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Objective: The BRAFV600E mutation is the universal genetic mutation in papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC). The present study is to estimate the role of the BRAFV600E mutation in the clinical outcome of PTMC with intermediate to high recurrence risk after radioactive iodine (RAI) therapy, which is considered to be an indolent tumor. Methods: We conducted a single-center retrospective study. Between May 2016 and March 2019, PTMC patients with known BRAFV600E status who received RAI therapy were reviewed at the Second Hospital of Shandong University. Treatment and follow-up were defined according to criteria used in the 2015 ATA guidelines. The association between the BRAFV600E mutation and clinicopathological characteristics, response to RAI therapy, and recurrence after a period of follow-up were analyzed. Propensity score matching (PSM) and logistic regression were used to control confounding variables. Results: Of the 322 patients with intermediate to high recurrence risk in PTMC, the mean age of the patients were 43.7 ± 12.2 years, and 72.1% were women. BRAFV600E mutation was found in 64.9% (209/322). After PSM, 112 pairs of patients were matched, and except for multifocality (P = 0.001), extrathyroidal invasion (P = 0.003) and tumor size (P = 0.03), there was no significant difference in all baseline characteristics between the two groups. An excellent response (ER) to RAI therapy was observed in 273 patients (84.7%). At the end of the study, 17(5.2%) and 6(1.8%) patients showed structural incomplete response (SIR) and biochemical incomplete response (BIR) status. The proportion of patients who achieved ER status in the BRAFV600E mutation positive and negative groups was 86.6% and 81.4%, respectively. Kaplan–Meier analyses showed that the BRAFV600E mutation was not related to lower ER reached time. The median follow-up was 51 months. Conclusions: We found the BRAFV600E mutation was associated with multifocality, extrathyroidal invasion, and tumor size in papillary thyroid microcarcinoma. However, the BRAFV600E mutation had no significant association with clinical outcomes in patients with intermediate to high recurrence risk after RAI therapy. Furthermore, the extra-thyroid uptake results and distant metastasis had been proven to be independent factor predicting the clinical response. Registration number: ChiCTR2200062911 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-performance flame-retardant polylactic acid (PLA) bio-composites based on biobased fillers to meet usage requirements represents a promising direction for creating a sustainable world. Although flame retardant PLA composites have been reported extensively, it still remains a huge challenge to develop mechanically robust. The flame retardant PLA composites due to plastication effect of organic flame retardants and poor compatibility of organic fillers with the matrix lead to the severe deterioration in mechanical properties. In this work, a bio-inspired surface manipulation strategy for halloysite nanotubes (HNTs) was proposed via a facile and green self-assembly process. The structure and morphology of bio-inspired HNTs (b-HNTs) proved that biomass nanofillers (PA-NA-Fe) grew well both within the lumen and on the surface of HNTs. The growth of biomass on the inner and outer surfaces of HNTs was inspired from wooden towards enhancing the interface compatibility and imparting multi-properties to PLA biopolymer. Excellent mechanical properties (tensile, thermomechanical and anti-impact mechanical), great fire safety (heat release and smoke emission), thermostability and improved electromagnetic interference shielding effectiveness of this well-designed PLA nanocomposite were realized. The mechanisms of the enhanced performances of the PLA bio-composites by loading b-HNTs were proposed. This work presents a facile and environmentally-friendly bio-inspired modification strategy for HNTs to fabricate high-performance, multi-functional polymer composites, which is also suitable for surface modification of many other nanomaterials, including nanofibers, nanotubes, nanowires, and nanosheets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photodynamic therapy is known for its non-invasiveness to significantly reduce undesired side effects on patients. However, the infiltration and invasiveness of tumor growth are still beyond the specificity of traditional light-controlled photodynamic therapy (PDT), which lacks cellular-level accuracy to tumor cells, possibly leading to "off-target" damage to healthy tissues such as the skin or immune cells infiltrated. Here, upconversion nanoparticles (UCNPs) were co-encapsulated with manganese dioxide (MnO2) by amphiphilic polymers poly(styrene-co-methyl acrylate) (PSMA) and further coated with photosensitizer (riboflavin)-loaded mesoporous silica (C@S/V). The C@S/V nanoprobes exhibited shielded upconversion luminescence in normal conditions (pH 7.4, no hydroperoxide (H2O2)) under 980-nm irradiation and thus minimal reactive oxygen production from riboflavin. However, the excess H2O2 (1 mM) and acidic environment (pH 5.5) could decompose the MnO2 within the C@S/V, resulting in remarkable enhancement of upconversion luminescence and a favorable hypoxia-relieving condition for PDT, providing a spatiotemporal signal for therapy initiation. The C@S/V nanoprobes were applied to the co-culture of normal cells (HEK293) and pancreatic cancer cells (Panc02) and performed a selective killing on Panc02 under the 980-nm irradiation. By using the "double-safety" strategy, a responsive C@S/V nanoprobe was designed by the selective activation of acidic and H2O2-rich conditions and 980-nm irradiation for spatiotemporally selective photodynamic therapy with cellular-level accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work presents a high energy efficiency onboard hydraulic system for quadruped robot. Firstly, based on the rhythmic motion and mechanical characteristics of leg joints, the energy supply mode that supplies low-pressure oil and high-pressure oil separately for the swing phase and supporting phase is used, and the switch between different oil circuits for each legs is implemented by two digital on-off valves. What's more, to obtain the pressure dynamics characteristics and energy consumption model, the mathematical models is deduced, and the analysis results illustrates that a better rate response can be achieved by adjusting time offset reasonable properly. Finally, the simulations and experiments are conducted to prove that the proposed system shows better energy efficiency compared with that of single pump supply pressure system, meanwhile, the fast dynamic response and the high tracking accuracy are also maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Probiotic functional products have drawn wide attention because of their increasing popularity. However, few studies have analyzed probiotic-specific metabolism in the fermentation process. This study applied UPLC-QE-MS-based metabolomics to track changes in the milk metabolomes in the course of fermentation by two probiotic strains, Lacticaseibacillus paracasei PC-01 and Bifidobacterium adolescentis B8589. We observed substantial changes in the probiotic fermented milk metabolome between 0 and 36 h of fermentation, and the differences between the milk metabolomes at the interim period (36 h and 60 h) and the ripening stage (60 h and 72 h) were less obvious. A number of time point-specific differential metabolites were identified, mainly belonging to organic acids, amino acids, and fatty acids. Nine of the identified differential metabolites are linked to the tricarboxylic acid cycle, glutamate metabolism, and fatty acid metabolism. The contents of pyruvic acid, γ-aminobutyric acid, and capric acid increased at the end of fermentation, which can contribute to the nutritional quality and functional properties of the probiotic fermented milk. This time-course metabolomics study analyzed probiotic-specific fermentative changes in milk, providing detailed information of probiotic metabolism in a milk matrix and the potential beneficial mechanism of probiotic fermented milk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Superoxide anion (O2•−) is an important reactive oxygen species (ROS), and plays critical roles in biological systems. ER stress has close relation with many metabolic diseases, and could lead to the abnormal production of ROS including O2•−. Herein, we present an ER-targeting probe (ER-Tf) for the detection of O2•− in living cells. The probe ER-Tf used triflate as the response site for O2•−, and employed p-methylbenzenesulfonamide as ER-targeting moiety. In response to O2•−, the triflate of the probe ER-Tf converted to hydroxyl group, providing strong blue emission under the excitation of ultraviolet light. The probe ER-Tf exhibited high sensitivity and selectivity to O2•−. Bioimaging experiments showed that the probe ER-Tf can be applied to detect O2•− at ER, and also demonstrated that rotenone could increase the generation of O2•− in living cells, while the O2•− level at ER showed no remarkable change during ferroptosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, gastric cancer patients account for a large proportion of all tumor patients. Gastric tumor image segmentation can provide a reliable additional basis for the clinical analysis and diagnosis of gastric cancer. However, the existing gastric cancer image datasets have disadvantages such as small data sizes and difficulty in labeling. Moreover, most existing CNN-based methods are unable to generate satisfactory segmentation masks without accurate labels, which are due to the limited context information and insufficient discriminative feature maps obtained after the consecutive pooling and convolution operations. This paper presents a gastric cancer lesion dataset for gastric tumor image segmentation research. A multiscale boundary neural network (MBNet) is proposed to automatically segment the real tumor area in gastric cancer images. MBNet adopts encoder–decoder architecture. In each stage of the encoder, a boundary extraction refinement module is proposed for obtaining multi granular edge information and refinement firstly. Then, we build a selective fusion module to selectively fuse features from the different stages. By cascading the two modules, the richer context and fine-grained features of each stage are encoded. Finally, the astrous spatial pyramid pooling is improved to obtain the remote dependency relationship of the overall context and the fine spatial structure information. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the model reaches 92.3%, the similarity coefficient (DICE) reaches 86.9%, and the performance of the proposed method on the CVC-ClinicDB and Kvasir-SEG datasets also outperforms existing approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The BRAF V600E and TERT promoter mutations are well known to be associated with poor clinical outcomes of papillary thyroid cancer (PTC). Radioactive iodide (RAI)-refractory can be evaluated in advance of treatment, for which predictive biomarkers may be helpful. The present study is to analyze the correlation of both mutations with the curative effect of radioiodine therapy. Methods: A total of 126 patients who underwent RAI therapy from October 2016 to August 2019 were recruited. Treatment and follow-up were defined according to criteria used in the 2015 ATA guidelines. The RAI response of patients was assessed as excellent response (ER) and RAI-refractory at the end of follow-up. Results: When dividing the 126 patients into 4 groups, the no mutation, only BRAF V600E mutation, only TERT promoter mutation, and coexistence of two mutation groups were found in 15.8%, 68.3%, 2.4%, and 13.5% patients. RAI-refractory was found in 52.9% (9/17) patients with the coexisting BRAF and TERT mutations. In logistic regression analysis, M1, BRAF, and TERT mutation were confirmed to be independent factors predicting the RAI-refractory. Moreover, 35.3%, 41.2%, and 23.5% of patients in the BRAF and TERT mutation group were assessed as ER, SIR, and BIR respectively. Kaplan–Meier analyses revealed that the genetic duet of BRAF V600E and TERT promoter mutations was associated with a lower ER reached time. Conclusions: We found that BRAF V600E and TERT promoter mutation is significantly correlated with the poor curative effect of RAI therapy in PTC. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: ChiCTR1800018760. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The segmentation of the lesion region in gastroscopic images is highly important for the detection and treatment of early gastric cancer. This paper proposes a novel approach for gastric lesion segmentation by using generative adversarial training. First, a segmentation network is designed to generate accurate segmentation masks for gastric lesions. The proposed segmentation network adds residual blocks to the encoding and decoding path of U-Net. The cascaded dilated convolution is also added at the bottleneck of U-Net. The residual connection promotes information propagation, while dilated convolution integrates multi-scale context information. Meanwhile, a discriminator is used to distinguish the generated and real segmentation masks. The proposed discriminator is a Markov discriminator (Patch-GAN), which discriminates each N × N matrix in the image. In the process of network training, the adversary training mechanism is used to iteratively optimize the generator and the discriminator until they converge at the same time. The experimental results show that the dice, accuracy, and recall are 86.6%, 91.9%, and 87.3%, respectively. These metrics are significantly better than the existing models, which proves the effectiveness of this method and can meet the needs of clinical diagnosis and treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The forest musk deer, Moschus berezovskii, is a nationally protected species of economic importance in China. However, in captive breeding programmes, they usually die as a result of diarrhoea. In this study, six M. berezovskii were randomly selected and divided into two groups: probiotics group (n = 3) and placebo (control) group (n = 3). The two groups were fed a basal diet that included 2 g probiotics (probiotic group) or 2 g whey powder (placebo group) for 30 days. Faecal samples were collected at day 0, 15 and 30 and evaluated for microbial diversity, species richness and metabolic function. Probiotic intervention significantly improved gut health in M. berezovskii by changing the overall community structure of the gut microbiota. Intake of probiotics reduced the relative abundance of pathogenic bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Citrobacter freundii in the intestinal flora and increased the relative abundance of beneficial Bifidobacterium species and other lactic acid bacteria. At the same time, gut microbiota in the probiotics group were involved in regulating degradation of phenylacetic acid and in dTDP-l-rhamnose synthesis; these processes have the potential to enhance immunity in M. berezovskii. This preliminary study revealed the beneficial effects of probiotics on the gut microbiota of M. berezovskii, which the potential to significantly improve the health, wellbeing and economic value of M. berezovskii. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To better learn the dependency relationship between nodes, we address the relationship extraction task by capturing rich contextual dependencies based on the attention mechanism, and using distributional reinforcement learning to generate optimal relation information representation. This method is called Dual Attention Graph Convolutional Network (DAGCN), to adaptively integrate local features with their global dependencies. Specifically, we append two types of attention modules on top of GCN, which model the semantic interdependencies in spatial and relational dimensions, respectively. The position attention module selectively aggregates the feature at each position by a weighted sum of the features at all positions of nodes internal features. Meanwhile, the relation attention module selectively emphasizes interdependent node relations by integrating associated features among all nodes. We sum the outputs of the two attention modules and use reinforcement learning to predict the classification of nodes relationship to further improve feature representation which contributes to more precise extraction results. The results on the TACRED and SemEval datasets show that the model can obtain more useful information for relational extraction tasks, and achieve better performances on various evaluation indexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acetohydroxamic acid (AHA) is a hydrophilic organic complexing agent with excellent masking or stripping effects on the tetravalent actinides in the extraction operations. Therefore, AHA is a promising reagent for the spent nuclear fuel reprocessing. In the reprosessing of spent uranium-aluminum fuel with a high U-235 enrichment which is used in research reactor, the dissolver solution contains a high concentration of Al(NO3)3, several orders of magnitude higher than that of minor actinides such as plutonium, and dilute tri-n-butyl phosphate(TBP)/n-dodecane is adopted as the extractant. In this research, complexation of Pu(IV) with AHA under the condition of U-Al fuel reprocessing is investigated. Results show that Al(NO3)3 insignificantly affects the mentioned complexation reaction. Further, the possibility of uranium purification against Pu(VI) is also investigated by using AHA in the presence of a high concentration of Al(NO3)3 by simulating some experiments on the separation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rosa rugosa 'Shanxian', a local variety of rose in Shandong Province, was studied for its aroma characteristics, including changes in aroma components and differential expression of aroma-related genes during flowering. The volatiles emitted from flowers were collected by headspace solid-phase microextraction and analyzed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry at the budding stage, the early, half and full opening stages, and the withering stage. Sixty-six compounds were identified, and the full opening stage contained the highest level of every single aroma component compared with the other four stages. The major constituents of R. rugosa 'Shanxian' were alcohols, esters, ketones, aldehydes, phenols, and terpenes, with alcohols being the most abundant. The aroma of R. rugosa 'Shanxian' was mainly characterized by rich fruit aromas, floral aromas, and soft plant aromas. RrAAT, RrDXR, and RrDXS genes played a key role in monoterpene biosynthesis in R. rugosa 'Shanxian'. The temporal and spatial expression of RrAAT, RrDXR, and RrDXS were measured at different flower developmental stages. Among the three genes, the overall expression level of RrAAT was significantly higher than that of RrDXR and RrDXS and was associated with the accumulation of acetate esters in R. rugosa, which could be used as an important candidate gene for rose metabolism. Taken together, our results demonstrated that R. rugosa 'Shanxian' has better aromatic characteristics than R. rugosa 'Fenghua'. With a particularly prominent aroma that is strong and sweet, 'Shanxian' should be further investigated as a valuable breeding material that could be used to enhance genetic diversity and develop new rose varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sorption of Eu(III) on Th(PO)PO was studied under ambient conditions using the batch technique. The effects of pH, the concentrations of Eu(III) on Th(PO)PO sorption were investigated. The sorption characteristics of sulfate, phosphate and fulvic acid (FA) on Th(PO)PO was explored in the presence Eu(III). The results indicated that sorption of Eu(III) on Th(PO)PO was strongly affected by pH and the concentrations of Eu(III). Eu(III) sorption onto Th(PO)PO was greatly enhanced in FA and phosphate media than in KNO. The Langmuir, Freundlich and D-R model were used to simulate the sorption isotherms of Eu(III) at four different medium. FA sorption isotherm can be described by Langmuir model in presence and absence of Eu(III) in solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Monolayer and multilayer Ni(OH) nanoflakes/3D graphene composites were successfully prepared by modulating the seed layer of Ni(OH) in a hydrothermal synthesis. An important advantage is that no other inactive binder is required to be utilized in the composite electrode to produce a flexible supercapacitor. It is found that the 3D graphene grown via CVD has a limited contribution to the overall capacitance when solely utilized as a current collector, while Ni(OH) nanoflakes have been determined to be the primary contributor to the overall capacitance of the device. The electrochemical properties of monolayer Ni(OH) nanoflakes/3D graphene are significantly enhanced relative to multilayer Ni(OH) nanoflakes/3D graphene. At 10 A/g current density, a high specific capacitance of 1606 F/g (per total mass of electrodes) is obtained for monolayer Ni(OH) nanoflakes/3D graphene composites. After 1000 cycles of charge/discharge, cycling performance shows 96 % capacitance retention at 10 A/g current density. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]