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Finite treatment with nucleos(t)ide analogues (NAs) remains a great challenge for chronic hepatitis B in the clinic. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between intrahepatic quasispecies heterogeneity and the NAs off-treatment outcomes in a prospective cohort. Eighteen HBeAg-positive patients with chronic hepatitis B who achieved the cessation criteria underwent liver biopsy, and stopped treatment thereafter. Patients were followed up prospectively for 1 year. The reverse transcriptase (RT) gene of intrahepatic hepatitis B virus (HBV) was cloned and sequenced. Intrahepatic quasispecies heterogeneity and specific gene mutations were analysed using bioinformatic methods. Ten patients achieved sustained response, and eight patients developed viral relapse. The intrahepatic quasispecies Shannon entropy and nucleotide diversity within either RT or the surface (S) region of patients with sustained response were significantly higher (p < 0.05) than those of patients who had a viral relapse. Intrahepatic quasispecies Shannon entropy at the nucleotide level predicted the sustained off-treatment response (area under receiver operating characteristics curve 0.925; 95% CI 0.807-1.000; p 0.003). More positive selection sites and N-glycosylation mutations within the S region were found in patients with sustained response than in the patients with viral relapse (p < 0.01). Most of the positive selection sites in patients with sustained response were located in reported HLA-I-restricted or HLA-II-restricted epitopes. Intrahepatic quasispecies heterogeneity at the end of treatment was correlated with off-treatment outcomes in HBeAg-positive patients with chronic hepatitis B. More immune escape mutations were found within the S region in patients with sustained response. The higher intrahepatic quasispecies heterogeneity indicated a more robust immune control over HBV, which in turn maintained a sustained response after withdrawal of NAs.

SSD (Single Shot Detector) is one of the state-of-the-art object detection algorithms, and it combines high detection accuracy with real-time speed. However, it is widely recognized that SSD is less accurate in detecting small objects compared to large objects, because it ignores the context from outside the proposal boxes. In this paper, we present CSSD–a shorthand for context-aware single-shot multibox object detector. CSSD is built on top of SSD, with additional layers modeling multi-scale contexts. We describe two variants of CSSD, which differ in their context layers, using dilated convolution layers (DiCSSD) and deconvolution layers (DeCSSD) respectively. The experimental results show that the multi-scale context modeling significantly improves the detection accuracy. In addition, we study the relationship between effective receptive fields (ERFs) and the theoretical receptive fields (TRFs), particularly on a VGGNet. The empirical results further strengthen our conclusion that SSD coupled with context layers achieves better detection results especially for small objects (+3.2%AP@0.5 on MSCOCO compared to the newest SSD), while maintaining comparable runtime performance.

Depthwise convolution and grouped convolution has been successfully applied to improve the efficiency of convolutional neural network (CNN). We suggest that these models can be considered as special cases of a generalized convolution operation, named channel local convolution(CLC), where an output channel is computed using a subset of the input channels. This definition entails computation dependency relations between input and output channels, which can be represented by a channel dependency graph(CDG). By modifying the CDG of grouped convolution, a new CLC kernel named interlaced grouped convolution (IGC) is created. Stacking IGC and GC kernels results in a convolution block (named CLC Block) for approximating regular convolution. By resorting to the CDG as an analysis tool, we derive the rule for setting the meta-parameters of IGC and GC and the framework for minimizing the computational cost. A new CNN model named clcNet is then constructed using CLC blocks, which shows significantly higher computational efficiency and fewer parameters compared to state-of-the-art networks, when being tested using the ImageNet-1K dataset. Source code is available at https://github.com/dqzhang17/clcnet.torch .

The paper introduces the measuring principle of glass thermal expansion coefficient. It expresses the features and advantages of the linear variable differential transformer measuring principle by comparing the thermal expansion coefficient measurement methods analysis. Meanwhile, the paper introduces DIL402PC dilatometer measuring devices and measurement procedures. It use standard samples to execute thermal expansion instrument system check from the accuracy and repeatability. The result shows thermal expansion coefficient of linear expansion instrument bias of DIL402PC dilatometer is within the error range of the theoretical value. The process proves it has a wide range of applications.

Smartphone cameras are often used to take pictures and videos because so many people now carry their smartphones everywhere. Therefore, smartphone camera quality plays an important role in overall smartphone evaluation and usage. Although smartphone camera quality has been continually improving, mobile media processing can provide significant enhancements. The authors discuss mobile media processing techniques, including color and contrast enhancement, backlight image compensation, deblurring, denoising, and video stabilization, within the framework of smartphone camera quality improvement.

The high-density randomly deployment of nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks results in a large number of redundant nodes due to the overlap of sensing areas. A scheduling algorithm for redundant nodes is proposed to effectively prolong the lifetime of WSN. The algorithm focuses on employing different scheduling strategies on border nodes and internal nodes to avoid contraction of the network boundary by judging whether a node is on the network boundary according to the number of working nodes in its neighbor table. The simulation results show that the algorithm can effectively prolong the lifetime of the network.

In recent years, the operating cost of sewage treatment plants (STPs) in some parts of the world has been rising due to increases in the cost of energy. STPs have focused on energy reduction and recovery from treatment processes in order to lower energy consumption. The development involves the improvement of capital set-up for treatment plants in terms of equipment upgrading/plant sizing as well as exploration of novel technologies for sewage, excess sludge treatment and biogas recovery. This review compares the current technologies applied in STPs around the world and discusses these technologies and facilities which may enhance energy reduction and recovery in sewage treatment.

This paper forecasts the grape sales in Huancui District of Weihai (in Shandong Province of China). After analyzing the most popular methods in sales forecasting field, we select the most applicable ones. Different models are selected for grape sales forecasting aiming at different seasonal features. The forecasts are modified by some seasonal and festival indexes to get more accurate results, through which we can guide the market, optimize the supply chain and increase the incomes of fruit growers and suppliers.

The objective was to investigate the prevalence of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children with frontal lobe epilepsy and related factors. The medical records of 190 children diagnosed with frontal lobe epilepsy at Qilu Hospital of Shandong University between 2006 and 2011 were retrospectively collected, and a follow-up analysis of the prevalence of ADHD in these children was conducted. Of the 161 children with an effective follow-up, 59.0% (95/161) with frontal lobe epilepsy suffered from ADHD as well. Analysis of epilepsy and ADHD-related factors indicated that the incidence of ADHD was 89.4% (76/85) in children with abnormal electroencephalogram (EEG) discharges on the most recent EEG, which was significantly higher than the ADHD incidence of 25% (19/76) in children with normal readings on the most recent EEG ( P < .01). Children with frontal lobe epilepsy have a high incidence of ADHD. Sustained abnormal discharge on the electroencephalogram is associated with increased comorbidity of ADHD with frontal lobe epilepsy.

Maintaining color consistency across panoramic video captured by multi-camera array is a challenging problem. In an uncalibrated multi-camera array with automatic camera settings, each camera individually adjusts its parameters in accordance with the region of scene captured, independent of adjacent cameras. This leads to inconsistency in intensity and color in the stitched panoramic image. Selection of one of the images as reference for color correction may yield poor results because no individual camera image may represent the color palette of entire scene. We address these issues by capturing a separate low resolution reference color image with a field of view that encompasses entire scene. The color statistics of the reference image are used to bring each camera array image into a uniform radiance and color palette. We then estimate optimal color correction parameters using a joint pairwise optimization that minimizes overall error in stitched panorama, thus achieving a fast and robust color correction scheme for multi-camera panoramic high resolution imaging.

Calycosin, which is a kind of typical phytoestrogen, can bind with estrogen receptor and produce estrogen-like effects. Calycosin were reported to have antioxidant, anti-osteoporosis, anti-tumor and immunomodulating activities. This review covers biological activities and its mechanism of calycosin. It will provide a useful reference for clinical research and rational utilization of monomericompound.

X. B. Zhu, Y. B. Wang, O. Chen, D. Q. Zhang, Z. H. Zhang, A. H. Cao, S. Y. Huang and R. P. Sun (2012) Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology38, 602–616 Characterization of the expression of macrophage inflammatory protein-1α (MIP-1α) and C-C chemokine receptor 5 (CCR5) after kainic acid-induced status epilepticus (SE) in juvenile rats Aims: To identify the potential role of macrophage inflammatory protein-1α (MIP-1α) with its C-C chemokine receptor 5 (CCR5) in epileptogenic brain injury, we examined their expression in juvenile rat hippocampus and explored the potential link between MIP-1α, CCR5 and neuropathological alterations after status epilepticus (SE) induced by intracerebroventricular (i.c.v.) kainic acid (KA) injection. Methods: Based on the determination of the development of spontaneous seizures initiated by SE in developing rat brain, we firstly examined hippocampal neurone damage through Nissl and Fluoro-Jade B staining, and evaluated microglial reaction during the early phase following KA-induced SE in 21-day-old rats. MIP-1α and CCR5 protein were quantified by ELISA and Western blot respectively following mRNA by real-time PCR. We also mapped MIP-1α and CCR5 expression in the hippocampus by immunohistochemistry and identified their cellular sources using double-labelling immunofluorescence. Results: In juvenile rats, KA caused characteristic neurone damage in the hippocampal subfields, with accompanying microglial accumulation. In parallel with mRNA expression, MIP-1α protein in hippocampus was transiently increased after KA treatment, and peaked from 16 to 72 h. Double-labelling immunofluorescence revealed that MIP-1α was localized to microglia. Up-regulated CCR5 remained prominent at 24 and 72 h and was mainly localized to activated microglia. Further immunohistochemistry revealed that MIP-1α and CCR5 expression were closely consistent with microglial accumulation in corresponding hippocampal subfields undergoing degenerative changes. Conclusions: Our data indicated that MIP-1α as a regulator, linking with the CCR5 receptor, may be involved within the early stages of the epileptogenic process following SE by i.c.v. KA injection.

Biostabilization can remove considerable amounts of moisture and degradable organic materials from municipal solid waste (MSW), and can therefore be an effective form of pretreatment prior to landfill. The environmental and economic impacts of two combined processes, active stage biostabilization + sanitary landfill (AL), and active and curing stage biostabilization + sanitary landfill (ACL), were compared with sanitary landfill (SL) for MSW with high moisture content. The results indicated that land requirement, leachate generation, and CH(4) emission in the ACL process decreased by 68.6%, 89.1%, and 87.6%, respectively, and the total cost was reduced by 24.1%, compared with SL. This implies that a combined biostabilization and landfill process can be an environmentally friendly and economically feasible alternative to landfill of raw MSW with high moisture content. Sensitivity analysis revealed that treatment capacity and construction costs of biostabilization and the oxidation factor of CH(4) significantly influenced the costs and benefits of the AL and ACL process at an extremely low land price. When the land price was greater than 100 USD m(-2), it became the dominating factor in determining the cost of treatment and disposal, and the total costs of ACL were reduced to less than 40% of those of SL.

Accumulating evidence indicates the involvement of N-methyl- d -aspartate receptors (NMDARs) in regulating neural stem/progenitor cell (NSPC) proliferation. Functional properties of NMDARs can be markedly influenced by incorporating the regulatory subunit NR2B. Here, we aim to analyze the effect of NR2B-containing NMDARs on the proliferation of hippocampal NSPCs and to explore the mechanism responsible for this effect. NSPCs were shown to express NMDAR subunits NR1 and NR2B. The NR2B selective antagonist, Ro 25-6981, prevented the NMDA-induced increase in cell proliferation. Moreover, we demonstrated that the phosphorylation levels of calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase IV (CaMKIV) and cAMP response element binding protein (CREB) were increased by NMDA treatment, whereas Ro 25-6981 decreased them. The role that NR2B-containing NMDARs plays in NSPC proliferation was abolished when CREB phosphorylation was attenuated by CaMKIV silencing. These results suggest that NR2B-containing NMDARs have a positive role in regulating NSPC proliferation, which may be mediated through CaMKIV phosphorylation and subsequent induction of CREB activation.

The chloride permeability of concrete with slag or (20wt%, 30wt%, and 40wt% of binder) and binary slag and fly ash (the ratio of slag and fly ash 5:5, 4:6 and 6:4) was investigated in this study. The results show that the chloride permeability of concrete decreases firstly and increases latterly with the increasing of fly ash content. However, the permeability of concrete with slag decreases sharply with the slag content increases. Especially the content of slag is 40 wt%, the permeability is only 15.4% of the control concrete. The permeability of concrete using binary admixture of slag and fly ash is less than that of fly ash concrete and more than that of slag concrete.

Carbonation of concrete for hydraulic structure containing mineral admixtures is studied. It is observed that the fly ash is not benefit to the carbonation resistance, and the different content of fly ash in concrete may play a different role without activator. However, concrete for hydraulic structure using binary admixture of fly ash and slag will make up the defects and when the fly ash to slag ratio is 1:1, the depth of carbonation decreases comparing to concrete using fly ash.

One aerobic and two combined bio-drying processes were set up to investigate the quantitative relationships of sorting efficiency and combustion properties with organics degradation and water removal during bio-drying. Results showed that the bio-drying could enhance the sorting efficiency of municipal solid waste (MSW) up to 71% from the initial of 34%. The sorting efficiency was correlated with water content negatively (correlation coefficient, r = −0.89) and organics degradation rate positively ( r = 0.92). The higher heating values (HHVs) were correlated with organics degradation negatively for FP (i.e. the sum of only food and paper) ( r = −0.93) but positively for the mixing waste (MW) ( r = 0.90), whereas the lower heating values (LHVs) were negatively correlated with water content for both FP ( r = −0.71) and MW ( r = −0.96). Other combustion properties depended on organics degradation performance, except for ignition performance and combustion rate. The LHVs could be greatly enhanced by the combined process with insufficient aeration during the hydrolytic stage. Compared with FP, MW had higher LHVs and ratios of volatile matter to fixed carbon. Nevertheless, FP had higher final burnout values than MW.

One aerobic and two combined hydrolytic–aerobic processes were set up to investigate the influence of bio-drying on the potential emissions of combustion gases and the quantitative relationships of potential emissions with organics degradation. Results showed that the bio-drying would result in the increase of the HCl and SO 2 emissions and potential for polychlorinated dibenzo- p -dioxins and dibenzofurans (PCDD/Fs) formation, but the decrease of NO x emissions in the combustion. The potential emissions of combustion gases were correlated with organics degradation (correlation coefficient, r = 0.67 for HCl, r = 0.96 for SO 2 , r = 0.91 for PCDD/Fs and r = −0.60 for NO x ). Interestingly, the total emissions of combustion gases based on input waste could be minimized by bio-drying. The bio-drying caused a reduction of NO x emissions but a negligible variation of total emissions of HCl and SO 2 as well as the potential for total PCDD/Fs formation. Moreover, the bio-drying could significantly improve the ratio of gas emissions to low heating values. The mixed waste after bio-drying was more favorable for combustion and the combined process with insufficient aeration during the hydrolytic stage was proposed for the bio-drying operation.

For the purpose of characterizing the evolution of water-extractable organic matter (WEOM) during the biostabilization of municipal solid waste (MSW) and investigating the correlation between biostability and WEOM characteristics, this study conducted 100-day investigation on biostabilization of MSW and applied various analytical approaches to characterize WEOM. The results showed that the respirometric activity of MSW was reduced by 93% to 10.7 mg kg(-1), and the dissolved organic carbon concentration of WEOM kept steady at around 4.0 g kg(-1) after day 44, when the MSW was considered to be stabilized. Moreover, the aromaticity of WEOM significantly increased and the high-molecular weight fraction became the main part of WEOM. Being highly related to the biostability of MSW, the excitation-emission matrix spectra indicated the stability by the fluorescence regional integration technique either by the presence of specific Ex/Em maxima (with wavelength pair of approximately 288/455) or by the rapid increase of normalized excitation-emission area volumes with respect to the humic substances.

The high water content of municipal solid waste (MSW) will reduce the efficiency of mechanical sorting, consequently unfavorable for beneficial utilization. In this study, a combined hydrolytic-aerobic biodrying technology was introduced to remove water from MSW. The total water removals were proved to depend on the ventilation frequency and the temporal span in the hydrolytic stage. The ventilation frequency of 6 times/d was preferable in the hydrolytic stage. The hydrolytic span should not be prolonged more than 4 d. At this optimal scenario, the final water content was 50.5% reduced from the initial water content of 72.0%, presenting a high water removal efficiency up to 78.5%. A positive correlation was observed between the organics losses and the water losses in both hydrolytic and aerobic stages (R = 0.944, p < 0.01). The evolutions of extracellular enzyme activities were shown to be consistent with the organics losses.

Image stitching has been developed to enhance users' immersive experiences by constructing new images of higher spatial resolution and broader field of view from multiple input images. Most image stitching schemes assume 2D transformation of the whole frame between images. There usually exist local misalignments of contents that do not match with the transformation and may cause artifacts such as ghosting. Several schemes including seam cutting, image blending and other image composition algorithms, have been developed to relieve such artifacts. However, these schemes are essentially post-stitching processing that do not address the alignment problem and would fail when the parallax is large. In this paper, we propose a multi-objective content preserving warping (CPW) for local adjustment of image alignment which is optimized considering feature matching, line preserving, line matching, shape smoothness and other factors to significantly reduce the visual artifacts. In particular, we adjust the image warping from their pre-warping results using the homography estimated during the image registration step. Experimental results show that the proposed CPW scheme for image stitching is able to generate much smoother stitching results comparing with the state-of-the-art methods reported in the literature.

Video stitching requires proper seam cutting technique to decide the boundary of the sub video volume cropped from source videos. In theory, approaches such as 3D graph-cuts that search the entire spatiotemporal volume for a cutting surface should provide the best results. However, given the tremendous data size of the camera array video source, the 3D graph-cuts algorithm is extremely resource-demanding and impractical. In this paper, we propose a sequential seam cutting scheme, which is a dynamic programming algorithm that scans the source videos frame-by-frame, updates the pixels' spatiotemporal constraints, and gradually builds the cutting surface in low space complexity. The proposed scheme features flexible seam finding conditions based on temporal and spatial coherence as well as salience. Experimental results show that by relaxing the seam continuity constraint, the proposed video stitching can better handle abrupt motions or sharp edges in the source, reduce stitching artifacts, and render enhanced visual quality.

Objectives. The effect of theKIF6polymorphism Trp719Arg on the risk of T2DM and T2DM with CHD remains unclear.Methods. 946 unrelated subjects of Han Chinese origin were recruited, comprising 346 controls, 312 T2DM, and 288 T2DM + CHD patients. Genotyping was performed by high-resolution melting curve analysis using real-time qPCR. The impact of the variant on T2DM/T2DM + CHD and gene-sex interaction were evaluated by stepwise multiple regression analysis.Results. The frequencies of the Trp719 allele in T2DM and T2DM + CHD patients were similar to the control group, whereas significantly increased 719Arg allele frequencies were observed in male T2DM and T2DM + CHD patients compared with the corresponding control group. Further sex partition analysis revealed that only male 719Arg allele carriers had approximately 3-fold and 5-fold higher risk of T2DM and T2DM + CHD, respectively, than noncarriers. There was also a significant association between carriers and higher TG and lower HDL-C levels.Conclusion. The KIF6 719Arg allele may increase the risk of T2DM and T2DM + CHD only in Han Chinese men by modulating lipid metabolism, especially with regard to TG and HDL.

In recent years, the performance of image denoising has been boosted drastically by nonlocal algorithms and sparse coding techniques. In this paper, we also take a nonlocal approach to image denoising and formulate the problem as one of collaborative LMMSE estimation from grouped image patches. We show that our optimal LMMSE solution amounts to shrinking the singular values of the matrix representation of the grouped image patches. This interpretation of our solution allows us to relate our estimation-theoretic approach to other nonlocal algorithms and sparse coding techniques in the literature. In addition, we develop an iterative algorithm to find the best LMMSE estimate. Experimental results show that our proposed denoising algorithm achieves better PSNR and subjective performance than the state of the art.

Long scene panorama (LSP) can provide the immersive experience for an extended view in one single photograph. The state-of-the-art image mosaicing based LSP techniques are significantly constrained by their high computational complexity, limiting their applications to platforms with rich computing resource. Slit-scanning based schemes, although implementation friendly, heavily rely on the consistency of the camera's speed and suffer from pushbroom distortion. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme which can generate the LSP for the indoor environment via consumer-grade cameras. A novel adaptive resampling scheme is introduced to generate more natural looking panoramas from videos captured by cameras with non-constant moving speed. A multiple slits replacement scheme is also developed to reduce the zigzag distortion and to handle the depth change. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve satisfactory performance with handheld cameras.