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How beta-amyloid accumulation influences brain atrophy in Alzheimer's disease remains contentious with conflicting findings. We aimed to elucidate the correlations of regional longitudinal atrophy with cross-sectional regional and global amyloid in individuals with mild cognitive impairment and no cognitive impairment. We hypothesized that greater cortical thinning over time correlated with greater amyloid deposition, particularly within Alzheimer’s disease characteristic regions in mild cognitive impairment, and weaker or no correlations in those with no cognitive impairment. 45 patients with mild cognitive impairment and 12 controls underwent a cross-sectional [11C]-Pittsburgh Compound B PET and two retrospective longitudinal structural imaging (follow-up: 23.65 ± 2.04 months) to assess global/regional amyloid and regional cortical thickness, respectively. Separate linear mixed models were constructed to evaluate relationships of either global or regional amyloid with regional cortical thinning longitudinally. In patients with mild cognitive impairment, regional amyloid in the right banks of the superior temporal sulcus was associated with longitudinal cortical thinning in the right medial orbitofrontal cortex (p = 0.04 after False Discovery Rate correction). In the mild cognitive impairment group, greater right banks amyloid burden and less cortical thickness in the right medial orbitofrontal cortex showed greater visual and verbal memory decline over time, which was not observed in controls. Global amyloid was not associated with longitudinal cortical thinning in any locations in either group. Our findings indicate an increasing influence of amyloid on neurodegeneration and memory along the preclinical to prodromal spectrum. Future multimodal studies that include additional biomarkers will be well-suited to delineate the interplay between various pathological processes and amyloid and memory decline, as well as clarify their additive or independent effects along the disease deterioration.

Additional file 1: Supplementary Material 1.

The Spiking Neural Network (SNN) has attracted more and more attention recently. It adopts binary spike signals to transmit information. Benefitting from the information passing paradigm of SNNs, the multiplications of activations and weights can be replaced by additions, which are more energy-efficient. However, its ``Hard Reset" mechanism for the firing activity would ignore the difference among membrane potentials when the membrane potential is above the firing threshold, causing information loss. Meanwhile, quantifying the membrane potential to 0/1 spikes at the firing instants will inevitably introduce the quantization error thus bringing about information loss too. To address these problems, we propose to use the ``Soft Reset" mechanism for the supervised training-based SNNs, which will drive the membrane potential to a dynamic reset potential according to its magnitude, and Membrane Potential Rectifier (MPR) to reduce the quantization error via redistributing the membrane potential to a range close to the spikes. Results show that the SNNs with the ``Soft Reset" mechanism and MPR outperform their vanilla counterparts on both static and dynamic datasets., Comment: Accepted by ECCV2022

Wrapping insulation of coatings is effective for enhancing the microwave-absorbing properties (MAPs) of ferromagnetic absorbents (FMAs). However, the process is still limited by the low bonding strength with the matrix. Herein, an in situ regulation strategy based on the preparation of thin thickness and strong adhesion insulating layers through HNO3 oxidation was developed to address the limitations. The oxidation process of FeSiAl (FSA) powders was carried out by HNO3 following three main steps. First, the original oxide layer first reacted with HNO3 to form Fe3+ and Al3+. Second, the oxide layer composed of Al2O3 and Fe3O4 was preferentially formed due to the negative change in Gibbs free energy. Finally, the oxide and pigment-deposition layers were subjected to competitive growth and dissolution accompanied by the dissolution of Fe and Al atoms. Oxidation time up to 10 min resulted in the formation of a bilayer structure with a thickness of ∼50 nm on the FSA surface, as well as an outer layer crammed of Al(OH)3 and Fe(OH)3, and an inner layer containing mixed Fe2O3, Fe3O4, Al2O3, and SiO2. The MAPs of as-treated FSA achieved minimum reflection loss (RL) of −25.90 dB at 13.36 GHz, as well as absorption bandwidth of 5.61 GHz (RL < −10 dB) at 10.13–15.74 GHz and thickness of 2.5 mm. In sum, the developed route looks promising for the preparation of high-performance FMAs.

Silicone rubber is a widely used functional material whose lifetime and safety properties can be improved by achieving superhydrophobicity on the surface. However, there are few studies on the use of superhydrophobic surfaces as nano-energy devices. In this work, laser etching was used to achieve continuous regulation of the superhydrophobic to superhydrophilic state of the surface on silicone rubber. The modulation of wettability is attributed to laser manufactured micro-nanostructures, while the laser can be used to recover the damaged structures. Meanwhile, a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is fabricated using superhydrophobic silicone rubber and drives the LED to light up. In short, this study provides a simple solution for TENG and its recycling.

Uterine status determines pregnancy success. Although it is well known that superovulation operations can disrupt uterine function, our understanding of the morphological changes in the uterine endometrium at the three-dimensional (3D) level is limited. Here, combining the tissue clearing with 3D deep imaging, we reveal an increase in epithelial density and angiogenesis after ovarian stimulation, which is accompanied by a circulating surge in P4 levels. Using an ovariectomized mouse model, we further detected the separate regulatory effects of P4 and E2 on the uterine endometrium, with P4 promoting endothelial cell growth and E2 inducing epithelial proliferation. Additionally, we observed that the effects of E2 can be partially neutralized by P4, and vice versa. By analyzing the 3D uterine imaging, we discovered an interesting phenomenon in which the growing blood vessels closely surround the remodeling uterine epithelium, indicating a close relationship between angiogenesis and epithelial growth. These findings provide new insight into the uterine epithelial changes and angiogenesis at the 3D level, and explain a potential reason for endometrial changes due to the low implantation rate in patients undergoing clinic super-ovulation.

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is a rapid and simple analytical method that provides qualitative and quantitative elemental information of samples without damaging them and does not re...

Additional file 1.

Additional file 2: Supplementary Table 2. Comparison of the changes in oropharynx and hyoid bone position between class II-norm extraction patients and class II-norm non-extraction patients.

Additional file 1: Fig. S1. (Left) B-cell were isolated from the peripheral blood from healthy donors and cultured in the absence (left) or presence (right) of cytokines and a CD40L expressing fibroblasts as previously described((1)). Flow cytometry was performed for the indicated markers. (Top right) Resting and activated B cells were fixed and stained with PI for cell cycle analysis. (Bottom right) Lysates were collected from resting and activated B-cells and blotted for p-Btk, total Btk, c-myc, and GAPDH. Fig. S2. (top) UMAP plots from 4 different patients with leukemic MCL showing lineage specific clustering of cells. (bottom) Dot plots verifying lineage specific marker enrichment among the individual clusters. Fig. S3. UMAP plots compiled from 4 different patients with leukemic MCL (left) or a reference PMBC B-cell data set (right) showing their distinct transcriptional states with an overall small amount of normal B-cells in leukemic MCL samples. Fig. S4. Jeko cells were retrovirally transduced with lentiviruses encoding either a non-targeting sh or an sh directed against SAE1. Cells were GFP sorted and the total viable cells in each was enumerated 3 days after sorting (n=3 biological replicates). Fig. S5. B cells and MCL cell lines were treated with TAK-981 (100 nM, 24 hours). Lysates were prepared and blotted for an antibody recognizing the SUMO-TAK-981 adduct (above) and GAPDH (below). Fig. S6. Representative cell cycle profiles of primary MCL patients samples taken at the time of beginning TAK-981 treatment in Fig.3B. Fig. S7. Jeko cells were synchronized with palbociclib (500 nM) and treated with either DMSO or TAK-981 (100nM) and lysates. Cell were fixed at the indicated time points and cell cycle distribution was determined of PI stained cells. Fig. S8. Z-138 cells were synchronized with palbociclib (500 nM) and treated with either DMSO or TAK-981 (100nM) and lysates. Cell were fixed at the indicated time points and cell cycle distribution was determined of PI stained cells. Fig. S9. (Top) Z-138 cells were synchronized with Palbociclib (500 nM, 24 hours) followed by drug washout and treatment with nocodazole (50 ng/mL) either in the presence of DMSO or TAK-981 (100 nM) for 24 hours. Both drugs were then washed out and cells were collected every hour for cell cycle analysis and lysates were prepared for protein for SUMOylation levels. (Bottom) Z-138 cells were synchronized with Palbociclib (500 nM, 24 hours) followed by drug washout and treatment with nocodazole (50 ng/mL) for 24 hours. Cells were then treated with either DMSO or TAK-981 for 3 hours. Cells were then washed from drugs and treated with either DMSO or TAK-981 and collected every hour for cell cycle analysis and lysates were prepared for protein for SUMOylation levels. Fig. S10. Results of DAVID functional annotation analysis performed on proteins enriched for sumoylation for SUMO1 (top) and SUMO2/3 (bottom). The percentage of SUMOylated proteins within individual functional annotations are shown along with the false discovery rate (FDR). Fig. S11. (Top). Jeko cells were synchronized with Palbociclib (500 nM, 24 hours) followed by drug washout and treatment with nocodazole (50 ng/mL) either in the presence of DMSO or TAK-981 (100 nM) for 24 hours. Both drugs were then washed out and cells were fixed and stained for CENP-A. Representative confocal images of cells or chromosomes are shown. (Bottom) Enumeration of CENP-A foci from DMSO or TAK-981 treated cells was performed using cellSens software. Results are representative of two independent experiments.

Additional file 4: Supplementary Table 4. Comparison of the changes in oropharynx and hyoid bone position between class II-hyper extraction patients and class II- hyper non-extraction patients.

Additional file 1: Supplementary Table 1. Comparison of the changes in oropharynx and hyoid bone position between class I-norm extraction patients and class I-norm non-extraction patients.

Additional file 3: Supplementary Table 3. Comparison of the changes in oropharynx and hyoid bone position between class I-hyper extraction patients and class I- hyper non-extraction patients.

T-helper (Th) 17 and Th22 cells are critical for the pathogenic process of Kawasaki Disease (KD). A total of 43 children with freshly diagnosed KD and 20 healthy controls (HC) were quantified for the numbers of Th17, Th22 and Th1 cells by flow cytometry. The concentrations of serum IL-17, IL-22, IL-6, IFN-γ and TNF-α were examined by ELISA. Compared to those in the HC, significantly increased numbers of Th17 and Th22 cells, but not Th1 cells, and higher levels of serum IL-17 and IL-22, but not IFN-γ, were found in KD patients. Stratification analysis indicated the numbers of both Th17 and Th22 cells and the concentrations of serum IL-17 and IL-22 in KD patients with coronary artery lesions (CAL) were significantly greater than that in those with noncoronary artery lesions (NCAL). Treatment with the intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) therapy significantly decreased numbers of Th22 and Th17 cells as well as the serum concentrations of IL-22 and IL-17 in KD patients. The concentrations of serum IL-22 and IL-17 were correlated positively with C-reactive protein (CRP) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) values as well as N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) in those patients respectively. Conclusion: Our study provided direct evidence that Th22 and Th17 cells might contribute to the pathogenesis of KD.

IntroductionKawasaki disease (KD) , also known as Kawasaki syndrome, is an acute, self-limited febrile vasculitis that predominantly affects infants and children under 5 years of age [1]. KD is characterized by high spiking fever persisting for more than 5 days, erythematous rash, bilateral conjunctivitis, congestive oral mucosa, swelling lymph node, and edematous extremity [2]. Furthermore, KD is the most common cause of acquired cardiac disease, especially coronary artery aneurysms in children [3]. Although KD has been studied for almost half a century, the pathogenic mechanism of KD remains unclear. Furthermore, while most patients respond well to intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG), roughly one-quarter of the children meeting clinical criteria will go on to have coronary artery inflammation, including aneurysms [4]. Hence, further illustration of the mechanism of KD is a crying need to find a therapeutic for KD treatment clinically.Both innate and adaptive immune systems are involved in the pathogenesis of KD [5]. The early event of visualized immunological abnormality is the activation of innate immune system represented as the elevated numbers of activated monocytes and increased expression of circulating cytokines, such as interleukin (IL)-6 and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) -α [6]. Subsequently, it is generally believed that autoreactive T cell and their inflammatory cytokines play a major role in the development of KD [7]. T helper (Th) 17 cells, a recently identified lineage of CD4+ Th cells, predominantly produce IL-17A. Th17 cell and IL-17A have been shown to participate in host defense responses and inflammatory diseases, such as systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Graves’ disease (GD), and Crohn’s disease (CD) [8-11]. A recent study has shown that a high frequency of Th17 cells and high levels of IL-17 were demonstrated in the acute stage of KD, and that elevated Th17 cells might be associated with tissue damage and coronary artery aneurysm formation [7, 12]. However, there is little information about whether higher frequency of Th17 and higher concentrations of IL-17A also exist in Chinese patients with KD and how Th17 responses are associated with the development of coronary artery aneurysm in KD patients.More notably, a newly identified T-cell subset, termed Th22 cells, has been described as expressing their key cytokines interleukin (IL)-22, which can activate signal transduction and transcription 3 (STAT3) [13]. IL-22, originally termed as an IL-10-related T-cell-derived-inducible factor, enhance innate immunity and promote epithelial cell proliferation and tissue. In contrast, IL-22 also act as regulator in the pathogenesis of RA and SLE [14-15]. Furthermore, recent studies have reported that IL-22 may function as a biphasic cytokine: protective and regenerative in steady state while amplifying proinflammatory signals given by TNF-α [16], which is necessary for exacerbation of vascular injury in KD. However, little is known about the role of Th22 cells in the pathogenesis of KD. We believe that Th22 cells may partially contribute to the formation of coronary aneurysms.Here, in the current study, we sought to further clarify the mechanism underlying hyperactivation of Th22 and Th17 during acute KD. We characterized the numbers of circulating Th22 and Th17 cells by flow cytometry, and measured the concentration of serum inflammatory cytokines by enzymelinked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in 43 Chinese patients with new onset KD. Furthermore, we analyzed the potential association of the numbers of Th22 and Th17 cells with the clinical measures in these KD patients. Our findings indicated that increased numbers of Th22 and Th17 cells might be contributed to the pathogenesis of KD in Chinese patients.

Intestinal microbiota (IM) dysbiosis contributes to the development of autoimmune hepatitis (AIH). This study aimed to investigate the potential effect of fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) in a murine model of experimental AIH (EAH), a condition more similar to that of AIH patients. Changes in the enteric microbiome were determined in AIH patients and EAH mice. Moreover, we established an experimental model of secondary EAH mice harboring dysbiosis (ABx) to analyze the effects of therapeutic FMT administration on follicular regulatory T (TFR) and helper T (TFH) cell imbalances and IM composition in vivo. Alterations of the IM composition and bacterial translocation occurred in AIH patients compared to nonalcoholic fatty liver disease patients and healthy controls (HCs). Therapeutic FMT significantly attenuated liver injury and bacterial translocation and improved the imbalance between splenic TFR cells and TFH cells in ABx EAH mice. Furthermore, therapeutic FMT also partially reversed the increasing trend in serum liver enzymes (ALT and AST) of CXCR5−/−EAH mice on the 28th day. Finally, therapeutic FMT could effectively restore antibiotic-induced IM dysbiosis in EAH mice. Taken together, our findings demonstrated that FMT was capable of controlling hepatitis progression in EAH mice, and the associated mechanism might be involved in the regulation of the TFR/TFH immune imbalance and the restoration of IM composition.

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved competitive performance in the field of ground-based cloud image (GCI) classification. Proposed CNN-based methods can fully extract the local features of images. However, due to the locality of the convolution operation, they cannot well establish the long-range dependencies between the images, and thus they cannot extract the global features of images. Transformer has been applied to computer vision with great success due to its powerful global modeling capability. Inspired by it, we propose a Transformer-based GCI classification method that combines the advantages of the CNN and Transformer models. Firstly, the CNN model acts as a low-level feature extraction tool to generate local feature sequences of images. Then, the Transformer model is used to learn the global features of the images by efficiently extracting the long-range dependencies between the sequences. Finally, a linear classifier is used for GCI classification. In addition, we introduce a center loss function to address the problem of the simple cross-entropy loss not adequately supervising feature learning. Our method is evaluated on three commonly used datasets: ASGC, CCSN, and GCD. The experimental results show that the method achieves 94.24%, 92.73%, and 93.57% accuracy, respectively, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods. It proves that Transformer has great potential to be applied to GCI classification tasks.

Structural breaks have been commonly seen in applications. Specifically for detection of change points in time, research gap still remains on the setting in ultra high dimension, where the covariates may bear spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach to detect change points in ultra high dimension, by firstly proposing the dynamic titled current correlation screening method to reduce the input dimension, and then detecting possible change points in the framework of group variable selection. Not only the spurious correlation between ultra-high dimensional covariates is taken into consideration in variable screening, but non-convex penalties are studied in change point detection in the ultra high dimension. Asymptotic properties are derived to guarantee the asymptotic consistency of the selection procedure, and the numerical investigations show the promising performance of the proposed approach.

This paper studies constrained text generation, which is to generate sentences under certain pre-conditions. We focus on CommonGen, the task of generating text based on a set of concepts, as a representative task of constrained text generation. Traditional methods mainly rely on supervised training to maximize the likelihood of target sentences.However, global constraints such as common sense and coverage cannot be incorporated into the likelihood objective of the autoregressive decoding process. In this paper, we consider using reinforcement learning to address the limitation, measuring global constraints including fluency, common sense and concept coverage with a comprehensive score, which serves as the reward for reinforcement learning. Besides, we design a guided decoding method at the word, fragment and sentence levels. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly increases the concept coverage and outperforms existing models in various automatic evaluations.

ObjectiveMAPT mutations typically cause behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia with or without parkinsonism. Previous studies have shown that symptomatic MAPT mutation carriers have frontotemporal atrophy, yet studies have shown mixed results as to whether presymptomatic carriers have low gray matter volumes. To elucidate whether presymptomatic carriers have lower structural brain volumes within regions atrophied during the symptomatic phase, we studied a large cohort of MAPT mutation carriers using a voxelwise approach.MethodsWe studied 22 symptomatic carriers (age 54.7±9.1, 13 female) and 43 presymptomatic carriers (age 39.2±10.4, 21 female). Symptomatic carriers' clinical syndromes included: behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (18), an amnestic dementia syndrome (2), Parkinson's disease (1), and mild cognitive impairment (1). We performed voxel-based morphometry on T1 images and assessed brain volumetrics by clinical subgroup, age, and mutation subtype.ResultsSymptomatic carriers showed gray matter atrophy in bilateral frontotemporal cortex, insula, and striatum, and white matter atrophy in bilateral corpus callosum and uncinate fasciculus. Approximately 20% of presymptomatic carriers had low gray matter volumes in bilateral hippocampus, amygdala, and lateral temporal cortex. Within these regions, low gray matter volumes emerged in a subset of presymptomatic carriers as early as their thirties. Low white matter volumes arose infrequently among presymptomatic carriers.InterpretationA subset of presymptomatic MAPT mutation carriers showed low volumes in mesial temporal lobe, the region ubiquitously atrophied in all symptomatic carriers. With each decade of age, an increasing percentage of presymptomatic carriers showed low mesial temporal volume, suggestive of early neurodegeneration.

Although time-dependent springback is minor compared with instantaneous springback, its deformation-history dependent effects may deteriorates the compactness of parts assembly and poses potential hazards to the safety and stability of the equipment systems especially under harsh service conditions. However, time-dependent springback still has not been paid enough attention, and how to accurately predict this phenomenon is still a challenge needed to be solved urgently. In this work, taking high-strength Ti-3Al-2.5V titanium tubular materials (HSTT) upon bending as a case, the experimental exploration of the physical mechanisms and the prediction modeling for time-dependent springback of the HSTT were conducted. First, the residual stress and dislocation evolution of HSTT during bending, instantaneous springback and time-dependent springback are comprehensively experimentally obtained, and the compression-tension uneven residual stress-driven creep deformation mechanism of time-dependent springback for HSTT was revealed. Then, considering stress attenuation, a Viscoelastic-Kelvin constitutive model for time-dependent springback was developed and combined with the stress invariant-based model (SIM) and Chord modulus model to accurately predict the whole process of bending, instantaneous springback and time-dependent springback of the HSTT. Finally, the verified model is employed to explore the evolution rules of time-dependent springback and residual stress of HSTT upon bending, and the deformation-history dependent effects of time-dependent springback for spatial multi-bending component are clarified. The findings and methods of this study could aid in achieving higher precision manufacturing of high performance tubular components.

A framework of computational ghost imaging based on the conditional adversarial network is proposed to efficiently implement the reconstruction of object images in this research. Although the traditional ghost imaging can recover object images with a few amount of measured intensities and corresponding speckle patterns, the visual quality of reconstructed images is seriously influenced by a lot of noise. To solve this issue, a conditional adversarial network is designed to improve the quality of the noisy images reconstructed by the traditional ghost imaging. The objective function is composed of multiple loss metrics, which avoid suffering from training instability of the network. Especially, the combination of critic loss and gradient penalty metrics guarantees that a wide variety of network architectures are used as the generator and almost no hyperparameter tuning is required in the network. Most importantly, the proposed network can be trained with simulated data without spending a long time to collect the practical training samples and considering the experimental condition. After training, the parameters of the network such as kernel weights of convolution filters are optimized from the adversarial process between the generator and the discriminator, object images can be perfectly reconstructed at a very low sampling ratio. Through the simulated and optical experiments, it is demonstrated that the proposed method has much better performance than other methods such as the traditional and compressive-sensing-based methods.

A voltage-programmed circuit is presented for active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays. The circuit contains five low temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) thin film transistors (TFTs) and two capacitors. The circuit can effectively compensate both the threshold voltage shift and the power supply voltage drop. In the circuit, the OLED can avoid flicker in the initialization step. The simulation results demonstrate that the current errors rates of the pixel circuit are below 2.2%.

Rationale: Gastrointestinal bleeding as the first sign of Brunner's gland adenoma (BGA) is an extremely rare, and its clinical features and treatment methods have not been well described. Patient concerns: We described a 81-year-old female patient with coronary artery disease and chronic atrial fibrillation presenting with presenting with gastrointestinal bleeding requiring blood transfusion. Diagnoses: The diagnosis of our case mainly refered to radiologic imaging and endoscopic examination. Histological result was compatible with BGA. Interventions: This mass lesion (6 × 7 cm diameter) was successfully totally removed by endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) for more than three hours. Outcomes: The patient was followed up for 6 months to date without recurrence. Lessons: Endoscopic removal is considered as a safe and low-risk treatment for elderly patients with severe underlying diseases presenting with gastrointestinal bleeding.

Single-pixel correlated imaging has been developed as one of the most promising techniques in the past decades. In this paper, a new mechanism of single-pixel correlated imaging is designed for multiple-image authentication. The object wave is sequentially modulated by a series of phase-only mask pairs embedded into two cascaded spatial light modulators. The modulated wave passes through the input image located in the object plane, and its intensity is recorded as one of the ciphertext values by using a single-pixel bucket detector without spatial resolution. The sparse data of plaintext images are obtained with the multiple-level wavelet transform and used to construct an interim image with the help of binary amplitude masks. The interim image with a smaller size than that of plaintext images is considered as the input of single-pixel correlated imaging, which can guarantee the number of measurements reduced. Simultaneously, the phase-only mask pairs are retrieved from the 2D patterns formed with the row vectors of the spatially orthogonal Hadamard matrix by using an efficient iterative phase retrieval algorithm. Because the redundancy between speckle patterns generated with these phase-only mask pairs is greatly restrained, the number of measurements can be further reduced. Moreover, the related binary amplitude masks are employed as the secret keys so that the security level is also extensively enhanced. Given the above, the proposed method can significantly achieve the goal of multiple-image verification and provide a different research approach for optical authentication based on single-pixel correlated imaging.

This study is aimed at examining the potential role of regulatory T- (Treg-) Th1-Th17-Th22 cells in the pathogenic process of autoimmune hepatitis (AIH). The numbers of Foxp3+Tregs and Th1, Th17, and Th22 cells were measured in 32 AIH patients using flow cytometry. Moreover, a murine model of experimental autoimmune hepatitis (EAH) was also established and used to investigate the function of Treg-Th1-Th17-Th22 cells in disease progression. AIH patients undergoing an active state had significantly decreased numbers of CD3+CD4+CD25+Foxp3+Tregs and increased numbers of CD3+CD4+CD25−Foxp3+T, CD3+CD4+IFN-γ+Th1, CD3+CD4+IL-17+Th17, and CD3+CD4+IL-2+Th22 cells as well as higher levels of Th1/Th17/Th22-type cytokines compared to AIH patients in remission and HC. Additionally, the numbers of CD3+CD4+CD25+Foxp3+Tregs were negatively correlated with the numbers of Th1-Th17-Th22 cells. Also, the serum levels of IL-17A and IL-22 were correlated positively with liver injury (ALT/AST), whereas the serum levels of IL-10 were correlated negatively with hypergammaglobulinaemia (IgG, IgM) in AIH patients. Interestingly, the percentages of spleen Tregs, expression of Foxp3 mRNA, and liver IL-10 levels decreased, whereas the percentages of spleen Th1-Th17-Th22 cells, expression of T-bet/AHR/RORγt mRNA, and liver IFN-γ, IL-17, and IL-22 levels increased in the murine model of EAH. Our findings demonstrated that an imbalance between Tregs and Th1-Th17-Th22 cells might contribute to the pathogenic process of AIH.

We establish, for the first time, connections between feedforward neural networks with ReLU activation and tropical geometry --- we show that the family of such neural networks is equivalent to the family of tropical rational maps. Among other things, we deduce that feedforward ReLU neural networks with one hidden layer can be characterized by zonotopes, which serve as building blocks for deeper networks; we relate decision boundaries of such neural networks to tropical hypersurfaces, a major object of study in tropical geometry; and we prove that linear regions of such neural networks correspond to vertices of polytopes associated with tropical rational functions. An insight from our tropical formulation is that a deeper network is exponentially more expressive than a shallow network., Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures

We introduce here the concept of establishing Parity-time symmetry through a gauge transformation involving a shift of the mirror plane for the Parity operation. The corresponding unitary transformation on the system's constitutive matrix allows us to generate and explore a family of equivalent Parity-time symmetric systems. We further derive that unidirectional zero reflection can always be associated with a gauged PT-symmetry and demonstrate this experimentally using a microstrip transmission-line with magnetoelectric coupling. This study allows us to use bianisotropy as a simple route to realize and explore exceptional point behaviour of PT-symmetric or generally non-Hermitian systems., Comment: 13 pages total, 5 figures, 1 appendix

Rationale: Fungal infection of gastrointestinal (GI) tract is usually seen in immunocompromised patients, but can rarely occur in immunocompetent people in whom no permissive factor is present. Patient concerns: We describe a 68-year-old male immunocompetent patient presenting with simultaneous fungal esophagitis and giant gastric ulcer. Diagnoses: Repeated endoscopic biopsies were taken from the giant gastric ulcer edge and base and histology demonstrated granulation tissue and pseudohyphal fungal forms. Interventions: The patient was treated with fluconazole and omeprazole for 8 weeks. Outcomes: After antifungal treatment with fluconazole, the patient's clinical symptoms gradually disappeared with the healing of gastric ulcer, which never recurred in this patient until 3 months after follow-up. Lessons: Nonhealing gastroesophageal ulcers highlights the importance of repeated endoscopies and biopsies.

Rationale: Radiation-induced hemorrhagic gastritis is an infrequent cause of upper gastrointestinal bleeding and difficult to manage. The current standard treatment has not been well established. Patient concerns: We described a 32-year-old male patient with hemorrhagic gastritis induced by external radiotherapy for hepatocellular carcinoma recurrence. Diagnoses: The endoscopic examination showed a diffuse area of bleeding in the gastric antrum. Interventions: After failure of conventional hemostasis treatment, we successfully stopped the hemorrhage with repeated endoscopic argon plasma coagulation (APC) combined with low-dose polyglycerol sclerotherapy. Outcomes: The patient was followed up for 6 months to date without recurrence. Lessons: Based on this case, we think that endoscopic APC combined with low-dose polidocanol sclerotherapy can be tried as a treatment for potentially life-threatening radiation-induced hemorrhagic gastritis.

Background: The intestinal microbiota is linked with allergic reaction diseases. However, the difference in the fecal microbiota composition between sensitized wheezy and nonsensitized subjects in Chinese children remains unknown. The aim of this study was to quantitate the amounts of fecal microbiota in wheezy children, and to explore the correlation between fecal microbiota and serum Th1/Th2/Th17-type cytokines and total IgE in these patients. Methods: The amounts of Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus were determined using a 16S-RNA real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method in wheezy children (cases) and nonwheezy controls. Serum Th1/Th2/Th17-type cytokines levels were measured using flow a cytometric bead array assay. In addition, the concentrations of total serum IgE was also determined. Results: In comparison with that in the healthy control (HC), significantly lower abundance of Bifidobacterium and lower levels of Th1 cytokines (IFN-γ and TNF-α), but higher levels of Th2-type cytokines (IL-4, IL-5) and Th17-type (IL-17A) cytokine were detected in children with bronchiolitis and asthma. But there was no significant difference in the amounts of Lactobacillus. Interestingly, the amounts of fecal Bifidobacterium were correlated positively with serum Th1 cytokines IFN-γ, and correlated negatively with serum Th17 cytokines IL-17A, Th2 cytokines IL-4 and serum total IgE in these patients. Conclusions: Our findings demonstrated that lower quantity of Bifidobacterium, but not Lactobacillus, may be correlated with asthma and bronchiolitis in chinese children. These results also may provide guidance in choosing the proper probiotics for wheezing children.

We develop a new method to test structural changes in quantile regression in the presence of fixed censoring. The testing procedure is based on the observations in an informative subsetand is conducted with the subgradient of the quantile objective function, which only requires estimating the model under the null hypothesis. The proposed method is easy to understand and convenient to compute.We establish the limiting distribution of the test statistic under the null hypothesis,and show that its asymptotic critical values can be obtained via simulation methods.Simulation studies show that the proposed method has competitive performance but higher computational efficiency compared with the Powell-based method in finite samples.In addition, an empirical application to the American earnings gap is used to illustrate the performance of the proposed method.

Similarity between objects is multi-faceted and it can be easier for human annotators to measure it when the focus is on a specific aspect. We consider the problem of mapping objects into view-specific embeddings where the distance between them is consistent with the similarity comparisons of the form "from the t-th view, object A is more similar to B than to C". Our framework jointly learns view-specific embeddings exploiting correlations between views. Experiments on a number of datasets, including one of multi-view crowdsourced comparison on bird images, show the proposed method achieves lower triplet generalization error when compared to both learning embeddings independently for each view and all views pooled into one view. Our method can also be used to learn multiple measures of similarity over input features taking class labels into account and compares favorably to existing approaches for multi-task metric learning on the ISOLET dataset.

(2006). Chinese Philosophy Should 'Speak for Itself' and 'Speak About Itself' Contemporary Chinese Thought: Vol. 37, No. 2, pp. 4-21.

An examination of the tomb structure of Guodian Tomb No. 1, the special characteristics of the excavated burial goods, the style of the script on the bamboo slips and so on, shows that these are similar to the excavated Chu tomb burial goods and the style of script on the bamboo slips of the previously discovered tombs near the old Chu capital Jinan, at Jingmen Baoshan, Jiangling Yutaishang, Wangshan, Wuchang Yidi, and so on. Thus, we can date Guodian Tomb No. 1's burial date to the late middle Warring States period.1

Of all social activities, the two that most engage our attention are economic relationships and relations between the sexes. Both derive from the need for survival and continuation.

A l'occasion du seminaire international sur la pensee de Feng Youlan qui s'est tenu a Beijing les 4-6 decembre 1990, l'A. s'est engage dans de nouvelles recherches sur la philosophie Lixue des periodes Song et Ming, composee de trois ecoles differentes: celle du principe absolu (lixue), celle du principe subjectif (xinxue), celle du principe objectif (qixue). Aujourd'hui, la theorie physique de l'harmonie et de l'integration a transcende ce cadre tripartite pour former un nouveau systeme pohilosophique qui incarne l'essence et la vitalite de la culture chinoise

The mainstream of modern Chinese philosophical development (i.e., from the Opium War to the May Fourth Movement) is the movement to develop bourgeois philosophy, also known as the movement of "New Learning" (Xin xue yundong). In modern times, this movement underwent the various cycles of generation, emergence, development, progress toward maturity, and decline. Owing to the limitations and stipulations of the nature of semicolonial and semifeudal society and the basic contradictions in society, and to the fact that capitalism did not develop fully in China, modern China's bourgeois philosophy contained within itself a certain duality of character. In this essay, I would like to offer some discussions on this topic in the hope of learning something from the reactions of comrades.