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BACKGROUND: Qinxiang Qingjie (QXQJ), an oral solution containing various Chinese herbs, is indicated for pediatric upper respiratory tract infections. The treatment of influenza also shows potential advantages in shortening the duration of illness and improving symptoms. However, there is still a lack of high-quality clinical evidence to support this. The trial was to explore the efficacy and safety of QXQJ for treating pediatric influenza and provide an evidence-based basis for expanding its applicability. METHODS: A randomized, double-blind, double-dummy, positive-controlled, multicenter clinical trial was conducted in 14 hospitals in China. Children aged 1–13 years with influenza and “exterior and interior heat syndromes” as defined by traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) were randomly assigned to two groups with 1:1 radio. Children in the test group received QXQJ oral solution and oseltamivir simulant, while the control group received oseltamivir phosphate granules and QXQJ simulant. The duration of treatment was five days, followed by a two-day follow-up period. The primary endpoint was the clinical recovery time. Secondary endpoints included the time to defervescence, incidences of complications and severe or critical influenza, negative conversion rate, improvement of TCM syndromes, and safety profiles of the therapeutics, which mainly contained the adverse clinical events and adverse drug reactions. RESULTS: A total of 231 children were randomized to either the QXQJ (n=117) or oseltamivir (n=114) group. The FAS and PPS results showed that both groups experienced a median clinical recovery time of three days (P>0.05). The median time to defervescence of both groups were 36 hours in FAS and PPS (P>0.05), and two groups did not differ in terms of the other secondary endpoints (P>0.05). 14 patients (12.39%) in the QXQJ group and 14 patients (12.50%) in the oseltamivir group reported at least one adverse event, respectively. One serious adverse event occurred in the QXQJ group. There was no significant difference in the incidence of adverse events or adverse drug reactions between the groups. CONCLUSIONS: The efficacy of QXQJ oral solution was comparable to that of oseltamivir for treating influenza in children, with an acceptable safety profile. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR1900021060.

Glioma stem cells (GSCs) are considered the source for development, recurrence, and poor prognosis of glioma, so treatment targeted GSCs is of great interest. The frequently rearranged in advanced T cell lymphomas-1 (FRAT1) gene is an important member of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling transduction pathway, and aberrantly activation of Wnt signaling has been identified to contribute to the tumorigenesis, proliferation, invasion of a variety kinds of cancer stem cells. However, correlations between FRAT1 and GSCs and the specific mechanisms remain unclear. In this study, we aimed to investigate the effect of FRAT1 on GSCs proliferation, colony formation, sphere formation and tumorigenesity in vitro and in vivo and its underlying mechanism. Lentiviral transfection was used to construct GSCs with low FRAT1 expression. The expression of FRAT1 on GSCs proliferation in vitro was assessed by cell counting kit-8(CCK-8). Colony formation and sphere formation assays were conducted to assess the colony and sphere formation ability of GSCs. Then, an intracranial glioma nude mouse model was built to measure the effect of low FRAT1 expression on GSCs proliferation and tumorigenesity in vivo. Real-time PCR, Western blot, and Immunohistochemistry were processed to detect the mRNA and protein expressions of FRAT1, β-catenin in the glioma tissue of xenograft mice to study their correlations. The functional assays verifed that low FRAT1 expression inhibited CD133+Nestin+ GSCs proliferation, colony formation, sphere formation ability in vitro. In vivo GSCs xenograft mice model showed that low FRAT1 expression suppressed the proliferation and tumorigenesity of CD133+Nestin+ GSCs and reduced β-catenin mRNA and protein expression. Furthermore, the expression of FRAT1 and β-catenin were positively correlated. Altogether, results indicate that FRAT1 enhances the proliferation, colony formation, sphere formation and tumorigenesity of CD133+Nestin+ glioma stem cells in vitro and in vivo as well as the expression of β-catenin. Therefore, inhibiting proliferation of GSCs and FRAT1 may be a molecular target to GSCs in treating human glioma in the future.

When convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are applied to the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image classification, they are prone to overfitting due to scarce SAR image data, and CNNs require a large amount of storage and long computing time, so it is difficult to deploy them on resource constrained devices. This letter proposes a simple and feasible approach that can effectively solve these problems. First, the convolutional layers of the pretrained model on the ImageNet data set are transferred, and a new convolutional layer and global pooling layer are added afterward. Then, fine-tuning is performed on the new network from the SAR image data set. Finally, a filter-based pruning method is used on the convolutional layers to obtain a compact network. Compared with the all-convolutional network (A-ConvNets) which is the state-of-the-art method on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition data set, our method achieves about $3.6\times $ speedup during forward propagation and $3.7\times $ compression of the parameters, with only a 1.42% decrease in the accuracy.

The selection of scene matching areas is a difficult problem in the field of matching guidance. Compared with the traditional methods of matching feature extraction and pattern classification, this letter applies convolutional neural networks (CNN) to the extraction of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) scene matching regions for the first time. First of all, we match the SAR images of the same land taken by satellites from different angles and in different phases, and then automatically label the matching suitability of the images as the output of the network according to the matching results. Next, the digital elevation model data reflecting the elevation information and the SAR image grayscale information are fused as the input to the network. Finally, CNN is used to automatically extract the matching features and classify the suitability of the SAR images. The proposed method avoids the steps of extracting features manually and improves the classification performance of SAR scene matching area. Compared with the support vector machine method, the classification accuracy increases from 86.1% to 93.3%.

Heart failure (HF) is the end stage of many heart diseases, and ischemic heart disease (IHD) is the primary cause. Yiqi Fumai lyophilized injection, a contemporary Chinese medicine preparation, widely used in the treatment of IHF patients, shows clinical efficacy on improving symptoms and cardiac function, but the quality of the current literature does not address multiple important issues. This article describes a protocol for assessment of complementary treatment with Yiqi Fumai lyophilized injection in acute decompensated IHD. The protocol is designed as a multicenter randomized controlled trial to assess the efficacy and safety of complementary treatment with Yiqi Fumai lyophilized injection on acute decompensated IHD. This trial will be carried out in 37 hospitals in China and expected to enroll 666 inpatients with acute decompensated IHF due to coronary heart disease. On the basis of standardized western medications, patients are randomized to either the treatment group (250 ml 5% glucose / sodium injection + 5.2 g Yiqi Fumai lyophilized injection) or the control group for 7 days and follow-up for 30 ± 3 and 60 ± 3 days. The primary outcome is change in brain natriuretic peptide (BNP) concentrations. The secondary outcomes are composite endpoint, left ventricular ejection fraction, blood troponin T/I, cardiothoracic ratio, life quality scale, scores of the four traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) diagnostic methods. Standardized western medications together with TCM have been extensively used in China and have developed into a comprehensive treatment model. The trial will provide clinical research evidence for application of complementary treatment with intravenous Yiqi Fumai lyophilized injection on decompensated IHF. This study protocol has been listed in the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry (registration number: ChiCTR-IPR-15007396, http://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.aspx?proj=12370 ) on November 6, 2015.

Due to the limited space of the carrier, the multi-antenna system on the carrier is prone to electromagnetic interference. Most of the researchers used genetic algorithms to optimize the antenna layout. On this basis, this paper proposes a method of interactive simulation of MATLAB and electromagnetic simulation software CST. Firstly, the position information of the antenna and the carrier platform is initialized in MATLAB, and then the program of the genetic algorithm is run, and the layout scheme of each generation is automatically transmitted to the CST through the ActiveX. The CST solves the antenna coupling degree and automatically returns it to MATLAB as the fitness value of the scheme. After dozens of generations of genetic algorithms, a better layout scheme can be found. Compared with the previous optimization methods, the method of this paper does not need to build complex electromagnetic numerical calculation model, and it has strong operability and high degree of visualization. Therefore, it has certain reference for the layout optimization of multi-antenna systems of other carriers.

FRAT1 was originally characterized as a protein frequently rearranged in advanced T cell lymphoma, which inhibits GSK-3-mediated phosphorylation of β-catenin and positively regulates the Wnt signaling pathway. FRAT1 has been identified as a proto-oncogene involved in tumorigenesis. Previous studies have shown that FRAT1 is strikingly overexpressed in some human cancers. However, the relationship between FRAT1 and human gliomas is unclear. In this study, we detected the expression of FRAT1 in human gliomas by immunohistochemistry, Western blot and RT-PCR. FRAT1 was found to be specifically expressed in the majority of glioma samples, and their expression levels increased markedly with the increase of WHO grades. In addition, there was a positive correlation between FRAT1 immunoreactivity score (IRS) and β-catenin IRS. Our results suggest that FRAT1 may be an important factor in the tumorigenesis and progression of gliomas, and could be used as a potential molecular marker for pathological diagnosis and a target for biological therapy.

Glioma is the most common malignancy of the central nervous system. Approximately 40 percent of intracranial tumors are diagnosed as gliomas. Difficulties in treatment are associated closely with the malignant phenotype, which is characterized by excessive proliferation, relentless invasion, and angiogenesis. Although the comprehensive treatment level of brain glioma is continuously progressing, the outcome of this malignancy has not been improved drastically. Therefore, the identification of new biomarkers for diagnosis and therapy of this malignancy is of significant scientific and clinical value. FRAT1 is a positive regulator of the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway and is overexpressed in many human tumors. In the present study, we investigated the expression status of FRAT1 in 68 patients with human gliomas and its correlation with the pathologic grade, proliferation, invasion, angiogenesis, and prognostic significance. These findings suggest that FRAT1 may be an important factor in the tumorigenesis and progression of glioma and could be explored as a potential biomarker for pathological diagnosis, an indicator for prognosis, and a target for biological therapy of malignancy.

BACKGROUND: FRAT1 positively regulates the Wnt/β-catenin signaling pathway by inhibiting GSK-3-mediated phosphorylation of β-catenin. It was originally characterized as a protein frequently rearranged in advanced T cell lymphoma, but has recently also been identified as a proto-oncogene involved in tumorigenesis. Our previous studies showed that FRAT1 was dramatically overexpressed in gliomas and its expression level was significantly increased along with clinicopathological grades. METHODS: In the current study, we used RT-PCR and Western blotting to assess the mRNA and protein levels of FRAT1 in three glioma cell lines. In addition, to evaluate its functional role in gliomas, we examined the effects of FRAT1 knockdown on proliferation, migration and invasion in vitro and tumor growth in vivo using glioblastoma U251 cells and RNAi. RESULTS: FRAT1 was highly expressed in all three glioma cell lines. RNAi-mediated down-regulation of endogenous FRAT1 in human glioblastoma U251 cells resulted in suppression of cell proliferation, arrest of cell cycle, inhibition of cell migration and invasion in vitro. Moreover, FRAT1 depletion significantly impaired tumor xenograft growth in nude mice. CONCLUSIONS: Our results highlight the potential role of FRAT1 in tumorigenesis and progression of glioblastoma. These findings provide a biological basis for FRAT1 as a potential molecular marker for improved pathological grading and as a novel candidate therapeutic target for glioblastoma management.