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Fake detection has become an urgent task. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) extended to deep learning has shown its extraordinary ability in the fields of image, audio, and speech. But advanced technology benefits us, it also poses a threat to us when used in Cyber Crime. The Deepfake (common name for face manipulation methods) based on GANs can realize the replacement of different faces. Due to the development of GANs, faces generated by Deepfake can already be visually real. Deepfake can purposely replace any face to a different person, so that a fabricated event may be widely spread because of the convenience of the Internet, causing serious impacts such as personal attacks and cyber crime. Based on cutting-edge research , this paper proposes a intelligence forensic method of Deepfake detection. We first discover the subtle texture differences between real and fake image in image saliency, which shows difference in the texture of faces. To amplify this difference, we exploit guided filter with saliency map as guide map to enhance the texture artifacts caused by the post-processing and display the potential features of forgery. Resnet18 classification network efficiently learns the exposed difference and finally realizes the real and fake detection of face images. We evaluate the performance of the method and experiments verify that the proposed method can achieve the state-of-the-art detection accuracy .

Background Colon cancer is largely implicated in elderly patients (age ≥ 60 years). The prognosis of patients diagnosed with the M1b stage is vastly poor. Marital and insurance status has been considered important prognostic factors in various cancer types. However, how these factors influence elderly patients with stage M1b colon cancer remains to be explored. This study aims to uncover the role of marital and insurance status in the survival of elderly patients with stage M1b colon cancer. Methods We retrieved data for patients diagnosed with stage M1b colon cancer between 2010 and 2016 from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. Our analysis of the clinicopathological features, overall survival (OS), and cancer-specific survival (CSS) was based on the marital and insurance status, respectively. Results In sum, 5709 stage M1b colon cancer patients with complete information from SEER were enrolled for analysis. The OS and CSS of the Non-married group were poorer compared to that of the Married group. The OS and CSS of the Uninsured group were poorer than both of the Insured group and Medicaid group. However, OS was comparable between Uninsured group and Medicaid groups. The findings allude that marital and insurance status potentially impact the long-term survival of elderly patients with M1b colon cancer. The subgroup survival analyses revealed the lowest risk for death among the Insured Married group based on the comparison of the OS and CSS across all other groups. Moreover, Univariate and multivariate analyses revealed race, marital status, surgery, and chemotherapy as independent predictors for OS, whereas insurance status, surgery,and chemotherapy were independent predictors for CSS in elderly patients with M1b colon cancer. Conclusion The marital and insurance status greatly impact the survival of elderly patients with M1b colon cancer. Therefore, it is imperative to provide more support to this vulnerable patient group who are lonely and uninsured, particularly in the psychological and health insurance aspect.

Background Mucinous adenocarcinoma (MC) is the second most common pathological type of colon carcinoma (CC). Colon cancer liver metastases (CLMs) are common and lethal, and complete resection of the primary tumour and metastases for CLM patients would be beneficial. However, there is still no consensus on the role of surgery for MC with liver metastases (M-CLM). Methods Patients diagnosed with M-CLM or classical adenocarcinoma with CLM (A-CLM) from 2010 to 2013 in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database were retrieved. The clinicopathological features and overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) data were compared and analysed. Results The results showed that the M-CLM group had a larger tumour size, more right colon localizations, higher pT and pN stages, more female patients, and more retrieved and positive lymph nodes and accounted for a higher proportion of surgeries than the A-CLM group. The OS and CSS of M-CLM patients who underwent any type of surgery were significantly better than those of patients who did not undergo any surgery, but poorer than those of A-CLM patients who underwent surgery. Meanwhile, the OS and CSS of M-CLM and A-CLM patients who did not undergo any surgery were comparable. Compared with hemicolectomy, partial colectomy led to similar or better OS and CSS for M-CLM, and surgery was an independent protective factor for long-term survival in M-CLM. Conclusions M-CLM had distinct clinicopathological characteristics from A-CLM, and surgery could improve the survival and is an independent favourable prognostic factor for M-CLM. In addition, partial colectomy might be a non-inferiority choice as hemicolectomy for M-CLM according to the results from this study.

Lynch syndrome is the most prevalent form of familial colorectal cancer (CRC) and is caused by pathogenic germline mismatch repair (MMR) gene mutations. MLH1, MSH2 and MSH6 mutations have been well studied, but the rate and characteristics of PMS2 mutations are rare, especially in China. This study enrolled 1706 unselected patients with CRC who underwent colorectal resection from June 2016 to November 2018, the MMR status and clinicopathological features were analysed. A total of 11.8% of patients with CRC had defects in at least one MMR-related protein. Among them, 8.3% were identified with PMS2 defects, and 3.1% of patients had isolated PMS2 defects. Compared with MMR-proficient CRC, PMS2-defect CRC occurred more frequently in the right colon and less frequently in the rectum, had more poorly differentiated and mucinous carcinoma cases, and had fewer perineural invasions and a lower pN stage but a more advanced pT stage and a larger tumour size. In the cases with PMS2 defect, there were fewer tumours in the right colon, fewer poorly differentiated cases and smaller tumour sizes than in the cases with both MLH1 and PMS2 defects. In addition, in cases with isolated PMS2 defects, there were more tumours in the right colon and, more mucinous carcinoma cases than in cases with MMR-proficient CRCs, but had a similar cancer onset age. This study identified the rate, clinicopathological and age characteristics of PMS2 defects in CRCs in China and highlighted the importance of universal screening and germline detection of PMS2 in CRC.

The rapid popularization of cloud computing and ultra-high-speed Internet has promoted the vigorous development of data sharing and collaborative office, especially in Big Data and AI. Aiming at protecting the security of users’ data, researchers developed PDP scheme to verify data. However, existing schemes all rely on semi-trusted Third Party Auditor (TPA) or group management to store verification information. In order to solve this problem, we propose a distributed data integrity audit scheme based on blockchain. This scheme provides a brand-new method, which allows customers to store data safely without relying on any specific TPA and protect users’ privacy at a lower cost. For the new concept, this paper points out the problems of the existing scheme and puts forward system model and security model. Then, a decentralized data integrity audit scheme using blockchain is designed. The proposed private PDP scheme based on blockchain is provably secure. At the same time, the security analysis and efficiency analysis show that the proposed PDP scheme is safe, efficient and practical.

Cloud storage is now a very popular service for many enterprises and their users. However, ensuring the integrity of the outsourced data is a very challenging problem. The concept of provable data possession is very effective for solving this problem. Based on this concept, in this paper we propose a new group-user-based privacy-preserving secure cloud auditing protocol for enterprise users and analyse its security. This protocol is also constructed on a recently proposed lightweight and privacy-preserving secure cloud auditing scheme for group users via a third-party medium. We point out that scheme is not secure and that the authenticators corresponding to the outsourced data blocks can be easily forged, that means the cloud servers can delete all the outsourced data but can still give correct proof for the possession of outsourced data, while our protocol has no such shortcoming. The performance analysis results demonstrate that our proposal is very practical and can have large-scale applications.

Real-world sequential data are often generated based on complicated and latent mechanisms, which can be formulated as event sequences occurring in the continuous time domain. In addition, continuous signals may often be associated with event sequences and be formulated as time series with fixed time lags. Traditionally, event sequences are often modeled by parametric temporal point processes, which use explicitly defined conditional intensity functions to quantify the occurrence rates of events. However, these parametric models often merely take one-side information from event sequences into account while ignoring the information from concurrent time series, and their intensity functions are usually designed for specific tasks dependent on prior knowledge. To tackle the above-mentioned problems, we propose a model called recurrent point process networks which instantiates temporal point process models with temporal recurrent neural networks (RNNs). In particular, the intensity functions of the proposed model are modeled by two RNNs: one temporal RNN capturing the relationships among events and the other RNN updating intensity functions based on time series. Furthermore, an attention mechanism is introduced, which uncovers influence strengths among events with good interpretability. Focusing on challenging tasks such as temporal event prediction and underlying relational network mining, we demonstrate the superiority of our model on both synthetic and real-world data.

Background Endoscopy biopsy (EB) is the standard diagnostic method for colorectal cancer (CRC), whereas its accuracy and efficiency in mucinous adenocarcinoma (MAC) initial diagnosis is unclear. Methods The initial EB and postoperative specimen (PS) pathological diagnosis of MAC from two centers were retrospectively collected and analyzed. The accuracy and efficiency of initial EB compared with PS pathological diagnosis were analyzed. The potential factors which would affect the initial EB diagnosis of MAC were analyzed. Results 280 and 78 eligible cases were enrolled in this study from two centers respectively. The initial EB diagnosis accuracy for MAC were 84.62% and 83.33%. However, among the cases of PS diagnosis with MAC, the diagnostic efficiency of initial EB was only 36.49% and 32.50% respectively. Lower tumor differentiation and more EB number were associated with an increased probability for the EB diagnosis of MAC, but only tumor differentiation was an independent diagnositic factor for EB in the two cohorts. Conclusions The accuracy of initial EB with MAC is high, but the diagnostic efficiency was extremely low. Tumor differentiation and EB number were associated with the diagnosis efficiency of MAC before surgery.

In recent years, denoising methods based on deep learning have achieved unparalleled performance at the cost of large computational complexity. In this work, we propose an Efficient Multi-stage Video Denoising algorithm, called EMVD, to drastically reduce the complexity while maintaining or even improving the performance. First, a fusion stage reduces the noise through a recursive combination of all past frames in the video. Then, a denoising stage removes the noise in the fused frame. Finally, a refinement stage restores the missing high frequency in the denoised frame. All stages operate on a transform-domain representation obtained by learnable and invertible linear operators which simultaneously increase accuracy and decrease complexity of the model. A single loss on the final output is sufficient for successful convergence, hence making EMVD easy to train. Experiments on real raw data demonstrate that EMVD outperforms the state of the art when complexity is constrained, and even remains competitive against methods whose complexities are several orders of magnitude higher. Further, the low complexity and memory requirements of EMVD enable real-time video denoising on commercial SoC in mobile devices.

Image denoising is one of the most critical problems in mobile photo processing. While many solutions have been proposed for this task, they are usually working with synthetic data and are too computationally expensive to run on mobile devices. To address this problem, we introduce the first Mobile AI challenge, where the target is to develop an end-to-end deep learning-based image denoising solution that can demonstrate high efficiency on smartphone GPUs. For this, the participants were provided with a novel large-scale dataset consisting of noisy-clean image pairs captured in the wild. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Samsung Exynos 2100 chipset with a powerful Mali GPU capable of accelerating floating-point and quantized neural networks. The proposed solutions are fully compatible with any mobile GPU and are capable of processing 480p resolution images under 40-80 ms while achieving high fidelity results. A detailed description of all models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper., Mobile AI 2021 Workshop and Challenges: https://ai-benchmark.com/workshops/mai/2021/. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2105.07809, arXiv:2105.07825

In order to reduce the blocking rate of wavelength routing DWDM optical network and improve the wavelength resource utilization, this paper proposes a deep learning optical network routing algorithm based on wavelength continuity supervision (DL-RWA). In this algorithm, wavelength continuity is taken as the key parameter, and the data set is created by supervised learning. After the deep neural network (DNN) is constructed, the data set is used to train it, and the network parameters are adjusted, so that the algorithm can select the routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) scheme with the best wavelength continuity according to the real-time situation of the dynamic network. The simulation results show that compared with the traditional KSP + FF routing algorithm, DL-RWA algorithm can effectively enhance the routing effect and improve the network environment when dealing with the long correlation traffic model (IP traffic simulation).

Solar-driven electrochemical CO2 reduction to fuels has considerable potential to satisfy future renewable energy needs and mitigate CO2 emissions, but current approaches face significant challenges, such as poor selectivity and large overpotential for the catalytic reactions. Here we present a hybrid microbial-photoelectrochemical system that selectively converts CO2 into methane in a single step without any by-products. The hybrid system employs a biocathode that was capable of reducing CO2 into CH4 with an unprecedentedly low overpotential (

Background Metastasis is the main cause of death in patients with advanced stage colon cancer. Epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT) plays an important role in invasion and metastasis. Actin-like 6A (ACTL6A) is vital for embryogenesis and differentiation and is also critical for metastasis and EMT in hepatocellular carcinoma, as observed in our previous study. In the present study, we further explored the role of ACTL6A in colon cancer metastasis. Methods ACTL6A expression levels were analyzed in normal colon, colon adenoma and colon cancer specimens using public databases and tissue samples. ACTL6A expression and its association with clinicopathologic features of colon cancer patients were also analyzed. ACTL6A-overexpression and ACTL6A-knockdown colon cancer cells were used to perform cytological experiments to explore the potential biological function of ACTL6A in metastasis and EMT in colon cancer. Results The data from both the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and Oncomine databases showed that ACTL6A expression levels in colon adenoma and cancer were higher than those in normal colon samples. The ACTL6A expression level in fresh colon cancer specimens was also higher than that in the corresponding adjacent normal colon specimens. Patients with high ACTL6A expression directly correlated with advanced pT status, distant metastasis, poor differentiation and microvascular/perineural invasion. ACTL6A overexpression promoted migration and invasion of colon cancer cells, whereas ACTL6A knockdown exhibited the opposite effect in vitro. Moreover, we demonstrated that ACTL6A promoted EMT in colon cancer cells in vitro. Conclusions Our findings indicate that ACTL6A exhibits pro-tumor function and acts as an EMT activator in colon cancer. ACTL6A may serve as a potential therapeutic target for colon cancer. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12885-018-4931-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

With the increase of the renewable energy sources connected to the power system, the fluctuation and uncertainty of the output of the renewable energy generator has significant effects on power system security and stability operation. The synchronicity of power generation characteristics and load demands are different, which leads to frequency regulation pressure of power system further prominent. The battery energy storage system has good frequency regulation ability and can quickly respond to system frequency change. In this paper, in the case of the energy storage required to be configured in new wind farms, the virtual inertia control, and droop control strategies of energy storage participating in frequency regulation are proposed. Then, the comprehensive control strategy is put forward, considering the frequency regulation ability of the wind turbines and energy storage system. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by using the IEEE 30-bus system.

This paper reviews the first NTIRE challenge on quality enhancement of compressed video, with a focus on the proposed methods and results. In this challenge, the new Large-scale Diverse Video (LDV) dataset is employed. The challenge has three tracks. Tracks 1 and 2 aim at enhancing the videos compressed by HEVC at a fixed QP, while Track 3 is designed for enhancing the videos compressed by x265 at a fixed bit-rate. Besides, the quality enhancement of Tracks 1 and 3 targets at improving the fidelity (PSNR), and Track 2 targets at enhancing the perceptual quality. The three tracks totally attract 482 registrations. In the test phase, 12 teams, 8 teams and 11 teams submitted the final results of Tracks 1, 2 and 3, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of video quality enhancement. The homepage of the challenge: https://github.com/RenYang-home/NTIRE21_VEnh, Comment: Corrected the MOS values in Table 2, and corrected some minor typos

With the high penetration of renewable energy sources participating in the power grid, frequency stability control becomes a significant problem restricting the security and stability operation of a multi-HVDC sending-end system with a small load and large power. HVDC monopolar blocking or bipolar blocking leads to increasing the sending-end system frequency. Over-frequency generator tripping is an important control measure to restraining the sending-end system frequency increasing. This paper proposes the configuration principles of over-frequency generator tripping considering the transient instability generating units, the frequency protection of wind turbines, and the variation of the line power flow. Then, the configuration process and the method of the over-frequency generator tripping scheme is proposed according to the configuration principles and the field operation experience. An example of a provincial power grid is used to verify the effectiveness and the adaptability of the proposed over-frequency generators tripping scheme under different operation modes and HVDC blocking failures.

Ethnopharmacological relevance Traditional Chinese medicine believes that depression syndrome has become one of the core pathogenesis of insomnia. The pharmacology of traditional Chinese medicine points out that Perilla frutescens has the effect of regulating Qi and relieving depression, promoting Qi circulation to relieve pain, so Perilla frutescens may have the potential therapeutic effect on insomnia. Related studies have reported the sedative and hypnotic effects of Perilla frutescens, but these studies have not yet explored the mechanism of sedative and hypnotic effects of Perilla frutescens essential oil (PFEO) through inhalation administration. Aim of the study The purpose of this study is to explore the underlying sedative and hypnotic mechanisms of PFEO through the GABAergic system pathways. Materials and methods Established the PCPA insomnia model of mice, The open field test, pentobarbital-induced falling asleep rate, latency of sleeping time, and duration of sleeping time experiments were used to evaluate the behavior of mice, the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was used to analyze the content of 5-HT and GABA in hypothalamus and cerebral cortex. Immunohistochemical experiment, Western blot experiment and RT-PCR experiment were used to study the mechanism of PFEO through GABAergic pathway to regulate insomnia. The main volatile constituents of PFEO were analyzed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Results The inhalation of PFEO has sedative and hypnotic effects, which reduce significantly the autonomic activity of PCPA insomnia mice, increase falling asleep rate, shorten latency of sleeping time, and prolong duration of sleeping time; the results of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay show that PFEO increase the content of 5-HT and GABA in hypothalamus and cerebral cortex. The results showed that inhalation of PFEO increase the expression of GABAAα1 and GABAAα2 positive cells, increase the level of GABAAα1 and GABAAα2 protein and also increase the level of GABAAα1 mRNA and GABAAα2 mRNA in the hypothalamus and cerebral cortex. The highest content of PFEO is Perillaldehyde (54.37%), followed by 1,4-Cineole (7.42%), Acetaldehyde diethyl acetal (6.61%), D-Limonene (5.09%), Eucalyptol (4.94%), etc. Conclusion The inhalation of PFEO has sedative and hypnotic effects, it is speculated that the mechanism of which may be the sedative and hypnotic effects through the GABAergic pathway.

Cooperative cognitive radio network is a new method to alleviate the spectrum scarcity problem. Proactive content caching and UAV relaying techniques are deployed in a CRN, to enable the achievable rates for primary and secondary systems. Even though these two emerging technologies are grateful to solve the problem of spectrum scarcity, there are still open issues to influence the system performance and the utilization of spectrum. In this article, we provide an overview of the cooperation technique, including their theoretical schemes and the advanced performance in radio networks. Then, this article proposes a cache-enabled UAV cooperation scheme in CRN, which enhances the CRN's transmission capability and reduces the redundant traffic load of CRN. The experimental results show that the cache-enabled UAV scheme significantly improves the achievable rates for both systems in CCRN. In addition, we present future work related to content caching, deployment of UAVs and CCRN to support radio networks.

Background Castor zinc finger 1 (CASZ1) plays critical roles in various biological processes and pathologic conditions, including cancer. However, the prognostic importance and biologic functions of CASZ1 in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are still unclear. Methods qRT-PCR, western blot and immunohistochemistry analyses were used to determine CASZ1 expression in HCC samples and cell lines. The clinical significance of CASZ1 was assessed in two independent study cohorts containing 232 patients with HCC. A series of in vitro and in vivo experiments were performed to explore the role and molecular mechanism of CASZ1 in HCC progression. Results Here we report that CASZ1 expression was downregulated in HCC tissues and cell lines. Low CASZ1 expression was closely correlated with aggressive clinicopathological features, poor clinical outcomes and early recurrence of HCC patients. Moreover, overexpression of CASZ1 in HCCLM3 cells significantly inhibited cell proliferation, migration, invasion in vitro and tumor growth and metastasis in vivo, whereas silencing CASZ1 significantly enhanced the above abilities of PLC/PRF/5 cells. Further mechanism study indicated that these phenotypic changes were mediated by MAPK/ERK signaling pathway and involved altered expression of MMP2, MMP9 and cyclinD1. Finally, we proved that CASZ1 exerted its tumor-suppressive effect by directly interacting with RAF1 and reducing the protein stability of RAF1. Conclusions Our study for the first time demonstrated that CASZ1 is a tumor suppressor in HCC, which may serve as a novel prognostic predictor and therapeutic target for HCC patients. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s13046-018-0720-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Due to the rapidly growing volume of publications, it is an urgent task to evaluate the potential impact of emerging works and identify valuable publications for the benefit of researchers with limited time. The impact of authors is significant in terms of personal promotion and fund raising. However, the criterion used to evaluate the impact of authors is largely based on credits they have received, not potential credits. We take the citation count, the most direct and widely used metric for publication popularity, as the potential impact and evaluate its predictability. To this end, we propose a neural network-based point process model for predicting the citation count of individual publications. Our approach integrates signals from paper-specific features and their citation traces, which reflect the trend of either losing or gaining popularity. The model is learned in an adversarial way, which mitigates the bias-exposure efficiently. We verify our model on the largest publicly available academic publication repository, and our model outperforms alternatives with a notable margin.

The shortage of fossil fuels and extensive environmental pollution force the development of renewable energy. To address these problems, converting solar energy to valuable fuels and chemicals by photosynthesis is thought to be a promising and prospective approach. However, the low solar energy conversion efficiency of natural photosynthesis and the poor selectivity of current artificial photosynthesis technologies significantly limit the development of solar-to-chemicals conversion. Recently, solar-driven biological inorganic hybrid systems, which integrate biological catalysts with the inorganic light-harvesting components, are proposed to overcome the limitations of artificial and natural photosynthesis. This review presents recent progress and accomplishment of the hybrid systems for the production of organic fuels and chemicals from carbon dioxide. Firstly, we introduce the working principles of three typical hybrid systems, including photovoltaic-driven biological inorganic system, microbial photoelectrochemical system, and photosensitized biological inorganic system. Then, to deeply understand the interaction between microorganisms and inorganic materials, we discuss the charge transfer between microorganisms and inorganic materials. Moreover, to improve the interaction between microorganisms and inorganic materials, the surficial morphological and chemical modification of the inorganic materials are proposed to promote the adherence of microorganisms and the charge transfer between microorganisms and inorganic materials. Finally, we discuss the current challenges for the development of the hybrid systems.

Metastasis-associated recurrence is the main cause for the poor prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, the detailed molecular mechanisms underlying HCC metastasis remain elusive. Though some data indicated the oncogenic role of Sorcin in tumors, the prognostic value and biological role of Sorcin in HCC is still unknown. In this study, it demonstrated that Sorcin expression levels were significantly upregulated in HCC tumor tissues compared with matched adjacent nontumorous liver tissues and normal liver tissues, and such expression level correlated with HCC metastasis. High Sorcin expression was significantly correlated with aggressive clinicopathological characteristics such as multiple tumor nodules, high Edmondson-Steiner grade, microvascular invasion, advanced TNM stage and advanced BCLC stage (all P P in vitro, and facilitate HCC growth and metastasis in vivo. Mechanistically, Sorcin exerted its role by activating extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) pathway and promoted metastasis by facilitating epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) in HCC.

With the development and application of blockchain technology, more and more fields are beginning to use blockchains for industrial innovation, In recent years. At the same time, the data integrity verification techniques based on blockchain have also attracted wide attention of researchers. However, the state-of-the-art schemes are only using the structure of the blockchain on centralized server which cannot leverage the characteristics of the blockchain and resist malicious modification attacks. In addition, the centralized blockchain structure introduces additional storage and computing costs. In this paper, we propose a decentralized verifiable outsourcing framework based on blockchain networks, in which no administrators are required to be in charge of auditing and recording data changes.

With the progress of society and the improvement of people’s democratic consciousness, voting, as a channel to fully develop democracy, is playing an increasingly important part in many application scenarios. In the era of Internet, electronic voting has replaced the traditional paper voting with the advantages of low cost, high efficiency and few mistakes. The fact that the data of electronic voting system is stored in the central database gives rise to the following problems: the voting data is not open and transparent enough, and it is easy to be tampered with and forged; the users’ private information faces the risk of being leaked; voters can not verify the voting results. Fortunately blockchain technology can make up for the shortcomings of the current voting system, making the voting process open and transparent, preventing fraudulent votes, enhancing the security of voting data and verifying the voting results. The application of blockchain electronic voting system has very important significance and prospects. In this paper, we first introduce the development process of electronic voting system at home and abroad, then introduce the development status of blockchain-based electronic voting system, finally we compare and summarize several typical blockchain-based electronic voting schemes.

With the rapid development of cloud computing, an increasing number of organizations and individuals store and share their data on untrusted clouds. Therefore, shared data auditing has become an important issue in the field of cloud storage, attracting the attention of researchers. However, the state-of-the-art schemes can not fully meet the performance and security requirements. Therefore, in this paper we propose a public audit shared data protocol for cloud storage by using blockchain and Rank-based Merkle AVL tree (RB-MHT) to achieve privacy preserving and batch auditing to reduce system overhead as well as keeping the security of modification record in this blockchain-based scheme. For privacy-perserving, the auditing signature is only related to group management during the audit process and data will be blind by a random value. Furthermore, we prove the security of our scheme and evaluate the performance of it through implementation. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is provably secure and efficient.

Objective We aimed to expound feasibility of serum cell-free microRNA-214 (miR-214) as a noninvasive biomarker for glioma in this study. Patients and Methods We detected expression of miR-214 in medium from 2 glioma cell lines to confirm whether it is secretory in screening phase. Then, we verified cell-free miR-214 expression in serum samples from an independent set of 100 preoperative patients with glioma, 30 matching postoperative patients, and 100 healthy controls. Results MiR-214 was secreted from glioma cell lines. Extracellular miR-214 levels were significantly overexpressed in preoperative serum from glioma patients with glioma, whereas its expression significantly decreased in matched postoperative serum. Upregulated cell-free miR-214 in serum was significantly associated with higher tumor grade, absence of isocitrate dehydrogenase, and unmethylated methylguanine methyltransferase promoter. Extracellular miR-214 in serum could effectively distinguish patients with glioma from healthy control (area under the curve = 0.885; 95% confidence interval, 0.833–0.926). Moreover, serum cell-free miR-214 was an independent prognostic indicator of overall survival for patients with glioma. Conclusions Serum cell-free miR-214 could serve as a promising noninvasive biomarker of glioma in tumor stratification, early diagnosis, and prognostic evaluation.

We report our investigation on the correlation between glass viscosity and the lifetime of femtosecond laser written silica fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) at high temperatures. The FBGs are made by a direct, point-by-point writing method using an 800-nm Ti:sapphire femtosecond laser. It shows that the femtosecond laser inscribed FBGs in the commercial silica fibers can survive under high-temperature up to 1150 °C. An empirical formula of FBG thermal lifetime τ (in second) versus glass viscosity η (in dPa·s), τ=0.27η0.32, is deduced. Both our experimental results and the previously reported work on femtosecond laser induced photo-defects is in good agreement with such a formula, indicating its effective prediction on the thermal stability and thermal decay of such a type of FBG at high temperatures.

Solar-driven carbon-based fuels production is a promising way to store solar energy and alleviate the greenhouse effect. However, current approaches face a lot of challenges, such as poor selectivity, high overpotential, and the requirement of external electrical bias. In this study, based on the photoelectrochemical and bioelectrochemical technologies, we reported a novel self-biased hybrid solar-microbial device, which was capable of converting solar energy into methane without external electrical bias. Owing to the self-generated bias (~0.47 V) from the bioanode and the low overpotential (

Silver Beach is a typical sandy plain coast located in the southeastern city of Beihai in Guangxi province, China. Because of its obvious land-use changes and ecosystem deterioration in recent decades, a sustainable development management and environmental protection project should be urgently proposed. Therefore, the remote-sensing images of Landsat are adopted to analyze the land use evolution and to evaluate its ecological security during the past 35 years in Silver Beach of this paper. The results show: in the period of 1979a---2013a, the areas of constructive land and artificial wetland are considerably increased and mainly transformed from cultivated land and forest land. The areas of cultivated land and forest land are substantially reduced accordingly, but the areas of grassland, water area and intertidal zone have no great extent of variation. Its land use intensities are consistently increased, but its land use diversities are abundant before 2000a and then significant decreased. Overall, the land use evolution presents slow in development speed, strengthen in development intensity, down in ecological richness and fragment in spatial patterns. In terms of ecological security, although there has short-term rising of ecological service value and security in 2006a, the whole structure, stability and ecological service function in Silver Beach are declined, and its vulnerabilities are accordingly increased. As a matter of fact, these results are achieved by shortly to improve the utilization rate of the artificial wetland and the intertidal zone resources with the cost of ecosystem structure and stability destruction. The impact factors of leading to above results are not only climatic factors as air temperature, typhoon, tide, but also even more important human activity factors as urbanization, sea reclamation, fishing, tourism and planning management in the studied time period. In consequence, the research findings from this study should be able to help understand the interacting mechanism among above multiple factors and to quantify respective contribution to land use evolution and its ecological security, which would provide an importantly scientific instruction for the future development management protection in Silver Beach.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most lethal cancers worldwide because of metastasis. Epithelial‐mesenchymal transition (EMT) is widely considered to be crucial to the invasion‐metastasis cascade during cancer progression. Actin‐like 6A (ACTL6A) is initially verified important for cell proliferation, differentiation, and migration. In this study, we find that ACTL6A plays an essential role in metastasis and EMT of HCC. ACTL6A expression is up‐regulated in HCC cells and tissues. A high level of ACTL6A in HCCs is correlated with aggressive clinicopathological features and is an independent poor prognostic factor for overall and disease‐free survival of HCC patients. Ectopic expression of ACTL6A markedly promotes HCC cells migration, invasion, as well as EMT in vitro and promotes tumor growth and metastasis in the mouse xenograft model. Opposite results are observed when ACTL6A is knocked down. Mechanistically, ACTL6A promotes metastasis and EMT through activating Notch signaling. ACTL6A knockdown has the equal blockage effect as the Notch signaling inhibitor, N‐[N‐(3,5‐difluorophenacetyl)‐L‐alanyl]‐S‐phenylglycine t‐butylester, in HCC cells. Further studies indicate that ACTL6A might manipulate SRY (sex determining region Y)‐box 2 (SOX2) expression and then activate Notch1 signaling. Conclusions: ACTL6A promotes metastasis and EMT by SOX2/Notch1 signaling, indicating a prognostic biomarker candidate and a potential therapeutic target for HCC. (Hepatology 2016;63:1256–1271)

Artificial photosynthesis is a promising technology to convert CO2 to fuels using solar energy, but it faces significant challenges, such as low Faradaic efficiency, poor selectivity, and the requirement of external electrical energy input. Here, we coupled a TiO2/CdS composite photoanode with a CH4-producing biocathode to construct a visible-light responsive hybrid microbial photoelectrochemical system for CO2-to-CH4 conversion. Owing to the low onset potential of the TiO2/CdS photoanode and the high selectivity and low overpotential of the biocathode, we successfully demonstrated efficient methane production with a high Faradaic efficiency up to 94.4% without any external electrical bias. The visible-light responsive hybrid system yielded a high solar-to-fuel conversion efficiency (SCE) up to 1.28%, which is around 6 times of that of global natural photosynthesis. The successful demonstration of such a visible-light responsive hybrid system provides new opportunities for artificial photosynthesis to produce solar fuels.

Summary: Intestinal-type gastric cancer is preceded by premalignant lesions, including chronic atrophic gastritis and intestinal metaplasia. In this study, we constructed a single-cell atlas for 32,332 high-quality cells from gastric antral mucosa biopsies of patients spanning a cascade of gastric premalignant lesions and early gastric cancer (EGC) using single-cell RNA sequencing. We then constructed a single-cell network underlying cellular and molecular characteristics of gastric epithelial cells across different lesions. We found that gland mucous cells tended to acquire an intestinal-like stem cell phenotype during metaplasia, and we identified OR51E1 as a marker for unique endocrine cells in the early-malignant lesion. We also found that HES6 might mark the pre-goblet cell cluster, potentially aiding identification of metaplasia at the early stage. Finally, we identified a panel of EGC-specific signatures, with clinical implications for the precise diagnosis of EGC. Our study offers unparalleled insights into the human gastric cellulome in premalignant and early-malignant lesions. : Zhang et al. conduct a single-cell transcriptomic study on gastric antral biopsies from patients across premalignant lesions and early gastric cancer. They construct the single-cell network for epithelial cells across lesions and dissect the molecular characteristics for representative cell types in each lesion. Keywords: single-cell, stomach, premalignant lesions, early gastric cancer, network

Metastasis-associated recurrence is the main cause for the poor prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, the detailed molecular mechanisms underlying HCC metastasis remain elusive. Though some data indicated the oncogenic role of Sorcin in tumors, the prognostic value and biological role of Sorcin in HCC is still unknown. In this study, it demonstrated that Sorcin expression levels were significantly upregulated in HCC tumor tissues compared with matched adjacent nontumorous liver tissues and normal liver tissues, and such expression level correlated with HCC metastasis. High Sorcin expression was significantly correlated with aggressive clinicopathological characteristics such as multiple tumor nodules, high Edmondson-Steiner grade, microvascular invasion, advanced TNM stage and advanced BCLC stage (all P

This paper proposes a research method for mitigating wind power fluctuations in a hybrid energy storage system considering the confidence level of wind power volatility. First, the typical daily wind power output is subjected to Fourier spectrum analysis to determine the frequency range of wind power output, and combined with low-pass filtering to find the optimal cutoff frequency, for obtaining energy storage reference power; Then determining the optimal energy storage reference power by comparing the energy storage reference powers solved at different confidence levels. Finally, empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is used to decompose the stored energy into a series of intrinsic mode functions(IMFs), demarcation of the energy storage reference power with minimum aliasing in the instantaneous frequency-time curve, the high frequency part is configured by power type energy storage, and the low frequency part is configured by energy type energy storage. The simulation of the wind farms in a certain area of Hunan Province is carried out. The result shows that proper reduction of confidence level can reduce energy storage power and capacity.

// Dipeng Ou 1,* , Hao Yang 1,* , Dong Hua 1 , Shuai Xiao 1 and Lianyue Yang 2,3 1 Department of Geratic Surgery, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China 2 Department of Surgery, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China 3 Liver Cancer Laboratory, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Dipeng Ou, email: // Keywords : TMEM100; HCC; metastasis; proliferation; prognosis Received : January 10, 2015 Accepted : April 08, 2015 Published : April 29, 2015 Abstract Transmembrane protein 100 (TMEM100) was activated by ALK1/TGF-β signaling. We found that TMEM100 was decreased in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tissues and in highly metastatic cell lines. Overexpressed of TMEM100 inhibited invasion, migration and proliferation. Low levels of TMEM100 were associated with cirrhosis, tumor size, Tumor nodule number, TNM stage, BCLC stage, Edmondson-Steiner Stage and vein invasion. Furthermore, TMEM100 was an independent risk factor for overall survival ( P = 0.03) and disease-free survival ( P = 0.019). The current findings suggest that TMEM100 functions as a tumor suppressor in HCC metastasis and proliferation.

Epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) plays an important role in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) dissemination. Bromodomain PHD-finger transcription factor (BPTF) could regulate embrogenesis and stem cell differentiation, and it may be involved in tumor progression and EMT. In this study, we aimed to determine BPTF, E-cadherin and vimentin expression in tumor tissues and the clinical significance in relation to HCC. The BPTF, vimentin and E-cadherin expression of 106 HCC tissue samples was examined by immunohistochemical staining. BPTF and vimentin showed high expression and E-cadherin showed low expression in HCC. BPTF is associated with the tumor number, vascular invasion, Edmondson-Steiner grade, TNM stage and recurrence (P

Long-term wind power forecasting plays an important role in the planning, prevention and control of harmful wind power events. However, short operation time of domestic wind farms result in the deficiencies of wind power data and it restricts the modeling of wind power forecasting. The staging operation of wind farms also bring bad effect to forecasting. To solve the problems, this paper proposed a long-term wind power forecasting model by multi meteorological variables based on data compensation. This model uses correlation coefficient method to select the optimal meteorological variables. Establishing the RBF neural network between optimal meteorological variables and historical power to get years of fitting power data. In this way, the power data can be compensated. Then, using the fitting power to replace the special year's wind power and forecasting the next year's wind power in steps of 3h. The verification with the actual data of Nanshan wind farm shows the proposed long-term forecasting method is effective and practicable. Those problems, deficiencies of power data and the special year, are solved.

Aim To analyze the incidence of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) in a population that underwent health checkups and had high serum miR-106b levels. Methods A total of 335 subjects who underwent checkups in the Digestive and Liver Disease Department of our hospital were randomly selected. RT-PCR was used to detect the level of miR-106b in serum samples. Laboratory and imaging examinations were carried out to confirm the HCC diagnosis in patients who had a > 2-fold change in miR-106b levels. Ultrasound-guided biopsy was also used for HCC diagnosis when necessary. On this basis, the clinical data of these subjects, including history of hepatitis virus infection, obesity, long-term history of alcohol use and stage of HCC, were collected. Then, the impact of these factors on the level of miR-106b in serum was analyzed. Furthermore, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was drawn to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of miR-106b for HCC. Results A total of 35 subjects had abnormal serum miR-106b levels, of which 20 subjects were diagnosed with HCC. t-test revealed that the difference in serum miR-106b level in terms of sex, age, history of hepatitis virus infection, obesity and long-term history of alcohol use was not statistically significant. However, serum miR-106b levels in patients with advanced HCC (stage III/IV) was higher than in patients with early HCC (stage I/II), and the difference was statistically significant (P = 0.000). Moreover, the ROC curve revealed that the area under the curve value for miR-106b was 0.885, which shows that serum miR-106b level has a certain clinical value for HCC diagnosis. Conclusion The random sampling survey shows that serum miR-106b level is a valuable diagnostic marker for HCC. However, the diagnostic threshold value needs to be further researched.

As the modern wind turbines (WTs) become larger in size, the structural loads experienced by the WTs increase dramatically, which would shorten the working life of the WTs and increase the maintenance cost. To mitigate such problem, this study proposes a non-linear pitch control strategy including tower load reducing objective for the WTs operating in the above-rated wind speed region. The proposed non-linear controller consists of a rotor speed regulator, a tower oscillation damper and a lead compensator. The rotor speed regulator and tower oscillation damper are designed separately based on inverse system method, which is a powerful tool in solving the control problem of non-affine non-linear system. The lead compensator is utilised to compensate for the phase lag of the pitch angle command caused by the pitch actuator. Furthermore, light detection and ranging (LIDAR) preview measurements are introduced to provide wind information for the proposed controller in order to improve its control performance. The simulation results with the aero-elastic model of fatigue, aerodynamics, structures and turbulence (FAST) show that, the proposed non-linear controller outperforms the baseline gain-scheduled proportional-integral controller. The proposed non-linear controller can work well in the whole above-rated wind speed region, and is easy to implement for application.

With the scale of small and medium hydropower increasing gradually, it is difficult to establish a detailed model because the parameters of each generating unit can barely be obtained. To build a dynamic equivalent model of the hydropower generator group, this paper presents an estimation-based equivalent method, which will keep the dynamic responses and the transient stability consistent before and after the equivalence. A 3rd order generator and a parallel static characteristic ZIP load model are selected as the dynamic equivalent model of hydropower generator group. Based on phasor measurements in the tie line which connects to the modeled hydropower generator group, the self-adaptive control parameters modified differential evolution (SACPMDE) algorithm is used to obtain the parameters of equivalent model. The proposed method is verified in the small and medium hydropower generator group with simulation in an actual power grid of China. The results show that the proposed equivalent model has highly precision on the dynamic responses and the parameters identification method is stable. The proposed method can be used for modeling a group of small and medium hydropower generators whose structures and parameters are unknown.

With the continuous and rapid development of cloud computing, it becomes more popular for users to outsource large-scale data files to cloud servers for storage and computation. However, data outsourcing brings convenience to users while it also causes certain security problems. The integrity of outsourced data needs to be periodically checked by users to protect their data. Also, the secure transfer of cloud data can avoid data losses to users. Aiming at solving these problems in the data outsourcing process, a provable data transfer scheme based on provable data possession and deletion is recently proposed by Xue et al. However, we found a security flaw in Xue et al.’s scheme. Concretely, the block tags can be forged in their scheme. In this article, we first give a brief review of Xue et al.’s scheme and then a detailed attack is shown. To remove the security flaw, an improved scheme is proposed. Furthermore, we replace the integrity checking protocol of their proposal with a more efficient protocol to improve the efficiency of data integrity auditing.

The objective of this study was to enhance removal of chemical oxygen demand (COD), total nitrogen (TN) and total phosphorus (TP) from domestic sewage in a sequencing batch reactor with added new materials. A modified anoxic/anaerobic/oxic (MAAO) process, integrating a micro-electrolysis (ME) bed in an anoxic tank, and complex biological media (CBM) in anoxic, anaerobic and oxic tanks to treat domestic sewage, and their performances were investigated. The MAAO system was operated at controlled hydraulic retention time (HRT) of 8 h and mixed liquor recirculation (MLR) at 75%. The results showed that the MAAO system could effectively remove COD, TN and TP with average rates of 93%, 80% and 94%, respectively, in March, and 94%, 76% and 91%, respectively, in August. In this system, TP was primarily removed from the anoxic tank regardless of the operational conditions; removal contribution ratios to TP of the anoxic tank reached 56% both in March and August, indicating that the ME bed can effectively enhance phosphorus removal. TN was primarily removed from the anoxic and anaerobic tanks; removal contribution ratios to TN of anoxic and anaerobic tanks reached 36-38% and 37-38%, respectively. The oxic tank had the highest share of COD removal (56% both in March and August) in the removal of phosphorus. The outflow concentrations of COD, TN and TP were 3-46, 7-14 and 0.3-0.5 mg/L, respectively, in March, and 26-49, 9-15 and 0.04-0.1 mg/L, respectively, in August. COD and TN removal performances indicated that the innovative materials of the ME bed and CBM can effectively enhance COD and TN removal.

For doubly fed induction generator (DFIG)-based wind energy conversion systems (WECSs), large electromotive force will be induced in the rotor circuit during grid faults. Without proper protection scheme, the rotor side of DFIG will suffer from overcurrents, which may even destroy the rotor-side converter (RSC). To mitigate this problem, a new flux-linkage-tracking-based low-voltage ride-through (LVRT) control strategy is proposed to suppress the short-circuit rotor current. Under the proposed control strategy, the rotor flux linkage is controlled to track a reduced fraction of the changing stator flux linkage by switching the control algorithm of RSC during grid faults. To validate the proposed control strategy, a case study of a typical 1.5-MW DFIG-based WECS is carried out by simulation using the full-order model in SIMULINK/SimPowerSystems. In the case study, a comparison with a typical LVRT method based on RSC control is given, and the effect of the control parameter on the control performance is also investigated. Finally, the validity of the proposed method is further verified by means of laboratory experiments with a scaled-size DFIG system.