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BACKGROUND: Beclin-1 is an autophagy gene and higher levels suggest mammalian testicular damage. Our study aims at exploring the role of Beclin-1 in non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA) patients and clarifying the predictive value of Beclin-1for sperm retrieval in microdissection testicular sperm extraction (micro-TESE). METHODS: In the present study, 62 NOA patients were finally recruited. Serum hormone including luteinizing hormone (LH), follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH), estradiol II (E2), testosterone (T) and prolactin (PRL), as well as testicular volume were measured. Testicular histopathology was diagnosed by two independent pathologists. The expression of Beclin-1 was detected by real-time PCR in testicular tissue. RESULTS: Our study illustrated that Beclin-1 was differently expressed in three pathological types of NOA. Compared with hypospermatogenesis (HS, P=0.002) or maturation arrest (MA, P=0.049), Beclin-1 showed significantly up-regulated in Sertoli cell-only syndrome (SCOS) group. Moreover, Beclin-1 expression was obviously positive related with serum LH (rho =0.269, P=0.036), meanwhile significantly negative correlation with testicular volume (rho =−0.370, P=0.003), serum T (rho =−0.326, P=0.010), Johnsen score (rho =−0.318, P=0.012), and pathologic type (rho =−0.452, P

Vascular invasion (VI) in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is an important clinical parameter to predict survival. In this study, we collected microRNA (miRNA) expression data from HCC patients using The Cancer Genome Atlas database and identified a novel miRNA signature associated with VI. First, we categorized HCC patients into groups with or without VI (VI+ and VI-). We identified three miRNAs (miRNA-210, miRNA-10b, and miRNA-9-1) that were associated with VI according to a Kaplan-Meier analysis. This three-miRNA signature exhibited good predictive ability for VI in patients with HCC according to a receiver operating characteristic curve analysis at 1, 3, and 5 years. Patients with HCC with a high risk score exhibited a trend toward worse outcomes as determined by multivariable Cox regression and stratified analyses. This three-miRNA signature provides an accurate prediction of VI and can be used as an independent prognostic indicator for predicting VI in HCC patients.

Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text, Thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (TTP) is a life-threatening disease, and its mortality rate is 10% to 20%. However, there are currently only a few markers to predict the prognosis in patients with TTP. We aimed to identify several clinical indices and laboratory parameters for predicting the prognosis of TTP at admission. A single-centre observational cohort study that included patients with TTP from the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University in China was conducted from January 1, 2012 to November 30, 2018. The primary outcome was prognosis, including in-hospital mortality, major thromboembolic events, or failure to achieve remission at discharge. We used the random forest method to identify the best set of predictors. Eighty-seven patients with TTP were identified, of whom 12 died during the treatment. The total number of patients within-hospital mortality, major thromboembolic events, and failure to achieve remission at discharge was 58. The machine learning method showed that the D-dimer level was the strongest predictor of the primary outcome. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis demonstrated that the sensitivity and specificity of the D-dimer level alone for identifying high-risk patients were 78% and 81%, respectively, with an optimum diagnostic cut-off value of 770 ng/mL. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) was 0.80, and the 95% confidence interval (CI) was 0.70 to 0.90. This study found that the D-dimer level exhibited a good predictive ability for prognosis in patients with TTP. These findings may aid in the development of new and intensive treatment strategies to achieve remission among high-risk patients. However, external validation is necessary to confirm the generalizability of our approach across populations and treatment practices.

Stimulated emission has been observed from oxide structure of silicon when optically excited by 514 nm laser. The twin peaks in the region from 690 nm to 700 nm are dominated by stimulated emission which can be demonstrated by its threshold behavior and transition in linear evolution. The oxide structure was fabricated by laser irradiation and annealing treatment on silicon. A model for explaining the stimulated emission has been proposed in which the trap states of the interface between oxide of silicon and porous nanocrystal play an important role.

Stimulated emission has been observed from oxide structure of silicon when optically excited by 514 nm laser. The photoluminescence (PL) pulse has a Lorentzian shape with a full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 0.5–0.6 nm. The twin peaks at 694 nm and 692 nm are dominated by stimulated emission which can be demonstrated by its threshold behavior and transition from sub-threshold to linear evolution in light emission. The gain coefficient from the evolution of the peak-emission intensity as a function of the optically pumped sample length has been measured. The oxide structure was fabricated by laser irradiation and annealing treatment on silicon. A model for explaining the stimulated emission has been proposed in which the trap states of the interface between oxide of silicon and porous nanocrystal play an important role.

Formaldehyde (FA), a ubiquitous environmental pollutant, has long been suspected of having male reproductive toxicity. However, FA male reproductive toxicity was inconclusive due to dearth of human studies. Therefore, we sought to investigate whether occupational exposure to FA affects semen quality. Semen quality including five conventional parameters and seven kinematics parameters were compared between 114 male workers occupationally exposed to FA and 76 referents. FA exposure index (FEI) was measured and calculated. Our results showed that sperm progressive motility, total sperm motility, VCL, VSL and VAP were statistically significant decreased in FA exposure workers compared with the referents. Moreover, FEI was significantly negative associated with sperm progressive motility (β = −0.19, P = 0.01) and total sperm motility (β = −0.23, P = 0.004). In addition, a significant elevated risk of abnormal sperm progressive motility were observed in both low- (OR = 2.58; 95% CI: 1.11–5.97) and high-FA-exposed group (OR = 3.41; 95% CI: 1.45–7.92) respectively. Furthermore, a significant increased risk was also estimated for abnormal total sperm motility in both low- (OR = 3.21; 95% CI: 1.24–8.28) and high-FA-exposed group (OR = 4.84; 95% CI: 1.83–12.81) respectively. In conclusion, our study revealed the adverse effects of FA occupation exposure on semen quality, especially on sperm motion parameters.

Due to its low encoding complexity, compressed sensing (CS) has gained wide attention in image processing related areas such as image compression, medical imaging and remote sensing. In existing research on CS based image processing, the commonly used sparse representation scheme for image recovery is the discrete wavelet transform (DWT), which is limited by poor directionality and lack of phase space information. What’s more, the structural information of transform-domain coefficients other than pure sparsity is seldom explored. In this paper, to improve the image recovery performance, we propose a new recovery method by adopting the double-density dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DDDT-CWT) as the sparse representation scheme. In addition, the structural characteristics of the DDDT-CWT coefficients are utilized as extra prior knowledge in the recovery process to further improve the recovery quality. Extensive simulation results have been conducted, and the results show that under the same compression ratio, the proposed method has achieved considerable PSNR gain compared with the traditional recovery algorithm.