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The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between prognostic nutritional index (PNI) and systemic immune-inflammation index (SII) and clinical features and prognosis of osteosarcoma patients. We retrospectively investigated 126 patients with surgery for osteosarcoma between 2012 and 2018 at our hospital. The preoperative PNI was calculated as albumin level (g/L) + 5 × total lymphocyte count (10 9 /L). The SII was defined as platelet × neutrophil/lymphocyte counts. The optimal cut-off values for PNI and SII were evaluated with receiver operating curve analysis. Clinical features and PNI and SII were tested with the χ 2 test. The effects of PNI and SII on overall survival (OS) was investigated by Kaplan-Meier method and Cox proportional hazards model. A low preoperative PNI was remarkably correlated with tumor size, Enneking stage, pathological fracture, local recurrence, metastasis, and neoadjuvant chemotherapy ( p < 0.05). Whereas, a high SII was significantly associated with tumor size, histological type, Enneking stage, and neoadjuvant chemotherapy ( p < 0.05). There was a significant negative relationship between the PNI and SII ( r = 0.384; p < 0.001). For univariate analyses, the results revealed that tumor size, local recurrence, metastasis, PNI, and SII were predictors of OS ( p < 0.05). In multivariate analyses, local recurrence ( p = 0.010), metastasis ( p < 0.001), PNI ( p < 0.001), and SII ( p = 0.029) as independent prognostic factors were significantly correlated with OS. This study suggested that PNI and SII could be important prognostic parameters for patients with osteosarcoma.

A novel fluorescent reagent for determination of ammonium, 4-methoxyphthalaldehyde (MOPA), was successfully synthesized in this study. Under alkaline conditions, MOPA could reacted with ammonium rapidly at room temperature, producing fluorescent substance which had maximum excitation at 370 nm and emission wavelength at 454 nm. Based on this, a novel fluorescence analysis method was established for the determination of trace ammonium in natural water. Experimental parameters including reagent concentration, pH, reaction equilibrium time, and metal ions masking agent were optimized. The results showed that the optimized MOPA concentration was 0.12 g/L, pH was in the range of 11.2–12.0, and sulfite concentration was 0.051 g/L, respectively. Metal ions masking agent had no obvious effect on the fluorescence signal. With the reaction time of 15 minutes, linear range of this method was between 0.025 and 0.300 μmol/L, and the method detecting limit was 0.0058 μmol/L. The matrix recovery of the proposed method was in the range of 93.6–108.1%. Compared with the OPA method, this method was much more sensitive and rapid without the interference of background peak and would be more suitable for developing a portable fluorescence detection system.

Icariin is a prenylated flavonol glycoside derived from the Chinese herb Epimedium sagittatum. This study investigated the mechanism by which icariin prevents H2O2-induced apoptosis in rat nucleus pulposus (NP) cells. NP cells were isolated from the rat intervertebral disc and they were divided into five groups after 3 passages: (A) blank control; (B) 200 μM H2O2; (C) 200 μM H2O2 + 20 μM icariin; (D) 20 μM icariin + 200 μM H2O2 + 25 μM LY294002; (E) 200 μM H2O2 + 25 μM LY294002. LY294002 is a selective inhibitor of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt signaling pathway. NP cell viability, apoptosis rate, intracellular reactive oxygen species levels, and the expression of AKT, p-AKT, p53, Bcl-2, Bax, caspase-3 were estimated. The results show that, compared with the control group, H2O2 significantly increased NP cell apoptosis and the level of intracellular ROS. Icariin pretreatment significantly decreased H2O2-induced apoptosis and intracellular ROS and upregulated p-Akt and BCL-2 and downregulated caspase-3 and Bax. LY294002 abolished the protective effects of icariin. Our results show that icariin can attenuate H2O2-induced apoptosis in rat nucleus pulposus cells and PI3K/AKT pathway is at least partly included in this protection effect.

Icariin is a prenylated flavonol glycoside derived from the Chinese herb Epimedium sagittatum. This study investigated the mechanism by which icariin prevents H2O2-induced apoptosis in rat nucleus pulposus (NP) cells. NP cells were isolated from the rat intervertebral disc and they were divided into five groups after 3 passages: (A) blank control; (B) 200 μM H2O2; (C) 200 μM H2O2 + 20 μM icariin; (D) 20 μM icariin + 200 μM H2O2 + 25 μM LY294002; (E) 200 μM H2O2 + 25 μM LY294002. LY294002 is a selective inhibitor of the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K)/Akt signaling pathway. NP cell viability, apoptosis rate, intracellular reactive oxygen species levels, and the expression of AKT, p-AKT, p53, Bcl-2, Bax, caspase-3 were estimated. The results show that, compared with the control group, H2O2 significantly increased NP cell apoptosis and the level of intracellular ROS. Icariin pretreatment significantly decreased H2O2-induced apoptosis and intracellular ROS and upregulated p-Akt and BCL-2 and downregulated caspase-3 and Bax. LY294002 abolished the protective effects of icariin. Our results show that icariin can attenuate H2O2-induced apoptosis in rat nucleus pulposus cells and PI3K/AKT pathway is at least partly included in this protection effect.

This paper deals with the modeling of fault for analog circuits. A two-dimensional (2D) fault model is first proposed based on collaborative analysis of supply current and output voltage. This model is a family of circle loci on the complex plane, and it simplifies greatly the algorithms for test point selection and potential fault simulations, which are primary difficulties in fault diagnosis of analog circuits. Furthermore, in order to reduce the difficulty of fault location, an improved fault model in three-dimensional (3D) complex space is proposed, which achieves a far better fault detection ratio (FDR) against measurement error and parametric tolerance. To address the problem of fault masking in both 2D and 3D fault models, this paper proposes an effective design for testability (DFT) method. By adding redundant bypassing-components in the circuit under test (CUT), this method achieves excellent fault isolation ratio (FIR) in ambiguity group isolation. The efficacy of the proposed model and testing method is validated through experimental results provided in this paper.

Under the modern network environment, ubiquitous learning has been a popular way for people to study knowledge, exchange ideas, and share skills in the cyberspace. Existing research findings indicate that the learners’ initiative and community cohesion play vital roles in the social communities of ubiquitous learning, and therefore how to stimulate the learners’ interest and participation willingness so as to improve their enjoyable experiences in the learning process should be the primary consideration on this issue. This paper aims to explore an effective method to monitor the learners’ psychological reactions based on their behavioral features in cyberspace and therefore provide useful references for adjusting the strategies in the learning process. In doing so, this paper firstly analyzes the psychological assessment of the learners’ situations as well as their typical behavioral patterns and then discusses the relationship between the learners’ psychological reactions and their observable features in cyberspace. Finally, this paper puts forward a CyberPsychological computation method to estimate the learners’ psychological states online. Considering the diversity of learners’ habitual behaviors in the reactions to their psychological changes, a BP-GA neural network is proposed for the computation based on their personalized behavioral patterns.

The characteristics of users' browsing behaviors on websites can be used to analyze system performance as well as network communication, understand users’ reaction and motivation, and build adaptive websites. However, the motivation, requirement and experience of users may dynamically change, which cause difficulty in exactly refining a stable behavior pattern and describing their shifted interest. This paper introduces an optimized ant colony clustering algorithm (OACA) in dynamic pattern discovery, and explores the structured formula to describe the users’ browsing behavior patterns as well as to analyze their characteristics adaptively. The test and results show that users are clustered accurately based on their similar browsing behavior from dynamic Web log data.

Due to the intensely increasing individualized and rapidly changing demand in global market, customer oriented design has been the top priority for modern enterprises to quickly respond to the volatile personalized requirements. This leads to the great change of mass customization in supply chain management, in which the agility, efficiency and cost have become the main impediment to improve supply chain’s performance. In this paper, we first propose a new method of adaptive clustering for the orientation and analysis of target customers that is originally inspired from the swarm intelligence of ant colony, then the recommendation system for the design of LCD-TV is illustrated that applied by this method to test the validity of the algorithm. After that, we present a supply chain management based on mobile agents to satisfy the customization, especially, detailed description of the agent-based supply chain process is also expounded. Finally, an integrated intelligent system to support the customer oriented design as well as its supply chain management is discussed.

As an important financial derivative tool, SIF (stock index futures) gets an indispensable effect in the stock market for investors, including hedging, discovering price and resisting risk. The transaction mode and regulations of SIF are subject to change due to rapid financial products innovation, especially in an emerging market. Therefore, in SIF transaction, one of the essential requirements of business support system is flexibility. After analyzing current transaction modes and business systems of world famous SIF markets, we present a new solution for flexible business support system with multi-layer architecture, object-oriented components and FIB (Futures Exchange Information Bus) router cloud in this paper. The system shows excellent performance in Shanghai Stock Exchange with the top 4 largest transactions in the world.

Micro-blog has a major influence on network information transmission of social emergency events for its incomparable qualities. The dissemination of micro-blog information has all the typical characteristics of compound transmission by internet and mobile communication network, which has gradually become the mainstream. In addition, the transmission process is more closely related to the psychology and behavior of each micro blogger. In this paper, we regard each micro-blog user as a different agent who disseminates information in compound pattern. We first study and mine the psychology and behavior patterns of the agent by the analysis of their historical attributes and preferences combined with HowNet polarity of sentiment words, and then propose spreading mechanism of micro-blog and finally present an application case. The result of which will provide the important guidance in the analysis of micro-blog information dissemination on internet of social emergency events and the implementation of relevant intervention countermeasures. Key words: Micro-blog information, spreading mechanism, intelligence agent, emergency event.

Scientific and rational evaluation results depend on the indicators. Therefore, selecting the indicators which accorded with the characteristics of the target becomes the key for establishing the evaluation model. In this study, Delphi method was used to select the indicators. The results showed that the selected indicators are suitable for evaluating the safety of the navigation environment in Three Gorges Reservoir Areas.

The paper proposes a fault diagnosis model based on the HIWO–SVM algorithm given the fact that the basic support vector machines (SVM) cannot solve effectively the problem of fault diagnosis in analog circuit. First of all, the wavelet package technique is adopted for extracting the information of the faults from the test points in the analog circuit. The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is then integrated with the purpose of improving the performance of the basic IWO algorithm, i.e. a hybrid IWO (HIWO) algorithm. The HIWO algorithm is further used to optimize the parameters of SVM in order to avoid the randomness of the parameter selection, thereby improving the diagnosis precision and robustness. The experimental results on a filter circuit show that the method is more effective and reliable than the other methods for fault diagnosis.

In attempting to overcome the limitation of current methods to solve complicated constrained optimization problems, this paper proposes an adaptive hybrid particle swarm optimization multi-objective optimization (AHPSOMO) algorithm. In the early stage, this algorithm initializes the individuals in a population in an even manner using good point set (GPS) theory so that the diversity of the population can be guaranteed. In the process of local search, differential evolution (DE) algorithm is introduced for updating local optimal individuals. Particle swarm optimization method is further adopted to conduct global search as per the multi-objective approach. The results of simulation tests on 24 classic test functions and three engineering constrained optimization problems show that compared with other algorithms, our proposed algorithm is effective and feasible, which can offer highly accurate solutions with good robustness.

The product of the NH 3 - o- phthalaldehyde (OPA) -Na 2 SO 3 reaction is rose red at pH more than 10.4, and its maximum absorption wavelength is 550 nm. Based on this, a novel spectrophotometric method with flow injection analysis has been established to determine ammonia nitrogen in water. Experimental parameters related to the flow injection method and the reaction were optimized throughout the experiments based on univariate experimental design. The length of coil is optimized as 1.6 m for storing up standard or sample solution. The optimal value is 8.20 mL/min for loading flow rate of coloring solution. The OPA concentration, sulfite concentration and reaction pH are chosen as 1.06 g/L, 0.050 g/L and 10.80, respectively. The reaction temperature and stop flow time affects the performances of the method. The linearity range and detection limit of the proposed method are 0.100–0.700 mmol/L and 0.007 mmol/L at the reaction temperature of 55 °C and stop flow time of 340 s, respectively. The sample throughput is more than 8 h −1 . Under the optimal experimental conditions, the recovery is 100.4%, 95.2%, 101.7% and 92.4% for the lake water, river water, groundwater and sewage, respectively. Two lake water samples were analyzed using both the proposed method and indophenol blue method, the results show no significant difference between these two methods. In comparison with other spectrophotometric determination method of ammonia nitrogen, the main merits of the proposed method are simplicity, reliability, reproducibility and high sample throughput.