Search

A robust and sparse multi-class approach for Multi-Class classification is proposed.The proposed method is based on Ramp loss K-Support Vector Classification-Regression.The CCCP procedure is used to solve a non-differentiable non-convex optimization problem.ADMM is adopted to make our model well-adapted for the large-scale setting.The results of Ramp-KSVCR show superior generalization power and low computational cost. Network intrusion detection problem is an ongoing challenging research area because of a huge number of traffic volumes, extremely imbalanced data sets, multi-class of attacks, constantly changing the nature of new attacks and the attackers methods. Since the traditional network protection methods fail to adequately protect the computer networks, the need for some sophisticated methodologies has been felt. In this paper, we develop a precise, sparse and robust methodology for multi-class intrusion detection problem based on the Ramp Loss K-Support Vector Classification-Regression, named Ramp-KSVCR. The main objectives of this research are to address the following issues; 1) Highly imbalanced and skewed attacks distribution; hence, we utilized the K-SVCR model as a core of our model; 2) Sensitivity of SVM and its extensions to the presence of noises and outliers in the training sets, to cope with this problem, Ramp loss function is implemented to our model; 3) and since the proposed Ramp-KSVCR model is a non-differentiable non-convex optimization problem, we took ConcaveConvex Procedure (CCCP) to solve this model. Furthermore, we introduced Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) procedure to make our model well-adapted to be applicable in the large-scale setting and to reduce the training time. The performance of the proposed method has been evaluated by some artificial data and also by conducting some experiments with the NSL-KDD data set and UNSW-NB15 as a recently published intrusion detection data set. Experimental results not only demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the traditional approaches tested against it in terms of generalization power and sparsity but also saving a considerable amount of computational time.

Effective immobilization of enzymes on an electrode surface is of great importance for biosensor development, but it still remains challenging because enzymes tend to denaturation and/or form close-packed structures. In this work, a free-standing TiO2 hollow nanofibers (HNF-TiO2) was successfully prepared by a simple and scalable electrospun nanofiber film template-assisted sol-gel method, and was further explored for glucose oxidase (GOD) immobilization and biosensing. This porous and nanotubular HNF-TiO2 provides a well-defined hierarchical nanostructure for GOD loading, and the fine TiO2 nanocrystals facilitate direct electron transfer from GOD to the electrode, also the strong interaction between GOD and HNF-TiO2 greatly enhances the stability of the biosensor. The as-prepared glucose biosensors show good sensing performances both in O2-free and O2-containing conditions with good sensitivity, satisfactory selectivity, long-term stability and sound reliability. The novel textile formation, porous and hierarchically mesostructured nature of HNF-TiO2 with excellent analytical performances make it a superior platform for the construction of high-performance glucose biosensors.

Study design Retrospective clinical series. Objective To compare perioperative parameters, clinical outcomes, radiographic parameters, and complication rates of three reconstructive techniques after the anterior decompression of four-level cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM). Summary of background data At present, the decision to treat multilevel CSM, especially four-level CSM, remains controversial. No one compares multilevel anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (mACDF), segmental anterior cervical corpectomy and fusion (sACCF) to multilevel anterior cervical discectomy and fusion with cage alone (mACDF-CA) in four-level constructs. Methods Between July 2006 and February 2014, 97 consecutive patients with four-level CSM were enrolled in this study and divided into sACCF (n = 39) group, mACDF (n = 31) group, and mACDF-CA (n = 27) group. The study compared perioperative parameters, complication rates, clinical and radiologic parameters of three reconstructive techniques after the anterior decompression of four-level CSM. Results The mACDF-CA group had the least bleeding and cost of index surgery compared with the sACCF group having the most bleeding and cost. Although significant pain relief and functional activity improvement have been achieved in the three groups at the final follow-up, there was no significant difference in the Japanese Orthopedic Association, SF-36 and NDI scores among the three groups (P >0.05). The mACDF group maintained the best cervical lordosis at the final follow-up, compared with the sACCF group maintained the worst cervical lordosis. Solid fusion was achieved in 87.1% of subjects in sACCF group, 90.3% in mACDF, and in 88.9% in mACDF-CA. The mACDF-CA group had a higher rate of subsidence and lower rate of dysphagia than other two groups. Conclusion mACDF-CA can be considered an effective and safe alternative procedure in the treatment of the four-level CSM. Level of evidence 4.

Large-scale linear classification is widely used in many areas. Although SVM-based models for ordinal regression problem are proven to be powerful techniques, the performance with nonlinear kernels are often suffering from time consuming. Recently, linear SVC not only is shown to obtain competitive performance in most of the cases, but also it is considerably fast during the process of training and testing. However, few studies focused on linear SVM-based ordinal regression models. In this paper, we propose a new approach, called linear Nonparallel Support Vector Ordinal Regression (NPSVOR), which can deal with large-scale problems. An efficient algorithm based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is designed to solve the proposed model. Our experiments are performed on large document data sets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this Letter, a novel filtering power divider with second-order quasi-elliptic bandpass response is proposed, which has two transmission zeros near to the passband for sharp frequency selectivity. In addition, it is featured by ultra-wide stopband owing to specific topology. For demonstration, a filtering power divider example operating at 3.1 GHz is designed, fabricated and measured. Its 3 dB fractional bandwidth is about 11.9%, and the in-band isolation between two output ports exceeds 20 dB. Specifically, more than 21 dB out-of-band suppression is achieved from the upper side of the passband to 4.8f 0, and more than 12 dB suppression is achieved to at least 20f 0. The measurement agrees well with the simulation.

To analyze the changes of early procalcitonin (PCT) and hypersensitive C-reactive protein (hs-CRP) in patients with acute cerebral infarction, and to explore the predictive value of both for acute cerebral infarction with infection.206 acute cerebral infarction patients admitted to the department of neurology of Feicheng Mining Center Hospital from May 2014 to May 2019 were enrolled. Clinical data of patients and serum PCT and hs-CRP levels at 24, 48 and 72 hours after onset were collected. Patients were divided into infected group (n = 69) and non-infected group (n = 137) according to whether infection occurred within 5 days after onset. And 60 healthy people in the same period were selected as the healthy control group. The trends of serum PCT and hs-CRP levels in each group were analyzed. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to analyze the values of serum PCT and hs-CRP levels in identifying acute cerebral infarction with infection.The serum level of PCT at 24, 48 and 72 hours in the infected group and the non-infected group were significantly higher than those in the healthy control group, and the serum level of PCT at 48 hours and 72 hours in the infected group were significantly higher than those in the non-infected group (μg/L: 0.28±0.08 vs. 0.19±0.03, 0.31±0.07 vs. 0.15±0.06, both P0.05). Compared with 24 hours, the serum PCT level in the infected group at 48 hours and 72 hours were significantly increased, but decreased in the non-infected group. The serum hs-CRP level in the infected group at 24, 48 and 72 hours were significantly higher than those in the non-infected group and the healthy control group (mg/L: 5.86±1.73 vs. 5.45±1.08, 5.25±1.33; 8.01±2.41 vs. 5.67±2.13, 5.25±1.33; 14.25±2.19 vs. 12.30±1.87, 5.25±1.33; all P0.05). And the serum hs-CRP level in the non-infected group at 72 hours was significantly higher than that in the healthy control group. Compared with 24 hours, the serum hs-CRP level in the infected group and non-infected group at 48 hours and 72 hours were significantly increased. It was shown by ROC curve analysis that serum PCT and hs-CRP levels at 24 hours had no predictive value for infection in patients with acute cerebral infarction [area under ROC curve (AUC) was 0.440, 0.576 respectively, both P0.05]. At 48 hours, the AUC of serum PCT in diagnosis of acute cerebral infarction with infection was 0.850 [95% confidence interval (95%CI) = 0.784-0.916], the sensitivity and specificity were 66.7% and 97.8% when the cut-off of PCT was 0.25 μg/L; the AUC of serum hs-CRP was 0.759 (95%CI = 0.689-0.830), the sensitivity and specificity were 66.7% and 76.6% when the cut-off of hs-CRP was 6.80 mg/L; the AUC of PCT combined with hs-CRP was 0.911 (95%CI = 0.859-0.964), the sensitivity was 90.5%, the specificity was 86.9%. At 72 hours, the AUC of serum PCT in diagnosis of acute cerebral infarction with infection was 0.952 (95%CI = 0.916-0.989), the sensitivity and specificity were 89.9% and 93.4% when the cut-off of PCT was 0.23 μg/L; the AUC of serum hs-CRP was 0.753 (95%CI = 0.678-0.828), the sensitivity and specificity were 60.9% and 83.2% when the cut-off of hs-CRP was 14.01 mg/L; the AUC of PCT combined with hs-CRP was 0.954 (95%CI = 0.918-0.991), the sensitivity was 97.1%, and the specificity was 89.8%. The results showed that the diagnostic value of serum PCT at 48 hours and 72 hours were higher than those of hs-CRP, and the predictive value of PCT combined with hs-CRP was higher than those of single index.Acute cerebral infarction itself has an effect on serum PCT level; serum PCT level above 0.23 μg/L at 72 hours after onset and reference to serum hs-CRP level have a high predictive value for the diagnosis of infection in patients with acute cerebral infarction.

The development of floral organs plays a vital role in plant reproduction. In our research, the APETALA3 (AP3) promoter-transgenic lines showed abnormal developmental phenotypes in stamens and petals. The aim of this study is to understand the molecular mechanisms of the morphological defects in transgenic plants. By performing transgenic analysis, it was found that the AP3-promoted genes and the vector had no relation to the morphological defects. Then, we performed the expression analysis of the class A, B, and C genes. A dramatic reduction of transcript levels of class B genes (AP3 and PISTILLATA) was observed. Additionally, we also analyzed the methylation of the promoters of class B genes and found that the promoter of AP3 was hypermethylated. Furthermore, combining mutations in rdr2-2, drm1/2, and nrpd1b-11 with the AP3-silencing lines rescued the abnormal development of stamens and petals. The expression of AP3 was reactivated and the methylation level of AP3 promoter was also reduced in RdDM-defective AP3-silencing lines. Our results showed that the RdDM pathway contributed to the transcriptional silencing in the transgenic AP3-silencing lines. Moreover, the results revealed that fact that the exogenous fragment of a promoter could trigger the methylation of homologous endogenous sequences, which may be ubiquitous in transgenic plants.

Based on the statistics of 350 technical evaluations of changes in licensing items of class Ⅱ passive and active medical devices completed in Henan province from July 2017 to November 2018, this paper summarized and analysed the common problems and requirements listed in the correction notifications of the technical evaluation, and put forward relevant countermeasures or suggestions, with a view to further speeding up the evaluation and approval of medical devices.

The elucidation of neural networks is essential to understanding the mechanisms of brain functions and brain disorders. Neurotropic virus-based trans-synaptic tracing tools have become an effective method for dissecting the structure and analyzing the function of neural-circuitry. However, these tracing systems rely on fluorescent signals, making it hard to visualize the panorama of the labeled networks in mammalian brain in vivo. One MRI method, Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), is capable of imaging the networks of the whole brain in live animals but without information of anatomical connections through synapses. In this report, a chimeric gene coding for ferritin and enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) was integrated into Vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), a neurotropic virus that is able to spread anterogradely in synaptically connected networks. After the animal was injected with the recombinant VSV (rVSV), rVSV-Ferritin-EGFP, into the somatosensory cortex (SC) for four days, the labeled neural-network was visualized in the postmortem whole brain with a T2-weighted MRI sequence. The modified virus transmitted from SC to synaptically connected downstream regions. The results demonstrate that rVSV-Ferritin-EGFP could be used as a bimodal imaging vector for detecting synaptically connected neural-network with both ex vivo MRI and fluorescent imaging. The strategy in the current study has the potential to longitudinally monitor the global structure of a given neural-network in living animals.

Coordination of H-E (E = H, C, Si, etc.) σ-bonds to unsaturated element centers, forming η

Objective To investigate whether phenylephrine (PE) inhibits sepsis-induced cardiac dysfunction, cardiac inflammation, and mitochondrial injury through the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway. Methods A rat model of sepsis was established by cecal ligation and puncture. PE and/or wortmannin (a PI3K inhibitor) were administered to investigate the role of PI3K/Akt signaling in mediating the effects of PE on inhibiting sepsis-induced cardiac dysfunction, cardiac inflammation, and mitochondrial injury. Hematoxylin-eosin staining, echocardiography, and Langendorff system were used to examine the myocardial injury and function. The concentrations of TNF-α and IL-6 were analyzed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Intercellular cell adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1), myeloperoxidase, mitochondria-related fusion/fission proteins, and PI3K/Akt signaling pathway-associated proteins were analyzed by Western blotting. Results PE improved the cardiac function and survival in septic rats. PE decreased TNF-α, IL-6, ICAM-1, VCAM-1, and myeloperoxidase contents in the myocardium of septic rats. Meanwhile, PE increased the fusion-related proteins and decreased the fission-related proteins in the myocardial mitochondria of septic rats. On the other hand, PE activated the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway in the cecal ligation and puncture-treated rats, and all the protective effects of PE were abolished by wortmannin. Conclusions PE attenuated sepsis-induced cardiac dysfunction, cardiac inflammation, and mitochondrial injury through the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway.

Cardiac dysfunction is one of the main predictors of poor prognosis in septic patients. Although it has been investigated for more than 30 years, the mechanisms for sepsis-induced cardiac dysfunction are not completely understood, and no specific, effective treatment exists. Traditionally, sepsis-induced cardiac dysfunction was defined as a reversible decrease in ejection fraction of both ventricles with ventricular dilation and depressed response to fluid resuscitation and catecholamines. Many studies have demonstrated that autonomic nervous system imbalance, characterized by sympathetic overactivation and vagal suppression, contributes to the pathogenesis of sepsis-induced cardiac dysfunction. Thus, this kind of cardiac dysfunction can perhaps be best described as a sepsis-induced cardiac autonomic dysfunction as well as an intrinsic systolic and diastolic dysfunction of the whole heart, which is characterized by tachycardia, strongly decreased heart rate variability, and depressed intrinsic systolic and diastolic function of both ventricles. This review will summarize our current knowledge of sepsis-induced cardiac dysfunction, with a special focus on the role of autonomic dysfunction.

In relation extraction, directly adopting a model trained in the source domain to the target domain will suffer greatly performance decrease. Existing studies extract the shared features between domains in a coarse-grained way, which inevitably introduce some domain-specific features or suffer from information loss. Inspired by human beings often using different views to find connection between domains, we argue that, there exist some fine-grained features which can be shared across different views of origin data. In this paper, we proposed a cross-view adaptation network, which use adversarial method to extract shared features and introduce cross-view training to fine-turn it. Besides, we construct some novel views of input data for cross-domain relation extraction. Through experiments we demonstrated that the different views of data we construct can effectively avoid introducing some domain-specific features into unified feature space and help the model learn a fine-grained shared features of different domain. On the three different domains of ACE 2005 dataset, Our method achieved the state-of-the-art results in F1-score.

Introduction Sepsis is frequently complicated by disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), which promotes multiple organ dysfunctions and significantly increase the mortality of patients with sepsis. How bacteria cause DIC is not fully understood. Outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) are membrane-enclosed microvesicles released by variety of bacteria. The aim of this study is to determine whether OMVs contribute to the pathogenesis of DIC during bacterial infection. Methods Wild-type (WT) or Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) knock-out mice were intraperitoneally injected with purified Escherichia coli (E.coli) derived OMVs, or with either wild type E.coli or E.coli with genetic deletion of ypjA, which is critical for OMV's production. Blood samples, liver and lung tissues were collected. The development of DIC was assessed in terms of the occurrence of coagulopathy, the thrombi deposition in livers and lungs, the multiple organ injuries, and the lethality. Results Genetic deletion of ypjA significantly attenuated E.coli-induced coagulopathy, intravascular thrombi deposition, multiple organ injuries and mortality, whereas injection of purified E.coli-derived OMVs resulted in the development of DIC in a TLR4-dependent manner. Conclusions OMVs importantly contribute to the pathogenesis of DIC during Gram-negative bacterial infection. These findings might open a new avenue to prevent infection-associated coagulopathy by targeting OMVs production.

To evaluate the mechanical properties of structures in service, a portable micro-indentation device was developed and built. The basic design principle of the indentation device, i.e. measurement of the indentation depth and the indentation force with sufficient accuracy, was discussed. To avoid using load cell to decrease the machine compliance, a new method that using the current through voice coil motor to calculate the indentation force was proposed. After analyzing the equivalent mechanical model of the developed device, an eddy current displacement sensor was installed on the device to improve the measurement accuracy of indentation depth. Indentation tests were performed on polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) and unplasticized polyvinyl chloride (UPVC) with the developed device and the commercial indentation device ZHU2.5 to demonstrate the validity and accuracy of the developed micro-indentation device.

To compare perioperative parameters, clinical outcomes, radiographic parameters, and complication rates of the new zero-profile, stand-alone Fidji cervical cage with those of the stand-alone cages with a titanium plate for anterior cervical discectomy and fusion (ACDF) for the surgical treatment of single- and multilevel cervical degenerative disc disease (DDD).Between October 2009 and December 2013, 152 consecutive patients [86 males and 52 females; mean age 51.0 years (range 30-69 years)] with cervical DDD, who underwent surgery and were followed for more than 2 years, were enrolled in this study and divided into the cage group and plate group. The study compared perioperative parameters, surgery-related and implant-related complication rates, clinical outcomes, and radiologic parameters.The clinical and radiologic results in both groups were satisfactory after a minimum 2-year follow-up. No significant differences between the cage group and plate group in terms of improvement in the 36-Item Short Form Health Survey, visual analogue scale, Neck Disability Index, Japanese Orthopedic Association scores, disc height, mean fusion time, fusion rate, adjacent segment degeneration, and restoration of cervical lordosis, but the cage group was associated with a lower risk of postoperative dysphagia, shorter operation time, less blood loss, less cost of index surgery, and relatively greater simplicity than the plate group.The zero-profile, stand-alone Fidji cervical cage for ACDF is an effective, reliable, and safe alternate to the conventional method for the treatment of cervical DDD. However, there is no definitive evidence that Fidji cervical cage has better intermediate-term outcomes than the stand-alone cages with a titanium plate for ACDF.

Many organizations recognize the necessities of utilizing sophisticated tools and systems to protect their computer networks and reduce the risk of compromising their information. Although many machine-learning-based data classification algorithm has been proposed in network intrusion detection problem, each of them has its own strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we propose an effective intrusion detection framework by using a new adaptive, robust, precise optimization method, namely, time-varying chaos particle swarm optimization (TVCPSO) to simultaneously do parameter setting and feature selection for multiple criteria linear programming (MCLP) and support vector machine (SVM). In the proposed methods, a weighted objective function is provided, which takes into account trade-off between the maximizing the detection rate and minimizing the false alarm rate, along with considering the number of features. Furthermore, to make the particle swarm optimization algorithm faster in searching the optimum and avoid the search being trapped in local optimum, chaotic concept is adopted in PSO and time varying inertia weight and time varying acceleration coefficient is introduced. The performance of proposed methods has been evaluated by conducting experiments with the NSL-KDD dataset, which is derived and modified from well-known KDD cup 99 data sets. The empirical results show that the proposed method performs better in terms of having a high detection rate and a low false alarm rate when compared with the obtained results using all features. Time-varying inertia weight and acceleration coefficients is introduced to CPSO.Feature selection and parameter setting applied simultaneously to MCLP and SVM.A weighted objective function is proposed to evaluate the proposed IDS's framework.Penalized MCLP is introduced to deal with unbalanced datasets.Proposed IDS's framework obtained low false alarm rate and high detection rate.

To investigate the effect and the potential mechanism of Senegenin (Sen) against injury induced by hypoxia/reoxygenation (H/R) in highly differentiated PC12 cells.The cultured PC12 cells were treated with H/R in the presence or absence of Sen (60 μmol/L). Four groups were included in the experiment: control group, H/R group, H/R+Sen group and Sen group. Cell viability of each group and the level of lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) in culture medium were detected for the pharmacological effect of Sen. Hoechst 33258 staining and annexin V/propidium iodide double staining were used to analyze the apoptosis rate. Moreover, mitochondrial membrane potential (△Ψm), reactive oxygen species (ROS) and intracellular free calcium ([Ca(2+)]i) were measured by fluorescent staining and flow cytometry. Cleaved caspase-3 and activity of NADPH oxidase (NOX) were determined by colorimetric protease assay and enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, respectively.Sen significantly elevated cell viability (P0.05), decreased the leakage of LDH (P0.05) and apoptosis rate (P0.05) in H/R-injured PC12 cells. Sen maintained the value of △Ψm (P0.05) and suppressed the activity of caspase-3 (P0.05). Moreover, Sen reduced ROS accumulation P0.05) and [Ca(2+)]i increment (P0.05) by inhibiting the activity of NOX (P0.05).Sen may exert cytoprotection against H/R injury by decreasing the levels of intracellular ROS and [Ca(2+)]i, thereby suppressing the mitochondrial pathway of cellular apoptosis.

In this paper, a simple and highly selective electrochemical method for the simultaneous determination of catechol (CC) and hydroquinone (HQ) has been developed with a three-dimensional (3D) N-doped carbon nanotube (NCNT) film electrode. The 3D NCNT film was prepared by the combination of electrospinning and chemical vapor deposition procedure; dense and uniform NCNTs were firmly bonded onto the electrospun carbon nanofiber matrix (NCNT@CNFs). By directly dropping the flexible film onto the electrode surface without additional oxidant treatment, a dihydroxybenzene biosensor can be easily constructed. Differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) results showed that the isomers can be detected selectively at NCNT@CNF modified electrode with peak-to-peak separation about 115 mV. Under the optimized condition, the sensing platform showed wide linear responses from 0.08 to 350 μM and 0.1–425 μM with detection limits of 20 nM and 50 nM (S/N = 3) for CC and HQ, respectively. The proposed method was successfully applied to the simultaneous determination of CC and HQ in real samples with reliable recovery. The N-doping combining with abundant defective sites and favorable 3D network structure facilitate the electron transfer, which resulted in excellent electrocatalytic performance. The attractive electrochemical performances and facile preparation method made this novel electrode promising for the development of effective dihydroxybenzene sensor.

Two 2,4,6-tris(trifluoromethyl)phenyl-substituted 2-(lutidinyl)organoboranes (5a and 5b) were prepared. These complexes can function as intramolecular vicinal B/N frustrated Lewis pairs to heterolytically activate dihydrogen. When these complexes were treated with HBpin, two different reaction pathways took place. Whereas the reaction between 5a and HBpin affords a formal ligand-redistribution product, the reaction of 5b with HBpin leads to a dearomative dehydroborylation product.

Support vector machine is a well-known and computationally powerful machine learning technique for pattern classification and regression problems, which has been successfully applied to solve many practical problems in a wide variety of fields. Nonparallel Support Vector Machine (NPSVM) which is an extension of Twin-SVMs, is proved to be theoretically and practically more flexible and superior than TWSVMs and also it overcomes several drawbacks of the existing typical SVMs in order to be applicable in large-scale data sets. However, one of the difficulties in successful implementation of NPSVM is its different parameters, which should be well adjusted during the training process. In fact, the generalization power, robustness and sparsity of NPSVM are extremely depended on well setting of its parameters. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach for parameter determination of the NPSVM by Particle Swarm Optimization techniques. Furthermore, in order to increase the sparsity of NPSVM and to reduce the training time, we take into account the number of support vectors (SVs) along with classification accuracy as a weighted objective function. Our experiments on several public datasets show that the proposed method can achieve better classification accuracy compare to that of TWSVM and NPSVM with less computational time.

To investigate the effect of laser beam shaping on the determination of manganese (Mn) and chromium (Cr) elements in steel samples with different matrices using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), a commercial beam shaper was used to convert the Gaussian laser into a top-hat laser. Owing to the uniform beam energy distribution and the less unwanted heating, the crater produced by the top-hat laser is much flatter and smoother than that produced by the Gaussian laser. The leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO-CV) method was used to evaluate the predictive capability of the calibration models. After laser beam shaping, the determination coefficient (R2) values of the calibration curves were slightly improved, and the root mean squared error of cross-validation (RMSECV), relative error (RE), relative standard deviation (RSD), and the limits of detection (LOD) values were all about 2 times reduction. The results indicate that the laser beam shaping method is an effective approach to reduce the matrix effect and improve the repeatability and accuracy of LIBS.

A failure mode and effect analysis is performed on 58 centrifugal pumps of Atmospheric and Vacuum Distillation Unit in one of the plants of SINOPEC. Firstly, the failure modes of the pumps are classified. Then, the failure causes of the pumps are analyzed. After that, the influence of the failure and the risk level are determined. Finally, the maintenance strategies to reduce risk are put forward according to the equipment failure mode and risk level, which is the basis for the maintenance of pumps. The results show that the main failure modes of the centrifugal pumps are process medium leakage, unexpected stop, vibration, damage, noise, low output and of useful medium leakage. The mean time to failures of centrifugal pumps is 14533 hours, about 20 months. Nine centrifugal pumps are in the risk of high or medium-high, which accounts for 15.52% of the total number of pumps.

Successfully constructing restorer lines for the hau CMS line and molecular mapping of Rfh to a 94 kb candidate region on chromosome A03 in Brassica napus. Cytoplasmic male sterility is a general phenomenon in almost 200 species, and the interaction between chimeric genes in mitochondria and restorer genes in nucleus may be responsible for restoration of male fertility. Orf288 has been identified as a CMS-associated gene in the hau CMS line of Brassica napus and Brassica juncea; however, the restorer lines/genes have not been found yet. We therefore have successfully constructed two restorer lines in B. napus by extensive testcrossing and have mapped a major restorer gene Rfh to a physical distance of 94 kb on chromosome A03 by whole-genome resequencing and molecular markers. We found that the restorer line is indeed restored to male fertility at histological level. Comparative genomics and collinearity analysis between close relatives revealed that rearrangements and recombination may have happened and thus caused the production of Rfh or components of the restoration of fertility complex. Meanwhile, nuclear backgrounds with multiple loci and temperature were related to the variation and instability of restoration of fertility in three different populations. Our study provides new sights into the coevolution between restorer genes and CMS-associated genes as well as the cultivation of superior hybrids via molecular breeding.

Herpes simplex virus type 1 H129 strain has been widely used as a useful anterograde neuronal circuit tracing tool. However, whether H129 is a rigorous anterograde tracer and undergoes anterograde-only spreading are questions of significant interest. In the present study, we evaluated the retrograde labeling efficiency of H129 using a TK and ICP34.5 dual deleted H129 recombinant (named as H306) which was replication-deficient in non-dividing postmitotic neurons. The novel tracer was tested in vitro and in vivo for evaluating its invasion properties and tracing capacities. The results demonstrated that H306 could efficiently label the neurons following intracerebral injection. Notably, H306 could also efficiently infect upstream innervating neurons through axon terminal uptake and displayed obvious retrograde labeling phenotype, regardless of 3 days or 10 days of tracing. The data implied that replication-competent, trans-multisynaptic H129 tracing results might be a mixed neural networks from two types of starter cells, because the retrogradely infected neurons would also replicate H129 and spread virus anterogradely through their axon collaterals (ectopic starter sites), as the local infected neurons in the injection site (true starter site). Therefore, the interpretation of the anterogradely tracing neural networks by current H129 tools at longer post-inoculation intervals need to be cautious, and effective modification strategies are needed to avoid or block the axon terminal invasion process of H129, which is important for rigorous anterograde H129 tracer.

Due to the influence of self-absorption of major elements, scarce observable spectral lines of trace elements, and relative efficiency correction of experimental system, accurate quantitative analysis with calibration-free laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (CF-LIBS) is in fact not easy. In order to overcome these difficulties, standard reference line (SRL) combined with one-point calibration (OPC) is used to analyze six elements in three stainless-steel and five heat-resistant steel samples. The Stark broadening and Saha-Boltzmann plot of Fe are used to calculate the electron density and the plasma temperature, respectively. In the present work, we tested the original SRL method, the SRL with the OPC method, and intercept with the OPC method. The final calculation results show that the latter two methods can effectively improve the overall accuracy of quantitative analysis and the detection limits of trace elements.

Outer membrane vesicles (OMVs), released by variety of bacteria, are membrane-enclosed entities enriched in microbial components, toxins, and virulent factors. OMVs could deliver lipopolysaccharide (LPS) into the cytosol of host cells and subsequently activate caspase-11, which critically orchestrates immune responses and mediates septic shock. Although it is known that caspase-11 is activated by intracellular LPS, how OMVs deliver LPS into the cytosol remains largely unknown. Here we show that the activation of toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), a LPS receptor on the cytoplasmic membrane, licenses macrophages to transport LPS from OMVs into the cytosol through TIR domain-containing adaptor-inducing interferon-β (TRIF). TRIF-mediated cytosolic delivery of LPS from OMVs depends on the production of type 1 interferon and the expression of guanylate-binding proteins (GBPs). Deletion of TRIF or GBPs prevents pyroptosis and lethality induced by OMVs or OMVs-releasing Escherichia coli. Together, these findings provide novel insight into how host coordinates extracellular and intracellular LPS sensing to orchestrate immune responses during gram-negative bacterial infection.

Background Neonatal rat ventricular myocytes (NRVMs) have proven to be an ideal research model for cardiac disease. However, the current methods to purify NRVMs have a limitation to obtain high purity. The purpose of this study was to develop a NRVM purification method by using superparamagnetic iron oxide particles (SIOP). Methods NRVMs were purified by using SIOP (SIOP group). The differential attachment with or without bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) treatment served as control and BrdU groups, respectively. The Percoll gradient (Percoll) and magnetic–activated cell sorting (MACS) methods were performed to compare the purity and viability of NRVMs with SIOP method. Results The SIOP group enriched NRVMs up to 93.9 ± 2.0% purity determined by flow cytometry (FCM) and 95.6 ± 1.3% by immunofluorescence count (IF). In contrast, the control group gave purities of 71.9 ± 2.9% (by FCM) and 66.8 ± 8.9% (by IF), and the BrdU group obtained 82.0 ± 1.3% (by FCM) and 83.1 ± 2.4% (by IF). The purity of SIOP-isolated NRVMs was not different from that of Percoll and MACS groups. However, the cardiomyocytes separated by these methods, except SIOP protocol, were mixed with intrinsic cardiac adrenergic cells. NRVMs purified by SIOP shaped the similar three-dimensional morphology, with no difference in cell yield, viability and cytosolic Ca2+ homeostasis at 24 h after isolation compared with NRVMs in other groups. Furthermore, SIOP-purified NRVMs retained the responses to phenylephrine and lipopolysaccharide challenge. Conclusion We first reported an efficient and novel method to purify NRVMs using SIOP, which may help accelerate innovative research in the field of cardiomyocyte biology.

Sepsis is a leading cause of death in intensive care units that can result in acute hepatic damage. Animal experiments and clinical trials have shown that mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapy has some beneficial in several liver diseases. However, the protective effects of MSC therapy on sepsis-induced hepatic damage and associated mechanisms are not completely understood. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of MSCs on sepsis-induced liver injury and underlying mechanisms. A rat model of sepsis-induced liver injury was established by cecal ligation and puncture, and serum alanine aminotransferase and aspartate transaminase activities as well as liver histological changes were measured. Inflammatory cytokines, Kupffer cell M1 phenotype markers, and associated signal molecules were also determined in septic rats and in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-treated Kupffer cells. Our results showed that injection of MSCs attenuated sepsis-induced liver injury. Treatment with MSCs inhibited activation of Kupffer cells towards M1 phenotype, attenuated TNF-α and IL-6 expression, and promoted IL-4 and IL-10 expression in septic rats and LPS-treated Kupffer cells. Furthermore, MSCs also inhibited the nuclear translocation of nuclear factor-kappa B in LPS-challenged Kupffer cells and the liver of septic rats. These results indicated that MSCs attenuated sepsis-induced liver injury through suppressing M1 polarization of Kupffer cells.

Supplemental material for Standard Reference Line Combined with One-Point Calibration-Free Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (CF-LIBS) to Quantitatively Analyze Stainless and Heat Resistant Steel by Hongbo Fu, Huadong Wang, Junwei Jia, Zhibo Ni and Fengzhong Dong in Applied Spectroscopy

The reaction of a borylborenium cation with dihydrogen leads to the insertion of the borenium center to the H–H bond., The activation of a H–H bond, the simplest covalent bond, is a fundamentally important process. Addition of H2 to an elemental center typically occurs on low valent transition metal or main group complexes through oxidative addition to afford metal dihydride complexes. In contrast, activation of H2 on a high valent center generally results in heterolytic cleavage of the H–H bond to a proton and hydride. Here, we report experimental and computational evidence for the addition of H2 to a borenium center in an N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) coordinated borylborenium cation, which leads to the formation of a dihydroborenium complex accompanied by the elimination of two σ-bonded substituents, namely mesityl (Mes) and pinacolboryl (Bpin) groups, as mesitylboronic ester.

BACKGROUND Doctor’s performance evaluation is an important task in mobile health (mHealth), which aims to evaluate the overall quality of online diagnosis and patient outcomes so that customer satisfaction and loyalty can be attained. However, most patients tend not to rate doctors’ performance, therefore, it is imperative to develop a model to make doctor’s performance evaluation automatic. When evaluating doctors’ performance, we rate it into a score label that is as close as possible to the true one. OBJECTIVE This study aims to perform automatic doctor’s performance evaluation from online textual consultations between doctors and patients by way of a novel machine learning method. METHODS We propose a solution that models doctor’s performance evaluation as an ordinal regression problem. In doing so, a support vector machine combined with an ordinal partitioning model (SVMOP), along with an innovative predictive function will be developed to capture the hidden preferences of the ordering labels over doctor’s performance evaluation. When engineering the basic text features, eight customized features (extracted from over 70,000 medical entries) were added and further boosted by the Gradient Boosting Decision Tree algorithm. RESULTS Real data sets from one of the largest mobile doctor/patient communication platforms in China are used in our study. Statistically, 64% of data on mHealth platforms lack the evaluation labels from patients. Experimental results reveal that our approach can support an automatic doctor performance evaluation. Compared with other auto-evaluation models, SVMOP improves mean absolute error (MAE) by 0.1, mean square error (MSE) by 0.5, pairwise accuracy (PAcc) by 5%; the suggested customized features improve MAE by 0.1, MSE by 0.2, PAcc by 3%. After boosting, performance is further improved. Based on SVMOP, predictive features like politeness and sentiment words can be mined, which can be further applied to guide the development of mHealth platforms. CONCLUSIONS The initial modelling of doctor performance evaluation is an ordinal regression problem. Experiments show that the performance of our proposed model with revised prediction function is better than many other machine learning methods on MAE, MSE, as well as PAcc. With this model, the mHealth platform could not only make an online auto-evaluation of physician performance, but also obtain the most effective features, thereby guiding physician performance and the development of mHealth platforms.

Glucagon-like peptide (GLP-1), an intestinal incretin produced in L cells through proglucagon processing, is released in response to meal intake. The intracellular mechanism by which L cells sense the organism energy level to coordinate the production of GLP-1 remains unclear. Mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) is an intracellular fuel sensor critical for energy homeostasis. In this study, we investigated whether intestinal mTOR regulates GLP-1 production in L cells. The effects of mTOR on GLP-1 production were examined in lean- or high-fat diet (HFD) induced diabetic C57/BL6, db/db, Neurog3-Tsc1 −/− mice, and STC-1 cells. GLP-1 expression was investigated by real-time PCR and western blotting. Plasma GLP-1 and insulin were detected by enzyme immunoassay and radioimmunoassay, respectively. Fasting downregulated mTOR activity, which was associated with a decrement of intestinal proglucagon and circulating GLP-1. Upon re-feeding, these alterations returned to the levels of fed animals. In HFD induced diabetic mice, ileal mTOR signalling, proglucagon and circulating GLP-1 were significantly decreased. Inhibition of mTOR signalling by rapamycin decreased levels of intestinal and plasma GLP-1 in both normal and diabetic mice. Activation of the intestinal mTOR signalling by l-leucine or Tsc1 gene deletion increased levels of intestinal proglucagon and plasma GLP-1. Overexpression of mTOR stimulated proglucagon promoter activity and GLP-1 production, whereas inhibition of mTOR activity by overexpression of tuberous sclerosis 1 (TSC1) or TSC2 decreased proglucagon promoter activity and GLP-1 production in STC-1 cells. mTOR may link energy supply with the production of GLP-1 in L cells.

A bulky organoborane Ar(F)2BMe (Ar(F) = 2,4,6-tris(trifluoromethyl)phenyl, 1) has been synthesized. In C6D6 solution this organoborane and pyridine form a frustrated Lewis pair. Under mild conditions, 1 can efficiently catalyze 1,4-hydroboration of a series of pyridines. This reaction is highly chemo- and regioselective. The reaction intermediate, a boronium complex [Py2Bpin][Ar(F)2B(H)Me] (3), was characterized in solution by NMR spectroscopy, which was also confirmed by DFT calculation.

The frustrated Lewis pair comprised of B(C6F5)3 and a boryl-borate lithium salt Li[pinBB(Ph)pin] can efficiently activate dihydrogen, pinacolborane and ethylene at ambient temperature. Theoretical studies suggest that the nucleophilic sp(2) boryl moiety of Li[pinBB(Ph)pin] plays different roles in these reactions.

Neural stem cells (NSCs) transplanted is one of the hottest research to treat Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but cholinergic neurons from stem cells were also susceptible to cell death which Heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) was affirmed to reverse. Related to cognitive impairment, cholinergic nervous cells should be investigated and ginsenoside Rg1 (G-Rg1) was considered to increase them. We chose tert-butyl hydroperoxide (t-BHP) damage model to study in vitro. Functional properties of our recombination plasmid pEGFP-C2-HSP70 were affirmed by SH-SY5Y cells. To opposite the transitory appearance of HSP70, NSCs used as the vectors of HSP70 gene overexpressed HSP70 for at least 7 days in vitro. After transfection for 3 days, G-Rg1 pretreatment for 4 hours, and coculture for 3 days, the expression of acetylcholinesterase (ChAT), synaptophysin, and the ratio of NeuN and GFAP were assessed by western blot; Morphological properties were detected by 3D reconstruction and immunofluorescence. ChAT was markedly improved in the groups contained G-Rg1. In coculture system, the ratio of neurons/astrocytes and the filaments of neurons were increased; apoptosis cells were decreased, compared to monotherapy (P<0.05). In conclusion, we demonstrated that, as a safe cotreatment affirmed in vitro, overexpression of HSP70 in NSCs plus G-Rg1 promoted nervous cells regeneration from chronic oxidative damage.

In this work, calibration-free laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (CF-LIBS) is used to analyze a certified stainless steel sample. Due to self-absorption of the spectral lines from the major element Fe and the sparse lines of trace elements, it is usually not easy to construct the Boltzmann plots of all species. A standard reference line method is proposed here to solve this difficulty under the assumption of local thermodynamic equilibrium so that the same temperature value for all elements present into the plasma can be considered. Based on the concentration and rich spectral lines of Fe, the Stark broadening of Fe(I) 381.584 nm and Saha–Boltzmann plots of this element are used to calculate the electron density and the plasma temperature, respectively. In order to determine the plasma temperature accurately, which is seriously affected by self-absorption, a pre-selection procedure for eliminating those spectral lines with strong self-absorption is employed. Then, one spectral line of each element is selected to calculate its corresponding concentration. The results from the standard reference lines with and without self-absorption of Fe are compared. This method allows us to measure trace element content and effectively avoid the adverse effects due to self-absorption.

To explore the impact of gene polymorphism of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) on virus virulence, the full-length UL144 gene and partial sequence of glycoprotein B (UL55) gene were sequenced and analyzed for 23 clinical strains of HCMV isolated from urine samples of pediatric patients with congenital or postnatal HCMV infection. Among the 23 isolates, 13 (57 %) were UL144 genotype 1A, 3(13 %) were UL144 genotypes 2 and 7(30 %) were UL144 genotype 3; geographic differences in genotype distribution were found for both UL144 and gB gene. No UL144 genotypes 1B and 1C were found in this study while these two genotypes were common in HCMV strains isolated in the US. Our results also demonstrated that for all clinical strains of gB genotypes I, III and UL144 genotypes 1A, 2, and 3 found in this study, mother-to-fetus vertical transmission was possible.

Ca 9 Co 12 O 28 thermoelectric ceramics were fabricated by both sintering and hot-pressing methods. The hot pressed ceramic has a layered structure, and exhibits {0 l 0} preferred orientation and a high orientation degree of 0.84 calculated from the XRD patterns. Thermoelectric properties of the sintered and hot pressed samples were measured from 100 °C to 600 °C. For the hot pressed sample, the electrical conductivity in the direction perpendicular to the pressing direction is much higher than that in the direction parallel to the pressing direction. Thermal conductivity of the hot pressed sample is also anisotropic, and the lattice thermal conductivity is the main thermal transference. In the direction perpendicular to the pressing direction, the hot pressed sample shows a high ZT value of 0.18 at 600 °C.

To investigate the clinical and radiological results of the new zero-profile, stand-alone Fidji cervical cage to treat single- and multiple-level cervical DDD, and evaluate the safety and efficiency. Between October 2011 and July 2014, 72 consecutive patients (41 males and 31 females; mean age 50.9years [range, 33-68years]) with cervical DDD who underwent surgery and were followed for more than 2years were enrolled in this study (mean 31.1months, range 24-47months). The study compared clinical outcomes, radiologic parameters and complication rates. The SF-36, VAS, NDI, and JOA scores of all patients were improved significantly after surgery at any time point. (all p

We investigated the effect of distance between the laser spot and the cavity center on spatially confined laser-induced copper plasma in air. Spatial cylindrical cavities with various diameters (2mm, 3mm, 4mm and 5mm) and heights (2mm, 4mm, 6mm and 8mm) were used to confine the plasma, and different enhancements were observed when the laser spot at different locations in the same cavity. The maximum enhancement factor for the spectral intensity of Cu atomic line to be around 9 was measured at a time delay of 2.5μs when the distance was 0mm. The plasma temperature was calculated by the Boltzmann plot method, including five Cu atomic lines (324.75nm, 327.40nm, 510.55nm, 515.32nm and 521.82nm). The enhancement of the plasma temperature had a similar trend with the spectral intensity and also showed a strong dependence on the distance. The results demonstrated that the enhancement effect at the center of the cavity was the most significant for the uniform and balanced compression of the reflected shock waves in all directions.