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Analysts often make visual causal inferences about possible data-generating models. However, visual analytics (VA) software tends to leave these models implicit in the mind of the analyst, which casts doubt on the statistical validity of informal visual "insights". We formally evaluate the quality of causal inferences from visualizations by adopting causal support -- a Bayesian cognition model that learns the probability of alternative causal explanations given some data -- as a normative benchmark for causal inferences. We contribute two experiments assessing how well crowdworkers can detect (1) a treatment effect and (2) a confounding relationship. We find that chart users' causal inferences tend to be insensitive to sample size such that they deviate from our normative benchmark. While interactively cross-filtering data in visualizations can improve sensitivity, on average users do not perform reliably better with common visualizations than they do with textual contingency tables. These experiments demonstrate the utility of causal support as an evaluation framework for inferences in VA and point to opportunities to make analysts' mental models more explicit in VA software.

To explore the repairing effect of platelet-rich plasma (PRP) on tendon (AT) healing, and provide evidence for PRP therapy to treat tendon-related diseases, 32 New Zealand white rabbits were selected to construct tendinopathy animal model. Leukocyte-rich Platelet-Rich Fibrin (Lr-PRP) and Leukocyte-poor Platelet-Rich Fibrin (Lp-PRP) were prepared, whose biological effects on tendon stem cells (TSCs) were explored. Rabbits were divided into control group, low, medium, and high dose groups regrading concentration of Lp-PRP. The number of fibroblasts, collagen fiber content, tubuloglomerular feedback-β1 (TGF-β1) expression, and biomechanical properties were compared at 15 and 30 days after operation. The results showed that Collagen-III (CoI-III) protein expression levels, interleukin-β (IL-β), and interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels in the Lp-PRP group were significantly higher than Lr-PRP group (P < 0.05). Fibroblasts and collagen fibers in group II and III were significantly higher versus group C 15 and 30 days after operation (P < 0.05). Fibroblasts and of collagen fibers in group III were significantly higher versus group II (P < 0.05). Expression of TGF-β1 in groups II and III was significantly higher than that in group C 15 days after operation (P < 0.05). Tensile load of AT repair site in group III was significantly higher than group C 30 days after operation (P < 0.05). Platelet plasma concentration had a certain repair effect on tendon injury and can effectively improve the quality of healing. In addition, Lp-PRP was better than Lr-PRP in tissue healing. When the concentration of Lp-PRP was 100%, the repair effect was the best.

Automatic International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding is an important task in the future of artificial intelligence healthcare. In recent years, a lot of traditional machine learning-based methods have been proposed, and they achieved good results on this task. However, these traditional machine learning-based methods for automatic ICD coding only focus on the semantic features of clinical notes and ignore the feature extraction of ICD titles that are the descriptions of ICD codes. In this paper, we propose a knowledge attention-based deep learning framework called KAICD for automatic ICD coding. KAICD makes full use of the clinic notes and the ICD titles. The semantic features of clinic notes are extracted by a multi-scale convolutional neural network. For ICD titles, we use attention-based Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) to build a knowledge database, which can offer additional information. Depending on input clinic notes, we can use the attention mechanism to obtain different knowledge vectors from the knowledge database where some ICD titles are more relevant to the input clinic notes. Last, we concatenate the knowledge vectors and the semantic features of clinic notes, and use them for the final prediction. KAICD is tested on a public dataset Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC III); it achieves micro-precision of 0.502, micro-recall of 0.428, and micro-f1 of 0.462, which outperforms other competing methods. Furthermore, the results of the ablation study show that the knowledge database of ICD titles learned by the attention-based Bi-GRU enhances the feature expression and improves the prediction performance.

The development of remote frequency transfer techniques, especially the appearance of optical clocks with unprecedented stability, has prompted geoscientists to study their applications in geodesy. Using remote frequency transfer technique, by frequency comparison of two optical clocks at two points P and Q connected by optical fibers, one can measure the signal's frequency shift between them, and the geopotential difference between them can be determined based on the gravity frequency shift equation. Given the orthometric height of P, the orthometric height of Q can be determined. Since the present stability of the optical clock has achieved 1 × 10−18 or better and comparing the frequency transfer via optical fiber provides stability at 10−19 level, the optical clock network enables determining the orthometric height at centimeter-level. This study provides a formulation to determine the height difference at one-centimeter level between two points on the ground based on the optical fiber frequency transfer technique.

Xingan Qiu,&ast; Yifan Wu,&ast; Dong Zhang, Hao Zhang, Aixi Yu, Zonghuan Li Department of Orthopedics Trauma and Microsurgery, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, 430071, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Aixi Yu; Zonghuan LiDepartment of Orthopedics Trauma and Microsurgery, Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, 430071, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86-27-67813120; +86-134 76041532Email yuaixi@whu.edu.cn; lizonghuan@whu.edu.cnBackground: Negative-pressure wound therapy (NPWT) is an effective way to promote wound healing. However, its mechanisms have not been investigated thoroughly. Growing evidence suggests that oxidative stress and Raftlin levels play important roles in wound healing. However, whether NPWT promotes wound healing through this mechanism remains unclear.Purpose: Our study focuses on the different levels of oxidative stress and antioxidant response between wounds treated by NPWT and routine dressing change. The objective of this study was to measure the differences in Raftlin levels between the two groups, which is a new biomarker related to wound healing.Methods: We divided 48 male Sprague-Dawley rats with identical full-thickness skin defects into two groups. At specific times (0, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13 days after surgery), wound tissue samples were obtained for immunohistochemistry and biochemical analysis. The expression of Raftlin and levels of oxidative stress, including malondialdehyde (MDA), superoxide dismutase (SOD), and catalase (CAT) levels were measured by biochemical analysis. Wound-healing times were also compared.Results: In the NPWT group, MDA levels were significantly decreased on days 3, 5, and 7. Furthermore, the expressions of SOD and CAT were significantly reduced on days 3 and 5. Our data also revealed that Raftlin was significantly upregulated across the whole period of wound healing. Moreover, wound healing in the NPWT group was significantly more rapid (16 days on average) than in the control group (24 days on average). On day 13 post surgery, the wound-healing percentage in the NPWT group was 91%, while that in the control group was 48%.Conclusion: NPWT may promote wound healing by upregulating Raftlin and inhibiting oxidative stress levels.Keywords: SOD, CAT, MDA, Raftlin, negative-pressure wound therapy

Prostate biopsy procedures as a gold standard for early screening of prostate cancer often suffer from multipass needle perforations to irrelevant perineal tissue, high complication risk, and time consumption. To address these challenges, this article proposes a transurethral prostate biopsy robot that can deliver a flexible biopsy needle inside the prostate from different angles and thus obtain tissue samples from multiple locations. Emphasis is on the design and validation of the transurethral prostate biopsy robot with a detailed introduction of the working principle, mechanism modeling, and function testing. Phantom experiments in kiwi fruit puncture experiments and prostate phantom puncture experiments have demonstrated their potential in clinical application. The transurethral biopsy robot features a 7-mm tubular dual-roller bending mechanism together with a compact driver mechanism. The flexible biopsy needle can bend from 16.0 $^\circ$ to 55.8 $^\circ$ with a translational stroke of 32.5 mm and an overall rotational stroke of 360 $^\circ$ , which enable coverage a volume of 142.2 mL, more extensive than that of an enlarged prostate. The average angle positioning and overall positioning error are 0.82 $^{\circ }$ and 1.2 mm, respectively. It can provide a minimum of 6.3-N puncture force. The proposed transurethral prostate biopsy procedure is a unique inside-out robotic prostate biopsy method, contributing to a safer and less invasive prostate biopsy procedure.

Planar object tracking is an important problem in vision-based robotic systems. Several benchmarks have been constructed to evaluate the tracking algorithms. However, these benchmarks are built in constrained laboratory environments and there is a lack of video sequences captured in the wild to investigate the effectiveness of trackers in practical applications. In this paper, we present a carefully designed planar object tracking benchmark containing 280 videos of 40 planar objects sampled in the natural environment. In particular, for each object, we shoot seven videos involving various challenging factors, namely scale change, rotation, perspective distortion, motion blur, occlusion, out-of-view, and unconstrained. In addition, we design a semi-manual approach to annotate the ground truth with high quality. Moreover, 22 representative algorithms are evaluated on the benchmark using two evaluation metrics. Detailed analysis of the evaluation results is also presented to provide guidance on designing algorithms working in real-world scenarios. We expect that the proposed benchmark would benefit future studies on planar object tracking.

The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of brisk walking on blood pressure (BP) in Chinese Han occupational populations to identify the appropriate volume of exercise needed for BP management. Eight‐hundred and two office staff with sedentary lifestyles were recruited to receive a prescription pedometer‐assisted brisk walking intervention for 3 months. To evaluate exercise intervention efficiency using statistical methods, the effective steps was divided as follows: 4000‐ 12 000 (Level 4) steps/day. The data of 688 participants who completed the study were analyzed. After intervention, Systolic BP (SBP) and Diastolic BP (DBP) at Levels 1–3 were significantly decreased (p

BACKGROUND Photodynamic therapy had made great progress in the treatment of acne vulgaris. However, there is no meta-analysis on the effectiveness and safety of red light therapy for acne vulgaris. OBJECTIVE To assess the efficiency and safety of red light therapy for acne vulgaris. METHODS PubMed, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, and Web of Science were retrieved to identify related studies. The outcomes were expressed as improvement in the average percentages of inflammatory acne lesions (MPRI) and non-inflammatory acne lesions (NMPRI), as well as the improvement of acne lesions respectively after treatment. RESULTS 13 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) consisting of 422 participants were included. There was no significant difference in the average number of non-inflammatory lesions (weighted mean difference (WMD = -0.527; 95% CI,-3.055~2.001; p = 0.683). Moreover, there was no statistically significant difference in the average number of inflammatory lesions (WMD =0.701; 95% CI, -0.809~2.212; p =0.363). In the subgroup analysis of the outcome changes in comedones, pustules, papules, and total lesions, it was found that red light therapy elicited no significant superiority compared with other conventional treatment methods (WMD = -1.125; 95% CI, -3.122~0.873; p = 0.270). Adverse events of the red light group were generally mild or even completely non-existent. CONCLUSION There was no statistically significant difference between red light therapy and traditional therapies in terms of efficacy. However, due to the heterogeneity of the researches and the lack of large sample size, the result of this study needs to be interpreted with caution.

Hui-Fen Chen,1 Nuo Lei,1 Yan-Min Xu,1 Li Luo,1 Xian-Long Zhang,1 Bei-Ni Lao,1 Fang Tang,2 Li-Zhe Fu,2 Xu-Sheng Liu,3 Yi-Fan Wu3 1The Second Clinical College, Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China; 2Chronic Disease Management Outpatient Clinic, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine (Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Chinese Medicine), Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China; 3Renal Division, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine (Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Chinese Medicine), Guangzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Yi-Fan Wu Email wuyifan007@gzucm.edu.cnBackground: To transfer a paper-version Chinese and Western medication adherence scale for CKD into an electronic scale, and evaluate its validity, internal consistency and clinical implementation, and assess whether the transition is feasible in clinic.Methods: We built an e-version Chinese and Western medication adherence scale based on the Wen-JuanXing platform. CKD subjects’ responses were applied to test the scale’s validity and internal consistency. We retested some of the participants two weeks later randomly. We also tested the clinical application.Results: Of the 434 recruited patients, 228 responded. In exploratory factor analysis (EFA), the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy = 0.8 and Bartlett’s approx. Chi-Square = 1340.0 (df = 105, p < 0.001). We extracted four common factors which could explain 61.47% of the variance. However, Item 15 “Have you changed a traditional Chinese medicine prescription yourself within the past month?” had factor loading = 0.3 and measure of sampling adequacy (MSA) = 0.5, meaning we could not enter it into the factor analysis. The internal consistency reliability for medication adherence was 0.9, with a Guttman split-half coefficient = 0.5 and a Spearman–Brown coefficient = 0.6. Cronbach’s α was 0.9, 0.4 and 0.5 for the knowledge, belief and behavior domains, respectively. The correlation coefficient r of the test–retest reliability was − 0.8 and was − 0.8, 0.4, − 0.3 in the knowledge, belief and behavior domains, respectively. Patients with comorbidities were more likely to respond. We detected no other significant differences in the clinical profiles between respondents and non-respondents.Conclusion: The e-version Chinese and Western medication adherence scales have undesirable construct validity and internal consistency. Thus, caution is needed in transitioning the paper-version scale into an e-version.Keywords: medication adherence, renal insufficiency, chronic, surveys and questionnaires

Being bedridden is a frequent comorbid condition that leads to a series of complications in clinical practice. The present study aimed to predict bedridden duration of hospitalized patients based on EMR at admission by machine learning. The medical data of 4345 hospitalized patients who were bedridden for at least 24 hours after admission were retrospectively collected. After preprocessing of the data, features for modeling were selected by support vector machine recursive feature elimination. Thereafter, logistic regression, support vector machine, and extreme gradient boosting algorithms were adopted to predict the bedridden duration. The feasibility and efficacy of above models were evaluated by performance indicators. Our results demonstrated that the most important features related to bedridden duration were Charlson Comorbidity Index, age, bedridden duration before admission, mobility capability, and perceptual ability. The extreme gradient boosting algorithm showed the best performance (accuracy, 0.797; area under the curve, 0.841) when compared with support vector machine (accuracy, 0.771; area under the curve, 0.803) and logistic regression (accuracy, 0.765; area under the curve, 0.809) algorithms. Meanwhile, the extreme gradient boosting algorithm had a higher sensitivity (0.856), specificity (0.650), and F1 score (0.858) than that of support vector machine algorithm (0.843, 0.589, and 0.841) and logistic regression (0.852, 0.545, and 0.839), respectively. These findings indicate that machine learning based on EMRs at admission is a feasible avenue to predict the bedridden duration. The extreme gradient boosting algorithm shows great potential for further clinical application.

Aims Infantile eczema, usually coupled with a range of hypersensitive phenotypes, has come into notice with its rising prevalence and unclear pathogenesis. Recent studies show close ties between eczema and an infant's intestinal flora. To gain a further understanding of the interactions between microbiota and eczema, we studied the breast milk flora as a new factor and present the links among breast milk flora, infant intestinal flora and infantile eczema through a cohort study in Northeast China. Methods and results Fifty-two families were recruited with either an eczema or healthy infant younger than 6 months. Analysis and predictions using amplicon sequencing of microbiota found that Bifidobacterium and Bacteroidetes were enriched in healthy and eczema infant stools, respectively, consistent with previous reports. For breast milk flora, more 'positive' bacteria such as Akkermansia were enriched in breast milk from healthy infants' mothers. Further, higher bacterial delivery efficiencies were found in pairs of breast milk flora and infants' stool flora of families with eczema infants compared with families with healthy infants. Bacteroidetes, a widely known indicator of eczema, was found delivered more in eczema pairs. Further metagenomic predictions revealed that the breast milk microbiota participated significantly less in metabolism and immune system pathways, particularly in antigen processing and presentation and in Th17 cell-related pathways. Conclusions In conclusion, as with other components of breast milk, the breast milk microbiota closely associates with infants' health via mother-infant bacterial delivery and metabolic functions. Significance and impact of the study Our research aimed to fill the gap between the eczema and breast milk flora and describe the connections among breast milk and intestinal flora and eczema.

Research question Can melatonin provide non-invasive ovarian protection against damage caused by cis-diamminedichloroplatinum (cisplatin) and preserve fertility in female cancer patients? And if so, what is the possible mechanism? Design Athymic BALB/c nude tumour-bearing female mice were used to demonstrate whether melatonin affects the antineoplastic effect when co-administrated with cisplatin. Sexually mature and newborn C57BL/6 female mice were used to evaluate the potential effects of melatonin on the ovarian follicle pool, pregnancy rate and litter number in cisplatin-treated mice. The ovaries underwent immunohistochemical, TdT (terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase)-mediated dUTP nick-end labelling (TUNEL) and gene array analysis to explore the underlying mechanism. In addition, granulosa cells were isolated to investigate the potential protective mechanism of melatonin. Results Melatonin not only enhanced the anti-cancer effect of cisplatin in tumour-bearing nude mice, but also reduced ovarian toxicity and preserved long-term fertility in cisplatin-treated C57BL/6 female mice. When co-administrated, melatonin was able to reduce the DNA damage and toxic effects on lipid peroxidation in the ovaries caused by cisplatin. Specifically, melatonin was able to largely restore lipid peroxidation in granulosa cells and thus prevent ovarian follicles from being depleted. Conclusions Melatonin has the potential to be used as a chemotherapeutic adjuvant to simultaneously improve the outcome of anti-cancer treatment and preserve ovarian function during cisplatin chemotherapy. Notably, its properties of DNA protection and antioxidant effects on follicles may benefit female cancer survivors and prevent premature ovarian failure as well as fertility loss caused by chemotherapy.

Multi-scale image decomposition (MID) is a fundamental task in computer vision and image processing that involves the transformation of an image into a hierarchical representation comprising of different levels of visual granularity from coarse structures to fine details. A well-engineered MID disentangles the image signal into meaningful components which can be used in a variety of applications such as image denoising, image compression, and object classification. Traditional MID approaches such as wavelet transforms tackle the problem through carefully designed basis functions under rigid decomposition structure assumptions. However, as the information distribution varies from one type of image content to another, rigid decomposition assumptions lead to inefficiently representation, i.e., some scales can contain little to no information. To address this issue, we present Deep Residual Transform (DRT), a data-driven MID strategy where the input signal is transformed into a hierarchy of non-linear representations at different scales, with each representation being independently learned as the representational residual of previous scales at a user-controlled detail level. As such, the proposed DRT progressively disentangles scale information from the original signal by sequentially learning residual representations. The decomposition flexibility of this approach allows for highly tailored representations cater to specific types of image content, and results in greater representational efficiency and compactness. In this study, we realize the proposed transform by leveraging a hierarchy of sequentially trained autoencoders. To explore the efficacy of the proposed DRT, we leverage two datasets comprising of very different types of image content: 1) CelebFaces and 2) Cityscapes. Experimental results show that the proposed DRT achieved highly efficient information decomposition on both datasets amid their very different visual granularity characteristics.

Ship detection is significant and full of challenges in the field of remote sensing. The widely adopted horizontal bounding box representation is not appropriate for ubiquitous oriented ship objects. Complex backgrounds, small objects, and the dilemma of labeling ship datasets are all obstacles that further limit the successful operation of traditional methods in ship detection. In this paper, we propose a multi-task rotation detector using attention module, multi-scale feature fusion and rotation pseudo-label, namely AMR-Net. AMR-Net adds Deformable Convolution Channel Attention Block (DCCAB) to suppress background noise and highlight the foreground. Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) fuses features from different scales, which is beneficial for ship detection. We present Adaptive FPN (AFPN) to determine the optimal number of prediction layers automatically, which can reduce the disturbance of high-level detection of small objects, decrease the size of the model, and adapt to different ship datasets. To enable the detector to achieve excellent performance even when using fewer labeled data, a semi-supervised pseudo-label module is designed, namely Self-Learning Rotation Pseudo-Label (SRP). SRP allows the detector to iteratively self-learn the optimal thresholds, and use the thresholds to refine high-quality rotation pseudo-labels for retraining the model. SRP is optional. If this module is selected, the detector becomes a semi-supervised detector. Extensive both supervised and semi-supervised experiments on remote sensing public datasets HRSC2016 show the state-of-the-art performance of our detector. Experiments on DOTA further illustrate the effectiveness of AMR-Net.

OBJECTIVE: To examine which factors are driving improvement in the Dialysis Facility Compare (DFC) star ratings and to test whether nonclinical facility characteristics are associated with observed longitudinal changes in the star ratings. DATA SOURCES: Data were collected from eligible patients in over 6,000 Medicare‐certified dialysis facilities from three annual star rating and individual measure updates, publicly released on DFC in October 2015, October 2016, and April 2018. STUDY DESIGN: Changes in the star rating and individual quality measures were investigated across three public data releases. Year‐to‐year changes in the star ratings were linked to facility characteristics, adjusting for baseline differences in quality measure performance. DATA COLLECTION: Data from publicly reported quality measures, including standardized mortality, hospitalization, and transfusion ratios, dialysis adequacy, type of vascular access for dialysis, and management of mineral and bone disease, were extracted from annual DFC data releases. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: The proportion of four‐ and five‐star facilities increased from 30.0% to 53.4% between October 2015 and April 2018. Quality improvement was driven by the domain of care containing the dialysis adequacy and hypercalcemia measures. Additionally, independently owned facilities and facilities belonging to smaller dialysis organizations had significantly lower odds of year‐to‐year improvement than facilities belonging to either of the two large dialysis organizations (Odds Ratio [OR]: 0.736, 95% Confidence Interval [CI]: 0.631‐0.856 and OR: 0.797, 95% CI: 0.723‐0.879, respectively). CONCLUSIONS: The percentage of four‐ and five‐star facilities has increased markedly over a three‐year time period. These changes were driven by improvement in the specific quality measures that may be most directly under the control of the dialysis facility.

The action of crossing the ball in soccer has a long history as an effective tactic for producing goals. Lately, the benefit of crossing the ball has come under question, and alternative strategies have been suggested. This paper utilizes player tracking data to explore crossing at a deeper level. First, we investigate the spatio-temporal conditions that lead to crossing. Then we introduce an intended target model that investigates crossing success. Finally, a contextual analysis is provided that assesses the benefits of crossing in various situations. The analysis is based on causal inference techniques and suggests that crossing remains an effective tactic in particular contexts.

Objectives A questionnaire which provides desirable reliability and validity has been previously developed to assess the disease awareness of diagnosed chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients. However, conventional paper questionnaires often have disadvantages, including recall bias. To substantially improve this, we therefore aimed to explore the feasibility of developing a smartphone-based electronic version (e-version) based upon its original paper version and subsequently tested its validity, reliability, and applicability. Methods A pilot study was conducted at Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Chinese Medicine in Guangzhou, China, during August 2019. The e-version had identical content to the paper version and was adapted in terms of layout and assisted functions via the Wechat-incorporated Wen-Juan-Xing platform. Eligible patients with diagnosed CKD were invited to participate and were assigned the e-version. Randomly selected respondents received a test-retest of the same e-version 2 weeks after their first completion. In some instances, psychometric properties, including validity and reliability of the e-version, were examined. In others, its clinical application was also tested, which included comparisons among the clinical profiles of patients who had/had not responded to the questionnaire as well as patients with above or below average questionnaire scores. Results Of the 225 patients screened, 217 were enrolled to participate, with a response rate of 52.5%. Desirable reliability (Cronbachα = 0.962, ICC for total scores = 0.948), while good convergent validity (Cronbachα = 0.962) and low discriminant validity (one extracted component), of the e-version were detected. Performing inter-group comparisons highlighted statistical differences in terms of higher education level (z = -2.436, P = 0.015) and earlier CKD stages (z = -1.978, P = 0.048), with these patients often preferring to respond. No significant differences were detected in the clinical profiles between respondents who obtained an above or below average questionnaire score. Conclusion The e-version is reliable but was not shown to be a valid approach. Audiences with higher education levels and less advanced disease condition may prefer to respond to the e-version. Adaptation of this e-questionnaire, from its original paper version, may not be a direct transition and meticulous modifications may be required during the transition process. Trial registration Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (ChiCTR1900024633).

Background:Tendinopathy is still a great challenge in clinical practice, and the role of platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is controversial. The influence of leukocytes on tendinopathy at an early stage has not been defined so far.Purpose:To compare the effects of leukocyte-rich PRP (Lr-PRP) and leukocyte-poor PRP (Lp-PRP) on Achilles tendinopathy when applied at an early stage.Study Design:Controlled laboratory study.Methods:A rabbit Achilles tendinopathy model was induced by a collagenase injection. A week later, treatments were applied randomly on local Achilles tendon lesions: (1) 200 μL of Lr-PRP (16 legs), (2) 200 μL of Lp-PRP (16 legs), and (3) 200 μL of saline (16 legs). At 3 and 6 weeks after the collagenase injection, outcomes were evaluated by histology, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), real-time polymerase chain reaction analysis, immunohistochemistry, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM).Results:The Lr-PRP group had a lower T2 signal intensity ( P = .0377) and smaller diameter ( P = .0193) and cross-sectional area ( P = .0194) than the Lp-PRP group on MRI. Histologically, the Lr-PRP group had better scores than the Lp-PRP group ( P = .0284 and P = .0188, respectively). Compared with the Lp-PRP group, higher gene expression and more protein synthesis of collagen I ( P = .0160 and P = .0309, respectively) and CD163 ( P < .0001 and P = .0411, respectively) were found in the Lr-PRP group. Considering TEM and biomechanical testing, the Lr-PRP group demonstrated more mature collagen fibers ( P < .0001), a larger fiber diameter ( P = .0005), a higher failure load ( P = .00417), and higher tensile stress ( P < .0001) than the Lp-PRP group.Conclusion:Lr-PRP had more beneficial effects than Lp-PRP when delivered at an early stage during tendon repair.Clinical Relevance:Here, we showed that tendinopathy influenced the curative effects of PRP in vivo. An early-stage application of Lr-PRP had more benefits for the repair of tendinopathy than Lp-PRP in a rabbit model, which will supplement guidelines of PRP treatment on tendinopathy clinically.

Tendinopathy is a great obstacle in clinical practice due to its poor regenerative capacity. The influence of different stages of tendinopathy on effects of leukocyte-rich platelet-rich plasma (Lr-PRP) has not been elucidated. The aim of this study is to investigate the optimal time point for delivery of Lr-PRP on tendinopathy. A tendinopathy model was established by local collagenase injection on the rabbit Achilles tendon. Then after collagenase induction, following treatments were applied randomly on the lesion: (a) 200 μl of Lr-PRP at 1 week (PRP-1 group), (b) 200 μl of saline at 1 week (Saline-1 group), (c) 200 μl of Lr-PRP at 4 weeks (PRP-2 group), and (d) 200 μl of saline at 4 weeks (Saline-2 group). Six weeks after collagenase induction, outcomes were assessed by magnetic resonance imaging, cytokine quantification, gene expression, histology, and transmission electron microscopy. Our results demonstrated that PRP-1 group had the least cross-sectional area and lesion percent of the involved tendon, as well as the lowest signal intensity in magnetic resonance imaging among all groups. However, the PRP-2 group showed larger cross-sectional area than saline groups. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay indicated that PRP-1 group had a higher level of interleukin-10 but lower level of interleukin-6 when compared with PRP-2 and saline groups. Meanwhile, the highest expression of collagen (Col) 1 in PRP-1 and Col 3, matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-1, and MMP-3 in PRP-2 was found. Histologically, the PRP-1 showed better general scores than PRP-2, and no significant difference was found between the PRP-2 and saline groups. For transmission electron microscopy, PRP-1 had the largest mean collagen fibril diameter, and the PRP-2 group showed even smaller mean collagen fibril diameter than saline groups. In conclusion, intratendon delivery of Lr-PRP at early stage showed beneficial effect for repair of tendinopathy but not at late stage. For translation of our results to clinical circumstances, further studies are still needed.

Novel highly sensitive chiral organic field-effect transistors (COFET) were developed by directly assembling imidazolium3,5-dimethylphenylcabamoylated-β-cyclodextrin(Im+-Ph-β-CD)and 3,5-dimethylphenylcarbamoylated-β-CD (Ph-β-CD) respectively onto the semiconductor layer as sensing units. The Im+-Ph-β-CD/COFET afforded better enantioselectivity and a lowest detection concentration of 10−18 L/mol as well as the potentiality in quantitative analysis of commercial medicines.

Compared with a flat fingerprint, the rolled fingerprint has a larger fingerprint area and can be extracted more minutiae. It has high requirements in many fields, not only in the military environment or the police field but also in many civil application fields. The challenge that has been troubled for a long time is that contact-based rolled fingerprint registration is easy to cause obvious distortion without human experts’ supervision, which has a negative impact on fingerprint recognition performance. Due to the elastic deformation of fingertips, the mosaicking gaps in the rolled fingerprint are usually visible but challenging to locate. To address these problems, we propose a novel rolled fingerprint construction algorithm called BlockRFC ( Block -based R olled F ingerprint C onstruction) in this article. BlockRFC’s core idea is to use the fingerprint image block as a processing unit for mosaicking and distortion rectification. BlockRFC is based on a real-time mosaicking framework, which makes it possible to construct a rolled fingerprint while collecting fingerprint images. One distinctive advantage of BlockRFC is that it does not require minutiae or ridge information, but fully utilizes the gray-scale information and foreground area in the fingerprint image block. In this article, we first propose a metric called Mosaicking Gap Rate (MGR), which can effectively quantify the mosaicking gaps in the rolled fingerprints. Experimental results show that the proposed method can not only effectively locate and eliminate the mosaicking gaps but also have better recognition accuracy than previous methods.

Supervised learning-based sound source localization (SSL) methods have been shown to achieve a promising localization accuracy in the past. In this paper, MTIT, SSL for indoors using Multi-Task learning and Image Translation network, an image translation-based deep neural networks (DNNs) framework for SSL is presented to predict the locations of sound sources with random positions in a continuous space. We extract and represent the spatial features of the sound signals as beam response at each direction which can indicate the chance of the source in each point of the room. We utilize the multi-task learning (MTL) based training framework. There are one encoder and two decoders in our DNN. The encoder aims to obtain a compressed representation of the input beamspectrum surfaces while the two decoders focus on two tasks in parallel. One decoder focuses on resolving the multipath caused by reverberation and the other decoder predicts the source location. Since these two decoders share the same encoder, by training these two decoders in parallel, the shared representations are refined. We comprehensively evaluate the localization performance of our method in the simulated data, measured impulse response and real recordings datasets and compare it with multiple signal classification, steered response power with phase transform, and a competing convolutional neural network approach. It turns out that MTIT can outperform all of the baseline methods in a dynamic environment and also can achieve a good generalization performance.

Climate change may substantially affect the validity of identifying eco-compensation demand. Exploring the temporal-spatial variation in eco-compensation demands and assessing the contribution of climate change are essential for improving the justice and effectiveness. Since 2000, Chinese government implemented ambitious ecological and economic policies at Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) to balance the relationship between environment protection and socio-economic development. We selected YREB to explore the driving factors of temporal-spatial variation in eco-compensation demands for two major ecosystem services, i.e. carbon storage and oxygen release. The results (1) spatially, the eco-compensation demand became aggregated in the eastern and western areas of the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB) from 2003 to 2015; (2) the climate has become more suitable for vegetation growth in the changed eastern area (CE) from 2003 to 2015, while the changed central area (CC) presents a drier trend from 2003 to 2011; (3) during the study period, the climate change became the main factors among the environment metrics to affect identifying the eco-compensation demand, specifically, compared to the period 2003–2005, the contribution of climate change on eco-compensation demands in changed central area (CC) and changed eastern area (CE), during 2006–2015, increased from 16.90% to 18.43% and from 2.72% to 11.89%, respectively. This study could help policymakers addressing reliable compensation policies for regional sustainable development and may guide researchers in providing more practical and comprehensive eco-compensation approaches in the future.

Preeclampsia is a pregnancy-specific syndrome that affects maternal and neonatal mortality. Several serum biomarkers can be used to predict preeclampsia. Among these proteins, placental protein 13 (PP13) has received progressively more interest in recent studies. The decrease in PP13 expression is one of the earliest signs for the development of preeclampsia and has shown its predictive performance for preeclampsia. In this meta-analysis, we collected 17 observational studies with 40,474 pregnant women. The overall sensitivity of PP13 to predict preeclampsia was 0.62 [95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.49–0.74], the specificity was 0.84 (95%CI = 0.81–0.86), and the diagnostic odds ratio was nine (95%CI = 5–15). The area under the curve for summary receiver operating characteristic was 0.84. We then chose the early-onset preeclampsia as a subgroup. The sensitivity of early-onset subgroup was 0.63 (95%CI = 0.58–0.76), the specificity was 0.85 (95%CI = 0.82–0.88), and the diagnostic odds ratio was 10 (95%CI = 6–18). The findings of our meta-analysis indicate that PP13 may be an effective serum biomarker for the predictive screening of preeclampsia. Nonetheless, large prospective cohort studies and randomized controlled trials are expected to uncover its application in clinical practice. The heterogeneity of the original trials may limit the clinical application of PP13.Systematic Review Registration:https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/display_record.php?RecordID=188948 The meta-analysis was registered in PROSPERO (CRD42020188948).

Background: Patients with the inguinal wound infection after arterial surgery remains clinical challenge. Sustaining lymphatic leakage have been shown as a common and potentially serious complication. However, it remains clinical challenge for surgery to deal with this tough problem. Methods: This study describes a hybrid technique of using radical debridement, lateral femoral bypass (LFB) and intra-incisional negative pressure wound therapy (iNPWT) for single-staged treatment of complex inguinal wound infection after arterial surgery (IWI-AS).Results: Between January 2017 and June 2021, 5 IWI-AS cases treated with this new method were identified. Of the patients, 3 were males and 2 were females. The average age was 49.4 years (range, 33 to 77 years). 4 cases suffered emergent operations due to the sudden bleedings. after vascular bypass reconstructions and an average of 2.2 (range:1-3) iNWPT, all cases achieved wound healing at an average duration of 4.6 weeks (range: 3-6weeks). Moreover, all cases showed no bacterial growth and grafts patency as indicated by doppler ultrasound or CT angiography postoperatively. One case did not receive bypass imaging evaluation at postoperative 12 months. Weakness of quadriceps femoris was observed in one case. Conclusion: single-staged therapy of LFB and iNPWT hybridization is a technically handy and effective method for treatment of inguinal wound infection after arterial surgery.

In this paper, the phase interferometer high precision direction finding system is designed and researched for the urgent demand of single station passive positioning system for the phase interferometer high precision direction finding. The main feature of this system is: the integration of antenna array, RF front end, data processing (phase extraction, defuzzing, fitting, error analysis) based on heterogeneous CPU and GPU, effective transmission of data packets based on DDS and the interface display. Experiments show that the system can effectively realize the high precision direction finding and the whole process analysis of the trajectory of the target. In addition, the system uses GPU to realize the high speed phase extraction of angle data, adopts DDS to realize the efficient transmission of data and greatly simplify the complicated process such as protocol construction during the transmission process, which has remarkable innovation.

Limited by the conditions and performance of ground-based optical observations, it is difficult for us to obtain a plethora of optical cross section (OCS) data for some space objects (SOs). Unevenly distributed OCS data and unclear labels will affect the performance of SOs recognition based on neural networks. Furthermore, when we need to identify a new SO or SO category using deep neural network, the trained network model may no longer be applicable. We need to retrain the network with new training data. In order to alleviate these problems and improve the generalization and training convergence speed of SOs recognition networks, a novel, to the best of our knowledge, neural network model, ARSRNet, is proposed in this paper. The ARSRNet can identify SOs and their attitude accurately using only a small quantity of training OCS data and without clear labels. And the proposed network is able to adapt to new recognition tasks. Meanwhile, we propose an AdamRprop network optimization algorithm to accelerate network training and improve recognition accuracy. Experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of ARSRNet reaches 90.60% on the test OCS dataset. Compared with mainstream network optimization algorithms, the proposed AdamRprop is more appropriate for ARSRNet and can accelerate the convergence of ARSRNet.

MotivationLong non-coding RNAs (IncRNAs) are a class of RNA molecules with more than 200 nucleotides. A growing amount of evidence reveals that subcellular localization of lncRNAs can provide valuable insights into their biological functions. Existing computational methods for predicting lncRNA subcellular localization use k-mer features to encode lncRNA sequences. However, the sequence order information is lost by using only k-mer features.ResultsWe proposed a deep learning framework, DeepLncLoc, to predict lncRNA subcellular localization. In DeepLncLoc, we introduced a new subsequence embedding method that keeps the order information of lncRNA sequences. The subsequence embedding method first divides a sequence into some consecutive subsequences, and then extracts the patterns of each subsequence, last combines these patterns to obtain a complete representation of the lncRNA sequence. After that, a text convolutional neural network is employed to learn high-level features and perform the prediction task. Compared to traditional machine learning models with k-mer features and existing predictors, DeepLncLoc achieved better performance, which shows that DeepLncLoc could effectively predict lncRNA subcellular localization. Our study not only presented a novel computational model for predicting lncRNA subcellular localization but also provided a new subsequence embedding method which is expected to be applied in other sequence-based prediction tasks.AvailabilityThe DeepLncLoc web server, source code and datasets are freely available at http://bioinformatics.csu.edu.cn/DeepLncLoc/, and https://github.com/CSUBioGroup/DeepLncLoc.Contactlimin@mail.csu.edu.cn

ObjectiveVascularized fibular bone graft is an efficient method for various segmental bone defects. The objective of this report is to introduce our experience of folded free vascularized fibular bone graft for segmental femoral bone defect.Patients and methodsClinical data collected by surgeons and Hospital Information System (HIS) system were screened respectively. Cases with segmental femoral bone defect repaired by folded free vascularized fibular bone graft were collected. Clinical data including demographic characteristics, defect size, coinfection, perioperative treatment and imaging data during follow up were all collected for analysis.ResultsTwelve patients (10 males and 2 females), aged from 6 to 58, were included in this report. The defect range was 3 to 10 cm, with an average of 6.2 cm. Three cases were complicated with infection, the others were not. Folded free vascularized fibular bone graft were harvested for the reconstruction of segmental femoral bone defect. The grafts were fixed with plates in 9 cases and external fixators in 3 cases. All grafts healed uneventfully with an average healing time of 5.2 months (range 4~8 months). Internal fixation failure occurred in one case. The follow up time ranged from 15 to 130 months (average 58.3 months).ConclusionFolded free fibula graft is one of the optional methods for segmental bone defect of femur. Through this method, patients can achieve one-time operation to reconstruct the bone defect of the affected limb.

For the sentiment analysis of barrage texts, traditional methods cannot distinguish the different meanings of the same word in a sentence in different contexts when performing feature extraction, which cannot take into account the local feature information in the text and the contextual semantic association during the training process. As a result, its classification accuracy is relatively low. To this end, this paper proposes a sentiment classification model for barrage text that combines the ALBERT pre-training language model and BiLSTM with the attention mechanism. First, use the ALBERT pre-training language model to obtain the dynamic feature representation of the barrage text, then use the BiLSTM network to extract the text context relationship features, dynamically adjust the feature weights through the attention mechanism, and then use the Softmax classifier to obtain the sentiment category of the barrage text. Experiments on the barrage text data set obtained by the crawler show that the ALBERT-ATT-BiLSTM model compares W2V-Att-CNN and W2V-Att-LSTM models with attention mechanism, the precision value has increased by 5.34% and 4.32%, the recall value has increased by 5.23% and 4.27%, and the F1 has increased by 5.27% and 4.25%. Compared with the MC-CNN-GRU model, the precision value of ALBERT -ATT -BiLSTM model is also improved by 3.61%, which is more accurate on the data set than some traditional models.

With the development of artificial intelligence technology, computer vision has gradually entered people's daily lives. In recent years, target detection as an important branch of computer vision has attracted the attention of many scholars and has made some progress. In various application scenarios with target detection and recognition, such as night, haze and other severe weather conditions, the demand and application of target detection for infrared images are becoming more and more extensive. There are obvious differences between infrared images and visible light images. Infrared images have low imaging contrast, unobvious texture features, and more noise. These physical characteristics make infrared target detection always challenging. This paper is based on the one-stage target detection algorithm YOLOv3. In order to improve the detection ability of small targets, we improve the network structure and expand the network to 4 feature scales; by introducing GIOU, the loss function is improved, and the accuracy of network detection is improved; by merging the Batch Normalization layer and the convolutional layer, the speed of network inference is speeded up. Experimental results show that compared with the original YOLOv3 network, the improved YOLOv3-4GB network has improved detection accuracy and enhanced detection capabilities for small targets; this paper deploys the improved algorithm on the embedded platform to meet the requirements of real-time detection.

Background Patients with diabetes have an increased risk of nonunion and delayed union of fractures. Macrophages have been shown as a key player in diabetic complications. However, it remains obscure how diabetic milieu affects macrophage-derived exosomes and its implications on osteogenic differentiation of BMSCs. In this study, we aim to define the impact of diabetic milieu on macrophage-derived exosomes, role of extracellular vesicles in intercellular communication with BMSCs, and subsequent effects on osteogenic differentiation and fracture repair. Results The osteogenic potential and the ability of fracture repair of exosomes derived from diabetic bone marrow-derived macrophages (dBMDM-exos) were revealed to be lower, as compared with non-diabetic bone marrow-derived macrophages (nBMDM-exos) in vitro and in vivo. Interestingly, miR-144-5p levels were sharply elevated in dBMDM-exos and it could be transferred into BMSCs to regulate bone regeneration by targeting Smad1. In addition, the adverse effects of dBMDM-exos on the osteogenic potential and the ability of fracture repair were reversed through the suppression of miR-144-5p inhibition in vitro and vivo. Conclusions The results demonstrated an important role of exosomal miR-144-5p in bone regeneration, offering insight into developing new strategy for the improvement of fracture healing in patients with diabetes mellitus. Graphic Abstract

Objective The self-reported scale is a widely used method to assess patients' medication adherence in clinical practice, but there is still a lack of medicine adherence measurement scale for patients with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). Therefore, this study aimed to develop a medication adherence measurement scale of traditional Chinese medicine and Western medicine, providing a tool for evaluating medicine adherence of CKD patients. Methods In the preliminary stage, we formed the prediction scale after three rounds Delphi method and it was filled by 20 patients, who were selected randomly. After pre-investigation and language adaption, we adjusted the prediction measurement scale which included 31 items based on Knowledge-Attitude-Belief Theory. Then, 222 CKD patients in Guangdong Hospital of traditional Chinese Medicine were investigated by this 31-item scale. We screened 31 items by Items analysis theory, including critical ratio, item correlation analysis, internal consistency analysis, principal component analysis and other methods. The left 26 items made up a formal scale. We collected and analyzed data of the 26-item scale and Chinese version of MGL scale, and took their scores correlation analysis as the criterion validity of the 26-item scale. At the same time, we evaluated content validity, Cronbach alpha coefficient and retest reliability of the 26-item scale. Results We developed a scale with 26 items and 5 dimensions finally. In the validation analysis, the scale had good construct validity and content validity. The Pearson relation index between respective scores of the scale and Chinese version of MGL scale was 0.426, P

Background Despite advances in the treatment of acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) with all-trans-retinoic acid (ATRA), its underlying mechanism has not been fully elucidated. The oncogenic microRNA cluster miR-17-92 modulates multiple cellular processes, including survival, proliferation, and apoptosis. However, the role of miR-17-92 and its regulation has not yet been documented for APL. Methods We analyzed miR-17-92 expression in APL samples and cell lines by qRT-PCR. The expression of c-Myc was measured by western blot. Cell differentiation was assessed by measuring the surface CD11b antigen expression by flow cytometry analysis. Results We observed that miR-17-92 was upregulated in APL compared with healthy donors. Furthermore, we demonstrated that expressions of c-Myc and miR-17-92 are markedly suppressed during ATRA-induced NB4 cell differentiation. Importantly, we also demonstrated that miR-17-92 is directly regulated by c-Myc during the granulocytic differentiation of APL cells. Finally, the overexpression of miR-17-5p blocks ATRA-induced differentiation. Conclusions We report abnormal expression of the miR-17-92 cluster in APL cells, which is responsible for the differentiation block in blast cells in APL. In addition, we identified miR-17-92 as a target gene of c-Myc during ATRA-induced granulocytic differentiation.

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Small diameter vascular grafts have been promising substitutes for bypass surgery to treat cardiovascular disease. However, no ideal product is available in the clinic. In order to design improved, next generation vascular grafts, it is essential to understand the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying tissue regeneration after vascular graft implantation. Two diverse microenvironments, circulating blood and the surrounding tissue, are involved in the regeneration process after vascular graft implantation in situ. However, their regenerative functions are not completely understood. To elucidate their roles in regeneration, we used electrospinning to fabricate four types of tubular scaffolds with a structure consisting of a microfiber layer (fiber diameter ∼ 6 μm) and a nanofiber layer (fiber diameter < 1 μm): microfiber scaffold, nanofiber scaffold, outer microfiber bilayer scaffold and inner microfiber bilayer scaffold. In the outer microfiber scaffold, cells from the surrounding tissue were allowed into the scaffold but not cells from the circulating blood while it was opposite in the inner microfiber scaffold. The processes of endothelium formation, smooth muscle cell regeneration, neo-tissue formation and vascularization of these scaffolds were analyzed with a rat left common carotid artery replacement model. Our data showed that smooth muscle cells' regeneration and vascularization were different among the four types of scaffolds. The thickest neo-tissue and α-SMA+ cell layers were detected in the microfiber scaffold group while the thinnest in the nanofiber scaffold group, and thicker neo-tissue and α-SMA+ cell layers were found in the outer microfiber bilayer scaffold group compared to the inner microfiber bilayer scaffold group. In addition, vascularization in the outer microfiber bilayer scaffold group and microfiber group was dramatically better than the inner microfiber bilayer scaffold group and the nanofiber group. Furthermore, we demonstrated that the regenerated SMCs were associated with the CD206+ macrophages in the graft wall. In all, the microfiber scaffold showed the best neo-tissue regeneration in vivo. These results indicate that the surrounding tissue contributes more to vascular regeneration than circulating blood. This finding gives a significant design clue that modulating the vascular surrounding tissue will be an alternative strategy for designing advanced and feasible small diameter vascular grafts.

Myocardial ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury could lead to severe cardiovascular ischemic disease, including myocardial infarction and contractile dysfunction. Remifentanil demonstrated protective effect on myocardial I/R injury. The underlying pathophysiological mechanism was then investigated in this study. In the current study, primary cardiomyocytes were isolated from rats, and then preconditioned with remifentanil. Rats, tail vein injected with miR-205 antagomir, were subjected to infusion of remifentanil, and then subjected to regional ischemia followed by reperfusion. The results demonstrated that cell viability of hypoxia/reoxygenation-induced cardiomyocytes was increased post remifentanil, while the apoptosis was decreased accompanied with reduced cleaved caspase-3 expression. Hypoxia/reoxygenation treatment increased miR-205 and decreased PINK1 (PTEN induced putative kinase 1) expression. However, preconditioning with remifentanil reduced miR-205 and enhanced PINK1. Moreover, over-expression of miR-205 decreased PINK1 expression and counteracted the effects of remifentanil-induced increase of cell viability and decrease of cell apoptosis in hypoxia/reoxygenation-induced cardiomyocytes. Injection with miR-205 antagomir improved remifentanil-induced decrease of infarct size and LDH (lactic acid dehydrogenase) activity in rat model with I/R injury. In conclusion, miR-205 might participate in the protective effect of remifentanil in rat myocardial I/R injury via regulation of PINK1, providing a potential target for amelioration of cardiovascular ischemic disease.

During the outbreak of the COVID-19, the shipboard spaces receive lots of attentions due to the confined space and limited air flow. This article is dedicated to design a compact and effective equipment to eliminate Covid-19 on cargo ships to ensure the safety of the crew. Due to the limited space in cargo ship, it would be better to design a light and small virus destructor with high power density. Therefore, a high frequency converter circuit is proposed. The circuit parameters and layout has been carefully considered and designed. In that case, voltage regulator with a high frequency transformer can work at relative optimal state. To further optimize the high frequency transformer, a nanocrystal toroid is used instead of traditional ferrite cores. The control system is proposed, which can help monitor the movement of people on board. If someone is going over the warehouse, then camera will send a digital signal to the core controller to change the operating voltage of the virus destructor. Also, the picture will send to database for storing and looking up in the future.

Li Lin,1 Weiming Wang,1 YiFan Wu,2 JingYuan Xie,1 Xiao Li,1 XiaoXia Pan,1 Wen Zhang,1 Jing Xu,1 YiKai Cai,1 Hong Ren,1 Nan Chen1 1Department of Nephrology, Ruijin Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 2Biomedical and Health Informatics, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USACorrespondence: Hong Ren; Nan ChenDepartment of Nephrology, Ruijin Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiaotong University, No. 197, Ruijin Er Road, Shanghai, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 21 64370045, extension 665233Fax +86 21 64456419Email renhong66@126.com; cnrj100@126.comPurpose: There is currently a lack of studies investigating long-term prognosis and the necessity of further rituximab (RTX) consolidation treatment for minimal change disease (MCD) and focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS). The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of RTX for these diseases and to investigate whether a consolidation treatment can lower risks of relapse and reinforce long-term remission.Patients and Methods: A retrospective study was conducted. The relapse and remission of 70 patients treated with 1 course of RTX treatment (4 infusions of 375 mg/m2) over a median follow-up time of 27 months (12– 60 months) were analyzed. The rates of patients that were able to achieve non-relapse for a duration of 24 months between RTX consolidation therapy and non-consolidation therapy were compared.Results: There were 67 cases (95.71%) of remission and 3 cases (4.29%) of non-remission. The average number of relapses decreased from 3.7± 2.5 times before the treatment to 0.8± 1.8 times after treatment (P < 0.001). The average avannual number of relapses decreased from 1.3± 1.2 times/year to 0.2± 0.3 times/year (P < 0.001). The results from the Cox proportional-hazards model showed that the risk of relapse in patients who received RTX non-consolidation treatment was significantly higher than those with consolidation treatment (odds ratios (OR) 20.9, 95% confidence intervals (CI) OR 5.7– 75.7, p< 0.001). The 24-month relapse-free rate was also significantly higher in patients with consolidation therapy compared with non-consolidation therapy (86.36% vs 25%, p< 0.001). No adverse events were recorded.Conclusion: RTX is highly effective in treating MCD and FSGS, and RTX consolidation therapy may be recommended to reinforce long-term remissions.Keywords: RTX, MCD, FSGS, consolidation, therapeutic effect

BackgroundInhalation of fungal spores is a strong risk factor for severe asthma and experimentally leads to development of airway mycosis and asthma-like disease in mice. However, in addition to fungal spores, humans are simultaneously exposed to other inflammatory agents such as lipopolysaccharide (LPS), with uncertain relevance to disease expression. To determine how high dose inhalation of LPS influences the expression of allergic airway disease induced by the allergenic moldAspergillus niger(A. niger).MethodsC57BL/6J mice were intranasally challenged with the viable spores ofA. nigerwith and without 1 μg of LPS over two weeks. Changes in airway hyperreactivity, airway and lung inflammatory cell recruitment, antigen-specific immunoglobulins, and histopathology were determined.ResultsIn comparison to mice challenged only withA. niger, addition of LPS (1 μg) toA. nigerabrogated airway hyperresponsiveness and strongly attenuated airway eosinophilia, PAS+ goblet cells and TH2 responses while enhancing TH1 and TH17 cell recruitment to lung. Addition of LPS resulted in more severe, diffuse lung inflammation with scattered, loosely-formed parenchymal granulomas, but failed to alter fungus-induced IgE and IgG antibodies.ConclusionsIn contrast to the strongly allergic lung phenotype induced by fungal spores alone, addition of a relatively high dose of LPS abrogates asthma-like features, replacing them with a phenotype more consistent with acute hypersensitivity pneumonitis (HP). These findings extend the already established link between airway mycosis and asthma to HP and describe a robust model for further dissecting the pathophysiology of HP.

Background: Homologous recombination repair gene mutations are associated with increased platinum-based chemosensitivity, whereas few studies have reported the predictive value of family history of cancer for breast cancer in the neoadjuvant setting. This study aimed to construct a brief and effective novel family history scoring system and explore its association with pathological complete response (pCR), survival outcomes, and safety for locally advanced breast cancer receiving platinum-based neoadjuvant chemotherapy. Methods: A total of 262 patients treated with neoadjuvant cisplatin and paclitaxel were included. Neo-Family History Score (NeoFHS) was calculated according to cancer type, age at diagnosis, kinship, and number of affected relatives. Logistic regression was performed to analyze the association between pCR and NeoFHS. Survival rates were compared by Kaplan-Meier curves, examined by log-rank test and Cox proportional hazard regressions. Results: For all patients enrolled in this study, clinical tumor stage (p=0·048), estrogen receptor status (p=0·001), progesterone receptor status (p=0·036), human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) status (p=0·013), and molecular subtype (p=0·016) were significantly related to NeoFHS. The multivariate logistic regression revealed that NeoFHS is an independent predictive factor of pCR (OR=2·262, 95% CI 1·159-4·414, p=0·017), especially in node-positive (OR=3·088, 95% CI 1·498-6·367, p=0·002), hormone receptor-positive (OR=2·645, 95% CI 1·164-6·010, p=0·020), and HER2-negative subgroups (OR=4·786, 95% CI 1·550-14·775, p=0·006). Kaplan-Meier estimates suggested that NeoFHS could serve as an independent prognostic factor for relapse-free survival in the whole group (adjusted HR=0·305, 95% CI 0·102-0·910, p=0·033) and node-positive subgroup (adjusted HR=0·317, 95% CI 0·103-0·973, p=0·045). Furthermore, alopecia (p=0·001), nausea (p=0·001), peripheral neuropathy (p=0·018), diarrhea (p=0·026), constipation (p=0·037) of any grade and leukopenia of grade 3 or greater (p=0·005) were more common in patients with higher NeoFHS. Conclusions: Our study revealed that NeoFHS is a practical and effective biomarker for predicting not only pCR and survival outcomes but also chemotherapy-induced AEs for neoadjuvant platinum-based chemotherapy for breast cancer. It may help screen candidate responders and guide safety managements in the future. Trial Registrion: SHPD001 (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02199418) and SHPD002 (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT02221999). Funding: The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by Shanghai Natural Science Foundation [grant numbers 19ZR1431100], Clinical Research Plan of Shanghai Hospital Development Center [grant numbers SHDC2020CR3003A, 16CR3065B and 12016231], Shanghai “Rising Stars of Medical Talent” Youth Development Program for Outstanding Youth Medical Talents [grant numbers 2018-15 and 2018-16], Shanghai Collaborative Innovation Center for Translational Medicine [grant number TM201908], Multidisciplinary Cross Research Foundation of Shanghai Jiao Tong University [grant numbers YG2017QN49 and ZH2018QNA42], Nurturing Fund of Renji Hospital [grant numbers PYMDT-002, PY2018-IIC-01 and PY2018-III-15], Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality [grant numbers 20DZ2201600 and 15JC1402700], and Shanghai Municipal Key Clinical Specialty Declaration of Interest: None to declare. Ethical Approval: Ethical approvals were granted for both trials by the Ethics Committee of Renji Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

BACKGROUND: In clinical practice, Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) purportedly has beneficial therapeutic effects for chronic kidney disease (CKD), which include delaying disease progression and dialysis initiation. However, there is a lack of high-quality evidence-based results to support this. Therefore, this study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of CHM combined with Western medicine in the treatment of stage 5 CKD. METHODS: This was a prospective nonrandomized controlled study. Stage 5 CKD (nondialysis) patients were recruited form 29 AAA class hospitals across China from July 2014 to April 2019. According to doctors’ advice and the patients’ wishes, patients were assigned to the CHM group (Western medicine + CHM) and the non-CHM group (Western medicine). Patient demographic data, primary disease, blood pressure, Chinese and Western medical drugs, clinical test results, and time of dialysis initiation were collected during follow-up. RESULTS: A total of 908 patients were recruited in this study, and 814 patients were finally included for further analysis, including 747 patients in the CHM group and 67 patients in the non-CHM group. 482 patients in the CHM group and 52 patients in the non-CHM group initiated dialysis. The median time of initiating dialysis was 9 (7.90, 10.10) and 3 (0.98,5.02) months in the CHM group and non-CHM group, respectively. The multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that patients in the CHM group had a significantly lower risk of dialysis [adjusted hazard ratio (aHR): 0.38; 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.28, 0.53] compared to those in the non-CHM group. After 1:2 matching, the outcomes of 160 patients were analyzed. The multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that patients in the CHM group had a significantly lower risk of dialysis (aHR: 0.32; 95% CI: 0.21, 0.48) compared to patients in the non-CHM group. Also, the Kaplan-Meier analysis demonstrated that the cumulative incidence of dialysis in the CHM group was significantly lower than that in the non-CHM group (log-rank test, P

Machine learning algorithms for building network threat detection model are regarded as effective methods. Some big network security data has 1D characteristics. And 1D CNN can deal with 1D signal data well. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a network threat detection model based on 1D CNN and shallow machine learning algorithms. Firstly, 1D CNN deep model is constructed, including input layer, convolution layer, pooling layer, full connection layer, softmax layer and output layer. Combining the layers nonlinear learning, reconstructed feature data is generated, which reduces the dimension of the features comparing with that of original data. Secondly, the reconstructed data is input into the shallow machine learning algorithms to classify the network security data and detect the abnormal behavior in the security dataset. The experimental results show that the classification performance of 1D CNN is outstanding comparing with other dimension reduction algorithms.

Purpose To study the differentially expressed protein between thyroid cancer and radioactive iodine refractory differentiated thyroid cancer (RR-DTC), which presents highly aggressive and unfavorable prognosis. Meanwhile, to search for a potential radiotherapeutic target for patients suffer from RR-DTC. Methods Totally 6 metastatic lymph nodes of RR-DTC and DTC were collected during lymph node dissection for proteomics studies. Immunohistochemical staining was performed to verify the expression of Chitinase-3-like 1 (CHI3L1) in RR-DTC and DTC tissues. Western blotting was used to detect the expression of sodium-iodine symporter (NIS), MEK, and ERK1/2 in CHI3L1 over-expression stable transfectants, control stable transfectants, and PTC-K1 cells. Results CHI3L1 was demonstrated to be significantly up-regulated in RR-DTC by immunohistochemical staining. Besides, CHI3L1 over expression would inhibit expression of sodium-iodine symporter, a key protein for iodine accumulation, by activating MEK/ERK1/2 signal pathway. Conclusion CHI3L1 might be a potential molecular target for RR-DTC due to its over expression in RR-DTC and membrane location.

Building footprint extraction in remote sensing data benefits many important applications, such as urban planning and population estimation. Recently, rapid development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and open-sourced high resolution satellite building image datasets have pushed the performance boundary further for automated building extractions. However, CNN approaches often generate imprecise building morphologies including noisy edges and round corners. In this paper, we leverage the performance of CNNs, and propose a module that uses prior knowledge of building corners to create angular and concise building polygons from CNN segmentation outputs. We describe a new transform, Relative Gradient Angle Transform (RGA Transform) that converts object contours from time vs. space to time vs. angle. We propose a new shape descriptor, Boundary Orientation Relation Set (BORS), to describe angle relationship between edges in RGA domain, such as orthogonality and parallelism. Finally, we develop an energy minimization framework that makes use of the angle relationship in BORS to straighten edges and reconstruct sharp corners, and the resulting corners create a polygon. Experimental results demonstrate that our method refines CNN output from a rounded approximation to a more clear-cut angular shape of the building footprint.

Index Rebalancing is a strategy based on the changes of constituent stocks within the index. The strategy takes long positions for the added stocks and takes short positions for the eliminated stocks. This work is motivated to implement the strategy due to the existence of arbitrage opportunity. With the aid of the China Securities 500 Index (CSI 500), the strategy has been systematically studied in this work. The strategy uses the performance of CSI 500 from Dec 2013 to Dec 2019, 13 times of rebalancing in total. This work calculates the profit and loss of the portfolio and draws the diagram to illustrate it. The volatility is also calculated to show the risk of the portfolio. Numbers of refinements are used in the work, including the adjustment of holding period, Beta hedging and money management. The research results indicate that when the holding period is 20 days, the return is the largest. Beta-hedging is significantly effective, and the use of maximum drawback and take profit can significantly reduce the probability of loss. The strategy is proved to be profitable in inefficient markets. In addition, other investment and business concerns for the strategy are also discussed, as well as the trading recommendation. This work can be helpful for better understanding and applying the strategy.

Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) might have benefits in patients with non-diabetic chronic kidney disease (CKD), but there is a lack of high-quality evidence, especially in CKD4. This study aimed to assess the efficacy and safety of Bupi Yishen Formula (BYF) vs. losartan in patients with non-diabetic CKD4. This trial was a multicenter, double-blind, double-dummy, randomized controlled trial that was carried out from 11-08-2011 to 07-20-2015. Patients were assigned (1:1) to receive either BYF or losartan for 48 weeks. The primary outcome was the change in the slope of the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) over 48 weeks. The secondary outcomes were the composite of end-stage kidney disease, death, doubling of serum creatinine, stroke, and cardiovascular events. A total of 567 patients were randomized to BYF (n = 283) or losartan (n = 284); of these, 549 (97%) patients were included in the final analysis. The BYF group had a slower renal function decline particularly prior to 12 weeks over the 48-week duration (between-group mean difference of eGFR slopes: −2.25 ml/min/1.73 m2/year, 95% confidence interval [CI]: −4.03,−0.47), and a lower risk of composite outcome of death from any cause, doubling of serum creatinine level, end-stage kidney disease (ESKD), stroke, or cardiovascular events (adjusted hazard ratio = 0.61, 95%CI: 0.44,0.85). No significant between-group differences were observed in the incidence of adverse events. We conclude that BYF might have renoprotective effects among non-diabetic patients with CKD4 in the first 12 weeks and over 48 weeks, but longer follow-up is required to evaluate the long-term effects.Clinical Trial Registration:http://www.chictr.org.cn, identifier ChiCTR-TRC-10001518.