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It is well-known that thermocapillary-buoyancy flow instability can be affected by several dimensionless control parameters. The general relationships among them are helpful for actively controlling flow instability but were not clear. This work reported some experiments in the annular pool with a radius ratio of 0.25, and proposed the general relationships among these dimensionless control parameters, especially for the critical Marangoni number of the flow destabilization and the dimensionless oscillatory frequency of pulsating pattern. Combined with previous studies, these general relationships are achieved within no more than 15% relative deviations, whose applicability is for the thermocapillary-buoyancy flow of medium Prandtl number fluids in side-heated annular pools. Based on the experimental findings, we can confirm that the flow destabilization can be suppressed by buoyancy. The steady multicellular flow appears before flow destabilization. When the flow is destabilized, the pulsating pattern first appears, and then a superimposition of the pulsating pattern and the flower-like wave.

Background: Machine-learning (ML) and radiomics features have been utilized for survival outcome analysis in various cancers. This study aims to investigate the application of ML based on patients’ clinical features and radiomics features derived from bone scintigraphy (BS) and to evaluate recurrence-free survival in local or locally advanced prostate cancer (PCa) patients after the initial treatment. Methods: A total of 354 patients who met the eligibility criteria were analyzed and used to train the model. Clinical information and radiomics features of BS were obtained. Survival-related clinical features and radiomics features were included in the ML model training. Using the pyradiomics software, 128 radiomics features from each BS image’s region of interest, validated by experts, were extracted. Four textural matrices were also calculated: GLCM, NGLDM, GLRLM, and GLSZM. Five training models (Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Random Forest, Support Vector Classification, and XGBoost) were applied using K-fold cross-validation. Recurrence was defined as either a rise in PSA levels, radiographic progression, or death. To assess the classifier’s effectiveness, the ROC curve area and confusion matrix were employed. Results: Of the 354 patients, 101 patients were categorized into the recurrence group with more advanced disease status compared to the non-recurrence group. Key clinical features including tumor stage, radical prostatectomy, initial PSA, Gleason Score primary pattern, and radiotherapy were used for model training. Random Forest (RF) was the best-performing model, with a sensitivity of 0.81, specificity of 0.87, and accuracy of 0.85. The ROC curve analysis showed that predictions from RF outperformed predictions from other ML models with a final AUC of 0.94 and a p-value of

Depth estimation using stereo images can be achieved by calculating the disparity values between the left and the right images captured by two parallel cameras. Reconstructing depth information from 2D images is crucial in many applications, such as self-driving vehicles and robot navigation. Furthermore, most of these applications are employed with resource-constrained devices and have real-time requirements. In this paper, a high-speed, low-cost hardware implementation for disparity estimation is proposed. We adopted the novel disparity fusion method in our architecture, which can significantly reduce the number of calculations in the overall process. A refinement method is also designed to reduce the error rate of the resulting depth map and improve the tolerance to light noise. The proposed algorithm was implemented with the Kintex-7 field-programmable gate array. Its performance was tested by using the Middlebury-Version 2 and -Version 3 datasets. The proposed algorithm provides an operating speed of 118 fps with an error rate of only 6.36%. Compared with other state-of-the-art designs used for similar applications, the proposed method can achieve a 34.6% reduction in the error rate while providing the highest speed with competitive hardware cost.

Abstract The effectiveness of existing tissue‐engineering cartilage (TEC) is known to be hampered by weak integration of biocompatibility, biodegradation, mechanical strength, and microenvironment supplies. The strategy of hydrogel‐based TEC holds considerable promise in circumventing these problems. Herein, a non‐toxic, biodegradable, and mechanically optimized double‐network (DN) hydrogel consisting of polyethylene glycol (PEG) and kartogenin (KGN)‐conjugated chitosan (CHI) is constructed using a simple soaking strategy. This PEG‐CHI‐KGN DN hydrogel possesses favorable architectures, suitable mechanics, remarkable cellular affinity, and sustained KGN release, which can facilitate the cartilage‐specific genes expression and extracellular matrix secretion of peripheral blood‐derived mesenchymal stem cells (PB‐MSCs). Notably, after tracing the transplanted cells by detecting the rabbit sex‐determining region Y‐linked gene sequence, the allogeneic PB‐MSCs are found to survive for even 3 months in the regenerated cartilage. Here, the long‐term release of KGN is able to efficiently and persistently activate multiple genes and signaling pathways to promote the chondrogenesis, chondrocyte differentiation, and survival of PB‐MSCs. Thus, the regenerated tissues exhibit well‐matched histomorphology and biomechanical performance such as native cartilage. Consequently, it is believed this innovative work can expand the choice for developing the next generation of orthopedic implants in the loadbearing region of a living body.

ObjectiveReliable electrophysiological indicators are urgently needed in the precise evaluation of Parkinson’s disease (PD). It is still elusive whether oculomotor performance is impaired or has clinical value in early PD. This study aims to explore oculomotor performance in newly diagnosed, drug-naïve PD and its correlation with clinical phenotype.MethodsSeventy-five patients with de novo PD, 75 patients with essential tremor (ET), and 46 gender-and age-matched healthy controls (HCs) were included in this cross-sectional study. All subjects underwent oculomotor test via videonystagmography. Visually guided saccade latency, saccadic accuracy and gain in smooth pursuit eye movement (SPEM) at three frequencies of the horizontal axis were compared among the three groups. Patients with PD also received detailed motor and non-motor evaluation by serial scales. The association between key oculomotor parameters and clinical phenotypes were explored in PD patients.ResultsBoth de novo PD and ET patients showed prolonged saccadic latency and decreased saccadic accuracy relative to HCs. SPEM gain in PD was uniformly reduced at each frequency. SPEM gain at 0.4 Hz was also decreased in ET compared with HCs. However, there was no significant difference of oculomotor parameters between de novo PD and ET patients. Furthermore, prolonged saccadic latency was correlated with long disease duration, whereas decreased SPEM gain was associated with severe motor symptoms in de novo PD patients.ConclusionOcular movements are impaired in de novo, drug naïve PD patients; these changes could be indicators for disease progression in PD.

To reveal the chimney effect on smoke spread behavior, three-dimensional numerical simulations of subway station fires in a 1/8 scale model were presented by using large eddy simulation. The impacts of the cross-sectional area of the shaft, fire location and shaft height on the smoke spread behavior were analyzed. The results show that the chimney effect significantly influences smoke movement. For the cases with heights of 1 m for the left and right shafts and the fire location at the hall center, when the ratio of small cross-sectional area to large area equals 0.4 or more, the smoke exhausts from the shaft with a small area; otherwise, the smoke exhausts from the shaft with a large area. With equal cross-sectional areas and heights of 1 m or more for the two shafts, the smoke exhausts from the shaft closer to the fire location. The left and right shafts are both passages for flowing upward smoke and flowing downward air when the heights of the two shafts are less than 1 m. In the stable flow stage, the chimney effect increases with decreasing cross-sectional area and increasing shaft height and is not affected by the change in fire location.

Abstract Background The stem cells of the stem cell banks have prominent problems for insufficient sources, easy contamination, unstable biological characteristics after serial subcultivations, and high cost. Methods After collecting the construction processes of the existing stem cell banks and suggestions from authoritative experts in the past 10 years, 230 reference principles were obtained, and finally, the principles of “5C” for the establishment of modern standardized stem cell banks were summarized, and their related applications on the management of sports injuries were reviewed as well. Results The basic principles of “5C” for the establishment of modern standardized stem cell banks include (1) principle of informed consent, (2) confidentiality principle, (3) conformity principle, (4) contamination-free principle, and (5) commonweal principle. The applications of stem cells on repairs, reconstructions, and regenerations of sports injuries were also reviewed, especially in tissue-engineered cartilage, tissue-engineered meniscus, and tissue-engineered ligament. Conclusions The proposal of the basic principles of “5C” is conducive to relevant stem cell researchers and clinical medical experts to build modern stem cell banks in a more standardized and efficient manner while avoiding some major mistakes or problems that may occur in the future. On this basis, stem cells from stem cell banks would be increasingly used in the management of sports injuries. More importantly, these days, getting stem cell samples are difficult in a short time, and such banks with proper legal consent may help the scientific community.

Little has been known about the role of long non-coding RNA (lncRNA) involves in change of aged meniscus. Microarray analyses were performed to identify lncRNAs and mRNAs expression profiles of meniscus in young and aging adults and apple bioinformatics methods to analyse their potential roles. The differentially expressed (DE) lncRNAs and mRNAs were confirmed by qRT-PCR. A total of 1608 DE lncRNAs and 1809 DE mRNAs were identified. Functional and pathway enrichment analyses of all DE mRNAs showed that DE mRNAs were mainly involved in the TGF-beta, Wnt, Hippo, PI3K-Akt signaling pathway. The expressions of TNFRSF11B and BMP2 were significantly upregulated in aging group. LASSO logistic regression analysis of the DE lncRNAs revealed four lncRNAs (AC124312.5, HCG11, POC1B-AS1, and AP001011.1) that were associated with meniscus degradation. CNC analysis demonstrated that AP001011 inhibited the expression of TNFRSF11B and AC1243125 upregulated the expression of TNFRSF11B. CeRNA analysis suggested that POC1B-AS1 regulates the expression of BMP2 by sponging miR 130a-3p, miR136-5p, miR 18a-3p, and miR 608. Furthermore, subcellular localization and m6A modification sites prediction analysis of these four lncRNAs was performed. These data lay a foundation for extensive studies on the role of lncRNAs in change of aged meniscus.

Abstract Background Tuberculosis is a leading cause of death worldwide. BCG is an effective vaccine, but not widely used in many parts of the world due to a variety of issues. Mycobacterium vaccae (M. vaccae) is another vaccine used in human subjects to prevent tuberculosis. In the current study, we investigated the potential mechanisms of M. vaccae vaccination by determining differentially expressed genes in mice infected with M. tuberculosis before and after M. vaccae vaccination. Methods Three days after exposure to M. tuberculosis H37Rv strain (5 × 105 CFU), adult BALB/c mice randomly received either M. vaccae vaccine (22.5 μg) or vehicle via intramuscular injection (n = 8). Booster immunization was conducted 14 and 28 days after the primary immunization. Differentially expressed genes were identified by microarray followed by standard bioinformatics analysis. Results M. vaccae vaccination provided protection against M. tuberculosis infection (most prominent in the lungs). We identified 2326 upregulated and 2221 downregulated genes in vaccinated mice. These changes could be mapped to a total of 123 signaling pathways (68 upregulated and 55 downregulated). Further analysis pinpointed to the MyD88-dependent TLR signaling pathway and PI3K-Akt signaling pathway as most likely to be functional. Conclusions M. vaccae vaccine provided good protection in mice against M. tuberculosis infection, via a highly complex set of molecular changes. Our findings may provide clue to guide development of more effective vaccine against tuberculosis.

Affected by complex international factors in recent years, terrorism events are increasingly rampant in many countries, thereby posing a great threat to the gloal community. In addition, with the widespread use of emerging technologies in military and commercial fields, terrorist organizations have begun to use emerging technologies to engage in destructive activities. As the Internet and information technology develop, terrorism has been rapidly spreading in cyberspace. Terrorist organizations have created terrorism websites, established multinational networks of terrorist organizations, released recruitment information and even conducted training activities through various mainstream websites with a worldwide reach. Compared with traditional terrorist activities, cyber terrorist activities have a greater degree of destructiveness. Cybercrime and cyber terrorism have become the most serious challenges for societies. Terrorist organizations take advantage of the Internet in rapid dissemination of extremism ideas, and develop a large number of terrorists and supporters around the world, especially in developed Western countries. Terrorist organizations even use the Internet and “dark net” networks to conduct terrorist training, and their activities are concealed. As a result, the "lone wolf" terrorist attacks in various countries have emerged in an endless stream, which is difficult to prevent. This study proposed a method of extracting entities and attributes of terrorist events based on semantic role analysis, and provided technical support for monitoring and predicting cyberspace terrorism activities. Firstly, a naive Bayesian text classification algorithm is used to identify terrorism events on the cleaned text corpus collected from the Anti-Terrorism Information Site of the Northwest University of Political Science and Law. The keyword extraction algorithm TF-IDF is adopted for constructing the terrorism vocabularies from the classified text corpus, combining natural language processing technology. Then, semantic role and syntactic dependency analyses are conducted to mine the attributive post-targeting relationship, the name//place name//organization, and the mediator-like relationship. Finally, regular expressions and constructed lexical terrorism-specific vocabularies are used to extract six entities and attributes (occurrence time, occurrence location, casualties, attack methods, weapon types and terrorist organizations) of terrorism event based on the four types of triad short texts. The F1 values of the six types of entity attribute extraction evaluation results exceeded 80% based on the experimental data of 4221 articles collected. Therefore, the method proposed has practical significance for maintaining social public safety because of the positive effect in monitoring and predicting cyberspace terrorism events.

Abstract Background Immune- and inflammation-related genes (IIRGs) play an important role in the pathogenesis of tuberculosis (TB). However, the relationship between IIRG polymorphisms and TB risk remains unknown. In this study, the gene polymorphisms and their association with tuberculosis were determined in a Chinese population. Methods We performed a case-control study involving 1016 patients with TB and 507 healthy controls of Han Chinese origin. Sixty-four single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) belonging to 18 IIRGs were genotyped by the PCR-MassArray assay, and the obtained data was analyzed with χ 2-test, Bonferroni correction, and unconditional logistic regression analysis. Results We observed significant differences in the allele frequency of LTA rs2229094*C (P = 0.015), MBL2 rs2099902*C (P = 0.001), MBL2 rs930507*G (P = 0.004), MBL2 rs10824793*G (P = 0.004), and IL12RB1 rs2305740*G (P = 0.040) between the TB and healthy groups. Increased TB risk was identified in the rs930507 G/G genotype (P adjusted = 0.027) under a codominant genetic model as well as in the rs2099902 (C/T + C/C) vs T/T genotype (P adjusted = 0.020), rs930507 (C/G + G/G) vs C/C genotype (P adjusted = 0.027), and rs10824793 (G/A + G/G) vs A/A genotype (P adjusted = 0.017) under a dominant genetic model after Bonferroni correction in the analysis of the overall TB group rather than the TB subgroups. Furthermore, the rs10824793_rs7916582*GT and rs10824793_rs7916582*GC haplotypes were significantly associated with increased TB risk (P = 0.001, odds ratio [OR] = 1.421, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.152–1.753; and P = 0.018, OR = 1.364, 95% CI: 1.055–1.765, respectively). Moreover, the rs10824793_rs7916582*AT/AT or rs10824793_rs7916582*GT/GT diplotype showed a protective (P = 0.003, OR = 0.530, 95% CI: 0.349–0.805) or harmful (P = 0.009, OR = 1.396, 95% CI: 1.087–1.793) effect against the development of TB. Conclusions This study indicated that MBL2 polymorphisms, haplotypes, and diplotypes were associated with TB susceptibility in the Han Chinese population. Additionally, larger sample size studies are needed to further confirm these findings in the future.

Over centuries, several advances have been made in osteochondral (OC) tissue engineering to regenerate more biomimetic tissue. As an essential component of tissue engineering, scaffolds provide structural and functional support for cell growth and differentiation. Numerous scaffold types, such as porous, hydrogel, fibrous, microsphere, metal, composite and decellularized matrix, have been reported and evaluated for OC tissue regeneration in vitro and in vivo, with respective advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, due to the inherent complexity of organizational structure and the objective limitations of manufacturing technologies and biomaterials, we have not yet achieved stable and satisfactory effects of OC defects repair. In this review, we summarize the complicated gradients of natural OC tissue and then discuss various osteochondral tissue engineering strategies, focusing on scaffold design with abundant cell resources, material types, fabrication techniques and functional properties.

Bone and cartilage injury is common, tissue engineered scaffolds are potential means to repair. Because most of the scaffold materials used in bone and cartilage tissue engineering are bio-inert, it is necessary to increase the cellular adhesion ability of during tissue engineering reconstruction. The Arginine - Glycine - Aspartic acid (Arg-Gly-Asp, RGD) peptide family is considered as a specific recognition site for the integrin receptors. Integrin receptors are key regulators of cell-cell and cell-extracellular microenvironment communication. Therefore, the RGD polypeptide families are considered as suitable candidates for treatment of a variety of diseases and for the regeneration of various tissues and organs. Many scaffold material for tissue engineering and has been approved by US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for human using. The application of RGD peptides in bone and cartilage tissue engineering was reported seldom. Only a few reviews have summarized the applications of RGD peptide with alloy, bone cements, and PCL in bone tissue engineering. Herein, we summarize the application progress of RGD in bone and cartilage tissue engineering, discuss the effects of structure, sequence, concentration, mechanical stimulation, physicochemical stimulation, and time stimulation of RGD peptide on cells differentiation, and introduce the mechanism of RGD peptide through integrin in the field of bone and cartilage tissue engineering.

Cartilage damage is a common injury. Currently, tissue engineering scaffolds with composite seed cells have emerged as a promising approach for cartilage repair. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) hydrogels are attractive tissue engineering scaffold materials as they have high water absorption capacity as well as nontoxic and nutrient transport properties. However, PEG is fundamentally bio-inert and lacks intrinsic cell adhesion capability, which is critical for the maintenance of cell function. Cell adhesion peptides are usually added to improve the cell adhesion capability of PEG-based hydrogels. The suitable cell adhesion peptide can not only improve cell adhesion capability, but also promote chondrogenesis and regulate the immune microenvironment. To improve the interactions between cells and PEG hydrogels, we designed cysteine-arginine-glycine-aspartic acid (CRGD), a cell adhesion peptide covalently cross-linked with PEG hydrogels by a Michael addition reaction, and explored the tissue-engineering hydrogels with immunomodulatory effects and promoted chondrogenic differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs). The results indicated that CRGD improved the interaction between peripheral blood mesenchymal stem cells (PBMSCs) and PEG hydrogels. PEG hydrogels modified with 1 mM CRGD had the optimal capacity to promote chondrogenic differentiation, and CRGD could induce macrophage polarization towards the M2 phenotype to promote tissue regeneration and repair. PEG-CRGD hydrogels combined with PBMSCs have the potential to be suitable scaffolds for cartilage tissue engineering.