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OBJECTIVE To evaluate the efficacy and safety of resveratrol combined with ablative fractional CO2 laser system (AFL) treating skin photoaging. METHODS Thirty-two subjects were assigned to the treatment group (TG) or the control group (CG), respectively, applied test product (resveratrol essence) or control product twice daily for 6 months. Each subject was given an AFL treatment or no laser treatment on left or right side of the face randomly. Subjective evaluations by investigators and subjects themselves were conducted after treatment. Melanin index, erythema index, and cuticle moisture content were conducted at baseline and after treatments. Adverse events (AEs) were evaluated during the study period. RESULTS All subjects in TG achieved improvements of their photoaging signs compared to pre-treatment both the laser side and the non-laser side at 6 months (p

Objectives To develop and validate a preoperative CT-based nomogram combined with radiomic and clinical–radiological signatures to distinguish preinvasive lesions from pulmonary invasive lesions. Methods This was a retrospective, diagnostic study conducted from August 1, 2018, to May 1, 2020, at three centers. Patients with a solitary pulmonary nodule were enrolled in the GDPH center and were divided into two groups (7:3) randomly: development (n = 149) and internal validation (n = 54). The SYSMH center and the ZSLC Center formed an external validation cohort of 170 patients. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) algorithm and logistic regression analysis were used to feature signatures and transform them into models. Results The study comprised 373 individuals from three independent centers (female: 225/373, 60.3%; median [IQR] age, 57.0 [48.0–65.0] years). The AUCs for the combined radiomic signature selected from the nodular area and the perinodular area were 0.93, 0.91, and 0.90 in the three cohorts. The nomogram combining the clinical and combined radiomic signatures could accurately predict interstitial invasion in patients with a solitary pulmonary nodule (AUC, 0.94, 0.90, 0.92) in the three cohorts, respectively. The radiomic nomogram outperformed any clinical or radiomic signature in terms of clinical predictive abilities, according to a decision curve analysis and the Akaike information criteria. Conclusions This study demonstrated that a nomogram constructed by identified clinical–radiological signatures and combined radiomic signatures has the potential to precisely predict pathology invasiveness. Key Points • The radiomic signature from the perinodular area has the potential to predict pathology invasiveness of the solitary pulmonary nodule. • The new radiomic nomogram was useful in clinical decision-making associated with personalized surgical intervention and therapeutic regimen selection in patients with early-stage non-small-cell lung cancer.

Objectives To evaluate the clinical potential of a higher resolution noninvasive prenatal screening (NIPS-Plus) test for detection of microdeletion/microduplication syndromes (MMS) in addition to common aneuploidies. Methods In a multicenter prospective study, 37,002 pregnant women with unremarkable first-trimester ultrasound scans had a NIPS-Plus test. Ultrasound screen positive women were not included in this study. Results Of 36,970 ultrasound negative women there were 291 NIPS-Plus screen positive results indicating 237 aneuploidies and 54 MMS. Following amniocentesis, 171 (72%) were confirmed as genuine, comprising 3 T13s, 10 T18s, 61 T21s, 70 SCAs and 27 MMS. The PPV for MMS with unremarkable ultrasound findings was 50%. Routine clinical examination of children born from NIPS-Plus negative pregnancies revealed no obvious signs of chromosome disease syndromes at one year of age. Conclusions NIPS-Plus has the potential for clinical utility not only for routine aneuploid screening but also for MMS that do not show overt signs during early pregnancy ultrasound screening. We suggest that ultrasound with NIPS-Plus in combination with appropriate counselling could be considered as a comprehensive first-tier prenatal screening approach for all pregnant women.

Background Persistent infection by high-risk human papillomavirus (HPV) is the leading cause of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia and cervical carcinoma. Local hyperthermia at 44ºC has been proven efficacious to clear cutaneous or anogenital warts caused by HPV infection. This study aims to assess the effect of hyperthermia at 44ºC on the clearance of high-risk HPV. Methods A randomized, patient-blind, sham treatment–controlled trial was conducted in 4 medical centers. We enrolled patients with positive high-risk HPVs and normal or insignificant cytological findings (negative/atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance/low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion). Participants were randomly assigned (1:1) to receive either hyperthermia at 44ºC or 37ºC, for 30 minutes in each session. Patients in both groups received treatment once a day for 3 consecutive days, plus 2 more sessions 10 ± 3 days later. The primary outcome was clearance rate of HPV 3 months after treatment. Results After a 3-month follow-up, hyperthermia treatment at 44ºC and 37ºC achieved HPV clearance rates of 85.19% (23/27) and 50% (13/26), respectively (P = .014). There was no significant difference of treatment response between patients with single and multiple type of HPV by 44ºC hyperthermia treatment. There were no significant adverse events recorded during the treatment period in both groups. Conclusions Local hyperthermia at 44ºC safely and significantly aids in clearing cervical high-risk HPVs, the effect of which helps halt the progression of cervical transformation and transmission of the virus. Clinical Trials Registration NCT03436251.

Background and aims Clarifying the association between 5-methyltetrahydrofolate and homocysteine and the effect pattern of methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR C677T) may contribute to the management of homocysteine and may serve as a significant reference for a randomized controlled trial of 5-methyltetrahydrofolate intervention. This study aimed to reveal the association between these two biochemical indices. Methods Study population was drawn from the baseline data of the China Stroke Primary Prevention Trial (CSPPT), including 2328 hypertensive participants. 5-methyltetrahydrofolate and homocysteine were determined by stable-isotope dilution liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry and automatic clinical analyzers, respectively. MTHFR C677T polymorphisms were detected using TaqMan assay. Multiple linear regression was performed to evaluate the association between serum 5-methyltetrahydrofolate and homocysteine. Results There was a significant inverse association between 5-methyltetrahydrofolate and homocysteine when 5-methyltetrahydrofolate was ≤ 10 ng/mL, and this association was modified by MTHFR C677T (per 1-ng/mL increment; All: β = − 0.50, P β = − 0.14, P = 0.087; CT: β = − 0.20, P = 0.011; TT: β = − 1.19, P P for difference P for difference P for difference = 0.757). Conclusions Our data showed a non-linear association between serum homocysteine and 5-methyltetrahydrofolate among Chinese hypertensive adults, however, it could be inversely linearly fitted when serum 5-methyltetrahydrofolate was ≤ 10 ng/mL, and this association was modified by MTHFR C677T.

A deficiency in proprioception caused by some nerve injuries could result in movement disorders. An effective assessment of proprioception for patients with nerve injuries is essential for their rehabilitation. When visual input is inconsistent with motor input, humans tend to depend heavily on proprioception to perform a task. Based on it, we designed a novel robot-assisted task to identify proprioceptive acuity. We developed a robotic device to provide RM of wrist and employed VR immersing technology to present VM for a user. The RM and VM were programmed randomly to be consistent or not (conflicting) for each trial. The user was required to decide whether what they were perceiving (real motion) and seeing (virtual motion) is consistent or not in a total of 36 trials. We recruited 40 healthy participants (20 males and 20 females) for the assessment validation. The outcome indicated that the novel robot-assisted identification is sensitive enough to distinguish the difference in proprioceptive acuity between males and females. The male participants have better proprioceptive acuity of the wrist than the females ( $p ), especially in the P/S motion $p ). In addition, the gender difference was found in the sensitivity of proprioceptive acuity ( $p ) while no difference was found in the specificity ( $p > 0.05$ ), indicating that female participants had poorer performance on the identification than the males when the RM is consistent with VM. This study indicated that the novel robot-assisted task is effective to identify limb proprioceptive acuity.

Monocular depth estimation has been carried out with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, vast quantities of ground truth depth data are required as a supervising signal. Recently, self-supervised learning is explored for monocular depth estimation, which uses the minor loss of image reconstruction, rather than depth information, as the supervising signal in the training phase. However, the blurring problem often occurs on the surface of a near object when using the image reconstruction as a major loss function. Here, we propose a novel Progressive Strategy Network (PSNet) to overcome this problem, which optimizes the depth map from coarse to fine with several progressive modules. A progressive module estimates a coarse depth map with a color image by CNNs and outputs it into the next module for progressively accurate refinement. It can simplify the difficulty of estimating the depth map with a large size and reduce the blurring problem. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently improves the quality of depth map on the surface of large objects and keeps edges clear. Our proposed method performs high-quality depth estimation on the KITTI dataset and achieves a strong generalization on the Make3D dataset. Besides, it can be flexibly used on the real scenes captured by mobile phones without extra training.

Stereo depth estimation is an efficient method to perceive three-dimensional structures in real scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised method, to the best of our knowledge, to extract depth information by learning bi-directional pixel movement with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Given left and right views, we use CNNs to learn the task of middle-view synthesis for perceiving bi-directional pixel movement from left-right views to the middle view. The information of pixel movement will be stored in the features after CNNs are trained. Then we use several convolutional layers to extract the information of pixel movement for estimating a depth map of the given scene. Experiments show that our proposed method can significantly provide a high-quality depth map using only a color image as a supervisory signal.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has deemed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to be a pandemic. The strict prevention and control measures taken by China have proven to be effective, creating a window of opportunity for other countries. The tracking and management of contacts of patients with COVID-19 are important components of prevention and control measures. This article briefly describes the placement of close contacts of patients with COVID-19 under collective quarantine for medical observation in China from the perspective of frontline staff. This article focuses on a community in the Jiading District of Shanghai to provide a reference for placement of close contacts of patients with COVID-19 under collective quarantine for medical observation in other countries and regions.

Interleukin (IL)‑18, a pro‑inflammatory cytokine, plays an important role in a number of skin diseases. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of IL‑18 in the development of atopic dermatitis (AD). For this purpose, mice were divided into 4 groups (n=5/group) as follows: i) The wild‑type (WT) controls; ii) IL18 knockout (KO) controls; iii) MC903‑treated WT mice; and iv) MC903‑treated KO mice. MC903 (4 nmol in ethanol) was topically applied daily for 15 consecutive days to the exposed skins of mice. AD‑like symptoms and severity were evaluated by the scoring of AD (SCORAD). Serum immunoglobulin E (IgE) and thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) levels were determined with the use of an enzyme‑linked immunosorbent assay. Immunohistochemistry was used to assess the expression of IL‑1β, signal transducer and activator of transcription (STAT)3 and filaggrin (FLG) in the skin lesions. RT‑qPCR was performed to assess the mRNA levels of IL‑1β, IL‑4, IL‑9, STAT3, corticotropin‑releasing hormone receptor (CRHR)1, CRHR2, TSLP and caspase‑1 in the skin lesions. It was demonstrated that IL‑18 may function as a pleiotropic pro‑inflammatory cytokine in the development of AD‑like lesions. IL‑18 KO reduced aggravated AD‑like lesions induced by MC903, in part by upregulating Th2 cytokines. IL‑18 promoted the expression of FLG in the epidermis and CRHR2 in AD‑like lesions, but downregulated the serum levels of IgE. On the whole, the findings of the present study demonstrate that IL‑18 deficiency alleviates AD‑induced lesions in mice.

Background Hyperthermia upregulates DNAJA4, a member of heat shock proteins (HSPs) 40 family, in human keratinocytes and HPV-infected tissue. DNAJA4 deficiency enhances growth arrest induced by hyperthermia. Clusterin (CLU) and phosphorylated ERK (p-ERK) play a role in regulating cell proliferation and apoptosis, under environmental stress. Objectives To examine the downstream molecules and signalling pathways of DNAJA4 and assess their roles in cell cycle and apoptosis of keratinocytes in response to hyperthermia. Methods Wild-type and DNAJA4-knockout (KO) HaCaT cells were exposed to either 44 °C (hyperthermia) or 37 °C (control) for 30 min. The expression levels of CLU and p-ERK were determined by RT-PCR and Western blotting. RNAi and PD98059 were used to inhibit the expression of CLU and p-ERK, respectively. Cell viability, cell cycle and apoptosis were analysed by MTS assay and flow cytometry. Fresh biopsy samples of human normal foreskin or condyloma acuminatum (CA) were utilized to examine the expression of CLU and p-ERK after ex vivo culture at 44 °C. Results The expression of CLU and p-ERK was significantly increased by hyperthermia treatment at 44 °C in HaCaT cells, foreskin and HPV-infected tissues. In HaCaT cells subjected to hyperthermia, DNAJA4 deficiency further augmented the expression of CLU and p-ERK. CLU deficiency enhanced the p-ERK expression. Hyperthermia-induced CLU and p-ERK exerted protective roles mainly through inhibiting apoptosis and maintaining cell cycle, respectively. Conclusions In keratinocytes, CLU and p-ERK are induced by hyperthermia, an effect which can be further enhanced by DNAJA4 deficiency. CLU deficiency also increases p-ERK expression. Both CLU and p-ERK are critical protective factors of human keratinocytes from hyperthermia-induced injury.

Background: In treating androgenetic alopecia, 5% minoxidil is a commonly used topical drug. By using electrodynamic microneedle at the same time may increase absorption of minoxidil and further stimulate hair growth.Objective: A 24-week, randomized, evaluator blinded, comparative study was performed to evaluate the efficacy of treating Chinese male androgenetic alopecia using microneedle combined with 5% minoxidil topical solution. Methods: Randomized subjects received topical 5% minoxidil (group 1, n = 20), local electrodynamic microneedle treatments (group 2, n = 20), or local electrodynamic microneedle treatments plus topical 5% minoxidil (group 3, n = 20). A total of 12 microneedle treatments were performed every 2 weeks with 2ml 5% minoxidil delivery in group 3 during each microneedle treatment. Patient receiving topical 5% minoxidil applied 1 ml of the solution twice daily over the course of the study. A total of 60 Chinese male subjects with Norwood-Hamilton type III-VI androgenetic alopec...

With less extra stress on the testing sample, a free-stress sample holder was designed to place the sample horizontally. With the free-stress sample holder, a magnetoelectric (ME) coefficient measurement system was developed based on dynamic method. This measurement system has the hardware part and the software part, integrated by the DC magnetic field generation module, the AC magnetic field generation module, the induced ME voltage detecting module and PC software module. Then, a sample of Terfenol-D/PZT/Terfenol-D trilayer was designed and fabricated, and the relationships of its ME coefficient influenced by the DC magnetic field and the frequency of the AC magnetic field were tested using the measurement system. And the results showed that the free-stress sample holder was proven to improve the accuracy of the measurement system by less stress interference.

Due to physical limitation in resolution of display device, it is usually very difficult to achieve a high spatial resolution and a high angular resolution simultaneously for a three-dimensional (3D) light field display. Here, a computational super-resolution full-parallax 3D light field display is demonstrated, which can achieve both high spatial resolution and angular resolution. The proposed display consists of a specially designed backlight unit with controlled scattering angle, two cascadedly arranged LCDs with a resolution of 3840 × 2160, an aberration-suppressed compound lens array, and a holographic functional screen. The optical image formation processing of the display is analyzed and modeled as a whole process, and the superresolution light field synthesis method is presented. By co-designing the optical elements with computation processing, our proposed display architecture can improve the spatial resolution and angular resolution with a factor of 2× in both horizontal and vertical directions, comparing with these of the conventional light field display with single LCD and standard lens array. Finally, a super-resolution full-parallax 3D light field display with a designed spatial resolution of about 640 × 360 in a display area of 21.5 inches and an angular resolution of 166 × 166 in a viewing angle of 45 × 45 degrees is constructed, and an excellent 3D visual experience with improved image quality can be perceived.

The Drug Administration Law of the People's Republic of China (amended in August 2019) is a major piece of legislation governing drug administration in China. This law seeks to improve health legislation; to achieve this, it defines the concepts of fake drugs and inferior drugs and their differences, it emphasizes the regulation of reliability, it standardizes online drug sales, it encourages technological innovation, and it specifies legal liability and punishment through legislative amendments. The Drug Administration Law is characteristic of responsive legislation, and it guarantees a right to health for citizens. The law provides for priority review and approval of new drugs for diseases like rare diseases, it encourages the domestic manufacturing and development of new drugs for rare diseases, and it provides a firm legal basis for medications to treat rare diseases under the Healthy China strategy.

Reflection and refraction images are treated as the texture of the object in computer graphics, which brings wrong depth information when focusing on the object in holographic display. In this paper, a method of ray tracing rendering with complete depth information for computer-generated hologram(CGH) is proposed. Correct depths of reflection and refraction images are calculated, and layer-based method is used to generate CGH. In experiment result, our method truthfully reconstructs the complete depth information of complex scene. Reflection or refraction images and its corresponding media surfaces can be focused on correct depth. All layer data is computed in a single ray tracing procedure, and the generation speed of 1024×1024 CGH for 3D scene divided into 10 layers is 100fps.

With the technological development of stereoscopic display, an immersive 3D space with large size can be reconstructed more and more easily, and a 3D spatial interaction method with high-efficiency become more and more urgent. Gesture interaction, as the most natural and efficient way of human-computer interaction, can convey information very quickly and efficiently. However, the effective interaction distance of most existing gesture interaction methods is less than one meter, and can not meet the demand of the long distance 3D spatial interaction. In this paper, an efficient network named Gesture YOLO for long-distance gesture detection is proposed to achieve the small gesture object detection with improved accuracy. There are two modules in our Gesture YOLO, one is the Dual CSPDarknet53-tiny Backbone module for fusing person features and gesture features, and the other is the Progressive Multi-Scale Feature Fusion module for enhancing output features. The experimental results on our test set show that our Gesture YOLO can achieve higher gesture detection accuracy than the YOLOv4-tiny at distances ranging from 2m to 5m, and can mitigate the significant drop in gesture detection accuracy when the distance increases.

The rapid spread of pneumonia caused by SARS-CoV-2 has seriously threatened people. In this study, we detected the expression of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG/IgM and respiratory tract SARS-CoV-2 RNA in patients with COVID-19 and explored the correlation and clinical significance between SARS-CoV-2 antibody and respiratory SARS-CoV-2 RNA.From March 5, 2020 to April 28, 2020, 48 cases with COVID-19 diagnosed in Beijing Xiaotangshan Hospital were enrolled. SARS-CoV-2 RNAs were detected by real-time fluorescence RT-PCR method. Serum SARS-CoV-2 IgG/IgM antibodies were determined by colloidal gold immunochromatography. The statistical analysis was performed using chi-squared test.In all the patients, SARS-CoV-2 RNA among 270 upper respiratory tract (nasal or throat swabs) samples, 71 lower respiratory tract (sputum) samples, and anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgM/IgG antibodies in 123 serum samples were detected during the hospitalization period. The positive rate of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG was significantly higher than that of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgM within the first week after symptom onset (p0.05). The positive rate of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG was also significantly higher than that of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgM during day 8 - 30 after symptom onset (p0.01). The positive rate of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the lower respiratory tract specimens (64.8%, 46/71) was significantly higher than that in the upper respiratory tract (46.7%, 126/270) (p0.05). The positive rate (100%, 4/4) of SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection in the lower respiratory tract specimens before IgG seroconversion was significantly higher than that of the positive rate (59.3%, 32/54) after IgG seroconversion (p0.01). The positive rate (72.2%, 57/79) of SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection in the upper respiratory tract specimens before IgG seroconversion was significantly higher than that of the positive rate (30.7%, 39/127) after IgG seroconversion (p0.01).Anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG might be detected within the first week after symptom onset. The application of SARS-CoV-2 antibody (IgG/IgM) detection is important for the suspected cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection with negative SARS-CoV-2 RNA results. The positive rate of SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection in the lower respiratory tract specimens was significantly higher than that in the upper respiratory tract. Sputum detection is recommended for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Using lower respiratory tract specimens may reduce the false negative PCR tests. The detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA can be improved by investigating follow-up specimens over time.

This article describes a technique for making an esthetic treatment plan by using a virtual face scan reconstructed from digital photographs through three-dimensional dense face alignment (3DDFA) and intraoral scans. Portrait photographs were captured with a digital camera and were reconstructed to a virtual 3D face scan by 3DDFA. After scaling the virtual face scan to the correct size, intraoral scans and virtual face scans were aligned to create a 3D view of the patient. A virtual diagnostic waxing was created accordingly. In select cases, this technique can provide 3D esthetic predictions when 3D face imaging devices are not available.

Primary cutaneous localized amyloidosis (PCLA) is a severely pruritic and potentially disfiguring disorder which impact greatly on a patient’s quality of life. There is no ‘silver bullet’ cure for ...

The excitation power and temperature dependence of the photoluminescence (PL) and electroluminescence (EL) spectra were studied in green InGaN/GaN multiple quantum well (MQW)-based light-emitting diodes (LED). An examination of the PL-325, PL-405, and EL spectra at identical optical or electrical generation rates at room temperature showed that the normalized spectra exhibited different characteristic peaks. In addition, the temperature behavior of the peak energy was S-shaped for the PL-405 spectrum, while it was V-shaped for the EL spectrum. These measurement results demonstrate that the excitation source can affect the carrier dynamics about the generation (injection), transfer, and distribution of carriers.

BACKGROUND Actinic keratosis (AK) is a precancerous disease, caused by ultraviolet radiation (UV). OBJECTIVE To analyze the clinical and pathological characteristics of AK in four areas with different ultraviolet radiation intensities. METHODS 1188 diagnosed AK patients, from January 2000 to July 2015, in dermatology department of four hospitals were collected. The UV intensity of hospital located cities from high to low is Kunming, Yinchuan, Shenyang and Nanjing. The information comes from medical records, and the pathological types and Keratinocyte Intraepithelial Neoplasia (KIN) grades were checked by two experienced pathologists. All information was conducted a retrospective multicenter research. RESULTS The patients were mainly middle-aged and elderly female, which was in direct contrast to the majority of men in European. The age of onset in Kunming group was lower than that in Yinchuan Group (p = 0.013) and Nanjing Group (p

Hashing methods for cross-modal retrieval have recently been widely investigated due to the explosive growth of multimedia data. Generally, real-world data is imperfect and has more or less redundancy, making cross-modal retrieval task challenging. However, most existing cross-modal hashing methods fail to deal with the redundancy, leading to unsatisfactory performance on such data. In this paper, to address this issue, we propose a novel cross-modal hashing method, namely aTtEntion-Aware deep Cross-modal Hashing (TEACH). It could perform feature learning and hash-code learning simultaneously. Besides, with designed attention modules for different modalities, one for each, TEACH can effectively highlight the useful information of data while suppressing the redundant information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms some state-of-the-art hashing methods in cross-modal retrieval tasks.

With the rapid development of social websites, recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of social images with user-provided tags which continuously arrive in a streaming fashion. Due to the fast query speed and low storage cost, hashing-based methods for image search have attracted increasing attention. However, existing hashing methods for social image retrieval are based on batch mode which violates the nature of social images, i.e., social images are usually generated periodically or collected in a stream fashion. Although there exist many online image hashing methods, they either adopt unsupervised learning which ignore the relevant tags, or are designed in the supervised manner which needs high-quality labels. In this paper, to overcome the above limitations, we propose a new method named Weakly-supervised Online Hashing (WOH). In order to learn high-quality hash codes, WOH exploits the weak supervision by considering the semantics of tags and removing the noise. Besides, We develop a discrete online optimization algorithm for WOH, which is efficient and scalable. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of WOH compared with several state-of-the-art hashing baselines., Comment: Accepted by ICME 2021

Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite shows a great potential in the field of photoelectrics. Embedding methyl ammonium lead bromide (MAPbBr3) in a mesoporous silica (mSiO2) layer is an effective method for maintaining optical performance of MAPbBr3 at room temperature. In this work, we synthesized MAPbBr3 quantum dots, embedding them in the mSiO2 layer. The nonlinear optical responses of this composite thin film have been investigated by using the Z-scan technique at a wavelength of 800 nm. The results show plural nonlinear responses in different intensities, corresponding to one- and two-photon processing. Our results support that composites possess saturation intensity of ~27.29 GW/cm2 and varying nonlinear coefficients. The composite thin films show high stability under ultrafast laser irradiating. By employing the composite as a saturable absorber, a passively Q-switching laser has been achieved on a Nd:YVO4 all-solid-state laser platform to generate a laser at ~1 μm.

Continuous depth maps are reconstructed based on depth estimation from light-field data of axially distributed image sensing (ADS). In the proposed method, the light field of ADS is introduced, and the light-field trajectory function is presented, which formulates the relationship between image point positions in different axially captured images and the depth of object point. The depth value of an object is achieved by searching the light-field trajectory through statistical regression, which leads to an accurate depth estimation by making use of the structure information among the densely sampled views in light-field data. Moreover, as regions with smooth texture and occlusions do not contain reliable depth information, an energy minimization-based depth map optimization is carried out from initial estimations to obtain continuous and robust depth maps. Experimental results demonstrate that the reconstructed depth maps are accurate, continuous, and able to preserve more details. Moreover, the synthesized light-field images calculated by reconstructed depth map show good effect in 3D light-field display, and the validity of the proposed method is verified.

The limitations in discriminating preablation disease-active status of differentiated thyroid carcinoma (DTC) still represent a major challenge to radioiodine dose management. Cytokines, the small protein signaling molecules that constitute the thyroid tumor microenvironment, play significant roles in the facilitation of intercellular communication and the control of tumorigenesis. Also, more attention should be paid to the molecular events within the innate and adaptive immune systems that occur after the organism being exposed to ionizing radiation. Therefore, we implemented a study of 260 patients with DTC in thyroid hormone withdrawal status who were treated with total thyroidectomy to explore the relationship between cytokines and recurrence/active disease status. Besides, we made a cross-sectional study to analyze pre- and post-ablation serum concentration of cytokines of 86 patients with DTC. There was a relationship between clinicohistopathological characteristics of patients with DTC and the presence of cytokines. It is noteworthy that patients with recurrence/active disease were at a higher serum interleukin-2 receptor (IL-2R) level than the disease-free patients (213.59 ± 75.43 pg/ml vs. 186.80 ± 77.40 pg/ml, P = 0.005). Positive correlation was observed between serum IL-2R and thyroglobulin (Tg) (P = 0.003). We also found significant changes in the cytokine profile after radioiodine ablation, including the decrease of tumor necrosis factor-α and IL-8 (P < 0.001, P < 0.001, respectively), and increase of IL-2R (P < 0.001). Thus, we suggest that serum IL-2R may assist in evaluating the disease status during the post-thyroidectomy follow-up and radioiodine therapy has an immunoregulatory effect on serum cytokines.

Lens aberrations degrade the image quality and limit the viewing angle of light-field displays. In the present study, an approach to aberration reduction based on a pre-correction convolutional neural network (CNN) is demonstrated. The pre-correction CNN is employed to transform the elemental image array (EIA) generated by a virtual camera array into a pre-corrected EIA (PEIA). The pre-correction CNN is built and trained based on the aberrations of the lens array. The resulting PEIA, rather than the EIA, is presented on the liquid crystal display. Via the optical transformation of the lens array, higher quality 3D images are obtained. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed through simulations and optical experiments. A 70-degree viewing angle light field display with the improved image quality is demonstrated.

Multi-label image classification problem is one of the most important and fundamental problems in computer vision. In an image with multiple labels, the objects usually locate at various positions with different scales and poses. Moreover, some labels are associated with the entire image instead of a small region. Therefore, both the global and local information are important for classification. To effectively extract and make full use of these information, in this paper, we present a novel deep Dual-stream nEtwork for the muLTi-lAbel image classification task, DELTA for short. As its name indicates, it is composed of two streams, i.e., the Multi-Instance network and the Global Priors network. The former is used to extract the multi-scale class-related local instances features by modeling the classification problem in a multi-instance learning framework. The latter is devised to capture the global priors from the input image as the global information. These two streams are fused by the final fusion layer. In this way, DELTA can extract and make full use of both the global and local information for classification. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., PASCAL VOC 2007, PASCAL VOC 2012 and Microsoft COCO, demonstrate that DELTA significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, DELTA can automatically locate the key image patterns that trigger the labels.

In order to ascertain the current status of and challenges posed by the incidence and prevalence of rare diseases in China, this study teases out data on the incidence and prevalence of 121 rare diseases listed in China's First List of Rare Disease to provide rationales and references for the development and promotion of rare-disease-related policies. The National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China issued the Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment Guide (2019) (denoted here as China's Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment Guide), which cited data on the incidence/prevalence of 21 rare diseases (21 of 121 rare diseases, 17.36%). Data on 68 diseases (56.20%) were found in monographs, literature databases, and official websites. Data on the incidence/prevalence of 70 diseases were compiled, though no data were available for the 51 remaining diseases. There are published data on the incidence/prevalence of only 14 diseases at the national level. Sources of data on the incidence and prevalence of rare diseases mainly include cases counts from hospitals (40.56%), other sources of data (24.48%), screening (20.98%), cross-sectional studies (8.39%), and estimates from models (7.69%). Data on the incidence/prevalence of rare diseases in China are limited and typically lack accuracy, uniformity, and timeliness. Epidemiological data at the national level are greatly lacking, and data are not amenable to comparison. China recently initiated epidemiological studies of rare diseases at the national and regional level. The country will continue to promote, use, and update its list of common rare diseases, actively encourage the coding and registration of cases of rare diseases, and take actions to collect, share, and use that information.

This study evaluated the difference in treatment response and survival profiles between drug-eluting bead transarterial chemoembolization (DEB-TACE) and conventional transarterial chemoembolization (cTACE) treatments in Chinese hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) patients. A total of 120 HCC patients were consecutively enrolled in this prospective cohort study, which showed that DEB-TACE achieved higher complete response (CR) (30.8%) compared with cTACE (7.4%) with no difference in overall response rate (ORR) for patients treated with DEB-TACE and cTACE (80.8% vs. 73.5%). In addition, DEB-TACE was associated with a lower rate of progressive disease (PD) compared with cTACE (1.9% vs. 11.8%). With respect to survival, patients in the DEB-TACE group achieved median progression-free survival (PFS) of 15 months (95% CI 12‐18 months), which was longer than the cTACE group [median PFS 11 months (95% CI 10‐12 months)]. Median overall survival (OS) was also longer with DEB-TACE [25 months (95% CI 22-28 months)] when compared with cTACE [21 months (95% CI 18‐24 months)]. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that DEB-TACE was an independent predictive factor for achieving CR. Univariate Cox’s regression analysis revealed that DEB-TACE was a predictive factor for prolonged PFS and OS, while multivariate analysis demonstrated that DEB-TACE was not an independent factor for predicting PFS or OS. In conclusion, we found that DEB-TACE achieved higher treatment response and prolonged survival compared with cTACE in Chinese HCC patients.

Summary Background Melasma is an acquired, common hyperpigmented disorder on the face. While many therapeutic approaches are available, their efficacy is moderate. Objective To investigate the safety and efficacy of a cream containing herbal mixture for melasma. Methods A total of 90 volunteers with melasma were enrolled in this randomized, double‐blind, controlled clinical study, and they were randomly divided into three groups (A, B, and C). Patients in group A were treated with a cream containing herbal mixture, while groups B and C were treated with arbutin cream and placebo, respectively, twice daily for 12 weeks. Melasma area and severity index (MASI) score, melanin index (MI), erythema index (EI), changes in density of inflammatory cells, and adverse events were evaluated every 4 weeks. Results Although MASI scores declined significantly in both groups A and B (P

Background:. As a potent pro-inflammatory cytokine of the interleukin (IL)-1 family, IL-18 was elevated in early active and progressive plaque-type psoriatic lesions and that serum or plasma levels of IL-18 correlated with the Psoriasis Area and Severity Index (PASI). Although results from previous studies have established that IL-18 may aggravate psoriatic inflammation, the mechanisms of this process remain unknown. In this study, IL-18 knock out (KO) mice and wild-type (WT) mice were used to investigate the effects of IL-18 within a mouse model of psoriasis. Methods:. WT and IL-18 KO mice were divided into four groups, including imiquimod (IMQ)-treated IL-18 KO group (n = 11) and WT group (n = 13) as well as their respectively gene-matched control mice (receiving vaseline; n = 12). PASI scores were used to evaluate psoriatic lesions in IMQ-treated mice. Pathological features and dermal cellular infiltration were investigated by hematoxylin and eosin staining. The levels of psoriasis-related cytokines including IL-23, IL-17, IL-12, IL-1β, IFNγ, IL-15, IL-27, and IL-4 were tested by real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The protein level of IL-1β, IL-27, CXCL1, and Ly6 g were investigated by immunohistochemistry (IHC). Results:. Acanthosis (98.46 ± 14.12 vs. 222.68 ± 71.10 μm, P

With the increasing application of light field, especially in the light field display field (LFD), more and more light field data are required. However, there are some disadvantages for current light field acquisition methods, such as high hardware cost, low spatial resolution and other defects. A novel light field acquisition method using external mask and compressive sensing theory is presented. Different from the conventional methods with the camera array or the light field camera based on the micro-lens array, an external mask is pasted on the large aperture lens of an ordinary camera, and the 3D scene is captured at several typical positions. The compressive sensing theory is introduced to recover the original light field data ( 5 × 5 ) even though the photos captured by camera is vignette and with a limited field-of-view (F.O.V) of the lens. Simulation is carried to confirm our method with a good SSIM. The acquired light field data with our method is demonstrated with a light field display, and the validity of the proposed method is proved.

Background Extramammary Paget’s disease (EMPD), a rare skin malignancy with non-specific manifestations, is often misdiagnosed as eczema of scrotum or tinea cruris. Although the diagnosis of EMPD could be confirmed by biopsy, it can be delayed as patients are reluctant to receive invasive operations. Herein, we investigated the serum miRNA expressions of EMPD patients and compared to that of the eczema of scrotum or tinea cruris patients as well as health volunteers for potential diagnostic markers for EMPD. Methods Altogether 45 subjects including 16 patients diagnosed with EMPD, 12 patients diagnosed with eczema of scrotum or tinea cruris and 17 healthy volunteers were enrolled in this study. Serum from all of subjects were collected to identify miRNAs (by miRNA array global normalization, RT-PCR validation, and receiver operating characteristic curve analysis) that could be potential diagnostic markers for EMPD. Results The miRNA array analyses revealed that the expressions of 37 miRNAs from the EMPD patients were different (change ≥4-fold) from health volunteers. Among these miRNAs, the expression of miR-155 was significantly increased (p

On October 25, 2018, the National Health Commission of China issued the National Essential Medicines List (2018 edition) [NEML (2018)]. The NEML (2018) contains 685 drugs, which consist of 417 chemicals and biological products and 268 Chinese patent medicines. Compared to the 2012 version of the NEML, a total number of 165 drugs were added, representing an increase of 31.7%. The biggest increase (90.9%) is in Chinese patent medicines for surgical use. The NEML (2018) set up the category of pediatric medications for the first time, and 11 cancer drugs were added. The NEML (2018) is characterized by: "basic" to "comprehensive" coverage, it includes both Chinese and Western medicines, it now includes pediatric drugs, and more cancer drugs have been added. There are several issues with the new NEML such as the link between the essential medicines system and the medical insurance system and establishment of firm support for implementation.

Recently, supervised cross-modal hashing has attracted much attention and achieved promising performance. To learn hash functions and binary codes, most methods globally exploit the supervised information, for example, preserving an at-least-one pairwise similarity into hash codes or reconstructing the label matrix with binary codes. However, due to the hardness of the discrete optimization problem, they are usually time consuming on large-scale datasets. In addition, they neglect the class correlation in supervised information. From another point of view, they only explore the global similarity of data but overlook the local similarity hidden in the data distribution. To address these issues, we present an efficient supervised cross-modal hashing method, that is, fast cross-modal hashing (FCMH). It leverages not only global similarity information but also the local similarity in a group. Specifically, training samples are partitioned into groups; thereafter, the local similarity in each group is extracted. Moreover, the class correlation in labels is also exploited and embedded into the learning of binary codes. In addition, to solve the discrete optimization problem, we further propose an efficient discrete optimization algorithm with a well-designed group updating scheme, making its computational complexity linear to the size of the training set. In light of this, it is more efficient and scalable to large-scale datasets. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that FCMH outperforms some state-of-the-art cross-modal hashing approaches in terms of both retrieval accuracy and learning efficiency.

BackgroundPemphigus is a rare but life-threatening autoimmune skin disease characterized by blistering on skin and/or mucous membranes. The physiological process of blister formation involves IgG antibodies against the desmogleins (Dsgs) and desmocollins (Dscs). Additional autoAbs have also been suggested to mediate the disease heterogeneity, such as anti-thyroid peroxidase (anti-TPO) and antithyroglobulin (anti-Tg) antibodies, the essential culprits of the immune system in autoimmune thyroid diseases.PurposeTo investigate the levels and antibody positivity of anti-TPO and anti-Tg antibodies in pemphigus patients.MethodsAntibody positivity and levels of anti-TPO and anti-Tg antibodies in pemphigus patients as compared to healthy controls were examined. A meta-analysis was conducted by reviewing six similar studies.Results98 Chinese pemphigus patients and 65 healthy controls were enrolled in the study. Our meta-analysis revealed a significant correlation between increased presence of positive anti-TPO and anti-Tg antibodies and pemphigus, particularly for pemphigus vulgaris (PV). Such correlation was also observed in our own hospitalized PV patients, but not in pemphigus foliaceus (PF) patients. In addition, the status of anti-TPO and anti-Tg antibodies were also compared between females and males within PV patients, PF patients or controls, as well as compared for females or males between pemphigus patients and controls. In the analysis of T cell counts, we found abnormal low CD3 + T cell counts (< 690 n/µl) were only detected in patients whose thyroid antibody levels were less than 20 IU/ml.ConclusionPemphigus patients showed higher levels and antibody positivity of anti-TPO and anti-Tg antibodies than healthy controls. Further investigations are needed to identify the pathogenic functions of these antibodies in pemphigus, as well as to identify the potential shared susceptibility genes.

It is insufficiently powerful to compute multi-view images at a high enough frame or data rate to support high quality dynamic three-dimensional displays with the current computer software and hardware. According to the correspondence between lens position and elemental image, a real-time computer-generated content generation method for integral imaging based on cross perspective is presented. A GPU-driven rendering pipeline (GDRP) with geometry instancing and instance culling technique is designed, and the number of triangles processed in the rasterization stage is reduced greatly. Several virtual dynamic scenes including various materials and millions of vertices are used to verify the performance of the GDRP method in the experiment. Experimental results show that the frame rate can reach 60 fps with 3840 × 2160 resolution.

Oncolytic viruses are of growing importance in cancer therapeutics since they combine direct oncolytic effect and the stimulation of antitumor immunity. Emerging evidences showed that the function of oncolytic viruses is dependent on immune response in tumor microenvironment, and the modulation of immunity could influence their efficacy. Here we combined the interleukin 10 (IL-10) and oncolytic adenovirus Ad-hTERT to treat lung cancer and explored the underlying mechanism under combination therapy. Lewis lung carcinoma (LLC) and B16F10 tumor-bearing immunocompetent C57BL/6 mice that received Ad-hTERT or IL-10 alone showed mild antitumor effect, while the combination therapy shrink tumor bulks and prolonged survival remarkably. In addition, IL-10 didn’t show direct influence on tumor cell viability or Ad-hTERT mediated tumor cell lysis in vitro. To further explore the influence of combination therapy mediated antitumor capacity, we eliminated CD8+ T, CD4+ T or natural killer (NK) cells in LLC and B16F10-bearing C57BL/6 mice, and found that CD8+ T cells were critical mediator in the combination therapy. The combination therapy induced intensive infiltration of CD8+ T cells in tumors, increased tumor-specific IFN-γ secretion by CD8+ T cells. The long-term tumor-specific immune memory induced by the combination therapy rejected rechallenge by respective tumor cell lines. This study demonstrated that the therapy combining IL-10 and Ad-hTERT augmented antitumor efficacy which was CD8+ T cells dependent. Our findings paved the way to combine cytokines and oncolytic viruses to enhance antitumor immunotherapy in treating cancer.

The human visual system has powerful information processing capabilities, and humans can find their areas of interest in a very short time. The traditional salient object detection method is dedicated to detecting the area where the salient object is located. But when people are concentrating, they often only focus on a part of an object, not the whole object. Therefore, detecting the gaze position by detecting the eye movement can better simulate the attention transition. In order to achieve a more accurate simulation of human visual attention mechanism, we propose a model to predict attention transition of consecutive frames of video, which use multi-scale spatiotemporal features to extract static and dynamic saliency maps separately.

Highlights The current understanding and advances on laser synthesis of nanomaterials are summarized. The laser microfabrication-enabled energy conversion and storage devices are reviewed. The limitations and solutions for current laser processing of nanomaterials and other more potential development directions for laser processing are proposed., Nanomaterials are known to exhibit a number of interesting physical and chemical properties for various applications, including energy conversion and storage, nanoscale electronics, sensors and actuators, photonics devices and even for biomedical purposes. In the past decade, laser as a synthetic technique and laser as a microfabrication technique facilitated nanomaterial preparation and nanostructure construction, including the laser processing-induced carbon and non-carbon nanomaterials, hierarchical structure construction, patterning, heteroatom doping, sputtering etching, and so on. The laser-induced nanomaterials and nanostructures have extended broad applications in electronic devices, such as light–thermal conversion, batteries, supercapacitors, sensor devices, actuators and electrocatalytic electrodes. Here, the recent developments in the laser synthesis of carbon-based and non-carbon-based nanomaterials are comprehensively summarized. An extensive overview on laser-enabled electronic devices for various applications is depicted. With the rapid progress made in the research on nanomaterial preparation through laser synthesis and laser microfabrication technologies, laser synthesis and microfabrication toward energy conversion and storage will undergo fast development.

Posterior circulation aneurysms account for 3.8–15% of intracranial aneurysms, among which the aneurysms in intracranial segments of the vertebral artery and apex of the basilar artery are common, while the rare sites are posterior cerebral artery, posterior inferior cerebellar artery, and anterior inferior cerebellar artery [1]. Previous studies have shown that aneurysms in the posterior circulation have a greater tendency to rupture than those in the anterior circulation. The related risks of aneurysm rupture are site, shape, blood flow, and flow rate [2, 3]. Additionally, there is a higher tendency for posterior circulation aneurysms to be giant or fusiform with attendant mass effects, ischemic effects, and hydrocephalus, which make their management complicate. Accidental cases may have no clinical symptoms. Large unruptured aneurysms may be treated due to the local occupying effect and corresponding clinical symptoms. Patients with ruptured posterior circulation aneurysms visit the hospital due to bleeding-related symptoms. The rupture risk of posterior circulation aneurysms is 50%, the annual rupture incidence is about 10%, and the mortality rate within 2 years is as high as 60%. Therefore, treatment should be given as soon as possible after the diagnosis of the posterior circulation aneurysms [4].

Three-dimensional light field display, which can provide human with natural 3D images in the way of humans observing the real world without any glasses, has attracted more and more attentions in recent years. However, most of studies focus on the performance improvement of 3D light field display, and there is rarely work on the performance evaluation of 3D light field display. In this paper, a quantitative performance evaluation method of the 3D light field display based on cognitive measurement of the observer with a specifically designed mental rotation task is proposed. The procedure of the performance evaluation experiment design is demonstrated, some pairs of complex images with either same structure or mirror structure are displayed, and the participants are required to distinguish whether the displayed images are the same. Three different control experiments including 2D display with fixed viewpoint, 3D light field display with fixed viewpoint and 3D light field display with a free view are designed. 45 participants which are divided into three groups are assigned to take part in three difference control experiments, and the rate of mission success and the completion time are evaluated. By comparing the results on different experimental conditions and using a statistic analysis method called T-test, the superiority of 3D light field display is proved quantitatively.

Background The purpose of this study is to investigate and analyze the prevalence and influencing factors of stroke in hypertensive patients aged 60 and above in Jiading District, Shanghai. Methods The population-based study included 18,724 screened people with hypertension (age ≥ 60 years, 48.7% women). From 2016 to 2019, data on demographics, potential influencing factors and health status were collected through face-to-face interviews, physical examinations, and laboratory tests. Logistic multivariate logistic regression model was used to analyze the influencing factors associated with stroke. Results Among the object of study from 2016 to 2019, 2,025 patients were screened for stroke, with the overall prevalence rate of 10.82% (10.41%-11.23%). Multivariate adjusted model analysis showed that dyslipidemia (OR:1.31,95%CI:1.19–1.45), lack of exercise (OR:1.91,95%CI:1.32–2.76), atrial fibrillation [OR:1.49,95%CI:1.35–1.65), family history of stroke (OR:2.18,95%CI:1.6–2.88) were the significant independent influencing factors of stroke in hypertensive patients over 60 years old. When these four factors were combined, compared with participants without any of these factors, the multi-adjusted odds ratios (95% confidence interval) of risk of stroke for persons concurrently having one, two and three or more of these factors were 1.89 (1.67–2.13), 2.15 (1.86–2.47) and 6.84 (4.90–9.55), respectively (linear trend P < 0.001); after multivariate adjustment, the family history of stroke had additive interaction with lack of exercise [RERI = 1.08(0.22–1.94), AP = 0.19(0.04–0.35), S = 1.31(1.02–1.69)], dyslipidemia [RERI = 0.87(0.41–1.33), AP = 0.23(0.08–0.38), S = 1.46(1.04–2.05)]. Conclusion The prevalence of stroke was high in hypertensive patients aged 60 and above in Jiading District, Shanghai. Dyslipidemia, lack of exercise, atrial fibrillation and family history of stroke were significantly associated with stroke in hypertensive population. Stroke risk can be increased especially when multiple factors coexisting, and family history of stroke combined with a lack of exercise or dyslipidemia.

Subcutaneous panniculitis-like T cell lymphoma (SPTCL) is an extremely rare subtype of primary cutaneous T cell lymphomas mimicking panniculitis. Clinically, patients are usually presented with subcutaneous nodules, which usually leads to initial misdiagnosis as a benign cutaneous condition. Here, we report a 40-year-old female who presented with subcutaneous erythematous nodules on her extremities with fever. On the basis of the clinical presentations, histopathological features and immunohistochemical findings, a diagnosis of SPTCL was made. The patient was treated with the injection of recombinant human interferon α-1b (30 μg) every other day for 3 months. The lesions gradually regressed. No new erythema nodules reappeared during the 10-month follow-up.