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Background: Hospital disaster resilience can be defined as a hospital’s ability to resist, absorb, and respond to the shock of disasters while maintaining critical functions, and then to recover to its original state or adapt to a new one. This study aims to explore the status of resilience among tertiary hospitals in Shandong Province, China. Methods: A stratified random sample (n = 50) was derived from tertiary A, tertiary B, and tertiary C hospitals in Shandong Province, and was surveyed by questionnaire. Data on hospital characteristics and 8 key domains of hospital resilience were collected and analysed. Variables were binary, and analysed using descriptive statistics such as frequencies. Results: A response rate of 82% (n = 41) was attained. Factor analysis identified four key factors from eight domains which appear to reflect the overall level of disaster resilience. These were hospital safety, disaster management mechanisms, disaster resources and disaster medical care capability. The survey demonstrated that in regard to hospital safety, 93% had syndromic surveillance systems for infectious diseases and 68% had evaluated their safety standards. In regard to disaster management mechanisms, all had general plans, while only 20% had specific plans for individual hazards. 49% had a public communication protocol and 43.9% attended the local coordination meetings. In regard to disaster resources, 75.6% and 87.5% stockpiled emergency drugs and materials respectively, while less than a third (30%) had a signed Memorandum of Understanding with other hospitals to share these resources. Finally in regard to medical care, 66% could dispatch an on-site medical rescue team, but only 5% had a ‘portable hospital’ function and 36.6% and 12% of the hospitals could surge their beds and staff capacity respectively. The average beds surge capacity within 1 day was 13%. Conclusions: This study validated the broad utility of a framework for understanding and measuring the level of hospital resilience. The survey demonstrated considerable variability in disaster resilience arrangements of tertiary hospitals in Shandong province, and the difference between tertiary A hospitals and tertiary B hospitals was also identified in essential areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anatomical liver resection is currently the preferred treatment for liver cancer. With the recent introduction of medical microwave coagulation for liver metastases, anatomical hepatectomy may be performed more efficiently. The present study retrospectively reviewed the results of microwave tissue coagulation performed during anatomical liver resection for patients with liver disease at the TangDu Hospital (Xi'an, China) between January, 2009 and June, 2012. A total of 128 patients met the inclusion criteria and were divided into two groups for comparison; those treated with the microwave coagulation technique (n=66) and the conventional group (n=62), who were treated with standard partial hepatectomy. There was no reported perioperative mortality. The univariate analysis revealed that the duration of liver dissection, intraoperative blood loss, intraoperative erythrocyte transfusion volume and alanine aminotransferase levels on the 5th postoperative day were significantly different between the microwave and conventional groups (P<0.05). Therefore, microwave tissue coagulation in anatomical liver resection was shown to be efficacious and safe and, provided proficient skills are developed in this technique, microwave tissue coagulation may be an effective alternative to anatomical hepatectomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background. Diabetic patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) suffer from low quality of life (QOL). We aim to assess the effectiveness of auricular acupressure for QOL improvement in these patients. Materials and Methods. Sixty-two participants were randomly assigned to an auricular or a control arm in a randomized controlled trial. Participants in the auricular arm were instructed to perform auricular acupressure 3-5 times per day for 3 months, when they were receiving conventional treatments. Participants in the control arm received conventional treatments only. The primary outcome was the summarized score of Kidney Disease and Quality of Life Short-Form (KDQOL-SF) at 3 months after randomization. The secondary outcomes included the 36-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36), glycosylated hemoglobin (HbA1c), and estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR). Results. The summarized KDQOL differed significantly between the acupressure (76.6, 95% CI, 72.2 to 81.0) and the control group (61.8, 95% CI, 57.7 to 65.9). Similar results were found in the SF-36 scores. HbA1c and eGFR were not found to be significantly different between the arms and neither were the adverse events. Conclusion. Auricular acupressure was well tolerated in diabetic patients with chronic kidney diseases receiving hemodialysis. Future research is needed to confirm these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Pituitary stalk interruption syndrome (PSIS) is characterized by the absence of pituitary stalk, pituitary hypoplasia, and ectopic posterior pituitary. Due to the rarity of PSIS, clinical data are limited, especially in Chinese people. Herein, we analyzed the clinical characteristics of patients diagnosed with PSIS from our center over 10 years. Patients and Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the clinical manifestations and laboratory and MRI findings in 55 patients with PSIS. Results: Of the 55 patients with PSIS, 48 (87.3%) were male. The average age was 19.766.7 years and there was no familial case. A history of breech delivery was documented in 40 of 45 patients (88.9%) and 19 of 55 patients (34.5%) had a history of dystocia. Short stature was found in 47 of 55 patients (85.5%) and bone age delayed 7.2665.37 years. Secondary sex characteristics were poor or undeveloped in most patients. The prevalence of deficiencies in growth hormone, gonadotropins, corticotropin, and thyrotropin were 100%, 95.8%, 81.8%, 76.3%, respectively. Hyperprolactinemia was found in 36.4% of patients. Three or more pituitary hormone deficiencies were found in 92.7% of the patients. All patients had normal posterior pituitary function and absent pituitary stalk on imaging. The average height of anterior pituitary was 28 mm, documented anterior pituitary hypoplasia. Midline abnormalities were presented in 9.1% of patients. Conclusions: The clinical features of our Chinese PSIS patients seem to be different from other reported patients in regarding to the higher degree of hypopituitarism and lower prevalence of midline defects. In addition, our patients were older at the time of case detection and the bone age was markedly delayed. We also had no cases of familial PSIS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although considerable research has been conducted in the field of hierarchical text categorization, little has been done on automatically collecting labeled corpus for building hierarchical taxonomies. In this paper, we propose an automatic method of collecting training samples to build hierarchical taxonomies. In our method, the category node is initially defined by some keywords, the web search engine is then used to construct a small set of labeled documents, and a topic tracking algorithm with keyword-based content normalization is applied to enlarge the training corpus on the basis of the seed documents. We also design a method to check the consistency of the collected corpus. The above steps produce a flat category structure which contains all the categories for building the hierarchical taxonomy. Next, linear discriminant projection approach is utilized to construct more meaningful intermediate levels of hierarchies in the generated flat set of categories. Experimental results show that the training corpus is good enough for statistical classification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work explores the use of 20-μm-i.d. polymeric polystyrene-divinylbenzene monolithic nanocapillary columns for the LC-ESI-MS analysis of tryptic digest peptide mixtures. In contrast to the packing of microparticles, capillary columns were prepared, without the need of high pressure, in fused-silica capillaries, by thermally induced in situ copolymerization of styrene and divinylbenzene. The polymerization conditions and mobile-phase composition were optimized for chromatographic performance leading to efficiencies over 100000 plates/m for peptide separations. High mass sensitivity (∼10 amol of peptides) in the MS and MS/MS modes using an ion trap MS was found, a factor of up to 20-fold improvement over 75-μmi.d. nanocolumns. A wide linear dynamic range (∼4 orders of magnitude) was achieved, and good run-to-run and column-to-column reproducibility of isocratic and gradient elution separations were found. As samples, both model proteins and tissue extracts were employed. Gradient nano-LC-MS analysis of a proteolytic digest of a tissue extract, equivalent to a sample size of ∼1000 cells injected, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Background To investigate the predictive value of neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) in the short-term prognosis of elderly patients with severe sepsis combined with diabetes mellitus (DM). Methods The clinical data of 162 elderly patients with severe sepsis combined with DM from January 2018 to December 2022 were retrospectively collected. These patients were divided into a survival group (n = 104) and a death group (n = 58) according to 90-day prognosis. The number of neutrophils, lymphocytes, and NLR were compared. The optimal cut-off value for NLR to predict 90-day prognosis in elderly patients with severe sepsis combined with DM was determined using Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) curves, and the patients were divided into high and low NLR groups depending on the optimal cut-off value. The Kaplan-Meier method was used to plot the survival curves of the high and low NLR groups. Risk factors for the 90-day death in elderly patients with severe sepsis combined with DM were analyzed by a multivariate cox regression model. Results There were no significant differences in gender, age, history of hypertension and hyperlipidemia, intensive care unit (ICU) stay, duration of mechanical ventilation, and oxygenation index between the survival group and death group (p > 0.05). However, acute physiological and chronic health evaluation II (APACHE II) scores, and sepsis-related organ failure assessment (SOFA) scores were significantly lower in the survival group compared with the death group (p

PurposeThis study aims to explore the value of clinical features, CT imaging signs, and radiomics features in differentiating between adults and children with Mycoplasma pneumonia and seeking quantitative radiomic representations of CT imaging signs.Materials and methodsIn a retrospective analysis of 981 cases of mycoplasmal pneumonia patients from November 2021 to December 2023, 590 internal data (adults:450, children: 140) randomly divided into a training set and a validation set with an 8:2 ratio and 391 external test data (adults:121; children:270) were included. Using univariate analysis, CT imaging signs and clinical features with significant differences (p

Cross-domain recommendation methods are designed to learn and transfer knowledge across multiple domains to enhance recommendation performance, thereby offering an effective solution to the cold-start problem. Owing to their superior information representation capability and scalability across domains, Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based methods have demonstrated substantial potential in cross-domain recommendation. Nevertheless, current methods frequently encounter limitations due to insufficient overlapping data across domains and a lack of attention to differences within the domain space. This leads to suboptimal node representation learning and recommendation performance, particularly for cold-start users. In response, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph-based contrastive learning method for cross-domain recommendation. Initially, we utilize review and score information to construct an informative heterogeneous graph, while developing intra-domain and inter-domain graph augmentation strategies to create new edges between users. Subsequently, a heterogeneous graph embedding algorithm based on a multi-layer attention mechanism and disentangled representation learning is proposed. To enhance user embeddings, we discuss the differences among domains and devise a cross-view contrastive learning method to align domain-independent features generated from local and global domains. Ultimately, user embeddings learned from multiple perspectives are effectively integrated to alleviate the negative transfer problem. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method compared with state-of-the-art baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AIM: To analyze the anatomical characteristics of nasolacrimal duct development in children with congenital nasolacrimal duct obstruction by nasolacrimal duct CT scan combined with three-dimensional reconstruction technology.METHODS: Prospective case control study. Totally 84 children(84 eyes)with unilateral congenital nasolacrimal duct obstruction were treated in the Department of Ophthalmology of Baoding Children's Hospital from September 2018 to September 2020. The nasolacrimal duct CT scan combined with three-dimensional reconstruction was performed. The transverse diameter and anterior posterior diameter of bilateral nasolacrimal duct were measured, and the anatomical characteristics of nasolacrimal duct development were observed and analyzed. Paired t-test was performed on the transverse diameter and anteroposterior diameter of bilateral nasolacrimal duct.RESULTS: Nasolacrimal duct CT scan combined with three-dimensional reconstruction can clearly show the anatomical characteristics of nasolacrimal duct development in children with congenital nasolacrimal duct obstruction. The transverse diameter of bony nasolacrimal duct was 4.63±0.92mm, anterior posterior diameter was 6.03±1.08mm, the transverse diameter of middle bony nasolacrimal duct was 4.02±0.88mm, anterior posterior diameter was 5.42±1.10mm, the transverse diameter of final bony nasolacrimal duct was 4.26±0.93mm, anterior posterior diameter was 5.66±1.02mm. The transverse diameter of the bony nasolacrimal duct in the initial segment of the contralateral side was 4.12±0.78mm, the anteroposterior diameter was 5.60±1.02mm, the transverse diameter of the bony nasolacrimal duct in the middle segment was 3.92±0.86mm, the anteroposterior diameter was 5.24±1.04mm, the transverse diameter of the bony nasolacrimal duct in the final segment was 4.30±0.98mm, the anteroposterior diameter was 5.52±1.04mm. The transverse diameter and anteroposterior diameter of the affected side were larger than those of the healthy side and enlarged(P0.05).CONCLUSION:The development of bony nasolacrimal duct in the affected side of congenital nasolacrimal duct obstruction is different from that in the healthy side. The initial segment of the affected side expanded obviously.

Chiari's I malformation with hydrocephalus is commonly seen in clinical experience. Trigeminal neuralgia (TN) and hemifacial spasm (HFS) are most commonly related to vascular compression of the root entry/enter zone (REZ). Until now, TN and HFS associated with hydrocephalus caused by Chiari's malformation have not been reported. The patient was a 24-year old male with left HFS and ipsilateral TN. Arnold-Chiari's I malformation with hydrocephalus and platybasia were found in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of brain. We underwent a programmable ventriculoperitoneal shunt with complete resolution of all symptoms. This is the first report of one case only presenting as coexistent ipsilateral TN and HFS secondary to Chiari's I malformation with hydrocephalus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study an interacting mixture of ultracold spinless fermions on the s band and bosons on the p band in a 2D square optical lattice, of which the effective model is reduced to a p-band fermionic system with nearest-neighbor attractive interaction. From this effective p-band model, we find a translation symmetry protected Z2 topological superfluid that is characterized by a special fermion parity pattern at high-symmetry points in momentum space k=(0,0), (0, π), (π,0), (π, π). Such Z2 topological superfluid supports the robust Majorana edge modes and a new type of low-energy excitation--(supersymmetric) Z2 link excitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To study the correlation between miR-21 and Treg/Th17 ratio in the microenvironment of rats with hepatocellular carcinoma., Methods: Diethylnitrosamine was used to build the hepatocellular carcinoma model of rats; the content of Treg cells and Th17 cells and the expression of miR-21 in the peripheral blood of rats with hepatocellular carcinoma were detected. The statistical analysis was performed on the correlation between miR-21 expression and Treg/Th17 ratio., Results: Hepatocellular carcinoma model of rats was successfully constructed. The proportion of Th17 cells among all CD4(+)T cells in the peripheral blood of rats with hepatocellular carcinoma was 5.319%, which was higher than the control group; while the proportion of Treg cells was 9.472%, which was higher than the control group. Treg/Th17 ratio in the model group was 1.781, compared with 1.478 in the control group. The expression of miR-21 was increased in the peripheral blood of rats with hepatocellular carcinoma and it showed a positive correlation with the ratio of Treg/Th17., Conclusions: There is a positive correlation between the expression level of miR-21 and the ratio of Treg/Th17., (Copyright © 2015 Hainan Medical College. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Objective: We conducted a perspective study to investigate the association between mRNA expression quantities of ERCC1, BRCA1, RRM1 and RRM2 and response to chemotherapy and clinical outcome of advance Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer.(NSCLC)., Methods: Two hundred eight patients who were diagnosed as advanced stage NSCLC were included in our study. A fluorescence-based and real-time detection method was used to determine the relative cDNA quantification for ERCC1, BRCA1, RRM1 and RRM2, and β-actin was used as the reference gene., Results: The median expression levels of ERCC1, BRCA1, RRM1 and RRM2 mRNA were 0.67±0.17, 0.095±0.012, 0.24±0.17 and 2.45±0.32, respectively. Our study found that the low ERCC1 (OR=1.82, 95% CI=1.01-3.20) and Low BRCA1 (OR=2.53, 95%CI=1.38-4.64) mRNA expression was more likely to response to chemotherapy when compared with high expression, respectively. Multivariate Cox regression analysis indicated that patients with low mRNA expression of ERCC1 and BRCA1 attained 0.43 (OR=0.43, 95%CI=0.27-0.89) and 0.37 (OR=0.37, 95%CI=0.22-0.66) fold risk of death from NSCLC. However, we found RMM1 and RRM2 mRNA expression could not influence the response to chemotherapy and clinical outcome of NSCLC., Conclusion: ERCC1 and BRCA1 mRNA expression could be important predictive markers for individualized platinum-based chemotherapy for NSCLC patients.