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Single image haze removal, which is to recover the clear version of a hazy image, is a challenging trask in computer vision. In this paper, an additive haze model is proposed to approximate the hazy image formation process. In contrast with the traditional optical model, it regards the haze as an additive layer to a clean image. The model thus avoids estimating the medium transmission rate and the global atmospherical light. In addition, based on a critical observation that haze changes gradually and smoothly accross the image, a haze smoothness prior is proposed to constrain this model. This prior assumes that the haze layer is much smoother than the clear image. Benefiting from this prior, we can directly separate the clean image from a single hazy image. Experimental results and comparisons with synthetic images and real-world images demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art single image haze removal algorithms.

Video deblurring, which aims at restoring the sharp video from blurry video, is drawing increasing attention in the field of computer vision. In this paper, a method called Multi-Attention Convolutional Neural Network (MACNN) consisting of the temporal-spatial attention module, the frame channel attention module, and the feature extraction-reconstruction module is proposed. First, we use the temporal-spatial attention module and the frame channel attention module to capture features with temporal and spatial information existing across neighboring frames. Then, these captured features are fused and reconstructed to restore the sharp frame. Last but not least, we train MACNN together with a content loss and a perceptual loss in an end-to-end manner to recover realistic video details. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation results on standard benchmarks demonstrate the proposed MACNN is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and visual effect.

Stereo matching is one of the popular methods to acquire the depth maps in 3-D reconstruction due to its high accuracy and completeness. However, traditional stereo matching methods are only suitable for general scenes or aerial images instead of urban scenes from large-scale satellite imageries. This article presents a novel double propagation stereo matching (DPSM) for urban 3-D reconstruction from satellite images. To make full use of the geometrical properties of man-made buildings, stereo-rectified satellite images, as input, are initialized to multiple superpixels with geometric models. Then, three similarity metrics are combined to calculate the weighted matching cost. A novel double propagation optimization is developed to optimize iteratively the weighted matching cost under the constraints of region boundaries and geometric models, and the disparity maps can be obtained by minimizing the energy function. Consequently, the corresponding dense 3-D point clouds and digital surface models (DSMs) are calculated by triangulation. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on stereo images captured by Pleiades and WorldView-2 satellites show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the most state-of-the-art stereo matching algorithms in terms of preserving depth discontinuous areas and restoring occlusions.

Background Isthmus-originating papillary thyroid carcinoma has unique clinicopathological characteristics. There are no specific guidelines regarding the extent of surgery for isthmic papillary thyroid carcinoma. We aimed to evaluate the characteristics of clinically lymph node–negative patients with solitary isthmic papillary thyroid carcinoma and to determine the best surgical protocol for these patients. Methods A total of 904 patients diagnosed with solitary papillary thyroid carcinoma who underwent surgery were retrospectively reviewed. These patients were divided into the isthmic group (246 patients) or lobar group (658 patients). We compared the 2 groups and conducted a multivariate analysis to assess risk factors for ipsilateral and contralateral central lymph node metastasis in isthmic papillary thyroid carcinoma patients. Nomograms for predicting central lymph node metastasis in isthmic papillary thyroid carcinoma patients were developed and internal calibration was performed for these models. Results Isthmic papillary thyroid carcinoma patients have a significantly higher incidence of extrathyroidal extension and central lymph node metastasis than do lobar papillary thyroid carcinoma patients. For isthmic papillary thyroid carcinoma patients, sex, BRAF V600E mutation, chronic lymphocytic thyroiditis, tumor size, margin, and extrathyroidal extension were independent risk factors of ipsilateral central lymph node metastasis. Body mass index, BRAF V600E mutation, tumor size, location, and extrathyroidal extension were independent risk factors of contralateral central lymph node metastasis. All the above factors were incorporated into nomograms, which showed the perfect discriminative ability. Conclusion Based on the predictive nomograms, we proposed a risk stratification scheme and corresponding individualized surgical treatment based on different nomogram scores. In the debate about prophylactic central neck dissection among clinically lymph node-negative patients with solitary isthmic papillary thyroid carcinoma, our nomograms provide the balance to avoid overtreatment and undertreatment through personal risk assessment.

Purpose: There is no research evidence demonstrate which is the better partner strategy, endocrine therapy or chemotherapy, to combine with anti-HER2 therapy as the first-line management of hormone receptor (HR)-positive (HR+) and HER2-positive (HER2+) metastatic breast cancer (MBC). We wished to ascertain if trastuzumab plus endocrine therapy is noninferior to trastuzumab plus chemotherapy. Patients and Methods: We conducted an open-label, noninferiority, phase III, randomized, controlled trial (NCT01950182) at nine hospitals in China. Participants, stratified by previous adjuvant endocrine therapy and disease status (recurrent disease vs. de novo metastasis), were assigned randomly (1:1) to receive trastuzumab plus endocrine therapy (per investigator's choice of oestrogen-receptor modulators or aromatase inhibitor, with/without concurrent ovarian suppression) or chemotherapy (per investigator's choice of taxanes, capecitabine, or vinorelbine). The primary endpoint was progression-free survival (PFS) with a noninferiority upper margin of 1.35 for the HR. The intention-to-treat population was used in primary and safety analyses. Results: A total of 392 patients were enrolled and assigned randomly to receive trastuzumab plus endocrine therapy (ET group, n = 196) or trastuzumab plus chemotherapy (CT group, n = 196). After a median follow-up of 30.2 months [interquartile range (IQR) 15.0–44.7], the median PFS was 19.2 months [95% confidence interval (CI), 16.7–21.7)] in the ET group and 14.8 months (12.8–16.8) in the CT group (hazard ratio, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.71–1.09; Pnoninferiority < 0.0001). A significantly higher prevalence of toxicity was observed in the CT group compared with the ET group. Conclusions: Trastuzumab plus endocrine therapy was noninferior to trastuzumab plus chemotherapy in patients with HR+HER2+ MBC.

Purpose Endothelial dysfunction and the subsequent decrease in endothelium-dependent vascular relaxation of small arteries are major features of hypertension. Artemisinin, a well-known antimalarial drug, has been shown to exert protecting roles against endothelial cell injury in cardiac and pulmonary vascular diseases. The current study aimed to investigate the effects of artemisinin on endothelium-dependent vascular relaxation and arterial blood pressure, as well as the potential signalling pathways in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHRs). Methods In this study, acetylcholine (ACh)-induced dose-dependent relaxation assays were performed to evaluate vascular endothelial function after treatment with artemisinin. Artemisinin was administered to the rats by intravenous injection or to arteries by incubation for the acute exposure experiments, and it was administered to rats by intraperitoneal injection for 28 days for the chronic experiments. Results Both acute and chronic administration of artemisinin decreased the heart rate and improved ACh-induced endothelium-dependent relaxation but negligibly affected the arterial blood pressure in SHRs. Incubation with artemisinin decreased basal vascular tension, NAD(P)H oxidase activity and reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels, but it also increased endothelial nitric oxide (NO) synthase (eNOS) activity and NO levels in the mesenteric artery, coronary artery, and pulmonary artery of SHRs. Artemisinin chronic administration to SHRs increased the protein expression of eNOS and decreased the protein expression of the NAD(P)H oxidase subunits NOX-2 and NOX-4 in the mesenteric artery. Conclusion These results indicate that treatment with artemisinin has beneficial effects on reducing the heart rate and basal vascular tension and improving endothelium-dependent vascular relaxation in hypertension, which might occur by increasing eNOS activation and NO release and inhibiting NAD(P)H oxidase derived ROS production., Graphical Abstract

In this work, different doping strategies are adopted to improve the photocatalytic activity of KTaO3 (KT) by hybrid functional theory. The La and W monodoped KTs are n-type semiconductors and the photocatalytic performance of Ti, Mo, Cr, N, La–Bi, La–Cr, W–N, Cr–N, Cr–Ti doped KTs are limited by either wide bandgaps or the appeared local unoccupied impurity states. The Bi, C monodoped and La–C, Mo–N, Mo–Ti, W–Ti codoped KTs possess suitable bandgaps of 2.12, 2.06, 1.39, 2.66, 2.66, and 2.61 eV for absorbing visible light without the introduction of localized unoccupied states. The band edge alignments suggest that Mo–N and W–Ti codoped KTs possess the ability for spontaneous overall water-splitting, Bi and Mo–Ti doped KTs can only spontaneously produce oxygen, and C doped KTs only spontaneously generate hydrogen. While La–C doped KT is thermodynamically unfeasible to generating both hydrogen and oxygen. Thus, Mo–N and W–Ti codoped KTs are promising photocatalysts for overall water-splitting, and Bi, C, and Mo–Ti doped KTs are considered for Z-scheme photocatalysis.

5G defines below 100 GHz as the millimeter-wave bands, whereas 100 GHz - 3 THz is categorized as THz band in 6G. Deep leraning (DL) is expected to enable a significant paradigm shift in 6G wireless networks. In this paper, D-band 90-Gbps single channel PAM-4 signal generation and transmission over 10-km SMF and 3-m wireless link at 140-GHz can be achieved. A novel complex-valued neural network (CVNN) equalizer using ‘CReLU’ activation function to directly recover PAM-4 signals from received noised signals is demonstrated. There are three DSP options in the experiment. In Opt .1, firstly conducted cascaded multi-modulus algorithm (CMMA) pre-equalization (pre-EQ) at transmitter, then processed via frequency offset estimation (FOE), carrier phase recovery (CPR) and finally real-valued neural network (RVNN) equalization at receiver. Here, the RVNN equalizers include DNN with a softmax output layer, two-step joint-DNN equalizer and LSTM. The experimental results show that LSTM-based equalizer outperforms the other real NN-based equalizers by average 0.5 to 1.5 dB at BER of 10−3 magnitude. Differently from Opt . 1, real-valued CMMA pre-EQ at transmitter is unexpected for CVNN in the other two options. In Opt . 2, we only combine down-conversion and CVNN regarded as ‘pure data-driven’ training at receiver. This pure data-driven CVNN equalizer improves BER a lot and also has a larger computation burden, especially BER is as low as 1 × 10−4 with n 0 = 571 and n 1 = 200 training cells and the time complexity reaches 350000 in one iteration. Thanks to the aid of traditional mathematical-oriented models including FOE and CPR, the computation burden of CVNN in Opt . 3 is released significantly. Furthermore, we compare the performance of CVNN and RVNN in terms of BER decision accuracy, time complexity and receiver sensitivity. Followed by the same DSP with the same complexity, the comparison result between DNN and CVNN in the same structure of [371-260-1] with 11000 samples and 300 epochs shows that CVNN performs better due to its reservation of phase information. Therefore, we believe that the joint use of model-based, e.g., FOE, CPR steps and complex DL-based techniques has a potential for the future 6G wireless physical layer algorithms.

Depression endangers people's health conditions and affects the social order as a mental disorder. As an efficient diagnosis of depression, automatic depression detection has attracted lots of researcher's interest. This study presents an attention-based Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for depression detection to make full use of the difference between depression and non-depression between timeframes. The proposed model uses frame-level features, which capture the temporal information of depressive speech, to replace traditional statistical features as an input of the LSTM layers. To achieve more multi-dimensional deep feature representations, the LSTM output is then passed on attention layers on both time and feature dimensions. Then, we concat the output of the attention layers and put the fused feature representation into the fully connected layer. At last, the fully connected layer's output is passed on to softmax layer. Experiments conducted on the DAIC-WOZ database demonstrate that the proposed attentive LSTM model achieves an average accuracy rate of 90.2% and outperforms the traditional LSTM network and LSTM with local attention by 0.7% and 2.3%, respectively, which indicates its feasibility.

Objectives. This study aimed to investigate whether soluble dietary fibers (SDFs) could protect against obesity by influencing weight, body mass index (BMI), body fat rate (BFR), visceral fat rate (VFR), or waistline. Methods. We examined obese adult patients from western China at 0 and 3 weeks after an SDF diet. Index assessments of obesity including height, weight, BMI, BFR, VFR, and waistline were carried out. We used the Mann–Whitney U test to examine the difference between the usual diet and the SDF group. Results. Weight, BMI, BFR, and waistline were reduced in both the control group and the SDF group ( P < 0.001 ). The reduction of the four indices in the SDF group was significantly higher than in the control group ( P < 0.001 ). Higher intake of various SDFs has significantly reduced the weight, BMI, BFR, and waistline than the usual diet group in obesity. Conclusion. Our results indicated that increased intake of SDFs in the diet of obese patients would protect against obesity in the first 3 weeks.

BACKGROUND ACTA2 gene is a specific gene that encodes actin α2. Multisystem smooth muscle dysfunction syndrome (MSMDS) is a multisystem disease characterized by aortic and cerebrovascular lesions caused by ACTA2 gene mutations. There have been many reports of cardiac, pulmonary and cerebrovascular lesions caused by MSMDS; however, few studies have focused on seizures caused by MSMDS. CASE SUMMARY Our patient was a girl aged 7 years and 8 mo with recurrent cough, asthma and seizures for 7 years. She was diagnosed with severe pneumonia, congenital heart disease, cardiac insufficiency, and malnutrition in the local hospital. Cardiac ultrasonography revealed congenital heart disease, patent ductus arteriosus (with a diameter of 0.68 cm), left coronary arteriectasis, patent oval foramen (0.12 cm), tricuspid and pulmonary regurgitation, and pulmonary hypertension. Cerebral magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic resonance angiography indicated stiffness in the brain vessels, together with multiple aberrant signaling shadows in bilateral paraventricular regions. A heterozygous mutation (c.536G>A) was identified in the ACTA2 gene, resulting in generation of p.R179H. Finally, the girl was diagnosed with MSMDS combined with epilepsy. The patient had 4 episodes of seizures before treatment, and no onset of seizure was reported after oral administration of sodium valproate for 1 year. CONCLUSION MSMDS has a variety of clinical manifestations and unique cranial imaging features. Cerebrovascular injury and white matter injury may lead to seizures. Gene detection can confirm the diagnosis and prevent missed diagnosis or misdiagnosis.

Yong Chen,1 Yanjuan Chen,2 Li Zhao,3 Hui He,3 Laiyou Wei,1 Wenjuan Lai,1 Jingxia Yuan,1 Xiaoping Hong,1 Lixiong Liu,1 Baojiang Wang,4 Kutty Selva Nandakumar,5,&ast; Dongzhou Liu1,&ast; 1Division of Rheumatology and Research, The Second Clinical Medical College, Jinan University (Shenzhen People’s Hospital), Shenzhen, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China; 2School of Basic Medicine, Jinan University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China; 3Division of Health Management, The Second Clinical Medical College, Jinan University (Shenzhen People’s Hospital), Shenzhen, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China; 4Shenzhen Maternity & Child Healthcare Hospital, Shenzhen, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China; 5Southern Medical University-Karolinska Institute United Medical Inflammation Center, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Dongzhou LiuDivision of Rheumatology and Research, The Second Clinical Medical College, Jinan University (Shenzhen People’s Hospital), Shenzhen, Guangdong, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 183 2111 6879Email liu_dz2001@sina.comPurpose: Inflamm-aging is a novel-concept in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) with accelerating aging process. We try to find a correlation between serum albumin/globulin (A/G) ratio and clinical biochemical parameters, incidence of aging-related diseases (ARDs) as well as inflammaging-related molecules.Patients and Methods: Healthy controls (HC) and RA patients were compared with their clinical biochemical parameters including albumin and globulin levels, A/G ratio, and levels of serum lipids. Incidence of ARDs in RA was compared with A/G ratio, having a cut off value of 1.2. Expression levels of leptin and Trf2 genes in PBMCs, and inflammatory factors like IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8 and TNF-ɑ between HC and RA patients were compared, and correlated with the A/G ratio.Results: Compared to HC, RA patients had decreased levels of albumin, while globulin levels were found to be increased, which led to a significantly lower A/G ratio in RA patients. A/G ratio rather than ESR and CRP had significant correlation with dyslipidemia in RA patients. Patients with A/G < 1.2 had a higher risk of ARDs than patients with A/G > 1.2. The RR was 2.48 (95% CI: 1.79 to 3.64, p < 0.0001). In addition, A/G ratio has positively correlated to leptin and Trf2 expression, while an inverse correlation was observed with the levels of inflamm-aging related cytokines like IL-6, IL-8 and TNF-ɑ.Conclusion: A decreased A/G ratio in RA patients has significantly correlated with dyslipidemia and ARDs, as well as inflammaging- related adipokine and pro-inflammatory cytokines. Thus, A/G ratio could be a reliable marker for evaluating the inflammaging process during clinical management in ARDs.Keywords: inflammation, age-related disease, dyslipidemia, leptin, biomarker

A transmitarray antenna with an elliptical cylindrical shape is presented for a wide-angle multibeam radiation in this communication. The transmitarray has a cylindrical radiating aperture with an elliptical cross-section, namely, elliptical cylindrical shape. Multiple feeds can be placed on the middle horizontal plane to realize multiple beams. Inspired by a 2-D Ruze lens, the antenna shape and the phase compensation are jointly designed according to the desired maximal beam direction. Innovative methods including a feed refocusing analysis and a virtual focal length are utilized to achieve the phase compensation across the 3-D aperture for multiple beam radiations with a small scanning loss. In order to validate the proposed antenna, a prototype operating in the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) $E$ -band has been designed, fabricated, and measured. By changing the position of the feeding gain horn along the refocusing arc, the main beam of antenna can be scanned in 11 directions. The measured peak boresight realized gain is 27 dBi at 70.5 GHz and a beam coverage of ±43° with a less than 2.7 dB scanning loss is obtained.

Vasculopathy is an important complication of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), which is closely related to oxidative stress and inflammation. Haptoglobin (Hp), an acute-phase protein, binds to hemoglobin (Hb) and prevents haeme-iron oxidative damage. To investigate the distribution of the frequencies of Hp genotypes and to analyse the association between Hp gene polymorphisms and vascular complications in diabetes patients. The study included 171 patients with T2DM without vascular complications and 797 patients with T2DM with vascular complications. The clinical characteristics of the studied population were recorded. Hp genotyping was performed using polymerase chain reaction–sequence specific primers (PCR-SSP). Our results showed that the frequencies of Hp genotypes in all 968 T2DM patients were as follows: Hp1-1, 4.98%; Hp2-1, 38.07%; and Hp2-2, 56.95%. Although there was no significant difference in the Hp allele or genotype frequencies among individuals with vascular complications in the T2DM groups and controls regardless of gender, we found that the distribution of the Hp2-2 genotype and allele frequency was higher in males with diabetic retinopathy than in the control group (p

Background Three-dimensional computed tomography bronchography and angiography (3D-CTBA) provides detailed imaging information for pulmonary segmentectomy. This study was performed to verify the feasibility of 3D-CTBA-guided thoracoscopic segmentectomy for the treatment of pulmonary nodules. Methods A retrospective analysis was performed on all patients who underwent 3D-CTBA-guided uniport thoracoscopic segmentectomies or subsegmentectomies for pulmonary nodules in the period from May 2019 to May 2020. All of the information related to perioperative management and surgical operations was retrieved from the medical records and operating notes for detailed analysis. Results A total of 104 eligible operations involving the resection of 110 nodules with diameters in the range of 5-20 mm were included. Under 3D-CTBA guidance, the pulmonary nodules were located with an accuracy of 100% (110/110) and the median resection margin was 24.3 mm (17-33 mm). Additionally, the segmental (subsegmental) bronchi, arteries, and veins were identified with accuracy rates of 100% (104/104), 96.2% (100/104), and 94.2% (98/104), respectively. The postoperative complications consisted of 3 cases of pulmonary infection (2.9%), 6 cases of arrhythmia (5.8%), 2 cases of hemoptysis (1.9%), 4 cases of air leak (3.8%), and 2 cases of subcutaneous emphysema (1.9%). No perioperative death occurred. Conclusion 3D-CTBA-guided thoracoscopic segmentectomy is an effective surgical approach for the management of pulmonary nodules.

Objectives. The present study is aimed at investigating the frequency and associated factors of asymmetrical prominent veins (APV) in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS). Methods. Consecutive patients with AIS admitted to the Comprehensive Stroke Center of Shanghai Fourth People’s Hospital between January 2013 and December 2017 were enrolled. MRI including diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI), perfusion-weighted imaging (PWI), and susceptibility-weighted imaging (SWI) was performed within 12 hours of symptom onset. The volume of asymmetrical prominent veins (APV) was evaluated using the Signal Processing In nuclear magnetic resonance software (SPIN, Detroit, Michigan, USA). Multivariate analysis was used to assess relationships between APV findings and medical history, clinical variables as well as cardio-metabolic indices. Results. Seventy-six patients met the inclusion criteria. The frequency of APV ≥ 10 mL was 46.05% (35/76). Multivariate analyses showed that proximal artery stenosis or occlusion (≥50%) ( P < 0.001 , adjusted odds ratio OR = 660.0 , 95 % CI = 57.28 -7604.88) and history of atrial fibrillation ( P < 0.001 , adjusted OR = 10.48 , 95 % CI = 1.78 -61.68) were independent factors associated with high APV (≥10 mL). Conclusion. Our findings suggest that the frequency of APV ≥ 10 mL is high in patients with AIS within 12 hours of symptom onset. History of atrial fibrillation and severe proximal artery stenosis or occlusion are strong predictors of high APV as calculated by SPIN on the SWI map.

Ceramic membranes are attractive for thermal management applications due to its lightweight and ultralow thermal conductivity, while it is indispensable to address the long-standing obstacle of its poor mechanical stability and degradation under thermal shock. In this work, a series of the organic polymer template-modulated yttria doped zirconia (YDZ) nanofibrous membranes with lightweight, superior mechanical and thermal stability are developed through a cost-effective, scalable sol-gel electrospinning and subsequent calcination method. The YDZ membranes demonstrate excellent flexibility and foldability, which can be attributed to the tetragonal phase and small crystallite size of the YDZ fibers due to the presence of yttria. Besides, the fibrous size, grain size, mechanical and thermal stability of YDZ nanofibrous membranes could be tailored by varying the species and molecular weight of polymer template. The remarkable performances are obtained through the poly(vinyl pyrrolidone) (PVP) template YDZ nanofibrous membranes, featuring the superior tensile strength up to ∼ 4.82 MPa, excellent flexibility with bending rigidity ∼ 26 mN, robust thermal stability up to 1,200 °C, ultra-low thermal conductivity of 0.008–0.023 W·m−1·K−1 (25–1,000 °C), and excellent flame retardancy with tolerance of flame up to 1,000 °C. The remarkable properties can be attributed to the smaller fibrous size, and higher grain size resulting from PVP template. This robust material system is ideal for thermal superinsulation with a wide range of uses from energy saving building applications to spacecraft.

Due to COVID-19, the primary teaching method has changed from traditional face-to-face teaching to online teaching. The present study explored the correlates between two personality traits, Neuroti...

The role of diet in depression is becoming increasingly acknowledged. This umbrella review aimed to summarize comprehensively the current evidence reporting the effects of dietary factors on the prevention and treatment of depression. PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library were searched up to June 2021 to identify relevant meta-analyses of prospective studies. Twenty-eight meta-analyses, with 40 summary estimates on dietary patterns (n = 8), food and beverages (n = 19), and nutrients (n = 13) were eligible. The methodological quality of most meta-analyses was low (50.0%) or very low (25.0%). Quality of evidence was moderate for inverse associations for depression incidence with healthy diet [risk ratio (RR): 0.74, 95% confidential interval (CI), 0.48–0.99, I2 = 89.8%], fish (RR: 0.88, 95% CI, 0.79–0.97, I2 = 0.0%), coffee (RR: 0.89, 95% CI, 0.84–0.94, I2 = 32.9%), dietary zinc (RR: 0.66, 95% CI 0.50–0.82, I2 = 13.9%), light to moderate alcohol (I2 = 20.5%), as well as for positive association with sugar-sweetened beverages (RR: 1.05, 95% CI, 1.01–1.09, I2 = 0.0%). For depression treatment, moderate-quality evidence was identified for the effects of probiotic [standardized mean difference (SMD): −0.31, 95% CI, −0.56 to −0.07, I2 = 48.2%], omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (SMD: −0.28, 95% CI, −0.47 to −0.09, I2 = 75.0%) and acetyl-l-carnitine (SMD: −1.10, 95% CI, −1.65 to −0.56, I2 = 86.0%) supplementations. Overall, the associations between dietary factors and depression had been extensively evaluated, but none of them were rated as high quality of evidence, suggesting further studies are likely to change the summary estimates. Thus, more well-designed research investigating more detailed dietary factors in association with depression is warranted.

Background Previous studies have demonstrated the preclinical pharmacological and toxicological consistency, and clinical pharmacokinetic equivalence of bevacizumab biosimilar LY01008 with reference bevacizumab (Avastin). This randomized controlled trial aimed to compare the efficacy and safety of LY01008 with Avastin in first‐line treatment of Chinese patients with advanced or recurrent non‐squamous non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Methods Stage IIIB‐IV NSCLC patients with evaluable lesions, good physical status, and adequate organ functions from 67 centers across China were randomized in a ratio of 1:1 to receive LY01008 or Avastin 15 mg/kg intravenously in combination with paclitaxel/carboplatin (combined treatment) for 4‐6 cycles, followed by maintenance monotherapy with LY01008 until disease progression, intolerable toxicity, or death. The primary endpoint was objective response rate (ORR) in accordance with Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST) version 1.1 confirmed by independent radiological review committees (IRRC). Secondary endpoints included disease control rate (DCR), duration of response (DoR), progression‐free survival (PFS), overall survival (OS), and safety. This study was registered in ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT03533127). Results Between December 15th, 2017, and May 15th, 2019, a total of 649 patients were randomized to the LY01008 (n = 324) or Avastin (n = 325) group. As of September 25th, 2019 for primary endpoint analysis, 589 patients received ORR evaluation, with a median number of combined treatment cycles of 5 (range 1‐6) and median duration of treatment of 3.0 (range 0.0‐5.1) months. ORR of response‐evaluable patients in the LY01008 and Avastin groups were 48.5% and 53.0%, respectively. The stratified ORR ratio was 0.91 (90% CI 0.80‐1.04, within the prespecified equivalence margin of 0.75‐1.33). Up to May 15th, 2020, with a median follow‐up of 13.6 (range 0.8‐28.4) months, no notable differences in DCR, median DoR, median PFS, median OS, and 1‐year OS rate were observed between the LY01008 and Avastin groups. There were no clinically meaningful differences in safety and immunogenicity across treatment groups. Conclusions LY01008 demonstrated similarity to Avastin in terms of efficacy and safety in Chinese patients with advanced or recurrent non‐squamous NSCLC. LY01008 combined with paclitaxel/carboplatin is expected to become a new treatment option for unresectable, metastatic, or recurrent non‐squamous NSCLC patients in the first‐line setting., This study demonstrated similarity between LY01008 and reference bevacizumab (Avastin) in terms of efficacy, safety, and immunogenicity in combination with paclitaxel and carboplatin as first‐line treatment in Chinese patients with advanced non‐squamous NSCLC.

Video deblurring is a challenging low-level vision task due to variant blur artifacts caused by factors such as depth variations, high-speed movements and camera shakes. Although significant efforts have been devoted to addressing this task, two challenges of capturing temporal patterns and spatial topologies still remain. In this paper, an attention-based interframe compensation scheme is proposed to address the first challenge. The proposed scheme replaces frames in blurry sequences with newly restored frames, and estimates temporal patterns among the replaced sequence to restore the whole sequence. After each replacement, an attention block is employed to exploit dependencies among restored and blurry frames to capture stable temporal patterns. To tackle the second challenge, we propose an adaptive residual block that dynamically fuses multi-level features via learning location-specific weights. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of accuracy, visual effect and model size.

Due to the images obtained in lowlight environments often showing low contrast, low brightness and artifacts, it is difficult to distinguish the details of these images for people. In the field of images fusion and target tacking, lowlight images cannot be processed better. In this paper, we proposed an end-to-end lowlight image enhancement network, which uses modules stacking methods and attention modules. Firstly, the method of module stacking was applied to extract the different features of images, and then the features are fused on the channel dimension. Finally, the final image was reconstructed with a series of convolutions. In particular, our loss function consists of two parts: the first part of the loss function was calculated using L1 loss, L2 loss and the gradient loss, and VGG network was utilized to calculate the second part. Furthermore, we verified the effectiveness of the model via a large number of comparative experiments, and illustrated the comparison results through quantitative and qualitative methods. We additionally show the performance of our network on lowlight video enhancement, which also has better results than the other methods.

Given the complexity and uncertainty of the current COVID-19 risks, the elderly people in long-term care facilities are at the highest risk for infection. In order to study the prevention and control strategies of COVID-19 risks in long-term care facilities, this paper uses the prospect theory to construct the decision-making model of COVID-19 risk behavior of long-term care facilities, analyses the risk behavior strategies of the caregivers and managers, and reveals the impact of risk management cost, risk loss and external supervision on the risk behavior decision-making of the caregivers and managers. Furthermore, from the perspective of long-term care facilities, this paper analyzes the constraints that enable it to achieve optimal risk management strategy. Combined with the simulation analysis, it is found that the decision of risk behavior of the caregivers and managers is positively related to the risk behavior choice, risk loss, and supervision. Then, only when the incentives set by the supervision are within a reasonable range can the caregivers and managers be motivated to take proactive risk management strategies. The study has important theoretical and practical significance for the management of COVID-19 risks in long-term care facilities.

This study aimed to evaluate predictors for adverse cardiovascular outcomes in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) undergoing coronary stenting.We retrospectively recruited consecutive patients with previously documented non-valvular AF who underwent coronary stenting between January 2010 and June 2015 in 12 hospitals of Beijing, China. Major adverse cardiac/cerebrovascular events (MACCE) were a composite of all-cause death, non-fatal myocardial infarction, repeat revascularization, and ischaemic stroke/systemic thromboembolism (IS/STE). Major bleeding referred to grade 2 or higher of Bleeding Academic Research Consortium criteria.A total of 2394 patients (men: 72.3%Chinese patients with AF and coronary stenting had high mortality and incidence of MACCE. We compiled separate predictive models for all-cause death, IS/STE, MACCE, and major bleeding.

BACKGROUND: The optimal duration of treatment for intestinal tuberculosis (TB), which remains a common disease worldwide, has not yet been established. The proposed randomized controlled study will aim to compare the efficacy of short-term six-month with nine-month anti-TB therapy for treating intestinal TB. METHODS: This multicenter, open-label, double-blinded, randomized controlled trial conducted in the Affiliated Hangzhou Chest Hospital of Zhejiang University will include a total of 80 patients. Patients who meet the inclusion criteria will be randomly assigned to either the six-month (n=40) or nine-month (n=40) treatment group. The primary outcome will be complete response, which is defined as endoscopy displaying active lesion healing at the end of treatment. Participants will be scheduled for follow-up visits once a month in the first three months, then once every three months until the end of the treatment. The last follow-up will be one year after the treatment. Recurrence will be assessed one year after the end of treatment, which is defined as endoscopy displaying recurrent lesions after complete response. DISCUSSION: In addition to the reports of tuberculous lymphadenitis and spinal TB, there are few appropriate randomized trials for the treatment of extrapulmonary TB with appropriate clinical endpoints. We believe that the proposed randomized controlled trial will provide further data on the efficacy of short-term six-month anti-TB therapy in intestinal TB patients. TRIAL REGISTRATION: This trial will be registered on ClinicalTrial.gov.

Most published newborn growth references are based on conventional monitoring data that usually included both low- and high-risk pregnancies. We sought to develop a set of neonatal growth standards constructed from only a large sample of low-risk pregnancies. A total of 24,375 naturally conceived singleton live births with gestational ages of 24–42 weeks were collected in 69 hospitals in thirteen Chinese cities between 2015 and 2018. Unhealthy infants or those with high-risk mother were excluded. Smoothed percentile curves of six anthropometric indicators were established using the Generalized Additive Model for Location, Scale and Shape. The 3rd, 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th, and 97th percentile references for birth weight, length, head circumference, weight/length, body mass index, and ponderal index were calculated for neonates with gestational ages of 24–42 weeks. This set of neonatal growth standards with six anthropometric indicators can provide more tools for growth and nutrition assessment and body proportionality in neonatal clinical practice. These standards might also help to show the differences between growth curves based on low-risk and mixed low- and high-risk pregnancies.

Graphite carbon nitride (g-C3N4), a two-dimensional polymer semiconductor material, has good semiconductor properties, suitable electronic energy band structure, excellent physical and chemical stability. It is widely used in the field of energy and materials science such as photoelectric conversion. In this paper, the progress of g-C3N4 in dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC) and perovskite solar cells (PSC) was reviewed. As a new semiconductor material, g-C3N4 has the advantages of simple preparation, abundant amino and Lewis basic groups. Therefore, on the basis of excellent structure of g-C3N4, its electronic and optical properties are utilized to further expand its application in the field of photoelectric conversion.

BACKGROUND: Acute kidney injury (AKI), the most common complication after cardiac resuscitation, is highly prevalent and harmful. There is increasing evidence that levosimendan can improve cardiac output, increase renal blood flow, and prevent AKI. As a novel calcium sensitizer, levosimendan may exert its protective effect via mitochondria. METHODS: Rat models of asphyxia-induced cardiac arrest and cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) were set up. Thirty healthy adult male SD rats were randomly divided into CPR group (CPR group, n=10), levosimendan-treated group (levo group, n=10), and sham-operated group (sham group, n=10). Twelve hours after CPR, serum renal function indicators were measured, the kidney injury and mitochondrial morphological changes were observed. Oxygen uptake of the mitochondria, mitochondrial adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and mitochondrial free Ca(2+) concentration were measured. Oxidative stress-related indicator levels in rat kidney tissues were further detected to analyze the differences in apoptosis rates among these three groups. Mitochondrial optic atrophy 1 (Opa1), dynamin-related protein 1 (Drp1), and apoptosis-related proteins were detected using Western blotting. RESULTS: Compared with the sham group, the CPR group had a significant increase in renal tissue damage. PAS staining and HE stains confirmed that CPR led to renal histopathological damage and destruction of the mitochondrial structure. Levosimendan improved the histopathological and ultrastructural damages of kidneys. Further analysis revealed that mitochondrial ATP content, NADH dehydrogenase, succinate dehydrogenase/cytochrome C oxidase, superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and glutathione peroxidase (CSH-Px) decreased. Free Ca(2+) concentration and malondialdehyde (MDA) significantly increased (all P

Background Procalcitonin (PCT) plays an important role in the identification of bacterial infection and therapy guidance. The relevant literature is mainly classified under critical care medicine or infectious disease. The research status of PCT in general internal medicine (GIM) is currently unclear. This research aimed to analyze PCT-related literature in the GIM field and provide references for future research. Methods A subject search strategy was used for the term PCT, with the search scope limited to Medicine, General & Internal. We conducted a search of relevant literature in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) database in the Web of Science Core Collection (WOSCC), with no publication date limit (1900 to May 16, 2021, the date of the final search for this study). The search results were analyzed using CiteSpace software to assess the status of PCT research in the GIM field based on annual paper publication numbers, the number of citations, country distribution, institution distribution, author distribution, journal distribution, and keyword usage. Results A total of 905 document records were retrieved. Articles were mainly from Europe, the United States, and China, and the number of citations totaled 15,917. There were 5 research institutions that published more than 10 related papers and 3 authors who published more than 10 papers. There was little cooperation between authors from different countries and institutions. This field should focus on leading journals in critical care medicine and quality comprehensive journals. Keyword analysis showed that the current research focus is the standardized application of PCT. Conclusions There are few targeted studies on the application of PCT in GIM, and the relevant important literature mainly comes from other journals. GIM-specific research should be increased in the future.

Summary Background & aims Sarcopenic obesity (SO), which refers to the coexistence of sarcopenia and obesity. It can lead to physical disability, morbidity, and even mortality. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to estimate the global prevalence of SO in older adults. Methods We searched PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science for studies reporting the prevalence of SO from inception to December 2020. Two researchers independently screened the literature, evaluated study quality, and extracted data. A random-effects model was used to pool the estimates for the prevalence of SO. Subgroup analysis, sensitivity analysis, and meta-regression analysis were conducted. Publication bias was assessed using a funnel plot and the Egger test. All statistical analyses were performed using Stata 15.0 software. Results This review included 50 studies, we found that the global prevalence of SO in older adults was 11%. Subgroup analyses showed that the prevalence of SO was higher among studies using diagnostic criteria of muscle mass alone (15%) to diagnose sarcopenia, using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (15%) to assess muscle mass, and those focused on age ≥ 75 years old (23%), hospitalized (16%), South Americans (21%) and North Americans (19%). There were no significant differences in the prevalence of SO among studies using body fat percentage (10%), body mass index (13%), waist circumference (16%) to diagnose obesity and in female (14%), male (10%) patients. Sensitivity analysis showed that none of the studies affected the overall pooled results. Meta-regression analysis found that publication year, geographical region, study setting, and the diagnostic criteria of sarcopenia were sources of heterogeneity. Conclusion This meta-analysis indicated SO affects more than one in ten older adults globally. Therefore, we should attach importance to the screening and early diagnosis of SO in older adults, then selecting appropriate interventions to reduce the occurrence of it and various adverse outcomes in this demographic.

PURPOSE Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is an aggressive type of lymphoma with high mortality and poor prognosis that especially has a high incidence in Asia. Accurate segmentation of DLBCL lesions is crucial for clinical radiation therapy. However, manual delineation of DLBCL lesions is tedious and time-consuming. Automatic segmentation provides an alternative solution but is difficult for diffuse lesions without the sufficient utilization of multimodality information. Our work is the first study focusing on positron emission tomography and computed tomography (PET-CT) feature fusion for the DLBCL segmentation issue. We aim to improve the fusion performance of complementary information contained in PET-CT imaging with a hybrid learning module in the supervised convolutional neural network. METHODS First, two encoder branches extract single-modality features, respectively. Next, the hybrid learning component utilizes them to generate spatial fusion maps which can quantify the contribution of complementary information. Such feature fusion maps are then concatenated with specific-modality (i.e., PET and CT) feature maps to obtain a representation of the final fused feature maps in different scales. Finally, the reconstruction part of our network creates a prediction map of DLBCL lesions by integrating and up-sampling the final fused feature maps from encoder blocks in different scales. RESULTS The ability of our method was evaluated to detect foreground and segment lesions in three independent body regions (nasopharynx, chest, and abdomen) of a set of 45 PET-CT scans. Extensive ablation experiments compared our method to four baseline techniques for multimodality fusion (input-level (IL) fusion, multichannel (MC) strategy, multibranch (MB) strategy, and quantitative weighting (QW) fusion). The results showed that our method achieved a high detection accuracy (99.63% in the nasopharynx, 99.51% in the chest, and 99.21% in the abdomen) and had the superiority in segmentation performance with the mean dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 73.03% and the modified Hausdorff distance (MHD) of 4.39 mm, when compared with the baselines (DSC: IL: 53.08%, MC: 63.59%, MB: 69.98%, and QW: 72.19%; MHD: IL: 12.16 mm, MC: 6.46 mm, MB: 4.83 mm, and QW: 4.89 mm). CONCLUSIONS A promising segmentation method has been proposed for the challenging DLBCL lesions in PET-CT images, which improves the understanding of complementary information by feature fusion and may guide clinical radiotherapy. The statistically significant analysis based on P-value calculation has indicated a degree of significant difference between our proposed method and other baselines (almost metrics: P

Background. Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a chronic nonspecific inflammatory disease of the colon and rectum. Recent studies found that berberine had effects on inflammatory diseases and immune diseases. Methods. The PharmMapper database was used to predict the berberine potential target and GeneCards database and OMIM database were utilized to collect UC genes. The Cytoscape software was used to construct and analyze the networks and DAVID was utilized to perform enrichment analysis. Then, animal experiments were performed to validate the prediction results. The experimental rats were randomly divided into normal group (control group), model group, and berberine group. The general condition, body weight, gross morphology of colon tissue, and colonic mucosal damage index (CMDI) score were observed. The pathological changes of colon tissue were observed by H&E staining. The levels of serum interleukin-1β (IL-1β), tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), and IL-4 were detected by ELISA. The expressions of IL-1β, TNF-α, and IL-4 protein in colon tissue were detected by immunohistochemistry. Results. A total of 211 Berberine’s potential targets and 210 UC genes were obtained. The enrichment analysis showed that berberine may regulate inflammation, inflammatory cytokines, and their mediated inflammation signal pathways such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), rheumatoid arthritis, cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction, TNF, T cell receptor, Toll-like receptor, and JAK/STAT signaling pathway. Compared with the model group, the body mass of rats in the berberine group was significantly increased ( P P P

Deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performance in most computer vision tasks in recent years. However, they are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations generated by adversarial attacks. These human-imperceptible perturbations often lead to severe distortion in the high-dimensional intermediate feature space, which is one of the major reasons for the vulnerabilities in deep neural networks. Therefore, input images with perturbations can completely change the predictions of the networks in the decision space. To overcome this drawback, we propose to progressively align the intermediate feature representations extracted from the adversarial domain with feature representations extracted from a clean domain through domain adaptation. The difference between two feature distributions can be accurately measured via an optimal transport-based Wasserstein distance. Thus, the deep networks are forced to learn robust and domain-invariant feature representations, so that the gap between the different domains is minimized and that the networks are no longer easily fooled by diverse adversaries. Extensive evaluations are conducted on four classification benchmark datasets in white-box attack scenarios. The evaluation results demonstrate a significant performance improvement over several state-of-the-art defense methods.

Chenye Feng,1 Mingtao Xu,1 Jian Kang,1 Fuqiang Wen,2 Yahong Chen,3 Jing Zhang,4 Wei Xiao,5 Zhonghe Zhang,6 Lan Yang,7 Jianmin Huo,8 Jie Cao,9 Li Zhao,10 Shuyue Xia,11 Yan Yin,1 Wei Wang1 1Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Institute of Respiratory Diseases, First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, West China Hospital of Sichuan University and Division of Pulmonary Disease, State Key Laboratory of Biotherapy of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Peking University, Third Hospital, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Qilu Hospital, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong, People’s Republic of China; 6Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University, Dalian, Liaonign, People’s Republic of China; 7Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shanxi, People’s Republic of China; 8Department of Respiratory, First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, People’s Republic of China; 9Respiratory Department, Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China; 10Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Institute of Respiratory Diseases, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, People’s Republic of China; 11Department of Pulmonary Medicine, Central Hospital Affiliated with Shenyang Medical College, Shenyang, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Jian KangDepartment of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Institute of Respiratory Diseases, First Affiliated Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, Liaoning, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86-024-83282530Fax +86-024-83282002Email kangjian58@163.comPurpose: The proportion of atypical pathogens in patient with AECOPD within mainland China is unknown. The objectives of this study were to determine the distribution of atypical pathogens among Chinese patients with AECOPD, to evaluate the clinical characteristics of different atypical pathogen infections, and to compare different detection methods for atypical pathogens.Patients and Methods: Specimens were collected from patients with AECOPD from March 2016 to November 2018 at eleven medical institutions in eight cities in China. Double serum, sputum, and urine samples were obtained from 145 patients. Serological and nucleic acid tests were used to assess for Mycoplasma pneumonia and Chlamydia pneumoniae; serological, urinary antigen, and nucleic acid tests were applied to detect Legionella pneumophila. The clinical characteristics of atypical pathogen-positive and -negative groups were also compared.Results: The overall positivity rate for Mycoplasma pneumoniae was 20.69% (30/145), with the highest rate being 20.00% (29/145) when determined by passive agglutination.The overall positive rates for Chlamydia pneumoniae and Legionella pneumophila were 29.66% (43/145) and 10.34% (15/145), respectively. The most common serotype of Legionella pneumophila was type 6. The maximum hospitalized body temperature, ratio of eosinophils, C-reactive protein (CRP) level, and procalcitonin (PCT) level of the Mycoplasma pneumoniae-positive group were significantly higher than those of the Mycoplasma pneumoniae-negative group. Patients in the Chlamydia pneumoniae-positive group smoked more, had higher proportions of comorbidities and frequent aggravations in the previous two years than those in the Chlamydia pneumoniae-negative group. Furthermore, the forced expiratory volume in one second to forced vital capacity (FEV1/FVC) ratio assessment of lung function was higher, and the concentration of arterial blood bicarbonate (HCO3−) was lower in the Legionella pneumophila-positive group than in the Legionella pneumophila-negative group.Conclusion: Overall, atypical pathogens play an important role in AECOPD. Regarding the testing method, serological testing is a superior method to nucleic acid testing.Keywords: COPD, exacerbations, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, Chlamydia pneumoniae, Legionella pneumophila

Learning-based methods have attracted considerable interest in image dehazing. However, most existing methods are not well adapted to different hazy conditions, especially when dealing with the heavily hazy scene. There is often a significant amount of haze that remains in the images recovered by most methods. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end Haze Concentration Adaptive Network (HCAN), including a pyramid feature extractor (PFE), a feature enhancement module (FEM), and a multi-scale feature attention module (MSFAM) for image dehazing. Specifically, PFE based on the feature pyramid structure leverages complementary features from different CNN layers to help the clear image prediction. Then, FEM fuses four kinds of images with different haze density (i.e., three recovered images in the FEM with light haze density, and the input hazy image with strong haze condition) to guide the network to adaptively perceive images under different haze conditions. Finally, MSFAM is designed under two principles, multi-scale structure and attention mechanism. It is used to help the network produce a clear image with more details, and ease the network training. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed HCAN performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and visual effect. The results, per-trained models and code are available at https://github.com/TaoWangzj/HCAN .

Clean-energy substitution technology for existing residential buildings in cities is an inevitable choice for sustainable development and low-carbon ecological city construction. In this paper, the current status of energy-saving renovation and renewable-energy applications for existing residential buildings in various cities in China was summarized by using statistical methods. The geographical distribution of clean-energy power generation in primary energy production in China was explored in depth. According to different climatic divisions for existing urban residences, clean-energy production and consumption were analyzed and predicted based on the STIRPAT model. The results show that the energy consumption of urban residential buildings in 2016 increased by 43.6% compared with 2009, and the percentage of clean energy also increased from 7.9% to 13.4%. Different climatic regions have different advantages regarding clean energy: nuclear power generation leads in the region that experiences hot summers and warm winters, whereas wind and solar power generation lead in the cold and severely cold regions. The present results provide basic data support for the planning and implementation of clean-energy upgrading and transformation systems in existing urban residences in China.

This paper develops a methodology for simultaneously modeling lane-changing and car-following behavior of automated vehicles on freeways. Naturalistic driving data from the Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD) program are used. First, a framework to process the SPMD data is proposed using various data analytics techniques including data fusion, data mining, and machine learning. Second, pairs of automated host vehicle and their corresponding front vehicle are identified along with their lane-change and car-following relationship data. Using these data, a lane-changing-based car-following (LCCF) model, which explicitly considers lane-change and car-following behavior simultaneously, is developed. The LCCF model is based on Gaussian-mixture-based hidden Markov model theory and is disaggregated into two processes: LCCF association and LCCF dissociation. These categories are based on the result of the lane change. The overall goal is to predict a driver’s lane-change intention using the LCCF model. Results show that the model can predict the lane-change event in the order of 0.6 to 1.3 s before the moment of the vehicle body across the lane boundary. In addition, the execution times of lane-change maneuvers average between 0.55 and 0.86 s. The LCCF model allows the intention time and execution time of driver’s lane-change behavior to be forecast, which will help to develop better advanced driver assistance systems for vehicle controls with respect to lane-change and car-following warning functions.

BACKGROUND: An accurate assessment of lymph node (LN) status in patients with rectal cancer is important for treatment planning and an essential factor for predicting local recurrence and overall survival. In this study, we explored the potential value of histogram parameters of synthetic magnetic resonance imaging (SyMRI) in predicting LN metastasis in rectal cancer and compared their predictive performance with traditional morphological characteristics and chemical shift effect (CSE). METHODS: A total of 70 patients with pathologically proven rectal adenocarcinoma who received direct surgical resection were enrolled in this prospective study. Preoperative rectal MRI, including SyMRI, were performed, and morphological characteristics and CSE of LN were assessed. Histogram parameters were extracted on a T1 map, T2 map, and proton density (PD) map, including mean, variance, maximum, minimum, 10th percentile, median, 90th percentile, energy, kurtosis, entropy, and skewness. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to explore their predictive performance for assessing LN status. RESULTS: Significant differences in the energy of the T1, T2, and PD maps were observed between LN-negative and LN-positive groups [all P

Integration of each aspect of the manufacturing process with the new generation of information technology such as the Internet of Things, big data, and cloud computing makes industrial manufacturing systems more flexible and intelligent. Industrial big data, recording all aspects of the industrial production process, contain the key value for industrial intelligence. For industrial manufacturing, an essential and widely used electronic device is the lithium-ion battery (LIB). However, accurately predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of LIB is urgently needed to reduce unexpected maintenance and avoid accidents. Due to insufficient amount of degradation data, the prediction accuracy of data-driven methods is greatly limited. Besides, mathematical models established by model-driven methods to represent degradation process are unstable because of external factors like temperature. To solve this problem, a new LIB RUL prediction method based on improved convolution neural network (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM), namely Auto-CNN-LSTM, is proposed in this article. This method is developed based on deep CNN and LSTM to mine deeper information in finite data. In this method, an autoencoder is utilized to augment the dimensions of data for more effective training of CNN and LSTM. In order to obtain continuous and stable output, a filter to smooth the predicted value is used. Comparing with other commonly used methods, experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

To better understand early brain development in health and disorder, it is critical to accurately segment infant brain magnetic resonance (MR) images into white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Deep learning-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance; h owever, one of the major limitations is that the learning-based methods may suffer from the multi-site issue, that is, the models trained on a dataset from one site may not be applicable to the datasets acquired from other sites with different imaging protocols/scanners. To promote methodological development in the community, the iSeg-2019 challenge ( http://iseg2019.web.unc.edu ) provides a set of 6-month infant subjects from multiple sites with different protocols/scanners for the participating methods. T raining/validation subjects are from UNC (MAP) and testing subjects are from UNC/UMN (BCP), Stanford University, and Emory University. By the time of writing, there are 30 automatic segmentation methods participated in the iSeg-2019. In this article, 8 top-ranked methods were reviewed by detailing their pipelines/implementations, presenting experimental results, and evaluating performance across different sites in terms of whole brain, regions of interest, and gyral landmark curves. We further pointed out their limitations and possible directions for addressing the multi-site issue. We find that multi-site consistency is still an open issue. We hope that the multi-site dataset in the iSeg-2019 and this review article will attract more researchers to address the challenging and critical multi-site issue in practice.

Background Due to random motion of fetuses and maternal respirations, image quality of fetal brain MRIs varies considerably. To address this issue, visual inspection of the images is performed during acquisition phase and after 3D-reconstruction, and the images are re-acquired if they are deemed to be of insufficient quality. However, this process is time-consuming and subjective. Multi-instance (MI) deep learning methods (DLMs) may perform this task automatically. Purpose To propose an MI count-based DLM (MI-CB-DLM), an MI vote-based DLM (MI-VB-DLM), and an MI feature-embedding DLM (MI-FE-DLM) for automatic assessment of 3D fetal-brain MR image quality. To quantify influence of fetal gestational age (GA) on DLM performance. Study type Retrospective. Subjects Two hundred and seventy-one MR exams from 211 fetuses (mean GA ± SD = 30.9 ± 5.5 weeks). Field strength/sequence T2 -weighted single-shot fast spin-echo acquired at 1.5 T. Assessment The T2 -weighted images were reconstructed in 3D. Then, two fetal neuroradiologists, a clinical neuroscientist, and a fetal MRI technician independently labeled the reconstructed images as 1 or 0 based on image quality (1 = high; 0 = low). These labels were fused and served as ground truth. The proposed DLMs were trained and evaluated using three repeated 10-fold cross-validations (training and validation sets of 244 and 27 scans). To quantify GA influence, this variable was included as an input of the DLMs. Statistical tests DLM performance was evaluated using precision, recall, F-score, accuracy, and AUC values. Results Precision, recall, F-score, accuracy, and AUC averaged over the three cross validations were 0.85 ± 0.01, 0.85 ± 0.01, 0.85 ± 0.01, 0.85 ± 0.01, 0.93 ± 0.01, for MI-CB-DLM (without GA); 0.75 ± 0.03, 0.75 ± 0.03, 0.75 ± 0.03, 0.75 ± 0.03, 0.81 ± 0.03, for MI-VB-DLM (without GA); 0.81 ± 0.01, 0.81 ± 0.01, 0.81 ± 0.01, 0.81 ± 0.01, 0.89 ± 0.01, for MI-FE-DLM (without GA); and 0.86 ± 0.01, 0.86 ± 0.01, 0.86 ± 0.01, 0.86 ± 0.01, 0.93 ± 0.01, for MI-CB-DLM with GA. Data conclusion MI-CB-DLM performed better than other DLMs. Including GA as an input of MI-CB-DLM improved its performance. MI-CB-DLM may potentially be used to objectively and rapidly assess fetal MR image quality. Evidence level 4 TECHNICAL EFFICACY: Stage 3.

With the rapid development of terahertz technologies, basic research and applications of terahertz waves in biomedicine have attracted increasing attention. The rotation and vibrational energy levels of biomacromolecules fall in the energy range of terahertz waves; thus, terahertz waves might interact with biomacromolecules. Therefore, terahertz waves have been widely applied to explore features of the terahertz spectrum of biomacromolecules. However, the effects of terahertz waves on biomacromolecules are largely unexplored. Although some progress has been reported, there are still numerous technical barriers to clarifying the relation between terahertz waves and biomacromolecules and to realizing the accurate regulation of biological macromolecules by terahertz waves. Therefore, further investigations should be conducted in the future. In this paper, we reviewed terahertz waves and their biomedical research advantages, applications of terahertz waves on biomacromolecules and the effects of terahertz waves on biomacromolecules. These findings will provide novel ideas and methods for the research and application of terahertz waves in the biomedical field.

Lidong Jiao,1 Xiaoqin Huang,1 Chunqiu Fan,1 Hong Zhao,2 Zhen Li,3 Huixin Shen,1 Jian Chen,4 Jiangang Duan5 1Department of Neurology, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Hematology, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Ophthalmology, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Neurosurgery, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Emergency, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Xiaoqin HuangDepartment of Neurology, Xuanwu Hospital, Capital Medical University, Beijing, 100053, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 10-83198899– 8319Email huangxqxw@126.comBackground and Objective: Essential thrombocythemia (ET) is a rare cause of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST). Analysis of the risk factors and treatment therapies of CVST in ET has yielded controversial findings.Subjects and Methods: We retrospectively investigated the clinical characteristics of CVST events in ET and compared baseline characteristics, causative factors, hematological effects, and treatments between ET patients with and without CVST.Results: Overall, 91 of 115 patients who met the ET diagnosis were included in this study. Among them, 23 (25.27%) patients met the diagnostic criteria of ET with CVST for inclusion, 14 (60.87%) of whom were females, with a median age of 34 (range 25– 50). CVST diagnosis was made concomitantly to ET in 19 patients (82.61%). The most common symptom and sites of thrombosis of CVST was an acute or subacute headache and sigmoid sinuses, respectively. Compared with ET patients without CVST, ET patients with CVST were significantly younger (37.65± 14.45 vs 60.93± 13.46, P< 0.001) and had lower prevalence of hypertension (4.34 vs 32.35%, P=0.003) and coronary artery disease (0 vs 14.71%, P = 0.045). Patients with CVST presented with significant lower platelet count (510.39± 176.71 vs 750.82± 249.10, P< 0.001) and higher score of IPSET-thrombosis (P=0.017). Multivariate logistic regression analysis indicated that age (P=0.002, OR 1.096, 95% CI 1.035– 1.161), at least one CVRF (P = 0.024, OR 0.037, 95% CI 0.002– 0.649), platelet count (P=0.045, OR 0.994, 95% CI 0.989– 1.001), and lower percentage of antiplatelet therapy (P=0.035, OR 0.307, 95% CI 0.001-1.280) significantly contributed to the risk of CVST in ET.Conclusion: Most patients (95.65%) had a favorable outcome without recurrence after standard anticoagulant and cytoreductive treatment at last follow-up. These findings indicate that CVST may be the initial presentation of ET, with its detection crucial for early diagnosis and appropriate management. Anticoagulant and cytoreductive therapies should be recommended for preventing ET-related CVST with JAK2 V617F mutation.Keywords: cerebral venous thrombosis, JAK2 V617F, anticoagulant therapy, cytoreductive therapy, essential thrombocythemia

As a pre-processing step of computer vision applications, single image dehazing remains challenging due to existing inefficiencies in the restoration of content and details. In this paper, the self-supporting dehazing network (SSDN) is proposed to overcome these two problems. For the restoration of image content, the self-filtering block is introduced to remove redundant features, hence improving the representation abilities of learned features. For the recovery of image details, a novel self-supporting module is proposed as a crucial component of the proposed SSDN. With this module, the complementary information among support images that are transformed from multi-level features is explored. By incorporating such information, the self-supporting module can learn more intrinsic image characteristics and generate fine-detail images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SSDN outperforms state-of-the-art dehazing methods in terms of both quantitative accuracy and qualitative visual effect.

We study the problem of Reinforcement Learning from Demonstrations (RLfD), where the agent has access to not only reward signals from the environment, but also some available expert demonstrations. Recent works absorb ingredients from imitation learning and utilize demonstration data as reward reshaping. Despite their success, these methods update policy over these states seen in the demonstration data, in the same way as other states in the state space, overlooking the validity of direct supervision signals on these states. To address this issue, we propose a novel RLfD objective function with a new shaping reward, by optimizing which can directly leverage the supervision signal on these demonstrated states. We propose a general framework for policy optimization of the proposed objective, with convergence guarantees under the classic tabular setting. Based on that, we further make some approximations based on deep neural networks, and then introduce a new practical algorithm, called Demonstration Actor Critic (DAC) in large continuous domains. Extensive experiments on a range of popular benchmark sparse-reward tasks show that our method can lead to significant performance gains over several strong and off-the-shelf baselines.

Context Capsule of alkaloids from the leaf of Alstonia scholaris (L.) R.Br. (Apocynaceae) (CALAS) is a new investigational botanical drug (No. 2011L01436) for bronchitis, post-infectious cough and asthma. Objective To observe the clinical safety and tolerability of CALAS. Materials and methods Subjects were assigned to eight cohorts, and each received randomly CALAS or placebo in one of single ascending dose (SAD) of 8, 40, 120, 240, 360, 480, or in one of multiple ascending dose (MAD) of 40 or 120 mg, three times daily for 7 days. Each cohort contained two placebo subjects. Results Sixty-two enrolled volunteers completed the study and no serious adverse events and clinically significant changes in vital signs, electrocardiography, and upper abdominal Doppler ultrasonography were observed. The ratios of treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAEs) were reported in 11/46 (23.91%) of CALAS groups and 3/16 (18.75%) of the placebo group (p > 0.05), respectively, based on the results of SAD and MAD. All TEAEs were mild, transient, and disappeared without any intervention. The TEAEs possibly related to CALAS treatment were as followings: hiccups (4/46: 8%), dry mouth and nausea (3/46: 6%), increased sleep (2/46: 4%), abdominal distension (1/46: 2%), bilirubin elevated (1/46: 2%). Discussion and conclusions CALAS is safe and well-tolerated with no unexpected or clinically relevant safety concerns up to a single dose of 360 mg and three times daily for 7 days up to 120 mg in healthy Chinese volunteers, supporting further Phase II studies.