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BackgroundCognitive impairment as a complication in post-stroke patients has high prevalence throughout the world. However, few studies have focused on the older adult stroke survivors and explored their prevalence and factors of post-stroke cognitive impairment (PSCI). The study aims to evaluate the cognitive status of stroke patients in Hunan Province, China and to determine the potential risk factors associated with PSCI in order to identify the older adult population in advance and promote healthy aging.MethodsThis cross-sectional study was carried out from August to December, 2021. A total of 520 stroke survivors from 6 tertiary hospitals were randomly selected. The information was collected using the general questionnaire, the Barthel Index Rating Scale and the Mini-mental State Examination (MMSE). Analysis was based on descriptive statistics, chi-square test and the significant variables were included in multivariate logistic regression. The reporting of this cross-sectional study followed the STROBE checklist.ResultsA total of 195 older adults (40.37%) were screened for cognitive impairment based on the results of the MMSE score. Patients in the PSCI group had a higher proportion of individuals aged 70 or older (35.90% vs. 24.65%, p

Agricultural subsidies have an important effect on the farmer’s fertilizer application behavior, but the differences in the effect on different farmers and its mediating mechanism have not been sufficiently studied. Using relevant data from the CFHS database in 2015, this paper focused on the differences in the effect of agricultural subsidies on fertilizer application intensity among farmers with different operation scales and planting structures, as well as the mediating mechanism of the effect of agricultural subsidies on farmers’ fertilizer application intensity. It was found that agricultural subsidies in general helped farmers reduce fertilizer application. This finding still held after replacing the explanatory variables. However, the effect of agricultural subsidies on fertilizer application intensity varied significantly across farmers with different operation scales and planting structures. The fertilizer reduction effect of agricultural subsidies was weakened by the increase in the operation scale and the share of food crop cultivation, i.e., the fertilizer reduction effect of agricultural subsidies on smaller farmers and cash crop cultivation was greater relative to larger farmers and food crop cultivation. Farmers’ operation scale, planting structure and farm machinery inputs are important mediating variables of the effect of agricultural subsidies on farmers’ fertilizer application intensity. The agricultural subsidies played a role in reducing fertilizer application intensity by encouraging farmers to expand their operation scale and increase food crop cultivation, and increased fertilizer application intensity by incentivizing farmers to purchase farm machinery and adopt mechanical farming. Finally, some suggestions were put forward to play the fertilizer reduction effect of agricultural subsidies based on the findings of the study.

Recently, robust principal component analysis (RPCA) has been widely used in the detection of moving objects. However, this method fails to effectively utilize the low-rank prior information of the background and the spatiotemporal continuity prior of the moving object, and the target extraction effect is often poor when dealing with large-scale complex scenes. To solve the above problems, a new non-convex rank approximate RPCA model based on segmentation constraint is proposed. Firstly, the model adopts the low-rank sparse decomposition method to divide the original video sequence into three parts: low-rank background, moving foreground and sparse noise. Then, a new non-convex function is proposed to better constrain the low-rank characteristic of the video background. Finally, based on the spatiotemporal continuity of the foreground object, the video is segmented by the super-pixel segmentation technology, so as to realize the constraint of the motion foreground region. The augmented Lagrange multiplier method is used to solve the model. Experimental results show that the proposed model can effectively improve the accuracy of moving object detection, and has better visual effect of foreground object detection than existed methods.

Echogenic intracardiac focus (EIF) is one of the most common ultrasound soft markers (USMs) in prenatal screening. However, the association of EIF with chromosomal abnormalities is still controversial. From January 2018 to April 2020, a total of 571 fetuses with USMs in our center were enrolled, among which 150 (26.27%) presented EIFs. We analyzed the karyotype anomalies and copy number variations (CNVs) in fetuses who presented EIFs by comparing their ultrasound indications, maternal ages and gestational stages. There were no statistically significant differences in the incidence of chromosomal abnormalities between fetuses with EIFs and the fetuses with USMs (4.00 vs. 7.71%, p = 0.112). Additionally, the incidence of chromosomal abnormalities was not related to maternal age (4.10% in maternal age below 35 yeas vs. 3.57% in maternal age above 35, p = 1.000). Interestingly, after 28 weeks of gestation, fetuses with EIFs showed more chromosomal abnormalities (20.00%) than that in the group before 28 weeks of gestation (2.22%, p = 0.014), and this result was attributed to the detection of pathogenic CNVs. After birth, 25 of children conducted cardiac development re-examination. Among them, 9 (36%, 9/25) were diagnosed with congenital heart disease, primarily patent foramen oval and ventricular septal defects (7/9, 77.77%). We concluded that the appearance of EIFs in early or mid-trimester would not indicate an increased risk of fetal chromosomal abnormalities. However, the persistence of EIFs in late trimester was associated with a higher risk of pathology-related CNVs and its persistent appearance may indicate heart development defects after birth. Thus, our results suggest that CNV detection has its advantages in prenatal diagnosis, especially for those with EIFs that persist in the third trimester.

Background/foreground separation has become an inevitable step in numerous image/video processing applications, such as image/video inpainting, anomaly detection, motion segmentation, augmented reality, and so on. Recent low-rank based approaches, such as robust principal component analysis separating a data matrix into a low-rank matrix with a sparse matrix, have achieved encouraging performance. However, these approaches usually need relatively high computation cost, mainly due to calculation of full or partial singular value decomposition of large matrices. On the other hand, the nuclear norm is widely exploited as a convex surrogate of the original rank function, while it is not a tighter envelope of the original rank function. To address these above-mentioned issues, this paper proposes a fast background/foreground separation algorithm in which the low-rank constraint is solved by a matrix factorization scheme, thus heavily reducing the computation cost. We further adopt two non-convex low-rank approximations to improve the robustness and flexibility of the traditional nuclear norm. In comparison with the state-of-the-art low-rank reconstruction methods, experimental results on challenging data sets, which contain different real data sets, show our superior performance in both image clarity and computation efficiency.

Reconstruction of highly accelerated dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is of crucial importance for the medical diagnosis. The application of general robust principal component analysis (RPCA) to MRI can increase imaging speed and efficiency. However, conventional RPCA makes use of nuclear norm as convex surrogate of the rank function, whose drawbacks have been mentioned in plenty of literature. Recently, nonconvex surrogates of the rank function in RPCA have been widely investigated and proved to be tighter rank approximation than nuclear norm by the massive experimental results. Motivated by this, we propose a nonconvex alternating direction method based on nonconvex rank approximation to reconstruct dynamic MRI data from undersampled $k-t$ space data. We solve the associated nonconvex model by the alternating direction method and difference of convex programming. The convergence analysis provided guarantees the effectiveness of our algorithm. Experimental results on cardiac perfusion and cardiac cine MRI data demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art MRI reconstruction methods in both image clarity and computation efficiency.

Background: China had implemented policies to limit antimicrobials prescription since 2004; we conducted this study to reflect the effect of these national policies by analyzing antimicrobial prescription trends of medical insurance in patients from 2003 to 2014 in Changsha city, China. Methods: The participants were inpatients of the medical insurance of urban workers (UEBMI). Data were extracted from medical insurance information system of Changsha Medical Insurance Institution, which directly connects with hospitals information systems. Results: Trend analysis showed great changes in antimicrobial prescription and inpatients’ cost on antimicrobials over the study period. Antimicrobial prescription rates gradually declined over the study period from 79.0% in 2003 to 43.5% in 2014 (adjusted OR0.205; 95%CI 0.198 to 0.213). There was a quicker decline from 2011 to 2014 (with implementing national antimicrobial stewardship action plan) than the period from 2003 to 2010 (with implementing antimicrobials use education and self-management strategies). The proportion of inpatients used one antimicrobial increased significantly from 25.6% in 2003 to 46.7% in 2014, while the proportion of inpatients used three or more antimicrobials gradually decreased. Bacterial culture rate increased from 20.4% in 2003 to 36.6% in 2014 (adjusted OR 2.248; 95% CI 2.149 to 2.352). The average costs on antimicrobials decreased significantly, from 277.43 US Dollar in 2003 to 91.05 US Dollar in 2014. Conclusion: National efforts to promote rational use of antimicrobials in clinical practice have had a positive effect over the past decade in China.

This paper deals with the integral boundary value problems of fractional differential equations at resonance. By Mawhin’s coincidence degree theory, we present some new results on the existence of solutions for a class of differential equations of fractional order with integral boundary conditions at resonance. An example is also included to illustrate the main results.

BACKGROUND: We investigated the relationships between the ALOX5AP gene rs10507391 and rs4769874 polymorphisms, serum levels of leukotriene (LT) B4, and risk of acute coronary syndrome (ACS). METHODS: A total of 709 participants, comprising 508 ACS patients (ACS group) and 201 noncoronary artery disease patients with chest pain (control group) were recruited from the Han population of the Changwu region in China. Two polymorphic loci were genotyped using polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis. Serum LTB4 level was determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. RESULTS: Serum LTB4 levels were significantly higher (P

A modified parallel variable distribution (PVD) algorithm for solving large-scale constrained optimization problems is developed, which modifies quadratic subproblem QPl at each iteration instead of the QPl0 of the SQP-type PVD algorithm proposed by C. A. Sagastizábal and M. V. Solodov in 2002. The algorithm can circumvent the difficulties associated with the possible inconsistency of QPl0 subproblem of the original SQP method. Moreover, we introduce a nonmonotone technique instead of the penalty function to carry out the line search procedure with more flexibly. Under appropriate conditions, the global convergence of the method is established. In the final part, parallel numerical experiments are implemented on CUDA based on GPU (Graphics Processing unit).