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Surgery for pituitary adenomas (PAs) with cavernous sinus (CS) invasion in Knosp grade 4 is a great challenge and whether to adopt a conservative or aggressive surgical strategy is controversial. The aim of this study is to provide the outcomes and complications of an aggressive resection strategy for Knosp grade 4 PAs with transsphenoidal endoscopic surgery. Outcomes and complications were retrospectively analyzed in 102 patients with Knosp grade 4 PAs. Among them, primary PAs were seen in 60 patients and recurrent PAs were seen in 42 cases. Gross total resection (GTR) of the entire tumor was achieved in 72 cases (70.6%), subtotal tumor resection (STR) in 18 cases (17.6%), and partial tumor resection (PTR) in 12 cases (11.8%). Additionally, GTR of the tumor within the CS was achieved in 82 patients (80.4%), STR in 17 patients (16.7%), and PTR in 3 patients (2.9%). Statistical analyses showed that both recurrent tumors and firm consistency tumors were adverse factors for complete resection (P

BackgroundIt is well known that the clivus is composed of abundant cancellous bone and is often invaded by pituitary adenoma (PA), but the range of these cancellous bone corridors is unknown. In addition, we found that PA with clivus invasion is sometimes accompanied by petrous apex invasion, so we speculated that the petrous apex tumor originated from the clivus cancellous bone corridor. The aim of this study was to test this hypothesis by investigating the bony anatomy associated with PA with clival invasion and its clinical significance.MethodsTwenty-two cadaveric heads were used in the anatomical study to research the bony architecture of the clivus and petrous apex, including six injected specimens for microsurgical dissection and sixteen cadavers for epoxy sheet plastination. The surgical videos and outcomes of PA with clival invasion in our single center were also retrospectively reviewed.ResultsThe hypoglossal canal and internal acoustic meatus are composed of bone canals surrounded by cortical bone. The cancellous corridor within clivus starts from the sellar or sphenoid sinus floor and extends downward, bypassing the hypoglossal canal and finally reaching the occipital condyle and the medial edge of the jugular foramen. Interestingly, we found that the cancellous bone of the clivus was connected with that of the petrous apex through petroclival fissure extending to the medial margin of the internal acoustic meatus instead of a separating cortical bone between them as it should be. It is satisfactory that the anatomical outcomes of the cancellous corridor and the path of PA with clival invasion observed intraoperatively are completely consistent. In the retrospective cohort of 49 PA patients, the clival component was completely resected in 44 (89.8%), and only five (10.2%) patients in the early-stage had partial residual cases in the inferior clivus.ConclusionThe petrous apex invasion of PA is caused by the tumor invading the clivus and crossing the petroclival fissure along the cancellous bone corridor. PA invade the clivus along the cancellous bone corridor and can also cross the hypoglossal canal to the occipital condyle. This clival invasion pattern presented here deepens our understanding of the invasive characteristics of PA.

Abstract Several studies have shown potent antineoplastic effects of tea, which can induce apoptosis and inhibit proliferation of cancer cells. Yellow tea is one of the six major types of tea, and yellowing time, a key factor in its processing, is known to improve its quality and bioactivity. However, the effects of yellowing on the composition of the bioactive substances of tea are poorly understood. We analyzed the biochemical composition and the antioxidant and anticancer activities of the extracts of yellow tea (EYTs) subjected to different yellowing durations. Prolonged yellowing increased the content of water extracts, amino acids, soluble sugars, theaflavins, and nonesterified catechins (p

After the local outlier factor was first proposed, there is a large family of local outlier detection approaches derived from it. Since the existing approaches only focus on the extent of overall separation between an object and its neighbors, and ignore the degree of dispersion between them, the precision of these approaches will be affected by various degrees in the scattered datasets. In addition, the outlier data occupy a relatively small amount in the dataset, but the existing approaches need to perform local outlier factor calculation on all data during the outlier detection, which greatly reduces the efficiency of the algorithms. In this paper, we redefine a local outlier factor called local deviation coefficient (LDC) by taking full advantage of the distribution of the object and its neighbors. And then, we propose a safe non-outlier objects elimination approach named as rough clustering based on multi-level queries (RCMLQ) to preprocess the datasets to eliminate the non-outlier objects to the utmost. Finally, an efficient local outlier detection approach named as efficient density-based local outlier detection for scattered data (E2DLOS) is proposed based on the LDC and RCMLQ. The RCMLQ greatly reduces the amount of data that needs to be quantified for local outlier factor and the LDC is more sensitive to the degree of anomaly of the scattered datasets, and so the E2DLOS improves the existing local outlier detection approaches in time efficiency and detection accuracy. Experiments show that the LDC can better reflect the true abnormal situations of the data for the scattered datasets. And the RCMLQ can be used in parallel with the traditional methods of improving the efficiency of the nearest neighbor search, which can further improve the efficiency of the E2DLOS algorithm by about 16%.

The polarity conversion sequence directly determines polarity conversion efficiency and then affects polarity optimization efficiency. However, few studies have focused on the polarity conversion sequence problem of Reed-Muller (RM) circuits. In this paper, we propose a continuous Hopfield neural network (CHNN)-based polarity conversion algorithm (CHNNPCA) for Mixed Polarity RM (MPRM) circuits, which uses the CHNN to solve the best polarity conversion sequence of polarity set waiting for evaluation before converting the polarity set. Moreover, based on the CHNNPCA, a polarity optimization algorithm (POA) is proposed to improve the polarity optimization efficiency of MPRM circuits. The experimental results on MCNC benchmark circuits show that for the large-scale polarity set, the CHNNPCA is superior to the mixed polarity conversion algorithm based on the tabular technique in terms of polarity conversion efficiency. Furthermore, compared to the traditional polarity optimization algorithm neglecting polarity conversion sequence, the POA has a considerable advantage in improving polarity optimization efficiency, especially for large-scale circuits. The POA can be extended to improve the polarity optimization efficiency of fixed polarity RM circuits.

Logic minimization has recently attracted significant attention because in many applications it is important to have a compact representation as possible. In this paper, we propose a fast minimization algorithm (FMA) of fixed polarity Reed-Muller expressions (FPRMs). The main idea behind the FMA is to search the minimum FPRM with the fewest products by using the proposed binary differential evolution algorithm (BDE). The BDE can efficiently maintain population diversity and achieve a better tradeoff between the exploration and exploitation capabilities by use of proposed binary random mutation operator and improved selection operator. The experimental results on 24 MCNC benchmark circuits demonstrate that the FMA outperforms the genetic algorithm-based and simulated annealing genetic algorithm-based FPRMs minimization algorithms in terms of accuracy of solutions and solving efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use differential evolution algorithm to minimize FPRMs. The FMA can be extended to derive a minimum mixed polarity Reed-Muller expression.

Characterization of adsorbed molecular layers on surfaces is the key to wide-ranging applications, but elucidating the structure and composition of such adlayers remains challenging. Here the authors develop an approach to unveil the nanoscale structure and composition of adlayers through spectrally resolved super-resolution microscopy.

Coupling losses for all-fiber integration of subwavelength core hybrid optical fibers have been first analyzed and optimized in detail. We have taken into account the effects of mode size, mode shape, effective refractive index, tapering beat length, interface, and endface reflections on the coupling loss. By optimizing parameters such as the subwave-length core diameter, single mode condition, and transition length, the coupling losses can be reduced. In addition, the influence of the core fabrication and misalignment tolerances have been explored. The results will benefit the all-fiber integration of hybrid optical fibers and their nanoengineering realization.

The integrity measurement method is used to detect whether the files are tampered with and to build a trusted environment. It can improve the security of virtual machines using base and increment image. Currently, the traditional integrity measurement methods (MDA-IMM) are based on the message digest algorithm with high computational complexity and heavy data. As a result, the MDA-IMM consumes a lot of I/O resources and spends too much time. To address those issues, we propose a novel method (COW-IMM) based on copy-on-write for the files in base image, the precondition is that, there is oneto-one correspondence between the cluster of image and the logic block of file system, and both of them have the same size. The COW-IMM gets the information of files for integrity measurement from base image and measures the integrity of files in increment image. We implement a prototype based on KVM, Qcow2 image, and Ext4. The algorithm analysis shows that, the volume of data used by COW-IMM is 512 times smaller than that used by MDA-IMM at least, if the file size is the same. The experimental evaluations show that, the speed of COW-IMM is faster and faster than that of MDA-IMM with the increment of file size. For example, when the file size is 0.1M, the speed of COW-IMM is about 10 times faster than that of MDA-IMM; when the file size is 90M, the speed of COW-IMM is about 592 times faster than that of MDA-IMM.

A novel video shot boundary recognition method is proposed, which includes two stages of video feature extraction and shot boundary recognition. Firstly, we use adaptive locality preserving projections (ALPP) to extract video feature. Unlike locality preserving projections, we define the discriminating similarity with mode prior probabilities and adaptive neighborhood selection strategy whichmake ALPPmore suitable to preserve the local structure and label information of the original data. Secondly, we use an optimized multiple kernel support vector machine to classify video frames into boundary and nonboundary frames, in which the weights of different types of kernels are optimized with an ant colony optimization method. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Endoscopy has been introduced into cardiac surgery employing robotic systems. We have developed a new-minimally invasive approach that combines these two technologies for secundum atrial septal defect (ASD). The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of this approach, paying particular attention to its cosmetic effects. Methods: Between November 2004 and April 2006, 22 patients (aged 18 to 62) with ASDs (with sizes 10 to 39 mm) were treated with occlusion apparatus with endoscopy and robotic arm (AESOP 3000, Computer Motion Inc., Santa Barbara, CA, USA) assist. Results: All ASDs were successfully occluded with a mean device size of 26.8 mm (12 to 42 mm). Procedure time was ranged from 30 to 60 minutes. The ICU stay was less than 1 day and hospital stays was 3 to 7 days. No postoperative mortality was noted. During follow-up of 2 to 19 months, no major morbidities occurred. Conclusions: Endoscopic ASD occlusion assisted with robotic is safe and effective with rapid recovery. The cosmetic effect is better results than conventional surgical repair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thanks to its base stacking structure, DNA can behave as an electric wire, but external control of its electronic properties has not been achieved yet. Here, the authors show that DNA conductance can be switched electrochemically when a DNA base is replaced by the redox molecule anthraquinone.

Device-to-device (D2D) communication has become a key technology in the fifth-generation cellular networks. Resource allocation is critical to ensure satisfactory performance. However, most existing resource allocation policies focus on delay-unaware performance metrics, such as throughput and power consumption, thus being effective only in delay-insensitive scenarios. To overcome this problem, in this paper, we consider an orthogonal frequency division multiple access-based cellular network, where multiple cellular users and D2D pairs along with delay quality-of-service (QoS) requirements coexist to share multiple sub-channels. We propose an effective resource allocation and source adaptation policy to maximize the system throughput while satisfying each user's delay QoS requirement. Specifically, we formulate a constraint optimization problem and solve it using the Lagrangian approach. In the dual domain, the key problem is solving for the dual function under given dual variable. This is a mixed integer non-linear programming problem with non-concave function and is non-linearly coupled over layers, thus being very difficult to solve. In response, we propose effective algorithms based on an alternating optimization method, successive convex approximation method, and outer approximation method. Analysis on the convergence and optimality of the proposed algorithms is given. Simulation results show that our proposed policy can improve the QoS-guaranteed system throughput significantly compared with the baselines.

Chinese onion (Allium chinense) is widely cultivated as a vegetable, native to China and cultivated in many other countries. Its bulbs are commonly processed into pickles and spices. In this study, seven new spirostanol saponins (5, 7, 9–11, 13 and 15) together with ten known congeners (1–4, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16 and 17) were isolated from the bulbs of Chinese onion and their structures were elucidated by spectroscopic analysis and chemical degradation. The isolated components were evaluated for anti-inflammatory and anti-proliferative activities. As a result, compounds 4 and 8 showed potent inhibitory effects on the lipopolysaccharides (LPS) induced nitric oxide (NO) production in murine macrophage RAW264.7. Compound 13 displayed potential inhibitory activity against five human cancer cell lines with IC50 values of 1.43–6.81 µM. Compound 14 exhibited significant selective inhibition against these cancer cells (IC50 2.22–15.58 µM), in comparison with the normal cells MRC-5 (IC50 > 100 µM).

Chinese hickory (Carya cathayensis Sarg.) is a common and nutritious nut. Twenty-nine phenolic compounds, together with three quinones and three triterpenoids, were isolated from Chinese hickory husks. Their structures were determined by comprehensive spectroscopic methods. The total methanolic extract, chloroform and ethyl acetate fractions and all the isolated compounds were evaluated for antioxidant activity and neuroprotective effects on SH-SY5Y cells, as well as the effects on the expression of PPAR-γ in 3T3-L1 cells. Quercetin (10) and protocatechuic acid methyl ester (24) showed pronounced antioxidant activities in all of the different antioxidant assays and neuroprotective effect against H2O2-induced oxidative stress. Some of the flavonoids could significantly decrease the mRNA expression level of PPAR-γ by approximately 70%. The present study provided supplement information for the evaluation of antioxidant activity and health benefit of Chinese hickory.

Understanding the thermoelectric effect of materials and molecules is important for understanding their charge transport properties. Here, the authors study the thermoelectric effect in single DNA molecules and show that the charge carrier properties are dependent on both the DNA length and sequence.

Fiber gas sensing techniques have been applied for a wide range of industrial applications. In this paper, the basic fiber gas sensing principles and the development of different fibers have been introduced. In various specialty fibers, hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HC-PCFs) can overcome the fundamental limits of solid fibers and have attracted intense interest recently. Here, we focus on the review of HC-PCF gas sensing, including the light-guiding mechanisms of HC-PCFs, various sensing configurations, microfabrication approaches, and recent research advances including the mid-infrared gas sensors via hollow core anti-resonant fibers. This review gives a detailed and deep understanding of HC-PCF gas sensors and will promote more practical applications of HC-PCFs in the near future.

The extraction conditions of epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) from Jinxuan summer green tea and antitumor activity against human gastric cancer SGC-7901 cells of the green tea extracts were investigated. On the basis of a single factor experiment, Box-Behnken design and response surface methodology were employed to optimize the hot water extraction conditions. The optimal extraction conditions for EGCG were determined as: extraction temperature of 85 °C, extraction time of 34 min, water-tea ratio of 41 mL/g, a solution of pH 6, and extraction twice. Under these conditions, the experimental extraction yield value of EGCG was 33.82 mg/g, which was not significantly different in comparison to predicted values. The results indicated that the regression models were suitable for the EGCG extraction from Jinxuan summer green tea. The summer green tea extract prepared under the optimal conditions had a higher antitumor activity against human gastric cancer SGC-7901 cells than the green tea extract made with traditional tea brewing method.

Hawthorn berry is a common fruit native to Northern China. Its chemical identity of potent antiproliferative and antioxidant constituents was carried out. Fifteen triterpenoids, including 4 novels, were isolated and identified. The new triterpenoids were elucidated to be 3β,6β,18β-trihydroxy-olean-12-en-28-oic acid (1), 3β,6β,18β,23-tetrahydroxy-olean-12-en-28-oic acid (2), 2α,3β,6β,18β-tetrahydroxy-olean-12-en-28-oic acid (3), and 2α,3β,6β,18β,23-pentahydroxy-olean-12-en-28-oic acid (4), respectively. Antiproliferative and antioxidant activities of the triterpenoids were evaluated. Compounds 2, 3 and 4 showed high potent inhibitory activity toward the proliferation of HepG2 and MCF-7 cells, with the EC50 values were lower than 5 µM. 1 and 10 also exhibited high antioxidant activity in PSC assay, which were 70 and 28 times higher than ascorbic acid in antioxidant capacity. These results showed the triterpenoids isolated from hawthorn berries have potent antiproliferative and antioxidant activity and may be responsible for the anticancer activities of hawthorn berries.

Second-order vector modes, possessing doughnut-shaped intensity distribution with unique polarization, are widely utilized in material micromachining, optical tweezers, and high-resolution microscopy. Since the hollow-core fiber can act as a flexible and robust optical waveguide for ultra-short pulse delivery and manipulation, high-order vector modes guided in hollow-core fibers will have huge potential in many advanced applications. We firstly reveal that a second-order vector mode can be well guided in a hollow-core antiresonant fiber with the suppression of the fundamental mode and other second-order vector modes at the red side of transmission band. We interpret our observation through a phase-matched coupling mechanism between core modes and coupled cladding modes. A single second-order vector mode such as TE01, TM01, or HE21 can be guided with low confinement loss at specific wavelengths with appropriate structure parameters. Our proposed hollow-core fibers have a modal engineering function which will open up a new avenue toward the single second-order vector mode propagation and its fiberized applications.

While oolong tea (OT) has been shown to induce weight loss and reduce fat accumulation, the mechanisms remain poorly defined, especially for aged OT. In this study, five groups of mice (n = 9/group) were used including a normal diet with vehicle treatment, and a high-fat diet (HFD) with vehicle or the water extracts from aged OTs (EAOTs, three different storage years) by oral gavage at 1000 mg/kg·BW for 6 weeks. Body weight, fat accumulation, and serum biochemical parameters were used to evaluate obesity. The morphology of hepatocytes and adipocytes was analyzed by being stained with hematoxylin and eosin. The levels of p-AMPK, p-ACC (and non-phosphorylated versions), CPT-1 and FAS were determined by Western blotting and immunohistochemistry. EAOTs decreased HFD-induced body weight, fat accumulation, serum levels of triglyceride, total cholesterol, and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, while enhancing the serum high-density lipoprotein cholesterol level. At the same time, EAOTs clearly alleviated fatty liver and reduced the size of adipocytes in the epididymal fat, especially in the 2006 group. Most importantly, EAOTs increased the phosphorylation of AMPK and ACC, and up-regulated the expression of CPT-1 but down-regulated the expression of fatty acid synthase, TNF-α and iNOS. Thus, EAOTs may inhibit obesity by up-regulating energy expenditure and fatty acid oxidation while inhibiting fatty acid synthesis and inflammation.

With the increasing scale of the melody database, the query-by-humming system faces the trade-offs between response speed and retrieval accuracy. Melody accurate matching is the key factor to restrict the response speed. In this paper, we present a GPU acceleration method for melody accurate matching, in order to improve the response speed without reducing retrieval accuracy. The method develops two parallel strategies (intra-task parallelism and inter-task parallelism) to obtain accelerated effects. The efficiency of our method is validated through extensive experiments. Evaluation results show that our single GPU implementation achieves 20x to 40x speedup ratio, when compared to a typical general purpose CPU’s execution time.

This paper presents results for delay and Doppler spread characterization in high-speed railway (HSR) hilly scenario. To investigate the propagation characteristics in this specific terrain, a measurement campaign is conducted along the “Guangzhou-Shenzhen” HSR in China. A wideband channel sounder with 40 MHz bandwidth is used to collect raw data at 2.4 GHz band. The delay spread and Doppler frequency features are analyzed based on measured data. It is found that there are abundant multipath components (MPCs) in this scenario. We present the relationship between the delay spreads and the transceiver distances. The measured route can be divided into four areas with different delay and Doppler characteristics. Finally, a tapped delay line (TDL) model is proposed to parameterize the channel responses in the HSR hilly environment, which is supposed to provide criterions for evaluations of the radio interface and development of wireless communication system.

Distributed MIMO (D-MIMO) system is one of the candidates for future wireless access networks. In this study, the spatial correlation and capacity in indoor D-MIMO system are presented. All results are from the actual channel measurements in typical indoor scenarios, including office and corridor. Based on measured data, spatial correlation coefficients between distributed transmitting antennas are analyzed. Although the literature about D-MIMO system assumes the small scale fading between distributed antennas is independent, we find that spatial correlation may still exist in specific propagation scenario. This correlation can also degrade the performance of D-MIMO system. To mitigate the impact of spatial correlation, one efficient method is to use transmitting antenna selection technique.

This paper focuses on the fading characteristics of wireless channel on High-Speed Railway (HSR) in hilly terrain scenario. Due to the rapid speed, the fading characteristics of HSR channel are highly correlated with time or Transmit-Receive distance and have their own special property. To investigate the fading characteristics, the measurement is conducted on the Guangzhou-Shenzhen passenger-dedicated line in China with the speed of 295 km/h in the data-collection area at 2.4 GHz. From the measured data, the amplitude of each path is estimated by using the Subspace-Alternating Generalized Expectation-Maximization (SAGE) algorithm along with other parameters of channel impulse responses. Then the fading parameters, including path loss, shadow fading, and K-factor, are analysed. With the numerical results in the measurement and analysis, the fading characteristics have been revealed and modelled. It is supposed that this work has a promotion for HSR communication system design and improvement.

The antidiabetic and antioxidant activities of the ethyl acetate-soluble extract (MFE) of mulberry fruit (Morus alba L.) were investigated. In vitro, MFE showed potent α-glucosidase inhibitory activity and radical-scavenging activities against DPPH and superoxide anion radicals. In vivo, MFE could significantly decrease fasting blood glucose (FBG) and glycosylated serum protein (GSP), and increase antioxidant enzymatic activities (SOD, CAT, GSH-Px) in streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic mice. Bioactivity-guided fractionation of the MFE led to the isolation of 25 phenolic compounds, and their structures were identified on the basis of MS and NMR data. All the 25 compounds were isolated from mulberry fruit for the first time. Also, the α-glucosidase inhibitory activity and antioxidant activity of the phenolics were evaluated. Potent α-glucosidase inhibitory and radical-scavenging activities of these phenolics suggested that they may be partially responsible for the antidiabetic and antioxidant activities of mulberry fruit.

Aircraft seems to be the last isolated island where the wireless access is still not available. In this paper, we consider the distributed multiple-input multiple-output (D-MIMO) system application based on measurements in aircraft cabin. The channel response matrices of in-cabin D-MIMO system are collected by using a wideband channel sounder. Channel capacities with optimum transmit antenna selections (TASs) are calculated from the measured data at different receiver positions. Then the optimum capacity results are compared to those without selection in different transmit SNR. It is shown that the TAS can lead obvious capacity gain, especially in the front and back of cabin. The capacity gain represents a decreasing trend with the transmit SNR increasing. The optimal transmit antenna subset is closely related to the transmit SNR. With the SNR increasing, more transmit antennas will be chosen for higher performance. The subset of those transmit antennas near the receiver is a reasonable choice in practical application of D-MIMO system.

We investigate the uplink of a power-controlled multi-user distributed antenna system (DAS) with antennas deployed on a circle. Applying results from random matrix theory, we prove that for such a DAS, the per-user sum rate and the total transmit power both converge as user number and antenna number go to infinity with a constant ratio. The relationship between the asymptotic per-user sum rate and the asymptotic total transmit power is revealed for all possible values of the radius of the circle on which antennas are placed. We then use this rate-power relationship to find the optimal radius. With this optimal radius, the circular layout DAS (CL-DAS) is proved to offer a significant gain compared with a traditional colocated antenna system (CAS). Simulation results are provided, which demonstrate the validity of our analysis.