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Family studies routinely employ biased sampling schemes in which individuals are randomly chosen from a disease registry and genetic and phenotypic data are obtained from their consenting relatives. We view this as a two‐phase study and propose the use of an efficient selection model for the recruitment of families to form a phase II sample subject to budgetary constraints. Simple random sampling, balanced sampling and use of an approximately optimal selection model are considered where the latter is chosen to minimize the variance of parameters of interest. We consider the setting where family members provide current status data with respect to the disease and use copula models to address within‐family dependence. The efficiency gains from the use of an optimal selection model over simple random sampling and balanced sampling schemes are investigated as is the robustness of optimal sampling to model misspecification. An application to a family study on psoriatic arthritis is given for illustration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a beta-hersvirinae that has a high latent infection rate worldwide and can cause serious consequences in immunocompromised patients when reactivation; however, the mechanism of how HCMV convert from latent to reactivation has rarely been investigated. In the present study, we aimed to perform a comprehensive analysis of the HCMV-encoded microRNA (miRNA) profile in serum of patients upon HCMV reactivation from latency and to further evaluate its clinical significance for the disease monitoring and preventing usefulness.Methods: Serum samples from 59 viremia patients and 60 age-gender matched controls were enrolled in this study for screening and validation of different expression of HCMV miRNAs. Serum concentrations of 22 known HCMV miRNAs were determined by a hydrolysis probe-based stem-loop quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) assay. HCMV DNA was measured by quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) with the whole blood sample. Serum HCMV IgG and IgM were assessed using enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Another 47 samples from 5 patients at different time points were collected to evaluate the monitoring effectiveness and disease prediction ability of differential expression HCMV-miRNAs during the antiviral treatment.Results: The RT-qPCR analysis revealed that the serum levels of 16 of the 22 examined HCMV miRNAs were elevated in HCMV viremia patients compared with controls, and a profile of 8 HCMV miRNAs including hcmv-miR-US25-2-3p, hcmv-miR-US4-5p, hcmv-miR-US25-2-5p, hcmv-miR-US25-1-3p, hcmv-miR-US25-1, hcmv-miR-UL36, hcmv-miR-UL148D, hcmv-miR-US29-3p were markedly elevated (fold change > 2, P < 0.01). Receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) analysis were performed on the selected HCMV-miRNAs in all of the patients and controls that enrolled in this study, and which ranged from 0.72 to 0.80 in the autoimmune patients. In addition, hcmv-miR-US25-1-3p levels were significantly correlated with HCMV DNA load (r = 0.349, P = 0.007), and were obviously higher in the reactivation set than the latency set in the autoimmune patients, which could be a predictor for the monitoring of the antiviral treatment.Conclusions: HCMV miRNAs profile showed markedly shift-switch from latency to reactivation in circulation from HCMV infected patients and hcmv-miR-US25-1-3p may be served as a predictor for the switch upon reactivation from latency in patients suffered with autoimmune diseases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The leading phase of eutectic materials has an effect on the solidification behavior and further influences on their properties. Many studies have been carried out on the leading phase of metal/metal and nonmetal/metal eutectic alloys. Nevertheless, few studies were focused on no‐metal/no‐metal eutectic materials. In the present work, the leading phase in the Al2O3/Y3Al5O12 eutectic crystal during solidification was investigated by electron back‐scattered diffraction and discussed according to the classical solidification theory. It is observed that the Y3Al5O12 was the leading phase. The leading phase was determined by the wetting angle and the undercooling. At a given wetting angle, the Y3Al5O12 would be the leading phase when the undercooling exceeds the critical value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heritability and parent‐of‐origin effect hypotheses for chronic diseases can be evaluated by estimating and conducting inference about the parameters that measure the within‐family dependences in disease onset times. We model the within‐family associations in these times using a Gaussian copula whose correlation matrix accommodates the different pairwise family relationships. We derive score‐type statistics to test the heritability and parent‐of‐origin effect hypotheses when the families selection protocol induces a sampling bias. We illustrate the use of the developed methods through an application to a motivating family study in Psoriatic arthritis and provide strong evidence of excessive paternal transmission of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work successfully prepared a novel Al 2 O 3 /(Y 0.2 Er 0.2 Yb 0.2 Ho 0.2 Lu 0.2) 3 Al 5 O 12 /ZrO 2 (or Al 2 O 3 /(5RE 0.2)AG/ZrO 2 in short) ternary eutectic ceramic with the seed-crystal-induced technique by directional solidification. ZrO 2 was a cubic structure and was stabilized by all oxides of Y 2 O 3 , Er 2 O 3 , Yb 2 O 3 , Ho 2 O 3 , and Lu 2 O 3. The three phases interpenetrated each other and ZrO 2 was highly dispersed. Al 2 O 3 inherited well the direction of the c-sapphire seed. The orientation relationship among the three was determined to be [0001]Al 2 O 3 || [100](5RE 0.2)AG || [110]ZrO 2 , (11–20)Al 2 O 3 || (004)(5RE 0.2)AG || (002)ZrO 2. The three interfaces were all semi-coherent and showed higher interfacial misfit strain energy due to the solid solution effect of (5RE 0.2)AG. The novel Al 2 O 3 /(5RE 0.2)AG/ZrO 2 ternary eutectic ceramic showed improved mechanical properties compared to other Al 2 O 3 -based eutectic ceramics. The solid solution effect was the main reason for its enhanced hardness and elastic modulus. Several toughening mechanisms including crack bridging, bifurcation, deflection, and screening can be found in the Al 2 O 3 /(5RE 0.2)AG/ZrO 2 ternary eutectic ceramic. The micro-scale suture-like deflection was newly found in the microstructure, which contributed to its fracture toughness. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The microstructure evolution and growth behavior of the Al2O3/Y3Al5O12(YAG)/ZrO2 ternary eutectic ceramics during directional solidification were well investigated. During directional solidification of the Al2O3/YAG/ZrO2 ternary eutectic ceramics, {112¯0} Al2O3 paralleled with {001}ZrO2 while they did not parallel with {001}YAG at the same time in the competitive growth stage. All of the interfaces parallel to each other finally. The area percentage of the Al2O3/ZrO2 and YAG/ZrO2 interfaces are 40.4 ± 0.2% and 30.8 ± 0.1%, respectively, higher than that of the Al2O3/YAG (28.8 ± 0.2%). The content of Al2O3 and YAG phases are 39.9% and 41.1%, respectively, almost double of that of ZrO2. The interfaces of Al2O3/ZrO2 and YAG/ZrO2 are shorter and more dispersed than that of the Al2O3/YAG. It was found that the interfacial energy of Al2O3/ZrO2 and YAG/ZrO2 interfaces are lower than that of Al2O3/YAG. It can be concluded that interfacial energy plays a decisive role in affecting the crystallographic orientation and interfaces distribution in the Al2O3/YAG/ZrO2 eutectic since the interfaces of Al2O3/ZrO2 and YAG/ZrO2 with lower interfacial energy can be formed more easily during directional solidification. Therefore, the contents of Al2O3/ZrO2 and YAG/ZrO2 interfaces are higher. This study can provide theoretical guidance for interface design of multi‐phase materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been many advances in statistical methodology for the analysis of recurrent event data in recent years. Multiplicative semiparametric rate-based models are widely used in clinical trials, as are more general partially conditional rate-based models involving event-based stratification. The partially conditional model provides protection against extra-Poisson variation as well as event-dependent censoring, but conditioning on outcomes post-randomization can induce confounding and compromise causal inference. The purpose of this article is to examine the consequences of model misspecification in semiparametric marginal and partially conditional rate-based analysis through omission of prognostic variables. We do so using estimating function theory and empirical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel Al 2 O 3 /(Y 0.2 Er 0.2 Yb 0.2 Ho 0.2 Lu 0.2) 3 Al 5 O 12 ((5Re 0.2)AG)/ZrO 2 eutectic high entropy oxide ceramic composite (HEOC) was prepared by the directional solidification technique. The Al 2 O 3 /(5Re 0.2)AG/ZrO 2 eutectic HEOCs had a refined microstructure and different crystallographic orientation relationships of <10-10>Al 2 O 3 || <103>(5Re 0.2)AG || <100>ZrO 2 , {11–20}Al 2 O 3 || {100}(5Re 0.2)AG || {100}ZrO 2 , {0001}Al 2 O 3 || {103}(5Re 0.2)AG || {100}ZrO 2 compared to Al 2 O 3 /YAG/ZrO 2 eutectic ceramic composites. ZrO 2 was distributed more uniformly and dispersedly in Al 2 O 3 /(5Re 0.2)AG/ZrO 2 eutectic HEOCs than in Al 2 O 3 /YAG/ZrO 2 due to the similar volume strain of Al 2 O 3 /(5Re 0.2)AG, (5Re 0.2)AG/ZrO 2 and Al 2 O 3 /ZrO 2. As a result, mechanical performance including hardness, elastic modulus, and fracture toughness had been greatly improved because of the refined microstructure, tailored interfacial structure, and homogeneous distribution of ZrO 2 caused by the introduction of the high entropy (5Re 0.2)AG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An Al2O3/Y3Al5O12 eutectic ceramic was prepared with a c-axis sapphire seed by an optical floating zone furnace. The crystallographic relationships in the initial and the steady growth sections of the as-grown eutectic ceramic were investigated by electron backscattering diffraction and transmission electron microscopy. The corresponding results were: <111 > {101}Y3Al5O12 || <0001 > { [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strength and fracture behavior of a directionally solidified Al 2 O 3 /Y 3 Al 5 O 12 eutectic single-crystal were investigated. To identify and classify the toughening mechanism, fractography of the single-crystal was thoroughly analyzed. It was observed that the interfaces between Al 2 O 3 and Y 3 Al 5 O 12 , which hindered the crack propagation, and nm-sized (111) cleavage planes appearing along the tearing ridge of Y 3 Al 5 O 12 markedly improved the Al 2 O 3 /Y 3 Al 5 O 12 eutectic single-crystal toughness. These results could improve understanding of the microstructure design and deformation mechanism of the Al 2 O 3 /Y 3 Al 5 O 12 eutectic crystal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the worldwide planting crop, rice feeds nearly half of the world's population. However, the continuous spread of diseases is threatening rice production. It is of great practical value to identify rice diseases precisely. Recent studies suggest that the computational approaches provide an opportunity for rice leaf disease prediction and achieve a series of achievements. However, the existing works for rice leaf disease identification are still unsatisfactory either in identification accuracy or model interpretability. To address these limitations, a residual-distilled transformer architecture is proposed in this study. Inspired by the early success of transformers in computer vision, the distillation strategy is introduced to distill weights and parameters from the pre-trained vision transformer models. The residual concatenation between vision transformer and the distilled transformer are as residual blocks for features extraction, and then fed them into multi-layer perceptron (MLP) for prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that the presented method achieves 0.89 F1-score and 0.92 top-1 accuracy, outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models on the rice leaf disease dataset which collected in paddy fields. In addition, the proposed architecture provides model interpretability to grasp the key features that are significant for positive prediction results. • A residual-distilled transformer architecture is presented for rice leaf disease identification. • The intuitive and clear interpretation of the proposed architecture and prediction results are provided. • The two Pooling methods such maxpooling and averagepooling are normalized and concatenated as the key synthetic features. • To the best of our knowledge, it is the first downstream task in rice disease identification using transformers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building load forecasting is critical for energy saving and carbon emission reduction, as building loads account for a rising percentage of energy consumption. Existing load forecasting methods only target a single building and do not consider the spatial characteristics of different building loads in an architectural complex, making it impossible to effectively forecast loads for all buildings in an architectural complex simultaneously. In this paper, considering the spatial correlation among building loads in an architectural complex, a novel short-term load forecasting method is proposed to improve the load forecasting accuracy for the architectural complex. First, Pearson correlation analysis is carried out to determine the key influencing factors of load, which are treated as multi-information. Then, to realize the load forecasting of all buildings in an architectural complex at the same time, a multi-information fusion model combined with a graph convolutional network and a long-short term memory network is proposed, and spatio-temporal attention modules are included to extract the dynamic spatio-temporal correlations of load. The performance of the proposed model is evaluated using actual load data from a public university in Beijing. When compared to other current methods, the experimental results show that the proposed model not only achieves the best results for architectural complex load forecasting (the largest MAPE is only 6.86%, the smallest R2 and Accuracy reach 0.87 and 0.85, respectively), but also maintains forecasting stability to some extent over a longer forecast period. The proposed method is a meaningful step towards achieving fast and accurate architectural complex load forecasting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heritability of chronic diseases can be effectively studied by examining the nature and extent of within-family associations in disease onset times. Families are typically accrued through a biased sampling scheme in which affected individuals are identified and sampled along with their relatives who may provide right-censored or current status data on their disease onset times. We develop likelihood and composite likelihood methods for modeling the within-family association in these times through copula models in which dependencies are characterized by Kendall's [Formula: see text] Auxiliary data from independent individuals are exploited by augmentating composite likelihoods to increase precision of marginal parameter estimates and consequently increase efficiency in dependence parameter estimation. An application to a motivating family study in psoriatic arthritis illustrates the method and provides some evidence of excessive paternal transmission of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In cluster-randomized trials, intervention effects are often formulated by specifying marginal models, fitting them under a working independence assumption, and using robust variance estimates to address the association in the responses within clusters. We develop sample size criteria within this framework, with analyses based on semiparametric Cox regression models fitted with event times subject to right censoring. At the design stage, copula models are specified to enable derivation of the asymptotic variance of estimators from a marginal Cox regression model and to compute the number of clusters necessary to satisfy power requirements. Simulation studies demonstrate the validity of the sample size formula in finite samples for a range of cluster sizes, censoring rates, and degrees of within-cluster association among event times. The power and relative efficiency implications of copula misspecification is studied, as well as the effect of within-cluster dependence in the censoring times. Sample size criteria and other design issues are also addressed for the setting where the event status is only ascertained at periodic assessments and times are interval censored. Copyright © 2014 JohnWiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we report a careful study of the properties and mechanisms of a 2LiBH4–MgH2 composite with a niobium oxide (Nb2O5) additive. It was found that directly milling with a small amount of the Nb2O5 additive exerted a negligible effect on the dehydrogenation kinetics of the 2LiBH4–MgH2 composite in the first cycle. However the recycled sample showed notable property advantages over the neat 2LiBH4–MgH2 composite. Phase/chemical state analyses and control experiments were conducted to gain insight into the chemical transformation of the Nb-containing species. It was found that the Nb2O5 additive reacted with LiBH4 to form a niobium boride (NbB2) heterogeneous nucleation agent, via a niobium hydride (NbH2) intermediate, in the dehydrogenation process of the composite sample. The retarded formation of the NbB2 is a major mechanistic reason for the observed drastic property change of the composite upon cycling. As a solution, we employed a novel three-step method to controllably promote the formation of the targeted NbB2 species and improve its dispersion state. As expected, the 2LiBH4–MgH2–0.08Nb2O5 composite sample, prepared using the new method, exhibits rapid dehydrogenation kinetics and high cyclic stability, which compare favorably with the literature results of the 2LiBH4–MgH2 composites with transition metal additives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this paper, we report a novel method of improving the reversible dehydrogenation properties of the 2LiBH4–MgH2 composite. Our study found that mechanically milling with small amount of Al powder can markedly shorten or even eliminate the problematic incubation period that interrupts the dehydrogenation steps of the 2LiBH4–MgH2 composite. But the resulting composite showed serious kinetics degradation upon cycling. In an effort to solve this problem, we found that combined usage of small amounts of Al and MgO enabled the 2LiBH4–MgH2 composite to rapidly and reversibly deliver around 9 wt% hydrogen at 400 °C under 0.3 MPa H2, which compares favorably with the dehydrogenation performance of the composites with transition-metal additives. A combination of phase/microstructural analyses and series of control experiments has been conducted to gain insight into the promoting effects of Al and MgO. It was found that Al and MgO additives act as precursor and promoter for the formation of AlB2 heterogeneous nucleation sites, respectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Jujuboside A (JuA) is a triterpenoid saponins isolated from the seed of jujube (semen Ziziphi spinosae) with anti-oxidant, anti-inflammation and anti-apoptosis properties. The present study aimed to investigate the reno-protective effects of JuA on type II diabetes. JuA (20 mg/kg) and Metformin (Met, 300 mg/kg) were administrated to diabetic Sprague Dawley rat for 8 weeks daily. Our results showed that JuA reduced blood glucose and kidney function markers including 24 h urinary protein, urinary β-NAG/urinary creatinine, serum urea nitrogen, serum uric acid and serum creatinine, and relieved renal pathological changes. In addition, JuA decreased O 2 − and H 2 O 2 level, enhanced SOD, CAT and GPx activities, decreased NOX4 expression and improved mitochondrial respiratory chain function through regulating respiratory chain complex expression. Moreover, JuA downregulated the expressions of mitochondrial apoptosis proteins: Bax, CytC, Apaf-1 and caspase 9. Apoptosis mediated by ER stress also been inhibited by JuA via downregulating p-PERK, p-IRE1, XBP1s, ATF4, p-CHOP and caspase 12 expressions. JuA also enhanced autophagy and mitophagy via regulating CaMKK2-AMPK-p-mTOR and PINK1/Parkin pathways. Collectively, these results indicated that JuA protected against type II diabetic nephropathy through inhibiting oxidative stress and apoptosis mediated by mitochondria and ER stress. In addition, autophagy and mitophagy was enhanced by JuA. [Display omitted] • Jujuboside A relieved oxidative stress through inhibiting NOX4 and improving mitochondrial respiratory chain function in DN rat. • Jujuboside A enhanced antioxidant enzyme activities in DN rat. • Jujuboside A inhibited apoptosis induced by ER stress and mitochondria in DN rat. • Autophagy and mitophagy contributed to the protective effect of Jujuboside A on DN rat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant progress has been achieved in multi-object tracking (MOT) through the evolution of detection and re-identification (ReID) techniques. Despite these advancements, accurately tracking objects in scenarios with homogeneous appearance and heterogeneous motion remains a challenge. This challenge arises from two main factors: the insufficient discriminability of ReID features and the predominant utilization of linear motion models in MOT. In this context, we introduce a novel motion-based tracker, MotionTrack, centered around a learnable motion predictor that relies solely on object trajectory information. This predictor comprehensively integrates two levels of granularity in motion features to enhance the modeling of temporal dynamics and facilitate precise future motion prediction for individual objects. Specifically, the proposed approach adopts a self-attention mechanism to capture token-level information and a Dynamic MLP layer to model channel-level features. MotionTrack is a simple, online tracking approach. Our experimental results demonstrate that MotionTrack yields state-of-the-art performance on datasets such as Dancetrack and SportsMOT, characterized by highly complex object motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]