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Information fusion is very effective and necessary to respond to a public epidemic outbreak such as COVID-19. Big data intelligent, as a product of information fusion, plays an important role in th...

In this paper, we investigate the value distributions of linear q-difference polynomials $$f^{n}(z)+\sum ^{l}_{j=1}a_{j}(z)f(q_{j}z+c_j)$$ and $$f^{n}(z)\sum ^{l}_{j=1}a_{j}(z)f(q_{j}z+c_j)$$ when f is a transcendental meromorphic function of zero order. The uniqueness theorems of q-difference polynomials were also considered.

Many brain functions that underlie behavior, cognition, and emotions vary with age, as does susceptibility to neuropsychological disorders. The expression of specific genes that are involved in these functions, such as the genes encoding for oxytocin, its receptors, and apolipoprotein D, varies with age across different brain regions. The cannabinoid 1 receptor (CB

The purpose of this study was to evaluate differences in endovascular treatment (EVT) outcomes in M1 segment middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) patients with different pathologic subtypes.Patients with MCAO who received EVT from July 2014 to December 2020 were categorized into three groups: embolism without internal carotid artery steno-occlusion (MCAO-E), in situ atherosclerotic thrombosis (MCAO-AS) and embolism from tandem ICA steno-occlusion (MCAO-T). Baseline characteristics, EVT-related factors and clinical outcomes were compared between groups. Multivariable regression analyses were performed to evaluate the relationship between aetiologic classification and outcomes at 90 days after stroke.Among eligible patients (n = 220), MCAO-E (n = 129, 58.6%) was the most common aetiology, followed by MCAO-AS (n = 47, 21.4%) and MCAO-T (n = 44, 20.0%). Patients with MCAO-E were significantly older but had a lower rate of dyslipidaemia and smoking history than those with MCAO-AS. Although patients with MCAO-AS and MCAO-T more often required rescue balloon angioplasty and stenting (p 0.001), no significant difference in the rate of final recanalization was found. Patients in the MCAO-AS group obtained better functional outcomes (90-day modified Rankin Scale score, 0-2) (p = 0.002) and lower mortality than in the MCAO-E group (p = 0.009). On multivariable logistic regression, we failed to find that stroke subtype was an independent predictor of functional outcomes and mortality.Patients with acute MCA M1 occlusion stroke due to different pathogeneses had comparable successful recanalization rates and functional independence at 90 days. The optimal management for MCAO patients with different aetiologies requires further research.

The effect of pulsed magneto oscillation (PMO) on the microstructure and tensile properties of Al-25% Si alloys with and without phosphorus addition was investigated. When PMO was applied to the melt during solidification, the results show that the PMO treatment is an effective method for refining the primary Si of Al-25% Si alloy with and without phosphorus addition. The morphology of primary Si was considerably refined via coarse dendritic and polygon shape to fine and regular block under the PMO treatment, and the average size of primary Si was refined to 30.8 μm and 45.3 μm under the optimal processing conditions for the alloy with and without phosphorus addition, respectively. The tensile strength and elongation of the alloys first increased and then decreased with rise of current. Analysis shows that application of PMO decreases Gibbs free energy and critical nucleus radius of the Al-25% Si alloy during solidification. The nucleation rate first increased and then decreased with increasing PMO intensity. The variation tendency of average number of primary Si per unit area is consistent with the theory analysis.

The effects of ultrasonic melt treatment (UST) on the microstructure and tensile properties of Al-25% Si alloys with and without phosphorus addition were investigated. The average size of the primary Si firstly decreased and then increased with the rise of the ultrasonic intensity. The minimum value is about 25.4 and 32.8 μm when the ultrasonic intensity is 900 W with phosphorus addition and 1 200 W without phosphorus addition. The average number of primary Si per unit area firstly increased and then decreased in both alloys with increasing of ultrasonic intensity. Both tensile strength and elongation were improved mainly due to the refinement of microstructure by UST. Finally, the mechanism of UST on the primary Si is discussed.

The electromagnetic flow meter (EMF) is one of the most suitable flowmeter for slurry measurement. It is an important research point of electromagnetic flowmeter to overcome slurry noise in slurry measurement. The main approach to overcome slurry noise is to modify the excitation method and to improve the signal processing method. The novelty of this paper is the first study on the mechanism of excitation switching process to overcome slurry noise. The vortex electric field generated during excitation switching is theoretically analyzed and simulated based on Maxwell’s equations. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the vortex electric field to overcome the slurry noise, an experiment based on the step excitation signal is proposed. The results of the slurry noise power spectrum show that the increase of the excitation switching process can effectively suppress the slurry noise. The experimental results are consistent with the simulation results. On this basis, the stepwise excitation EMF was developed. Comparison results with conventional three-value excitation EMF show that increasing of excitation switch can effectively suppress slurry noise in real industrial measurement scenarios.

Protein Preferentially Expressed Antigen in Melanoma (Prame), a tumor-associated antigen, has been found to frequently overexpress in various cancers, which indicates advanced cancer stages and poor clinical prognosis. Moreover, previous reports noted that Prame functions as a substrate recognizing receptor protein of Cullin RING E3 ligases (CRLs) to mediate potential substrates degradation through Ubiquitin Proteasome System (UPS). However, none of the Prame specific substrate has been identified so far. In this study, proteomic analysis of RBX1-interacting proteins revealed p14/ARF, a well-known tumor suppressor, as a novel ubiquitin target of RBX1. Subsequently, immunoprecipitation and in vivo ubiquitination assay determined Cullin2-RBX1-Transcription Elongation Factor B Subunit 2 (EloB) assembled CRL2 E3 ligase complex to regulate the ubiquitination and subsequent degradation of p14/ARF. Finally, through siRNA screening, Prame was identified as the specific receptor protein responsible for recognizing p14/ARF to be degraded. Additionally, via bioinformatics analysis of TCGA database and clinical samples, Prame was determined to overexpress in tumor tissues vs. paired adjacent tissues and associated with poor prognosis of cancer patients. As such, downregulation of Prame expression significantly restrained cancer cell growth by inducing G2/M phase cell cycle arrest, which could be rescued by simultaneously knocking down of p14/ARF. Altogether, targeting overexpressed Prame in cancer cells inactivated RBX1-Cullin2-EloB-Prame E3 ligase (CRL2Prame) and halted p14/ARF degradation to restrain tumor growth by inducing G2/M phase cell cycle arrest.

Due to the Nevanlinna theory, the paper gives the general structure of transcendental meromorphic solutions of a certain ordinary differential equation with rational coefficients. As an application, the meromorphic solutions of the FitzHugh–Nagumo system are obtained in explicit form.

High-speed camera (HSC) is an advanced technology, which can be applied to observe the solid–liquid interface directly during solidification. It has never been reported that the temperature evolutions of solidification that was monitored by using cameras and their images. In this study, a new application of HSC technology was developed for the temperature evolution investigation. With this technology, the effects of the measured position, the thermocouple size and thermocouple sensitivity (delay) can be demonstrated in temperature measurement. It is important that the higher accuracy of temperature profiles can be obtained by the HSC technology. This method can be expected to analyze the temperature profiles of small melt-pool and subsequent rapid solidification process in additive manufacturing. In the end, we discussed the relationship of the recalescence rate and the solidification interface.

Background: Leukocyte telomere length (LTL) has been associated with risk of several cancers. The association between LTL and bladder cancer is still inconsistent. Methods: In this large case–control study consisting of 2,011 patients with bladder cancer and 2,259 healthy controls of European ancestry, we investigated the associations of real-time qPCR-measured LTL (a retrospective case–control study) and genetically predicted LTL [a Mendelian randomization (MR) study] with bladder cancer risk. Genotypes from 10 LTL-associated SNPs were used as instrumental variables to predict LTL. We used an individual level data–based weighted genetic risk score (GRS) and a summary statistics–based inverse-variance weighting (IVW) method in MR analyses. Results: The qPCR-measured LTL was shorter in cases with muscle-invasive bladder cancer (MIBC) than those with non–muscle-invasive bladder cancer [NMIBC; ratio of telomere repeats copy number to single gene copy number (T/S): 1.19 ± 0.34 vs. 1.23 ± 0.36, P = 0.081]. Multivariable logistic regression analyses showed long qPCR-measured LTL was associated with a reduced risk of MIBC. In MR analyses, genetically predicted LTL was weakly associated with bladder cancer risk in both the GRS analysis [OR = 1.13, per SD increase; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.73–1.75; P = 0.595] and the IVW analysis (OR = 1.14 per SD increase; 95% CI, 0.75–1.74; P = 0.543). Conclusions: There was no strong evidence supporting an association between LTL and bladder cancer risk in European Americans. Impact: This is the largest study of LTL and bladder cancer risk. The study showed that LTL does not play an important role in bladder cancer etiology.

Purpose Knowledge regarding the systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) associated with emergent large vessel occlusion (ELVO) is still insufficient. We aimed to investigate the occurrence rate, predictors, and clinical outcomes of SIRS in patients with ELVO after endovascular treatment (EVT). Patients and Methods We retrospectively collected EVT data of patients with ELVO from July 2015 to August 2019 in our center. SIRS in the absence of infection was recorded in detail. A favorable outcome was defined as obtaining a 90-day modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score ≤2. Results Among the 256 patients who received EVT, 91 (35.5%) developed SIRS. The patients who developed SIRS had a reduced favorable outcome (OR 4.112 [95% CI 1.705 to 9.920]; p=0.002) and higher mortality (OR 25.336 [95% CI 8.578 to 74.835]; p

Surveillance videos which record crowd behaviors have dramatically increased due to the wide applications. A quick view of such crowd surveillance video in a constrained time is an increasing demand because it always contain a huge number of redundancy frames. In this paper, we focus on summarization of crowd surveillance videos. But it is not easy due to two reasons. First, how to make the decision to keep or discard a subshot from the input surveillance video stream so that the summary can outline the main behaviors of the crowd over a limited frames sequence. Second, how to maintain performance of summarization model for long surveillance videos. To tackle these challenges, we formulate surveillance video summarization as a sequential decision-making process and train the summarization network with reinforcement learning-based framework. A novel crowd location-density reward is proposed to teach summarization network to produce high-quality summaries. In addition, a summarization network with three layers LSTM is designed to maintain performance across longer time spans. Extensive experiments on three public crowd surveillance videos datasets show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

As an interesting and emerging topic, multiple foreground cosegmentation (MFC) aims at extracting a finite number of common objects from an image collection, which is useful to variety of visual media applications. Although a number of approaches have been proposed to address this problem, many of them are designed with the misleading consistent information, suboptimal image representation, or inefficient segmentation assist and thus still suffer from certain limitations, which reduces their capability in the real-world scenarios. To alleviate these limitations, we propose a novel unsupervised MFC framework, which is composed of three components: unsupervised label generation, saliency based pseudo-annotation and cosegmentation by MIML learning. Specifically, we combine the high-level and low-level feature to represent the proposal objects, and adopt a novel SPAP clustering scheme to obtain more accurate consistent information of common objects. Then the saliency based pseudo-annotation help us reformulate the MFC problem as a Multi-Instance Multi-Label (MIML) learning problem by label propagation. Finally, by introducing a novel ensemble MIML learning scheme, the consistent information of common objects can more efficiently assist the segmentation of the images and get the more accurate segmentation results. We evaluate our framework on widely used public databases including the ICoseg dataset, MSRC dataset and FlickrMFC dataset for single and multiple common object cosegmentation respectively. Comparison results show that the proposed methods reach advanced and efficient performance.

Background Gastrin (GAST) is a well-known hormone regulating gastric biofunctions in the secretion of acid and maintaining its structural integrity. Furthermore, the dysregulation of GAST is also involved in the development of various forms of cancer. However, there are some limitations for illustrating the cellular regulation of GAST and its regulatory mechanisms in gastric malignant transformation and the potential epigenetic regulators systematically. Methods We explored the role of GAST expression in gastric cancer (GC) and normal tissues with the clinical features and investigated the potential relationship between GAST and STAT3/MMP11 pathway by gain or loss of function analyses. Besides, based on our microRNA/mRNA expression profiles, miR-30a-3p was the potential epigenetic regulator and additional experiments were performed to identify the hypothesis. Results Elevated GAST expression was frequently detected in GC and was associated with worse outcomes (p

In order to obtain high-quality CuCrZr/316L clad plates prepared by explosive welding (EW), theoretical analysis and numerical simulation were introduced to optimize welding parameters. The bonding properties of the achieved joints were systematically studied through multiscale interface analyses, mechanical performance tests, and evaluation of sealing properties. It was concluded that the theoretical analysis in collaboration with numerical calculations is an effective way to design parameters, because its predicted result was in good agreement with the ultrasonic test (UT) one. In both microstructure observations and mechanical tests, an excellent bonding quality of the CuCrZr/316L bimetallic plate was confirmed, where a uniform wavy morphology without defects such as voids and cracks was found at the bonding interface. The bonding strength was higher than the CuCrZr alloy. Moreover, a self-designed hydraulically pressed mold method was developed to manufacture a U-shaped CuCrZr/316L component, and the resulting sample matches well with the designed dimensions. Finally, the helium-leak test results demonstrate that the sealing property of the CuCrZr/316L bimetallic plate meets the practical requirements, indicating that the welded specimens were sound.

A series of three-dimensionally ordered macro-mesoporous (3DOMM) La1−xCaxFeO3 (x = 0–0.3) perovskite-type oxides were designed and successfully fabricated for the first time via a dual-template method. In which, PMMA and Brij-56 were employed as the hard template and soft template, respectively. It is found that 3DOMM La1−xCaxFeO3 exhibits abundant wormlike mesoporous channels about 3 nm in diameter on macroporous skeleton walls. The excellent catalytic activity of soot combustion benefits from not only the well-designed hierarchical porous structure of catalyst, but also the redox electron pair of Fe3+/Fe4+ induced by the doping of low-valent alkaline earth metal Ca to A-site of LaFeO3. 3DOMM La0.8Ca0.2FeO3 exhibits superior catalytic performance for soot combustion, which shows T50 of 396 °C. It is 189 °C lower than that without catalyst. A combination of structure and composition in the design of catalyst can be widely extended to other catalytic systems.

In this paper, we study finite-order entire solutions of nonlinear differential-difference equations and solve a conjecture proposed by Chen, Gao, and Zhang when the solution is an exponential polynomial. We also find that any exponential polynomial solution of a nonlinear difference equation should have special forms.

Numerous experimental data on the rapid solidification of eutectic systems exhibit the formation of metastable solid phases with the initial (nominal) chemical composition. This fact is explained by the suppression of eutectic decomposition due to diffusionless (chemically partitionless) solidification beginning at a high but finite growth velocity of crystals. In the present work, a model is suggested for the diffusionless growth to analyse the atomic diffusion in the rod eutectic couples growing into supercooled liquid. A simplified calculating method for the equation related to the Bessel function in the solution of the growth of rod eutectics is obtained. This method can also be used in the calculation of other rod eutectic growth models. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Transport phenomena in complex systems (part 2)’.

As one of the regions with intensive agriculture and rapid economic development in China, North China also has a high nitrogen (N) deposition. This study characterized the spatial pattern of N deposition in North China, combining the tropospheric columns from satellite measurements and the simulated profiles from an atmospheric chemistry transport model. The total N deposition fluxes ranged from 16.3 to 106.5 kg N ha−1 yr−1, with an average of 54.5 ± 17.2 kg N ha−1 yr−1. The high values were concentrated in urban and farmland areas, while low values were found in forests and grasslands with less human activities. Of the total N deposition, 36% was deposited via precipitation, 12% was deposited through dry particulate deposition, and the remaining 52% was comprised of dry gaseous deposition. For the seasonal variation of dry deposition, gaseous HNO3 and particulate NO3− were higher in winter and autumn, but lower in spring and summer. In contrast, gaseous NH3 and particulate NH4+ were higher in spring and summer, but lower in winter and autumn. This is possibly caused by the seasonal differences in emission intensity between NOx and NH3 emission sources. The gaseous NO2 deposition did not show strong seasonal variation. The wet deposition was mainly affected by precipitation, with high values in summer and low values in winter. This research provides an objective spatial perspective and insight into the total N deposition in North China.

Through an unique manufacturing process which we call it “the Russian-doll-like experimental arrangement”, Steel/Cu pipes and Al/Cu pipe/rod are simultaneously explosively welded in a single experiment. After that, optical microscope (OM), scanning electron microscope (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), longitudinal compression, transversal compression and compression-shear tests are conducted to analyze samples’ microstructure and mechanical properties. Results show that bonding interfaces of Al/Cu and Steel/Cu couples change from unstable ones, via regular/wavy ones, to final flat ones along the detonation direction. AlCu and Al2Cu are identified around the Al/Cu interface via EDS analysis, and atomic ratios of steel and copper around the Steel/Cu interface varies from 47/53 to 75/25. Samples’ yield strength/strain in longitudinal compression and transversal compression for Al/Cu couple are respectively 340 MPa/4.8% and 120 MPa/4.5%. Steel/Cu specimens’ yield strength/strain in longitudinal compression and compressive strength/failure strain in transversal compression are 598 MPa/5.8% and 90.97 MPa/21.0%, respectively.