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Abstract Objective To investigate the clinical characteristics of neonatal necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) complicated by intestinal perforation and predict the incidence of intestinal perforation in NEC. Methods Neonates diagnosed with NEC at the Affiliated Hospital of Zunyi Medical University from January 2012 to May 2022 were enrolled, and the clinical data were collected and analyzed retrospectively. The patients were divided into two groups based on intestinal perforation occurrence or not. Mann-Whitney U tests, t-tests, chi-square tests, and fisher’s exact tests were performed between-group comparisons. Logistic and lasso regressions were applied to screen independent risk factors for concomitant bowel perforation, and R software (RMS package) was used to formulate the nomogram prediction model. In addition, the receiver operating curve (ROC) and the calibration curve were drawn to verify the predictive power, while decision curve analysis (DCA) was constructed to evaluate the clinical applicability of the nomogram model. Results One hundred eighty neonates with NEC were included, of which 48 had intestinal perforations, and 132 did not; the overall incidence of intestinal perforation was 26.67% (48/180). Bloody stool (OR = 5.60), APTT ≥ 50 s (OR = 3.22), thrombocytopenia (OR = 4.74), and hypoalbuminemia (OR = 5.56) were identified as independent risk variables for NEC intestinal perforation (P

Geothermal energy is a clean, green renewable resource, which can be utilized for power generation, heating, cooling, and could effectively replace oil, gas, and coal. In recent years, oil companies have put more efforts into exploiting and utilizing geothermal energy with advanced technologies for heat-tracing oil gathering and transportation, central heating, etc., which has not only reduced resource waste, but also improved large-scale and industrial resource utilization levels, and has achieved remarkable economic and social benefits. Based on the analysis of oilfield geothermal energy development status, resource potential, and exploitation and utilization modes, the advantages and disadvantages of harnessing oilfield geothermal resource have been discussed. Oilfield geothermal energy exploitation and utilization have advantages in resources, technical personnel, technology, and a large number of abandoned wells that could be reconstructed and utilized. Due to the high heat demand in oilfields, geothermal energy exploitation and utilization can effectively replace oil, gas, coal, and other fossil fuels, and has bright prospects. The key factors limiting oilfield geothermal energy exploitation and utilization are also pointed out in this paper, including immature technologies, lack of overall planning, lack of standards in resource assessment, and economic assessment, lack of incentive policies, etc.

Abstract Objective To explore the application of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the evaluation of radiation-induced sinusitis (RIS), MRI-based scoring system was used to evaluate the development regularity, characteristics and influencing factors of RIS in nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients. Patients and methods A retrospective analysis was performed by collecting the clinical and MRI data of 346 NPC patients to analyze the characteristics and prognosis of RIS. The predictive model was constructed according to the influencing factors of RIS. Results (1) In the 2-year follow-up after radiotherapy (RT), there was significant change in L-M score in both groups of NPC patients (sinusitis before RT group: p = 0.000 vs. non-sinusitis before RT group: p = 0.000). After 6 months of RT, the L-M scores of the two groups tended to plateau (sinusitis before RT group: p = 0.311 vs. non-sinusitis before RT group: p = 0.469). (2) The prevalence of sinusitis in two groups of NPC patients (without or with sinusitis before RT) was 83% vs. 93%, 91% vs. 99%, 94% vs. 98% at 1, 6 and 24 months after RT, respectively. (3) In the patients without sinusitis before RT, the incidence of sinusitis in maxillary and anterior/posterior ethmoid, sphenoid and frontal sinuses was 87.1%, 90.0%/87.1%, 49.5%, 11.8% respectively, 1 month after RT. (4) A regression model was established according to the univariate and multivariate analysis of the factors related to RIS (smoking history: p = 0.000, time after RT: p = 0.008 and TNM staging: p = 0.040). Conclusion (1) RIS is a common complication in NPC patients after RT. This disorder progressed within 6 months after RT, stabilized and persisted within 6 months to 2 years. There is a high incidence of maxillary sinus and ethmoid sinus inflammation in NPC patients after RT. (2) Smoking history, time after RT and TNM staging were significant independent risk factors for RIS. (3) The intervention of the risk factors in the model may prevent or reduce the occurrence of RIS in NPC patients.

In the research of robot systems, path planning and obstacle avoidance are important research directions, especially in unknown dynamic environments where flexibility and rapid decision makings are required. In this paper, a state attention network (SAN) was developed to extract features to represent the interaction between an intelligent robot and its obstacles. An auxiliary actor discriminator (AAD) was developed to calculate the probability of a collision. Goal-directed and gap-based navigation strategies were proposed to guide robotic exploration. The proposed policy was trained through simulated scenarios and updated by the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithm. The robot executed the action depending on the AAD output. Heuristic knowledge (HK) was developed to prevent blind exploration of the robot. Compared to other methods, adopting our approach in robot systems can help robots converge towards an optimal action strategy. Furthermore, it enables them to explore paths in unknown environments with fewer moving steps (showing a decrease of 33.9%) and achieve higher average rewards (showning an increase of 29.15%).

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) poses as a multifaceted neurodevelopmental condition, significantly impacting children’s social, behavioral, and communicative capacities. Despite extensive research, the precise etiological origins of ASD remain elusive, with observable connections to brain activity. In this study, we propose a novel framework for ASD detection, extracting the characteristics of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data and phenotypic data, respectively. Specifically, we employ recursive feature elimination (RFE) for feature selection of fMRI data and subsequently apply graph neural networks (GNN) to extract informative features from the chosen data. Moreover, we devise a phenotypic feature extractor (PFE) to extract phenotypic features effectively. We then, synergistically fuse the features and validate them on the ABIDE dataset, achieving 78.7% and 80.6% accuracy, respectively, thereby showcasing competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. The proposed framework provides a promising direction for the development of effective diagnostic tools for ASD.

OBJECTIVES:. To perform a systematic review and meta-analysis to generate estimates of mortality in patients with COVID-19 that required hospitalization, ICU admission, and organ support. DATA SOURCES:. A systematic search of PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane databases was conducted up to December 31, 2021. STUDY SELECTION:. Previously peer-reviewed observational studies that reported ICU, mechanical ventilation (MV), renal replacement therapy (RRT) or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO)-related mortality among greater than or equal to 100 individual patients. DATA EXTRACTION:. Random-effects meta-analysis was used to generate pooled estimates of case fatality rates (CFRs) for in-hospital, ICU, MV, RRT, and ECMO-related mortality. ICU-related mortality was additionally analyzed by the study country of origin. Sensitivity analyses of CFR were assessed based on completeness of follow-up data, by year, and when only studies judged to be of high quality were included. DATA SYNTHESIS:. One hundred fifty-seven studies evaluating 948,309 patients were included. The CFR for in-hospital mortality, ICU mortality, MV, RRT, and ECMO were 25.9% (95% CI: 24.0–27.8%), 37.3% (95% CI: 34.6–40.1%), 51.6% (95% CI: 46.1–57.0%), 66.1% (95% CI: 59.7–72.2%), and 58.0% (95% CI: 46.9–68.9%), respectively. MV (52.7%, 95% CI: 47.5–58.0% vs 31.3%, 95% CI: 16.1–48.9%; p = 0.023) and RRT-related mortality (66.7%, 95% CI: 60.1–73.0% vs 50.3%, 95% CI: 42.4–58.2%; p = 0.003) decreased from 2020 to 2021. CONCLUSIONS:. We present updated estimates of CFR for patients hospitalized and requiring intensive care for the management of COVID-19. Although mortality remain high and varies considerably worldwide, we found the CFR in patients supported with MV significantly improved since 2020.

The in vitro antioxidation and cytoprotection of abalone visceral peptides against oxidative damage were investigated. Results show that the DPPH· scavenging activities of the 16 chemically synthesized peptides were significantly and positively correlated with their reducing power. Their scavenging activities against ABTS·+ were positively correlated with their ability to inhibit linoleic acid oxidation. Only Cys containing peptides exhibited good DPPH· scavenging activity, while only Tyr containing peptides showed significant ABTS·+ scavenging activity. In the cytoprotection assay, all four representative peptides significantly increased the viability of H2O2-damaged LO2 cells and the activities of GSH-Px, CAT, and SOD, and all decreased MDA levels and LDH leakage, in which the Cys-containing peptides were more effective at increasing the activities of antioxidant enzymes, while the Tyr-containing peptides were more effective at decreasing MDA levels and LDH leakage. Abalone visceral peptides containing both Cys and Tyr exhibit strong in vitro and cellular antioxidation.

The sample imbalance of expression datasets always leads to poor recognition results for minority classes. To solve this problem, we propose a facial expression recognition network, called Residual Attentive Sharing Network (RASN). There is a fact that different expressions have affinity features, which makes it possible for the minority classes to benefit from the majority classes in the expression feature extraction process, from which we propose a sharing affinity features module to compensate for the inadequate feature learning of minority classes by sharing affinity features. In addition, an affinity features attention module is added to highlight expression-related affinity features and suppress expression-unrelated ones for enhancing the role of sharing affinity features. Experiments on the CK+, RAF-DB, and FER2013 datasets validate the robustness of our method to sample imbalance. The validation accuracies of our method are 96.97% on CK+, 71.44% on FER2013, and 90.91% on RAF-DB, respectively, which exceed current state-of-the-art methods.

Abstract Background Some proposed methods for identifying essential proteins have better results by using biological information. Gene expression data is generally used to identify essential proteins. However, gene expression data is prone to fluctuations, which may affect the accuracy of essential protein identification. Therefore, we propose an essential protein identification method based on gene expression and the PPI network data to calculate the similarity of "active" and "inactive" state of gene expression in a cluster of the PPI network. Our experiments show that the method can improve the accuracy in predicting essential proteins. Results In this paper, we propose a new measure named JDC, which is based on the PPI network data and gene expression data. The JDC method offers a dynamic threshold method to binarize gene expression data. After that, it combines the degree centrality and Jaccard similarity index to calculate the JDC score for each protein in the PPI network. We benchmark the JDC method on four organisms respectively, and evaluate our method by using ROC analysis, modular analysis, jackknife analysis, overlapping analysis, top analysis, and accuracy analysis. The results show that the performance of JDC is better than DC, IC, EC, SC, BC, CC, NC, PeC, and WDC. We compare JDC with both NF-PIN and TS-PIN methods, which predict essential proteins through active PPI networks constructed from dynamic gene expression. Conclusions We demonstrate that the new centrality measure, JDC, is more efficient than state-of-the-art prediction methods with same input. The main ideas behind JDC are as follows: (1) Essential proteins are generally densely connected clusters in the PPI network. (2) Binarizing gene expression data can screen out fluctuations in gene expression profiles. (3) The essentiality of the protein depends on the similarity of "active" and "inactive" state of gene expression in a cluster of the PPI network.

Background A low–fermentable oligosaccharide, disaccharide, monosaccharide, and polyol (FODMAP) diet (LFD) appeared to improve gastrointestinal symptoms in patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). However, evidence of its efficacy in Asia remains scarce. Objectives This study aims to investigate the clinical effectiveness of LFD intervention among Asian IBS patients and barriers to its adherence. Methods Patients with IBS who were instructed to follow LFD by dietitians at a tertiary hospital in Singapore between July 2013 and December 2014 were retrospectively reviewed. Severity scores of 19 gastrointestinal symptoms were recorded using an 11-point rating scale (0 = “no symptoms,” 10 = “extremely severe”) pre- and post-LFD intervention. Adherence to LFD was assessed based on patients’ diet history and a high-FODMAP food checklist. Results Eighty-two patients with a median follow-up of 5.8 weeks were investigated. The LFD adherence rate was 61.0% ( n = 50). Overall, statistically significant improvement was observed in 14 of 19 gastrointestinal symptoms (median difference = −2.0 to −0.5, p < .05). The proportion of patients who had improvement in 10 individual symptoms (defined as ≥1 point reduction in symptom severity rating) was significantly higher in LFD-adherent patients (67.5%–82.4%) than that of the non-adherent group (27.8%–55.0%). Reasons reported for non-adherence included “limited availability of low-FODMAP alternatives” ( n = 9), “limited understanding of LFD” ( n = 7), and “perceived lack of benefit” ( n = 4). Conclusions LFD intervention improved gastrointestinal symptoms in a cohort of Asian IBS patients. Limited access to low-FODMAP alternatives was the main barrier to adherence.

Background: Long intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs) are endogenous non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) that are transcribed from 'intergenic' regions of the genome and may play critical roles in regulating gene expression through multiple RNA-mediated mechanisms. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are single-stranded small ncRNAs of approximately 21-24 nucleotide (nt) that are involved in transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene regulation. While miRNAs functioning as mRNA repressors have been studied in detail, the influence of miRNAs on lincRNAs has seldom been investigated in plants. Methods: LincRNAs as miRNA targets or decoys were predicted via GSTAr.pl script with a set of rules, and lincRNAs as miRNA targets were validated by degradome data. Conservation analysis of lincRNAs as miRNA targets or decoys were conducted using BLASTN and MAFFT. The function of lincRNAs as miRNA targets were predicted via a lincRNA-mRNA co-expression network, and the function of lincRNAs as miRNA decoys were predicted according to the competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) hypothesis. Results: In this work, we developed a computational method and systematically predicted 466 lincRNAs as 165 miRNA targets and 86 lincRNAs as 58 miRNA decoys in maize (Zea mays L.). Furthermore, 34 lincRNAs predicted as 33 miRNA targets were validated based on degradome data. We found that lincRNAs acting as miRNA targets or decoys are a common phenomenon, which indicates that the regulated networks of miRNAs also involve lincRNAs. To elucidate the function of lincRNAs, we reconstructed a miRNA-regulated network involving 78 miRNAs, 117 lincRNAs and 8834 mRNAs. Based on the lincRNA-mRNA co-expression network and the competing endogenous RNA hypothesis, we predicted that 34 lincRNAs that function as miRNA targets and 86 lincRNAs that function as miRNA decoys participate in cellular and metabolic processes, and play role in catalytic activity and molecular binding functions. Conclusions: This work provides a comprehensive view of miRNA-regulated networks and indicates that lincRNAs can participate in a layer of regulatory interactions as miRNA targets or decoys in plants, which will enable in-depth functional analysis of lincRNAs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hospitalized geriatric patients are a highly heterogeneous group often with variable diseases and conditions. Physicians, and geriatricians especially, are devoted to seeking non-invasive testing tools to support a timely, accurate diagnosis. Chinese tongue diagnosis, mainly based on the color and texture of the tongue, offers a unique solution. To develop a non-invasive assessment tool using machine learning in supporting a timely, accurate diagnosis in the elderly, we created an annotated dataset of 15% of 688 (=100) tongue images collected from hospitalized geriatric patients in a tertiary hospital in Shanghai, China. Images were captured via a light-field camera using CIELAB color space (to simulate human visual perception) and then were manually labeled by a panel of subject matter experts after chart reviewing patients’ clinical information documented in the hospital's information system. We expect that the dataset can assist in implementing a systematic means of conducting Chinese tongue diagnosis, predicting geriatric syndromes using tongue appearance, and even developing an mHealth application to provide individualized health suggestions for the elderly.

Literature on consumer choice has demonstrated that the inclusion of an inferior alternative choice (decoy) can increase interest in a target product or action. In two online studies, we tested the impact of decoys on the probability of previous non-intenders to have a screening test which could significantly lower their chances of dying of colorectal cancer. We find that the presence of a decoy increased the probability to choose screening at the target hospital (over no screening) from 39% to 54% and 37% to 59% depending on how many hospital attributes were communicated and how strongly the decoy was dominated by the target. We also show that the presence of the decoy was associated with lower levels of reported decisional complexity while not undermining information seeking and knowledge acquisition. These findings offer a 'proof of principle' that decoys have the potential to increase screening uptake without negatively influencing informed choice.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213668.].