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Background To date, there is no approved blood‐based biomarker for breast cancer detection. Herein, we aimed to assess semaphorin 4C (SEMA4C), a pivotal protein involved in breast cancer progression, as a serum diagnostic biomarker. Methods We included 6,213 consecutive inpatients from Tongji Hospital, Qilu Hospital, and Hubei Cancer Hospital. Training cohort and two validation cohorts were introduced for diagnostic exploration and validation. A pan‐cancer cohort was used to independently explore the diagnostic potential of SEMA4C among solid tumors. Breast cancer patients who underwent mass excision prior to modified radical mastectomy were also analyzed. We hypothesized that increased pre‐treatment serum SEMA4C levels, measured using optimized in‐house enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay kits, could detect breast cancer. The endpoints were diagnostic performance, including area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), sensitivity, and specificity. Post‐surgery pathological diagnosis was the reference standard and breast cancer staging followed the TNM classification. There was no restriction on disease stage for eligibilities. Results We included 2667 inpatients with breast lesions, 2378 patients with other solid tumors, and 1168 healthy participants. Specifically, 118 patients with breast cancer were diagnosed with stage 0 (5.71%), 620 with stage I (30.00%), 966 with stage II (46.73%), 217 with stage III (10.50%), and 8 with stage IV (0.39%). Patients with breast cancer had significantly higher serum SEMA4C levels than benign breast tumor patients and normal controls (P < 0.001). Elevated serum SEMA4C levels had AUC of 0.920 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.900–0.941) and 0.932 (95%CI: 0.911–0.953) for breast cancer detection in the two validation cohorts. The AUCs for detecting early‐stage breast cancer (n = 366) and ductal carcinoma in situ (n = 85) were 0.931 (95%CI: 0.916–0.946) and 0.879 (95%CI: 0.832–0.925), respectively. Serum SEMA4C levels significantly decreased after surgery, and the reduction was more striking after modified radical mastectomy, compared with mass excision (P < 0.001). The positive rate of enhanced serum SEMA4C levels was 84.77% for breast cancer and below 20.75% for the other 14 solid tumors. Conclusions Serum SEMA4C demonstrated promising potential as a candidate biomarker for breast cancer diagnosis. However, validation in prospective settings and by other study groups is warranted., Breast cancer patients had significantly higher serum SEMA4C levels than patients with benign breast tumor and normal controls. Serum SEMA4C is considered as a candidate diagnostic biomarker for the early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer.

BACKGROUND Multiple primary malignant tumors are two or more malignancies in an individual without any relationship between the neoplasms. In recent years, an increasing number of cases have been reported. However, concomitant primary gastric and pancreatic cancer reported a relatively small incidence, involving no pancreatic acinar cell carcinoma reports. Here, we present the first case of concomitant pancreatic acinar cell carcinoma and gastric adenocarcinoma. CASE SUMMARY A 69-year-old male presented to our department with a history of vomiting, epigastric pain, and weight loss. Imaging revealed space-occupying lesions in the stomach and the tail of the pancreas, respectively. The patient underwent laparoscopic radical gastrectomy and pancreatectomy simultaneously. The pathologies of surgical specimens were completely different: The resected gastric specimen was moderate to poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma, whereas the pancreatic tumor was consistent with acinar cell carcinoma. The patient was treated with six cycles of oxaliplatin and S-1 chemotherapy. As of March 2021, the patient was healthy without any recurrence or metastasis. After thoroughly reviewing the literature on simultaneous pancreatic and gastric cancers at home and abroad, we discussed the clinical characteristics of these rare synchronous double cancers. Most of the cases had undergone surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy, and all of the cases were pathologically confirmed by the postoperative specimen. CONCLUSION Synchronous pancreatic acinar cells and gastric adenocarcinoma can occur and should be considered when tumors are found in these organs.

The control of epidemics taking place in complex networks has been an increasingly active topic in public health management. In this article, we propose an efficient networked epidemic control system, where a modified susceptible-exposed-infected-vigilant (SEIV) model is first built to simulate epidemic spreading. Then, different from existing continuous resource models which abstractly map resources to parameters of epidemic models, a concrete resource description model is built to simulate real-world goods/services and their allocation. Based on the two models, a cost-constraint subset selection problem in epidemic control is identified. To solve the problem, a swarm-based stochastic optimization policy is proposed, where each particle in the swarm can determine its own solutions according to the guidance of its superior peers and historical searching experience of the whole swarm, without extra problem-relative information. Theoretical proof about system equilibrium is provided, which is consistent with experimental observations. The competitive performance of the proposed optimizer is validated by theoretical analysis and comparison experiments. Finally, an application case is provided to illustrate the practicability.

Hot dry rock, as a renewable and sustainable energy source, can alleviate resource shortages and environmental pollution. Based on data from the Qiabuqia geothermal field and an established thermal-hydrological-mechanical coupled mathematical model, a novel horizontally layered enhanced geothermal system (EGS) is proposed and compared with the conventional double vertical well EGS. Under the simulated conditions in this paper, the comprehensive heat recovery performance of the horizontally layered EGS is significantly better than that of the double vertical well EGS. Specifically, although the average production temperature of the double vertical well EGS is higher than that of the horizontally layered EGS in the attenuation stage, the heat power output of the horizontally layered EGS ranges from 6.10 MW to 12.25 MW, which is 1.36 to 1.67 times that of the double vertical well EGS. Additionally, the heat recovery rate of the horizontally layered EGS is 6.63% higher than that of the double vertical well EGS and is thus more economical. Finally, parametric analysis was performed to investigate the influence of the controllable parameters on heat recovery for the horizontally layered EGS. The heat power output and heat extraction ratio are proportional to the pressure difference and well spacing and inversely proportional to the injection fluid temperature. The thermal power output is most greatly influenced by the pressure difference, followed by the well spacing and injection fluid temperature. The effects of the pressure difference and well spacing on the heat recovery rate are almost the same, and the injection fluid temperature has no effect.

Accurately assessing the impact of groundwater exploitation on land subsidence can provide scientific support for decision-makers. This article establishes a groundwater–subsidence model in a typical area using the land subsidence characteristics of Tongzhou, China, and subsequently classifies a land subsidence early warning zone based on the land subsidence rate. Results show that land subsidence occurred throughout the whole Tongzhou District. The land subsidence that developed to the west of Liuzhuang, Tongzhou city and Taihu was the most serious The maximum annual subsidence rate reached 120 mm a−1 under the current groundwater extraction conditions, and the early warning level for land subsidence reached its highest level. If the pumping of groundwater was reduced by 50 % in the second and the fourth aquifers and by 60 % in the third aquifer, the land subsidence early warning level would be largely reduced and would meet the requirements for land subsidence control.

Objective This study aimed to evaluate the overall effects of hormone therapy (HT) on muscle strength in postmenopausal women through a systematic review and meta-analysis. Methods PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials were systematically searched from the inception dates to August 2019. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that compared the effects of HT with either no therapy or placebo on muscle strength in postmenopausal women were eligible. The quality of studies was assessed using the Cochrane risk of bias tool. Measurements of changes in muscle strength compared to baseline were extracted for pooled analysis. The effect size was calculated as standardized mean differences using a random effects model. Results We identified nine studies with a combined population of 2,476 postmenopausal women. The studies included were assessed to be of good quality overall. The results showed that HT was not associated with muscle strength gain in postmenopausal women (standardized mean difference = 0.352; 95% confidence interval, -0.098 to 0.803; P = 0.125; I = 95.3%). The changes in muscle strength in women receiving HT were not significant. The results were unchanged when stratified by treatment type, muscle group, and treatment duration. Conclusions The use of HT was not associated with the improvement of muscle strength in postmenopausal women. This finding suggested that HT might not improve muscle strength or that the effect size was too small to identify significant therapeutic efficacy.

The increasing scale of Structure-from-Motion is fundamentally limited by the conventional optimization framework for the all-in-one global bundle adjustment. In this paper, we propose a distributed approach to coping with this global bundle adjustment for very large scale Structure-from-Motion computation. First, we derive the distributed formulation from the classical optimization algorithm ADMM, Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers, based on the global camera consensus. Then, we analyze the conditions under which the convergence of this distributed optimization would be guaranteed. In particular, we adopt over-relaxation and self-adaption schemes to improve the convergence rate. After that, we propose to split the large scale camera-point visibility graph in order to reduce the communication overheads of the distributed computing. The experiments on both public large scale SfM data-sets and our very large scale aerial photo sets demonstrate that the proposed distributed method clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art method in efficiency and accuracy.

Yue Sun,1 Dai-Feng Li,2 Yin-Li Zhang,1 Xu Liang,1 Tian-Fang Li1 1Department of Rheumatology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, 450000, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Orthopaedics, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, 450000, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Tian-Fang Li, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, 450000, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86-15713865716, Email tfli@zzu.edu.cnPurpose: To determine the characteristics and prognoses of dermatomyositis (DM) by comparing the difference in initial symptoms.Patients and Methods: A retrospective analysis was performed on the patients diagnosed with DM from 1 January 2019 to 1 January 2021. Based on the firstly presented symptoms, patients were divided into five groups, namely rash group, muscle weakness group, arthritis group, respiratory symptom group and atypical symptom group. Clinical and laboratory data were recorded. All patients were followed up until 31 May 2021.Results: In total 136 DM patients, rash (40%) was the most common initial symptom, followed by respiratory symptoms (22%), arthritis (20%), muscle weakness (10%) and atypical symptoms (8%). Rash group and atypical group had a higher positive rate of anti-TIF1γ antibodies than arthritis group and respiratory symptom group (P < 0.05). Respiratory symptom and arthritis groups had a higher positive rate of anti-Ro52 antibodies than rash and muscle weakness groups (P < 0.05). Respiratory group had a higher incidence of ILD than rash and atypical groups. The FVC and DLCO in respiratory group were significantly lower than rash group, arthritis group and atypical group (P < 0.05). The survival rate of rash group was significantly higher than muscle weakness group and arthritis group (P < 0.05).Conclusion: DM patients with different initial manifestations had different myositis antibodies and prognoses.Keywords: initial symptom, interstitial lung disease, ILD, rash, myositis specific antibody, MSA

In this article, we present a tunable GaSb-based blazed grating external cavity laser (BG-ECL) with high spectral purity and high output power single-mode operation around 1940nm. The drastic increase in spectral selectivity and optical power results from the employment of a single-transverse-mode operating narrow ridge waveguide laser diode with an optimized AR coating on the front facet. The stable fundamental spatial mode output beam from the laser diode enables efficient collimation and high coupling efficiency with the blazed grating, leading to stronger wavelength-selective feedback. The AR coating with proper low reflectivity on the straight waveguide effectively suppresses the internal cavity mode lasing without causing extra optical loss. As a result, the BG-ECL device exhibits excellent comprehensive performance with a side mode suppression ratio (SMSR) over 50 dB with optical power exceeding 30 mW within a 70 nm tuning range. A maximum SMSR of 56.26 dB with 35.12 mW output power was observed in continuous-wave operation. By increasing the working temperature of the diode laser, the tuning range can be further extended to over 100 nm without noticeable degradation in spectral and output power performance.

Mutations in KRAS (codon 12/13), NRAS, BRAFV600E, and amplification of ERBB2 and MET account for 70–80% of anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) monoclonal antibody primary resistance. However, the list of anti-EGFR monoclonal antibody primary resistance biomarkers is still incomplete. Herein, we report a case of wild-type RAS/BRAF metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC) with resistance to anti-EGFR monoclonal antibody and chemotherapy. Initially, mutation detection in postoperative tumor tissue by using amplification-refractory mutation system polymerase chain reaction indicated wild-type RAS/BRAF without point mutations, insertion deletions, or fusion mutations. Therefore, we recommended combined therapy of cetuximab and FOLFIRI after failure of platinum-based adjuvant chemotherapy, but the disease continued to progress. Next generation sequencing analysis of the postoperative tumor tissue revealed that KRAS copy number was increased and detected SMAD4, RNF43, and PREX2 mutations. This is the first case of advanced CRC with increased copy numbers of KRAS resistant to cetuximab and chemotherapy, which results in poor patient survival, and other mutated genes may be associated with the outcomes. Our findings indicate KRAS copy number alterations should also be examined, especially with anti-EGFR monoclonal antibody therapy in CRC, since it may be related with the primary resistance to these drugs.

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic, debilitating joint disease characterized by progressive destruction of articular cartilage. For a long time, OA has been considered as a degenerative disease, while recent observations indicate the mechanisms responsible for the pathogenesis of OA are multifaceted. Aging is a key factor in its development. Current treatments are palliative and no disease modifying anti-osteoarthritis drugs (DMOADs) are available. In addition to articular cartilage degradation, cellular senescence, synovial inflammation, and epigenetic alterations may all have a role in its formation. Accumulating data demonstrate a clear relationship between the senescence of articular chondrocytes and OA formation and progression. Inhibition of cell senescence may help identify new agents with the properties of DMOADs. Several anti-cellular senescence strategies have been proposed and these include sirtuin-activating compounds (STACs), senolytics, and senomorphics drugs. These agents may selectively remove senescent cells or ameliorate their harmful effects. The results from preclinical experiments and clinical trials are inspiring. However, more studies are warranted to confirm their efficacy, safety profiles and adverse effects of these agents.

Background Approximately 5.0–24.2% of colorectal cancers (CRCs) have inactivating mutations in SMAD4, making it one of the frequently mutated genes in CRC. We thus carried out a comprehensive system review and meta-analysis investigating the prognostic significance and clinicopathological features of SMAD4 gene mutation in CRC patients. Methods A detailed literature search was conducted in PubMed, Web of Science and Embase databases to study the relationship between SMAD4 mutations and the demographic and clinicopathological characteristics in CRC patients. The hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) were used to evaluate the effect of SMAD4 mutations on overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS)/recurrence-free survival (RFS). Results Ten studies enrolling 4394 patients were eligible for inclusion. Data on OS were available from 5 studies and data on PFS/RFS were available from 3 studies. Comparing SMAD4-mutated CRC patients with SMAD4 wild-type CRC patients, the summary HR for OS was 1.46 (95% CI 1.28–1.67, P = 0.001), the summary HR for PFS/RFS was 1.59 (95% CI 1.14–2.22, P = 0.006). In terms of clinicopathology parameters, 9 studies have data that can be extracted, SMAD4 mutations were associated with tumor location (odds ratio [OR] = 1.15, colon/rectum, 95% CI 1.01–1.31, P = 0.042), TNM stage (OR = 1.28, stage IV/I–III, 95% CI 1.03–1.58, P = 0.025), lymph node metastasis (OR = 1.42, N1 + N2/N0, 95% CI 1.20–1.67, P P P = 0.001). No connection was found with age, gender, tumor grade, microsatellite instability status and b-viral oncogene homolog B1 mutation status. Besides, publication bias was not observed in any study. Conclusions This meta-analysis suggests that SMAD4 mutation was associated with OS, PFS/RFS, and clinicopathological parameters, including tumor site, disease stage, RAS status, lymph node metastasis and mucinous differentiation. Our meta-analysis indicated that SMAD4 mutations could predict the poor prognosis and aggressive clinicopathological characteristics of CRC. More large-sample cohort studies are needed to confirm this conclusion. Since SMAD4 mutations are closely related to RAS mutations, their relationship warrants further investigation.

Osteoporosis (OP) is a chronic bone disease characterized by aberrant microstructure and macrostructure of bone, leading to reduced bone mass and increased risk of fragile fractures. Anti-resorptive drugs, especially, bisphosphonates, are currently the treatment of choice in most developing countries. However, they do have limitations and adverse effects, which, to some extent, helped the development of anabolic drugs such as teriparatide and romosozumab. In patients with high or very high risk for fracture, sequential or combined therapies may be considered with the initial drugs being anabolic agents. Great endeavors have been made to find next generation drugs with maximal efficacy and minimal toxicity, and improved understanding of the role of different signaling pathways and their crosstalk in the pathogenesis of OP may help achieve this goal. Our review focused on recent progress with regards to the drug development by modification of Wnt pathway, while other pathways/molecules were also discussed briefly. In addition, new observations made in recent years in bone biology were summarized and discussed for the treatment of OP.

Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) is one of the most common diseases in the urinary system of elderly men. Pao extract is an herbal preparation of the bark of the Amazon rainforest tree Pao Pereira (Geissospermum vellosii), which was reported to inhibit prostate cancer cell proliferation. Herein we investigated the therapeutic potential of Pao extract against BPH development in a testosterone-induced BPH rat model. The administration of testosterone induced the prostate enlargement, compared with the sham operated group with vehicle treatment. The BPH/Pao group showed reduced prostate weight comparable with BPH/finasteride group. Notably, Pao treatment did not significantly reduce body weights and sperm number of rats, compared with the control group. Furthermore, Pao extract treatment reduced the proliferative index in prostate glands and testosterone-induced expression levels of AR, as well as androgen-associated proteins such as SRD5A1 and PSA. Moreover, Pao extract and its active component, flavopereirine, induced cytotoxicity on human prostate epithelial RWPE-1 cells in a dose- and time- dependent manner with G2/M arrest. Consistently, Pao extract and flavopereirine suppressed the expression levels of SRD5A1, AR and PSA, respectively. Together, these data demonstrated that Pao extract suppresses testosterone-induced BPH development through inhibiting AR activity and expression, and suggested that Pao extract may be a promising and relative safe agent for BPH.

PurposeCurrent models of transaction credit in the e-commerce network face many problems, such as the one-sided measurement, low accuracy and insufficient anti-aggression solutions. This paper aims to address these problems by studying the transaction credit problem in the crowd transaction network.Design/methodology/approachThis study divides the transaction credit into two parts, direct transaction credit and recommended transaction credit, and it proposes a model based on the crowd transaction network. The direct transaction credit comprehensively includes various factors influencing the transaction credit, including transaction evaluation, transaction time, transaction status, transaction amount and transaction times. The recommendation transaction credit introduces two types of recommendation nodes and constructs the recommendation credibility for each type. This paper also proposes a “buyer + circle of friends” method to store and update the transaction credit data.FindingsThe simulation results show that this model is superior with high accuracy and anti-aggression.Originality/valueThe direct transaction credit improves the accuracy of the transaction credit data. The recommendation transaction credit strengthens the anti-aggression of the transaction credit data. In addition, the “buyer + circle of friends” method fully uses the computing of the storage ability of the internet, and it also solves the failure problem of using a single node.

Significant progresses have been made in adoptive cell therapy with CAR-T cells for cancers, especially for hematological malignancies. However, the treatment of solid tumors still poses a tremendous challenge and remains an unmet medical need. Several factors are held responsible for the inadequate responses: tumor heterogeneity, inefficient homing of T cells to tumor tissues, immunosuppressive microenvironment and the shortage of specific antigens shortage. Mesothelin is a cell-surface glycoprotein highly expressed in many types of solid tumors. As such, it has attracted much attention as a molecular target in cancer immunotherapy. Here, we delineate the barriers imposed by solid tumors on CARs, outline the rationale of mesothelin as a target for immunotherapy, summarize the preclinical and clinical results of mesothelin-targeted therapies, and extrapolate the expected results of CAR-T cells directed against mesothelin for solid tumors.

Context: Zukamu granule, a traditional Chinese medicine, has shown clinical treatment efficacy. However, the pharmacodynamic effects and possible anti-inflammatory mechanisms of zukamu are still unclear. Objective: To investigate the analgesic and anti-inflammatory effects and possible mechanisms of zukamu granules on acute lung injury. Materials and methods: Kunming mice and Sprague Dawley rats were gavaged with zukamu (1.35, 2.7 and 5.4 g/kg, respectively) or ganmaoling (GMLG; 2.7 g/kg) once a day for 7 d. Dexamethasone treatment (5 mg/kg) were administered only on the last day. Analgesic effects were evaluated through the hot plate test and acetic acid writhing test. The expression of cytokines and proteins was measured in serum and lung tissues to elucidate the efficacy of zukamu against lung injury. Results: Significant analgesic effects were observed at 30 min after zukamu administration at medium and high doses (p 0.05). Zukamu treatment at all doses notably reduced the lung wet-to-dry (W/D) ratios compared to that of model rats (p

BackgroundBehçet’s syndrome (BS) is an inflammatory vessel disease characterized by recurrent oral and genital ulcers. It is a rare disorder that affects blood vessels throughout the body. It can affect any bodily system, including the skin, joints and cardiovascular, respiratory, central nervous and degestive systems. But cerebral infarction related to cerebral artery, intracardiac thrombosis (ICT) and inflammatory pseudotumor (IPT) are complications hard to see. And there is no effective therapy in clinic.Case presentationWe report the case of a 17-year-old patient with a two-month history of recurrent hyperpyrexia without obvious infection symptoms. He had a medical history of cerebral infarction ten months ago. Antinuclear antibody (ANA), antiphospholipid antibodies, parasite antibodies and antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA) were all negative, consequently. Echocardiography demonstrates heterogeneous echoes in the right ventricle and apex. He was suspected to have cardiac myxomas and infective endocarditis and underwent thoracotomy afterwards. Histological examinations showed the specimen is inflammatory mass of vascular origin and intracardiac thrombus (ICT). However, the hyperpyrexia and intracardiac masses relapsed in two months. The antibiotic treatment failed to control the temperature and he was diagnosed as BS and treated with prednisone, aspirin and oral cyclophosphamide. Since then, the body temperature turned to normal and the size of intracardiac mass maintained stable. Conclusion BS should be considered as a causative factor in young man with stroke, intracardiac masses and hyperpyrexia. Glucocorticoid and immunosuppressive agents may be effective for IPT and ICT in patient with BS.

Background Severe thrombocytopenia (TP) is a common manifestation of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) that increases the risk of accruing damage and mortality. This study aimed to describe the demographic features, clinical characteristics, laboratory findings and outcomes of a large series of treatment-naïve SLE patients with severe TP and explore the factors influencing prognosis in patients with SLE-associated TP. Methods The study enrolled treatment-naïve SLE patients complicated with severe TP who were older than 14 years old and admitted to our hospital between November 2010 and November 2018. Demographic, clinical and laboratory data were collected retrospectively between October 2019 and February 2020. Results TP occurred in 31.83% of SLE patients, of whom 37.80% had severe TP. 162 treatment-naïve SLE patients complicated with severe TP were included in the analysis, including 17 males. The clinical and laboratory features are shown in Table 1–2. The treatment responses are displayed in Table 3–4, and the parallel program model is shown in Fig. 1. Multivariate analysis of the risk factors is shown in Table 5. Conclusions In patients with SLE-associated TP, male and older age predicted the lack of a response, serositis predicted the lack of a complete response, and anti-Sm antibodies predicted a response in week 1. Advanced age predicted the lack of a complete response at week 4, and anti-nRNP antibodies and anti-SSB antibodies predicted a complete response. Advanced age, myositis and anti-Ro antibodies predicted the lack of a response at week 24, and leukocytopenia predicted the lack of a complete response. Pulmonary arterial hypertension was predictive of serious infections. Myositis and leukopenia were predictive of mortality. Advanced age and mucocutaneous hemorrhage predicted the lack of a low-dose glucocorticoid complete response (LDG-CR), while anti-nRNP antibodies were predictive of LDG-CR.

Background: Multiple primary malignant tumors are two or more malignancies in an individual without any relationship between the neoplasms. In recent years, increasing number of cases have been reported. However, Synchronous double primary gastric cancer and pancreatic acinar cell carcinoma are relatively rare to be reported. Further, most pancreatic tumors are consistent with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas, and other histologies are rare. We present the first case of synchronous pancreatic acinar cell adenocarcinoma and gastric adenocarcinoma.Case presentation: A 69-year-old man came to our department with a history of vomiting, epigastric pain, and weight loss. Imaging revealed space-occupying lesions in the stomach and the tail of the pancreas, respectively. The patient underwent laparoscopic radical gastrectomy and pancreatectomy simultaneously. The pathologies of surgical specimens were completely different: the resected gastric specimen was a moderate to poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma, whereas the pancreatic tumor was consistent with acinar cell carcinoma. The patient was treated with six cycles of oxaliplatin and S-1 chemotherapy. As of March 2021, the patient was healthy without any recurrence or metastasis. After reviewing lots of literatures on simultaneous pancreatic and gastric cancers at home and abroad, we discuss the clinical characteristics of these rare synchronous double cancers. Most of the cases had undergone surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy, and all of the cases were pathologically confirmed by postoperative specimen. Conclusions: Synchronous pancreatic acinar cell and gastric adenocarcinoma can occur and should be considered when tumors are found in these organs.

While the COVID-19 pandemic is hammering trade around the world, China and ASEAN have managed to buck the trend with a 5% growth this year, and ASEAN has become China's largest trading partner. International road transport plays an important role in the circulation of goods and people, contributing to the economic growth and trade facilitation in the region. This paper analyzes the international road transport situation in China-ASEAN Area, combs the problems it faced, draws lessons from the EU, and makes suggestions (i.e., strengthen infrastructure construction, expand the scope of international road transport, deepen transportation cooperation among countries, speed up the establishment of coordination mechanism, establish emergency transportation security system) for better China-ASEAN economic and trade cooperation.

Due to COVID-19, China closed most of the passenger transport corridors and only kept about 30 ports to carry out necessary cargo transportation in 2020, so that international road transportation was seriously affected, which had negative impact on economic development and trade facilitation. This paper analyzed the impact of the spread of the virus on international road transport and the exposed problems by investigations, learned from the experience of EU and put forward relevant measures and suggestions (i.e., strengthen epidemic prevention measures to ensure the safety of international road transportation, ensure international road transport services during the epidemic, and promote regional international road transport integration) for the development of international road transport in order to eliminate negative effects on economy and trade while prevent the epidemic at the same time.

Mid-infrared spectral region (2-4 μm) is acquiring significant attention due to the presence of various enabling applications in the field of remote gas detection, environmental pollution detection applications. Tm:YAP is an important crystal materials for diode-pumped laser emission of 2μm wavelength. We report a room-temperature diode pumped Tm:YAP thin disk laser. The maximum output power was 3.5 W at wavelength of 1940 nm.

An experimental investigation for the polarization analysis of the high power GaSb-based semiconductor laser diodes emitting at 2.1μm in terms of measuring Stokes parameters has been exploited and adopted, which gives further insight into understanding, manipulating and applying the polarization properties of the laser diode. Results of output performance and polarization behavior of the laser are presented in the paper. The average linear polarization of the laser diode reaches 97.72% with output power exceeding 1W at 3.5A under CW operation at 20℃, which demonstrates the dominant position of linear polarization light of the output beam. Highly linear-polarized properties could not only enhance the performance of high power GaSb-based laser diodes in traditional applications in laser processing and beam combing, but also open new application fields such as parametric convention and coherent detection.

We report on successful fabrication of GaSb-based type-I quantum well distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) lasers emitting around 2.3μm. Second-order Bragg gratings of chromium were patterned by electron beam lithography. For 1.5-mm-long laser diode, single mode continuous-wave operation with output power of 10mW is obtained. The devices show a stable single mode operation with high side mode suppression ratio.

Learning-based stereo matching has recently achieved promising results, yet still suffers difficulties in establishing reliable matches in weakly matchable regions that are textureless, non-Lambertian, or occluded. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a stereo matching network that considers pixel-wise matchability. Specifically, the network jointly regresses disparity and matchability maps from 3D probability volume through expectation and entropy operations. Next, a learned attenuation is applied as the robust loss function to alleviate the influence of weakly matchable pixels in the training. Finally, a matchability-aware disparity refinement is introduced to improve the depth inference in weakly matchable regions. The proposed deep stereo matchability (DSM) framework can improve the matching result or accelerate the computation while still guaranteeing the quality. Moreover, the DSM framework is portable to many recent stereo networks. Extensive experiments are conducted on Scene Flow and KITTI stereo datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework over the state-of-the-art learning-based stereo methods., Accepted to ICPR 2020

Food safety traceability is an important method used to guarantee food safety, but the traditional data center-based food safety traceability system is not of strong data security. A blockchain-based food safety traceability system was constructed in this study and divided into four layers using a hyperledger architecture. It is verified through a test that the traceability system with blockchain technology can effectively prevent nodes from tampering data, so the data becomes safer and more credible.

Among researches on parameter extraction in sheep body measurements, wool is one of the important influence factors causing sheep body measurement errors. Wool images were analyzed in this study using ridge regression algorithm, KNN algorithm, and SVM to discriminate wool length. The final body measurement parameters were processed according to the discrimination results in order to reduce the measurement errors caused by non-uniform wool length.

Context. Hanchuan Zupa granule (HCZP), as a Chinese traditional medicine, is used to treat asthma. Objective. To investigate the molecular mechanisms of HCZP treatment of asthma. Materials and Methods. Thirty Sprague Dawley (SD) rats were divided into normal, asthma, and HCZP groups (n = 10). The asthma model was sensitized by 1 mg ovalbumin (OVA)/aluminum hydroxide Al(OH)3mixture and then challenged with 1% aerosolized OVA for four weeks. Rats in the HCZP group received 10.08 g/kg/d HCZP for four weeks during OVA challenge. Then, lung tissues of rats in each group were collected for RNA sequencing. Moreover, the expression level of some core genes was detected by using western blotting and immunohistochemistry. Results. Inflammatory cell infiltration and pathological damage of the lungs improved in the HCZP group. Compared with the asthma group (0.049 ± 0.002 mm2/mm; 0.036 ± 0.006 mm2/mm; and 0.014 ± 0.001 mm2/mm), total wall thickness (0.042 ± 0.001 mm2/mm), inner wall thickness (0.013 ± 0.001 mm2/mm), and smooth muscle layer thickness (0.012 ± 0.001 mm2/mm) significantly decreased in the HCZP group. Bioinformatics analysis showed that hub genes such as bradykinin receptor B2 (Bdkrb2) and CD4 molecule (Cd4) had different expression patterns between model and HCZP groups. Two transcription factors, forkhead box Q1 (Foxq1) and nuclear factor of activated T cells 2 (Nfatc2), served important regulatory roles in asthma. Compared with the model group, Bdkrb2 protein expression increased and Nfatc2 protein expression decreased in the HCZP group. Discussion and Conclusion. HCZP could alleviate asthma via regulating the expression of several hub genes, which might serve as therapeutic targets for asthma. However, the mechanism of these genes will be studied in the future.

25 years after the first Berlin Workshop on Developmental Toxicity this 10th Berlin Workshop aimed to bring together international experts from authorities, academia and industry to consider scientific, methodologic and regulatory aspects in risk assessment of developmental toxicity and to debate alternative strategies in testing developmental effects in the future. Proposals for improvement of the categorization of developmental effects were discussed as well as the update of the DevTox database as valuable tool for harmonization. The development of adverse outcome pathways relevant to developmental neurotoxicity (DNT) was debated as a fundamental improvement to guide the screening and testing for DNT using alternatives to animal methods. A further focus was the implementation of an in vitro mechanism-based battery, which can support various regulatory applications associated with the assessment of chemicals and mixtures. More interdisciplinary and translation research should be initiated to accelerate the development of new technologies to test developmental toxicity. Technologies in the pipeline are (i) high throughput imaging techniques, (ii) models for DNT screening tests, (iii) use of computer tomography for assessment of thoracolumbar supernumerary ribs in animal models, and (iv) 3D biofabrication of bone development and regeneration tissue models. In addition, increased collaboration with the medical community was suggested to improve the relevance of test results to humans and identify more clinically relevant endpoints. Finally, the participants agreed that this conference facilitated better understanding innovative approaches that can be useful for the identification of developmental health risks due to exposure to chemical substances.

The etiology of subacute combined degeneration (SCD) of the spinal cord is closely associated with vitamin B12 (VitB12) deficiency. The clinical manifestations of SCD are complex and vary substantially. Due to some SCD patients with atypical manifestations and concomitant autoimmune disorders, the probability of misdiagnosis and missed diagnosis is still relatively high in the early stage. We report the cases of two patients who were missed or misdiagnosed at another hospital because of the normal initial VitB12 level and partial overlap of clinical manifestations, finally diagnosed as SCD with atypical manifestations and concomitant autoimmune disorders, pharyngeal-cervical-brachial Guillain-Barre syndrome in Case 1 and SCD with autoimmune thyroiditis in Case 2. After undergoing corresponding treatment, death was reported in Case 1 and improvement in Case 2. Analysis of the clinical manifestations and investigation of the underlying pathogenesis in such patients could help improve the rate of early diagnosis and allow timely treatment of SCD, thereby preventing disease progression and poor clinical outcomes.

Objectives The triggers of relapsing polychondritis (RPC) are not fully characterized. This study was performed to explore the association between mechanical injuries and RPC.Methods The history of mechanical injuries of 127 RPC patients was reviewed and confirmed. The characteristics and survivals of patients with mechanical injuries were analyzed. Results Fifty-four patients (42.5%) had 63 mechanical injuries, among which 17 were cartilage-related. Thirty mechanical injuries in 28 patients occurred in the preceding one year before disease onset. Patients with mechanical injuries(n=54) had a higher proportion of female gender (59.3% vs 38.4%, P=0.002) and similar features compared to those without injuries(n=73), regarding clinical manifestations and mortality rate. Among 54 patients with mechanical injuries, patients with cartilage related injury(n=17) had a significantly higher rate of tracheobronchial chondritis (64.7% vs 27%, P= 0.008), a significantly lower rate of auricular chondritis (35.3% vs 67.6%, P=0.026) and a relatively higher mortality rate(29.4% vs 8.1%, P=0.041) compared with those with non-cartilage related injury(n=37).Conclusion Our findings suggest that both cartilage-related and non-cartilage related injury may be triggers of RPC and patients with cartilage related injury seem to be more severe than those without.

Objective Herbal medicine is an important therapeutic option for benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), a common disease in older men that can seriously affect their quality of life. Currently, it is crucial to develop agents with strong efficacy and few side effects. Herein we investigated the effects of the extract of Rauwolfia vomitoria, a shrub grown in West Africa, on BPH. Methods Rats with testosterone-induced BPH were treated with R. vomitoria. Prostates were histologically analyzed by Hematoxylin and eosin staining. Proliferation index and the expression levels of androgen receptor and its associated proteins were quantified through immunohistochemistry and immunoblotting. Androgen receptor target genes were examined by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction. The sperm count and body weight of rats were also measured. Results The oral administration of R. vomitoria extract significantly reduced the prostate weight and prostate weight index in BPH rats, supported by the decreased thickness of the prostate epithelial layer and increased lumen size. Similar effects were observed in the BPH rats treated with the reference drug, finasteride. R. vomitoria extract significantly reduced the testosterone-induced proliferation markers, including proliferating cell nuclear antigen and cyclin D1, in the prostate glands of BPH rats; it also reduced levels of androgen receptor, its associated protein steroid 5α-reductase 1 and its downstream target genes (FK506-binding protein 5 and matrix metalloproteinase 2). Notably, compared with the finasteride group, R. vomitoria extract did not significantly reduce sperm count. Conclusion R. vomitoria suppresses testosterone-induced BPH development. Due to its milder side effects, R. vomitoria could be a promising therapeutic agent for BPH.

Primary Sjögren’s syndrome (pSS) is a chronic, systemic autoimmune disease characterized by dryness of the eyes and mouth. The histological feature is mononuclear cell infiltration in exocrine glands, primarily salivary and lachrymal glands. As the disease progresses, some other tissues and organs may be involved and extraglandular manifestations ensue. The major current treatments are palliative and empirical, and in most cases the outcomes are not satisfactory. Emerging data indicate a critical role of lymphocytes in its development and progression. While pioneering work targeting B cells has demonstrated some encouraging results, more trials are warranted to validate the safety and efficacy. In addition, modulation of T cell function with abatacept ameliorates the severity of pSS. Furthermore, clinical trials to inhibit important cytokines involved in its formation have been carried out. In this article, we summarize and compare current biological therapies in order to find new and effective treatments for pSS.

This work focuses on mitigating two limitations in the joint learning of local feature detectors and descriptors. First, the ability to estimate the local shape (scale, orientation, etc.) of feature points is often neglected during dense feature extraction, while the shape-awareness is crucial to acquire stronger geometric invariance. Second, the localization accuracy of detected keypoints is not sufficient to reliably recover camera geometry, which has become the bottleneck in tasks such as 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we present ASLFeat, with three light-weight yet effective modifications to mitigate above issues. First, we resort to deformable convolutional networks to densely estimate and apply local transformation. Second, we take advantage of the inherent feature hierarchy to restore spatial resolution and low-level details for accurate keypoint localization. Finally, we use a peakiness measurement to relate feature responses and derive more indicative detection scores. The effect of each modification is thoroughly studied, and the evaluation is extensively conducted across a variety of practical scenarios. State-of-the-art results are reported that demonstrate the superiority of our methods., Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2020, supplementary materials included, code available

In this paper, we present a joint multi-task learning framework for semantic segmentation and boundary detection. The critical component in the framework is the iterative pyramid context module (PCM), which couples two tasks and stores the shared latent semantics to interact between the two tasks. For semantic boundary detection, we propose the novel spatial gradient fusion to suppress non-semantic edges. As semantic boundary detection is the dual task of semantic segmentation, we introduce a loss function with boundary consistency constraint to improve the boundary pixel accuracy for semantic segmentation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance over state-of-the-art works, not only in semantic segmentation but also in semantic boundary detection. In particular, a mean IoU score of 81.8% on Cityscapes test set is achieved without using coarse data or any external data for semantic segmentation. For semantic boundary detection, we improve over previous state-of-the-art works by 9.9% in terms of AP and 6.8% in terms of MF(ODS).

Temporal camera relocalization estimates the pose with respect to each video frame in sequence, as opposed to one-shot relocalization which focuses on a still image. Even though the time dependency has been taken into account, current temporal relocalization methods still generally underperform the state-of-the-art one-shot approaches in terms of accuracy. In this work, we improve the temporal relocalization method by using a network architecture that incorporates Kalman filtering (KFNet) for online camera relocalization. In particular, KFNet extends the scene coordinate regression problem to the time domain in order to recursively establish 2D and 3D correspondences for the pose determination. The network architecture design and the loss formulation are based on Kalman filtering in the context of Bayesian learning. Extensive experiments on multiple relocalization benchmarks demonstrate the high accuracy of KFNet at the top of both one-shot and temporal relocalization approaches. Our codes are released at https://github.com/zlthinker/KFNet., Comment: An oral paper of CVPR 2020

In this paper, we introduce a novel network, called discriminative feature network (DFNet), to address the unsupervised video object segmentation task. To capture the inherent correlation among video frames, we learn discriminative features (D-features) from the input images that reveal feature distribution from a global perspective. The D-features are then used to establish correspondence with all features of test image under conditional random field (CRF) formulation, which is leveraged to enforce consistency between pixels. The experiments verify that DFNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin with a mean IoU score of 83.4% and ranks first on the DAVIS-2016 leaderboard while using much fewer parameters and achieving much more efficient performance in the inference phase. We further evaluate DFNet on the FBMS dataset and the video saliency dataset ViSal, reaching a new state-of-the-art. To further demonstrate the generalizability of our framework, DFNet is also applied to the image object co-segmentation task. We perform experiments on a challenging dataset PASCAL-VOC and observe the superiority of DFNet. The thorough experiments verify that DFNet is able to capture and mine the underlying relations of images and discover the common foreground objects.

CO2-enhanced coalbed methane (CO2-ECBM) can not only reduce greenhouse gas by geological storage of CO2 remarkablely, but also increase the recovery efficiency of Clean Coalbed gas. Therefore, it is regarded as a hot global topic, and is a significant approach to realizing the strategy of environment and energy of China. To better utilize coalbeds as the storage space, and to avoid the leakage of CO2 from the sealing site, coalbed and caprock in the pore-pressure limitation must be learnt, infiltrating ability and deforming modulus, etc. Because of the difficulty of underground exploration and inaccuracy of physical simulation, the numerical analysis so far is the main research technique. This paper employed sealing rods as the experimental materials according to their water swelling property, and built the swelling analogy relationship between water-injecting rod and gas-injecting coal. Furthermore, a similarly physical simulation was designed to measure the deformation and stress of coalbed–caprock system so as to provide the testing data for CO2-ECBM engineering. The results show that, based on the quantities analogy of water-swelling materials, all the data measured for the similar coalbed–caprock system are reasonable. In the caprock, a farther location from the injection well contributes a smaller deformation, and the deformation is the negative exponential function of the distance. In our experiment, coalbed strain can reach 10−4 in order of magnitudes, and therefore in the process of gas injection, the magnitude of stress change in the caprock can reach MPa. Finally, gradually upgrading the injecting pressure is a rational technology in the CO2-ECBM engineering.

BACKGROUND The goal of this study was to observe the effect of the apoptosis of Kupffer cells (KCs) selectively induced by zoledronate liposomes following the hepatic ischemia-reperfusion injury (IRI) in the rat liver transplantation model and to explore its mechanisms. MATERIAL AND METHODS The rat liver transplantation model was established using the improved Kamada method. Male Sprague Dawley rats were randomly divided into 3 groups: no liver transplantation or drug treatment (Group A); donor rats were injected with 1 mL normal saline through the tail vein for 3 continuous days before transplantation, and the donor liver was preserved in cold for 2 hours (Group B); donor rats were injected with 1 mL zoledronate liposomes (0.001 mg/mL) through the tail vein for 3 continuous days before transplantation, and the donor liver was preserved in cold for 2 hours (Group C). At 24 hours after transplantation, the receiving rats were sacrificed for sampling. RESULTS Compared with Group C and Group A, the bile secretion flow was dramatically decreased in Group B, whereas the serum liver function index [alanine aminotransferase (ALT), glutamate aminotransferase (AST), and γ-glutamyl transpeptidase (γ-GT)] was significantly increased (P

To review the evidence for benefits and harms of folate (folic acid or folinic acid) supplementation on methotrexate (MTX) treatment for rheumatoid arthritis (RA), to assess whether or not folate supplementation would reduce MTX toxicity or reduce MTX benefits, and to decide whether a higher MTX dosage is essential.We performed a sensitive search strategy and searched systematically the Medline, Embase, Web of Science and Cochrane Library databases from inception to 2 June 2016. Abstracts from major rheumatology meetings and major trial registers were also searched to retrieve all randomized controlled trials that interested us.Seven studies with 709 patients were included. No significant heterogeneity was found between these trials. For RA patients treated with MTX, those supplied with folate were less likely to have elevated transaminase (odds ratio [OR] 0.15; 95% confidence interval [95% CI] 0.10, 0.23 [p0.00001]) and gastrointestinal side-effects such as nausea and vomiting (OR 0.71; 95% CI 0.51, 0.99 [p = 0.04]). Folate appeared to promote compliance to MTX as it reduced patient withdrawal compared to placebo (OR 0.29; 95% CI 0.21, 0.42 [p0.00001]). There was no statistical difference for mouth sores between folate and placebo (OR 0.83; 95% CI 0.57, 1.22 [p = 0.35]). As the markers of disease activity in those trials were not consistent, it was impossible to decide whether folate supplementation reduced MTX efficacy. Besides, we compared high-dose folate (≥25 mg per week) and low-dose folate (≤10 mg per week) on MTX efficacy, finding no statistical difference (OR 2.07; 95% CI 0.81, 5.30 [p = 0.13]), nor on MTX toxicity (OR 1.56; 95% CI 0.80,3.04 [p = 0.19]).Folate supplementation can reduce the incidence of hepatotoxicity and gastrointestinal side-effects of MTX in patients with RA. It can also reduce patient withdrawal from MTX treatment. Although it tended to reduce mouth sores, it had no statistical significance. No significant difference was found between high-dose folate and low-dose folate on MTX efficacy or toxicity.

Genetic ablation of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) in mice is known to impair fracture healing. To determine if teriparatide (human PTH1-34) can promote healing of Cox-2-deficient fractures, we performed detailed in vivo analyses using a murine stabilized tibia fracture model. Periosteal progenitor cell proliferation as well as bony callus formation was markedly reduced in Cox-2-/- mice at day 10 post-fracture. Remarkably, intermittent PTH1-34 administration increased proliferation of periosteal progenitor cells, restored callus formation on day 7, and enhanced bone formation on days 10, 14 and 21 in Cox-2-deficient mice. PTH1-34 also increased biomechanical torsional properties at days 10 or 14 in all genotypes, consistent with enhanced bony callus formation by radiologic examinations. To determine the effects of intermittent PTH1-34 for callus remodeling, TRAP staining was performed. Intermittent PTH1-34 treatment increased the number of TRAP positive cells per total callus area on day 21 in Cox-2-/- fractures. Taken together, the present findings indicate that intermittent PTH1-34 treatment could compensate for COX-2 deficiency and improve impaired fracture healing in Cox-2-deficient mice.

This paper introduced detailed the design of intelligent system for decision-making. Firstly, the overall design of grassland degradation decision-making system of Sanjiangyuan based on neural network is carried out, including man–machine interface module, knowledge base module, neural network module and inference engine module. Secondly, the specific functions of each module are introduced. Finally, the design of neural network was introduced detailed, the entire BP neural network consists of three layers of structure. There are five nodes in the input layer, five nodes in the output layer, and six nodes in the hidden layer.

We report a GaSb-based type-I quantum well cascade diode laser emitting at nearly 2-μm wavelength. The recycling of carriers is realized by the gradient AlGaAsSb barrier and chirped GaSb/AlSb/InAs electron injector. The growth of quaternary digital alloy with a gradually changed composition by short-period superlattices is introduced in detail in this paper. And the quantum well cascade laser with 100-μm-wide, 2-mm-long ridge generates an about continuous-wave output of 0.8 W at room temperature. The characteristic temperature T 0 is estimated at above 60 K.

In biomedical studies, it is often of interest to estimate how the risk profile of an adverse event is related to the timing of an intervention. For example, in randomized controlled clinical trials of bivalent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, investigators are interested to know how miscarriage rate relates to the timing of HPV vaccination. A risk window is defined as an interval for the covariate where the risk of adverse event is elevated. Existing methods cannot make simultaneous inference on both the risk window and the magnitude of the risk. A hierarchical Bayesian logistic regression model is developed to estimate the risk window of miscarriage on the time of conception with respect to vaccination. Hierarchical priors are proposed and used in Markov Chain Monte Carlo for statistical inference. The performance of the Bayesian model and two existing methods is evaluated in simulation settings with varying risk windows and relative risks. The proposed model provides both point and interval estimates for the risk window regarding to vaccination, and captures its effect modification on miscarriage risk in pregnancy. Analysis of the vaccine trial using the proposed model shows no significant evidence of an association between the HPV vaccine and miscarriage risk. The hierarchical Bayesian model is useful in general in analyzing a randomized trial or an epidemiological study in which the effect of an agent is potentially modified by a temporal factor.