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One of the successful strategies developed for studying the gene function of aphids is to silence aphid gene expression by plant-mediated RNA interference (RNAi). In this study, we analyzed the expression patterns and the biological functions of genes related to chitin metabolism ApCht7 and ApCht10 by using gene-specific plant-mediated RNAi in the green pea aphid, Acyrthosiphon pisum (Ap). The RT-qPCR results demonstrated that the RNAi-mediated silencing of these ApChts suppressed the expression of most genes involved in the chitin degradation pathway, but enhanced the expressions of ApHK, ApGFAT, ApPGM and ApCHS, indicating that the RNAi of ApChts could affect the expression of genes related to chitin metabolism and regulate the chitin metabolism. Furthermore, it resulted in a decrease in aphid body weight of aphids, with mortality rates ranging from 3.3 to 26.1%. Abnormal phenotypes (e.g., molting defect and wrinkled integument) were observed in the treated nymphs, leading to early lethality. The aphid reproduction rate reduced by 27.9–40.5% at 120 h after RNAi of ApChts. The target genes ApCht7 and ApCht10 expression were also downregulated in the progeny nymphs born from the mothers exposed to dsRNA-plants with significantly lower body weights. The previously mentioned results suggest that the effects of RNAi ApCht7 and ApCht10 are heritable and passed down to offspring. Our study provides a foundation for the practical application of the plant-mediated RNAi of ApCht7 and ApCht10 as a powerful tools and methods for controlling field aphid outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The low negative-electrode capacitance of supercapacitors results in low energy density, thereby severely limiting their practical applications. In this study, CuxTey composite anode materials were prepared using a microwave-assisted method and subsequently characterized using various techniques. The three-electrode performance of the material was tested using a 6 M KOH alkaline solution, and results showed that the multiple valence states of Cu element provided abundant redox active sites. These sites conferred the CuxTey electrode with excellent capacitance (708 mAh g−1). Thus, symmetric supercapacitor devices were constructed with a power of 3056 Wh kg−1 and an energy density of 73 Wh kg−1 in a relatively superior position. The capacitance retention for 1000 consecutive charge–discharge cycles was 71.3%, and the Coulomb efficiency was 99.1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Yunnan-Guizhou-North region of the Sichuan Basin in Southern China is a favorable research area for southern marine stratigraphy. The classification and evaluation of shale lithofacies are essential for shale gas exploration and development. This study uses XRD analysis, thin section identification, geochemical analysis, gas content testing, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), high-pressure adsorption, and low-temperature N2 adsorption. And machine learning methods to predict the shale lithofacies of uncored well sections systematically analyze the shale lithofacies of the Longmaxi Formation in the study area. The study showed that (1) the Longmaxi Formation in the study area mainly develops organic-rich mixed shale (ORM), organic-rich calcareous/siliceous mixed shale (ORM-1), organic-rich argillaceous/siliceous mixed shale (ORM-2), organic-fair argillaceous/siliceous mixed shale (OFM-2), organic-poor mixed shale (OPM), organic-poor argillaceous/siliceous mixed shale (OPM-2), organic-poor clay-rich siliceous shale (OPS-3). (2) ORM, ORM-1, and ORM-2 have high organic matter content and brittleness index (BI), pore-specific surface area, strong adsorption capacity, and generally higher gas content than 2 m3/t, with good gas content. The specific surface area of OFM-2, OPM, OPM-2, and OPS-3 is much smaller than the previous three organic matter-rich shale lithofacies, and the total pore volume is also lower. In contrast, their average pore size is higher than the previous three. The average pore size of OPM-2 is the largest, which is favorable to the aggregation of free gas, but its gas content is shallow. (3) The ORM, ORM-1, and ORM-2 shale lithofacies have high organic matter abundance, diverse storage space types, excellent pore structure parameters, high brittle mineral content, and high gas content, and are the shale facies with the advantages of integrated production and storage conditions in the Longmaxi Formation in the study area. The ORM-1 shale is the best shale reservoir facies, followed by the ORM and ORM-2 shale facies, and the combination of ORM and ORM-2 interbedded shale lithofacies is favorable for shale gas enrichment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is critical for both the sensory and emotional/cognitive components of pain. However, the underlying mechanism remains largely unknown. Here, we examined changes in the transcriptomic profiles in the mPFC of mice with chronic pain using RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) technology. A mouse model of peripheral neuropathic pain was established via chronic constriction injury (CCI) of the sciatic nerve. CCI mice developed sustained mechanical allodynia and thermal hyperalgesia, as well as cognitive impairment four weeks after surgery. RNA-seq was conducted 4 weeks after CCI surgery. Compared with contral group, RNA-seq identified a total 309 and 222 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the ipsilateral and contralateral mPFC of CCI model mice, respectively. GO analysis indicated that the functions of these genes were mainly enriched in immune- and inflammation-related processes such as interferon-gamma production and cytokine secretion. KEGG analysis further showed the enrichment of genes involved in the neuroactive ligand–receptor interaction signaling pathway and Parkinson disease pathway that have been reported to be importantly involved in chronic neuralgia and cognitive dysfunction. Our study may provide insights into the possible mechanisms underlying neuropathic pain and pain-related comorbidities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the problem that AISI4340, a common material for fully mechanized coal mining equipment, is prone to wear failure in harsh working environment. To repair damaged area and improve service performance, the high-strength Fe-Cr alloy coatings having different laser energy densities were fabricated on the AISI4340 by laser-directed energy deposition. The effects of the energy densities on the tensile properties, hardness, residual stress, wear, and fatigue damage were systematically studied. The models of fatigue damage and service life were established and improved, and the prediction accuracy was verified. The results indicated that with the increasing energy density, the tensile strength and Rockwell hardness increased first and then decreased, and the residual stress on the coating surface aggrandized with increasing temperature gradient. When the energy density was 35.01 J/mm2, the wear depth and wear rate were 51.8 μm and 1.91 × 10−2 mm3∙N−1∙mm−1, and the wear resistance was increased by two times compared with the substrate. Considering the effective crack propagation and loading order, the accuracy of the service life models was improved from 65.9% and 23.1% to 14.6% and 6.7%, respectively. Selecting appropriate energy density is beneficial to improve the mechanical properties and decrease the fatigue damage of Fe-Cr alloy coatings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To enhance sludge dewatering performance, Zero-valent iron/peroxymonosulfate/walnut shell powder was used to condition sludge at 55 °C and pH=3 (ZVI/PMS/WSP-T/pH), and the dewatering mechanism was also analyzed. The results showed that the capillary suction time (CST) and water content of sludge cake (Wc) were reduced to 6.8 s and 62.1%, respectively, and net sludge yield (YN) increased to 58.74kg/(m2·h) after being treated by ZVI/PMS/WSP-T/pH. The thermal and acid conditions could promote the corrosion of Fe2+ from ZVI and enhance PMS to produce more SO4−· and ·OH. The radicals combined with acid and thermal hydrolysis could efficiently reduce extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), especially tightly bound EPS (TB-EPS), destroy sludge floc and release bound water. The stripping off of EPS and neutralization of Fe3+, Fe2+ and H+ caused the zeta potential to increase to −0.91 mV The flocculation of cations and adsorption of WSP further increased the fractal dimension to 1.71. Moreover, the rigid and porosity structure of WSP increased sludge incompressibility and formed channels for water. Under the combined oxidation, acid/thermal hydrolysis, re-aggregation and skeleton builder functions, the sludge dewatering performance was greatly improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The engineering vehicle detection is a key issue for the raw material warehouse scenes. Through the engineering vehicle detection, the working conditions of engineering vehicles in the raw material warehouse can be intelligently managed to prevent large-scale smoke pollution and the danger of smoke and dust. In this paper, we propose an intelligent method based on the framework of YOLOv4-Tiny for locating and identifying the engineering vehicles. In our detection task, the monitoring scenes are complex with a lot of interference. And the scope of monitoring is large. In order to solve these challenging problems, we introduce the Split-attention module to the network, which can adaptively extract important information of the image and improve the receptive field of detection. In addition, we introduce the Dynamic ReLU function to the network, which allow the network to adaptively learn more suitable ReLU parameters based on the input. We also collect a large number of images obtained from the front-end cameras and create a self-built dataset of engineering vehicles. In this paper, we test our method on the COCO dataset and the self-built engineering vehicle dataset. Experimental results show that our method proposed in this paper can detect engineering vehicles with higher accuracy and faster speed, which can be used for engineering vehicle detection in the scenes of raw material storage warehouses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remote sensing interpretation for surveillance of land use often needs to mark out construction disturbance on satellite imagery, such as illegal buildings or spoil area. These disturbance region annotated by a set of surveillance rules contain the corresponding image characteristics which are regarded as semantic information in computer vision. Different from the natural Landscapes interpretation, the semantic information of construciton disturbance region shows more complex to extract with lack of available training dataset and interference of the various sizes of targets. This paper proposes a hybrid attention semantic segmentation network (HAssNet) which can extract the target and its surroundings through a large receptive field for multi-scale targets. Based on the full convolutional networks (FCN), spatial attention mechanism is firstly introduced to acquire the position of segmentation target with the global correlations, so that the small targets in large scale scene are guaranteed not to be omitted in semantic features extraction. Secondly, channel attention mechanism is designed to assign higher weights to task-related channels for semantic consistency. Experimental results on an open remote sensing dataset show that HAssNet achieves average 6.7% improvement in mIoU than the state-of-the-art segmentation networks. In a land use surveillance project, HAssNet shows considerable performance compared with manual interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the problems that still adversely affect the optical flow accuracy is the missing parts or the loss of some details in the flow map that is estimated by the flow estimation network. The main reasons are the feature maps that are extracted by the local kernels of the convolution neural networks (CNN), which cause feature loss and provide low-quality features, and the occluded parts after the image reconstruction. This loss in the encoder part becomes hard to recover in the flow estimation network. To overcome this problem, we propose a CNN with transformer architecture to emphasize the important features and model the long-range dependencies to produce a better feature representation that can provide the flow map with strong details. In addition, we propose an occlusion compensation loss to rectify the occlusion map and assist the network in learning how to predict the flow in the occluded regions. Extensive experiments are conducted on Sintel and KITTI benchmarks, and the results demonstrate the efficiency of our model in increasing the accuracy of the optical flow and improving the flow in the occluded regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scene flow estimation is one of the most crucial components of many scene understanding tasks, which represents the complete 3D motion of objects in dynamic scene. Most of existing scene flow estimation approaches are usually based on joint learning framework, which cast the problem of scene flow estimation to dense prediction of optical flow and stereo matching. However, these approaches need to reconstruct 3D motion from optical flow and disparity using 2D stereo image pairs, which leads the estimation process to be indirect. Recently, FlowNet3D attempts to learn scene flow from 3D point clouds, which adopts element-wise max-pooling to aggregate features from different points. Nevertheless, max-pooling operation only can obtain the strongest activation on features across a local or global region, which may increase the loss of some useful detailed and contextual. Specifically, for dense estimation task, the ability to transfer information gradually from coarse to fine layers is important. To address this problem, we investigate a new deep architecture, 3D point convolutional network, to learn scene flow from 3D point clouds. This specific architecture uses multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to approximate the weight function and applies a density scale to re-weight the learned weight functions for each convolutional filter, which can make the network permutation-invariant and translation invariant on 3D space which is beneficial for feature aggregation. Extensive experimental results are conducted on FlyingThings3D and KITTI scene flow datasets and show the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Our algorithm can achieve state-of-the-art performance on FlyingThings3D and KITTI datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experimental research on laser additive remanufacturing technology of heavy-duty sprocket was carried out. The influences of laser power, scanning speed, and powder feeding rate on cladding height, cladding area, melting area, and dilution rate were compared and analyzed. The prediction models of the combination of process parameters with the geometric characteristics of cladding layer and dilution were established. A multi-objective process parameter optimization model with the maximum cladding height and cladding area, the minimum melting area, and dilution rate as objective functions was established, and the model was optimized and solved based on MOPSO algorithm. The laser additive remanufacturing repairing experiment of damaged sprocket was carried out by using the optimal parameter combination, and the microstructure and mechanical properties of the repaired region were analyzed. The results show that the scanning speed and powder feeding rate are the main factors influencing the geometric characteristics and dilution of the cladding area, and the models have good prediction accuracy. The optimal process parameters (1150 W, 950 mm/min, 3.8 rad/min) obtained by MOPSO algorithm are adopted to repair the damaged sprocket. The repaired area without cracks and pores and the cladding layer show good metallurgical bonding with the substrate, and the microhardness is twice that of the substrate. The experimental results prove that the laser additive remanufacturing technology is feasible to repair the damaged heavy-duty sprocket and has a strong engineering application prospect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dephosphorization slag is primarily composed of CaO–SiO2–FeO–P2O5 slag system. As it contains abundant valuable components, dephosphorization slag is considered a potential material to restore the degraded acid soil. To efficiently supply Ca, Si, Fe, and P elements for acid soil, the dissolution behavior of dephosphorization slag with high P2O5 content in the weakly acidic solution was investigated. It was found that the existence of citric acid could significantly promote the dissolution of slag in the aqueous solution. Most of the Ca, Si, and P was dissolved from slag at pH 5, and the Fe dissolution ratio reached 36.9%. In this case, the precipitation of Fe3(PO4)2∙8H2O was suppressed, and the majority of C2S–C3P solid phase and matrix phase was dissolved while wustite remained in the residue. The dissolution ratios of main elements from slag decreased dramatically as the pH increased. Only in the weakly acidic solution, it could make full use of dephosphorization slag, and large amounts of nutrient elements were simultaneously supplied. The dissolution ratios of nutrient elements decreased with the increase in particle size. The dissolution kinetics of slag in the citric acid solution followed the shrinking core model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dense depth estimation based on a single image is a basic problem in computer vision and has exciting applications in many robotic tasks. Modelling fully supervised methods requires the acquisition of accurate and large ground truth data sets, which is often complex and expensive. On the other hand, self-supervised learning has emerged as a promising alternative to monocular depth estimation as it does not require ground truth depth data. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised joint learning framework for depth estimation using consecutive frames from monocular and stereo videos. Our architecture leverages two new ideas for improvement: (1) triplet attention and (2) funnel activation (FReLU). By adding triplet attention to the deep and pose networks, this module captures the importance of features across dimensions in a tensor without any information bottlenecks, making the optimisation learning framework more reliable. FReLU is used at the non-linear activation layer to grasp the local context adaptively in images, rather than using more complex convolutions at the convolution layer. FReLU extracts the spatial structure of objects by the pixel-wise modeling capacity provided by the spatial condition, making the details of the complex image richer. The experimental results show that the proposed method is comparable with the state-of-the-art self-supervised monocular depth estimation method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing studies showed that several anti-platelet drugs turned out to be a promising strategy for inflammatory response. In this study, we investigated the protective efficiency of pretreatment of indobufen or aspirin combined with clopidogrel or ticagrelor (IACT) on cerebral ischemic injury via NF-κB/NLRP3 pathway. Ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury was simulated in vivo by middle cerebral artery occlusion/reperfusion (MCAO/R) model, and rats were pretreated with indobufen and aspirin and their combinations with clopidogrel or ticagrelor respectively. The platelet aggregation, cerebral infarct size, water content, neurological impairment and LDH release were measured. The relative expression of inflammasome mediated pyroptosis was determined by ELISA, RT-PCR, Tunel, Immunofluorescence and Western blotting as appropriate. In vitro, I/R injury was simulated in PC12 cells using oxygen glucose deprivation/reperfusion (OGD/R) and Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) to induce pyroptosis. The effect of combinations were significantly greater than MCAO/R group on decreasing the platelet aggregation, infarct size, brain edema, LDH release and neurologic impairment. LPS aggravated I/R-induced PC12 cell injury, which was significantly suppressed by pretreatment of IACT and Bay11–7082. Mechanistically, IACT alleviated transcriptionally encoded IL-1β, IL-18 and NLRP3 via inhibiting nuclear transportation of NF-κB. Importantly, at protein level, NLRP3, Caspase-1, IL-18, IL-1β and GSDMD were significantly decreased in combination groups both in vivo and vitro. IACT reduce inflammasome mediated pyroptosis in MCAO/R rats and OGD/R PC12 cells through inhibiting NF-κB/NLRP3 signaling pathway, which suggests that drug combination is a protective strategy with clinical potential against I/R-induced injury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years,object detection and data association have getting remarkable progress which are the core components for multi-object tracking. In multi-object tracking field,the main strategy is tracking-by-detection. Although the detection based tracking method can get great results, it is relies on the performance of the detector. In complex scene, detector can not provide reliable results. Moreover,due to the incorrect detection results, data association process can not be trusted. Based on this motivation, this paper focuses on improving the accuracy of detection and data association. We introduce the efficient channel attention module to the backbone network, which can adaptively extract important information in images. Furthermore, we apply switchable atrous convolution in the network to dynamically adjust the receptive field according to object changes. In data association process, the appearance features with minimum occlusion are saved for each existing trajectory, which are used for re-associate after the objects are lost. Extensive experiments on MOT16,MOT17 and MOT20 challenging datasets demonstrate that our method is comparable with the state-of-the-art multi-object tracking methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visible–infrared cross-modality person re-identification is a realistic problem of person re-identification. Under poor illumination scenario, general methods of visible–visible person re-identification can not solve the problem well. If we directly compare the visible images of pedestrians captured under dark lighting with the visible images of pedestrians captured under normal light, this extreme color deviation will greatly reduce the recognition ability of the learned representations. In this paper, we propose a dual-path framework for visible–infrared cross-modality person re-identification based human part level features. Feature learning module contains modality-specific dual-path layers and modality-shared human part-level layers, which achieve discriminative global and local representations. In order to better optimize the proposed network, we design a global loss function and a local loss function for the global features and local features, respectively. The two loss functions are integrated together to train the network. We verify the effectiveness of our method on the challenging benchmarks: SYSU-MM01 and RegDB. Experimental results show that, compared with other cross-modality methods, our method has better effect in improving visible–infrared cross-modality person re-identification tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semi-supervised image classification is one of the areas of interest within the computer vision, which can build better classifiers using a few labeled images and plenty of unlabeled images. Recently, semi-supervised image classification methods based on the generative adversarial network (GAN) get promising results. In this paper, we introduce a self-attention mechanism to propose an attention-based GAN for semi-supervised image classification, which can capture global dependencies and adaptively extract important information. Furthermore, we apply spectral normalization, which can stabilize the training of attention-based GAN. We also adopt manifold regularization as an additional regularization term so that we can make the most of the unlabeled images. We test the proposed method on SVHN and CIFAR-10 datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed method is comparable with the state-of-the-art GAN-based semi-supervised image classification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The relation between dyslipidemia and atrial fibrillation (AF) development remains controversial. We conducted a prospective study to investigate the association of lipids with the risk of recurrence of AF after radiofrequency catheter ablation (RFCA).Methods: This study enrolled 287 consecutive patients who underwent initial circumferential pulmonary vein ablation (CPVA). Fasting levels of total cholesterol (TC), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), and triglycerides (TG) were measured at baseline before ablation. Patients were classified according to lipid quartiles. AF recurrence was confirmed by 48-h electrocardiograms at follow-up visits.Results: A total of 71 patients (24.7%) experienced AF recurrence during 3 to 12 months after ablation. By univariate Cox regression survival analysis, TC (HR, 0.63; 95%CI, 0.48-0.82), LDL-C (HR, 0.61; 95%CI, 0.44-0.84), non-paroxysmal AF type (HR, 2.56; 95%CI, 1.52-4.21), and left atrial diameter (HR, 2.18; 95%CI, 1.46-3.24) were significantly associated with AF recurrence. By multivariate Cox regression survival analysis, lower quartiles of TC (HR, 3.66; 95%CI, 1.56-8.56) and LDL-C (HR, 2.28; 95%CI 1.09-4.77) were associated with higher risk of AF recurrence compared with the highest quartiles. After adjustment by sex, lower TC (HR, 11.70; 95%CI, 2.79-49.13) and LDL-C (HR, 11.00; 95%CI, 2.77-43.72) levels were associated with the recurrence of AF in women, but not in men. HDL-C and TG levels showed no association with AF recurrence in both genders.Conclusions: TC and LDL-C levels were negatively correlated with AF recurrence after RFCA in women. HDL-C and TG were not independently associated with AF recurrence in both genders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread use of pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) has attracted much attention and the impact of PPCPs on indigenous microbial communities has become increasingly important in recent days. Five common PPCPs, including doxycycline (DOX), ciprofloxacin (CIP), triclocarban (TCC), carbamazepine (CBZ), and sulfadimidine (SMZ), were selected and their effects on soil microbial respiration were studied at concentrations of 0, 0.2, 1, 5, 25 and 50 mg/kg. The results of this study indicate that the effect of five common PPCPs on soil microbial respiration was dose- and time- dependent. At low concentrations (0.2 and 1 mg/kg), CBZ and SMZ exhibited an activation effect on microbial soil respiration at 1 day (58.02%, 26.39% and 1.54%, 1.76% at 0.2 and 1 mg/kg respectively), while DOX showed inhibition for all tested concentrations at 1 day of incubation. At high concentrations (25 and 50 mg/kg) CIP and SMZ showed an inhibitory effect (− 69.13%, − 80.86% for 25 and 50 mg/kg, respectively), while TCC and CBZ exhibited stimulatory effect (38.07%, 9.64% and 4.06%, 12.18% at 25 and 50 mg/kg, respectively) at 1 day of incubation. Our findings indicate that the effect of tested PPCPs on soil microbial respiration had an inhibitory or stimulatory effect based on the dose and extent of time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tetanic stimulation of the sciatic nerve (TSS) triggers long-term potentiation in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord and long-lasting pain hypersensitivity. CX3CL1–CX3CR1 signaling is an important pathway in neuronal–microglial activation. Nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) is a key signal transduction molecule that regulates neuroinflammation and neuropathic pain. Here, we set out to determine whether and how NF-κB and CX3CR1 are involved in the mechanism underlying the pathological changes induced by TSS. After unilateral TSS, significant bilateral mechanical allodynia was induced, as assessed by the von Frey test. The expression of phosphorylated NF-κB (pNF-κB) and CX3CR1 was significantly up-regulated in the bilateral dorsal horn. Immunofluorescence staining demonstrated that pNF-κB and NeuN co-existed, implying that the NF-κB pathway is predominantly activated in neurons following TSS. Administration of either the NF-κB inhibitor ammonium pyrrolidine dithiocarbamate or a CX3CR1-neutralizing antibody blocked the development and maintenance of neuropathic pain. In addition, blockade of NF-κB down-regulated the expression of CX3CL1–CX3CR1 signaling, and conversely the CX3CR1-neutralizing antibody also down-regulated pNF-κB. These findings suggest an involvement of NF-κB and the CX3CR1 signaling network in the development and maintenance of TSS-induced mechanical allodynia. Our work suggests the potential clinical application of NF-κB inhibitors or CX3CR1-neutralizing antibodies in treating pathological pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an adaptive semiblind background calibration of timing mismatches in a two-channel time-interleaved analog-to-digital converter (TIADC). By injecting a test tone at the frequency of half the overall sampling frequency of TIADC, the timing mismatch between two sub-ADCs can be quickly estimated with great accuracy without affecting the normal operation of the TIADC. The estimated coefficient can then be used in compensation module formed by a fixed structure to calibrate the timing mismatches. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed estimation and correction technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Pain is one of the most common side effects of transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TACE) treatment. This study aimed to assess the analgesic effect of parecoxib sodium for postoperative pain control in patients with inoperable hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) undergoing TACE.Materials and Methods: This randomized placebo-controlled prospective clinical study was conducted at a single cancer centre. Patients were randomly assigned to receive parecoxib sodium (experimental group; n = 60) or 0.9 % sodium chloride (control group; n = 60) 1 h before TACE and once every 12 h for 2 days after TACE. Pain level, morphine consumption, adverse events, and quality of life were evaluated and compared between the two groups.Results: Pain scores, percentage distribution of pain categories, and morphine consumption were significantly lower in the experimental group than in the control group (P < 0.05). Fever score comparisons revealed significantly better body temperature balance in the experimental group than in the control group (P = 0.024). Quality-of-life scores in the experimental group were significantly better than those in the control group (P < 0.05).Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that the perioperative administration of parecoxib significantly improved its effectiveness in the control of postoperative pain after TACE.Key Points: • Perioperative administration of parecoxib is effective for control of pain after TACE. • COX-2 inhibitors provide effective and safe pain control. • Parecoxib helps improve quality-of-life after TACE for patients with inoperable hepatocellular carcinoma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Ultrasound-guided diffuse optical tomography (US-DOT) can potentially detect breast carcinomas by measuring total tumour haemoglobin concentrations (TTHC). The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether vascular haemoglobin concentrations (VHC) affect the ability of US-DOT to distinguish breast carcinomas from benign. Materials and methods: In 85 women (97 palpable lesions) referred for core breast biopsy, we measured VHC with a complete blood count and calculated TTHCs for each lesion with US-DOT. Anaemia was defined as a VHC less than 120.0 g/L. Results: Mean TTHCs were significantly higher in malignant lesions ( n = 53) than in benign lesions ( n = 44), regardless of whether the lesions were from women with anaemia (TTHC, 248.5 vs. 123.3 μmol/L; P = 0.001) or from those without (TTHC, 229.7 vs. 173.9 μmol/L; P = 0.016). A cut-off TTHC of 155.1 μmol/L provided 81.3 % sensitivity, 81.8 % specificity and 81.5 % accuracy for detecting malignant tumours in women with anaemia and 78.4 % sensitivity, 54.5 % specificity and 67.1 % accuracy for women without. There was no significant difference in sensitivity ( P = 0.813), specificity ( P = 0.108) and accuracy ( P = 0.162) between the anaemic group and the non-anaemic group. Conclusions: Vascular haemoglobin concentrations did not affect the ability of US-DOT to differentiate breast carcinomas from benign lesions. Key Points: • US-DOT can differentiate benign from malignant breast lesions by measuring TTHC. • No difference in TTHC between the anaemia and non-anaemia group. • Vascular haemoglobin concentrations do not affect the diagnostic ability of US-DOT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the existence of imprecise fitting of subapertures' overlap zone, the accumulation of adjustment errors is significant during the measurement of aspheric surface by stitching interferometry. Theoretical analysis indicates that the effect and the appearance of three-direction adjustment errors accords with that of Seidel aberration, of which the axial error leads defocus, third-order spherical aberration and higher-order errors of wave front distribution. Based on the analysis we have made, a correction model has been established, and the estimated values of adjustment errors have been acquired. By correcting the higher-order aberration in the model, fitting precision of subapertures' overlap zone can be improved. Experiment for comparison shows that, after fitting, the value of both residual error and uncertainty of measurement become smaller than those values obtained by traditional correction method of three-direction adjustment error, which proves that the stitching precision of proposed method is higher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new production bioprocess for sea cucumber rice wine (SCRW) was established. The traditional production technology of Chinese rice wine was combined with addition of sea cucumber hydrosylates. The optimal enzymatic conditions of sea cucumber and the fermentation process of SCRW were determined. The weight of sea cucumber enzymatic hydrolysates was 2.5% of millet while cooking the millet. SCRW contained abundant free amino acids (30 total at 1,681.216 mg/L), oligosaccharides (4 total at 10,999.380 mg/L), total phenols (658.850 mg/L), and mineral elements (9 total at 1,911.353 mg/kg), and an antioxidant activity, all of which were higher than for control rice wine (CRW). Galactosamine and glucuronic acid, both sea cucumber polysaccharides, were present in SCRW, but not in CRW. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several researches reported that overexpression of SIRT1 was associated with poor survival in several human cancers. However, some researches reported that SIRT1 had an antitumor potential. The definite role of SIRT1 is not clear now, and few studies have documented the value of SIRT1 in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). Therefore, the aim of this study is to evaluate the role of SIRT1 in TNBC and non-TNBC for prognosis. A total of 51 TNBC patients and 83 non-TNBC patients who were diagnosed from October 2001 to September 2006 were involved in this study. Immunohistochemical staining for SIRT1 and p53 on tissue microarrays were used. Expression of SIRT1 was seen in 55 % of TNBC patients and 53 % of non-TNBC patients. Expression of SIRT1 was associated with lymph nodes status, stage, distant metastatic relapse, and p53 status in TNBC patients. Expression of SIRT1 in non-TNBC patients was significantly correlated with lymph nodes status, age, stage, distant metastatic relapse, PR status, and p53 status. SIRT1+ group was associated with shorter DFS and OS compared with SIRT1− group in TNBC, non-TNBC, and overall breast cancer patients, according to univariate Cox regression analysis. Our study provides evidence that expression of SIRT is associated with worse prognosis in TNBC and non-TNBC and SIRT1 could be a potential therapeutic target in breast cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: High serum human epidermal growth factors receptor-2 (HER2) extracellular domain (ECD) has been identified as an independent prognostic indicator of poor prognosis in metastatic breast cancer. However, its prognostic value in primary operable breast cancer was still controversial. We aim to investigate the correlation between serum HER2 ECD levels and tissue HER2 status, the association between serum HER2 ECD levels and clinicopathological characteristics, and their impacts on disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS) in primary operable breast cancer. Methods: Two hundred and fifty-two primary operable breast cancer patients pretreated from 2002 to 2009 in Sun Yat-Sen University Cancer Center were enrolled in this study. Serum HER2 ECD was measured by chemiluminescent assay, and tissue HER2 status was accessed by immunohistochemistry (IHC) and fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) assay. Results: There was a significant correlation between serum HER2 ECD levels and HER2 tissue status ( P < 0.001, R = 0.36). High serum HER2 ECD levels (≥15 ng/mL) were significantly associated with age (≥35 years) ( P = 0.028), postmenopausal status ( P < 0.001), stage III ( P < 0.001), tumor size (≥2 cm) ( P < 0.001), lymph node involvement ( P < 0.001), negative estrogen receptor ( P = 0.005), and progesterone receptor status ( P = 0.001). Multivariate analysis showed that high serum HER2 ECD level was an independent prognostic factor of worse DFS ( P = 0.014) and OS ( P = 0.014) in primary operable breast cancer patients. Conclusion: Serum HER2 ECD level can reflect tissue HER2 status and can be an independent prognostic indicator for primary operable breast cancer patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BRAF mutations can be found in various solid tumors. But accurate and reliable screening for BRAF mutation that is compatible for clinical application is not yet available. In this study, we used an automated immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining coupled with mouse monoclonal anti-BRAF V600E (VE1) primary antibody to screen the BRAF V600E mutation in 779 tumor cases, including 611 colorectal carcinomas (CRC), 127 papillary thyroid carcinomas (PTC) and 41 malignant melanomas. Among the 779 cases, 150 cases were positive for BRAF (V600E) staining, including 38 (of 611, 6%) CRCs, 102 (of 127, 80%) PTCs and 10 (of 41, 24%) malignant melanomas. Sanger sequencing and real-time PCR confirmed the sensitivity and specificity of IHC staining for the V600E mutation are 100% and 99%, respectively. Therefore, our study demonstrates that the fully automated IHC is a reliable tool to determine BRAF mutation status in CRC, PTC and melanoma and can be used for routine clinical screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]