Search

Haiyin Hu,1,* Zhaochen Ji,1,* Xiaoyu Qiang,1 Shigang Liu,2 Xiaodi Sheng,1 Zhe Chen,1 Fanqi Liu,3 Hui Wang,1 Junhua Zhang1 1Evidence-Based Medicine Center, Tianjin University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Respiratory Diseases, Guang’anmen Hospital, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Cardiovascular Disease, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Tianjin University of Chinese Medicine, Tianjin, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Hui Wang, Junhua Zhang Email wanghui1983@foxmail.com; zjhtcm@foxmail.comBackground: The World Health Organization has indicated that chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) may become the third leading cause of death by 2030. Acute exacerbation of COPD (AECOPD) is an important process in clinical treatment. Recent studies have shown that Chinese medical injections (CMI) are effective against AECOPD, but the effective difference among different CMIs remains unclear. The aim of this network meta-analysis (NMA) is to compare the therapeutic effect of various CMIs.Methods: We conducted an overall, systematic literature search in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, VIP, SinoMed, PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, and Web of Science databases to retrieve randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of CMIs for AECOPD published up to January 2021. The Cochrane risk of bias tool was used to assess the risk of bias. Stata 13.1 and WinBUGS 14.3 were used for data analyses.Results: In total, 103 RCTs involving 8767 participants and 23 CMIs were included. The results indicated that among all treatments conventional Western medical therapy (WM) plus Dengzhanxixin injection (DZXX) led to the best improvement in the clinical efficacy and the ratio of forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) to forced vital capacity (FVC) (FEV1/FVC), with surface under the cumulative ranking curve (SUCRA)=80.47% and 98.55%, respectively. Moreover, Shenmai injection (SM) plus WM and Reduning injection (RDN) plus WM led to the best improvement in the FEV1 (SUCRA=80.18%) and the ratio of forced expiratory volume in one second to the predicted value (FEV1%, SUCRA=87.28%). Shengmai injection (SGM) plus WM led to the most considerable shortening in the length of hospital stay (SUCRA=94.70%). Cluster analysis revealed that WM+DZXX had the most favorable response for clinical efficacy and FEV1, as well as clinical efficacy and FEV1/FVC, WM+RDN had the most favorable response for clinical efficacy and FEV1%, WM+SGM had the most favorable response for clinical efficacy and length of hospital stay.Conclusion: WM+DZXX, WM+RDN, and WM+SGM were noted to be the optimum treatment regimens for improving in clinical efficacy, FEV1, FEV1/FVC, FEV1% and reducing the hospital stay length of AECOPD patients. Considering the limitations this NMA may have, the current results warrant further verification via additional high-quality studies.Keywords: traditional Chinese medicine, TCM, Chinese medical injection, CMI, acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, AECOPD, COPD, network meta-analysis, NMA

Recently, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been attracting considerable attention in single image super-resolution. Some CNN-based methods, such as VDSR verified that residual learning can speed up the training and significantly improve the performance of accuracy. However, with very deep networks, convergence speed is still a critical issue in training due to the cost of requiring enormous parameters. In order to deal with this issue, we redesign the residual networks based on dilated networks. In this paper, we propose symmetrical dilated residual convolution networks (FDSR) to tackle image super-resolution problems. Our network is on the basis of the dilated convolutions supported exponential expansion of the receptive field without loss of resolution and coverage. This means that FDSR can speed up the training and improve the performance of accuracy without increasing the model's depth or complexity. Meanwhile, we attempt to combine the image pre-processing approach of VGG-net with mean squared error (MSE) to enhance the performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the training time-consuming proposed model achieves nearly a half with even superior restoration quality. Further, we present a novel network with less layers and parameters can achieve real-time performance on a generic CPU and still maintain superior performance.

In recent years, Spatial and temporal dynamic monitoring of fishing boats has become an important data source for understanding the distributional dynamics of fisheries and for combating illegal fishing. Visible infrared imaging radiometer suite (VIIRS) Day / night band (DNB) nighttime remote sensing images can be used to monitor night fishing lights. In the study that we are reporting here, spike detection and threshold segmentation techniques were used to identify Pacific saury fishing boats employing night lights as fish attractors. GIS tools were then used to extract and analyze the fishing boat position and operation status. The results show that the method proposed in this study can effectively identify the location and operation status of Pacific saury fishing boats, and provide useful information for further understanding the spatial distribution and dynamics of Pacific saury fishing boats in the northwest Pacific region.