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Information on bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) in patients with COVID-19 is limited, and clinical correlation has not been reported. This study investigated the key features of BAL fluids from COVID-19 patients and assessed their clinical significance. A total of 320 BAL samples from 83 COVID-19 patients and 70 non-COVID-19 patients (27 patients with other respiratory viral infections) were evaluated, including cell count/differential, morphology, flow cytometric immunophenotyping, and immunohistochemistry. The findings were correlated with clinical outcomes. Compared to non-COVID-19 patients, BAL from COVID-19 patients was characterized by significant lymphocytosis (p more...

The fundamental characteristics of agricultural products are appearance, size, and weight, which affect their market value, consumer preference, and choice. Thus, food and agricultural industries seek rapid, simple, and nondestructive approaches to assess real-time measurements at the post-harvest stage before packaging for the consumer market. While sorting and grading may be performed by humans, it is unreliable, time-consuming, complicated, subjective, onerous, expensive, and easily influenced by surroundings. Therefore, an astute sorting and grading method for tomato fruit is required. We evaluated two tomato configurations on a conveyor belt: single tomatoes (no occlusion) and multi-tomatoes (partially occluded). We used polygon approximation for concave and convex point extraction algorithms to segment the occluded tomatoes. We developed seven models for regression using single-tomato image features. The Bayesian regularization artificial neural network outranked all the trained models in weight estimation with a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 1.468 g and R2 of 0.971. For volume estimation, the RBF SVM had the best performance with R2 of 0.982 and RMSE of 1.2683 cm3. It is feasible to implement a proposed system as a noninvasive in-line sorting technique for tomatoes. more...

Objectives Ribonucleotide reductase M2 (RRM2) is a rate-limiting enzyme involved in DNA repair and synthesis. This study aimed to investigate the expression level, clinicopathological significance, and prognostic value of RRM2 in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Materials and methods Human OSCC tissue microarrays were used to detect the expression of RRM2, cancer stem cell (CSC) markers CD44 and aldehyde dehydrogenase 1 (ALDH1), and the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) marker Slug. The correlation of RRM2 expression with clinicopathological parameters was evaluated. The effects of RRM2 on cell proliferation, migration, and apoptosis were investigated. Results Compared with normal and dysplastic tissues, the expression of RRM2 in human primary OSCC was significantly increased, and its overexpression was correlated with advanced pathological grade. The overall survival rate of patients with high RRM2 expression was lower than that of patients with low RRM2 expression. The overexpression of RRM2 was significantly associated with OSCC recurrence, and its overexpression was correlated with the CSC markers CD44 and ALDH1 and the EMT marker Slug. The expression of RRM2 promotes the proliferation and migration of human OSCC cells and inhibits apoptosis. Conclusion Ribonucleotide reductase M2 may be a novel target in the diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy of OSCC. more...

According to the problem that the multi-scale vehicle objects in traffic surveillance video are difficult to detect and the overlapping objects are prone to missed detection, an improved vehicle object detection method based on YOLOv3 was proposed. In order to extract feature more efficiently, we first use the inverted residuals technique to improve the convolutional layer of YOLOv3. To solve the multi-scale vehicle object detection problem, three spatial pyramid pooling(SPP) modules are added before each YOLO layer to obtain multi-scale information. In order to cope with the overlapping of vehicles in traffic videos, soft non maximum suppression (Soft-NMS) is used to replace non maximum suppression (NMS), thereby reducing the missing of predicted boxes due to vehicle overlaps. Our experiment results in the Car dataset and the KITTI dataset confirm that the proposed method achieves good detection results for vehicle objects of various scales in various scenes. Our method can meet the needs of practical applications better. more...

Inositol polyphosphate 4-phosphatase type II (INPP4B) is a phosphoinositide phosphatase that plays complex roles in the pathogenesis of different tumors. We aimed to explore the expression, clinicopathological significance, and prognostic value of INPP4B in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). Tissue microarrays that included samples from 176 primary OSCCs, 42 normal mucosae, and 69 dysplastic tissues were used for immunostaining analyses of INPP4B protein. Aperio ScanScope CS scanner and aperio quantification software were used to scan the microarrays and score the staining, respectively. We also evaluated the correlation between INPP4B expression and clinical parameters, pathological grades, node-positive status, and immune-related markers. Expression of INPP4B was statistically significantly upregulated in human primary OSCC tissues compared with dysplastic and normal tissues. Additionally, we found that patients with strong expression of INPP4B had a statistically significantly poorer overall survival than patients with weak expression of INPP4B. Furthermore, our study indicated that expression of INPP4B in OSCC was positively associated with expression of p-S6Ser235/236 , p-CADSer1859 , and certain immune checkpoints (B7-H4, Galectin-9). Therefore, INPP4B may be an independent prognostic indicator for patients with OSCC, in which it might function as an oncoprotein. more...

Objective This study aimed to explore the relationship between the expression of the coxsackie–adenovirus receptor (CAR) in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) and the clinicopathologic parameters associated with the disease. The diagnostic and prognostic potential of CAR in OSCC was also investigated. Study Design Immunohistochemistry was performed on human tissue microarrays, containing 42 oral mucosa, 69 dysplasia, and 176 OSCC tissue sections, to reveal the expression pattern of CAR. Statistical analysis was used to determine the correlation between CAR expression and the patient survival rate as a measure of the prognostic value of CAR. Results CAR was overexpressed in human OSCC tissues (P = .002), and higher expression of CAR was associated with a lower survival rate, which was not statistically significant (P = .123). In addition, patients with OSCC in the human papillomavirus (HPV)–positive group showed significantly higher CAR expression compared with the HPV- negative group (P = .0491). Conclusions This study indicated that CAR expression was upregulated in human OSCC and that patients with OSCC with higher expression of CAR had a lower survival rate. Moreover, CAR expression may be associated with HPV infection. more...

A prediction method of mass and volume of cherry tomato based on a computer vision system and machine learning algorithms were introduced in this study. The relation between tomato mass and volume was established as M = 1.312 V 0.9551 , and was used to estimate mass on a test dataset at an R 2 of 0.9824 and RMSE of 15.84g. Depth images of tomatoes at different orientations were acquired and features extracted by image processing techniques. Five regression prediction models based on 2D and 3D image features were developed. The RBF-SVM outperformed all explored models with an accuracy of 0.9706 (only 2D features) and 0.9694 (all features) in mass and volume estimation respectively. The model predicted mass or volume can then be applied to the established mass-volume power function. This introduced system can be applied as a non-destructive, accurate and consistent technique to in-line sorting and grading of cherry tomatoes based on mass, volume or density. more...

A 54-year-old woman with hairy cell leukemia developed severe polymorphic erythema and blisters on the trunk and limbs after injection of interferon (IFN) α-2b. Skin biopsy revealed lymphocytic exocytosis and perivascular lymphocytic infiltrate in the dermis, and the lesions improved after methylprednisolone pulse therapy. Although injection-site reactions have been observed after injection of IFNα-2b, this is the first report of a widespread cutaneous reaction to IFNα-2b. more...

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, has brought tremendous opportunities for the design and making of metallic components with high geometrical complexity. However, in order to maximize the performance and functionality of a specific part, the additive manufacturing industry currently still faces fundamental issues of material processability and limited mechanical properties. Here, we report a high strength in-process and post-process friendly Al alloy specifically developed for the selective laser melting (SLM) process, one of the most commonly used additive manufacturing techniques. We found that the introduction of Mn and Sc as major strengthening elements significantly improved the processability of the Al alloy and its corresponding mechanical properties due to the rapid solidification nature of the SLM process. The developed alloy demonstrates an exceptional high thermal stability, which enables the utilization of a very simple post heat treatment to relieve the residual stresses generated during the SLM process, maintain a high solid solution strengthening effect from Mn and simultaneously achieve exceptional precipitation strengthening from a high density of nano-sized Al3Sc precipitates. We created a new high strength Al alloy with a yield strength of up to 560 MPa and a ductility of about 18% after a simple industrially desirable post heat treatment of 5 h at 300 °C. The highly enhanced alloy properties, good processability and simple post heat treatment of the developed alloy offers tremendous benefits for the fabrication of complex high performance lightweight engineering components made by SLM. more...

Wave height is one of the most significant parameters of waves, affecting marine navigation, coastal environment, and surfing activities. In this paper, we present a wave height determination network from nearshore surveillance videos. This method consists of three parts. Firstly, video frames and frame differences are extracted to represent static and dynamic characteristics of waves, respectively. Then, by taking the two types of data as different modalities, two independent Network In Network (NIN) networks are constructed to learn spatial and temporal features of wave heights. Meanwhile, the two types of features are fused across multiple feature levels using a central network, where concatenation or attention-based fusion is applied. Finally, the wave height is determined by minimizing a global loss. The proposed network for wave height determination, dubbed NINMf-WH or NINMf-A-WH (with attention), was evaluated by a set of comparative experiments from two aspects: i) the basic network of feature learning: NIN vs. CNN; ii) the spatial-temporal feature fusion strategy: multi-level fusion vs. late fusion vs. intermediate feature fusion. The results show that NIN is suited to learn wave height features due to the nonlinearity of waves in video, and the multi-level spatiotemporal feature fusion can achieve low error and good stability of wave height determination. With attention-based fusion, NINMf-A-WH can further reduce the prediction error. To verify the generalization performance of the proposed network, we applied it for estimating wave heights in new surveillant videos. The results provide a low relative error of 6.43%±4.9, which can well meet the operational requirement for nearshore wave forecasting ( more...

In a broiler carcass production conveyor system, inspection, monitoring, and grading carcass and cuts based on computer vision techniques are challenging due to cuts segmentation and ambient light conditions issues. This study presents a depth image-based broiler carcass weight prediction system. An Active Shape Model was developed to segment the carcass into 4 cuts (drumsticks, breasts, wings, and head and neck). Five regression models were developed based on the image features for each weight estimation (carcass and its cuts). The Bayesian-ANN model outperformed all other regression models at 0.9981 R2 and 0.9847 R2 in the whole carcass and head and neck weight estimation. The RBF-SVR model surpassed all the other drumstick, breast, and wings weight prediction models at 0.9129 R2, 0.9352 R2, and 0.9896 R2, respectively. This proposed technique can be applied as a nondestructive, nonintrusive, and accurate on-line broiler carcass production system in the automation of chicken carcass and cuts weight estimation. more...

The appearance, size, and weight of poultry meat and eggs are essential for production economics and vital in the poultry sector. These external characteristics influence their market price and consumers' preference and choice. With technological developments, there is an increase in the application and importance of vision systems in the agricultural sector. Computer vision has become a promising tool in the real-time automation of poultry weighing and processing systems. Owing to its noninvasive and nonintrusive nature and its capacity to present a wide range of information, computer vision systems can be applied in the size, mass, volume determination, and sorting and grading of poultry products. This review article gives a detailed summary of the current advances in measuring poultry products' external characteristics based on computer vision systems. An overview of computer vision systems is discussed and summarized. A comprehensive presentation of the application of computer vision-based systems for assessing poultry meat and eggs was provided, that is, weight and volume estimation, sorting, and classification. Finally, the challenges and potential future trends in size, weight, and volume estimation of poultry products are reported. more...

The combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy motivates a potent immune system by triggering immunogenic cell death (ICD), showing great potential in inhibiting tumor growth and improving the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (ITM). However, the therapeutic effectiveness has been restricted by inferior drug bioavailability. Herein, we reported a universal bioresponsive doxorubicin (DOX)-based nanogel to achieve tumor-specific co-delivery of drugs. DOX-based mannose nanogels (DM NGs) was designed and choosed as an example to elucidate the mechanism of combined chemo-immunotherapy. As expected, the DM NGs exhibited prominent micellar stability, selective drug release and prolonged survival time, benefited from the enhanced tumor permeability and prolonged blood circulation. We discovered that the DOX delivered by DM NGs could induce powerful anti-tumor immune response facilitated by promoting ICD. Meanwhile, the released mannose from DM NGs was proved as a powerful and synergetic treatment for breast cancer in vitro and in vivo, via damaging the glucose metabolism in glycolysis and the tricarboxylic acid cycle. Overall, the regulation of tumor microenvironment with DOX-based nanogel is expected to be an effectual candidate strategy to overcome the current limitations of ICD-based immunotherapy, offering a paradigm for the exploitation of immunomodulatory nanomedicines., Graphical abstract Engineering DOX-based mannose nanogel via GSH-sensitive –SS– bond crosslinker was reported, which not only destroyed the glycolysis process of tumor cells, but also induced robust immunogenic cell death against tumors.Image 1 more...

Objectives Anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapy has recently been approved for head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). However, given that large numbers of patients with HNSCC do not respond to PD-1/PD-L1 antibodies, combination strategies for elevating the response rate need to be further investigated. The goal of this study was to explore the possibility of dual-targeting CD155/TIGIT and PD-1/PD-L1 signalling in HNSCC. Materials and methods Multiplex flow cytometry was performed to determine the co-expression of CD155 and PD-L1 in human HNSCC and transgenic HNSCC mouse models. The combined application of TIGIT mAb and PD-L1 mAb in a mouse model was used to explore the therapeutic effect. Results CD155 and PD-L1 were highly co-expressed on myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) derived from patients with HNSCC and were inversely associated with the percentage of tumour CD3+ T and effector memory T cells. CD155+PD-L1+ MDSCs in the mouse model were gradually enriched in the tumour microenvironment in the middle and late stages of tumour progression. Anti-PD-L1 treatment alone upregulated the expression of CD155 on MDSCs and while anti-TIGIT treatment upregulated the expression of PD-L1 on MDSCs in mice. The combined blockade of TIGIT/CD155 and PD-1/PD-L1 signalling in mice significantly inhibited tumour growth, enhanced the percentages of effector T cells and cytokine secretion and elicited immune memory effects. Conclusion Our study indicated that CD155+PD-L1+ MDSCs are enriched in the tumour microenvironment and blocking TIGIT/CD155 can effectively enhance the response rate of HNSCC to PD-L1 mAb therapy, which provides the clinical potential of co-targeting TIGIT/CD155 and PD-1/PD-L1 signalling. more...

This study focused on the expression of mitochondrial serine hydroxymethyltransferase (SHMT2) in oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) and its correlation with clinical traits and the prognosis of OSCC patients. Immunochemical staining and Western blotting were used to quantify the expression of SHMT2 and related immune markers in OSCC. Using OSCC microarrays and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database, we evaluated the association between SHMT2 and various clinical traits. We found that increased expression of SHMT2 was detected in OSCC and correlated with advanced pathological grade and recurrence of OSCC. By a multivariate Cox proportional hazard model, high expression of SHMT2 was shown to indicate a negative prognosis. In addition, in the OSCC microenvironment, increasing the expression of SHMT2 was associated with high expression levels of programmed cell death-ligand 1 (PD-L1), CKLF-like MARVEL transmembrane domain containing 6 (CMTM6), V-type immunoglobulin domain-containing suppressor (VISTA), B7-H4, Slug, and CD317. In the future, more effort will be required to investigate the role of SHMT2 in the OSCC microenvironment. more...

To explore the diagnostic value of pancreatic perfusion CT combined with contrast-enhanced CT in one-time scanning (PCECT) in pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PNETs) and to evaluate the difference of perfusion parameters between different grades of PNETs.From October 2016 to December 2018, forty consecutive patients with histopathological-proven PNETs were identified retrospectively that received PCECT for the preoperative PNETs evaluation. Two board certified radiologists who were blinded to the clinical data evaluated the images independently. The image characters of PNETs vs. tumor-free pancreatic parenchymal and different grades of PNETs were analyzed.One-time PCECT scanning had a detection rate of 89.1% for PNETs, which was higher than the detection accuracy of the perfusion CT only (83.6%). The perfusion parameters of PNETs including blood volume (BV), blood flow (BF), mean slope of increase (MSI), and capillary surface permeability (PS) were significantly increased than those of tumor-free pancreatic parenchyma (p 0.05, respectively). For differential comparison between grade I (G1) and grade II (G2) tumors, the parameters of BF and impulse residue function (IRF) of tumor tissue were significantly higher in the G2 tumors (p 0.05, for both). In this study, the total radiation dose of the whole PCECT scan was 16.241 ± 2.289 mSv.The one-time PCECT scan may improve the detection of PNETs according to morphological features and perfusion parameters with a relative small radiation dose. The perfusion parameters of BF and IRF may be used to help distinguish G1 and G2 tumors in the preoperative evaluation. more...

A series of two-dimensional (2D) single-layer binary group VA-VA crystals, where VA represents P, As, Sb and Bi, are explored by the first-principles calculations. Unlike the orthorhombic α-phase and hexagonal β-phase, these crystals have a tetragonal haeckelite lattice and are named as T-VA-VAs. These ultrathin 2D materials have high thermal stability and are semiconductors with moderate band gaps ranging from 0.80 to 2.68 eV (HSE06). The band gaps show a prevalent linear correlation with average ionization energies (AIEs) of different composites, and thus can be effectively designed. Furthermore, these materials exhibit superior carrier mobility, e.g. 2.96 × 103 cm-2 V-1 s-1 of T-SbBi, and considerable visible light absorption index. These novel 2D binary materials are expected to be fabricated and used as nanoelectronics and for solar energy harvesting. more...

Late endosomal/lysosomal adaptor and MAPK and mTOR activator 5 (LAMTOR5) is a novel oncoprotein associated with several human malignancies, but its clinical role in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) remains unclear. The present study aims to investigate the clinical and pathological significance of LAMTOR5 in HNSCC. We utilized immunohistochemical staining of human tissue microarrays (210 primary HNSCC, 42 normal oral mucosae, 69 oral epithelial dysplasia, and 68 metastasis lymph nodes) to explore the clinical and pathological significance of LAMTOR5 in HNSCC. Additionally, expression level of LAMTOR5 in immunoreactivity of Pten conditional knock out (Pten cKO) mice HNSCC was also assessed. We found LAMTOR5 was overexpressed in human and Pten cKO mice HNSCC, and its expression was significantly associated with patients' overall survival, lymph node metastasis and lymph node grade. Furthermore, LAMTOR5 expression was significantly correlated with the expression of p-AktSer473, p-S6Ser235/236, immune checkpoints (PD-L1, Galectin 9, VISTA and B7-H4) and macrophage markers (CD68 and CD163). In Pten cKO mice HNSCC, it was also significantly correlated with VISTA and F4/80. Consequently, we consider that high expression of LAMTOR5 might be a poor prognostic indicator and correlated with the immunosuppression of tumor microenvironment. more...

Deep learning achieves substantial improvements in face detection. However, the existing methods need to input fixed-size images for image processing and most methods use a single network for feature extraction, which makes the model generalization ability weak. In response to the above problems, our framework leverages a cascaded architecture with three stages of deep convolutional networks to improve detection performance. The network can predict face in a coarse-to-fine manner. We replace the standard convolution with a combination of separable convolution and residual structure in the network. Extensive experiments on the challenging FDDB and WIDER FACE benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracy to the state-of-the-art techniques while keeps real-time performance. more...

Aiming at the situation that complex natural scene text is difficult to recognize a scene text recognition method based on an encoder-decoder framework is proposed. The method converts the natural text recognition into a sequence mark by combining the connection time classification (CTC) and attention mechanism under the encoder-decoder framework, in order to overcome the problem of character segmentation, using the correlation between image and text sequence. First of all, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to generate an ordered feature sequence from the entire word image. Then, the generated feature sequence is feature-coded using the bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) network. Finally, an integrated module of the CTC and attention mechanism is designed to decode and output the text sequence. The experiments show that compared with the comparison method, the recognition accuracy of the method is improved obviously. more...

Major histocompatibility complex (MHC) II deficiency is a rare primary immunodeficiency disorder that is characterized by the deficiency of MHC class II molecules. The disease is caused by transcription factor mutations including class II transactivator (CIITA), regulatory factor X-5 (RFX5), RFX-associated protein (RFXAP), and RFXAP-containing ankyrin repeat (RFXANK), respectively. Mutations in the RFXANK gene account for >70% of all known patients worldwide. Herein, we reported a 10-month-old boy with MHC II deficiency caused by a novel mutation in the RFXANK gene (c.337 + 1G>C). The boy was admitted to the hospital due to pneumonia and diarrhea at 4 months of age. Genetic analysis revealed a novel homozygous mutation in the RFXANK gene, which derived from the c.337 + 1G>C heterozygous mutations in the RFXANK gene of his parents. The boy died 3 months after diagnosis. More than 200 cases have been reported, and a review of the literature revealed different mutation rates of 4 transcription factors in different countries or regions. This is the first case report of MHC II deficiency from East Asia. We also describe all gene mutations that cause MHC II deficiency and the epidemiology of MHC II deficiency with gene mutations in this paper. more...

Recently, the prognostic value of the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) has been widely evaluated in many cancers. Here we assessed the prognostic value of pretreatment NLR in melanoma.A range of online databases was systematically searched up to March,2018 for identify available studies which assessed the prognostic significance of NLR. Data from studies reporting a hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were weighted by generic inverse-variance and pooled in random effects meta-analysis.Twelve studies with 4593 individuals were included. Patients with elevated NLR had a significantly shorter overall survival (OS) (HR: 1.56, 95% CI: 1.28-1.90, p .001) and disease-free survival (DFS)/progression-free survival (PFS) (HR = 1.86; 95% CI = 1.24-2.80; P = .003). Subgroup analyses showed that the negative prognostic effect of elevated NLR on OS remained substantial in North American and Europen populations and patients with non-metastatic and metastatic stage. Additionally, elevated NLR was related to worse OS in patients with melanoma, regardless of the sample size and the cut-off value.Our findings suggest that elevated pretreatment NLR was associated with poor prognosis in melanoma patients, suggesting NLR might be a prognostic factor in patients with melanoma. more...

In this letter, we present a single-layered circularly polarized reflectarray antenna with a broad operating bandwidth in terms of realized gain, axial ratio (AR), radiation pattern, and aperture efficiency (AE). By employing multiple plasmon resonances, the proposed quasi-I-shaped element achieves a broadband linearly polarized conversion effect, which will contribute to a broadband reflectarray design. Thus, based on the element angular rotation method, a broadband offset-fed reflectarray with size of 215 × 215 mm2 and cells of 43 × 43 is designed, simulated, and then fabricated and measured. Good performances can be observed from both simulated and measured results, which confirm that the reflectarray antenna achieves a 75% 3 dB AR bandwidth (10–22 GHz) and a 49.7% 3 dB gain bandwidth (12.4–20.6 GHz). Furthermore, the measured AE exceeds 50% within a 28.2% bandwidth. more...

Gastrointestinal histoplasmosis (GIH) without pulmonary and bone marrow involvement is very rare worldwide. It can be misdiagnosed as intestinal tuberculosis or Crohn’s disease. There are just few case reports of GIH in patients with a positive HIV antibody test. Here, we report a patient who presented to our hospital with repeated intestinal obstruction. The suspicious diagnosis was intestinal tuberculosis or Crohn’s disease due to unspecific clinical manifestations and radiologic images. Our patient’s HIV antibody test was negative. She had no medical prescriptions. Therefore, our differential diagnosis needed to include ileum histoplasmosis besides intestinal lymphoma, intestinal tuberculosis, and Crohn’s disease. Finally, the patient was diagnosed with ileum histoplasmosis due to surgical resection. It is important to be aware of potential infectious diseases, such as ileum histoplasmosis, when making a differential diagnosis. Moreover, surgical resection might be the final approach for small-intestine stricture with fibrosis. more...

Spinal cord injury (SCI) from trauma or disease severely impairs sensory and motor function. Neurorehabilitation after SCI is a complex medical process that focuses on improving neurologic function and repairing damaged connections in the central nervous system. An increasing number of preclinical studies suggest that melatonin may be useful for the treatment of SCI. Melatonin is an indolamine that is primarily secreted by the pineal gland and known to be regulated by photoperiodicity. However, it is also a versatile hormone with antioxidative, antiapoptotic, neuroprotective, and anti-inflammatory properties. Here, we review the neuroprotective properties of melatonin and the potential mechanisms by which it might be beneficial in the treatment of SCI. We also describe therapies that combine melatonin with exercise, oxytetracycline, and dexamethasone to attenuate the secondary injury after SCI and limit potential side effects. Finally, we discuss how injury at different spinal levels may differentially affect the secretion of melatonin. more...

Additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, overcomes many design and manufacturing constraints to allow almost direct production of metals into complicated geometries. However, coarse columnar grain structures, up to the millimeter-scale, are commonly produced in titanium and its alloys through the layer-by-layer process and this causes significant anisotropy in mechanical properties. Here we report an innovative approach for microstructure refinement of an additively manufactured Ti-6Al-4V alloy via directed energy deposition of boron nitride nanotube (BNNT) decorated powders. With only 0.4 wt% BNNT, this process results in unprecedented grain refinement down to a few micrometers and over 50% strength enhancement. A unique texture-weakened structure comprising fine equiaxed grains is achieved via a novel nanoparticle-mediated nucleation mechanism enabled by local hypereutectic precipitation in the rapid solidification process. This mechanism is highly suited to the metallurgical environment of metal additive manufacturing and creates a pathway for screening effective grain refiners in titanium and other alloy systems. more...

To inhibit the radiant infrared energy between 8 and 14 μm, which is the infrared atmospheric window, and decrease the echo power of detecting laser and radar, to achieve compatible stealth, a doping structural one-dimensional photonic crystal (1-D PC) with Ge, ZnSe and Si was fabricated; and then combine it with radar absorbing material (RAM) to make a compound. After that, the reflection spectra of this compound was tested, and the result shows a high average reflectance (89.5%) in 8–14 μm waveband, and a reflective valley (39.8%) in the wavelength of 10.6 μm, which is the wavelength of CO2 laser; and the reflectance in radar band shows that at high frequency, especially between 7.8 and 18 GHz, the radar power is strongly absorbed by this material and the reflected energy attenuate over 10 dB within the range from 11.1 GHz to 18.3 GHz, even 24.5 dB to the most in the frequency of 14.6 GHz. more...

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) based methods recently keep setting new records on the tasks of predicting depth maps from monocular images. When dealing with video-based applications such as 2D (2-dimensional) to 3D (3-dimensional) video conversion, however, these approaches tend to produce temporally inconsistent depth maps, since their CNN models are optimized over single frames. In this paper, we address this problem by introducing a novel spatial-temporal conditional random fields (CRF) model into the DCNN architecture, which is able to enforce temporal consistency between depth map estimations over consecutive video frames. In our approach, temporally consistent superpixel (TSP) is first applied to an image sequence to establish the correspondence of targets in consecutive frames. A DCNN is then used to regress the depth value of each temporal superpixel, followed by a spatial-temporal CRF layer to model the relationship of the estimated depths in both spatial and temporal domains. The parameters in both DCNN and CRF models are jointly optimized with back propagation. Experimental results show that our approach not only is able to significantly enhance the temporal consistency of estimated depth maps over existing single-frame-based approaches, but also improves the depth estimation accuracy in terms of various evaluation metrics. more...

This paper is a simulation analysis of elderly electric vehicle. The designed 3D model was introduced into ANSYS, and the stiffness of the body structure was calculated by static analysis. In the modal analysis, the bending and torsion frequencies of the body are calculated separately. The simulation results show that the elderly electric vehicle will not be damaged under normal driving conditions. more...

In recent years, the aging of our country has intensified, and the needs of the elderly have been paid more and more attention. In order to meet the travel needs of the elderly, the old-age walking vehicle came into being. However, there are many problems with the old-age walking vehicle on the market. The paper started from the angle of human body size and psychological and behavioral characteristics of the elderly, based on the design concepts of humanization, emotional design and green design, then uses Solidworks software to design the ring steering wheel structure, and uses ANSYS finite element analysis to carry out mechanical analysis and modal analysis of the ring wheel mechanism of the elderly generation walker. The results show that the designed indicators meet the requirements of the work. more...

The novel COVID-19 outbreak has affected more than 200 countries and territories as of March 2020. Given that patients with cancer are generally more vulnerable to infections, systematic analysis of diverse cohorts of patients with cancer affected by COVID-19 is needed. We performed a multicenter study including 105 patients with cancer and 536 age-matched noncancer patients confirmed with COVID-19. Our results showed COVID-19 patients with cancer had higher risks in all severe outcomes. Patients with hematologic cancer, lung cancer, or with metastatic cancer (stage IV) had the highest frequency of severe events. Patients with nonmetastatic cancer experienced similar frequencies of severe conditions to those observed in patients without cancer. Patients who received surgery had higher risks of having severe events, whereas patients who underwent only radiotherapy did not demonstrate significant differences in severe events when compared with patients without cancer. These findings indicate that patients with cancer appear more vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Significance: Because this is the first large cohort study on this topic, our report will provide much-needed information that will benefit patients with cancer globally. As such, we believe it is extremely important that our study be disseminated widely to alert clinicians and patients. This article is highlighted in the In This Issue feature, p. 747 more...

Alveolar soft part sarcoma (ASPS) is a rare soft tissue malignant neoplasm. In the study, we selected a 29-year-old woman presented with a painless mass on her right parotid gland for 6 months. The lesion was confirmed pathology as ASPS. In this paper, we analysed the imaging and biological behaviors of ASPS to understand the disease deeply. more...

Objective: To investigate the computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and clinical features of intrahepatic biliary cystadenocarcinoma. Methods: The imaging and clinical data of two patients with intrahepatic biliary cystadenocarcinoma confirmed by pathology were retrospectively analyzed. CT and MRI examinations were performed in all patients. Results: The main complaint was upper abdominal discomfort. The lesion grows actively, which usually gets bigger in a short time. The lesion showed a solitary mass in the liver, with irregular shapes and clear boundaries. The lesion was mainly cystic, usually with solid nodules. MRI showed that the cystic part showed low signal on T1WI, high signal on T2WI, high signal on DWIBS, and without enhancement. The solid part shows a slightly higher signal, and the dispersion is slightly limited, and the enhancement can be seen. Conclusion: The combination of imaging and clinical features is helpful for the diagnosis of intrahepatic biliary cystadenocarcinoma. more...

Topological photonic crystals (PCs) with unique optical performances have tremendous potential application in the realm of integrated photonic circuits. In this paper, we propose split-ring topological PCs manufactured by conventional silicon material, which hosts both topological transition and helical edge states mimicking the quantum spin Hall effect. A large nontrivial bandgap from 224.85 THz to 235.03 THz can be achieved. Non-spin-mixing defect modes with the nature of topological protection are demonstrated when line defects are introduced by fabricating the sectional columns with Al2O3 at the interface of two different topologies. A guide path for the non-spin-mixing defect modes reveals that light can propagate unidirectionally with high efficiency, powerful optical localization, and strong stability. This work provides a versatile method to improve the performances of optical transmission and reveals a novel mechanism to guide light transmission, which has vast application prospects in the all-optical integrated circuits. more...

The aims of this study were to provide an overview of maxillofacial trauma and its relationship to patient's demographic data and alcohol consumption within the state of Sabah. It was a retrospective study of maxillofacial trauma cases treated by Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Department, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, from January 1, 2009, until December 31, 2013. A total of 630 maxillofacial trauma cases were included. Details of the trauma were collected from patients’ record, including patients’ cause of injuries, injuries suffered, treatment indications, and treatment received. Patients’ demographic data (age, gender), alcohol consumption in relation to causes, and type of maxillofacial injury were analyzed. There were 538 male (85.4%) and 92 female (14.6%) patients (ratio: 5.8:1), with mean age of 31.0 years. Most common causes of maxillofacial injury were motor vehicle accident (MVA; 66.3%), followed by fall (12.4%) and assault (11.6%). Motorcyclists made up more than half of the total cases (53.1%). Cases referred were primarily due to soft-tissue injury (458 cases). Other cases were dentoalveolar and maxillofacial bone fractures. Treatment provided for the fractures included open reduction and internal fixation (22.9%), closed reduction (28.7%), and conservative management (48.4%). Toilet and suturing were done for all patients with soft-tissue injury. Maxillofacial trauma is a major problem in Sabah. It affects mostly males in the age group of 21 to 30 years. Most of the MVA patients were motorcyclists. Mandibular fracture with parasymphysis involvement recorded the highest number. Most of the patients preferred conservative management, probably due to financial and logistic issue. more...

We propose a new method to disclose the camouflaged targets coated with far infrared/CO2 laser stealth-compatible coating by utilizing terahertz (THz) radar. A coating based on one-dimensional photonic crystal (1DPC) with a defect mode is specially designed and successfully prepared, which possesses a high reflectivity in 8–14 μm waveband and a low reflectivity at 10.6 μm, by alternating thin films of Ge, ZnSe and Si. The propagation characteristic of 0.3–2 THz wave at incident angle from 0° to 80° in such PC coating is investigated theoretically based on characteristic matrix method. The maximal transmittance is up to 92%, and the absorptivity keeps lower than 0.5% over the whole band. The results are verified by experiments, which demonstrate the feasibility of using THz radar to detect the targets covered with such stealth-compatible coatings. more...

The present paper describes a hyper-spectral polarization imaging system based on a non-collinear, acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF) and a linear polarizer. The paper begins with an analysis of the equivalent relationship of the AOTF to describe the principle of polarization detection of this system. Appropriate parameters of hardware components are assigned later. This system, being electronically controllable and tunable, can not only ensure the precision of imaging but also obtain hyper-spectral polarization signatures. The prototype has two optional working modes, namely, hyper-spectral polarization imaging and hyper-spectral intensity imaging. Moreover, parameters of this system – such as diffraction efficiency, spectral resolution and modulation precision – are tested using a halogen tungsten lamp and an optical fibre spectrometer. The results indicate that this instrument is compact, vibration-insensitive, robust and precisely controllable. The system designed in this paper has further ap... more...

Due to the normal forecasting methods for subgrade settlement using observation data have different applicabilities, and the predicting results has bigger volatility and lower accuracy. In view of the above problems, based on the twin support vector regression tool, the settlement prediction model is established by combining with the measured roadbed settlement data; The related parameters of the prediction model are given and compared with the standard support vector regression machine, the comparison tests show that the twins support vector regression is a new method to predict the settlement of the roadbed, and is superior in forecasting accuracy to the standard support vector regression. more...

Confronting diverse working pressure during office time, front-line sales staffs’ service quality will be threatened, which can affect customers’ satisfaction and loyalty degree, then influence market share and competitive edge of the company further. Thus, this paper focuses on the front-line sales staffs and aims at identifying the influence mechanism of transformational leadership on their service quality and the role of psychological capital among the triadic relationship. The result of hierarchy regression analysis about 250 sample data showed that both transformational leadership and psychological capital had significantly positive effect on front-line sales staffs’ service quality, while psychological capital acted as mediator between transformational leadership and front-line sales staffs’ service quality. Organizational management is advised to adopt transformational leadership and promote the employees’ level of psychological capital so as to improve the service quality of front-line sales staffs and the entire company. more...

The intriguing discoveries of quantum spin Hall effect of electrons and its analogy in photon systems have renovated several concepts in condensed matter physics. Here we emulate topological edge states at microwave frequencies utilizing honeycomb photonic crystals with elliptical rods made of silicon material, and a novel topological beam splitter is implemented and analyzed. Robustness against perturbations provides the beam splitter with extremely strong transmission stability. Noticeably, suppressing the backward transmission of electromagnetic wave mitigates undesirable reflection interference. The numerical analysis results reveal that the splitting ratio obtained is in the range of 0.5–1.5 and the maximum transmittance value can reach up to 97% in this system. Besides, by appropriately adjusting the configuration parameters of photonic crystals, the location of operating frequency can be tuned to match different cases. The proposed structure has tremendous potential applications in the field of all-optical integrated circuits and will promote the practicability of photonic topological insulators in the communication domain more...

The novel COVID-19 outbreak has affected more than 200 countries and territories as of March 2020. Given that patients with cancer are generally more vulnerable to infections, systematic analysis of diverse cohorts of patients with cancer affected by COVID-19 are needed. We performed a multi-center study including 105 cancer patients and 536 age-matched non-cancer patients confirmed with COVID-19. Our results showed COVID-19 patients with cancer had higher risks in all severe outcomes. Patients with hematological cancer, lung cancer, or with metastatic cancer (stage IV) had the highest frequency of severe events. Non-metastatic cancer patients experienced similar frequencies of severe conditions to those observed in patients without cancer. Patients who received surgery had higher risks of having severe events, while patients with only radiotherapy did not demonstrate significant differences in severe events when compared to patients without cancer. These findings indicate that cancer patients appear more vulnerable to SARS-COV-2 outbreak. Since this is the first large cohort study on this topic, our report will provide the much-needed information that will benefit global cancer patients. As such, we believe it is extremely important that our study be disseminated widely to alert clinicians and patients. Citation Format: Meng-Yuan Dai, Dian-bo Liu, Miao Liu, Fu-Xiang Zhou, Gui-Ling Li, Zhen Chen, Zhi-An Zhang, Hua-You Md, Meng Wu, Qi-Chao Zheng, Yong Xiong, Hui-Hua Xiong, Chun Wang, Chang-Chun Chen, Fei Xiong, Yan Zhang, Ya-Qin Peng, Si-Ping Ge, Bo Zhen, Ting-Ting Yu, Ling Wang, Hua Wang, Yu Liu, Ye-Shan Chen, Jun-Hua Mei, Xiao-Jia Gao, Zhu-Yan Li, Li-Juan Gan, Can He, Zhen Li, Yu-Ying Shi, Yu-Wen Qi, Jing Yang, Daniel G. Tenen, Li Chai, Lorelei Ann Mucci, Mauricio Santillana, Hongbing Cai. Patients with cancer appear more vulnerable to SARS-COV-2: A multi-center study during the COVID-19 outbreak [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research 2020; 2020 Apr 27-28 and Jun 22-24. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(16 Suppl):Abstract nr CT406. more...

Quantum computing has seen tremendous progress in the past years. Due to the implementation complexity and cost, the future path of quantum computation is strongly believed to delegate computational tasks to powerful quantum servers on cloud. Universal blind quantum computing (UBQC) provides the protocol for the secure delegation of arbitrary quantum computations, and it has received significant attention. However, a great challenge in UBQC is how to transmit quantum state over long distance securely and reliably. Here, we solve this challenge by proposing and demonstrating a resource-efficient remote blind qubit preparation (RBQP) protocol with weak coherent pulses for the client to produce, using a compact and low-cost laser. We demonstrate the protocol in field, experimentally verifying the protocol over 100-km fiber. Our experiment uses a quantum teleportation setup in telecom wavelength and generates $1000$ secure qubits with an average fidelity of $(86.9\pm1.5)\%$, which exceeds the quantum no-cloning fidelity of equatorial qubit states. The results prove the feasibility of UBQC over long distances, and thus serving as a key milestone towards secure cloud quantum computing., 11 pages, 9 figures more...

We derive a state dependent error-disturbance trade-off based on a statistical distance in the sequential measurements of a pair of noncommutative observables and experimentally verify the relation with a photonic qubit system. We anticipate that this Letter may further stimulate the study on the quantum uncertainty principle and related applications in quantum measurements. more...