attention. In this paper, we propose a novel subspace-based QBIVR framework to enable efficient video search. We first define a new geometry-preserving distance metric to measure the image-to-video distance, which transforms the QBIVR task to be the Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) problem. The merit of this distance metric lies in that it helps to preserve the genuine geometric relationship between query images and database videos to the greatest extent. To boost the efficiency of solving the MIPS problem, we introduce two asymmetric hashing schemes which can bridge the domain gap of images and videos properly. The first approach, termed Inner-product Binary Coding (IBC), achieves high-quality binary codes by learning the binary codes and coding functions simultaneously without continuous relaxations. The other one, Bilinear Binary Coding (BBC) approach, employs compact bilinear projections instead of a single large projection matrix to further improve the retrieval efficiency. Extensive experiments on four real-world video datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed approaches, as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Objective: Using correlation analysis between the sperm spontaneous acrosome reaction rate (SARR) and routine semen parameters in male infertility patients, we explored the value of the sperm spontaneous acrosome reaction in the evaluation of sperm functions. Methods: The participants comprised of 219 male infertility patients who had visited the Center for Reproductive Medicine, Shandong University from October 2016 to March 2017. According to the sperm SARR, we classified the patients with infertility into the control group and the case group. According to the WHO human semen examination and processing laboratory manual, fifth edition, recommendations and standards. We obtained routine semen parameters including semen volume, sperm concentration, total motility, and progressive sperm rate, and we measured sperm motility rate and the proportion of sperm with normal morphology. Results: With regard to the total motility, progressive sperm rate, sperm survival rate and the proportion of sperm with normal morphology, there were statistically significant differences between the two groups (p 0.05). Conclusion: Sperm SARR in patients with infertility is closely related to routine semen parameters and plays a supplementary reference in male fertility evaluation.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the application of health assessment instruments in Chinese medicine. METHODS: According to a pre-defined search strategy, a comprehensive literature search for all articles published in China National Knowledge Infrastructure databases was conducted. The resulting articles that met the defined inclusion and exclusion criteria were used for analysis. RESULTS: A total of 97 instruments for health outcome assessment in Chinese medicine have been used in fundamental and theoretical research, and 14 of these were also used in 29 clinical trials that were randomized controlled trials, or descriptive or cross-sectional studies. In 2 152 Chinese medicine-based studies that used instruments in their methodology, more than 150 questionnaires were identified. Among the identified questionnaires, 51 were used in more than 10 articles (0.5%). Most of these instruments were developed in Western countries and few studies (4%) used the instrument as the primary evidence for their conclusions. CONCLUSION: Usage of instruments for health outcome assessment in Chinese medicine is increasing rapidly; however, current limitations include selection rationale, result interpretation and standardization, which must be addressed accordingly.

The ever increasing prevalence of publicly available structured data on the World Wide Web enables new applications in a variety of domains. In this paper, we provide a conceptual approach that leverages such data in order to explain the input-output behavior of trained artificial neural networks. We apply existing Semantic Web technologies in order to provide an experimental proof of concept.

The effect of nanosilica on the sulfate attack resistivity of cement mortar was investigated through study on the mechanical property evolution and the length change of the cement mortar under 5 wt.% sodium sulfate for 6 months. Meanwhile, the effects were compared with those of fly ash-replacement mortar. Results showed that by taking the advantages of nanosilica and fly ash in improving the property of cement mortar at early and later ages, the sulfate attack resistance of cement mortar can be enhanced in mechanical property increase and expansion reduction. Further, it implies that a combination of both pozzolans could enhance the sulfate attack resistivity of cement-based materials.

Lexers and parsers are typically defined separately and connected by a token stream. This separate definition is important for modularity and reduces the potential for parsing ambiguity. However, materializing tokens as data structures and case-switching on tokens comes with a cost. We show how to fuse separately-defined lexers and parsers, drastically improving performance without compromising modularity or increasing ambiguity. We propose a deterministic variant of Greibach Normal Form that ensures deterministic parsing with a single token of lookahead and makes fusion strikingly simple, and prove that normalizing context free expressions into the deterministic normal form is semantics-preserving. Our staged parser combinator library, flap, provides a standard interface, but generates specialized token-free code that runs two to six times faster than ocamlyacc on a range of benchmarks., Comment: PLDI 2023 with appendix