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Abstract Background Spontaneous isolated superior mesenteric artery dissection (SISMAD) is a rare vascular disorder, and the treatment strategies remain controversial. This study aimed to compare outcomes of conservative and endovascular treatments in symptomatic patients with SISMAD. Methods Forty-two consecutive SISMAD patients who were admitted to a single center between October 2009 and May 2018 were enrolled in this study. Based on their symptoms, 15 had conservative treatment, and 27 had endovascular treatment. The baseline characteristics, treatments, and follow-up results of the conservative group and endovascular group were analysed. Results The rates of symptom relief were 93.3% in the conservative group and 96.3% in the endovascular group. The procedure-related complications in the endovascular group included one case of pseudoaneurysm formation in the left brachial artery. During the follow-up period (median 28.5 months), a higher proportion of patients in the conservative group had symptom recurrence (42.9% in the conservative group versus 4.8% in the endovascular group, p

Abstract Background The performance of drug-coated balloons (DCBs) in femoropopliteal interventions has been proven through randomized trials in short lesions and lesions with relatively low proportion of occlusions. There is limited evidence of DCBs in long or occlusive lesions. This study is to investigate the efficacy of the paclitaxel-coated balloon for treatment of long and occlusive femoropopliteal arterial lesions. Methods A single-arm trial including 44 femoropopliteal lesions (chronic total occlusion (CTO) plus > 10 cm) treated with DCBs was performed to collect data of average 1-year follow-up. Endpoints contain primary patency, target lesion revascularization (TLR), amelioration of the Rutherford classification, change of ankle brachial index (ABI) and major adverse events. Results Technical success is 97.7% while device success is 100%. Mean lesion length was 186 ± 86.3 cm. Stent implantation was performed in 13.6%. Cumulative probability of primary patency was 78.8% ± 6.8% at 1 year while that of freedom from TLR was 91.4% ± 4.9%. Rutherford classification improved from average 3.3 ± 1.0 to 2.1 ± 1.4 (p

This paper presents a new deep visual-inertial odometry and depth estimation framework for improving the accuracy of depth estimation and ego-motion from image sequences and inertial measurement unit (IMU) raw data. The proposed framework predicts ego-motion and depth with absolute scale in a self-supervised manner. We first capture dense features and solve the pose by deep visual odometry (DVO), and then combine the pose estimation pipeline with deep inertial odometry (DIO) by the extended Kalman filter (EKF) method to produce the sparse depth and pose with absolute scale. We then join deep visual-inertial odometry (DeepVIO) with depth estimation by using sparse depth and the pose from DeepVIO pipeline to align the scale of the depth prediction with the triangulated point cloud and reduce image reconstruction error. Specifically, we use the strengths of learning-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO) and depth estimation to build an end-to-end self-supervised learning architecture. We evaluated the new framework on the KITTI datasets and compared it to the previous techniques. We show that our approach improves results for ego-motion estimation and achieves comparable results for depth estimation, especially in the detail area.

Understanding historical trends in temperature, precipitation, and runoff is important but incomplete for developing adaptive measures to climate change to sustain fragile ecosystems in cold and arid regions, including the Balagaer River watershed on the Mongolian Plateau of northeast China. The objective of this study was to detect such trends in this watershed from 1959 to 2017. The detection was accomplished using a Mann-Kendall sudden change approach at annual and seasonal time scales. The results indicated that the abrupt changes in temperature preceded that in either runoff or precipitation; these abrupt changes occurred between 1970 and 2004. Significant (α = 0.05) warming trends were found at the minimum temperatures in spring (0.041 °C a−1), summer (0.037 °C a−1), fall (0.027 °C a−1), and winter (0.031 °C a−1). In contrast, significant decreasing trends were found in the precipitation (−1.27 mm a−1) and runoff (−0.069 mm a−1) in the summer. Marginally increasing trends were found in the precipitation in spring (0.18 mm a−1) and fall (0.032 mm a−1), whereas an insignificant decreasing trend was found in the runoffs in these two seasons. Both precipitation and runoff in the wet season exhibited a significant decreasing trend, whereas in the dry season, they exhibited a marginally increasing trend. Sudden changes in spring runoff and sudden rises in temperature are the main causes of sudden changes in basin rainfall.

This paper is concerned with the nonlinear boundary value problems for first order integro-differential equations with impulsive integral conditions. By using of the method of lower and upper solutions coupled with the monotone iterative technique, we give conditions for the existence of extremal solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An enantioselective approach to a diastereomer of iriomoteolide-1a is described. Highlighted is a SmI2-mediated intramolecular reductive cyclization approach to complex cyclic hemiketals. An acetylide−chloroformate coupling strategy is also featured. Our results show that the structures of iriomoteolide-1a−1c require careful reassessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An efficient synthesis of the C1−C12 fragment of iriomoteolide 1a has been accomplished via sequential application of two catalytic, asymmetric, vinylogous aldol reactions: a catalytic vinylogous aldol reaction was used to enantioselectively introduce the C5−C8 segment, and a second catalytic vinylogous aldol reaction was used to install the remaining two stereocenters and a stereodefined alkene in the form of an α,β-unsaturated δ-lactone in one step. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Proteolysis-targeting chimera (PROTAC) that specifically targets harmful proteins for destruction by hijacking the ubiquitin–proteasome system is emerging as a potent anticancer strategy. How to efficiently modulate the target degradation remains a challenging issue. In this study, we employ a single amino acid–based PROTAC, which uses the shortest degradation signal sequence as the ligand of the N-end rule E3 ubiquitin ligases to degrade the fusion protein BCR (breakpoint cluster region)–ABL (Abelson proto-oncogene), an oncogenic kinase that drives the progression of chronic myeloid leukemia. We find that the reduction level of BCR–ABL can be easily adjusted by substituting different amino acids. Furthermore, a single PEG linker is found to achieve the best proteolytic effect. Our efforts have resulted in effective degradation of BCR–ABL protein by the N-end rule pathway and efficient growth inhibition of K562 cells expressing BCR–ABL in vitro and blunted tumor growth in a K562 xenograft tumor model in vivo. The PROTAC presented has unique advantages including lower effective concentration, smaller molecular size, and modular degradation rate. Demonstrating the efficacy of the N-end rule–based PROTACs in vitro and in vivo, our study further expands the limited degradation pathways currently available for PROTACs in vivo and is easily adapted for broader applications in targeted protein degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]