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Aim Patients with acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF) have a high risk of developing infections while hospitalized. Nosocomial bloodstream infection (BSI) is not uncommon, particular in patients who receive invasive operation, which may have negative impact on prognosis. In this study, we aim to investigate the characteristics and short-term outcome of nosocomial BSI in patients with ACLF. Methods Sixty-three patients with ACLF and nosocomial BSI from January 2014 to December 2015 were retrospectively studied. Clinical characteristics and distribution of bacteria at the time of BSI onset and short-term mortality were collected. Results The most common etiology of ACLF was hepatitis B virus infection. Eighty-one percent of ACLF patients had other types of infections at BSI onset. Gram-negative bacteria (77.8%) were the main pathogens, among which Escherichia coli was responsible for 46.9%. Staphylococcus epidermidis was the main Gram-positive bacteria. The most prevalent multidrug resistance (MDR) bacteria was extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL)-producing E. coli. The overall 28-day mortality rate was 42.9%. Multivariate analysis found that model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) score and number of organ failures were predictors of 28-day mortality. The area under the receiver operating characteristic of the numbers of organ failures to predict 28-day mortality was higher than MELD score (0.833 vs. 0.784, 0.4099), but without significant difference. Conclusion Gram-negative bacteria were the most prevalent pathogens and ESBL-producing bacteria were responsible for most of the MDR bacteria in patients with ACLF and nosocomial BSI. Higher MELD score and multiorgan failure were associated with worse outcomes.

Objective Treatment of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) remains a challenge. It is urgent to understand the microenvironment to improve therapy and prognosis. Methods Bioinformatics methods were used to analyze transcription expression profile of AML patient samples with complete clinical information from UCSC Xena TCGA-AML datasets and validate with GEO datasets. Western blot, qPCR, RNAi and CCK8 assay were used to assay the effect of GPX1 expression on AML cell viability and the expression of genes of interest. Results Our analyses revealed that highly expressed GPX1 in AML patients links to unfavorable prognosis. GPX1 expression was positively associated with not only fraction levels of myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs), monocytes and T cell exhaustion, the expression levels of MDSC markers, MDSC-promoting CCR2 and immune inhibitory checkpoints (TIM3/Gal-9, SIRPα and VISTA), but also negatively with low fraction levels of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells. Silencing GPX1 expression reduced AML cell viability and CCR2 expression. Moreover, GPX1-targetd kinases were PKC family, SRC family, SYK and PAK1, which promote AML progression and the resistance to therapy. Furthermore, Additionally, GPX1-associated prognostic signature (GPS) is an independent risk factor with high area under curve (AUC) values of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves. High risk group based on GPS enriched not only with endocytosis which transfers mitochondria to favor AML cell survival in response to chemotherapy, but also NOTCH, WNT and TLR signaling which promote therapy resistance. Conclusion Our results revealed the significant involvement of GPX1 in AML immunosuppression via and provided a prognostic signature for AML patients.

Confining ZnO quantum dots (QDs) into a solid state matrix to form nanocomposite materials is an important mean to design nonlinear optical devices. In this paper, ZnO confined in Al2O3 matrix are synthesized by pulsed laser deposition method and rapid thermal annealing technique. The substantial oxygen vacancies are generated in the N2-annealed ZnO QDs. Magnetic measurements illustrate that the ferromagnetic nature of ZnO QDs confined in Al2O3 matrix can be due to the oxygen vacancies. The determined two-photon absorption in N2-annealed ZnO QDs is an instantaneous nonlinear process and is enhanced almost 2 times compared to that of O2-annealed ZnO QDs. The enhancement of optical nonlinearities achieved in confined ZnO QDs with substantial oxygen vacancies is important for the practical applications of ZnO nanostructures in such as optical limiting devices and all-optical switching elements.

For large-area electronic applications, the mechanism of the leakage current in oxide-semiconductor thin-film transistors (TFTs) has become a critical issue. In this work, the impact of the irradiation location on the photo-leakage current of zinc oxide (ZnO) TFTs is investigated. The photo-leakage current of the ZnO TFTs is not only dependent on the light irradiation but it is also dependent on the parasitic capacitance between the drain electrode and the floating gate metal. The photo-leakage current of the source-half irradiation TFT is larger than that of the drain-half irradiation TFT. To explain this phenomenon, the profile of the electric potential and the electron concentration is analyzed by two-dimensional device simulation. It is found that the floating gate metal plays the dominant role in the photo-leakage current. This research provides insight into TFT structure optimization and high-performance TFT process development.

The heavy-duty vehicle fleet involved in delivering water and sand makes noticeable issues of exhaust emissions and fuel consumption in the process of shale gas development. To examine the possibility of converting these heavy-duty diesel engines to run on natural gas-diesel dual-fuel, a transient engine duty cycle representing the real-world engine working conditions is necessary. In this paper, a methodology is proposed, and a target engine duty cycle comprising of 2231 seconds is developed from on-road data collected from 11 on-road sand and water hauling trucks. The similarity of inherent characteristics of the developed cycle and the base trip observed is evidenced by the 2.05% error of standard deviation and average values for normalized engine speed and engine torque. Our results show that the proposed approach is expected to produce a representative cycle of in-use heavy-duty engine behavior.

MXene-based magnetic–dielectric composites with synergetic magnetic and dielectric losses have exhibited great potential in the practical applications of microwave absorbing material. In the present paper, novel composites consisting of laminated Ti3C2Tx MXene decorated with magnetic FeNi nanoparticles were constructed via a facile in situ hydrothermal approach. The microstructure, morphology, magnetic properties, and microwave absorption performances of as-synthesized samples were investigated in detail, and corresponding mechanisms were further discussed. Results demonstrated that the frequency dependence of electromagnetic parameters for the FeNi/Ti3C2Tx MXene composites could be easily regulated by simply changing the content of FeNi nanoparticles in favor of improved magnetic loss and optimized impedance matching. Consequently, a broadband effective absorption bandwidth (RL

Tailoring the carbon-electrode with rich porosities and heteroatoms has been demonstrated to break the limitation of capacitive storage and microwave absorption, but the balance between them remains a great challenge, resulting in the difficulty to control and utilize the active sites. Here, porous heteroatoms co- and tri-doping carbon nanosheets are easily achieved by a developed melting-pressing-carbonization (MPC) approach with the assistance of g-C3N4, which concurrently activates pore structure and surface properties by serving as structure-directing agent, activating agent and nitrogen resource. The optimized co-doping carbon nanosheet (NPCN-1) exhibits a novel surface structure containing high N (14.1%) contents with well-distributing conductive and redox-active N species, and ions-matched pores centered on 0.7 nm, which provides rich-effective active sites to capture fast electron and ion transport, reflected by the energy storage dynamics. Therefore, the NPCN-1 supplies a large specific areal capacitance of 0.434 F m−2, even outperforming the graphene (0.21 F m−2) as supercapacitor electrode, and displays a broad effective absorption bandwidth of 6.64 GHz and a strong reflection loss of −44.5 dB in microwave absorption (MA). These energy storage and MA capability can be further enhanced after realizing tri-doping of O, N and Fe2O3 by MPC strategy, shedding light on an avenue to future application and development for the active materials.

Quantifying the spatiotemporal distribution of water resources is still a key constraint on water resources management against the background of climate change and human activities. To investigate the interaction of climate variability and human activities on blue and green water scarcity (BW and GW-scarcity), the soil and water assessment tool (SWAT) model was used to simulate BW and GW-scarcity and its spatiotemporal distribution under scenarios of single or combined land-use change and climate variability. Multivariate statistical methods were used to identify the main factors affecting blue/green water and confirm the hot spots of water management. Taking the rapidly-developing Xiangjiang River Basin (XRB) in China as an example, where the urbanization rate increased from 42.15% in 2008 to 56.02% in 2018, the results showed that BW-scarcity was mainly affected by precipitation (r = 0.425) and population (r = −0.612), while GW-scarcity was mainly affected by agriculture (r = 0.429) and urban land (r = −0.593). The hot spot areas of blue and green water (BW and GW) shortage accounted for 29.7%, 4.6% and 3.4% of the total area in the lower reach, middle reach and upper reach of XRB, respectively. The rapid development of urbanization in the lower reach of the XRB caused serious shortage of BW and GW resources. This study would provide useful information for water resources management in corresponding human-water system. Future research should focus on how to optimize water resource allocation upstream and downstream of the basin.

An optically transparent metamaterial absorber (MMA) operated in the C-band (4–8 GHz) is optimally designed based on the second-order cross fractal structure. The experimental results show that the reflection loss of the proposed MMA is lower than −10 dB from 3.98 GHz to 8.68 GHz. Two overlapped resonances located at 4.77 GHz and 7.33 GHz, respectively, are caused by the second-order cross fractal structure. Distributions of surface current, electromagnetic field and power loss density are investigated to illustrate the absorptive characteristics and electromagnetic loss mechanisms of the proposed MMA. Moreover, the average optical transmittance of the MMA is close to 75% from 390 nm to 780 nm. The MMA possesses simultaneously strong absorptive capacity in the C-band and high transmittance in the visible light range, showing potential application in special environment.

Researches on the fracmemristor have aroused increasing interest in the last several years, but there are no reports on design of the discrete fracmemristor. Based on the fractional-order difference and the mathematical model of the charge-controlled memristor, the discrete fracmemristor is designed where the amount of charge is determined by a fractional-order discrete system. In the numerical simulations, it shows that the pinched hysteresis loops are observed, which imply that the proposed memristor satisfies the definition of the memristor. As an application, the fracmemristor sine map is designed, and multistability is observed regarding the initial conditions of both the memristor and system. It provides a potential model for different applications such as cellular neural networks, modulators, sensors, chaotic systems, and programmable digital circuits.

ABSTRACT: Aim: We sought to determine the relationship between cancer-related fatigue, chemotherapy-associated adverse effects in patients with advanced stages of cancer, and the levels of TNF-α, IL-1 and 17-hydroxycorticosteroids (17-HCS). Patients & methods: Two hundred cancer patients were recruited. They were given a Cancer Fatigue Scale survey to assess their general state of health before and after chemotherapy. Their plasma levels of TNF-α and IL-1 and urine levels of 17-HCS were also measured. Results: Increased levels of TNF-α and IL-1 are common in cancer patients. Thirty-five (17.5%) patients suffered from chemotherapy-associated adverse effects, but their plasma levels of TNF-α and IL-1 were not significantly elevated after chemotherapy. However, the urinary levels of 17-HCS levels were significantly elevated in 23 patients after chemotherapy. Conclusion: Patients who had elevated urinary levels of 17-HCS before chemotherapy are accompanied by chemotherapy-associated adverse effects. Thus, elevated 17-HCS in urine could be a possible predictor for chemotherapy-associated adverse effects.

Ti3C2 MXene is highly desirable as a potential microwave absorbent due to its positive dielectric loss ability. However, lack of magnetic loss for pure Ti3C2 MXene results in unbalanced electromagnetic parameters and poor impedance matching. In this paper, the laminated Ti3C2 MXene was synthesized using HF etching process. Then, the magnetic FeCo-decorated Ti3C2 MXene (FeCo-Ti3C2 MXene) composite was fabricated for the first time via a in-situ hydrothermal method. The incorporation of magnetic FeCo nanoparticles on Ti3C2 MXene can enhance microwave absorption property. Specifically, the FeCo-Ti3C2 MXene composite displayed a broad effective bandwidth (RL

The broadband nonlinear absorption in ZnO nanocrystals embedded in Al2O3 matrix was investigated by Z-scan and pump–probe techniques from 400 nm to 800 nm. The effective two-photon absorption and three-photon absorption coefficients were determined to be ∼1.1×103 cm/GW at 400 nm and ∼1.1×10−1 cm3/GW2 at 800 nm, respectively, which are at least two orders of magnitude greater than that in ZnO bulk crystal. It may be attributed to the defect-states-mediated multiphoton absorption process, which was proofed by comparison experiments with different densities of interfacial defect states. The corresponding lifetimes for the intraband relaxation, defect-states trapping, and interband recombination processes were measured by femtosecond transient absorption measurements as τ1 ∼ 1 ps, τ2 ∼ 13 ps, and τ3 ∼ 350 ps, respectively.

Recently, there is increasing evidence indicating a link between cadmium exposure and human breast cancer. This study was aimed to explore the relationship between blood cadmium burden and the risk of breast cancer in Chaoshan women with no occupational exposure. Blood cadmium levels (BCLs) were determined in whole blood of 186 breast cancer cases and 139 controls. Basic clinical data and information of age, occupation, blood types, family cancer history, and disease history, as well as other demographic characteristics were collected from medical records. BCLs were detected by graphite-furnace atomizer absorption spectrophotometer (GFAAS). BCLs and proportions of BCLs over 3 μg/L between cases and controls were compared. The relationships between BCLs and breast cancer were explored by comparing BCL differences between/among different characteristics of investigated factors. In addition, BCLs within cases were also compared in relation to the disease clinical stages, tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) stages, and estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR), and Cerb-B2 expressions. The breast cancer patients had a higher median concentration of blood cadmium (2.28, interquartile range 1.57-3.15 μg/L) than the controls (1.77, 1.34-2.57 μg/L; P = 0.001). The proportion of BCLs over 3 μg/L was 2.35 times higher in the breast cancer cases than that of the controls after adjusting for age. Cadmium tends to accumulate in the human body with age and body mass index (BMI) but not associates with type of job, family history, disease history, and other investigated characters. With the increase of clinical stages and T and M stages, the BCLs in the breast cancer cases also increased. BCLs were positively associated with Cerb-B2 expression (r = 0.152, P = 0.038) but not significantly associated with ER and PR expressions. The data obtained show that cadmium concentration is significantly higher in blood of breast cancer patients in comparison to healthy controls. Cadmium seems to be a risk factor of breast cancer, and high cadmium exposure was observed in advanced stages of this disease, which indicates that it may promote the development of breast cancer.

Short-term wind power prediction is an effective way to mitigate the impact of large-scale wind power variability incurring to the electric power system. Given the fluctuation of wind energy is random; uncertainty analysis of wind power prediction is very important for engineering application. A risk assessment index of wind power prediction named PaR (Predict at Risk) was proposed based on quantile regression. And an uncertainty analysis model for wind power prediction was established to provide a possible fluctuation range of predicted wind power at any confidence level. Operation data and predicted power from a wind farm in north China are used as a test case to validate proposed model. The results show that the model can tolerate a wide range of different conditions without hypothesis of the error distribution of wind power prediction and is an effective, practical way to provide uncertainty information.

Registration of scattered cloud data is an important topic in model construction. Firstly, local geometric characteristic of point clouds is expressed by point feature. Then, coarse registration is implemented based on feature points selected. By reducing search scope of matching points and accelerating search speed based on k-d tree, the conventional ICP algorithm is improved. Experiment results show that it is valid.

Routing in intermittently connected networks(ICN) is a challenging problem due to the time varying nature of network connectivity. In this work, we focus on a special class of ICN formed by mobile ad-hoc participates called ICMAN. Asynchronous contacts become the basic way of communication in ICMANs instead of data links in traditional ad-hoc networks. Current approaches are primarily based on estimation with pure probability calculation. Stochastic forwarding decisions from statistic results can lead to disastrous routing performance when wrong choices are made. This paper introduces a new routing protocol, based on contact profile, to address the problem. To exploit the knowledge about contact profiles, we propose a contact modeling method and the corresponding contact prediction algorithm makes use of both statistic and time sequence information of contacts and allows to choose the relay that has the earliest contact to destination, which results in low average latency. Simulation is used to compare the routing performance of our algorithm with three other categories of forwarding algorithms proposed already. The results demonstrate that our scheme is more efficient in both data delivery and energy consumption than previously proposed schemes.

One of the key issues to realizing map services in the GIS mobile system is to overcome the physical limitation of the mobile computing device, such as storage, CPU etc. This paper first proposed the resolution for mobile SVG map service on mobile phone, and then focused on the research of loading and displaying of mobile SVG map. The experiment shows that the mobile SVG map can be zoomed perfectly. The loading and displaying time of the mobile SVG map is non-proportional to the size of the map, and approximates to the parallel shift on the time axes.

Region segmentation involves in breaking a polygonal mesh into 'meaningful' patches with characteristic geometrical property respectively. Considering the characteristics of nonuniformity, sparseness and known facet normal for STL model from CAD system, an efficient approach for region segmentation is put forward. The algorithm contains two steps: extracting region boundaries and segmenting regional meshes. Region boundaries are classified into sharp feature edge and non-sharp feature edge. The former is detected based on dihedral edge angle angle between facets, while the latter is identified by analysing intrinsic region properties of triangular facets distribution without curvature estimation. By means of unidirectional increment of feature edges, continuous region boundaries are generated. Finally, we withdraw "meaningful" patches from STL model based on advancing front algorithm depending on the boundaries. Examples are given to show the feature edges detection, boundaries generation and region segmentation based on the boundaries.