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Over the years, numerous evidences have demonstrated that microbes living in the human body are closely related to human life activities and human diseases. However, traditional biological experiments are time-consuming and expensive, so it has become a research topic in bioinformatics to predict potential microbe-disease associations by adopting computational methods. In this study, a novel calculative method called BPNNHMDA is proposed to identify potential microbe-disease associations. In BPNNHMDA, a novel neural network model is first designed to infer potential microbe-disease associations, its input signal is a matrix of known microbe-disease associations, and its output signal is matrix of potential microbe-disease associations probabilities. And moreover, in the novel neural network model, a new activation function is designed to activate the hidden layer and the output layer based on the hyperbolic tangent function, and its initial connection weights are optimized by adopting Gaussian Interaction Profile kernel (GIP) similarity for microbes, which can improve the training speed of BPNNHMDA efficiently. Finally, in order to verify the performance of our prediction model, different frameworks such as the Leave-One-Out Cross Validation (LOOCV) and k-Fold Cross Validation ( k-Fold CV) are implemented on BPNNHMDA respectively. Simulation results illustrate that BPNNHMDA can achieve reliable AUCs of 0.9242, 0.9127 ± 0.0009 and 0.8955 ± 0.0018 in LOOCV, 5-Fold CV and 2-Fold CV separately, which are superior to previous state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, case studies of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), asthma and obesity demonstrate that BPNNHMDA has excellent prediction ability in practical applications as well.

The reliable operation of flexible display devices poses a significant engineering challenge regarding the metrology of high barriers against water vapor. No reliable results have been reported in the range of 10–6 g∙(m2∙d)−1, and there is no standard ultra-barrier for calibration. To detect trace amount of water vapor permeation through an ultra-barrier with extremely high sensitivity and a greatly reduced test period, a predictive instrument was developed by integrating permeation models into high-sensitivity mass spectrometry measurement based on dynamic accumulation, detection, and evacuation of the permeant. Detection reliability was ensured by means of calibration using a standard polymer sample. After calibration, the lower detection limit for water vapor permeation is in the range of 10–7 g∙(m2∙d)−1, which satisfies the ultra-barrier requirement. Predictive permeation models were developed and evaluated using experimental data so that the steady-state permeation rate can be forecasted from non-steady-state results, thus enabling effective measurement of ultra-barrier permeation within a significantly shorter test period.

Background Non-prescription antibiotic use at community is a main driver of antimicrobial resistance. Cough is a common condition and prevalent in all townships, including China. This study aims to investigate the non-prescription antibiotic use for cough in China and explore to which extent antibiotic use knowledge was correctly instructed in communities. Methods A probability-proportionate-to-size sampling method was adopted to survey from all 14 townships in Yiwu city, China. All participants were investigated by face-to-face interview on Portable Android Devices. The continuous variables were presented by mean and standard deviation or medium and inter-quartile range (IQR). The categorical variables were presented using percentage or constituent ratio. Chi-square test for univariate analysis and logistic regression for multivariate analysis were conducted to assess the odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals, respectively. Results A total of 3034 respondents across all the 14 townships and the 50 natural villages/streets completed all key items of the questionnaire. Of 2400 (79.10%) respondents stated that they experienced cough in the past 12 months with the medium age of 36.5 (IQR: 26–49) and 12.21% (293/2400) respondents had the non-prescription antibiotic use behavior. Among those 293 respondents, the proportion of non-prescription antibiotic use for cough peaked at around 16% among people aged 30–39 years old. The major sources of antibiotics were pharmacy (77.70%) and/or family storage (43.92%). Conclusions Non-prescription antibiotics use for cough is prevalent in the community, especially among people in their thirties. Strengthened drug purchase regulation and well-trained professional pharmacists would be promising alternatives to ameliorate AMR. Moreover, penetrating antibiotics knowledge to common citizens and is an urgent task to alleviate antimicrobial resistance. Therefore, proactive policies and regulations should be made to improve current situations.

To establish a dynamic nomogram based on preoperative clinical data for prediction of lateral lymph node metastasis (LLNM) of papillary thyroid carcinoma.Retrospective study.The Sixth Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-Sen University.The data of 477 patients from 2 centers formed the training group and validation group and were retrospectively reviewed. Preoperative clinical factors influencing LLNM were identified by univariable and multivariable analysis and were to construct a predictive dynamic nomogram for LLNM. Receiver operating characteristic analysis and calibration curves were used to evaluate the predictive power of the nomogram.The following were identified as independent risk factors for LLNM: male sex (odds ratio [OR] = 4.6,The dynamic nomogram for preoperative prediction of LLNM in papillary thyroid carcinoma can help surgeons identify high-risk patients and develop individualized treatment plans.

Binder jet 3D printing (BJ3DP) is one of the most promising 3D printing technologies, due to its ability of printing large-scale complex parts with high efficiency and low cost. The powder particle size is crucial for the sintering quality of BJ3DP. In this work, on the basis of the constitutive model of viscoplastic theory, the shape evolution (shrinkage and relative density) of cubes produced by BJ3DP using 316L stainless steel powders (normal distribution of powder sizes) with different mean particle sizes (i.e., 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 μm) was studied via finite element numerical simulation during sintering. It revealed that the volumetric shrinkage, relative density, and maximum sintering stress decreased with increasing the mean particle size. The maximum sintering stress of the sample with mean particle size of 70 μm was 0.0492 MPa, with the volumetric shrinkage of ~40% and the relative density of ~89%. In the meantime, the maximum sintering stress of the sample with mean particle size of 20 μm was 0.1789 MPa, with the volumetric shrinkage of ~48% and the relative density of ~97%. In addition, the simulated results of the relative density of assumed samples agreed well with the experimental results from the literature.

BACKGROUND Abnormal microangiogenesis and microenvironmental disturbances within the Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) can exacerbate tumor hypoxia, which may increase radiotherapy resistance and thus lead to poor prognosis in NPC patients. A non-invasive imaging technique, dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI), which can reflect the tumor blood perfusion and angiogenesis status, was used to investigate the relationships of DCE-MRI parameters with hypoxia-inducible factor 1 alpha (HIF-1α) expression and tumor grades in NPC patients. METHODS 42 treatment-naive patients with pathologically confirmed NPC were enrolled in this analysis. Plain magnetic resonance scans and DCE-MRI scans were performed before treatment, and post-processing was performed to calculate the relative enhancement (RE), maximum relative enhancement (MRE), maximum enhancement (ME), wash-in rate (WIR), wash-out rate (WOR), time to peak (TTP), and area under the curve (AUC). Immunohistochemistry was used to detect HIF-1α expression in electronasopharyngeal fiberoscopic specimens. The clinical grade/stage of NPC was jointly assessed by an experienced radiologist and a radiotherapist. The potential correlations of the DCE-MRI parameters with HIF-1α expression and clinical grades were analyzed. The statistical analysis was performed using SPSS 17.0 software package. RESULTS Among DCE-MRI parameters, RE, ME, and MRE were associated with the positive expression of HIF-lα in NPC and could reflect the hypoxic status in the local microenvironment of the cancer foci in vivo. RE, ME, and MRE were significantly higher in the positive HIF-1α expression group than in the negative HIF-1α expression group (F=5.281, P=0.027; F=11.923, P=0.001; F=6.228, P=0.017). RE, ME, and MRE were significantly correlated with clinical grade (F=3.646, P=0.021; F=3.204, P=0.034, F=3.050, P=0.040) and T stage (F=6.578, P=0.001; F=3.540, P=0.023; F=4.384, P=0.010). The values of RE, MRE, and ME gradually increased as the clinical grade and T stage increased. CONCLUSIONS DCE-MRI is a valuable imaging technique for the noninvasive evaluation of hypoxia in NPC, the development of individualized treatment protocols, and the prediction of efficacy.

Background: We aimed to evaluate the therapeutic effect of additional ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) with mesalazine, compared to mesalazine alone in patients with ulcerative colitis (UC). The mechanism was evaluated by monitoring the changes of IL-23-IL-17 axis and the intestinal microflora. Methods: In this prospective, single center study, patients with UC were randomly assigned to the Mesalazine group (n=20) or the UDCA + Mesalazine group (n=20). Mayo score and Inflammatory Bowel Disease Questionnaire (IBDQ), and fecal samples for 16S rRNA sequencing and blood samples for IL-23 and IL-17 ELISA were collected for analysis. Results: Mayo scores and IBDQ score of the UDCA + Mesalazine group were significantly better than those of the Mesalazine group (P = 0.015 and P < 0.001, respectively). At post-treatment week 4, IL-23 and IL-17 levels were significantly lower in the UDCA + Mesalazine group compared to those in the Mesalazine group (both P < 0.038). In patients with UC after treatment, Firmicutes in the UDCA + Mesalazine group was higher than those in the Mesalazine group (P < 0.001). The UDCA + Mesalazine group showed lower percentage of Proteobacteria compared to those in the Mesalazine group (P < 0.001). Conclusion: Additional UDCA could provide better therapeutic effects than mesalazine alone, possibly due to the change of IL-23 and IL-17 and the proportional distribution of intestinal microflora.

View variation is one of the greatest challenges in the field of gait recognition. Subspace learning approaches are designed to solve this issue by projecting cross-view features into a common subspace before recognition. However, similarity measures are data-dependent, which results in low accuracy when cross-view gait samples are randomly arranged. Inspired by the recent developments of data-driven similarity learning and multi-nonlinear projection, we propose a new unsupervised projection approach, called multi-nonlinear multi-view locality-preserving projections with similarity learning (M2LPP-SL). The similarity information among cross-view samples can be learned adaptively in our M2LPP-SL. Besides, the complex nonlinear structure of original data can be well preserved through multiple explicit nonlinear projection functions. Nevertheless, its performance is largely affected by the choice of nonlinear projection functions. Considering the excellent ability of kernel trick for capturing nonlinear structure information, we further extend M2LPP-SL into kernel space, and propose its multiple kernel version MKMLPP-SL. As a result, our approaches can capture linear and nonlinear structure more precisely, and also learn similarity information hidden in the multi-view gait dataset. The proposed models can be solved efficiently by alternating direction optimization method. Extensive experimental results over various view combinations on the multi-view gait database CASIA-B have demonstrated the superiority of the proposed algorithms.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third and second most common type of cancer diagnosed in males and females, respectively, and is the fourth leading cause of cancer-associated mortality worldwide. Liver metastasis is the primary cause of mortality in patients with CRC, and therefore requires therapeutic focus. Regulatory T cells (Tregs) and hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) are potentially involved in regulating the immune response during liver metastasis. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the influence of CD4+ forkhead box p3 (Foxp3)+ Tregs and the HGF/c-Met signaling pathway in the liver metastasis of CRC. A model of the latter was established using Balb/c mice via splenic injection of human CRC cells (CT-26 line). The mice were monitored for 3 weeks after being injected, and the spleens and livers were removed on day 22 for further analysis. Moreover, the single-cell suspensions were labeled with CD4 and Foxp3 antibodies, and were analyzed using flow cytometry. Expression levels of α-smooth muscle actin (SMA), hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) and hepatocyte growth factor receptor (c-Met) were analyzed using immunohistochemistry. Mice injected with CT-26 cells exhibited signs of illness and significant weight loss, compared with the control mice (P=0.013), and they also developed liver metastases, at an average of 20.5 tumors per mouse. Pathological evaluation using hematoxylin and eosin staining confirmed the tumors as liver metastases of CRC. The numbers of CD4+ T cells were significantly decreased in the spleen (P

BACKGROUND: The high cost and insufficient supply of HPV vaccines have substantially slowed their implementation in lower-income countries. This study aimed to assess the incremental cost-effectiveness of two doses of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination (bivalent 16/18 vaccine; 2vHPV) compared to a no-vaccination scenario and a three-dose scenario in one province in China. METHODS: A static Markov model was used to model a lifetime cohort of 100,000 girls aged 12 years at the start of vaccination. A two-dose vaccination schedule was assumed to be non-inferior to a three-dose schedule in terms of vaccine efficacy, and both vaccination schemes were assumed to provide lifelong protection. Incremental costs, health effects and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios were used to measure the outcomes when comparing the different strategies. RESULTS: Compared to no vaccination, the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (Chinese yuan per quality-adjusted life year) of the two-dose vaccination strategy is 12,472, and the 2-dose strategy is calculated to be cost saving relative to the 3-dose vaccination strategy. CONCLUSIONS: Introducing the 2vHPV vaccine would be highly cost effective at a per-dose vaccine price of CNY 500, which has implications for cervical cancer control in China and other resource-limited countries.

Identification of essential proteins is important for understanding cell survival and development, because even if only one of these proteins is missing, organisms cannot survive or develop. Since traditional methods for identifying essential proteins based on biological experiments are costly and inefficient, more and more computational models are proposed for predicting essential proteins in recent years. In this paper, a novel computational model called BSPM is proposed, in which, an original PPI network will be built based on known protein-protein associations first, and then topology information of the original PPI network will be adopted to measure the similarities between proteins based on the SimRank algorithm. Thereafter, a weighted PPI network can be obtained based on the similarities between proteins and the original PPI network. Finally, based on the weighted PPI network, the PageRank algorithm will be used to infer potential essential proteins. Moreover, in order to evaluate the performance of BSPM, we have compared the performance of BSPM with 14 classical prediction models in the field based on two different databases, and experimental results show that BSPM can achieve prediction accuracies of 92%, 81% and 76% out of the top 100, 200 and 300 candidate proteins separately, which not only are significantly better than those 14 competitive classical prediction models, but also means that BSPM can be used as an effective model for identifying essential proteins in the future.

Accumulating evidences have indicated that essential proteins play vital roles in human physiological process. In recent years, although researches on prediction of essential proteins are developing rapidly, they suffer from various limitations including unsatisfactory data suitability and low accuracy of predictive results. In this manuscript, a novel method called RWAMVL was proposed to predict essential proteins based on Random Walk and Adaptive Multi-View multi-label Learning. In RWAMVL, taking into account that the inherent noise is ubiquitous in existing datasets of known protein-protein interactions (PPIs), a variety of different features including biological features of proteins and topological features of PPI networks would be obtained by adopting adaptive multi-view multi-label learning first. And then, an improved random walk method would be designed to detect essential proteins based on these different features. Finally, in order to accurately verify the predictive performance of RWAMVL, intensive experiments would be done to compare RWAMVL with multiple state-of-the-art predictive methods under different expeditionary frameworks, and comparative results illustrated that RWAMVL could achieve high prediction accuracy than all these competitive methods as a whole, which demonstrated that RWAMVL may be a potential tool for prediction of key proteins in the future.

Importance Much remains unknown about the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. How the severity of the index case and timing of exposure is associated with disease in close contacts of index patients with COVID-19 and clinical presentation in those developing disease is not well elucidated. Objectives To investigate the association between the timing of exposure and development of disease among close contacts of index patients with COVID-19 and to evaluate whether the severity of the index case is associated with clinical presentation in close contacts who develop COVID-19. Design, Setting, and Participants This study used a large, population-based cohort of 730 individuals (index patients) who received a diagnosis of COVID-19 in Zhejiang Province, China, from January 8 to July 30, 2020, along with a contact tracing surveillance program. Field workers visited 8852 close contacts of the index patients and evaluated them for COVID-19 through August 2020. A timeline was constructed to characterize different exposure periods between index patients and their contacts. Main Outcomes and Measures The primary outcome was the attack rate of COVID-19, defined as the total number of new COVID-19 cases diagnosed among contacts of index patients divided by the total number of exposed contacts. A secondary outcome was asymptomatic clinical presentation among infected contacts. Relative risks were calculated to investigate risk factors for COVID-19 among contacts and asymptomatic clinical presentation among infected contacts. Results Among 8852 close contacts (4679 male contacts [52.9%]; median age, 41 years [interquartile range, 28-54 years]) of 730 index patients (374 male patients [51.2%]; median age, 46 years [interquartile range, 36-56 years]), contacts were at highest risk of COVID-19 if they were exposed between 2 days before and 3 days after the index patient’s symptom onset, peaking at day 0 (adjusted relative risk [ARR], 1.3; 95% CI, 1.2-1.5). Compared with being exposed to an asymptomatic index patient, the risk of COVID-19 among contacts was higher when they were exposed to index patients with mild (ARR, 4.0; 95% CI, 1.8-9.1) and moderate (ARR, 4.3; 95% CI, 1.9-9.7) cases of COVID-19. As index case severity increased, infected contacts were less likely to be asymptomatic (exposed to patient with mild COVID-19: ARR, 0.3; 95% CI, 0.1-0.9; exposed to patient with moderate COVID-19: ARR, 0.3; 95% CI, 0.1-0.8). Conclusions and Relevance This cohort study found that individuals with COVID-19 were most infectious a few days before and after symptom onset. Infected contacts of asymptomatic index patients were less likely to present with COVID-19 symptoms, suggesting that quantity of exposure may be associated with clinical presentation in close contacts.

Accumulating studies have shown that microbes are closely related to human diseases. In this paper, a novel method called MSBMFHMDA was designed to predict potential microbe–disease associations by adopting multi-similarities bilinear matrix factorization. In MSBMFHMDA, a microbe multiple similarities matrix was constructed first based on the Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity and cosine similarity for microbes. Then, we use the Gaussian interaction profile kernel similarity, cosine similarity, and symptom similarity for diseases to compose the disease multiple similarities matrix. Finally, we integrate these two similarity matrices and the microbe-disease association matrix into our model to predict potential associations. The results indicate that our method can achieve reliable AUCs of 0.9186 and 0.9043 ± 0.0048 in the framework of leave-one-out cross validation (LOOCV) and fivefold cross validation, respectively. What is more, experimental results indicated that there are 10, 10, and 8 out of the top 10 related microbes for asthma, inflammatory bowel disease, and type 2 diabetes mellitus, respectively, which were confirmed by experiments and literatures. Therefore, our model has favorable performance in predicting potential microbe–disease associations.

Highlights • Locoregional radiotherapy can prolong OS for patients with de novo metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma. • Nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients with oligometastic disease can benefit from locoregional radiotherapy rather than polymetastatic disease., Background To evaluate the value of locoregional radiotherapy (LRRT) in de novo metastatic nasopharyngeal carcinoma (dmNPC) and identify predictive factors for additional LRRT after palliative chemotherapy (PCT). Methods Overall survival (OS) was the primary endpoint. Patients who underwent PCT and LRRT were categorized as the PCT+LRRT group; patients who only received palliative chemotherapy were categorized as the PCT group. Oligometastatic diseases (OMD) was defined as ≤5 metastatic lesions and ≤2 metastatic organs. Results A total of 168 patients were included for this study. The median OS of patients in the PCT+LRRT group was significantly higher than those in the PCT group (57 months vs. 22 months, P

2.25Cr-1Mo-0.25V steel is the main material of hydrogenation reactor due to its good high temperature properties and hydrogen embrittlement resistance. As we all know, there is a great performance gap between virgin material and actual product. Nevertheless, current design methods cannot evaluate the impact of manufacturing. In engineering practice, tensile testing is widely implemented on online surveillance samples or experimentally simulated samples to acquire the actual material characteristics. However, sampling from service hydrogenation reactor, as well as simulating actual manufacturing process, is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and difficult. To systematically analyze the effect of fabrication on 2.25Cr-1Mo-0.25V steel, a prediction method that can consider manufacturing residual effects needs to be proposed. Nowadays, many data-driven methods, such as back propagation neural network (BPNN), support vector machine (SVM) and random forest (RF), are employed in predicting material behavior during hot forming, whereas they are scarcely applied on 2.25Cr-1Mo-0.25V steel. In this work, the mentioned three machine learning procedures were constructed to simulate the behavior of actually manufactured 2.25Cr-1Mo-0.25V steel in uniaxial tensile test. Firstly, tensile samples were extracted from different locations of an actually manufactured hydrogenation reactor, and stretched at 454 °C and 482 °C. Subsequently, BPNN, SVM and RF models were developed on the obtained tensile curves, respectively. Their inputs were manufacturing parameter, sampling location, service temperature and tensile strain, whereas their output was tensile stress. Finally, the predictability of models was evaluated by test set data which were not involved in model training process. The results show that the predictions of BPNN, SVM and RF all agree well with experimental data. BPNN exhibits lowest prediction error and highest generalization power, SVM is somewhere in between, while RF is the worst. This work will contribute to the application of data-driven methods in material property prediction of 2.25Cr-1Mo-0.25V steel.

Background Hepatitis E virus (HEV) infection is a leading cause of acute hepatitis worldwide, and results in high morbidity and mortality rates among elderly people in China. The hepatitis E vaccine, Hecolin®, has been shown to be safe and highly efficacious among healthy adults aged 16–65 years old. However, there is no data about Hecolin® vaccination in elderly people older than 65 years (y). Methods An open-labeled, controlled trial was conducted to evaluate the safety and immunogenicity of Hecolin® among the elderly aged >65 y. A total of 601 eligible participants were enrolled. Among them, 200 elderly people aged >65 y and 201 adults aged 18–65 y were assigned to the Hecolin® groups and vaccinated at day 0, month 1 and month 6. Serum samples were collected for anti-HEV IgG determination at day 0 prior to immunization and at month 7. The remaining 200 elderly people aged >65 y were assigned to the safety control group and received no intervention but were instructed to report any adverse events that occurred during the whole study period in the same way as those in the Hecolin® groups. Results After receiving 3 doses of Hecolin® with the standard schedule, most (96.7%) of the vaccinated elderly people aged >65 y seroconverted at one month after the final dose (month 7). At month 7, the geometric mean concentrations of anti-HEV IgG were 5.36 (95% CI, 3.88–7.41) and 19.65 (95% CI, 16.81–22.98) among the baseline seronegative and seropositive elderly, respectively. Of the vaccinated elderly, 97.3% (177/182) had anti-HEV IgG levels higher than 1.0 WU/ml at month 7. Hecolin® was very well tolerated in this population. No vaccine-related SAEs were reported. Conclusions Hecolin® is immunogenic and well tolerated in elderly people aged greater than 65 years.

Thin-walled cylindrical shells subjected to axial load are prone to buckling and very sensitive to the geometric imperfections. In order to determine a rational design load for axially loaded cylindrical shells, different analytical and numerical design methods have been developed. As an extension of single perturbation load approach (SPLA), multiple perturbation load approach (MPLA) is a promising method but has not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, the buckling tests of three steel cylindrical shell specimens are conducted. Combined with experimental and numerical results, the advantages and limitations of several commonly used design methods are discussed in detail, including NASA SP-8007, the measured imperfection approach, SPLA and MPLA. The results validate that SPLA is indeed risky to be adopted as a design method for isotropic metallic cylindrical shells. Meanwhile, it indicates that MPLA can not only improve the knock-down factor but also give a more safe design load than SPLA. The comprehensive numerical investigations are performed to study the effects of each perturbation load parameter on MPLA, including the number of perturbation loads, their relative position and magnitude. It is found that the symmetry of perturbation loads plays an important role in the global buckling load of cylindrical shell. Moreover, some guidance for the future application of MPLA is provided and the four perturbation load approach (4PLA) is proposed as an improved method for the preliminary design of isotropic metallic cylindrical shells.

ObjectiveAge-dependent asymptomatic and symptomatic transmission dynamics of COVID-19 have not been well quantified due to limited data. MethodsThrough a population-based surveillance network, we collected data on 1342 confirmed cases with a 90-days follow-up for all asymptomatic cases. ResultsThe difference in transmissibility of a symptomatic and asymptomatic case depended on age and was most distinct for the middle-age groups. The asymptomatic cases had a 66.72% lower transmissibility rate than symptomatic cases, and 74.10% (95%CI: 65.85% - 80.72%) of all asymptomatic cases were missed in detection. The average proportion of asymptomatic cases was 28.22% (95%CI: 22.97% - 34.56%). Simulation showed that the burden of asymptomatic transmission increased as the epidemic continued and could potentially dominate the spreading. ConclusionAsymptomatic COVID-19 cases play a significant role in transmission. Vaccine Strategies prioritizing the population between 30-60 years old are likely to have the most population-level benefits.

Hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD) is a common infectious disease in western Asia area and the full range of the long-term sequelae of HFMD remains poorly described. We conducted a retrospective hospital-based cohort study of HFMD patients with central nervous system (CNS) complications caused by EV-A71 or CV-A16 between 2010 and 2016. Patients were classified into three groups, including CNS only, autonomic nervous system (ANS) dysregulation, and cardiorespiratory failure. Neurologic examination, neurodevelopmental assessments, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and lung function, were performed at follow up. Of the 176 patients followed up, 24 suffered CNS only, 133 ANS dysregulation, and 19 cardiorespiratory failure. Median follow-up period was 4.3 years (range [1.4-8.3]). The rate of neurological abnormalities was 25% (43 of 171) at discharge and 10% (17 of 171) at follow-up. The rates of poor outcome were significantly different between the three groups of complications in motor (28%, 38%, 71%) domain (p=0.020), but not for cognitive (20%, 24%, 35%), language (25%, 36%, 41%) and adaptive (24%, 16%, 26%) domains (p = 0.537, p = 0.551, p = 0.403). For children with ventilated during hospitalization, 41% patients (14 of 34) had an obstructive ventilatory defect, and one patient with scoliosis had mixed ventilatory dysfunction. Persistent abnormalities on brain MRI were 0% (0 of 7), 9% (2 of 23) and 57% (4 of 7) in CNS, ANS and cardiorespiratory failure group separately. Patients with HFMD may have abnormalities in neurological, motor, language, cognition, adaptive behaviour and respiratory function. Long-term follow-up programmes for children's neurodevelopmental and respiratory function may be warranted.

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC), with high morbidity and mortality, is one of the top ten serious cancers. Due to limited therapies and little knowledge about the mechanism underlying RCC, overall survival of RCC patients is poor. UBE2C is a member of ubiquitin modification system and promotes carcinogenesis in cancer, but its role in RCC is unknown. Based on the TCGA (The Cancer Genome Atlas) data, UBE2C was over-expressed in a total of 525 RCC tissues and displayed higher expression in advanced tissues (stage IV vs stage I, p

In recent years a number of calculative models based on protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks have been proposed successively. However, due to false positives, false negatives, and the incompleteness of PPI networks, there are still many challenges affecting the design of computational models with satisfactory predictive accuracy when inferring key proteins. This study proposes a prediction model called WPDINM for detecting key proteins based on a novel weighted protein-domain interaction (PDI) network. In WPDINM, a weighted PPI network is constructed first by combining the gene expression data of proteins with topological information extracted from the original PPI network. Simultaneously, a weighted domain-domain interaction (DDI) network is constructed based on the original PDI network. Next, through integrating the newly obtained weighted PPI network and weighted DDI network with the original PDI network, a weighted PDI network is further constructed. Then, based on topological features and biological information, including the subcellular localization and orthologous information of proteins, a novel PageRank-based iterative algorithm is designed and implemented on the newly constructed weighted PDI network to estimate the criticality of proteins. Finally, to assess the prediction performance of WPDINM, we compared it with 12 kinds of competitive measures. Experimental results show that WPDINM can achieve a predictive accuracy rate of 90.19, 81.96, 70.72, 62.04, 55.83, and 51.13% in the top 1%, top 5%, top 10%, top 15%, top 20%, and top 25% separately, which exceeds the prediction accuracy achieved by traditional state-of-the-art competing measures. Owing to the satisfactory identification effect, the WPDINM measure may contribute to the further development of key protein identification.

A Low light level (LLL) image compression circuit is studied based on improved Embedded Zero-tree Wavelet (EZW) algorithm to improve the real-time transmission performance. The improved EZW compression algorithm is implemented on TMS320C6455 DSP chip based on the theory of wavelet transform. And then a transmitter and receiver is designed which can transmit dynamic image in real time over a distance of 2 kilometers. Experiment and numerical results are presented to validate the efficiency and accuracy of this method.

Importance Evidence of whether severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), can be transmitted as an aerosol (ie, airborne) has substantial public health implications. Objective To investigate potential transmission routes of SARS-CoV-2 infection with epidemiologic evidence from a COVID-19 outbreak. Design, Setting, and Participants This cohort study examined a community COVID-19 outbreak in Zhejiang province. On January 19, 2020, 128 individuals took 2 buses (60 [46.9%] from bus 1 and 68 [53.1%] from bus 2) on a 100-minute round trip to attend a 150-minute worship event. The source patient was a passenger on bus 2. We compared risks of SARS-CoV-2 infection among at-risk individuals taking bus 1 (n = 60) and bus 2 (n = 67 [source patient excluded]) and among all other individuals (n = 172) attending the worship event. We also divided seats on the exposed bus into high-risk and low-risk zones according to the distance from the source patient and compared COVID-19 risks in each zone. In both buses, central air conditioners were in indoor recirculation mode. Main Outcomes and Measures SARS-CoV-2 infection was confirmed by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction or by viral genome sequencing results. Attack rates for SARS-CoV-2 infection were calculated for different groups, and the spatial distribution of individuals who developed infection on bus 2 was obtained. Results Of the 128 participants, 15 (11.7%) were men, 113 (88.3%) were women, and the mean age was 58.6 years. On bus 2, 24 of the 68 individuals (35.3% [including the index patient]) received a diagnosis of COVID-19 after the event. Meanwhile, none of the 60 individuals in bus 1 were infected. Among the other 172 individuals at the worship event, 7 (4.1%) subsequently received a COVID-19 diagnosis. Individuals in bus 2 had a 34.3% (95% CI, 24.1%-46.3%) higher risk of getting COVID-19 compared with those in bus 1 and were 11.4 (95% CI, 5.1-25.4) times more likely to have COVID-19 compared with all other individuals attending the worship event. Within bus 2, individuals in high-risk zones had moderately, but nonsignificantly, higher risk for COVID-19 compared with those in the low-risk zones. The absence of a significantly increased risk in the part of the bus closer to the index case suggested that airborne spread of the virus may at least partially explain the markedly high attack rate observed. Conclusions and Relevance In this cohort study and case investigation of a community outbreak of COVID-19 in Zhejiang province, individuals who rode a bus to a worship event with a patient with COVID-19 had a higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection than individuals who rode another bus to the same event. Airborne spread of SARS-CoV-2 seems likely to have contributed to the high attack rate in the exposed bus. Future efforts at prevention and control must consider the potential for airborne spread of the virus.

Background Accumulating evidence has demonstrated that long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) are closely associated with human diseases, and it is useful for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases to get the relationships between lncRNAs and diseases. Due to the high costs and time complexity of traditional bio-experiments, in recent years, more and more computational methods have been proposed by researchers to infer potential lncRNA-disease associations. However, there exist all kinds of limitations in these state-of-the-art prediction methods as well. Results In this manuscript, a novel computational model named FVTLDA is proposed to infer potential lncRNA-disease associations. In FVTLDA, its major novelty lies in the integration of direct and indirect features related to lncRNA-disease associations such as the feature vectors of lncRNA-disease pairs and their corresponding association probability fractions, which guarantees that FVTLDA can be utilized to predict diseases without known related-lncRNAs and lncRNAs without known related-diseases. Moreover, FVTLDA neither relies solely on known lncRNA-disease nor requires any negative samples, which guarantee that it can infer potential lncRNA-disease associations more equitably and effectively than traditional state-of-the-art prediction methods. Additionally, to avoid the limitations of single model prediction techniques, we combine FVTLDA with the Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) for data analysis respectively. Simulation experiment results show that FVTLDA with MLR can achieve reliable AUCs of 0.8909, 0.8936 and 0.8970 in 5-Fold Cross Validation (fivefold CV), 10-Fold Cross Validation (tenfold CV) and Leave-One-Out Cross Validation (LOOCV), separately, while FVTLDA with ANN can achieve reliable AUCs of 0.8766, 0.8830 and 0.8807 in fivefold CV, tenfold CV, and LOOCV respectively. Furthermore, in case studies of gastric cancer, leukemia and lung cancer, experiment results show that there are 8, 8 and 8 out of top 10 candidate lncRNAs predicted by FVTLDA with MLR, and 8, 7 and 8 out of top 10 candidate lncRNAs predicted by FVTLDA with ANN, having been verified by recent literature. Comparing with the representative prediction model of KATZLDA, comparison results illustrate that FVTLDA with MLR and FVTLDA with ANN can achieve the average case study contrast scores of 0.8429 and 0.8515 respectively, which are both notably higher than the average case study contrast score of 0.6375 achieved by KATZLDA. Conclusion The simulation results show that FVTLDA has good prediction performance, which is a good supplement to future bioinformatics research.

Objective Liver inflammatory activity staging is critical to guide the treatment of chronic hepatitis B virus (CHB) infection. Here, we aimed to identify practical clinical biomarkers of moderate inflammatory activity in hepatitis B e-antigen (HBeAg)-negative CHB patients. Methods Treatment-naïve HBeAg-negative CHB patients who underwent liver biopsy at our hospital from 1 January 2013 to 31 December 2016 were enrolled. Markers of inflammatory activity were analyzed using binary logistic regression. The area under the receiver operator characteristic curve (AUROCC) was used to assess diagnostic accuracy. Results A total of 106 HBeAg-negative treatment-naive CHB patients were enrolled. According to their METAVIR inflammatory scores, 30.2% of patients were in stage ≥A2. Total triiodothyronine (TT3) and hepatitis B virus (HBV) DNA levels were predictors of moderate inflammatory activity (A ≥ 2). The AUROCCs of TT3 and HBV DNA levels were 0.651 and 0.797, respectively. The optimal cut-off values for TT3 and HBV DNA were 1.755 nmol/L and 4.61 log10 IU/mL, respectively. Conclusions A sizable proportion of treatment-naive HBeAg-negative CHB patients required antiviral treatment (30.2%) after undergoing liver biopsy. TT3 and HBV DNA helps identify patients with moderate inflammatory activity (A ≥ 2), potentially reducing the need for liver biopsies and helping guide treatment of CHB patients.

A new dielectric constant measurement method based on SIW (Substrate integrated waveguide) slot array traveling wave antenna is proposed in this paper. The SIW slot array antennas working at W-band using the different substrates are designed in this paper for verification. The simulation results show that when the substrate dielectric constant is 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, the main beam direction of the array will aim at -8.1°, -5°, and -2°, respectively. Thus, there is a mapping relationship between the substrate dielectric constant and the main beam direction. This method is very simple and can capture the small changes of dielectric constant of the substrate.

Interest in damage detection and damage pattern recognition of engineering structures by non-destructive techniques has been increasingly growing. As a non-destructive technique, acoustic emission (AE) has developed rapidly to detect dynamic defects and their evolution behaviors of composite structures, based on the transient elastic waves produced by rapid energy release due to the geometry change of structures. In this paper, AE technology is utilized to monitor the real-time condition of the composite scarf joint (SJ) under tensile loading. First, after AE signal acquisition, dimensionality reduction of eight AE features is realized by employing principal component analysis such that the Curse of Dimensionality can be avoided. Second, feature selection is continued by introducing two evaluation indexes, i.e., correlation coefficient and Laplacian score. Third, after the optimal cluster number is determined, damage pattern recognition is accomplished by introducing k-means++ algorithm which explores the distribution of each pattern in the space constructed by four informative AE features. Based on the clustering results, damage initiation and evolution in SJ specimens under tensile loading are subsequently explored. The shear failure of the adhesive layer which is a characteristic damage pattern for SJ specimens shows a relatively-high activity after the early stage. Matrix cracking and fiber/matrix interface debonding are two fundamental damage patterns which keep active in the whole process.

Biomedical research is increasingly dependent on a large number of genomic and clinical data, and in order to protect sensitive information from being exposed to multiple partners, these data are often encrypted before being outsourced to third-party cloud service providers with abundant storage and computing resources. However, these third parties will become potential targets to be violated. Hence, in this paper, a novel method is proposed for secure sharing and management of genomic and clinical data on an untruthful cloud server firstly, in which the Hamming codes and HashMap are adopted to ensure the privacy and integrity of biomedical data during counting queries. And then, the performance of our newly proposed method is evaluated on the basis of the existing single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) sequence database, and simulation results show that the new method has good encryption efficiency and realizability, and can guarantee the privacy and integrity of biomedical data effectively while being implemented in counting queries.

Background Between January 24, 2020 and February 15, 2020, an outbreak of COVID-19 occurred among 335 passengers on a flight from Singapore to Hangzhou in China. This study aimed to investigate the source of the outbreak and assess the risk of transmission of COVID-19 during the flight. Method Using a standardized questionnaire, we collected information on the travelers’ demographic characteristics and illness before, during, and after the flight. We also collected data on factors potentially associated with COVID-19 transmission during the flight. Results A total of 16 COVID-19 patients were diagnosed among all passengers; the overall attack rate was 4.8%. The attack rate among passengers who had departed from Wuhan was significantly higher than that among those who had departed from other places. One passenger without an epidemiological history of exposure before boarding developed COVID-19. During the flight, he was seated near four infected passengers from Wuhan for approximately an hour and did not wear his facemask correctly during the flight. Conclusions COVID-19 transmission may have occurred during the flight. However, the majority of the cases in the flight-associated outbreak could not be attributed to transmission on the flight but were associated with exposure to the virus in Wuhan or to infected members in a single tour group., Highlights • SARS-CoV-2 transmission, especially during flight, was of global concern. • An outbreak of COVID-19 among passengers on a flight was investigated. • There appears to have been limited transmission of COVID-19 to one person on board the flight based on the epidemiological findings.

The Tianlai Dish Pathfinder Array is a radio interferometer designed to test techniques for 21~cm intensity mapping in the post-reionization universe as a means for measuring large-scale cosmic structure. It performs drift scans of the sky at constant declination. We describe the design, calibration, noise level, and stability of this instrument based on the analysis of about $\sim 5 \%$ of 6,200 hours of on-sky observations through October, 2019. Beam pattern determinations using drones and the transit of bright sources are in good agreement, and compatible with electromagnetic simulations. Combining all the baselines, we make maps around bright sources and show that the array behaves as expected. A few hundred hours of observations at different declinations have been used to study the array geometry and pointing imperfections, as well as the instrument noise behaviour. We show that the system temperature is below 80~K for most feed antennas, and that noise fluctuations decrease as expected with integration time, at least up to a few hundred seconds. Analysis of long integrations, from 10 nights of observations of the North Celestial Pole, yielded visibilities with amplitudes of 20-30~mK, consistent with the expected signal from the NCP radio sky with $, 30 pages, 38 figures

To better describe the time-varying property of the dynamic investment risk and the ambiguity of the random return process, we propose two multi-period robust risk measures under the regime switching framework. Using regime-dependent dynamic uncertainty sets, we show that the multi-period robust portfolio selection problems under the two multi-period robust risk measures with regime switching can be transformed into second order cone programs, which can thus be efficiently solved in polynomial time. To show the generality of the dynamic uncertainty sets under the regime switching framework, we further consider multi-period robust risk measures under time-varying uncertainty sets with moments uncertainty and discuss the tractability of the corresponding multi-period robust portfolio selection problems. A series of empirical results demonstrate that the robust portfolio selection models with regime switching can flexibly help the investor make superior and robust investment strategies according to the switching of the market environment.

The absorbance, scattering and reflectance characteristics of main tube (MT) surface are critical elements in thermal scheme and scattering suppression of large aperture & small field of view (LASFOV) solar telescopes. With application of Space Solar Telescope (SST), surface of MT with bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) characteristics can cause additional thermal effect on the primary mirror (PM), field stop (FS) and MT, based on SST scattering elimination scheme. Considering space environment with solar radiation and heat conduction, micro-facets are added on MT to represent its BRDF characteristics, and the homeostatic thermal models of MT are developed with micro-facets to investigate their additional thermal effect. In practical, six series of MT with different micro-facets (height H c and H b , distance D c and D b , angle δ and θ ) are developed to estimate the temperature distribution of SST with thermal analysis software. Thermal analysis shows six parameters representing BRDF characteristics have obvious additional thermal effect on temperature distribution of PM, FS and MT. Therefore, thermal-scattering (TS) integrated design of MT surface with BRDF characteristics is practical and worthy for critical surfaces to obtain ideal TS performance. It is a guidance to optimize critical surfaces in LASFOV solar telescopes to minimizing theirs thermal characteristics and scattering characteristics.

The aim of this study was to assess the clinical outcomes of acoustic neuromas (ANs) treated with hypofractionated stereotactic radiotherapy (hypo-FSRT) prescribed at a uniform dose. Forty-seven patients with a unilateral AN were treated consecutively with hypo-FSRT between February 2007 and March 2012. Nineteen patients maintained a serviceable hearing status at the beginning of hypo-FSRT. The prescribed dose was 25 Gy delivered in five fractions per week to the isocenter, and the planning target volume was covered by the 80% isodose line. The median follow-up and audiometric follow-up periods were 61 and 52 months, respectively. The estimated tumor control rate at 5 years was 90% (95% CI 76–96). The existence of the cystic component before hypo-FSRT had a significantly worse impact on tumor control (p = 0.02). The estimated hearing preservation rates at 1, 3 and 5 years were 68% (95% CI 42–84), 41% (95% CI 20–62) and 36% (95% CI 15–57), respectively. A borderline significant difference was identified in the mean biological effective dose with an α/β value of 3 Gy (BED3) to the ipsilateral cochlea between the preserved hearing and hearing loss groups (19 Gy vs. 28 Gy) (p = 0.08). Hypo-FSRT delivered in five fractions for unilateral ANs may achieve excellent tumor control with no severe facial or trigeminal complications. The mean BED3 in the cochlea may impact the hearing preservation rate. Therefore, the cochlear dose should be as low as possible.

In practical engineering, cutouts in thin-walled cylindrical shells are usually welded with ringed stiffeners for the purpose of connect and seal. In this paper, experimental and numerical studies have been conducted to investigate the effects of ringed stiffener on the buckling behavior of perforated cylindrical shells under axial compression. Three test specimens with ringed stiffener and three specimens without ringed stiffener are manufactured and tested. The mid-surface imperfections of all specimens are measured and introduced into the finite element model. The finite element method using static analysis with artificial damping is used to simulate the displacement controlled compression tests. Good agreement is found between the numerical and experimental results. It is found that the global buckling loads of perforated shells are improved by ringed stiffener. The larger the cutout size is, the more obvious improvement shows. In addition, effects of ringed stiffener on axial stiffness and imperfection sensitivity of perforated shells are studied in details. The relationship between ringed stiffener thickness and global buckling load of perforated shell is also discussed. Meanwhile, a critical thickness parameter k of approximately 15% is proposed.

Summary: The age-related effects of GDF11 have been a subject of controversy. Here, we find that elevated GDF11 causes signs of cachexia in mice: reduced food intake, body weight, and muscle mass. GDF11 also elicited a significant elevation in plasma Activin A, previously shown to contribute to the loss of skeletal muscle. The effects of GDF11 on skeletal muscle could be reversed by administration of antibodies to the Activin type II receptors. In addition to the effects on muscle, GDF11 increased plasma GDF15, an anorectic agent. The anorexia, but not the muscle loss, could be reversed with a GDF15-neutralizing antibody. GDF15 upregulation is due to GDF11-induced recruitment of SMAD2/3 to the GDF15 promoter. Inhibition of GDF15 can restore appetite but cannot restore the GDF11-induced loss of muscle mass, which requires blockade of ActRII signaling. These findings are relevant for treatment of cachexia.

Introduction Most countries are dependent on nonpharmaceutical public health interventions such as social distancing, contact tracing, and case isolation to mitigate COVID-19 spread until medicines or vaccines widely available. Minimal research has been performed on the independent and combined impact of each of these interventions based on empirical case data. Methods We obtained data from all confirmed COVID-19 cases from January 7th to February 22nd 2020 in Zhejiang Province, China, to fit an age-stratified compartmental model using human contact information before and during the outbreak. The effectiveness of social distancing, contact tracing, and case isolation was studied and compared in simulation. We also simulated a two-phase reopening scenario to assess whether various strategies combining nonpharmaceutical interventions are likely to achieve population-level control of a second-wave epidemic. Results Our study sample included 1,218 symptomatic cases with COVID-19, of which 664 had no inter-province travel history. Results suggest that 36.5 % (95 % CI, 12.8–57.1) of contacts were quarantined, and approximately five days (95 % CI, 2.2–11.0) were needed to detect and isolate a case. As contact networks would increase after societal and economic reopening, avoiding a second wave without strengthening nonpharmaceutical interventions compared to the first wave it would be exceedingly difficult. Conclusions Continuous attention and further improvement of nonpharmaceutical interventions are needed in second-wave prevention. Specifically, contact tracing merits further attention.

In the second part of this series paper, a high-fidelity finite element model was established first to systematically study the buckling behaviors of thin-walled cylindrical shell subjected to localized axial compression load. By comparing with the experimental results, the feasibility and accuracy of the present FE model were validated. Then, the buckling mechanism, failure mode and load carrying capacity of cylindrical shell under localized axial compression load were thoroughly discussed and elucidated. Finally, some key factors that affect the buckling behaviors of cylindrical shells were carefully investigated, including material yield strength, the amplitude and topography of initial geometric imperfections, and the location of localized axial compression load along shell circumference. Results indicated that the distribution scope of localized axial compression load, shell material yield strength and the amplitude of initial geometric imperfections play a dominant role in the buckling behaviors of cylindrical shell under localized axial compression loads. The experimental and numerical investigations carried out in this research work can be regarded as a systematic attempt to study the buckling problems of thin-walled cylindrical shell structures under the more complex and practical axial load conditions. The results and conclusions obtained from this paper can also provide some guides for the design and application of thin-walled cylindrical shell in actual engineering.

The complex multi-station progressive die has many characteristics, such as many stations, complicated structure, and a strong correlation between stations. The trimming line is affected by the subsequent forming stations, which makes the accuracy of the trimming line very low and difficult to predict. Therefore, a new iterative optimization method of trimming line based on the strain path of material and the refined numerical simulation of the whole process was researched and proposed for multi-station progress dies of the complex automotive structural parts. The initial blank outline is unfolded by one-step and multi-step of the inverse finite element, respectively, to obtain higher accuracy trimming lines. The refined numerical simulation of the whole process based on the solid-shell element is utilized to verify the feasibility of the trimming lines, and the real parameters of the press, die surface, and process parameters are fully considered. The boundary nodes of the initial mesh of the blank are fitted according to the B-spline curve, and then the strain path and direction of the boundary node numerical simulation before and after are extracted. The iterative optimization of the trimming line is made by adjusting the B-spline curve, which can reduce the number of iterations and improve the edge quality of trimming inserting steels. The results of a complex example demonstrate that the newly proposed optimization method has an excellent performance and efficiency extremely in the trimming line optimization and numerical simulation.

The experimental and numerical methods were proposed to investigate the buckling failure behaviors of acrylic hemispheres under external pressure in this paper. The history of transient failure in the experiment was captured and recorded by a high-speed camera, which revealed the failure mode of acrylic hemispheres. Results showed that the critical buckling loads predicted by numerical buckling analysis were good agreement with experimental data. Lastly, the research results were applied into the stability design of an acrylic spherical vessel with the diameter of 35.5 m for China's Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) neutrino detector. A feasible scheme of the acrylic sphere was proposed to avoid buckling failure.

A novel extension of the basis reduction method for kinematic hardening shakedown problem is presented. Firstly, the basis reduction method is implemented based on the modified Newton–Raphson (N-R) method. Then a new technique for the construction of back stress field is introduced, where the simultaneous influence of multiple load corners in shakedown is taken into consideration. Finally, two typical numerical examples are investigated. The results compared with previous works in literatures demonstrated that the proposed method is accurate and the performance in reducing of computation time is significant.

When analyzing the relative performance of mutual funds, current data envelopment analysis (DEA) models with diversification ignore the performance change in consecutive periods or the dynamic dependence among investment periods. This paper introduces a novel multi-period network DEA approach with diversification and directional distance function. The new approach decomposes the overall efficiency of a mutual fund in the whole investment interval into efficiencies at individual periods. At each period, mutual funds consume exogenous inputs and intermediate products produced from the preceding period to produce exogenous outputs and intermediate products for the next period to use. Efficiency decomposition reveals the time at which the inefficiency occurs. The new model can provide expected inputs, outputs and intermediate variables at individual periods, which are helpful for managers to find factors causing the overall inefficiency of a fund. Under the assumption of discrete return distributions and a proper choice of inputs, outputs and intermediate variables, the proposed models can be transformed into linear programs. The applicability and reasonability of the proposed method are demonstrated by applying it to assess the relative performance of funds in Chinese security market and European security market, respectively.

For large radio telescope, pedestal deformation caused by sunshine temperature, especially the non-uniform temperature load, will produce axis tilt error and angular deviation. Therefore, the pointing accuracy of radio telescope will be seriously affected. The fundamental theory of thermal analysis is reviewed firstly. Analysis of the radio telescope underlying thermal environment is presented. Based on the detailed analysis of the Miyun 50-m radio telescope of NAOC, the temperature distribution and structural deformation field of the pedestal at different time is simulated by finite element analysis method. Analysis and calculation of the axis tilt error and angular deviation caused by thermal deformation is presented. The temperature distribution of 50-m radio telescope pedestal is measured in experiments, and the actual temperature value of radio telescope pedestal at different time is obtained. The correctness of the simulation results is verified by comparison with the measured temperature. Theoretical analysis and experimental research in this paper provides a basis for the pointing error correction affected by sunshine temperature.

Objective: To develop and validate the Thai version of the functional assessment of cancer therapy with nasopharyngeal cancer subscale (FACT-NP) with the abbreviated version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF instrument (WHOQOL-BREF).Material and Methods: A cross-sectional study was performed in the Radiology Department between January 2014 and October 2016. Inclusion criteria: nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients aged greater than 18 years. Exclusion criteria: no comprehension of the Thai language, had other cancers (except for skin cancer and diagnosed with impaired cognition and/or overt psychosis), major depression or delirium. After signing the consent form, participants were interviewed and self-completed FACT-NP and WHOQOL-BREF. The structure of the FACT-NP was determined with exploratory factors analysis. The internal reliability of identified domains was evaluated using Cronbach’s alpha. The correlation between domains of the modified FACT-NP and the domains of WHOQOL-BREF were examined with Spearman’s correlation. Known-group validity was determined by comparing patients with different sociodemographic and clinical characteristics using the T-test, Ranksum test and analysis of variance. A p-value of less than 0.05 was considered significant.Results: This study was terminated early due to a long accrual period. Of the 230 patients included in the study, only 220 completed both FACT-NP and WHOQOL-BREF. Exploratory factor analysis showed an accumulative variance of 0.56 with 4 factors. The internal reliability of modified FACT-NP was 0.92. There was moderate correlation between modified FACT-NP and WHOQOL-BREF. Both the modified FACT-NP and WHOQOL-BREF could identify differences between the groups.Conclusion: The Thai modified FACT-NP was found to be both valid and reliable for measuring the quality of life in Thai nasopharyngeal cancer patients.

The globally synchronised introduction of inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) and replacement of trivalent oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) with bivalent OPV (bOPV) were successfully implemented in China's routine immunisation programme in May, 2016. In response to the global shortage of Salk-strain IPV, Sabin-strain IPV production was encouraged to develop and use in low-income and middle-income countries. We assessed the immunogenicity of the current routine poliovirus vaccination schedule in China and compared it with alternative schedules that use Sabin-strain IPV (sIPV) and bOPV.This open-label, randomised, controlled trial recruited healthy infants aged 60-75 days from two centres in Zhejiang, China. Eligible infants were full-term, due for their first polio vaccination, weighed more than 2·5 kg at birth, were healthy on physical examination with no obvious medical conditions, and had no contraindications to vaccination. Infants were randomly assigned (1:1:1) using permuted block randomisation (block size of 12) to one of three polio vaccination schedules, with the first, second, and third doses given at ages 2 months, 3 months, and 4 months, respectively: sIPV-bOPV-bOPV (1sIPV+2bOPV group; current regimen), sIPV-sIPV-bOPV (2sIPV+1bOPV group), or sIPV-sIPV-sIPV (3sIPV group). The primary endpoint was the proportion of infants with seroconversion to each of the three poliovirus serotypes 1 month after the third dose. Serious and medically important adverse events were monitored for up to 30 days after each vaccination. We assessed immunity in the per-protocol population (all children who completed all three vaccinations and had pre-vaccination and post-vaccination laboratory data) and safety in all children who received at least one dose of study vaccine. This trial is registered with Clinicaltrials.gov, NCT03147560.Between May 1, 2016, and Dec 1, 2017, we enrolled and randomly assigned 528 eligible infants to one of the three treatment groups (176 in each group); 473 infants (158 in the 1sIPV+2bOPV group, 152 in the 2sIPV+1bOPV group, and 163 in the 3sIPV group) were included in the per-protocol population. 100% seroconversion against poliovirus types 1 and 3 was observed in all three groups. Infants who received an immunisation schedule containing bOPV had significantly higher antibody titres against poliovirus types 1 and 3 than did the sIPV-only group (2048 in all three treatment groups; p0·0001). Seroconversion against type 2 poliovirus was observed in 98 (62%) infants in the 1sIPV+2bOPV group, 145 (95%) infants in the 2sIPV+1bOPV group, and 161 (99%) infants in the 3sIPV group. No serious adverse events occurred during the study; 14 minor, transient adverse events were observed, with no significant differences across study groups.All three study schedules were well tolerated and highly immunogenic against poliovirus types 1 and 3. Schedules containing two or three sIPV doses had higher seroconversion rates against poliovirus type 2 than did the schedule with a single dose of sIPV. Our findings support inclusion of two sIPV doses in the routine poliovirus vaccination schedule in China to provide better protection against poliovirus type 2 than provided by the current regimen.Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and China National Biotec Group Company.

Background: The globally-synchronized introduction of inactivated poliovirus vaccine (IPV) and replacement of trivalent oral poliovirus vaccine (tOPV) with bivalent oral poliovirus vaccine (bOPV) was successfully implemented in China's routine immunization system in April and May of 2016. We assessed the immunogenicity of the current routine poliovirus vaccination schedule and compared it to alternative schedules that use Sabin-strain IPV (sIPV) and bOPV. Methods: We conducted an open-label, randomized, controlled trial among healthy infants in Zhejiang province, China. After obtaining informed consent, infants were randomly allocated to receive three polio vaccinations at age 2, 3 and 4 months in one of three sequential schedules: sIPV-bOPV-bOPV (Group 1), sIPV-sIPV-bOPV (Group 2), or sIPV-sIPV-sIPV (Group 3). We assessed immunogenicity in the three groups by measuring poliovirus type-specific antibody levels in sera immediately before the first dose and one month after the third dose. We assessed immunity in a per-protocol (PP) analysis (among subjects with no protocol deviations), and assessed safety in an intention-to-treat analysis (among subjects receiving at least one dose of study vaccine). Results: We enrolled and assigned 528 eligible infants to one of the three treatment groups (176 in each group); 473 infants (158 in Group 1, 152 in Group 2, and 163 in Group 3) completed the PP requirements. Three doses of sIPV or bOPV elicited seroconversion in 100% of subjects against poliovirus types 1 and 3 regardless of study group. Infants who received sIPV followed by bOPV had significantly higher antibody titers against poliovirus types 1 and 3 than did the sIPV-only group. Seroconversion against type 2 polio was observed in 62.03% of Group 1 infants, 95.39% of Group 2 infants, and 98.77% of Group 3 infants. The percentages of children with seroprotective antibody titers to poliovirus type 2 after vaccination were 63.29%, 96.05%, and 98.77% in Groups 1, 2, and 3. No serious adverse events occurred during the study; 14 minor, transient adverse events were observed with no significant differences across study groups. Conclusion: All three study schedules were well tolerated and highly immunogenic against poliovirus types 1 and 3. Schedules containing 2 or 3 sIPV doses had higher seroconversion rates against poliovirus type 2 than the schedule with a single dose of sIPV. Our findings support using a two-sIPV-dose routine poliovirus vaccination schedule in China to provide better protection against poliovirus type 2. Clinical Trial Number: The study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT03147560, and has been completed. Funding Statement: The study was funded by Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (funds number: 131031001000150001) and China National Biotec Group Company (CNBG). Declaration of Interests: Yan Liu received grants from Zhejiang provincial basic public welfare research projects (LGF18H260002) and Hangzhou research projects for agricultural and social development (20180533B94). Ethics Approval Statement: The study protocol was approved by the ethics committee of Zhejiang Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Written informed consent was obtained from legal guardians of the subjects before enrollment.

BackgroundDengue is one of the most important vector-bore infectious diseases in China because of its drastic increase in incidence, geographic extension and profound influence on China's economy. This study aims to retrospectively uncover the epidemiological profile of dengue in Zhejiang, one of the most developed provinces in China, and to find the problem existing in dengue control and prevention.MethodologyDescriptive analyses on the dengue incidence and associated factors were performed. We also identified potential space-time cluster and generated the risk map of dengue.Principal findingsA total of 529 cases were reported in Zhejiang Province from 2005 to 2016, and 44.4% were imported. 67.7% of cases were 25~60 years old and the overall male-to-female sex ratio was 1.09:1. Dengue was reported all year round and 70.7% of cases occurred between August and October. Indigenous cases were only reported in the period between July to November and more than half occurred in September. Geographically, dengue was most distributed in Jinghua (3.62 per million), Shaoxing (1.00 per million) and Taizhou (0.81 per million) prefecture level cities. Outbreaks were confirmed in Yiwu, Keqiao and Huangyan counties in 2009, 2015, and 2016, respectively. 73.9% cases would seek medical advice within two days after onset and be confirmed within 9 days after onset. 75.6% would be recognized as dengue within 8 days after their first visit. The time intervals between onset and confirmation (median 7 vs 6 days; Wilcoxon rank sum test Z = -2.40, P = 0.016), first visit and confirmation (median 7 vs 6 days; Wilcoxon rank sum test Z = -2.59, P = 0.009) of indigenous cases were significantly longer than those of imported ones. However, the time intervals between onset and first visit for indigenous cases was shorter (median 0 vs 1 days; Wilcoxon rank sum test Z = -2.10, P = 0.036). Fever (99.1%), fatigue (81.9), rash (63.7%), headache (67.2%) and myalgia (52.60%) were the most frequently mentioned symptoms.ConclusionsZhejiang has recently witnessed an increase in incidence and geographic extension of dengue. Timely diagnosis is important to stop local transmission and outbreak.

Buckling behavior of large steel tanks under measured settlement has been researched and analyzed in this paper. The settlement prediction model based on Poisson curve is established by applying least square principle and Lagrange quadratic interpolation. Settlement of each measuring point at any time can be obtained applying this prediction model. The discrete settlement data at any time beneath the tank wall is transformed into global settlement expression distributed in the circumferential direction by using the method of Fourier series expansion. Settlement variation with time beneath the tank wall is predicted accurately then. Based on the predicted settlement beneath the tank wall at any time, bucking behavior of the tank is researched by numerical simulation method and the critical buckling time of the tank is predicted. Hydrostatic pressures are applied to inner surface of the tank wall to research the buckling behavior of the tank with different liquid storage. The present method is applied to a fixed roof tank and result shows that the tank wall presents stable linear variation under settlement in initial stage. As time and settlement increase, a typical snap-through buckling occurs to the tank wall, which indicates that the buckling analysis method presented in this paper can be used to predict the buckling behavior of the tank effectively. Buckling behavior analysis of a floating roof tank with the same size and under the same settlement with the fixed roof tank is also made. It indicates that compared to the buckling of fixed roof tanks, the radial displacement on the top of the floating roof tank wall is regarded as the controlling factor to determine the tank failure.

Since large aperture & small field of view (FOV) solar telescopes operate in special environment, thermal design is a key to achieve excellent optical performance. A thermal-scattering integrated design on vanes in large aperture & small FOV solar telescopes is proposed to obtain high signal to noise ratio and high spatial resolution. The present study is aimed to investigate the importance of additional thermal effect on the primary mirror caused by closest vane with various geometrical parameters. Three series of thermal models of Space Solar Telescope (SST) are developed to investigate the effects on the primary mirror temperature for its original thermal design after adding closest vane. Thermal variation based on three different geometrical parameters for these models are analyzed and the importance of the additional thermal effects of closest vane are identified and discussed. Suggestion is proposed to optimize three geometrical parameters of closest vane in thermal-scattering integrated design of SST.