Search

Polymyositis/dermatomyositis (PM/DM) is a heterogeneous autoimmune disease characterized by inflammatory cell infiltration in skeletal muscles with unknown etiology. The incidence of interstitial lung disease (ILD) in PM/DM is higher. ILD is the most important factor affecting its prognosis. Existing evidence suggests that there is significant heterogeneity in PM/DM-related ILD, which requires individualized treatment based on the onset form, progression rate, lesion involvement range, laboratory examination, presence of adverse prognostic factors, and response to treatment of ILD. This article summarizes the research progress in the treatment of PM/DM-related ILD in recent years, including the selection of traditional therapeutic drugs, timing of medication, and new drugs attempted in this field in clinical practice (such as biological agents and Janus kinase inhibitors), intravenous immunoglobulin, anti-fibrotic drugs, and potentially effective non-drug treatment methods, aiming at providing reference for clinical doctors to formulate PM/DM-ILD treatment plans and improve patient prognosis.

Treatment of breast cancer with low expression of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2; HER2-low) has drawn much attention in recent years. With the proven therapeutic effect of trastuzumab deruxtecan (T-DXd) in patients with HER2-low (immunohistochemistry [IHC] 1+, or IHC2+/in situ hybridization [ISH]-) breast cancer, HER2-low may become a new subtype of targeted therapy for breast cancer. The expert committee formulated this consensus based on the current clinical studies and clinical medication experience. The current consensus is the collaborative work of an interdisciplinary working group, including experts in the fields of pathology and oncology. The purpose of this consensus was to guide the clinical diagnosis and treatment of HER2-low breast cancer, thereby prolonging the overall survival of patients.

[Objective]Intelligent feeding methods are significant for improving breeding efficiency and reducing water quality pollution in current aquaculture. Feeding image segmentation of fish schools is a critical step in extracting the distribution characteristics of fish schools and quantifying their feeding behavior for intelligent feeding method development. While, an applicable approach is lacking due to images challenges caused by blurred boundaries and similar individuals in practical aquaculture environment. In this study, a high-precision segmentation method was proposed for fish school feeding images and provides technical support for the quantitative analysis of fish school feeding behavior.[Methods]The novel proposed method for fish school feeding images segmentation combined VoVNetv2 with an attention mechanism named Shuffle Attention. Firstly, a fish feeding segmentation dataset was presented. The dataset was collected at the intensive aquaculture base of Laizhou Mingbo Company in Shandong province, with a focus on Oplegnathus punctatus as the research target. Cameras were used to capture videos of the fish school before, during, and after feeding. The images were annotated at the pixel level using Labelme software. According to the distribution characteristics of fish feeding and non-feeding stage, the data was classified into two semantic categories— non-occlusion and non-aggregation fish (fish1) and occlusion or aggregation fish (fish2). In the preprocessing stage, data cleaning and image augmentation were employed to further enhance the quality and diversity of the dataset. Initially, data cleaning rules were established based on the distribution of annotated areas within the dataset. Images with outlier annotations were removed, resulting in an improvement in the overall quality of the dataset. Subsequently, to prevent the risk of overfitting, five data augmentation techniques (random translation, random flip, brightness variation, random noise injection, random point addition) were applied for mixed augmentation on the dataset, contributing to an increased diversity of the dataset. Through data augmentation operations, the dataset was expanded to three times its original size. Eventually, the dataset was divided into a training dataset and testing dataset at a ratio of 8:2. Thus, the final dataset consisted of 1 612 training images and 404 testing images. In detail, there were a total of 116 328 instances of fish1 and 20 924 instances of fish2. Secondly, a fish feeding image segmentation method was proposed. Specifically, VoVNetv2 was used as the backbone network for the Mask R-CNN model to extract image features. VoVNetv2 is a backbone network with strong computational capabilities. Its unique feature aggregation structure enables effective fusion of features at different levels, extracting diverse feature representations. This facilitates better capturing of fish schools of different sizes and shapes in fish feeding images, achieving accurate identification and segmentation of targets within the images. To maximize feature mappings with limited resources, the experiment replaced the channel attention mechanism in the one-shot aggregation (OSA) module of VoVNetv2 with a more lightweight and efficient attention mechanism named shuffle attention. This improvement allowed the network to concentrate more on the location of fish in the image, thus reducing the impact of irrelevant information, such as noise, on the segmentation results. Finally, experiments were conducted on the fish segmentation dataset to test the performance of the proposed method.[Results and Discussions]The results showed that the average segmentation accuracy of the Mask R-CNN network reached 63.218% after data cleaning, representing an improvement of 7.018% compared to the original dataset. With both data cleaning and augmentation, the network achieved an average segmentation accuracy of 67.284%, indicating an enhancement of 11.084% over the original dataset. Furthermore, there was an improvement of 4.066% compared to the accuracy of the dataset after cleaning alone. These results demonstrated that data preprocessing had a positive effect on improving the accuracy of image segmentation. The ablation experiments on the backbone network revealed that replacing the ResNet50 backbone with VoVNetv2-39 in Mask R-CNN led to a 2.511% improvement in model accuracy. After improving VoVNetv2 through the Shuffle Attention mechanism, the accuracy of the model was further improved by 1.219%. Simultaneously, the parameters of the model decreased by 7.9%, achieving a balance between accuracy and lightweight design. Comparing with the classic segmentation networks SOLOv2, BlendMask and CondInst, the proposed model achieved the highest segmentation accuracy across various target scales. For the fish feeding segmentation dataset, the average segmentation accuracy of the proposed model surpassed BlendMask, CondInst, and SOLOv2 by 3.982%, 12.068%, and 18.258%, respectively. Although the proposed method demonstrated effective segmentation of fish feeding images, it still exhibited certain limitations, such as omissive detection, error segmentation, and false classification.[Conclusions]The proposed instance segmentation algorithm (SA_VoVNetv2_RCNN) effectively achieved accurate segmentation of fish feeding images. It can be utilized for counting the number and pixel quantities of two types of fish in fish feeding videos, facilitating quantitative analysis of fish feeding behavior. Therefore, this technique can provide technical support for the analysis of piscine feeding actions. In future research, these issues will be addressed to further enhance the accuracy of fish feeding image segmentation.

AbstractContext Fibroblast senescence was reported to contribute to the pathological development of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), and baicalein is reported to attenuate IPF.Objective This study explores whether baicalein attenuates lung fibrosis by regulating lung fibroblast senescence.Materials and methods Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) mice were randomly assigned to control, bleomycin (BLM), baicalein and BLM + baicalein groups. Lung fibrosis was established by a single intratracheal dose of BLM (3 mg/kg). The baicalein group received baicalein orally (100 mg/kg/day). Sirtuin 3 (Sirt3) siRNA (50 μg) was injected through the tail vein once a week for 2 weeks to explore its effect on the anti-pulmonary fibrosis of baicalein.Results BLM-treated mice exhibited obvious lung fibrosis and fibroblast senescence by showing increased levels of collagen deposition (27.29% vs. 4.14%), hydroxyproline (208.05 vs. 40.16 ng/mg), collagen I (25.18 vs. 9.15 μg/mg), p53, p21, p16, MCP-1, PAI-1, TNF-α, MMP-10 and MMP-12 in lung tissues, which were attenuated by baicalein. Baicalein also mitigated BLM-mediated activation of TGF-β1/Smad signalling pathway. Baicalein restored the BLM-induced downregulation of Sirt3 expression in lung tissues and silencing of Sirt3 abolished the inhibitory role of baicalein against BLM-induced lung fibrosis, fibroblast senescence and activation of TGF-β1/Smad signalling pathway.Conclusions Baicalein preserved the BLM-induced downregulation of lung Sirt3 expression, and thus the suppression of TGF-β1/Smad signalling pathway and lung fibrosis, which might provide an experimental basis for treatment of IPF.

With the large-scale integration of wind power, photovoltaic power, and other new energy sources, their volatility and intermittency tend to cause the problem of flexibility imbalance in power systems. To make full use of the advantages of flexible resources on the new energy and load sides in power dispatching, an optimal scheduling method of flexible resources considering comprehensive user satisfaction is proposed in this paper. First, a demand response model considering comprehensive user satisfaction is constructed. Then, by taking into account the constraints of demand response and comprehensive user satisfaction, an optimal dispatching model of flexible resources on the source and load sides is established to achieve economic optimality. Finally, the case study based on the improved IEEE 30-bus system is carried out, and the simulation results under various scenarios verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Electron beam (EB) irradiation is an efficient method for avoiding microbial contamination affecting food quality. To explore the properties of Litopenaeus vannamei after EB sterilization, samples were irradiated at an absorbed dose of 0-12 kGy using a 10-MeV backward wave linear accelerator and tested for protein, fat, and amino acid content; pH; volatile saline nitrogen; textural features; microbiology; and organoleptic satisfaction. The results showed that the protein content and fat content were in the normal range. In the optimal absorbed dose range (6-8 kGy), TVB-N, which characterizes the freshness of shrimp, was apparently lower. Further, most of the amino acids peaked; textural features such as chewiness and cohesiveness were significantly enhanced; no microbial colonies were detected; and both color and taste were relatively better. These results suggest that EB irradiation sterilization is an effective method for microbiological control of food, and it results in greater freshness without degradation of the properties of frozen Litopenaeus vannamei in terms of nutrient content and other properties.

In order to verify the technological feasibility of radiation sterilization for medical masks, three types of medical masks, namely, single-use, surgical, and protective masks, were sterilized by electron beam irradiation using a 10 MeV accelerator. The surface morphology, air permeability, mechanical properties, filtration performance, and microbiological criteria of the sterilized medical masks were investigated. After irradiation, no clear damage on the morphology of the melt-blown, inner, and outer layers of the medical masks (data not shown) was observed. Moreover, the air permeability showed no distinct change. The microbiological criteria of single-use and surgical masks met the requirements of the GB 15979-2002 standard; however, those of the protective masks did not. All samples were successfully sterilized after irradiation with an absorbed dose of 4 kGy. Moreover, the particle filtration efficiency, which is a key factor, was significantly decreased after irradiation. To elucidate the mechanism and to determine the filtration efficiency of the medical masks, electrostatic generators were used to charge and regenerate the masks. The particle filtration efficiency reached 60%–90% of the original value after treatment. Although the particle filtration efficiency of the irradiated masks was considerably recovered after charging and regeneration, the tensile strength at break, elongation at break, and particle filtration efficiency of the masks underwent irreversible decrement after irradiation. The results indicate that damage to the melt-blown layers occurred owing to the radiation degradation of polypropylene fibers. Moreover, because the function of medical masks mainly depends on the electrostatic filtration efficiency, radiation sterilization was not found to be a suitable sterilization method, and radiation sterilization processing can only be applied to a novel mask that does not rely on electrostatic filtration.

The domain terms in power grid operation management documents are professional and complex. In the process of information extraction, excellent and applicable event detection methods are needed to extract event subjects. However, most of the current Chinese event detection methods use the word embedding technology to capture semantic representation, but it is difficult for these methods to capture the dependency between trigger words and other domain words in the same sentence. Based on the above situation, this paper proposes a novel hybrid representation architecture to represent the semantic and structural information of two characters and words. The model can capture rich semantic features through the semantic representation generated by the dependency parser. The experiment is based on the corpus of dispatching log, dispatching maintenance ticket, and dispatching plan. The results show that this method can significantly improve the performance of power grid dispatching text event detection.

Objective To explore the dynamic changes of femur microstructure in ovariectomized osteoporosis mice at different stages. Methods Female C57 mice (8 weeks old) were randomly divided into sham-operation (Sham) and ovariectomy (OVX) groups. Each group was subdivided into 1-week, 1-month and 3-month subgroups on the basis of different postoperative time, which representeing early, middle and late menopause, respectively. The femurs were extracted for HE staining, immunohistochemistry and micro-CT analysis, and the changes in the bone microstructure of cancellous bone in the distal femurs, cortical bone in the middle femurs and the levels of osteogenic associated proteins in each group were evaluated. Results Compared with the Sham group, the bone microstructure of the OVX group showed no significant destruction at 1 week after operation, trabecula fracture and bone marrow cavity enlargement from 1 month to 3 months after operation, and significant changes in CT bone parameters BV/TV, Tb.N and Tb.Sp (P < 0.01, P < 0.001) except Tb.Th (P > 0.05). In the Sham group, the bone mass was significantly reduced until 3 months after operation compared with that in the 1-week group (P < 0.01). Bone loss in the OVX groups was worsened in a time dependent manner (P < 0.05, P < 0.01, P < 0.001). The expression level of Runx2 by immunohistochemistry was consistent with the results of micro-CT analysis. No significant differences were found in morphologic indices of cortical bone between the Sham subgroups and the OVX subgroups (P > 0.05). Conclusion Trabecular bone microarchitecture is impaired progressively after OVX operation in 8-week-old C57 mice from 1 week to 1 month, prior to cortical bone. This period can be regarded as the key time for studies on pathogenesis and prevention and treatment of osteoporosis.

We report a 26-year-old man with left chest pain for 4 days. His chest CT showed a cavity in the left upper lung. Tuberculosis was suspected first, but metagenomics next generation sequencing (mNGS) in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid only detected Tropheryma whipplei. Tropheryma whipplei is the pathogen of Whipple’s disease. The most frequently involved organs are the eyes, heart, and central nervous system. Pulmonary parenchymal involvement is rare. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of pulmonary cavity caused by Tropheryma whipplei. Nineteen cases of pulmonary parenchymal involvement were found by literature search. The most common respiratory symptom was cough, followed by dyspnea/breathlessness and chest pain. The most common finding in chest imaging was pulmonary nodules, followed by interstitial changes and patchy infiltration. Our case and literature review highlighted that Tropheryma whipplei infection should be considered in the differential diagnosis of pulmonary cavity, pulmonary nodules, interstitial changes, and patchy infiltration. mNGS is helpful to improve diagnosis rate.

Aiming at the problems existing in the process of river water quality detection, this paper proposes a BOD prediction model based on GA-RandomForest optimization, and evaluates the model through MAE and MAPE, and achieves good results. And the forecast experiment is carried out through the water quality data of Chaohu Lake for 3 months. The experimental results show that the BOD prediction model based on GA-RandomForest is effective, and the model is based on higher accuracy.

To explore the resilience experience of new nurses and how new nurses develop and apply resilience strategies to cope with the difficulties during the transition period.

For ensuring the safety and reliability of electronic equipment, it is a necessary task to detect the surface defects of the printed circuit board (PCB). Due to the smallness, complexity and diversity of minor defects of PCB, it is difficult to identify minor defects in PCB with traditional methods. And the target detection method based on deep learning faces the problem of imbalance between foreground and background when detecting minor defects. Therefore, this paper proposes a minor defect detection method on PCB based on FL-RFCN (focal loss and Region-based Fully Convolutional Network) and PHFE (parallel high-definition feature extraction). Firstly, this paper uses the Region-based Fully Convolutional Network(R-FCN) to identify minor defects on the PCB. Secondly, the focal loss is used to solve the problem of data imbalance in neural networks. Thirdly, the parallel high-definition feature extraction algorithm is used to improve the recognition rate of minor defects. In the detection of minor defects on PCB, the ablation experiment proves that the mean Average accuracy (mAP) of the proposed method is increased by 7.4. In comparative experiments, it is found that the mAP of the method proposed in this paper is 12.3 higher than YOLOv3 and 6.7 higher than Faster R-CNN.

PURPOSE: Women are at high risk of stress, anxiety, and depression during the postpartum but the ways in which these different types of psychological distress are related to cortisol regulation is not clear. We examined the distinct association of each type of distress with womens average cortisol level, cortisol awakening response (CAR), cortisol decline across the day (diurnal slope), and overall amount of cortisol secretion across the day (AUCG). METHODS: At 6 months postpartum, a diverse group of 58 women completed measures of depression, anxiety, perceived stress, and life stressors. Each woman provided 4 salivary samples for cortisol assay from waking to bedtime on each of 2 consecutive days. Linear regressions were used to examine associations of stress, anxiety and depression to each of the 4 cortisol measures, controlling for number of stressful life events. RESULTS: Depressive symptoms were associated with less of a rise in the CAR (β = -.46, p = 0.01), steeper diurnal slope (β = .51, p = 0.006), and higher average cortisol level (β = .42, p = .01). Women who met the clinical cutoff for an anxiety disorder had lower overall cortisol output (β = -.29, p = 0.03). Stress was not related to any cortisol metric. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that stress is less associated with cortisol alterations in the postpartum than are more severe types of psychological distress. Anxiety and depression may have distinct and opposite profiles of cortisol dysregulation. Results indicate that mental health assessment is critical even in the later postpartum so that interventions can be initiated to reduce emotional suffering and the risk of impaired cortisol regulation.

Abstract: Traditionally, Chinese indigenous cattle is geographically widespread. The present study analyzed based on genome-wide variants to evaluate the genetic background among 157 individuals from four representative indigenous cattle breeds of Hubei Province of China: Yiling yellow cattle (YL), Bashan cattle (BS), Wuling cattle (WL), Zaobei cattle (ZB), and 21 individuals of Qinchuan cattle (QC) from the nearby Shanxi Province of China. Linkage disequilibrium (LD) analysis showed the LD of YL was the lowest (r2=0.32) when the distance between markers was approximately 2 kb. Principle component analysis (PCA), and neighbor-joining (NJ)-tree revealed a separation of Yiling yellow cattle from other geographic nearby local cattle breeds. In PCA plot, the YL and QC groups were segregated as expected; moreover, YL individuals clustered together more obviously. In the NJ-tree, the YL group formed an independent branch and BS, WL, ZB groups were mixed. We then used the FST statistic approach to reveal long-term selection sweep of YL and other 4 cattle breeds. According to the selective sweep, we identified the unique pathways of YL, associated with production traits. Based on the results, it can be proposed that YL has its unique genetic characteristics of excellence resource, and it is an indispensable cattle breed in China.

The maximum test load of Changlongshan pumped storage power station steel bifurcation pipe is 10MPa. To ensure the safety of the water pressure test, acoustic emission is used to monitor the main welds of the crescent rib steel bifurcation and main cone. Taking NO.3 pipe’s data as an example, acoustic emission source location system was used to find the possible position of harmful defects, through the activity and intensity of the acoustic emission sources to confirm the defect significance. After analysis, the acoustic emission integrated level of the steel bifurcation pipe is in level II, the pipe’s data comply with the design requirements.

Information avoidance has been studied in medicine, economics, and psychology, and has recently been discussed in educational technology. In this study, the authors developed a grouping method to reduce students' information avoidance in reading through group work. This two-step group method includes the k-means and genetic algorithm to explore the grouping method based on students' marking tendencies. To examine the effect of this method, an experiment was conducted in a web-system development course with 33 graduate students. The results showed that information avoidance occurred less in the experimental group than in the control group. The students of the two-step grouping method evaluated group work as more helpful for their study than the students who attended the usual group work.