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In this study, a robust classification method for emotional speech single-trial event-related potential (ERP) signal was developed. The classification method based on compression sensing (CS) theory. First, we use CS theory to reduce the dimensionality of the ERP signal. Second, the ERP signal was reconstructed by using K-SVD method to construct the over-complete redundant dictionary. Finally, the ERP signal was classified by calculating the residuals between the reconstructed samples and the test samples. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively classify the noisy ERP signal and avoid the feature extraction process in the signal recognition.

A biodegradable micellar drug delivery system with a pH-responsive sheddable PEG shell was developed using an acetal-linked poly(ethylene glycol)-block-polylactide (PEG-a-PLA) copolymer and applied to the tumoral release of paclitaxel (PTX). The micelles with a diameter of ∼100 nm were stable in PBS at pH 7.4, started shedding the shell and aggregating slowly at pH 6.5, and decomposed faster at pH 5.5. PTX-loaded micelles (M-PTX) with a drug loading of 6.9 wt % exhibited pH-triggered PTX release in simulated tumoral acidic environments corresponding to the extracellular and intracellular spaces. In vitro experiments showed that the micelles were noncytotoxic to different cell lines, while M-PTX inhibited the proliferation and promoted the apoptosis of Hela cells. An in vivo study with Hela tumor-bearing mice indicated that M-PTX efficiently inhibited tumor growth. Because of these properties, the PEG-a-PLA micellar system appears to have bright prospects as a tumor-targeting drug carrier.

Background The current tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) staging system is insufficient to predict outcome of patients with operable Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) owing to its phenotypic and genomic heterogeneity. Integrating genomic signatures with clinicopathological factors may provide more detailed evaluation of prognosis. Methods All 2164 clinically annotated NSCLC samples (1326 in the training set and 838 in the validation set) with corresponding microarray data from 17 cohorts were pooled to develop and validate a clinicopathologic-genomic nomogram based on Cox regression model. Two computational methods were applied to these samples to capture expression pattern of genomic signatures representing biological statuses. Model performance was measured by the concordance index (C-index) and calibration plot. Risk group stratification was proposed for the nomogram. Results Multivariable analysis of the training set identified independent factors including age, TNM stage, combined prognostic classifier, non-overlapping signature, and the ratio of neutrophil to plasma cells. The C-index of the nomogram for predicting survival was statistically superior to that of the TNM stage (training set, 0.686 vs 0.627, respectively; P

High resolution remote sensing satellite can apply into mineral monitoring, but quantity of Chinese civil remote sensing satellites on orbit is limited. For analysing the ability and exploring the deficiency of satellites system, and improving the satellite system efficiency in mineral monitoring task, a simulation method of mineral monitoring with remote sensing satellites is proposed . Firstly the task demand analysis of mineral monitoring is developed, which is including the key observe areas and the payload parameters such as spectrum, resolution, and breadth and so on. Secondly, the satellites which can satisfy the task demand are selected, and base on the selected satellites system to build the simulation models. Thirdly, the task planning and scheduling methods is used to achieve the optimize simulation results. Finally the demand satisfaction of satellite system is assessed and the system efficiency is analysed. In this chapter, the simulation results is the parameters such as revisit time, covering time and continuous observation time of key observation areas. These parameters can be transformed to indicators which can reflect the satellite effectiveness. The contribution ratio of a single satellite to the whole satellite system is calculated and the satellite effectiveness is quantified, so the different kinds of satellites in the system can be compared with, meanwhile, the suggestion which can maximize satellites system effectiveness is provided specifically. Through the research on simulation method of mineral monitoring with remote sense satellites, the deficiency of remote sense payload and satellite system is recognized, which can provide the reference and suggestion for building optimization remote sense payload and satellite system in mineral monitoring application.

Characteristics of cohorts included in the study. (DOCX 37 kb)

Deep neural network (DNN) acoustic models have significantly advanced forward in recent years, outperforming the traditional Gaussian Mixture Hidden Markov Model (GMM-HMM) in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition tasks. We try to develop a practical Lhasa Tibetan ASR system. For higher speech recognition accuracy, in this paper, we consider to investigate the performances of Tibetan acoustic modeling using DNN method based on several different phoneme sets, which are defined based on linguistic and phonological knowledge of Tibetan Lhasa dialect. Experiments are conducted on a Tibetan corpus recorded by 20 persons, using a bigram language model over phones. The phone error rate (PER) results show that the acoustic model with CTL set performs best, which is relatively 10.43% higher accuracy than the basic phoneme set. Moreover, our results confirm the fact that for Lhasa Tibetan acoustic model, the paradigm DNN-HMM outperforms the conventional GMM-HMM.

Various studies examined the relationship between the expression of phosphatase and tensin homolog (PTEN) with the clinical outcome in patients with lung cancer, but yielded conflicting results.Electronic databases updated to January 2016 were searched to find relevant studies. A meta-analysis was conducted with eligible studies which quantitatively evaluated the relationship between the expression of PTEN and clinical outcomes of patients with lung cancer. Subgroup and sensitivity analysis were conducted.A total of 13 studies were included. When compared with high PTEN expression group, the lung cancer patients with reduced PTEN expression exhibited shorter overall survival (hazard ratio=0.40, 95%CI=0.32~0.52, P0.001) and shorter progression-free survival (hazard ratio=0.53, 95%CI=0.38~0.74, P0.001). In subgroup analysis, among lung cancer patients whose treatments including EGFR TKIs, we observed significant benefits of OS in high PTEN expression group.Reduced PTEN expression may be an indicator for poor prognosis in patients with lung cancer. It could have the same influence for patients whose treatments include EGFR-TKIs. The presence of PTEN expression may define a subset of patients with lung cancer appropriate for investigational therapeutic strategies.

A new H 2 O 2 biosensor was constructed by immobilizing Hb in the Chit-MWNTs/Au@Au 2 S 2 O 3 composite membrane. Owing to the superior performance of novel Au@Au 2 S 2 O 3 core–shell nanomaterials and its synergy with multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs), the direct electron transfer of Hb in composite membrane was easily achieved. The Chit-MWNTs/Hb/Au@Au 2 S 2 O 3 /GCE displayed a pair of well-defined and reversible redox peaks in 0.1 M pH 7.0 PBS. The electrocatalytic reduction to H 2 O 2 of Chit-MWNTs/Hb/Au@Au 2 S 2 O 3 /GCE was also studied. Its apparent Michaelis–Menten constant for H 2 O 2 was 0.014 mM, showing a good affinity. The experimental results showed that the linear dependence of the biosensor was from 4.0 × 10 −5 to 7.2 × 10 −4 M, and the detection limit of the sensor was 3.2 × 10 −6 M (S/N = 3). Moreover, the biosensor showed a rapid response to H 2 O 2 , a good stability and reproducibility.

Krüppel-like factor 17 (KLF17), a new member of the Krüppel-like factors (KLFs), has been reported to be a negative regulator of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and metastasis in breast cancer. However, the biological role and clinical significance of KLF17 in lung adenocarcinoma has been less clear. In the present study, we showed that KLF17 expression was decreased in lung adenocarcinoma. Reduced expression of KLF17 was correlated significantly with a short survival time in patients with lung adenocarcinoma (P0.0001). Moreover, KLF17 expression was an independent prognostic indicator for patients with lung adenocarcinoma. KLF17 expression level was correlated with the tumor stage (P=0.016) and tumor size (P=0.001) in lung adenocarcinoma. Overexpression of KLF17 inhibited cell growth in A549 and PC-9 cell lines. In conclusion, it is possible that KLF17 inhibits tumor growth in lung adenocarcinoma. The reduced expression of KLF17 is a valuable prognostic indicator for patients with lung adenocarcinoma, and KLF17 could be a novel target for treatment of lung adenocarcinoma.

Perceptual auditory filter banks such as Bark-scale filter bank are widely used as front-end processing in speech recognition systems. However, the problem of the design of optimized filter banks that provide higher accuracy in recognition tasks is still open. Owing to spectral analysis in feature extraction, an adaptive bands filter bank (ABFB) is presented. The design adopts flexible bandwidths and center frequencies for the frequency responses of the filters and utilizes genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize the design parameters. The optimization process is realized by combining the front-end filter bank with the back-end recognition network in the performance evaluation loop. The deployment of ABFB together with zero-crossing peak amplitude (ZCPA) feature as a front process for radial basis function (RBF) system shows significant improvement in robustness compared with the Bark-scale filter bank. In ABFB, several sub-bands are still more concentrated toward lower frequency but their exact locations are determined by the performance rather than the perceptual criteria. For the ease of optimization, only symmetrical bands are considered here, which still provide satisfactory results.

hMMS21 is a SUMO E3 ligase required for the prevention of DNA damage-induced apoptosis, and acts by facilitating DNA repair in human cells. The Arabidopsis genome contains a putative MMS21 homologue capable of interacting with the SUMO E2 conjugating enzyme AtSCE1a, as indicated by a yeast two-hybrid screen and bimolecular fluorescence complementation experiments. In vitro and in vivo data demonstrated that AtMMS21 was a SUMO E3 ligase. We identified the Arabidopsis AtMMS21 null T-DNA insertion mutant mms21-1, which had a short-root phenotype, and affected cell proliferation in the apical root meristem, as indicated by impaired expression of the cell division marker CYCB1:GUS in mms21-1 roots. The mms21-1 roots had reduced responses to exogenous cytokinins, and decreased expression of the cytokinin-induced genes ARR3, ARR4, ARR5 and ARR7, compared with the wild type. Thus, our findings suggest that the AtMMS21 gene is involved in root development via cell-cycle regulation and cytokinin signalling.

With the increase of water-inrush accidents from coal mine, water-inrush prediction has become a significant aim for coal mine safety experts. As an intelligent classifying algorithm, the Classification and Regression Tree (CART) is a potential method for predicting the possibility of water inrush from coal seam floor. One of its main advantages is that the Decision Rules (DRs) can be extracted from its structure. Another is that these DRs can be used to analysis safety problems. However, the time of establishing the decision tree is too long because of the existence of the redundant information. This paper presents an effective method named NRS-CART, which is a hybrid method by combining neighborhood rough set (NRS) and classification and regression tree (CART). Moreover, the novel approach was used to detect and classify water-inrush possibilities. The experimental results showed that it only took 0.3455 seconds to predict the water-inrush possibility using the proposed method, whereas the CART spent 1.0411 seconds to predict for the same dataset, and at the same time the prediction accuracy was also improved from 88.78% to 93.90%.

This paper investigates the location-routing problem arising in the context of hazardous waste (HW) management. The problem is to identify the location of recycling center, treatment center and disposal center, and determine the allocation and route plan of HW and waste residue. By incorporating various operational and capacity constraints, especially the link risk tolerance capacity constraints, the authors formulate the problem as a multi-objective mixed integer linear programming model to minimize the total cost and the total risk simultaneously. An augmented e-constraint algorithm is customized to approximate the non-dominated frontier to the problem. Finally, a realistic example is used to test the proposed approach. Computational results show that the augmented e-constraint algorithm is a suitable multi-objective optimization approach to handle the problem.

In order to provide different result to the decision makers with different risk preference of hazardous materials transportation adaptively, the authors bring conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) modal into the risk assessment question of multimodal transportation of hazardous materials. First the authors analyzed the entire process of multimodal transportation of hazardous materials systematically, and then the authors built the CVaR model, and tried to change the traditional model into a new optimization model. According to the characteristics of the model, the authors designed an algorithm based on node-arc. A numerical example shown that CVaR model of different confidence level could be solved by the algorithm quickly and efficiently. The results show that the CVaR model could cover risk preference from risk-neutral to risk-averse, and it is a more proper and flexible risk measure for multimodal transport of hazardous materials decision making.

To prepare a pH fluorescence probe based on styrylcyanine dyes for live cell imaging.The Probe 1 was prepared by reaction of 4-pyridinecarboxaldehyde with 1,1,2-trimethylbenz[e]indole. The influence of pH on the fluorescent properties was examined, and the cell viability was examined using cell counting kit-8. The Probe 1 was used as a pH fluorescence probe in living cell.Probe 1 emitted green fluorescence under neutral and basic conditions but orange fluorescence under acid condition. Probe 1 selectively stained the cytoplasmic regions of living cells without significantly affecting the cell viability.The pH-sensitive fluorescent probe prepared based on styrylcyanine possesses good ability of cell membrane permeation for live cell fluorescent imaging.

To evaluate the efficacy of a combined neurolytic block of the celiac and superior hypogastric plexuses for incapacitating upper abdominal cancer pain.Fifty-two patients with advanced upper abdominal malignancies and incapacitating pain were equally randomized to receive a combined neurolytic block of the celiac and superior hypogastric plexuses (combined group) or a neurolytic celiac plexus block alone (NCPB group) using a 90% ethanol trans-intervertebral disk approach under CT guidance. Visual analogue scores (VAS), morphine consumption, and quality of life (QoL) were assessed before the procedure and 24 hrs, 1 week, 1 month, and 3 months after the procedure. The complications and side effects were also recorded.The amount of ethanol used was 30 ± 5 ml in the combined group and 21 ± 3 ml in the NCPB group. VAS scores and morphine consumption decreased significantly pre- compared to post-procedure in both groups (p0.05). QoL significantly improved 24 hrs, 1 week, and 1 month after the procedure compared with each group pre-procedure (p0.05), but not after 3 months (p0.05). The combined group had significantly lower VAS and morphine consumption than the NCPB group (p0.05). QoL scores were significantly higher in the combined group 24 hrs, 1 week, and 1 month post-procedure than the NCPB group (p0.05), but not after 3 months (p0.05).A combined neurolytic block of the celiac and superior hypogastric plexuses is more effective than neurolytic celiac plexus block alone in pain relief for patients with advanced upper abdominal cancer.

Interleukin (IL)-32 is a novel proinflammatory cytokine, which has been shown to play an important role in tumor growth and metastasis. Here, we discovered that IL-32 was aberrantly over-expressed in lung adenocarcinoma tissues and cell lines. Positive expression of IL-32 significantly correlated with the clinical staging, and lymph node and distant metastases. High expression of IL-32 was an independent indicator of poor prognosis in lung adenocarcinoma patients. Moreover, IL-32-facilitated cell migration and invasion in vitro was mediated through transactivation of the nuclear transcription factor (NF)-κB signaling pathway and subsequent upregulation of matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-2 and MMP9 expression. These studies demonstrate that IL-32 plays a role in the tumor-associated inflammatory microenvironment and that overexpression of IL-32 contributes to invasion and metastasis in primary lung adenocarcinoma, suggesting that it may have clinical utility as a prognostic biomarker and potential target for immunotherapy in lung adenocarcinoma.

A model for an international undergraduate biomedical engineering research exchange program is outlined. In 2008, the Johns Hopkins University in collaboration with Tsinghua University in Beijing, China established the Tsinghua-Johns Hopkins Joint Center for Biomedical Engineering Research. Undergraduate biomedical engineering students from both universities are offered the opportunity to participate in research at the overseas institution. Programs such as these will not only provide research experiences for undergraduates but valuable cultural exchange and enrichment as well. Currently, strict course scheduling and rigorous curricula in most biomedical engineering programs may present obstacles for students to partake in study abroad opportunities. Universities are encouraged to harbor abroad opportunities for undergraduate engineering students, for which this particular program can serve as a model.

Based on the WC-OWA operator the traffic mode choice model is constructed in the paper. Assuming characteristic variables of traffic modes follow normal distribution, combining with 3σ principle, the values of the characteristic variables are transformed into random interval numbers and the optional decision matrix is established and standardized; Using the weighted least-square method of complementary judgment matrix ,the weight vector of characteristic variables is obtained .Then the integrative characteristic values of traffic modes are achieved by integrating the values of the characteristic variables based on the WC-OWA operator, and thus the sorting and selecting of traffic modes is realized. Finally a case shows that the model is feasible.

In recent years, with the rapid growth of economy and the entry of foreign investment, China's logistics industry had a great development. The holistic scale of modern logistics industry is expanding, and at the same time, its operation efficiency is increasing. The rapid development of logistics industry puts an urgent need of human resources of logistics, and the education of logistics also has a corresponding development. At present, the number of undergraduate and specialized logistics institutions which Sichuan Province has set up is more than 32, and Sichuan Province also has carried out some task about vocational qualification certification. Through the statistics, the number of current logistics human resources in Sichuan Province who have the academic qualification above junior college can be known. From statistics about the number of the college graduate of logistics each year and the number of people who gain the qualification about logistic is known. With the use of variety of forecasting methods, this article forecasts the number of demand and supply from 2006 to 2016, and then it discusses about the situation of supply and demand about the logistics human resources in Sichuan Province, and establishes a balanced model of supply and demand. This paper analyzes the development trend of supply and demand situation of logistics human resources, and then it gives some specific ideas and suggestions.

The Oldenburg LOgatome speech corpus (OLLO) [1] is specifically designed for evaluating speech recognition methods on variability. The performance of features carried on intrinsic variabilities in speech is meaningful for automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. ZCPA and MFCC were the two main features applied to OLLO French corpus in this paper. We took cepstral mean subtraction (CMS) on MFCC. Dynamic transforms (delta-delta-ZCPA and delta-delta-MFCC) were also adopted. The experiments show that the MFCC outperform the ZCPA in separate style. But ZCPA is more robust between different variabilities. The delta-delta operation of MFCC achieves best recognition in noise-free environment. Moreover, ZCPA could be complementary to MFCC so that one can combine them together especially on soft speaking style.

The filter bank in the front-end of a speech recognition system mimics the function of the basilar membrane. It is believed that the closer the band subdivision is to human perception, the better the recognition results. This paper proposes the use of Warped Filter Banks (WFBs) to replace traditional FIR filter banks and validates its use for the recognition of noisy speech. The WFBs bandwidths can be warped by using a first-order allpass transformation replacing the unit delay. Different warped factors in the allpass function can make the different scaled filter banks. Experiments carried on isolated words for speaker independent speech recognition show that the recognition rate with our proposed WFBs has been effectively increased.

Background Novel biomarkers are of particular interest for predicting cancer prognosis. This study aimed to explore the associations between enhancer of zeste homolog 2 (EZH2) and patient survival in various cancers. Methods Relevant literature was retrieved from PubMed and Web of Science databases. Pooled hazard ratios (HRs), odds ratios (ORs), and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated. Results Forty-nine studies (8,050 patients) were included. High EZH2 expression was significantly associated with shorter overall (hazard ratio [HR] 1.74, 95% CI: 1.46–2.07), disease-free (HR 1.59, 95% CI: 1.27–1.99), metastasis-free (HR 2.19, 95% CI: 1.38–3.47), progression-free (HR 2.53, 95% CI: 1.52–4.21), cancer-specific (HR 3.13, 95% CI: 1.70–5.74), and disease-specific (HR 2.29, 95% CI: 1.56–3.35) survival, but not recurrence-free survival (HR 1.38, 95% CI: 0.93–2.06). Moreover, EZH2 expression significantly correlated with distant metastasis (OR 3.25, 95% CI: 1.07–9.87) in esophageal carcinoma; differentiation (OR 3.00, 95% CI: 1.37–6.55) in non-small cell lung cancer; TNM stage (OR 3.18, 95% CI: 2.49–4.08) in renal cell carcinoma; and histological grade (OR 4.50, 95% CI: 3.33–6.09), estrogen receptor status (OR 0.15, 95% CI: 0.11–0.20) and progesterone receptor status (OR 0.30, 95% CI: 0.23–0.39) in breast cancer. Conclusions Our results suggested that EZH2 might be an independent prognostic factor for multiple survival measures in different cancers.