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Background Dietary factors, such as consumption of preserved foods, fresh vegetables, and fruits, have been linked to the risk of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). However, little is known about associations between dietary patterns and the risk of NPC in NPC-endemic areas. Objectives We aimed to evaluate whether dietary patterns are associated with NPC risk. Methods We studied 2554 newly diagnosed NPC patients aged 20–74 y living in 3 endemic regions of southern China, and 2648 population-based controls frequency-matched to case patients by age, sex, and region, between 2010 and 2014. Dietary components were derived from food frequency data in adulthood and adolescence using principal component analysis. Four dietary components were identified and highly similar in adulthood and adolescence. We used multivariable unconditional logistic regression to calculate ORs with 95% CIs for the association between dietary patterns and NPC risk. Results Compared with the lowest quartile, individuals in the highest quartile of the “plant-based factor” in adulthood had a 52% (OR: 0.48; 95% CI: 0.38, 0.59) decreased risk of NPC, and those in the highest quartile of the “animal-based factor” had a >2-fold (OR: 2.26; 95% CI: 1.85, 2.77) increased risk, with a monotonic dose-response trend (P-trend

Aspect category sentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention because of its outstanding performance in mining the fine-grained sentiment expression of users. In recent years, a new aspect category and sentiment pair extraction (ASPE) task has been proposed to simultaneously extract aspect categories and sentiment pairs. Most existing research works are designed in a two step pipeline, that is, they first perform aspect category detection, and subsequently conduct aspect category sentiment analysis. However, the pipeline method can clearly lead to error propagation from previous step. In this work, we propose a new framework for multiple perspective attention based on double BiLSTM with a novel joint strategy for ASPE to alleviate the accumulation of errors in the pipeline method. The experimental results on benchmark datasets SemEval and BDCI-2018 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of both accuracy and explainability for the ASPE task.

Background: The potential effect of alcohol or tea intake on the risk of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) remains controversial. Methods: In a population-based case–control study in southern China, we assessed alcohol or tea intake from 2,441 histopathologically confirmed NPC cases and 2,546 controls. We calculated mean daily ethanol (g/day) and tea intake (mL/day). Fully adjusted ORs with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were estimated using logistic regression; potential dose–response trends were evaluated using restricted cubic spline analysis. Results: Compared with nondrinkers, no significantly increased NPC risk in men was observed among current alcohol drinkers overall (OR, 1.08; 95% CI, 0.93–1.25), nor among current heavy drinkers (OR for ≥90 g/day ethanol vs. none, 1.32; 95% CI, 0.95–1.84) or former alcohol drinkers. Current tea drinking was associated with a decreased NPC risk (OR, 0.73; 95% CI, 0.64–0.84). Compared with never drinkers, those with the low first three quintiles of mean daily current intake of tea were at significantly lower NPC risk (OR, 0.53, 0.68, and 0.65, respectively), but not significant for the next two quintiles. Current daily tea intake had a significant nonlinear dose–response relation with NPC risk. Conclusions: Our study suggests no significant association between alcohol and NPC risk. Tea drinking may moderately reduce NPC risk, but the lack of a monotonic dose–response association complicates causal inference. Impact: Tea drinking might be a healthy habit for preventing NPC. More studies on biological mechanisms that may link tea with NPC risk are needed.

Objective To evaluate the effect of newly designed arthroscopic reconstruction of posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) using tibial tendon bolt. Methods The effects of embedded tendon pin were observed by X‐ray of knee joint. From October 2010 to September 2015, 51 PCL injury patients who met the inclusion criteria were enrolled in this retrospective study. The arthroscopically assisted reconstruction of the PCL with tibial tendon bolt was performed on all patients. Visual Analog Scale (VAS) pain score, Tegner activity score, Lysholm score, International Knee Documentation Committee (IKDC) assessment, posterior drawer test (PDT), and KT‐1000 activity score were evaluated preoperatively and at 1‐year postoperative and 3‐year postoperative. Results The preoperative, 1‐year postoperative, and 3‐year postoperative IKDC score (15.8% ± 14.8%, 89.6% ± 5.8%, and 86.8% ± 5.4%), Lysholm score (17.4 ± 10.7, 91.2 ± 2.8, and 88.2 ± 3.1), VAS score (5.8 ± 1.2, 1.3 ± 0.5, and 0.6 ± 0.5), Tegner activity score (1.2 ± 0.8, 8.1 ± 0.8, and 7.4 ± 0.8), and KT‐1000 score (15.6 ± 3.6, 4.5 ± 2.4, and 5.4 ± 1.8) were obtained. There were significant differences in these outcomes among preoperative, 1‐year postoperative, and 3‐year postoperative (all P, The application of tendon pin fixed by tibial inlay “8” shape tibial tunnel to reconstruct PCL was an effective, simple and safe surgical procedure for PCL injury.

Sentiment analysis has been a popular field in natural language processing. Sentiments can be expressed explicitly or implicitly. Most current studies on sentiment analysis focus on the identification of explicit sentiments. However, implicit sentiment analysis has become one of the most difficult tasks in sentiment analysis due to the absence of explicit sentiment words. In this article, we propose a BiLSTM model with multi-polarity orthogonal attention for implicit sentiment analysis. Compared to the traditional single attention model, the difference between the words and the sentiment orientation can be identified by using multi-polarity attention. This difference can be regarded as a significant feature for implicit sentiment analysis. Moreover, an orthogonal restriction mechanism is adopted to ensure that the discriminatory performance can be maintained during optimization. The experimental results on the SMP2019 implicit sentiment analysis dataset and two explicit sentiment analysis datasets demonstrate that our model more accurately captures the characteristic differences among sentiment polarities.

Aspect-level sentiment classification aims to determine sentiment polarities of various aspects in reviews, where each review typically contains multiple aspects, that may correspond to different polarities. Aspect-level sentiment classification, unlike document-level sentiment classification, requires different context representations for different aspects. Existing methods normally use Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network to model aspects and contexts separately, and they combine attention mechanisms to extract features of a specific aspect in its context. Attention mechanisms are not used for sequence modeling, so aspects are not considered when generating context sequence representations. This study proposes a novel aspect-context interactive representation structure that only relies on an attention mechanism for generating sequence-to-sequence representations in both context and aspect. It is capable of extracting features related to the specific aspect during the process of its context sequence modeling, and generating a high quality aspect representation simultaneously. We have conducted comprehensive experiments to compare with thirteen existing methods. Our experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve significantly better performance on Restaurant dataset, as well as very competitive results on Laptop and Twitter datasets.

With the development of my country's transportation industry, the original road guardrail cannot meet the protection requirements of the existing regulations and cannot be used. If the old guardrail is completely removed, it will not only cost a huge amount of money but also cause serious waste of resources. The guardrail can achieve the protective effect in the specification, which is conducive to the saving of funds and resources. Therefore, this article mainly conducts finite element collision simulation analysis for the two transformation schemes of Class A wave beams, and obtains the time and space distribution of the vibration frequency and vibration acceleration of the wave beams of the two schemes, and then compares the collision vibration frequency and The natural frequency range of the corrugated beam material. The protection effect is analyzed and evaluated in terms of the vibration frequency and vibration acceleration of the guardrail. The results show that the vibration frequency distribution range of the two schemes is different. The vibration acceleration of changing the original single-layer double-wave corrugated beam slab to double-layer double-wave corrugated beam slab is generally higher than that of adding the upper column and cross-beam to the original old A-level guardrail, and the peak vibration acceleration value is the same. The ratio is 12.43% higher. Therefore, it is more conducive to improve the protective effect of the guardrail by adding upper pillars and transverse beams to the original old A-level guardrail.

Wilson disease (WD) is a rare neurogenetic disease with a variety of clinical manifestations. The disorder of copper metabolism can lead to cell necrosis, while nerve cell necrosis can reduce the volume of the corresponding parts. This study quantifies the degree of nerve cell injury by studying the subcortical volume changes in WD patients, and discusses the correlation between nerve cell injury in different parts and clinical manifestations. The results showed that compared with the healthy control group, the subcortical volume of WD decreased significantly, and the decrease in different parts was related to clinical symptoms. This study shows that we can quantify the degree of nerve cell injury by measuring the change of subcortical volume. Predict possible clinical symptoms.

Background This study prospectively investigated the efficacy and radiation dose of ultralow dose computed tomography (CT)‐guided hook‐wire localization (HWL) at 100 kV with tin filtration (100Sn kV) for small solitary pulmonary nodules. Methods All HWL procedures were performed on a third generation dual‐source CT system. Eighty‐eight consecutive patients undergoing CT‐guided HWL were randomly assigned to standard dose CT (Group A: n = 44; reference 110 kV and 50 mA) or ultralow dose CT (Group B: n =44; 100Sn kV and 96 mA) protocols. The technical success rate, complications, subjective image quality, and radiation dose were compared between the groups. Results The mean volume CT dose index and total dose‐length product were significantly lower in Group B compared to Group A (0.32 mGy vs. 3.2 ± 1.1 mGy and 12.1 ± 0.97 mGy‐cm vs. 120 ± 40.6 mGy‐cm; P < 0.001). The effective dose in Group B was significantly lower than in Group A (0.17 ± 0.01 mSv vs. 1.68 ± 0.57 mSv, ‐89.8%; P < 0.001). The technical success rates were 100% for both groups. There were no significant differences in complication rates between the protocols (P > 0.05). The image quality of ultralow dose CT met the requirements for HWL procedure. Conclusion Ultralow dose CT‐guided HWL of solitary pulmonary nodules performed at 100Sn kVp spectral shaping significantly reduced the radiation dose compared to standard dose CT, with high technical success and acceptable patient safety.

Sentiment can be expressed in an explicit or implicit manner. Most of the current studies on sentiment analysis focus on the identification of explicit sentiment but ignore the implicit. According to our statistics during data labeling in previous work, nearly a third of subjective sentences contain implicit sentiment, and 72% of the implicit sentiment sentences are fact-implied ones. We analyze the characteristics of the sentences that express fact-implied implicit sentiment and consider that fact-implied implicit sentiment is usually affected by its sentiment target, context semantic background and its own sentence structure. This paper focuses on the recognition of fact-implied implicit sentiment at the sentence level. A multi-level semantic fusion method is proposed to learn the features for identification based on representation learning. Three features in different levels are learned from the corpus, namely, sentiment target representation at the word level, structure embedded representation at the sentence level and context semantic background representation at the document level. We manually construct a fact-implied implicit sentiment corpus in Chinese, and experiments on the datasets show that the proposed method can effectively recognize fact-implied implicit sentiment sentences.

Dental fluorosis, as an endemic disease, is an enamel development disorder caused by excessive exposure to fluoride during development stage of teeth. Such endemic shows differences in patients’ age, geographic location, and dwelling places. Dental fluorosis is often found in child patients and poses severe damage on the patients. Prevalence rate in children with dental fluorosis aged 8–12 is precise to mirror the overall prevalence rate and damage of this endemic. The pathogenesis of dental fluorosis is yet to be determined. Its major effects are enhancing the stability of crystal structures, affecting teeth development, and promoting the re-mineralization of teeth.

Existing link prediction methods focus on mining relations of nodes in terms of network structure, ignoring rich attributes of nodes. In the micro-blog social networks, text contents describe users’ diverse behaviors, which depicts ones’ multi-dimensional and multi-granularity preferences. Thus, based on users’ multi-granularity interest, we can predict and explain social relations among users. In this work, we develop an explainable social relation extraction method based on hierarchical semantic specificity matrices of user interest. First, according to users’ micro-blog contents, we model user interest subjects and design their semantic specificity matrices. Then, on the basis of interest subjects, we learn multi-dimensional and multi-granularity semantic specificity matrices with translation mechanism, which reflects user pairs’ follow relation causes from multiple aspects. Finally, by leveraging multi-granularity semantic specificity matrices, we predict and explain users’ social follow relation. To justify our proposal, we conduct extensive experiments on Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in Hits, MeanRank and MRR metrics. The proposal can effectively predict users’ follow relation from the aspects of multi-granularity interest subjects, and improve the accuracy of link prediction in social networks.

In heterogeneous e-commerce recommender systems, the type and attribute information of users and products contain rich semantics, which can benefit the prediction and explanation of user ratings of interesting items. Existing studies include collaborative and content-based recommendations that mainly capture semantic features by considering user–item interactions or behavioral history records, which ignores the explanatory role of the product type and attribute. In this paper, we first propose an attentional attribute and interaction method used to model the semantic embeddings of users and items. We then construct a type-specific matrix to exploit heterogeneous type-specific information to learn user and item representations. The incorporated heterogeneous type information helps capture a user’s latent features that solve the sparsity problem of user–item interactions for the recommender systems. Further, the rating relationship of the nodes is predicted through the translation mechanism based on user and items’ type-specific representations. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model over several state-of-the-art methods and show the visual interpretability for rating behaviors in e-commerce recommender systems.

The stability of rock engineering is generally dominated by existing seepage , particularly the seepage evolution due to the rock masses damage. However, the current research generally overlooks the seepage-damage coupling when studying the hydraulic-mechanical coupling effect in rock masses. This study aims to propose a dual-medium model, including equivalent continuous and discrete fracture media to study the coupled seepage-damage effect in fractured rock masses . The dual-medium seepage model considers the substantial water storage of the fracture network and the high conductivity of major large-scale fractures. Also, the seepage evolution is constructed to be a function of stress, seepage pressure and length of crack propagation in the rock mass. To illustrate the new model's application, a case of high-pressure water injection in a coal seam has been investigated to reveal the damage evolution in the coal seam. The results indicate that during the initial stage of the water injection, the seepage pressure in the discrete fracture medium increases faster than that in the equivalent continuous medium. Moreover, the seepage pressure difference between the two media gradually decreases with the increase of the seepage time, eventually forming a stable seepage field in the coal seam. Notably, the high-pressure water injection in the coal seam significantly affects the distribution of the coal seam's stress field, resulting in the effective minimum principle stress changing from compression to tension states. Also, during coal seam water injection, the damage zone and major fracture apertures in the coal seam gradually increase with increasing injection time .

Opinion object-attribute extraction is one of the fundamental tasks of fine-grained sentiment analysis. It is accomplished by identifying opinion aspect entities (including object entities and attribute entities) and then aligning object entities to attribute entities. Recent studies on knowledge graphs have shown that by adding the embeddings of semantic structures between opinion aspect entities, structure-based learning models can achieve better performance in link-prediction than traditional methods. The studies, however, focused only on learning semantic structures between aspect entities, did not take language expression features into account. In this paper, we propose the Fusion RElation Embedded Representation Learning (FREERL) framework, by which, one can fuse semantic structures and language expression features such as statistical co-occurrence or dependency syntax, into the embeddings of object entities and attribute entities. The obtained embeddings are then used to align object-attribute pairs and to predict new pairs in a zero-shot scenario. Experimental results on the datasets of COAE2014 and COAE2015 show that the best results in our framework achieve 12.1% and 32.1% improvements over the baselines, respectively.

Study of the dephasing in electronic systems is not only important for probing the nature of their ground states, but also crucial to harnessing the quantum coherence for information processing. In contrast to well-studied conventional metals and semiconductors, it remains unclear which mechanism is mainly responsible for electron dephasing in three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators (TIs). Here, we report on using weak antilocalization effect to measure the dephasing rates in highly tunable (Bi,Sb)$_2$Te$_3$ thin films. As the transport is varied from a bulk-conducting regime to surface-dominant transport, the dephasing rate is observed to evolve from a linear temperature dependence to a sublinear power-law dependence. While the former is consistent with the Nyquist electron-electron interactions commonly seen in ordinary 2D systems, the latter leads to enhanced electron dephasing at low temperatures and is attributed to the coupling between the surface states and the localized charge puddles in the bulk of 3D TIs., 18 pages, 4 figures, supplemental information available upon request or visit the ncomms website

An enantioselective Cu/Pd-catalyzed borylative coupling of styrenes with aryl/alkenyl iodides was realized using a chiral sulfoxide-phosphine (SOP) ligand. Enantioenriched 1,1-diarylethyl and β-aryl-homoallylic boronates are readily prepared. A streamlined procedure merging arylboration and subsequent Pd-catalyzed Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling enables the modular assembly of enantioenriched 1,1,2-triarylethanes, including two medicinally important chiral small-molecule targets.

BACKGROUND To the authors' knowledge, no studies to date have explored familial risks of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) in detail and quantified its lifetime risk in high-incidence populations. METHODS The authors conducted a population-based case-control study of 2499 NPC cases and 2576 controls randomly selected in southern China from 2010 through 2014. Unconditional logistic regression was used to estimate multivariable-adjusted odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) associated with a family history of NPC. In addition, the authors compiled a reconstructed cohort comprising 40,781 first-degree relatives of cases and controls to calculate the lifetime cumulative risk of NPC. RESULTS Individuals with a first-degree family history of NPC were found to be at a >4-fold risk of NPC (OR, 4.6; 95% CI, 3.5-6.1) compared with those without such a history, but had no excess risk of other malignancies. The excess risk was higher for a maternal than a paternal history and was slightly stronger for a sibling compared with a parental history, and for a sororal than a fraternal history. Among relatives of cases, the cumulative risk of NPC up to age 74 years was 3.7% (95% CI, 3.3%-4.2%), whereas that among relatives of controls was 0.9% (95% CI, 0.7%-1.2%). Cumulative risk was higher in siblings than in parents among relatives of cases, whereas no such difference was noted among relatives of controls. CONCLUSIONS Individuals with a family history of NPC have a substantially higher risk of NPC. These relative and cumulative risk estimates can guide the development of strategies for early detection and clinical consultation in populations with a high incidence of NPC. Cancer 2017;123:2716-25. © 2017 American Cancer Society.

To evaluate the association between the SPO11 gene C631T polymorphism and the risk of male infertility. We conducted a search on PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), China biology medical literature database (CBM), VIP, and Chinese literature database (Wan Fang) on 31 March 2016. Odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (95%CI) were used to assess the strength of associations. A total of five studies including 542 cases and 510 controls were involved in this meta-analysis. The pooled results indicated that the SPO11 gene C631T polymorphism was significantly associated with increased risk of male infertility (TT + CT vs. CC: OR = 4.14, 95%CI = 2.48–6.89; CT vs. CC: OR = 4.34, 95%CI = 2.56–7.34; T vs. C: OR = 4.35, 95%CI = 2.58–7.34). Subgroup analysis of different countries proved the relationship between SPO11 gene C631T polymorphism and male infertility risk in Chinese, but not in Iranian peoples. In conclusion, this study suggested that SPO11 gene C631T polymorphism may contribute as a genetic factor susceptible to cause male infertility. Furthermore, more large sample and representative population-based cases and well-matched controls are needed to validate our results.

To evaluate the relationship between the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) rs2066853 gene polymorphism and the risk of male infertility. PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) were searched for relevant case–control studies up to 31 July 2019. Odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) were used to assess the strength of associations. Finally, seven case–control studies involving 1247 cases and 1762 controls were included in this meta-analysis. The pooled results showed that there was no significant association between AHR rs2066853 gene polymorphism and male infertility risk (A vs. G: OR = 1.08, 95% CI = 0.83–1.39; AA vs. GG: OR = 1.16, 95% CI = 0.65–2.04; AA vs. GA + GG: OR = 1.17, 95% CI = 0.66–2.07; AA + GA vs. GG: OR = 0.99, 95% CI = 0.85–1.15). Subgroup analysis by ethnicity showed the same result. However, significant association was found between AHR rs2066853 gene polymorphism and male infertility risk in oligoasthenotspermia (A vs. G: OR = 2.52, 95% CI = 1.72–3.70). In conclusion, our meta-analysis indicated that AHR rs2066853 gene polymorphism might be associated with an increased susceptibility to oligoasthenotspermia.

As we know, there is a dilemma between Web servers and crawlers. The server may allow certain Web crawlers to visit it to harvest some useful feedbacks, while the interactions might draw the server into a vulnerable situation like being overloaded and consequently even harm the network security with possible DDOS (distributed denials of service attacks). Robots exclusion protocol (REP) which is implemented by robots.txt, serves as a reminder to inform crawlers whether or not a specific page they can crawl. However, several acute cases show that many crawlers do not obey the rules defined in the robots.txt. Hence, it is necessary to explore the validity of REP so that the key factors that lead to the disobey situation can be found. In this paper, we try to answer the question why many crawlers do not obey the REP from a point of view of game theory. We represent the interactions between servers and crawlers in the framework of game theory. The Nash equilibrium of the game model is attained, and the result shows that the best strategy for both parties of Web servers and crawlers in the context of present robots.txt will be the (Disobey, Disobey). Furthermore, several key factors, such as the reputation loss of the crawler, the cost of servers to take the crawler to court, and the benefit the server can get from crawlers, are shown to have influences in the effective implementation of REP.

Background An association between a nonmedicinal herbal diet and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) has often been hypothesized but never thoroughly investigated. Methods This study enrolled a total of 2469 patients with incident NPC and 2559 population controls from parts of Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces in southern China between 2010 and 2014. Questionnaire information was collected on the intake of traditional herbal tea and herbal soup as well as the specific herbal plants used in soups and other potentially confounding lifestyle factors. Multivariate logistic regression models were used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the NPC risk in association with herbal tea and soup intake. Results Ever consumption of herbal tea was not associated with NPC risk (OR, 1.03; 95% CI, 0.91-1.17). An inverse association was observed for NPC among ever drinkers of herbal soup (OR, 0.78; 95% CI, 0.67-0.90) but without any monotonic trend with an increasing frequency or duration of herbal soup consumption. Inverse associations with NPC risk were detected with 9 herbal plants used in herbal soup, including Ziziphus jujuba, Fructus lycii, Codonopsis pilosula, Astragalus membranaceus, Semen coicis, Smilax glabra, Phaseolus calcaratus, Morinda officinalis, and Atractylodes macrocephala (OR range, 0.31-0.79). Conclusions Consuming herbal soups including specific plants, but not herbal tea, was inversely associated with NPC. If replicated, these results might provide potential for NPC prevention in endemic areas.

Our previous study reported a method of using matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry to analyze the association between abnormal fucosylation of serum glycoproteins and the progression of hepatitis B virus (HBV)-associated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). In the present study, the aforementioned method was improved by focusing on fucosylated glycoproteins 20 ng/ml), the sensitivity and specificity of the models were significantly elevated to 80.73 and 87.37%, 87.16 and 90.00%, and 92.66 and 93.84%, respectively. In addition, the HBV-HCC vs. HBV-cirrhosis classification model was used to analyze serum samples collected from 9 patients with cirrhosis 1 year before they were diagnosed with HCC, and from 6 patients who had cirrhosis but developed no signs of HCC for the following 3 years. The model identified 7 patients (77.78%) with no significant clinical symptoms of HCC, and gave no false positive results, demonstrating that the classification models established in the present study may be useful for the early diagnosis of HCC. After isolation and purification, two proteins with differential expression were identified as isoform 1 of inter-α-trypsin inhibitor heavy chain 4 precursor, and thymosin β-4-like protein 3. These may be used as candidate markers for HCC diagnosis. Additionally, the present study indicates that defucosylation of serum glycoproteins may occur during the development and progression of HCC.

Background and aim To assess liver fibrosis stages in a liver fibrosis-early cirrhosis model in dogs, the clinical efficiency of contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) and computed tomography (CT) perfusion imaging were compared. Methods Hepatic vein arriving time (HVAT), hepatic artery arriving time, and hepatic artery to vein transit time (HA-VTT) were measured on CEUS. Total liver perfusion (TLP), portal vein perfusion (PVP), hepatic artery perfusion, and hepatic perfusion index (HPI) were measured on CT perfusion imaging. Histologic examination of liver specimens of the animals was performed to assess the fibrosis stage. Results For assessment of liver fibrosis, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of CEUS indexes HVAT and HA-VTT were 0.865 and 0.930, respectively; the perfusion CT indexes TLP, PVP, and HPI were 0.797, 0.800, and 0.220, respectively; the serological index hyaluronic acid was 0.793. While for assessment of early cirrhosis, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of CEUS indexes HVAT and HA-VTT were 0.915 and 0.948, respectively; the perfusion CT indexes TLP, PVP, and HPI were 0.737, 0.765, and 0.218, respectively; the serological index hyaluronic acid was 0.627. Conclusions This study showed that both CEUS and CT perfusion imaging have the potential to be complementary imaging tools in the evaluation of liver fibrosis. While CEUS is the better choice and the index HA-VTT can be considered as non-invasive semi-quantitative indexes for diagnosing liver fibrosis and early cirrhosis.

Based on first-principles calculations, a computational strategy to design smallest nanotube junctions in 0.3 nm diameter is proposed. The designed nanotube junctions are composed of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and boron nitrogen nanotubes (BNNTs) in (2,2) and (4,0) chirality. The obtained formation energies indicate that the combinations by smallest CNTs and BNNTs are favorable to form composite nanotubes. These composite nanotubes behave semiconductor character with a variation of energy gaps. Nonequilibrium Green's function calculations using two-probe modeling predict the increasing of conductance with bias voltages in junctions (4,0)CNT/(2,2)CNT and (4,0)CNT/(2,2)BNNT. Moreover, junctions (2,2)CNT/(2,2)BNNT and (4,0)CNT/(4,0)BNNT exhibit bias rectifying performance. The calculated I–V curves show that the designed ultrathin nanotube-junctions in 0.3 nm diameter can transport current in micro-ampere magnitude, which will help to the miniaturization of devices based on nanoelectronics. Keywords: Smallest carbon nanotube, Boron nitrogen nanotube, Nanojunction, First-principles, Conductance

A "sandwich" structure device consisted of ITO electrodes and PDMS spacer was designed and used to explore the impact of different electrical parameters (intensity and frequency) on the electroformation of GUVs (giant unilamellar vesicles). Theoretical analysis of the dielectrophoretic effect (DEPE) and the electrohydrodynamic effect (EHE) on the electroformation process indicated that the characteristic frequency of the system could maximize the mutual effect of the both, which might benefit the formation of GUVs. The calculated value of the characteristic frequency (13.3 kHz) was very close to the experimental one (11 kHz). We demonstrated that for a given electroformation system, large amount of well-distributed GUVs can be obtained by optimizing the electrical parameters. In this paper, when choosing the optimal electrical parameters (11 kHz frequency and 5V/mm intensity), the amount of GUVs could reach 65/mm(2), and the diameters of most GUVs (>70%) were 50-70 μm.

Whether the association between body size or shape and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) risk exists or varies by age‐specific body size indicators is unclear. In a population‐based case–control study conducted in Southern China between 2010 and 2014, self‐reported height, weight, and body shape at age 20 and 10 years before interview were collected from 2448 histopathologically confirmed NPC cases and 2534 population‐based controls. Body mass index (BMI) was categorized according to the World Health Organization guidelines for Asian populations: underweight (

Objects Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) incidence exhibits a remarkable sex disparity, with higher risk among males. Whether this pattern can be partly explained by female reproductive history is unclear. Methods A population-based case–control study of NPC was conducted in southern China between 2010 and 2014, including 674 histopathologically verified female NPC cases and 690 female controls randomly selected from population-based registries. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using logistic regression after adjusting for potential confounders. Results Women who had 3, 4, or ≥5 pregnancies compared with 2 pregnancies were at significantly increased risk for NPC (ORs 1.56, 1.45 and 1.88, respectively). History of deliveries was similarly associated with a greater risk of NPC. These positive associations were more prominent in women who were younger than 50 years, had less than 10 years of education, or were white-collar workers. Increasing time since menopause was associated with a diminished NPC risk (Ptrend = 0.010). Women more than 15 years after menopause had a 0.35-fold (95% CI: 0.16–0.75) NPC risk compared with those 0–3 years after menopause. Conclusion Contrary to our hypothesis, a history of pregnancy or delivery increased the risk of NPC and the risk decreased with increasing time since menopause. However, the non-linear relationship and no consistent risk patterns across strata indicate that the observed associations are unlikely to be causal, and may at least partially be ascribed to residual confounding by socioeconomic factors.

Background Chinese-style salted fish intake in early life is considered an established risk factor for nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). However, results for adult intakes of salted fish and preserved foods are inconsistent. Objective The aim of this study was to ascertain the relations of Chinese-style hard and soft salted fish and preserved food intakes with NPC risk. Methods We conducted a population-based case-control study in southern China with 2554 NPC cases identified through a rapid case ascertainment system and 2648 healthy controls, frequency-matched on age, sex, and area. Subjects (aged 20-74 y) were interviewed via a food-frequency questionnaire, including information on portion size. Data were also collected on alcohol consumption and potential confounders. Food intake was grouped into 3-5 energy-adjusted intake levels during adulthood (10 y prior) and adolescence (16-18 y). For childhood (at age 10 y), intake frequency of selected food items was collected. Multivariate-adjusted ORs with 95% CIs were estimated via logistic regression. Results We found no association between NPC and intake of hard Chinese-style salted fish during adulthood, and an increased risk at the highest level of intake during adolescence (OR: 1.19; 95% CI: 1.03, 1.39). In contrast, we found a decreased risk for the middle intake level of soft salted fish during adulthood (OR: 0.68; 95% CI: 0.57, 0.81) and adolescence (OR: 0.71; 95% CI: 0.59, 0.85). Preserved foods showed contrasting risk profiles, e.g., the highest adult intake level of salted egg (OR: 1.51; 95% CI: 1.22, 1.87) and fermented black beans (OR: 0.67; 95% CI: 0.56, 0.80). Associations with NPC were weaker than previously reported, e.g., for weekly childhood intake of salted fish (OR: 1.56; 95% CI: 1.24, 1.97). Conclusions Hard and soft salted fish have different risk profiles. Salted fish and other preserved foods were at most weak risk factors for NPC in all periods and may play a smaller role in NPC occurrence than previously thought.

Because persistent inflammation may render the nasopharyngeal mucosa susceptible to carcinogenesis, chronic ear-nose-throat (ENT) disease and its treatment might influence the risk of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). Existing evidence is, however, inconclusive and often based on methodologically suboptimal epidemiologic studies. In a population-based case-control study in southern China, we enrolled 2,532 persons with NPC and 2,597 controls, aged 20-74 years, from 2010 to 2014. Odds ratios were estimated for associations between NPC risk and history of ENT and related medications. Any history of chronic ENT disease was associated with a 34% increased risk of NPC. Similarly, use of nasal drops or aspirin was associated with approximately doubled risk of NPC. However, in secondary analyses restricted to chronic ENT diseases and related medication use at least 5 years prior to diagnosis/interview, most results were statistically nonsignificant, except a history of uncured ENT diseases, untreated nasal polyps, and earlier age at first diagnosis of ENT disease and first or most recent aspirin use. Overall, these findings suggest that ENT disease and related medication use are most likely early indications rather than causes of NPC, although the possibility of a modestly increased NPC risk associated with these diseases and related medications cannot be excluded.

In recent years, a large number of background subtraction methods have been proposed. Among these methods, the visual background subtraction method (ViBe) receives much attention due to its high efficiency and good performance. However, it can not work well in complex environments. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel background subtraction method based on ViBe, including a new foreground object detection strategy, a bilateral aperture detection strategy, and two effective strategies for foreground noise detection and ghost region detection. The proposed method can effectively alleviate the problems caused by foreground aperture, dynamic backgrounds and ghosts in background subtraction. Experiments on the benchmark dataset show that, the proposed method not only obtains better results compared with a couple of ViBe-based variants, but also achieves competitive results against several state-of-the-art methods.

Recent years have witnessed the widespread success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision and multimedia. The CNNs based background subtraction methods, which are effective for addressing the challenges (such as shadows, dynamic backgrounds, illumination changes) existing in real-world applications, have attracted much attention. However, these methods usually require a large amount of densely labeled video training data, which are hardly collected in the real-world. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a multiscale cascaded scene-specific CNNs based background subtraction method equipped with a novel training strategy, which takes advantage of the balance of positive and negative training samples. The proposed method can rely on a small number of training samples to effectively train the robust neural network models. Experimental results on the CDnet-2014 dataset show that the proposed method obtains better performance with much less training samples compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Our approach coordinately manages radio resources with multiple radio access technologies in an optimum way. A mobility prediction module and a remaining bandwidth estimation module are established at each BS as shown in the lower part of the above figure. The global radio resource manager located at the upper part of this figure consists of a bandwidth utilization optimization module. A mobile host (MH) collects required parameters and the latest MH's state is immediately updated at the BS the MH resides in when a MH's state changes. The mobility prediction module will check with a pre-built lookup table to determine whether the handoff will occur. If the handoff is predicted to occur, the MH sends out a bandwidth requirement to a nearest BS, and the remaining bandwidth estimation module in the target BS will be activated to determine the amount of remaining bandwidth that can be used by the handoffs. In case some BS finds that its bandwidth is going to be inadequate, a bandwidth adjustment coordinator located at the BS will request the common bandwidth utilization optimization module at its upper level to reallocate the bandwidth for the BSs/APs of different RATs. The results of the bandwidth reallocation will then be sent back to each BS to reassign the bandwidth to the MHs. A mobility prediction module is proposed to predict the mobility pattern of mobile host.A lookup table records the probability for the possible handoffs moving into the coverage of the BS.Bandwidth is estimated for the possible arriving MHs outside the coverage of the BS.The optimization of utilization and fairness for the bandwidth allocation are addressed.Hybrid Genetic Algorithm is employed to achieve real-time computation requirement. Recently, people have been able to connect with different types of networks anytime, anywhere using advanced network technologies. In order to properly distribute wireless network resources among different clients, this work proposed a user mobility prediction algorithm, which takes the coverage of different kinds of base stations, and the volatile mobility of pedestrians, vehicles, and mass transportation, into consideration. In addition, a novel bandwidth utilization optimization technique is proposed in the algorithm to allocate bandwidth more efficiently. The Hybrid Genetic Algorithm, which combines the Genetic Algorithm and local searches to improve the frequency of finding a Pareto set, is used to realize the optimization problem as well. Compared with our previous work and the other four methods in the literature, the simulation results show that our proposed work can achieve desirable performance by network utilization, throughput, and QoS quality in the heterogeneous wireless networks.

Surface topographies of lipid films have an important significance in the analysis of the preparation of giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs). In order to achieve accurately high-throughput and rapidly analysis of surface topographies of lipid films, a homemade SPR imaging device is constructed based on the classical Kretschmann configuration and an angle interrogation manner. A mathematical model is developed to accurately describe the shift including the light path in different conditions and the change of the illumination point on the CCD camera, and thus a SPR curve for each sampling point can also be achieved, based on this calculation method. The experiment results show that the topographies of lipid films formed in distinct experimental conditions can be accurately characterized, and the measuring resolution of the thickness lipid film may reach 0.05 nm. Compared with existing SPRi devices, which realize detection by monitoring the change of the reflective-light intensity, this new SPRi system can achieve the change of the resonance angle on the entire sensing surface. Thus, it has higher detection accuracy as the traditional angle-interrogation SPR sensor, with much wider detectable range of refractive index.

Trend forecasting is considered a difficult task, especially for China stock market due to its highly uncertainty. The study compares six forecasting models, i.e., Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, Multilayer perceptron (MLP), Recurrent neural network (RNN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). 9 features combinations are selected based on 23 technical indicators which are commonly used in stock market analysis, and trainsets of 12 different records numbers are chosen to compare the performance of the models under different scenarios. Evaluation is carried out on 8 years of historical data from 2008 to 2015 of the listed company (000592) in China stock market. Experimental results show that the performance of deep learning models MLP, RNN, LSTM is better than other models with respect to the index of accuracy. MLP is 20.75% higher than Decision Tree, Decision Tree is better than others under f-measure, and Decision Tree is 40.02% higher than Naive Bayes. Experimental results also show that in the imbalanced stock market data, the performance of models RNN and Decision Tree is better than others.

To evaluate the association between TP53 codon72 polymorphism and male infertility risk. We conducted a search on Medline, Embase, Web of Science and CNKI up to April 30, 2017. Odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) were used to assess the strength of the association. Seven studies including 1,818 cases and 2,278 controls met the inclusion criteria. The pooled results indicated that no significant association was observed between TP53 codon72 polymorphism and male infertility risk (G versus C: OR = 1.11, 95%CI = 0.94-1.32; GG versus CC: OR = 1.26, 95%CI = 0.90-1.78; GG versus GC+CC: OR = 1.16, 95%CI = 0.90-1.49; GG+GC versus CC: OR = 1.15, 95%CI = 0.88-1.49). In the subgroup analysis by ethnicity, significant association was observed between TP53 codon72 polymorphism and male infertility risk in non-Chinese (G versus C: OR = 1.47, 95%CI = 1.14-1.89), but not in Chinese population (G versus C: OR = 1.03, 95%CI = 0.87-1.22). In conclusion, this study suggested that TP53 codon72 polymorphism might be associated with an increased susceptibility to male infertility in non-Chinese population, but not in Chinese population. Studies with larger sample sizes and representative population-based cases and well-matched controls are needed to validate our results.

The magnitude and patterns of associations between smoking and risk of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) in high-incidence regions remain uncertain. Associations with active and passive tobacco smoking were estimated using multivariate logistic regression in a population-based case-control study of 2,530 NPC cases and 2,595 controls in Guangdong and Guangxi, southern China, in 2010-2014. Among men, risk of NPC was significantly higher in current smokers compared with never smokers (odds ratio (OR) = 1.32, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.14, 1.53) but not in former smokers (OR = 0.92, 95% CI: 0.73, 1.17). Risk increased with smoking intensity (per 10 cigarettes/day, OR = 1.09, 95% CI: 1.03, 1.16), smoking duration (per 10 years, OR = 1.11, 95% CI: 1.06, 1.16), and cumulative smoking (per 10 pack-years, OR = 1.08, 95% CI: 1.04, 1.12). Risk decreased with later age at smoking initiation (per year, OR = 0.97, 95% CI: 0.96, 0.98) but not greater time since smoking cessation. Exposures to passive smoking during childhood (OR = 1.24, 95% CI: 1.03, 1.48) and from a spouse during adulthood (OR = 1.30, 95% CI: 1.03, 1.63) were independently associated with increased NPC risk in never-smoking men and women, but exposure-response trends were not observed. In conclusion, active and passive tobacco smoking are associated with modestly increased risk of NPC in southern China; risk is highest among long-term smokers.

// Weimin Ye 1 , Ellen T. Chang 2, 3 , Zhiwei Liu 1 , Qing Liu 4, 5 , Yonglin Cai 6, 7 , Zhe Zhang 8, 9 , Guomin Chen 10 , Qi-Hong Huang 11 , Shang-Hang Xie 4, 5 , Su-Mei Cao 4, 5 , Jian-Yong Shao 5 , Wei-Hua Jia 5 , Yuming Zheng 6, 7 , Jian Liao 12 , Yufeng Chen 9 , Longde Lin 9 , Liming Liang 13, 14 , Ingemar Ernberg 15 , Thomas L. Vaughan 16, 17 , Guangwu Huang 8, 9, * , Yi Zeng 10, * , Yi-Xin Zeng 5, 18, * and Hans-Olov Adami 1, 13, * 1 Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden 2 Exponent, Inc., Health Sciences Practice, Menlo Park, CA, USA 3 Division of Epidemiology, Department of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA 4 Department of Cancer Prevention Center, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, Guangzhou, China 5 State Key Laboratory of Oncology in South China, Collaborative Innovation Center for Cancer Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, Guangzhou, China 6 Department of Clinical Laboratory, Wuzhou Red Cross Hospital, Wuzhou, China 7 Wuzhou Health System Key Laboratory for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Etiology and Molecular Mechanism, Wuzhou, China 8 Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, First Affiliated Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, China 9 Key Laboratory of High-Incidence-Tumor Prevention & Treatment (Guangxi Medical University), Ministry of Education, Nanning, China 10 State Key Laboratory for Infectious Diseases Prevention and Control, Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing, China 11 Sihui Cancer Institute, Sihui, China 12 Cangwu Institute for Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Control and Prevention, Wuzhou, China 13 Department of Epidemiology, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA 14 Department of Biostatistics, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA 15 Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden 16 Public Health Sciences Division, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA 17 Department of Epidemiology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA 18 Beijing Hospital, Beijing, China * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Weimin Ye, email: weimin.ye@ki.se Keywords: case-control study, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, china Received: April 26, 2017 Accepted: July 03, 2017 Published: July 29, 2017 ABSTRACT With its population of over 1.3 billion persons, China offers abundant opportunities to discover causes of disease. However, few rigorous population-based case-control studies have as yet been conducted in mainland China. We conducted a population-based case-control study of nasopharyngeal carcinoma in Guangdong Province and Guangxi Autonomous Region. We collected questionnaires and biospecimens from incident cases recruited between March 2010 and December 2013, and population-based controls between November 2010 and November 2014. Preparatory activities prior to subject enrollment required approximately 18 months. We enrolled a total of 2554 NPC cases and 2648 controls. Among all identified cases, 83.8% participated. For the participating cases, the median time between diagnosis and interview was 2 days. Among all contacted controls, 82.7% participated. From the enrolled cases, we collected 2518 blood specimens (provided by 98.6% of eligible cases), 2350 saliva specimens (92.0%), 2514 hair specimens (98.4%), and 2507 toenail/fingernail specimens (98.2%). From the enrolled controls, we collected 2416 blood specimens (91.2%), 2505 saliva specimens (94.6%), 2517 hair specimens (95.1%), and 2514 toenail/fingernail specimens (94.9%). We demonstrate that population-based epidemiologic research can successfully be conducted in southern China. The study protocols, databases, and biobank will serve as an extraordinarily valuable resource for testing future etiologic hypotheses.

Background Methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase gene (MTHFR C677T and A1298C) and methionine synthase gene (MS A2756G) polymorphisms have shown an association with male infertility risk in several ethnic populations. Although several studies have evaluated these associations in Chinese populations, their small sample sizes and inconsistent outcomes have prevented strong conclusions. Therefore, the present meta-analysis was performed with published studies to evaluate the associations of the three single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and male infertility in a Chinese population. Methods We conducted a search of PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), China biology medical literature (CBM), VIP, and Chinese literature (Wan Fang) databases up to May 31, 2016. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (95%CIs) were used to assess the strength of associations with a random-effect model or a fixed-effect model based on the heterogeneity analysis results. Sensitivity analysis was used to confirm the reliability and stability of the meta-analysis. Results A total of nine studies, including 1,713 cases and 1,104 controls, were included in the meta-analysis. The pooled results indicated that the MTHFR C667T polymorphism was significantly associated with increased risk of male infertility in the Chinese population in the allele model (T vs. C: OR = 1.47, 95%CI = 1.32–1.63), the dominant model (TT + CT vs. CC: OR = 1.51, 95%CI = 1.30–1.77), the additive model (TT vs. CC: OR = 2.08, 95%CI = 1.68–2.58) and the recessive model (TT vs. CT+CC: OR = 1.58, 95%CI = 1.31–1.90), whereas the MTHFR A1298C and MS A2756G polymorphisms were not risk factors. There was no significant heterogeneity in any genotype contrasts among the studies. The sensitivity analysis indicated that the results of this meta-analysis were relatively stable. Conclusion This study suggests that the MTHFR C667T polymorphism may contribute to the genetic susceptibility to male infertility in the Chinese population, whereas MTHFR A1298C and MS A2756G polymorphisms may be unrelated to male infertility. Studies with larger sample sizes and representative population-based cases and well-matched controls are needed to validate our results.

With the rapid development of information technology and computer technology, multimedia demonstration and its related application technology is matured. Multimedia demonstration is the carrier to pass the teaching information. Multimedia demonstration, as one of the multimedia material, is an important content in the multimedia teaching research. In this paper, mainly research the applications status of multimedia demonstration in aerobics skill learning, the production status of multimedia demonstration and multimedia demonstration teaching method in aerobics teaching and action skill learning.

Purpose To measure the distances between the medial and lateral sinus wall (sinus width [SW]) at different levels on cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) and apply those SW values to formulate a new sinus classification. Materials and Methods Edentulous sites adjacent to maxillary sinuses with inadequate residual bone height (RBH) were included from the CBCT database. SW was measured at the heights of 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 mm from the sinus floor. Mean SW was stratified into different groups by RBH, study sites (first and second premolars and molars), and measurement levels. Statistical analyses were conducted with commercially available software (IBM SPSS Statistics 19, SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). Results A total 186 patients (mean age 50.4 years) with 267 edentulous sites were included. Mean SW was wider at molar sites, higher measurement levels, and sites with less RBH. Narrow, average, or wide sinuses were classified based on the 33rd and 67th percentile SW values at 1-, 5-, and 9-mm measurement levels, respectively. Conclusions SW at different levels relating to sinus floor elevation was measured. The proposed classification could contribute to estimate the difficulty of sinus augmentation, useful for the selection of surgical approaches. Further studies are required to testify its clinical implications.

In order to solve the problem of the routine signal measuring apparatus applied in a certain type of electronic equipment , a wireless signal testing system based on bluetooth technology and LabVIEW is proposed and designed. The hardware and software structure of the system is demonstrated. The key principle of data acquisition, wireless transmission, data processing and display are described. The wireless signal testing system is successfully applied with the advantage of high accuracy, real-time and portable.

Nowadays, most road navigation systems’ planning of optimal routes is conducted by the On Board Unit (OBU). If drivers want to obtain information about the real-time road conditions, a Traffic Message Channel (TMC) module is also needed. However, this module can only provide the current road conditions, as opposed to actually planning appropriate routes for users. In this work, the concept of cellular automata is used to collect real-time road conditions and derive the appropriate paths for users. Notably, type-2 fuzzy logic is adopted for path analysis for each cell established in the cellular automata algorithm. Besides establishing the optimal routes, our model is expected to be able to automatically meet the personal demands of all drivers, achieve load balancing between all road sections to avoid the problem of traffic jams, and allow drivers to enjoy better driving experiences. A series of simulations were conducted to compare the proposed approach with the well-known A* Search algorithm and the latest state-of-the-art path planning algorithm found in the literature. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is scalable in terms of the turnaround times for individual users. The practicality and feasibility of applying the proposed approach in the real-time environment is thus justified.

Posture recognition plays an important role in three-dimensional virtual experiments, it means that to complete its specific function by a particular posture to control program in responding an action. In order to easy use and making the posture recognition more accurate, this article proposed the use of Kinect sensor to get articulation point information, through its the Euclidean distance and angle of the articular point to distinguish a particular posture. The results show that this method can get higher recognition rate, and expand action library at any time to meet the decision requirements of different postures. Its helpful to reuse software and improve the efficiency in the use of virtual experiment.

Interleukin-1 (IL) plays a pivotal role in immune–inflammatory response that maintains periodontal homeostasis. A number of epidemiological studies have been conducted to investigate the associations between common polymorphisms of IL-1 (IL-1A, IL-1B) genes and risk of peri-implant disease, but the findings remain inconclusive. Thirteen studies evaluating the association between IL-1 polymorphisms and risk for peri-implant diseases (implant failure/loss, peri-implantitis) were included. Fixed model or random-effects models were applied to calculate overall and ethnicity-specific summary odds ratios (ORs) and corresponding 95 % confidence intervals (CIs) as risk estimates for IL-1 polymorphisms individually or in combination. Heterogeneity and publication bias were evaluated by Q-test, I 2 statistic, Begg’s funnel plot and Egger’s test accordingly. The composite genotype of IL-1A (−889) and IL-1B (+3954) was associated with increased risk of implant failure/loss (OR 1.76, 95 % CI 1.21–2.57) and peri-implantitis (OR 2.34, 95 % CI 1.03–5.33). The significance was borderline in European descents (implant failure/loss: OR 1.48, 95 % CI 0.99–2.22; peri-implantitis: OR 1.65, 95 % CI 1.00–2.73). T allele of IL-1B (−511) was associated with increased risk of implant failure/loss (OR 1.28, 95 % CI 1.01–1.62), while the association was not significant in European descents (OR 1.12, 95 % CI 0.85–1.48). These findings support a potential role of IL-1 polymorphisms, particularly the composite genotype of IL-1A (−889) and IL-1B (+3954), in peri-implant disease susceptibility. More studies with large sample size are needed to validate the associations.

This paper develops an elevator evacuation model for ultra-tall building which is implemented by AnyLogic package. Pedestrian movement and the elevator running can be well combined into the elevator evacuation model. Theoretical analysis is conducted to explore the influencing factors of the elevator evacuation and how the elevator evacuation time is determined by these influencing factors, including the number of occupants evacuating by one elevator, the height of refuge floor, the elevator speed and acceleration speed, the elevator capacity and elevator door width etc. Simulation experiments are conducted to analyze the elevator evacuation time of ultra-tall building. By theoretical and simulation analysis and the elevator evacuation time 说 can be expressed as functions with several variables.

The characteristic of traveling wave transmission has great influence on the location precision of the fault point. In order to accurately evaluate the transmission and attenuation characteristic of actual traveling wave on transmission lines, a typical asymmetric arrangement 110kV transmission line is selected as the research object. First, the parameters of the transmission line are calculated, and the traveling wave decoupling algorithm is derived. Then, the traveling wave current collected by the distributed traveling wave monitoring system on the line is analyzed. The results show that for a short distance asymmetric 110kV line, it can be decoupled by the conventional decoupling balance line method, and the coupling component ratio is less than 2% after decoupling. With the increase of transmission distance, the attenuation degree of traveling wave increases. When the transmission distance is 60km, the attenuation of line mode is 21.2% and the zero mode attenuation is 50.4%.

An adaptive seamless streaming dissemination system for vehicular networks is presented in this work. An adaptive streaming system is established at each local server to prefetch and buffer stream data. The adaptive streaming system computes the parts of prefetched stream data for each user and stores them temporarily at the local server, based on current situation of the users and the environments where they are located. Thus, users can download the prefetched stream data from the local servers instead of from the Internet directly, meaning that the video playing problem caused by network congestion can be avoided. Several techniques such as stream data prefetching, stream data forwarding, and adaptive dynamic decoding were utilized for enhancing the adaptability of different users and environments and achieving the best transmission efficiency. Fuzzy logic inference systems are utilized to determine if a roadside base station or a vehicle can be chosen to transfer stream data for users. Considering the uneven deployment of BSs and vehicles, a bandwidth reservation mechanism for premium users was proposed to ensure the QoS of the stream data premium users received. A series of simulations were conducted, with the experimental results verifying the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed work.

To study the effectiveness and safety of acellular dermal matrix (ADM) graft in preventing Frey syndrome after parotid neoplasm surgery, we reviewed foreign reported clinical randomized controlled trials systematically. Based on this review, we aimed to assess the effectiveness of ADM graft and provide reliable evidence for clinical application.We reviewed foreign-language databases, such as MEDLINE, applied meta-analysis with Rev.Man 5, and drew forest plots with odds ratio as effect size.Three trials were recruited. The morbidity of Frey syndrome in experimental group was significantly lower than that in control on both subjective index and objective index, with odds ratios at 0.03 (95% confidence interval, 0.01-0.11) and 0.03 (95% confidence interval, 0.01-0.12), respectively. There was no significant difference between ADM group and blank control in total adverse reactions and complication incidence, whereas results differed for a kind of specific adverse reaction or complication.Based on existing research data, implanting ADM could effectively prevent Frey syndrome, and its poor prognosis effects did not significantly increase, which suggested that its total safety was reliable. Nevertheless, further investigations about the difference on a specific adverse reaction or complication were still needed.