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Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is an important adverse drug reaction that can lead to acute liver failure or even death in severe cases. Currently, the diagnosis of DILI still follows the strategy of exclusion. Therefore, a detailed history taking and a thorough and careful exclusion of other potential causes of liver injury is the key to correct diagnosis. This guideline was developed based on evidence-based medicine provided by the latest research advances and aims to provide professional guidance to clinicians on how to identify suspected DILI timely and standardize the diagnosis and management in clinical practice. Based on the clinical settings in China, the guideline also specifically focused on DILI in chronic liver disease, drug-induced viral hepatitis reactivation, common causing agents of DILI (herbal and dietary supplements, anti-tuberculosis drugs, and antineoplastic drugs), and signal of DILI in clinical trials and its assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There is growing recognition of natural history, complications, and outcomes of patients who develop non-acetaminophen (APAP) drug-induced acute liver failure (ALF). To clarify high-risk factors and develop a nomogram model to predict transplant-free survival (TFS) in patients with non-APAP drug-induced ALF. Methods: Patients with non-APAP drug-induced ALF from 5 participating centers were retrospectively analyzed. The primary endpoint was 21-day TFS. Total sample size was 482 patients. Results: Regarding causative agents, the most common implicated drugs were herbal and dietary supplements (HDS) (57.0%). The hepatocellular type (R ≥ 5) was the main liver injury pattern (69.0%). International normalized ratio, hepatic encephalopathy grades, the use of vasopressor, N-acetylcysteine, or artificial liver support system were associated with TFS and incorporated to construct a nomogram model (drug-induced acute liver failure-5, DIALF-5). The AUROC of DIALF-5 for 7-day, 21-day, 60-day, and 90-day TFS in the internal cohort were 0.886, 0.915, 0.920, and 0.912, respectively. Moreover, the AUROC of DIALF-5 for 21-day TFS had the highest AUROC, which was significantly higher than 0.725 of MELD and 0.519 of KCC (p < 0.05), numerically higher than 0.905 of ALFSG-PI but without statistical difference (p > 0.05). These results were successfully validated in the external cohort (147 patients). Conclusions: Based on easily identifiable clinical data, the novel DIALF-5 model was developed to predict transplant-free survival in non-APAP drug-induced ALF, which was superior to KCC, MELD and had a similar prediction performance to ALFSG-PI but is more convenient, which can directly calculate TFS at multiple time points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image-Recipe retrieval is the task of retrieving closely related recipes from a collection given a food image and vice versa. The modality gap between images and recipes makes it a challenging task. Recent studies usually focus on learning consistent image and recipe representations to bridge the semantic gap. Though the existing methods have significantly improved image-recipe retrieval, several challenges still remain: 1) Previous studies usually directly concatenate the textual embeddings of different recipe components to generate recipe presentations. Only simple interactions rather than complex interactions are considered. 2) They commonly focus on textual feature extraction from recipes. The methods to extract image features are relatively simple, and most studies utilize the ResNet-50 model. 3) Apart from the retrieval learning loss (triplet loss, for example), several auxiliary loss functions (such as adversarial loss and reconstruction loss) are commonly used to match the recipe and image representations. To deal with these issues, we introduce a novel Low-rank Multi-component Fusion method with Component-Specific Factors (LMF-CSF) to model the different textual components in a recipe for producing superior textual representations. Furthermore, try to pay some attention to image feature extraction. A visual transformer is used to learn better image representations. Then the enhanced representations from two modalities are directly fed into a triplet loss function for image-recipe retrieval learning. Experimental results conducted on the Recipe1M dataset indicate that our LMF-CSF method can outperform the current state-of-the-art image-recipe retrieval baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a growing health burden with limited treatment options worldwide. Herein we report a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multiple-dose trial of a first-in-class pan-phosphodiesterase inhibitor ZSP1601 in 36 NAFLD patients (NCT04140123). There were three cohorts. Each cohort included twelve patients, nine of whom received ZSP1601 50 mg once daily, 50 mg twice daily, or 100 mg twice daily, and three of whom received matching placebos for 28 days. The primary outcomes were the safety and tolerability of ZSP1601. A total of 27 (27/36, 75%) patients experienced at least one treatment-emergent adverse event (TEAE). Most TEAEs were mild to moderate. There was no Serious Adverse Event. Diarrhea, transiently elevated creatinine and adaptive headache were frequently reported adverse drug reaction. We conclude that ZSP1601 is well-tolerated and safe, showing effective improvement in liver chemistries, liver fat content and fibrosis in patients with NAFLD. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease is a growing health burden with limited treatment options worldwide. Herein the authors report a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, multiple-dose trial of a first-in-class pan-phosphodiesterase inhibitor ZSP1601 in NAFLD patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leaves and flowers of Amorphophallus konjac do not develop simultaneously thus unique features can be elucidated through study of flowering transformation in A. konjac. In this study, transcriptome libraries of A. konjac leaf buds (LB) and flower buds (FB) were constructed followed by high-throughput sequencing. A total of 68,906 unigenes with an average length of 920 bp were obtained after library assembly. Out of these genes, 24,622 unigenes had annotation information. A total of 6859 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified through differential expression analysis using LB as control. Notably, 2415 DEGs were upregulated whereas 4444 DEGs were downregulated in the two transcriptomes. Go and KEGG analysis showed that the DEGs belonged to 44 functional categories and were implicated in 98 metabolic pathways and 38 DEGs involved in plant hormone signal transduction. Several genes were mined that may be involved in A. konjac flower bud differentiation and flower organ development. Eight DEGs were selected for verification of RNA-seq results using qRT-PCR analysis. Two FLOWERING LOCUS T (FT) genes named AkFT1 and AkFT2 were identified though homologous analysis may be the florigen gene implicated in modulation of A. konjac flowering. These genes were significantly upregulated in flower buds compared with the expression levels on leaf buds. Overexpression of AkFT genes though heterologous expression in Arabidopsis showed that the transgenics flowered at a very early stage relative to wild type plants. These findings indicate that AkFT1 and AkFT2 function as regulation genes in A. konjac flowering development and the two genes may present similar functions during flowering transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There exist communication barriers between the deaf people and the listeners. Sign language translation is a reasonable and effective way to break these barriers. Recognition of sign language symbols is an essential part of sign language translation. Sign language digits of (0–9) and alphabetic letters of (A–Z) are elementary but important symbols of sign languages of different countries or regions. Capsule networks (CapsNet) are promising alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNN), which take into account of the spatial relationships and orientations of the features of an entity. For sign language digits and alphabets recognition tasks, the proposed SLR-CapsNet architecture achieves a start-of-the-art test accuracy of 99.52% with 100*100 RGB input size and 99.94% with 32*32 RGB input size on Sign Language Digits Dataset and 99.60% with 28*28 Gray-scale input on Sign Language MNIST Dataset. The experimental results also prove that CapsNet has higher generalization and expressiveness capacity on unseen data than CNN dose. Another important finding in our work is that SLR-CapsNet is robust to routing iterations, i.e., its performance will not be affected by various routing iterations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrating cognitive radio (CR) with traditional wireless networks is helping solve the problem of spectrum scarcity in an efficient manner. The opportunistic and dynamic spectrum access features of CR provide the functionality to its unlicensed users to utilize the underutilized spectrum at the time of need because CR nodes can sense vacant bands of spectrum and can also access them to carry out communication. Various capabilities of CR nodes depend upon efficient and continuous reporting of data with each other and centralized base stations, which in turn can cause leakage in privacy. Experimental studies have shown that the privacy of CR users can be compromised easily during the cognition cycle, because they are knowingly or unknowingly sharing various personally identifiable information (PII), such as location, device ID, signal status, etc. In order to preserve this privacy leakage, various privacy preserving strategies have been developed by researchers, and according to us differential privacy is the most significant among them. In this article, we provide a thorough survey on how differential privacy can play an active role in preserving privacy of cognitive radio networks (CRN). Firstly, we provide a thorough comparison of our work with other similar studies to show its novelty and contribution, and afterwards, we provide a thorough analysis from the perspective of various CR scenarios which can cause privacy leakage. After that, we carry out an in-depth assessment from the perspective of integration of differential privacy at different levels of CRN. Then, we discuss various parameters which should be considered while integrating differential privacy in CRN alongside providing a comprehensive discussion about all integrations of differential privacy carried out till date. Finally, we provide discussion about prospective applications, challenges, and future research directions. The discussion about integration of differential privacy in different CR scenarios indicates that differential privacy is one of the most viable mechanisms to preserve privacy of CRN in modern day scenarios. From the discussion in the article, it is evident that the proposed integration of differential privacy can pave the way for futuristic CRN in which CR users will be able to share information during the cognition cycle without the risk of losing their private information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: No reports exist regarding the prevalence of different Na levels and their relationship with 90-day prognosis in hospitalized patients with acute-on-chronic liver disease (AoCLD) in China. Therefore, the benefit of hyponatremia correction in AoCLD patients remains unclear. Methods: We prospectively collected the data of 3970 patients with AoCLD from the CATCH-LIFE cohort in China. The prevalence of different Na levels (≤ 120; 120–135; 135–145; > 145) and their relationship with 90-day prognosis were analyzed. For hyponatremic patients, we measured Na levels on days 4 and 7 and compared their characteristics, based on whether hyponatremia was corrected. Results: A total of 3880 patients were involved; 712 of those developed adverse outcomes within 90 days. There were 80 (2.06%) hypernatremic, 28 (0.72%) severe hyponatremic, and 813 (20.95%) mild hyponatremic patients at admission. After adjusting for all confounding factors, the risk of 90-day adverse outcomes decreased by 5% (odds ratio [OR] 0.95; 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.93–0.97; p < 0.001), 24% (OR 0.76; 95% CI 0.70–0.84; p < 0.001), and 42% (OR 0.58; 95% CI 0.49–0.70; p < 0.001) as Na level increased by 1, 5, and 10 mmol/L, respectively. Noncorrection of hyponatremia on days 4 and 7 was associated with 2.05-fold (hazard ratio [HR], 2.05; 95% CI, 1.50–2.79; p < 0.001) and 1.46-fold (HR 1.46; 95% CI 1.05–2.02; p = 0.028) higher risk of adverse outcomes. Conclusions: Hyponatremia was an independent risk factor for a poor 90-day prognosis in patients with AoCLD. Failure to correct hyponatremia in a week after admission was often associated with increased mortality. (ClinicalTrials.gov number: NCT02457637, NCT03641872). Clinical Trial Numbers: This study is registered at Shanghai www.clinicaltrials.org (NCT02457637 and NCT03641872). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommendation system is a technology that can mine user's preference for items. Explainable recommendation is to produce recommendations for target users and give reasons at the same time to reveal reasons for recommendations. The explainability of recommendations that can improve the transparency of recommendations and the probability of users choosing the recommended items. The merits about explainability of recommendations are obvious, but it is not enough to focus solely on explainability of recommendations in field of explainable recommendations. Therefore, it is essential to construct an explainable recommendation framework to improve the explainability of recommended items while maintaining accuracy and diversity. An explainable recommendation framework based on knowledge graph and multi-objective optimization is proposed that can optimize the precision, diversity and explainability about recommendations at the same time. Knowledge graph connects users and items through different relationships to obtain an explainable candidate list for target user, and the path between target user and recommended item is used as an explanation basis. The explainable candidate list is optimized through multi-objective optimization algorithm to obtain the final recommendation list. It is concluded from the results about experiments that presented explainable recommendation framework provides high-quality recommendations that contains high accuracy, diversity and explainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grass carp hemorrhagic disease is a fatal disease caused by the grass carp reovirus (GCRV). The aberrant regulation of transcripts has been implicated in many types of diseases. In the present study, we characterized mRNA and miRNA transcriptomes of different virulent GCRVs using RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq). One hundred eighteen miRNAs were identified as being differentially expressed between different virulent viruses in grass carp fibroblasts. Eight miRNAs were selected to verify the RNA-Seq results using RT-PCR and mRNA methods. In total, 996 differentially expressed mRNA genes were identified in grass carp fibroblasts, while 901 miRNA-mRNA target pairs were observed to be inversely regulated in grass carp fibroblasts. Integrated mRNA/miRNA expression profiling analysis results showed that the most influenced processes were the immune response and cell death. Three miRNAs were shown to exhibit the same expression patterns when two different methods were used and had important functions during viral infection. These results provide insights into the miRNA-mediated regulation of mRNA and valuable resources on transcript variation and regulation during GCRV infection, which are potentially useful for mechanistic and drug studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heteropoda venatoria in the family Sparassidae is highly valued in pantropical countries because the species feed on domestic insect pests. Unlike most other species of Araneomorphae, H. venatoria uses the great speed and strong chelicerae (mouthparts) with toxin glands to capture the insects instead of its web. Therefore, H. venatoria provides unique opportunities for venom evolution research. The venom of H. venatoria was explored by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization tandem time-of-flight and analyzing expressed sequence tags. The 154 sequences coding cysteine-rich peptides (CRPs) revealed 24 families based on the phylogenetic analyses of precursors and cysteine frameworks in the putative mature regions. Intriguingly, four kinds of motifs are first described in spider venom. Furthermore, combining the diverse CRPs of H. venatoria with previous spider venom peptidomics data, the structures of precursors and the patterns of cysteine frameworks were analyzed. This work revealed the dynamic evolutionary trends of venom CRPs in H. venatoria: the precursor has evolved an extended mature peptide with more cysteines, and a diminished or even vanished propeptides between the signal and mature peptides; and the CRPs evolved by multiple duplications of an ancestral ICK gene as well as recruitments of non-toxin genes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distance vector-hop (DV-hop) is a typical localization algorithm. It estimates sensor nodes location through detecting the hop count between nodes. To enhance the positional precision, the weight is used to estimate position, and the conventional wisdom is that the more hop counts are, the smaller value of weight will be. However, there has been no clear mathematical model among positioning error, hop count, and weight. This paper constructs a mathematical model between the weights and hops and analyzes the convergence of this model. Finally, the genetic algorithm is used to solve this mathematical weighted DV-hop (MW-GADV-hop) positioning model, the simulation results illustrate that the model construction is logical, and the positioning error of the model converges to 1/4R. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hybrid many-objective cuckoo search algorithm (HMaOCS) is a newly proposed method for Many-objective optimization problems (MaOPs), and has achieved promising performance. However, Lévy and Gaussian distributions used in global search manner of HMaOCS is originally proposed for optimization problems with one objective, and they are not suitable for MaOPs as illustrated in this paper. To further exploit the potential of HMaOCS, this paper investigates four different probability distributions and their six corresponding combinations. Comparison results illustrate that the combination of Lévy and Exponential distributions is able to greatly improve HMaOCS. On the basis of comparison results and analysis on both DTLZ and WFG test suites with 2, 3, 4, 6, 8 and 10 objectives, it can be concluded that HMaOCS with Lévy and Exponential distributions exhibits better performance compared with most advanced algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extracellular protease Vpr (Vpr), gamma-glutamyltranspeptidase (GGT; EC 2.3.2.2) and glyoxal/methylglyoxal reductase (YvgN; EC 1.1.1.21) are extracellular enzymes involved in feather degradation, which were identified by secretome analyses from an efficient feather-degrading strain Bacillus subtilis CH-1. The encoding sequences corresponding to the three secretory enzymes were cloned into vector pET22b for recombinant expression in Escherichia coli strain BL21 (DE3). Afterward, the proteins containing the C-terminal His-tag were purified using a Ni-IDA column. The optimal temperatures and pH values for protease activity of recombinant Vpr, GGT, and YvgN were identified as 45 °C/pH 7.0, 40 °C/pH 8.0, and 50 °C/pH 6.0 respectively when casein is the substrate. Furthermore, the synergistic effects of the three enzymes were studied using feather powder as substrate. Vpr was the core enzyme to hydrolyze keratin, while GGT and YvgN were coenzymes providing reducing activities for keratin decomposition. The keratinolytic activity was enhanced to about 1.4-folds when YvgN and Vpr applied together in comparison to Vpr alone. And the keratinolytic activity almost reached to 1.5-folds when all the three enzymes were combined to use. The study provides a novel perspective of the mechanism of keratin degradation by microorganisms, and thereby may also be of relevance for the design of an industrial process for enzymatic keratin degradation; however, additional experiments must be done to substantiate this conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barrier Coverage is an important sensor deployment issue in many industrial, consumer and military applications.The barrier coverage in bistatic radar sensor networks has attracted many researchers recently. The Bistatic Radars (BR) consist of radar signal transmitters and radar signal receivers. The effective detection area of bistatic radar is a Cassini oval area that determined by the distance between transmitter and receiver and the predefined detecting SNR threshold. Many existing works on bistatic radar barrier coverage mainly focus on homogeneous radar sensor networks. However, cooperation among different types or different physical parameters of sensors is necessary in many practical application scenarios. In this paper, we study the optimal deployment problem in heterogeneous bistatic radar networks.The object is how to maximize the detection ability of bistatic radar barrier with given numbers of radar sensors and barrier's length. Firstly, we investigate the optimal placement strategy of single transmitter and multiple receivers, and propose the patterns of aggregate deployment. Then we study the optimal deployment of heterogeneous transmitters and receivers and introduce the optimal placement sequences of heterogeneous transmitters and receivers. Finally, we design an efficient greedy algorithm, which realize optimal barrier deployment of M heterogeneous transmitters and N receivers on a L length boundary, and maximizing the detection ability of the barrier. We theoretically proved that the placement sequence of the algorithm construction is optimal deployment solution in heterogeneous bistatic radar sensors barrier. And we validate the algorithm effectiveness through comprehensive simulation experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel feather-degrading bacterium named CA-1 was isolated from the gut of the spider Chilobrachys guangxiensis, which degrades native whole chicken feathers within 20 h. The CA-1 was confirmed to belong to Stenotrophomonas maltophilia based on morphologic and molecular analysis. Maximum feather degradation activity of the bacterium was observed at 37 °C in basal feather medium (NaCl 0.5 g/L, KH2PO4 0.3 g/L, K2HPO4 0.4 g/L, feather powder 10.0 g/L, pH 8.0), which was inhibited when glucose and ammonium nitrate were added in the medium. Furthermore, the purified enzymes under the optimal and suppressive conditions were analyzed respectively by SDS-PAGE and LC-MS/MS. Three enzymes, namely alkaline serine protease (29.1 kDa), ABC transporter permease (27.5 kDa), and alkaline phosphatase (40.8 kDa), were isolated and identified from the supernatant of the optimal culture and were considered to play principal roles. On the other hand, the potential synergic effects of the three proteins in S. maltophilia CA-1 feather degradation system were analyzed theoretically. CA-1 may product outer-membrane vesicles comprised of membranes and periplasmic proteins in the feather medium. The newly identified CA-1 and its synergic enzymes provide a new insight into further understanding the molecular mechanism of feather degradation by microbes. They also have potential application in cost-effectively degrading feathers into feeds and fertilizers through careful optimization and engineering of the three newly identified enzymes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cuckoo search (CS) is a recently developed meta-heuristic, which has shown good search abilities on many optimization problems. In this paper, we present a hybrid multi-objective CS (HMOCS) for solving multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs). The HMOCS employs the non-dominated sorting procedure and a dynamical local search. The former is helpful to generate Pareto fronts, and the latter focuses on enhance the local search. In order to verify the performance of our approach HMOCS, six well-known benchmark MOPs were used in the experiments. Simulation results show that HMOCS outperforms three other multi-objective algorithms in terms of convergence, spread and distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Vitamin E is one of the most promising agents for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) treatment, and its drug responsiveness may be closely associated with haptoglobin (Hp) genotype. However, its efficacy and safety remain unknown in China. This clinical trial of vitamin E versus placebo for the treatment of nondiabetic patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (VENS) is conducted to evaluate (a) the efficacy and safety of treatment with vitamin E softgel (300 mg/day) determined from standardized histologic scoring of liver biopsies, (b) whether treatment with vitamin E improves biochemical parameters, cytokines, anthropometric parameters, controlled attenuation parameter (CAP), and transient elastography (TE) values determined by Fibroscan and health-related quality of life (SF-36), (c) whether the efficacy of vitamin E treatment is associated with the Hp genotype in nondiabetic adults with NASH.Methods: VENS is a multicenter, randomized, double-masked, placebo parallel controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy and safety of treatment with vitamin E softgel in nondiabetic adults with NASH versus treatment with placebo in China. Liver biopsies are read by a pathological evaluation committee independently according to the NASH Clinical Research Network (CRN) scoring system. The NAFLD activity score (NAS) represents the sum of scores for steatosis, lobular inflammation, and hepatocyte ballooning. The definition of histologic improvement requires all three of the following criteria to be met: (a) either improvement in NAS by at least 2 points or post-treatment NAS score no higher than 3, (b) at least 1-point improvement in the score for ballooning, and (c) no worsening of fibrosis stages. We plan to recruit 120 biopsy-proven NASH patients from13 centers in China. Participants will be randomly assigned to groups treated with either with vitamin E (100 mg, tid) or placebo for 96 weeks then followed by 24 weeks of post-treatment observation. Biochemical parameters, cytokines, anthropometric parameters, CAP and TE values, Hp genotype, and several questionnaires will be collected as per the schedule. This protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of Hangzhou Normal University Affiliated Hospital to ensure patients safety, and R&G Pharmastudies Co., Ltd. was established for monitoring the accumulated interim data to review efficacy and quality of data collection and overall study management.Results: As a preliminary study, a mobile phone application (app) for lifestyle modification and database recording ( http://laiyivens.365hy.com ) was exploited for every participant. The percentage of NAFLD patients with Hp 2-2 allele is much higher than that of Western patients (65.71% vs 36%, respectively), which suggests that the Chinese benefit more from vitamin E treatment.Conclusion: VENS is the first randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the efficacy of Vitamin E in treating nondiabetic NASH patients in China.Trial Registration: This study registered at https://clinicaltrials.gov (registration number: NCT02962297).Funding: Zhejiang Medicine Co., Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dioxin-like polychlorinated biphenyls (DLPCBs) are ubiquitous persistent pollutants that cause adverse effects in many environmental organisms. DLPCBs in marine sediments can be absorbed by benthic organisms, bioaccumulate, and biomagnify through the food chain and threaten animal and human health. There are no reports of DLPCBs concentrations in the Zhanjiang Gulf seabed. This study was designed to investigate the concentration of DLPCBs in the Zhanjiang coastal sediment and histopathological changes in zebrafish ( Diano rerio) embryos exposed to environmentally relevant concentrations of DLPCBs. Of the five sites selected, two sites TS and JSW contained DLPCBs at concentrations of 0.08 and 22.54 ng/g dry sediment, respectively. Two groups of zebrafish embryos were used. One group was exposed to 3.75, 7.5, 15, 30, and 60 mg/ml of DLPCBs extracted from the sediments sampled from the TS site and the second group to 4.375, 8.75, 17.5, 35, and 70 mg/ml of DLPCBs from JSW site from 0.75 h post-fertilization (hpf) to 96 hpf. The zebrafish exposed to 60 and 70 mg/ml of DLPCBs at 96 hpf displayed gross histopathological changes with cardiac lesions including pericardial edema being the most deleterious. Other changes observed were hydropic degeneration of gill filaments and hepatocytes, loss of intestinal folds, and uninflated swim bladder. It appears that only a few sites of the Zhanjiang gulf are contaminated with DLPCBs. This is the first report of histopathological changes in the gills, hepatocytes, intestines, heart, and the swim bladder in zebrafish embryos exposed to DLPCBs from a coastal sediment. Further studies with sampling at different stages of development are required to identify which organ/tissue is most sensitive to DLPCBs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate analyses of T-2 and HT-2 toxin in aquatic organisms including shrimp are important as these two toxins are increasingly detected in aquatic cereal-based feed. Therefore, the potential for these toxins to enter the human food chain from contaminated fish and shrimp products is very real. A rapid, sensitive, and validated method for simultaneous determination of T-2 and HT-2 toxins was developed using a liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method following extraction of the two toxins from shrimp tissues with ethyl acetate. This method is simple in that additional solid-phase extraction is not required to isolate and purify the toxins. LC was performed on an analytical Hypersil GOLD column. The mobile phase consisted of methanol and 5 mM ammonium acetate containing 0.1 % formic acid. The MS/MS ion transitions for both the T-2 toxin (484.20 → 214.87) and HT-2 toxin (442.20 → 214.96) were monitored. And the most intense transition ion product (m/z) of T-2 and HT-2 used for quantification on the SRM mode of a mass spectrometer was 304.95 and 262.91, respectively. The results linearly correlated with coefficients >0.9990. The limits of quantification ranged from 0.02 to 0.51 ng·g and from 0.17 to 4.48 ng·g for T-2 and HT-2, respectively, depending on the shrimp tissue type. The overall extraction recovery for both toxins ranged between 84 and 111 % with RSD values less than 15.0 %, indicative of good replication. Furthermore, the recovery and precision levels were within the predefined limits (≤15 %) at all concentrations. The application of this method to study the accumulation of T-2 toxin in shrimp showed that it can be successfully used to monitor even very low tissue toxin concentrations. Research is in progress to extend this method for the measurement of T-2 and HT-2 in aquatic foods that enter the human food chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cloud computing has rendered its ever-increasing advantages in flexible service provisions, which attracts the attentions from large-scale enterprise applications to small-scale smart uses. For example, more and more multimedia services are moving towards cloud to better accommodate people's daily uses on various smart devices that support cloud, some of which are similar or equivalent in their functionality (e.g., more than 1,000 video services that share similar 'video-play' functionality are present in APP Store). In this situation, it is necessary to discriminate these functional-equivalent multimedia services, based on their Quality of Service (QoS) information. However, due to the abundant information of multimedia content, dozens of QoS criteria are often needed to evaluate a multimedia service, which places a heavy burden on users' multimedia service selection. Besides, the QoS criteria of multimedia services are usually not independent, but correlated, which cannot be accommodated very well by the traditional selection methods, e.g., traditional simple weighting methods. In view of these challenges, we put forward a multimedia service selection method based on weighted Principal Component Analysis (PCA), i.e., Weighted PCA-based Multimedia Service Selection Method (W_PCA_MSSM). The advantage of our proposal is two-fold. First, weighted PCA could reduce the number of QoS criteria for evaluation, by which the service selection process is simplified. Second, PCA could eliminate the correlations between different QoS criteria, which may bring a more accurate service selection result. Finally, the feasibility of W_PCA_MSSM is validated, by a set of experiments deployed on real-world service quality set QWS Dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting trustworthiness of mobile services is a fundamental need for mobile service selection. With the popularization of mobile social networks, employing trust propagation to predict trust of a user placed on a mobile service becomes available. However, existing methods based on trust propagation in social networks may suffer from a scalability problem, i.e., their trust computation for two indirectly connected users is likely too time-consuming to be acceptable in very large social networks. To address this issue, this paper proposes a trust propagation method which exploits the peculiar properties of social networks and incorporates a landmark-based method with preprocessing to improve the efficiency of trust prediction. In this method, a small number of landmark users in the social network are firstly selected as referees in trust propagation, and the trust between these landmark users and the other users are then pre-computed. The trust between two indirectly connected users is finally estimated via aggregating the referrals provided by the landmark users. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, comprehensive experiments are conducted using a real online social network. The experimental results show that our method is quite more efficient than the other four classic trust propagation methods in trust prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To gain and retain competitive advantages in a competitive business arena, a business cloud-computing platform should continuously strive to offer new services and remain competitive. Unfortunately, it becomes more and more recognized by the industry that a cloud-computing platform could not cover all aspects of IT layers engaged in infrastructure, platform and application. In practice, end users' requests are nearly unlimited; while the services held by a cloud-computing platform is relatively limited, no matter in service category or in service capacity. In view of this challenge, an elastic cloud platform is investigated by recruited outside services that are absent from the cloud platform. Concretely, through dynamically hiring a qualified service on Internet to replace the absent service inside a cloud platform, an elastic cloud platform could nearly provide unlimited capabilities in an outsourcing service way, e.g., computing power, storage, application functions, etc. At last, the validity of the method is evaluated by a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are delighted to present this special issue of World Wide Web on Data Science in Cyberspace 2019. Liao et al., in "DP-FL: a novel differentially private federated learning framework for the unbalanced data", propose a novel differentially private federated learning framework to protect the data privacy for unbalanced data. In "Scene Text Reading Based Cloud Compliance Access User Behavior Analyze of Graphical System and Images Data Sanitization", the authors propose a Cloud Compliance Access system based on improved scene text reading model. [Extracted from the article]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including dynamic data caching as solution for high performance web server, soft error tolerance through dynamic binary instrumentation, and Virtual coordinate system (VCS) development.