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Yuan Chen,1,* Yiheng Chen,2,* Chonghui Tang,3 Qian Zhao,1 Tailin Xu,1 Qi Kang,1 Bin Jiang,2 Li Zhang4 1Department of Endocrinology, The First People’s Hospital of Zunyi, Zunyi, Guizhou, 563000, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Hand and Plastic Surgery, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, 325000, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Neurosurgery, Affiliated Cixi Hospital, Wenzhou Medical University, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, 315300, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Neurosurgery, China-Japan Friendship Hospital, Beijing, 100029, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Li ZhangDepartment of Neurosurgery, China-Japan Friendship Hospital, No. 2 Yinghua East Road, District of Chaoyang, Beijing, 100029, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail ftzy73129@sina.comAim: Endothelial dysfunction is a key pathological basis for diabetes mellitus complications, including diabetic nephropathy, diabetic retinopathy, and diabetic cardiomyopathy. This study aimed to reveal the functional role of ribosomal protein S4 Y-linked 1 (RPS4Y1) in endothelial dysfunction.Methods: Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) were subjected to high glucose. The expression of RPS4Y1 in cells was overexpressed or silenced by plasmid or siRNA transfection. MTT assay, flow cytometry, JC-1 probe, scratch test, tube formation, and ELISA were conducted to assess the effects of RPS4Y1 on cell. Western blot was performed to assay the downstream signaling of RPS4Y1. The inhibitors of p38, ERK, and Jnk were used to treat cells to validate the involvement of them in RPS4Y1-mediated endothelial dysfunction.Results: RPS4Y1 was upregulated in HUVECs in response to high glucose in both dose- and time-dependent manners. Overexpression of RPS4Y1 induced viability loss, apoptosis, and inflammation, but inhibited cell migration and tube formation. Silence of RPS4Y1 impacted these aspects in a contrary trend. The phosphorylation of p38 rather than ERK and Jnk was activated by RPS4Y1. In addition, the dysfunction of HUVECs mediated by RPS4Y1 was attenuated by SB203580 (a specific inhibitor of p38 signaling).Conclusion: The highly expressed RPS4Y1 in endothelial cells may contribute to high glucose-induced dysfunction through regulating p38 MAPK signaling. RPS4Y1 might be a potential therapeutic target for treating diabetes mellitus complications.Keywords: RPS4Y1, HUVEC, diabetes mellitus, high glucose, p38 MAPK signaling

In the field of computer vision, without sufficient labeled images, it is challenging to train an accurate model. However, through visual adaptation from source to target domains, a relevant labeled dataset can help solve such problem. Many methods apply adversarial learning to diminish cross-domain distribution difference. They are able to greatly enhance the performance on target classification tasks. Generative adversarial network (GAN) loss is widely used in adversarial adaptation learning methods to reduce an across-domain distribution difference. However, it becomes difficult to decline such distribution difference if generator or discriminator in GAN fails to work as expected and degrades its performance. To solve such cross-domain classification problems, we put forward a novel adaptation framework called generative adversarial distribution matching (GADM). In GADM, we improve the objective function by taking cross-domain discrepancy distance into consideration and further minimize the difference through the competition between a generator and discriminator, thereby greatly decreasing cross-domain distribution difference. Experimental results and comparison with several state-of-the-art methods verify GADM's superiority in image classification across domains.

Lysosomal storage diseases (LSDs) are a group of rare diseases that cause progressive physical dysfunction and organ failure, which significantly affected patients' quality of life. The objective of this study was to explore the characteristics and usage of Enzyme Replacement Treatments (ERTs), which is the only specific therapy for LSDs, of patients with the four different LSDs (Gaucher, Fabry, Pompe disease and Mucopolysaccharidosis) in Shanghai, and then evaluate the economic burden and quality of life of these patients. A total of 31patients, involving 5, 14, 4 and 8 patients with Gaucher, Fabry, Pompe disease and Mucopolysaccharidosis, respectively, were included in analysis. The result showed that only five Gaucher disease (GD) patients in Shanghai used Imiglucerase in 2019, while the other 26 patients with the other three LSDs did not receive ERTs. The total health expenditure of GD patients was 2,273,000CNY on average mainly resulted by the high cost of Imiglucerase. The total health expenditure of the other 26 patients was 37,765CNY on average. Though the cost-sharing mechanism between basic medical insurance, charity fund and patients had been explored for Gaucher disease in Shanghai, the out-of-pocket part, which was 164,301 CNY, still laid a heavy economic burden on the patients and their families. The mean EQ-VAS score of GD patients was 76.4 ± 15.5, which was higher than that of the other three LSDs. It is recommended that the scope of drug reimbursement list and the reimbursement level should be further expanded and raised to help improve the living conditions of patients with LSDs.

Hyperalgesia, which often occurs in people suffering from alcohol use disorder, may drive excessive drinking and relapse. Emerging evidence suggests that the lateral habenula (LHb) may play a significant role in this condition. Previous research suggests that endocannabinoid signaling (eCBs) is involved in drug addiction and pain, and that the LHb contains core components of the eCBs machinery. We report here our findings in rats subjected to chronic ethanol vapor exposure. We detected a substantial increase in endocannabinoid-related genes, including Mgll and Daglb mRNA levels, as well as monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL) protein levels, as well as a decrease in Cnr1 mRNA and type-1 cannabinoid receptor (CB1R) protein levels, in the LHb of ethanol-exposed rats. Also, rats withdrawing from ethanol exposure displayed hypersensitivity to mechanical and thermal nociceptive stimuli. Conversely, intra-LHb injection of the MAGL inhibitor JZL184, the fatty acid amide hydrolase inhibitor URB597, or the CB1R agonist WIN55,212-2 produced an analgesic effect, regardless of ethanol or air exposure history, implying that alcohol exposure does not change eCB pain responses. Intra-LHb infusion of the CB1R inverse agonist rimonabant eliminated the analgesic effect of these chemicals. Rimonabant alone elicited hyperalgesia in the air-, but not ethanol-exposed animals. Moreover, intra-LHb JZL184, URB597, or WIN55,212-2 reduced ethanol consumption in both homecages and operant chambers in rats exposed to ethanol vapor but not air. These findings suggest that LHb eCBs play a pivotal role in nociception and facilitating LHb eCBs may attenuate pain in drinkers.

Objective we aimed to investigate the association of smoking cessation with risk of all-cause mortality amongst oldest old people (aged ≥ 80 years). Design this was a prospective cohort study. Setting the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, implemented in 23 provinces of China. Participants a total of 28,643 community-dwelling oldest old people (mean age, 92.9 ± 7.5 years) were included. Methods in this community-based cohort study, Cox proportional hazards models were used to examine the association of smoking cessation with risk of all-cause mortality. Results during 136,585 person-years of follow-up from baseline to 1 September 2014, compared with never smokers, hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals for all-cause mortality were 1.06 (1.02–1.10) for current smokers, 1.23 (1.09–1.39) for transient quitters (≤1 consecutive years since smoking cessation), 1.22 (1.12–1.32) for recent quitters (2–6 consecutive years since smoking cessation) and 1.11 (1.02–1.22) for long-term quitters (>6 consecutive years since smoking cessation). Cox models with penalised splines revealed an increased risk of all-cause mortality after smoking cessation; the highest mortality risk was observed within 2–4 years after smoking cessation and the risk gradually decreased with duration of smoking cessation. We further conducted subgroup analyses and sensitivity analyses to reduce the impact of reverse causation. Conclusions smoking is harmful to health in all populations. Our study findings indicated smoking cessation in late life to be associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality amongst oldest old people who have smoked for a long time.

Hexavalent chromium is highly toxic and regarded as one of the main pollutants in the environment. Sophisticated laboratory instruments are commercially available for the in-field determination of chromium. It is highly desirable to develop affordable, portable, sensitive and reliable methods for on-site Cr(VI) detection. For field analysis, we designed a smartphone-based absorbance device with an ultralong absorption path to improve sensitivity. The intensity of the transmission light was detected by the illumination sensor in the smartphone. The absorption path was enlarged to a maximum of 83.5 cm by 41 reflection cycles. The intensity of the reflected light in an empty colorimetric cell can be serviced as the internal references to correct the possible baseline drift due to light source intensity decay. The absorbance measured by the proposed device obeys the Lambert–Beer law in the range of 0–1.1. This device was used to determine Cr(VI) in water samples on-site by using 1,5-diphenylcarbazide as a colorimetric reagent, with the linear range of 1–18 μg L−1 and limit of detection of 0.26 μg L−1. This simple absorbance device offers the advantages of cost-effectiveness, ease of implementation, portability, sensitivity and reliability for field analysis.

The classification problems with imbalanced datasets widely exist in real word. An Extreme Learning Machine is found unsuitable for imbalanced classification problems. This work applies a Weighted Extreme Learning Machine (WELM) to handle them. Its two parameters are found to affect its performance greatly. The aim of this work is to apply various intelligent optimization methods to optimize a WELM and compare their performance in imbalanced classification. Experimental results show that WELM with a dandelion algorithm with probability-based mutation can perform better than WELM with improved particle swarm optimization, bat algorithm, genetic algorithm, dandelion algorithm and self-learning dandelion algorithm. In addition, the proposed algorithm is applied to credit card fraud detection. The results show that it can achieve high detection performance.

Amidst the ongoing novel Coronavirus disease pandemic, children with developmental disabilities warrant specific attention to minimise having disproportionate consequences. These children are especially vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic due to (1) Greater healthcare needs, (2) Dependency on community-based services and (3) Mental health concerns. Healthcare professionals, public health systems and the society needs to come together to advocate for these children by optimising access to healthcare and community intervention services, promoting mental well-being and caregiver welfare. The consequences of missed present-day opportunities might only be evident in the years to come in these children. Hence, despite the prolonged pandemic, with consequent limitations in availability of resources, children with developmental disabilities should continue to be supported.

In computer vision, when labeled images of the target domain are highly insufficient, it is challenging to build an accurate classifier. Domain adaptation stands for an effective solution to address it by utilizing available and related source domain which has sufficient labeled images, even when there is a substantial difference in properties and distributions of these two domains. Yet, most prior approaches merely reduce subspace conditional or marginal distribution differences between domains but entirely ignoring label dependence (LD) information of source data in subspace. This article proposes a novel approach of domain adaptation, called enhanced subspace distribution matching (ESDM), which makes good use of label information to enhance the distribution matching between the source and target domains in a shared subspace. It reduces both conditional and marginal distributions in a shared subspace during a procedure of kernel principal dimensionality reduction and also preserves source data LD information to the maximum extent, thereby significantly improving cross domain subspace distribution matching. We also provide a learning algorithm with highly affordable computation, which solves the ESDM optimization problem without using time-consuming iterations. Results confirm that it can well outperform several recent domain adaptation methods on image classification tasks in terms of classification accuracy and running time. The results can be used in social cognition, person reidentification, and human–machine interactions.

For keeping microgravity level of microgravity and space science satellites, a kind of electric thruster, the radio-frequency ion thruster (RIT) has been designed and applied. The RIT produces thrust through ionizing neutral particles in the discharge chamber and extracting ions by the ion optics system. The length of discharge chamber affects the ionization of neutral particles as well as the performance of RIT. In this paper, an experimental study has been carried out for analyzing the influence of discharge chamber length. In the experiment, the RIT-5 with various discharge chamber lengths, 27.6 mm, 30.0 mm, 31.9 mm, 35.5 mm, 40.0 mm, has different performances under the same condition. With the same radio frequency power and propellant flow rate, the RIT-5 has the optimal performance in beam current and efficiency when the discharge chamber length is 30.0 mm or 31.9 mm.

Background: Antibacterial multidrug resistance has emerged as one of the foremost global problems affecting human health. The emergence of resistant infections with the increasing number of multidrug-resistant pathogens has posed a serious problem, which required innovative collaborations across multiple disciplines to address this issue. Methods: In this review, we will explain the mechanisms of bacterial multidrug resistance and discuss different strategies for combating it, including combination therapy, the use of novel natural antibiotics, and the use of nanotechnology in the development of efflux pump inhibitors. Results: While combination therapy will remain the mainstay of bacterial multi-drug resistance treatment, nanotechnology will play critical roles in the development of novel treatments in the coming years. Conclusion: Nanotechnology provides an encouraging platform for the development of clinically relevant and practical strategies to overcome drug resistance in the future.

Classification technology plays an important role in machine learning. In the process of classification, the presence of noisy samples in datasets tends to reduce the performance of a classifier. This work proposes a clustering-based Noisy-sample-Removed Under-sampling Scheme (NUS) for imbalanced classification. First, the samples in the minority class are clustered. For each cluster, its center is taken as a spherical center, and the distance of the minority class samples farthest from the cluster center is taken as the radius to form a hypersphere. The Euclidean distance from the center of the cluster to every of the majority samples is calculated to decide if they are in the hypersphere. Then, we propose a NUS-based policy to decide if a majority sample in the hypersphere is a noisy sample. Similarly, the noises samples of the minority class are found. Second, We remove noisy-samples from the majority and minority classes and propose NUS. Finally, logistics regression, Decision Tree, and Random Forest are used in NUS as the base classifiers, respectively and compare with Random Under-Sampling (RUS), EasyEnsemble (EE), and Inverse Random Under-Sampling (IRUS) on 13 public datasets. Results show that our method can improve the classification performance in comparison with its state-of-the art peers.

Although a large amount of studies have manifested resting state electroencephalogram oscillatory abnormalities in schizophrenia and their first-degree relatives and in schizotype, the results are far from consistent and no research found any relationship between electroencephalograph (EEG) abnormalities and schizotypal personality in first-degree relatives. The present study is to verify the modifications of EEG power spectra in eyes-open resting state of schizophrenia and first-degree relatives, and to investigate associations between EEG band power and schizotypal personality traits in first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients. Participant samples in this study consisted of 33 healthy normal controls, 35 unaffected first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients and 35 schizophrenia patients. Group differences in resting EEG band power were examined via repeated-measures analysis of variance, and correlation between EEG power and schizotypal personality traits via Pearson Correlation analysis. The results showed that patients with schizophrenia exhibited increased delta, theta and alpha activity over anterior and central regions in eyes-open resting state compared with that of normal control. Gamma band power was found for the first time to be negatively correlated to schizotypal personality traits in first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients. To conclusion, these findings suggested that low-frequency EEG activity might be neural manifestations of pathophysiological changes in the brain of schizophrenia, and gamma band activity might be an approach to measure the genetic liability of the disorder.

Background Sarcoidosis is a multi-system, idiopathic, inflammatory disorder that affects the lungs in over 90% of patients. The incidence of bone lesions in sarcoidosis is only 1-13%. Case report This study describes a 60-year-old woman with a previous history of thyroid cancer, and a more recent diagnosis of lung cancer with suspicious metastatic lesions, which were confirmed to be sarcoidosis. Conclusion This case suggests that pulmonary neoplasms and pulmonary sarcoidosis can coexist and be easily confused. When lung cancer is accompanied by symmetric hilar lymph node enlargement and multiple lung nodules, sarcoidosis should be considered in addition to metastasis, and a biopsy should be performed for confirmation.

Previous studies have reported the involvement of γδ T cells in recurrent spontaneous abortion (RSA); however, both pathogenic and protective effects were suggested. To interrogate the role of γδ T cells in RSA, peripheral blood from RSA patients and healthy women with or without pregnancy were analyzed for γδ T cells by flow cytometry (n= 9–11 for each group). Moreover, the decidua from pregnant RSA patients and healthy controls (RSA-P and HC-P group, respectively) was simultaneously stained for γδ T cells by immunohistochemistry (IHC) and bulk sequenced for gene expression. Our results demonstrated that the frequencies of peripheral γδ T cells and their subpopulations in RSA patients were comparable to that in healthy subjects, but the PD1 expression on Vδ2+cells was increased in pregnant patients. Furthermore, peripheral Vδ2+cells in RSA-P patients demonstrated significantly increased expression of CD107a, as compared to that in pregnant healthy controls. In addition, RSA-P patients had higher proportion of IL-17A-secreting but not IL-4-secreting Vδ2+cells compared to the control groups. In decidua, an inflammatory microenvironment was also evident in RSA-P patients, in whichCCL8expression and the infiltration of certain immune cells were higher than that in the HC-P group, as revealed by transcriptional analysis. Finally, although the presence of γδ T cells in decidua could be detected during pregnancy in both RSA patients and healthy subjects by multicolor IHC analysis, the expression of CD107a on γδ T cells was markedly higher in the RSA-P group. Collectively, our results indicated that the increased activation, cytotoxicity, and inflammatory potential of peripheral and/or local γδ T cells might be responsible for the pathogenesis of RSA. These findings could provide a better understanding of the role of γδ T cells in RSA and shed light on novel treatment strategies by targeting γδ T cells for RSA patients.

Background Telemedicine has been used increasingly as an alternative care model in the Coronavirus 2019 pandemic. The practice of Developmental and Behavioural Paediatrics (DBP) relies heavily on direct child observations and building trust and rapport with caregivers over time and telemedicine was not routinely used in the Singapore setting. Objectives We aimed to describe the initial experiences of caregivers and providers with telemedicine in a DBP service in Singapore during this pandemic. Methods This cross-sectional survey included caregivers who accessed telemedicine (through telephone or video-based platforms) and healthcare providers at a tertiary DBP clinic between 8 April and 14 May 2020, coinciding with the Circuit Breaker (similar to a lockdown) period in Singapore. Participants completed a questionnaire on experiences, perceived benefits and limitations of teleconsultation. Descriptive statistics and tests of comparison were conducted. Results Around half of the patients (N = 216, 47.3%) who were offered a teleconsultation agreed to it, of which 105 caregivers (48.6%) participated. Caregivers had children with diagnosis including autism spectrum disorder (33.3%), language delay (28.6%), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (12.4%). Most caregivers felt that their concerns were adequately addressed (98.1%), with good technological connectivity (95.2%). Majority had no difficulty preparing for the teleconsultation (61.0%) and 44.8% reported ease of follow-up with plans after. Perceived benefits included safety (47.6%) and reduced need to take time off work (24.8%). Perceived benefits included safety (47.6%) and reduced time off work (24.8%). Caregivers who had video-based teleconsultation (compared to telephone-based) had more difficulties preparing for the teleconsultation (52.3% vs 27.4, p=0.03). These caregivers were also more likely to have difficulties with remembering and following up with plans discussed during the consultation, compared to those who had a telephone-based consultation (52.3% vs 25.0%, p value = 0.02). Twenty-five providers participated. Providers included paediatricians, allied health therapists e.g. psychologists, speech and occupational therapists and social workers. Fifty-two percent of providers were as satisfied with teleconsultation compared to in person consults. Only 28.0% of providers rated technology infrastructure to be good. Most providers (92.0%) felt safer with teleconsultation. The most common difficulty perceived by providers was incompleteness of consultation without assessing the child physically. The two main perceived benefits of teleconsultation by providers included feeling safer as they were able to minimize physical interaction with patients and being able to provide similarly good care with less inconvenience to patients. Overall 63.8% of caregivers and 56.0% of providers would continue teleconsultation services post-pandemic. Amongst providers, paediatricians were more likely to continue teleconsultation services after current restrictions were lifted, compared to non-physician providers (100% vs 38.9%, p=0.008). Conclusions Telemedicine was generally well received by caregiver and physician providers. Teleconsultation in a DBP practice setting is a viable option in a pandemic situation and can be considered even beyond this pandemic for continued care.

In May 2019, China National Medical Products Administration approved the marketing of an elosulfase alfa injection (brand name: Vimizim) from BioMarin Pharmaceutical for the treatment of patients with mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS) type IVA. This is the first drug to treat MPS in China, and it has ended the "dearth of medicines" to treat MPS in China, a situation that has persisted for many years. One can reasonably say that the drug has benefited from the continuous reform of the drug review and approval system in China and the increasing attention paid to rare diseases. At present, China has implemented a series of preferential policies for the review and approval of drugs for rare diseases, mainly including priority review and approval, accelerated review and approval, special review and approval (mainly simplified review and approval), data protection, and communication. Moreover, China now has a specific reference for the review and approval of drugs for rare diseases with the creation of China's First List of Rare Diseases and the publication of two batches of the List of Overseas New Drugs Urgently Needed in Clinical Settings. Drug review and approval has been significantly accelerated, as has marketing. The two batches of lists of new drugs, issued in November 2018 and May 2019, include 43 drugs for rare diseases (58.1% of all drugs in the lists), 37 of which were included in China's First List of Rare Diseases. The lists also include three other drugs for MPS. As of July 1, 2019, four drugs for rare diseases from the first batch of new drugs have been approved for marketing. In order to further improve the review and approval of drugs for rare diseases in China, a special department should be established for the evaluation of drugs for rare diseases, research on and management of drugs in the post-approval phase should be enhanced, international cooperation in research on use of drugs to treat rare diseases should be enhanced, and the incentive policy for marketing drugs for rare diseases should be improved.

In order to ascertain the current status of and challenges posed by the incidence and prevalence of rare diseases in China, this study teases out data on the incidence and prevalence of 121 rare diseases listed in China's First List of Rare Disease to provide rationales and references for the development and promotion of rare-disease-related policies. The National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China issued the Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment Guide (2019) (denoted here as China's Rare Disease Diagnosis and Treatment Guide), which cited data on the incidence/prevalence of 21 rare diseases (21 of 121 rare diseases, 17.36%). Data on 68 diseases (56.20%) were found in monographs, literature databases, and official websites. Data on the incidence/prevalence of 70 diseases were compiled, though no data were available for the 51 remaining diseases. There are published data on the incidence/prevalence of only 14 diseases at the national level. Sources of data on the incidence and prevalence of rare diseases mainly include cases counts from hospitals (40.56%), other sources of data (24.48%), screening (20.98%), cross-sectional studies (8.39%), and estimates from models (7.69%). Data on the incidence/prevalence of rare diseases in China are limited and typically lack accuracy, uniformity, and timeliness. Epidemiological data at the national level are greatly lacking, and data are not amenable to comparison. China recently initiated epidemiological studies of rare diseases at the national and regional level. The country will continue to promote, use, and update its list of common rare diseases, actively encourage the coding and registration of cases of rare diseases, and take actions to collect, share, and use that information.

AIM: To investigate the relationship between the polymorphism of related gene loci of miRNAs regulated fibrinopeptide A and schizophrenia. Lay the foundation for the aetiology of schizophrenia. METHODS: Adapt to the phase match of sex and age case-control study, a total of 513 Chinese Han patients with schizophrenia were selected as the case group, 513 normal healthy persons as a control group. Obtaining SNPs information of the FGA gene by querying the dbSNP database, and reference HapMap database included SNPs site frequency information for screening. The frequency distributions of SNPs were genotyped by iMLDR® SNP detection technology. Two SNPs (pre-hsa-miR-605rs2043556 T>C, pre-hsa-miR-499a/pre-hsa-miR-499brs4909237 T < C) were analyzed to demonstrate their association with susceptibility to schizophrenia. RESULTS: There were no significant differences between patients and controls in genotype and allele distribution of SNPs(rs2043556 and rs4909237)in the precursor region of hsa-miR-605 and pre-hsa-miR-499a/pre-hsa-miR-499b. Their gene-gene interaction, which suggests that the polymorphisms of miRNA genes might not contribute to schizophrenia susceptibility in the Han Chinese population. CONCLUSION: No significant difference existed between schizophrenic patients and controls in SNP (rs2043556 and rs4909237) in the precursor region of hsa-miR-605 and pre-hsa-miR-499a/pre-hsa-miR-499b. There may not regulate FGA gene expression. Thus, hsa-miR-605 and pre-hsa-miR-499a/pre-hsa-miR-499b may not influence the risks of schizophrenia.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) routinely causes the immediate loss and disruption of neurons followed by complicated secondary injuries, including inflammation, oxidative stress, and dense glial scar formation. Inhibitory factors in the lesion scar and poor intrinsic neural regeneration capacity restrict functional recovery after injury. Minocycline, which has neuroprotective activity, can alleviate secondary injury, but the long-term administration of this drug may cause toxicity. Polysialic acid (PSA) is a large cell-surface carbohydrate that is critical for central nervous system development and is capable of promoting precursor cell migration, axon path finding, and synaptic remodeling; thus, PSA plays a vital role in tissue repair and regeneration. Here, we developed a PSA-based minocycline-loaded nanodrug delivery system (PSM) for the synergistic therapy of spinal cord injury. The prepared PSM exerted marked anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective activities both in vitro and in vivo. The administration of PSM could significantly protect neurons and myelin sheaths from damage, reduce the formation of glial scar, recruit endogenous neural stem cells to the lesion site, and promote the regeneration of neurons and the extension of long axons throughout the glial scar, thereby largely improving the locomotor function of SCI rats and exerting a superior therapeutic effect. The findings might provide a novel strategy for SCI synergistic therapy and the utilization of PSA in other central nervous system diseases.

Environmental issues are one of today’s growing concerns. Numerous associations, organizations and individuals are waging an active world preservation campaign. The purpose of this pilot study is to examine an important aspect of library directors’ attitudes towards environmental protection and the level of their concerns and green practices regarding sustainable development that has generally been overlooked in the literature. Multiple means of data collection (interviews, observation and document analysis) involving 14 libraries in China were conducted between March and May 2015; seven main thematic areas emerged from the data, such as: levels of awareness and commitment to sustainability issues in Chinese libraries are relatively low, and the current efficiency of facilities and operations have been seriously wasted. These findings indicate that the main priority of the library has been to attain economic and social development rather than environmental sustainability, while ignoring the energy costs and serious waste to some extent in the rapid development process of the Chinese library. The author notes just from observation of daily practices that there is definitely room for improvement to minimize the negative impact of their activities on the environment. This paper discusses for the first time the library directors’ concerns and attitudes towards “going green” and sustainability. The ideas are expected to inform and improve library directors’ environmental consciousness and sustainable practices, as well as open new vistas for research into the economic, social and environmental sustainability of library information services. How to achieve the social, economic and environmental requirements of present and future generations from libraries, especially library environmental sustainability is discussed intensively.

This paper addresses the problem of designing an active disturbance rejection controller for a high accuracy drag-free satellite with cubic test mass. The uncertain model of the drag-free satellite is defined. The performance requirement imposed on the acceleration of the test mass is broken down into specification of drag-free and suspension loop because of the disturbance decoupling controller, which is based on the linear active disturbance rejection control technique. We derive two-degree internal model control structure of ADRC, which is used for robust stability verification. Search programs determine the parameters that satisfy system stability and the performance requirement. The design technique has shown to be robust to the perturbation of the system and good performance in disturbance suppressing. To check the design of the controller, an overall simulation is preformed, and the results confirmed that the controller is able to meet the system requirements.

Pengfei Cao,1,2,* Jun Xing,1,* Yin Cao,3 Qi Cheng,1 Xiaojing Sun,1 Qi Kang,1 Libin Dai,1 Xianju Zhou,3 Zixiang Song1 1Psychological Centre for Adolescents and Children, The Affiliated 102nd Hospital of The Second Military Medical University of People’s Liberation Army of China, Shanghai, China; 2Department of Political Affairs, College of Politics, National Defense University of People’s Liberation Army of China, Beijing, China; 3Laboratory of Neurological Diseases, Department of Neurology, The Affiliated Changzhou No 2 People’s Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Changzhou, China *These authors contributed equally to this work Objective: To explore the effect of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) combined with atomoxetine (ATX) in the treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Methods: Sixty-four patients with newly diagnosed ADHD were enrolled from January 2016 to October 2017 from Psychological Centre for Adolescents and Children at 102th Hospital of People’s Liberation Army of China. These patients were randomly assigned to three groups according to treatment method: the rTMS group, the ATX group, and the rTMS+ ATX group. Before treatment and 6 weeks after treatment, clinical symptoms and executive functions of ADHD patients were evaluated with the Swanson, Nolan, and Pelham, Version IV (SNAP-IV) Questionnaire, continuous performance test, three subtests (arithmetic, digit span, and coding) of Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, as well as Iowa Gambling Tasks (IGT). The effects of treatment were compared among three groups. Results: After 6 weeks of treatment, the scores of all factors in the SNAP-IV questionnaire were lower than those before treatment in the three groups; the scores of three subtests of Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, continuous performance test, and IGT were also significantly higher than those before treatment. The rTMS+ ATX group had a better improvement in attention deficits and hyperactivity impulse on the SNAP-IV questionnaire compared with the other groups, and also had a higher efficacy on cold and hot executive functions such as arithmetic, forward numbers, coding, and IGT. In addition, the ATX group performed better than the rTMS group in coding and IGT. Conclusion: rTMS, ATX, and the combination therapy are effective in improving core symptoms and executive function in patients with ADHD. The combined treatment has significant therapeutic advantages over the single treatment groups. Compared with rTMS, the drug therapy has a better improvement in coding and IGT. Keywords: attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, atomoxetine, executive function

Herein, we developed a smartphone-based ratiometric resonance light scattering (RLS) device for portable field analysis and immunoassay. The RLS signal was detected by the camera in a smartphone controlled by a user-edited APP software. Except the smartphone, the total cost of the detection system itself is about 60 $, including a laser pointer and battery, a twin cuvette, a collective lens, and outside box. By using the RLS brightness ratio between the sample and reference channels in the twin cuvette as the signal indicator, the baseline drifts due to the variations in incident light intensity, ambient temperature, and shooting parameters of camera, can be eliminated efficiently. A new brightness indictor, (R − R0)/(Rmax − R), was proposed to linearize the calibration curve. Where R and R0 are the rightness ratio in sample and blank, Rmax is the maximum averaged brightness ratio, respectively. The applicability of the portable RLS device was demonstrated by the field analysis for Pb2+ in environmental water samples, using [CTA]2PbI4］(CAT = cetyltrimethyl ammonium) as the luminophore. The limit of detection for Pb2+ is 0.7 μg L−1. By using PbS nanoparticles conjugated second antibody as the signal tag, the RLS method was applied in immunoassay to determine alpha fetoprotein with the limit of detection of 0.1 pg mL−1. This smartphone-based ratiometric RLS device offers the advantages of good portability, low cost, high sensitivity and reliability.

Background To characterize the nature and severity of feeding difficulties in Asian young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and identify potential predictors of poorer feeding outcomes. Methods Cross sectional study of children aged 1–7 years with ASD. Parents completed the following: demographic information, brief autism mealtime behavior inventory, aberrant behavior checklist (ABC), behavioral pediatrics feeding assessment scale (BPFAS) and caregiver feeding style questionnaire. Additional information (medical data, cognitive and developmental assessment results, e.g., Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule Second Edition, Autism Diagnostic Interview, Revised, Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scales, etc.) were subsequently obtained from electronic medical records retrospectively by one of the study team members. Results Of the 67 children, 28.4% had feeding difficulties (high BPFAS total frequency score). Caregiver feeding styles were authoritarian (34.8%) or indulgent (39.4%). Child characteristics did not significantly predict for the severity of feeding difficulties. Univariate analysis revealed that authoritarian feeding style (p = 0.001) and ABC hyperactivity score (p = 0.006) were significantly associated with BPFAS severity score. Multivariate analysis revealed that ABC hyperactivity score remained significantly associated with BPFAS severity score after controlling for all other ABC subscale scores. A final regression model including all child characteristics and ABC scores did not reveal any significant predictors of BPFAS total frequency score (R2 = 0.557). Conclusion Our findings suggest an association between hyperactivity, authoritarian feeding style and feeding difficulties. Children with ASD who have significant hyperactivity behaviors in the context of parents with an authoritarian feeding style should be actively screened for problematic feeding behaviors.

The development of space experiment payload for studying thermocapillary convection in the liquid bridge with large Pr number on TG-2 space laboratory as well as the experiments are presented in detail in this paper, and the objectives of the space experiments are confirmed. The functions of the payload are analyzed, and the technical and engineering specifications are determined. Detailed designs and experimental verifications are performed on the structure of liquid bridge columns, the method of bubble removing in the liquid, the bridge cleaning system, the accurate control of aspect ratio and volume ratio, and the high-sensitivity measurement of fluid temperature. Matching experiments on the ground according to space experiment properties are carried out, 5cSt silicone oil is selected as the fluid medium in space experiments. And the states of liquid bridge and temperature oscillation signals obtained from space experiments are presented at the end of this paper. Specific summarizations and discussions to the experiment project on fluid science in space are conducted in this paper, which will provide a useful reference for scientists participating space experimental research in the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying infection control measures introduced significant disruptions to the routines of many higher education students around the world. It also deprived them of in-person counselling services and social support. These changes have put students at a greater risk of developing mental illness. The objective of this review is to assess the prevalence of depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms and sleep disturbances in higher education students during the pandemic. A systematic search of English and Chinese databases was conducted current to January 1st, 2021. The quality of included studies was evaluated using a modified Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Prevalence of depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms and sleep disturbances were pooled using random-effects meta-analysis. Eighty-nine studies (n=1,441,828) were included. The pooled prevalence of depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and sleep disturbances was 34%, 32% and 33%, respectively. The prevalence values differ based on geographical regions, diagnostic criteria, education level, undergraduate year of study, financial situation, living arrangements and gender. Overall, the prevalence of depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms synthesized in this study was higher compared to pre-pandemic prevalence in similar populations. Evidently, mental health screening and intervention should be a top priority for universities and colleges during the pandemic.

Text classification is a fundamental and important area of natural language processing for assigning a text into at least one predefined tag or category according to its content. Most of the advanced systems are either too simple to get high accuracy or centered on using complex structures to capture the genuinely required category information, which requires long time to converge during their training stage. In order to address such challenging issues, we propose a dynamic embedding projection-gated convolutional neural network (DEP-CNN) for multi-class and multi-label text classification. Its dynamic embedding projection gate (DEPG) transforms and carries word information by using gating units and shortcut connections to control how much context information is incorporated into each specific position of a word-embedding matrix in a text. To our knowledge, we are the first to apply DEPG over a word-embedding matrix. The experimental results on four known benchmark datasets display that DEP-CNN outperforms its recent peers.

Entrepreneurial ecosystem is an emerging field that prioritises in-depth discussions of the sustainable development of entrepreneurship. Scientometric analysis of the results of entrepreneurial ecosystem research helps understand the dynamics and development trends, providing new ideas for research on the sustainable development of entrepreneurial activities. This study conducts a quantitative examination of the development status of entrepreneurial ecosystem research using scientometric analysis and 286 articles focusing on entrepreneurial ecosystems. We identified the most influential institutions, authors, journals, references, betweenness centrality, as well as disciplines and topics in the field. Our paper summarises the literature on the entrepreneurial ecosystem from the perspective of scientometrics, analyses the research dynamics, and provides a foundation for future research on entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a chronic, relapsing neurological disease affecting over 11 million individuals around the world. Alcoholics often experience negative affective symptoms such as depression, which promote excessive alcohol consumption and relapse drinking. Likewise, depression is a serious, yet common, mood disorder that can encourage alcohol consumption. However, while this comorbid expression of alcohol use disorder and depression severely worsen patient outcome, many gaps in our knowledge remain and impede the effective and efficient treatment of these two disorders. Recently, the rostromedial tegmental nucleus (RMTg), also known as the tail of the ventral tegmental area, has received increasing attention for its role in both disorders. This chapter focuses on the RMTg and its associations with alcohol and depression. Specifically, we (1) review the various RMTg characteristics associated with alcohol consumption and depression, including afferent and efferent structures, (2) outline how RMTg activity relates to these two diseases, and (3) summarize recent evidence on how the RMTg participates in alcohol withdrawal-induced negative affective symptoms.

As it is difficult to directly share data among different organizations, data federation brings new opportunities to the data-related cooperation among different organizations by providing abstract data interfaces. With the development of Cloud computing, organizations store data on the Cloud to achieve elasticity and scalability for data processing. The existing data placement approaches generally only consider one aspect, which is either communication cost or time cost, and do not consider the features of jobs that process the data. In this paper, we propose an approach to enable secure data processing on the Cloud with the data from different organizations. The approach consists of a data federation platform for secure data processing on the Cloud named FedCube and a greedy data placement algorithm that creates a plan to store data on the Cloud in order to achieve multiple objectives based on a cost model. The cost model is composed of two objectives, i.e., reducing both monetary cost and execution time. We present an experimental evaluation by comparing our data placement algorithm with the existing methods based on the data federation platform. The experiments show that our proposed algorithm significantly reduce the total cost (up to 69.8%).

Evidence from previous coronavirus outbreaks has shown that infected patients are at risk for developing psychiatric and mental health disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbances. To construct a comprehensive picture of the mental health status in COVID‐19 patients, we conducted a systematic review and random‐effects meta‐analysis to assess the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbances in this population. We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL, Wanfang Data, Wangfang Med Online, CNKI, and CQVIP for relevant articles, and we included 31 studies (n = 5153) in our analyses. We found that the pooled prevalence of depression was 45% (95% CI: 37–54%, I 2 = 96%), the pooled prevalence of anxiety was 47% (95% CI: 37–57%, I 2 = 97%), and the pooled prevalence of sleeping disturbances was 34% (95% CI: 19–50%, I 2 = 98%). We did not find any significant differences in the prevalence estimates between different genders; however, the depression and anxiety prevalence estimates varied based on different screening tools. More observational studies assessing the mental wellness of COVID‐19 outpatients and COVID‐19 patients from countries other than China are needed to further examine the psychological implications of COVID‐19 infections., The objective of this systematic review and meta‐analysis was to assess the prevalence of depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbances in COVID‐19 patients. Our findings suggest that 45% of COVID‐19 patients experience depression, 47% of patients experience anxiety, and 34% of patients experience sleep disturbances. A majority of the included patients were inpatients and patients from China. We did not find any differences in prevalence between patients of different gender, however, the prevalence of depression and anxiety varied depending on the use of different screening tools.

This study examines the hepatoprotective activity of naringin loaded solid nanoparticles (NRG-SLNs) and compared with free naringin (FNRG) against aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) induced hepatocellular carcinoma. The liver's self-healing ability was studied using a self-recovery group that received no therapy. Following AFB1 therapy, rats were given NRG-SLNs produced using the ion-gelation technique. Histology, serum injury indicators, oxidative stress biomarkers, a pro-inflammatory response biomarker, and tumor indicators were used to evaluate the liver tumor and its responsiveness to therapy. At a dosage of 6.18 mg/kg BW, NRG-SLNs (128 ± 4 nm) provided substantially greater hepatoprotection than free NRG. The actions of NRG-SLNs were equivalent to those of silymarin (SILY), which was given at a dosage of 20 mg/kg BW. The lack of regeneration potential of liver tissue after the damage was verified by the self-recovery group. NRG's efficiency in treating hepatic cancer was increased by using SLN's approach. The increased impact is most likely due to: a) enhanced oral bioavailability, b) the regulated and sustained action of enclosed NRG, and c) a decrease in discomfort and toxicity if any after orally administered. NRG-SLNs may be considered as a therapeutic option for hepatic ailments as effectiveness post-induction of liver carcinoma, is demonstrated presently.

Background As the coronavirus 2019 pandemic continues, healthcare services need to adapt to continue providing optimal and safe services for patients. We detail our adaptive framework as a large Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics service in a tertiary academic institution in Singapore. Methods The multidisciplinary team at our unit implemented various adaptations and workflow processes during this evolving pandemic in providing continued clinical care tailored to the challenges specific to our patient population. Services were continued via teleconsultation mode during the ‘Circuit Breaker’ (enhanced movement restriction) period. Specific workflow processes, IT infrastructure, and staff training were put in place to support smooth running of this service. Segregation of services into two teams based at two separate sites and implementation of stringent infection control measures surrounding the clinic visit by providers, patients and their families were incorporated to ensure safety. Measures were also taken to ensure providers' mental wellbeing. Results The clinical service was continued for the majority of our patients with a lowest reduction in patient consultations to half of baseline during the ‘Circuit Breaker’ period. We received positive feedback from families for teleconsultation services provided. Conclusion We have been able to continue services in our DBP clinics due to our dynamic reassessment of workflow processes and their prompt implementation in conjunction with the hospital and national public health response to the pandemic. Given that this pandemic is likely to be long drawn, our unit remains ready to constantly adjust these workflows and make adaptations as we go along, together with the support for mental health of patients, parents and staff. Continual improvements in workflows will be helpful even beyond the pandemic to ensure good continuity of care for our patients and families.

A model can be easily influenced by unseen factors in nonstationary environments and fail to fit dynamic data distribution. In a classification scenario, this is known as a concept drift. For instance, the shopping preference of customers may change after they move from one city to another. Therefore, a shopping website or application should alter recommendations based on its poorer predictions of such user patterns. In this article, we propose a novel approach called the multiscale drift detection test (MDDT) that efficiently localizes abrupt drift points when feature values fluctuate, meaning that the current model needs immediate adaption. MDDT is based on a resampling scheme and a paired student $t$ -test. It applies a detection procedure on two different scales. Initially, the detection is performed on a broad scale to check if recently gathered drift indicators remain stationary. If a drift is claimed, a narrow scale detection is performed to trace the refined change time. This multiscale structure reduces the massive time of constantly checking and filters noises in drift indicators. Experiments are performed to compare the proposed method with several algorithms via synthetic and real-world datasets. The results indicate that it outperforms others when abrupt shift datasets are handled, and achieves the highest recall score in localizing drift points.

Background Sepsis is a common complication of severe wound injury and infection, with a very high mortality rate. The P2Y12 receptor inhibitor, cangrelor, is an antagonist anti-platelet drug. Methods In our study, we investigated the protective mechanisms of cangrelor in CLP-induced pulmonary injury in sepsis, using C57BL/6 mouse models. Results TdT-mediated dUTP Nick-End Labeling (TUNEL) and Masson staining showed that apoptosis and fibrosis in lungs were alleviated by cangrelor treatment. Cangrelor significantly promoted surface expression of CD40L on platelets and inhibited CLP-induced neutrophils in Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) (p p p p p Conclusion Our study indicated that cangrelor repressed the levels of GPR17, followed by a decrease in the inflammatory response and a rise of neutrophils in BALF, potentially reversing CLP-mediated pulmonary injury during sepsis.

Sleep disturbances are common in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but research on this topic is still limited in China. In the current study, we evaluated the prevalence of sleep problems in preschool-aged children with ASD and to examine the correlations between sleep disturbances and emotional/behavioral symptoms and repetitive behavior in the unique social context of China. This study recruited 475 preschool-aged children aged 3–6 years old, including 252 children with ASD (mean age 5.13 ± 1.15, 80.6% male) and 223 age-matched typically developing (TD) children (mean age 5.12 ± 0.97, 74.9% male). The parents of all children completed a sociodemographic questionnaire and the Childhood Sleep Habits Questionnaire. The parents of 114 ASD children completed the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the Repetitive Behavioral Questionnaire-2 (RBQ-2). The prevalence of sleep problems in preschool-aged children with ASD in this study was 81.7%, which was higher than that in TD children (61.0%). The scores for bedtime resistance, sleep anxiety, sleep duration, parasomnias, and sleep onset delay in the ASD group were significantly higher than those in the TD group (t=−7.664, P=0.000; t=−10.477, P=0.000; t=−4.133, P=0.000; Z=−3.916, P=0.000; Z=−7.093, P=0.000; respectively). Sleep onset delay explained 17.3% of the variance (adjusted R2 = 0.173) in the total SDQ score of children with ASD, and bedtime resistance explained a large proportion of total RBQ-2 score variance (adjusted R2 = 0.206). The high rate of sleep disturbances in preschool-aged children with ASD emphasizes the importance of screening for sleep problems in this population. Attention should also be directed toward formulating good sleep hygiene practices for preschool-aged children in the particular social context and cultural setting of China.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the association between 2 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) of HLA-B and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Methods: We enrolled 84 ASD and 182 healthy children in case-control study, and 67 family trios in family-based study. Two tag SNPs (rs1058026, rs2770) in gene HLA-B were selected to determine the association with ASD. Chi-square test was used in case-control study, haplotype relative risk test (HRR) and transmission disequilibrium test (TDT) analysis were performed in family-based study. Results: SNP rs1058026 was found significantly associated with ASD in family-based study (P = 0.016 for HRR; P = 0.020 for TDT), but not in case-control study. Conversely, SNP rs2770 did not show association with ASD in both studies. Conclusions: The association observed from this study indicates that gene HLA-B might play a role in ASD in Chinese population.

This paper presents the development and benchtop validation of a system that can wirelessly acquire gastric electrical activity called slow-waves (SWs), modulate the gastrointestinal activity through stimulating with low- and high-power current pulses, and measure the tissue bio-impedance over the frequency range of 0.01 – 10 kHz. The developed system is composed of a front-end unit, and a back-end unit connected to a computer. A graphical user interface was designed in LabVIEW to process and display the recorded SWs and measured bio-impedance in real time and to configure the stimulation pulses, wirelessly. Bench-top validation showed an appropriate frequency response for analog conditioning and digitization resolution to acquire SWs. Moreover, the system was able to deliver electrical pulses at amplitudes up to ±10 mA to a maximum load of 1 kΩ. After in vivo studies, the system will be used to diagnose and treat functional gastrointestinal disorders.

PurposeQuantitative bibliometric approaches were used to statistically and objectively explore patterns in the sharing economy literature.Design/methodology/approachJournal (co-)citation analysis, author (co-)citation analysis, institution citation and co-operation analysis, keyword co-occurrence analysis, document (co-)citation analysis and burst detection analysis were conducted based on a bibliometric data set relating to sharing economy publications.FindingsSharing economy research is multi- and interdisciplinary. Journals focused upon products liability, organizing framework, profile characteristics, diverse economies, consumption system and everyday life themes. Authors focused upon profile characteristics, sharing economy organization, social connections, first principle and diverse economy themes. No institution dominated the research field. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identified organizing framework, tourism industry, consumer behavior, food waste, generous exchange and quality cue as research themes. Document co-citation analysis found research themes relating to the tourism industry, exploring public acceptability, agri-food system, commercial orientation, products liability and social connection. Most cited authors, institutions and documents are reported.Research limitations/implicationsThe study did not exclusively focus on publications in top-tier journals. Future studies could run analyses relating to top-tier journals alone, and then run analyses relating to less renowned journals alone. To address the potential fuzzy results concern, reviews could focus on business and/or management research alone. Longitudinal reviews conducted over several points in time are warranted. Future reviews could combine qualitative and quantitative approaches.Originality/valueWe contribute by analyzing information relating to the population of all sharing economy articles. In addition, we contribute by employing several quantitative bibliometric approaches that enable the identification of trends relating to the themes and patterns in the growing literature.

A support vector machine (SVM) plays a prominent role in classic machine learning, especially classification and regression. Through its structural risk minimization, it has enjoyed a good reputation in effectively reducing overfitting, avoiding dimensional disaster, and not falling into local minima. Nevertheless, existing SVMs do not perform well when facing class imbalance and large-scale samples. Undersampling is a plausible alternative to solve imbalanced problems in some way, but suffers from soaring computational complexity and reduced accuracy because of its enormous iterations and random sampling process. To improve their classification performance in dealing with data imbalance problems, this work proposes a weighted undersampling (WU) scheme for SVM based on space geometry distance, and thus produces an improved algorithm named WU-SVM. In WU-SVM, majority samples are grouped into some subregions (SRs) and assigned different weights according to their Euclidean distance to the hyper plane. The samples in an SR with higher weight have more chance to be sampled and put to use in each learning iteration, so as to retain the data distribution information of original data sets as much as possible. Comprehensive experiments are performed to test WU-SVM via 21 binary-class and six multiclass publically available data sets. The results show that it well outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of three popular metrics for imbalanced classification, i.e., area under the curve, F-Measure, and G-Mean.

Distributed generation (DG) has gradually become significant in the power system owing to energy shortages and environmental pollution. However, the traditional structure of power systems is change...

Summary Introduction The incidence of pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PNETs) is increasing over the past few decades. Surgery for low-grade and small PNETs of less than 2 cm and N0M0 is still debated. The purpose of this study is to examine the association between surgical resection and survival in patients with low-grade nonfunctioning PNETs. Materials and methods Patients diagnosed with PNETs between 2004 and 2015 were extracted from SEER. Kaplan–Meier methods and Cox proportional hazard models were used to estimate independent predictors in PNETs patients. Results A total of 2637 patients (2147 underwent surgical resection and 490 did not undergo surgery) with histologically confirmed low-grade PNETs in this cohort study. Overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) of patients with surgery was better than those without surgery (log rank test POS Conclusions Surgical resection of primary tumor may have a significant benefit on survival for patients with low-grade nonfunctioning PNETs. To determine the optimal management, grade, stage and tumor size should be considered comprehensively.

Although plenty of active materials could be used as supercapacitor electrodes, only limited ones have been engineered to construct transparent supercapacitors. Specially, it is a great challenge to make opaque metal oxides, which often own high energy density, into transparent films. Here, we demonstrate a novel approach to fabricate transparent MnO2 films for flexible transparent supercapacitors. By utilizing breath-figure polymer films with ordered pores as template, arrays of MnO2 islands were electrochemically deposited, with high light transmission. The thickness and interspace distance of MnO2 island arrays could be adjusted by tuning deposition time so that the capacitance and transparency of the electrodes are changed accordingly. Such island array structure can effectively eliminate the internal stress existing in the composite film to avoid cracks during bending operation. The assembled transparent supercapacitor shows a transmittance of 44% at 550 nm and can yield a high capacitance of 4.73 mF...

Imbalanced classification using a support vector machine (SVM) is a normal but crucial problem in machine learning. Compared with binary classification, multiclass classification is much more complicated. Most existing studies on imbalanced classification using SVM focus on binary imbalanced classification; while only few of them look into imbalanced classification with multiple classes. Pre-clustering is a useful technique to prepare proper data from an imbalanced dataset for a classifier. It can be used to extract the feature of a dataset first and improve classification performance. Density peak based on Euclidean distance proves its effectiveness and generality in clustering. Motivated by this and the fact that the number of clusters is known in multi-class classification using a one-vs-rest strategy, we combine density peak clustering and SVM to propose a new pre-clustering method to perform effective imbalanced classification with multiple classes. Specifically, we transform a multi-class classification problem into several binary classification tasks. The results on 5 public datasets in terms of F-measure, G-mean and Area Under Curve (AUC) show its superiority over the original SVM and SVM with other methods including random under-sampling, Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique, pre-clustering using K-Means and EasyEnsemble methods using either a one-vs-rest or one-vs-one strategy.

Question Generation aims to create various questions from a given passage, which can provide education material, improve the training of question answering, and help chat bots have cold-to-start or continue to talk to people. Chinese Question Generation is a new research area, which mainly uses a rule-based model to convert declarative sentences into questions. We propose a Stroke-Aware Copy Network (SAC-Net), which is a sequence-to-sequence model. It can enhance the performance of Chinese question generation by using various specific components and techniques for Chinese characteristics. In view of the fact that the morphology of Chinese characters is related to its meaning, this research introduces the information of strokes in Chinese and obtain the relationship among strokes in Chinese characters. This model introduces the direction information of the questions, which helps us generate more diverse questions. For the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) word problem that often occurs in Chinese, this research has improved a Self-attention Copy mechanism. Extensive evaluations confirm that this model improves the performance of Chinese problem generation significantly and represents a state-of-the-art neural Chinese problem generation model.

Background/Aims: Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder, and complement 3 (C3) is closely related to schizophrenia. We investigated the association between C3 polymorphisms and schizophrenia in a Northeast Han Chinese population. Methods: A total of 2240 Chinese people, consisting of 1086 patients with schizophrenia and 1154 healthy controls, were recruited for this study. Ten single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs; rs11569562, rs344555, rs2241393, rs2241392, rs11569514, rs445750, rs451760, rs11672613, rs2230205, and rs2250656) in C3 were selected and genotyped. Results: Genotype distribution analysis indicated that rs11569514 was significantly associated with schizophrenia. In the dominant model (AA vs. GG+GA genotypes), we found a significant protective effect for rs344555 against schizophrenia (odds ratio [OR]: 0.72, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.53–0.99, P = 0.04). In the codominant model (TT vs. AA), we found a significant risk effect for rs11569514 on schizophrenia (OR: 4.39, 95% CI: 2.06–9.37, P < 0.001). Haplotypes, including TG (rs11569562 and rs344555), TGG (rs11569562-rs344555-rs2241393), AG (rs344555-rs2241393), CGGGT (rs11569562-rs344555-rs2241393-rs2241392-rs11569514), and ACGTG (rs11569514-rs445750-rs451760-rs11672613-rs2230205), showed either a risk or protective role for schizophrenia. Conclusions: SNP rs11569514 in C3 and haplotypes of C3 variants were associated with schizophrenia in a Han Chinese population.