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To enhance the high-temperature oxidation resistance and mechanical properties of a secondgeneration nickel-based superalloy, various concentrations of lanthanum (La) ranging from 5.0×10-5wt.% to 3.4×10-4wt.% are added to the alloy. The microstructure of the nickel-based single crystal superalloy with trace of La was examined by means of SEM, EDS and TEM. Results show the addition of La decreases the segregation of elements and increases the amount of γ/γ' eutectics of the as-cast alloy, and in the interdendritic region, the growth of eutectics is accompanied by the growth of strip clusters composed of Ni5La and Ni3Ta. As the La content in the alloy increases, the proportion of Ni5La in the cluster increases. After heat treatment, incipient melting occurs in the cluster regions, leading to an increase in microporosity compared to the original as-cast samples. Furthermore, the heat treatment alters the shape of the clusters from a strip morphology to an elliptical one, and it changes their composition from Ni5La and Ni3Ta to a combination of Ni5La, Ni3Ta, and MC carbides. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an automatic image synthesis method to transfer the style of an example image to a content image. When standard neural style transfer approaches are used, the textures and colours in different semantic regions of the style image are often applied inappropriately to the content image, ignoring its semantic layout and ruining the transfer result. In order to reduce or avoid such effects, we propose a novel method based on automatically segmenting the objects and extracting their soft semantic masks from the style and content images, in order to preserve the structure of the content image while having the style transferred. Each soft mask of the style image represents a specific part of the style image, corresponding to the soft mask of the content image with the same semantics. Both the soft masks and source images are provided as multichannel input to an augmented deep CNN framework for style transfer which incorporates a generative Markov random field model. The results on various images show that our method outperforms the most recent techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a novel adaptive gradient-based block compressive sensing (AGbBCS_SP) methodology for noisy image compression and reconstruction. The AGbBCS_SP approach splits an image into blocks by maximizing their sparsity, and reconstructs images by solving a convex optimization problem. In block compressive sensing, the commonly used square block shapes cannot always produce the best results. The main contribution of our paper is to provide an adaptive method for block shape selection, improving noisy image reconstruction performance. The proposed algorithm can adaptively achieve better results by using the sparsity of pixels to adaptively select block shape. Experimental results with different image sets demonstrate that our AGbBCS_SP method is able to achieve better performance, in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and computational cost, than several classical algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to assess whether genetic polymorphisms in p53, glutathione S-transferase P1 ( GSTP1), GSTM1, excision repair cross complementing group 1 ( ERCC1) and X-ray repair cross-complementing group 1 ( XRCC1) genes are associated with clinical outcome of gastric cancer patients treated with oxaliplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy. The genetic polymorphisms in p53, GSTP1, GSTM1 (null), ERCC1 and XRCC1 were determined in 102 gastric cancer patients treated with oxaliplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy using polymerase chain reaction-ligation detection reaction method. Among the five studied polymorphisms, p53 codon 72 Pro/Pro, GSTP1 codon 105 Ile/Ile, and XRCC1 codon 399 Gln/Gln + Arg/Gln were associated with poor relapse-free survival and overall survival ( P < 0.05); and the prognostic effect was retained in the Cox multivariate analysis. Combination analysis with the three polymorphisms using the Kaplan–Meier method and Cox multivariate analysis revealed that the relapse-free and overall survivals significantly increase with the number of favorable genotypes ( P < 0.05). No significant association was found between the GSTM1 (null) or the ERCC1 codon 118 genotypes and the clinical outcome ( P > 0.05). Testing for p53 Arg72Pro, GSTP1 Ile105Val, and XRCC1 Arg399Gln polymorphisms may allow identification of gastric cancer patients who will benefit from oxaliplatin-based adjuvant chemotherapy. Selecting specific adjuvant treatments according to the individual genetic background may represent an innovative strategy that warrants prospective studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The polymorphism of p53 codon 72 (Arg72Pro) has been suggested to play an important role in many cancers and may influence the response to chemotherapy. Our aim was to investigate the association of p53 Arg72Pro polymorphism with the clinical outcome of gastric cancer patients treated with 5-FU-based adjuvant chemotherapy. The p53 codon 72 genotype was determined in blood samples from 110 Chinese patients with gastric cancer treated with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU)-based adjuvant chemotherapy, using polymerase chain reaction-ligation detection reaction (PCR–LDR) method. Kaplan–Meier survival analysis showed that gastric cancer patients with Pro/Pro genotype had shorter relapse-free survival (χ2 = 10.632, P = 0.005) and overall survival (χ2 = 7.104, P = 0.029) than patients with other genotypes. Cox multivariate analysis showed that Pro/Pro genotype was associated with statistically significant reduced relapse-free survival (adjusted OR = 3.049, 95% CI: 1.363–6.819, P = 0.007) and overall survival (adjusted OR = 2.581, 95% CI: 1.052–6.330, P = 0.038). These results suggested that p53 codon 72 polymorphism appears to be an independent prognostic factor in gastric cancer patients treated with 5-FU-based adjuvant chemotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]