Search

Abstract Objectives This study aimed to investigate the impact of pregnancy and pre-existing comorbidities on COVID-19 infections and associated complications of hospitalisation and mortality in women of reproductive age (WRA). The study also compared the risk of severe COVID-19 complications between pregnant women (PW) and non-pregnant women (NPW) with and without pre-existing comorbidities. Special focus was placed on some understudied comorbidities of immunosuppression, chronic renal disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Methods The study utilized anonymized patient-related information for a population of 7,342,869 WRA from the Mexican Ministry of Health data repository on COVID-19. Descriptive variables were characterized using frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations. Adjusted odds ratios (aORs) were used to assess the associations between risk factors and outcomes of hospitalisation and mortality. The study covered the entire COVID-19 pandemic period from January 30, 2020, to May 5, 2023. Results The findings revealed that PW were not more likely to get COVID-19 infections than NPW. PW with COVID-19 infections were more likely to require hospital admission, intubation treatments, and ICU admission compared to NPW with COVID-19. PW with immunosuppression had an increased odds ratio (aOR) of getting COVID-19 infections compared to NPW (PW: aOR = 1.0396; NPW: aOR = 0.8373). NPW with immunosuppression had higher risk of mortality (all-cause death: aOR = 1.7084; COVID-19-associated death: aOR = 1.4079) and hospitalisation (all-cause hospitalisation: aOR = 4.1328; COVID-19-associated hospitalisation: aOR = 3.0451) than NPW without immunosuppression. Renal disease was identified as a concerning pre-existing condition that increased the risks of COVID-19 associated mortality/hospitalizations and all-cause mortality/hospitalizations for both PW and NPW. NPW with renal disease had much higher odds ratio (aOR) of either COVID-19-associated-hospitalisations (NPW: aOR = 8.639; PW: aOR = 1.7603) or all-cause hospitalisations (NPW: aOR = 8.8594; PW: aOR = 1.786) than PW with renal disease. Conclusions This study provides valuable insights into the impact of pregnancy and pre-existing comorbidities on COVID-19 outcomes in WRA. The findings underscore the importance of considering demographic factors and pre-existing comorbidities in the management of PW with COVID-19. The study also highlights the need for further research to understand the unique impacts of different comorbidities, particularly immunosuppression and renal disease, on COVID-19 outcomes in WRA.

Futures commodity prices are affected by many factors, and traditional forecasting methods require close attention from professionals and suffer from high subjectivity, slowness, and low forecasting accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new method for predicting the fluctuation in futures commodity prices accurately. We solve the problem of the slow convergence of ordinary artificial bee colony algorithms by introducing a population chaotic mapping initialization operator and use the resulting chaotic mapping artificial bee colony algorithm as a trainer to learn long short-term memory neural network hyperparameters. With the combination of gate structures learned by the algorithm, the long short-term memory network can accurately characterize the basic rules of futures market prices. Finally, we conduct a series of backtesting experiments on gold and natural gas futures commodity prices to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The experimental results show that, compared with various existing optimization models, our proposed model is able to obtain the lowest mean absolute error, mean square error, and root mean square error in the least number of iterations. In summary, the model can be used to predict the prices of a wide range of futures commodities.

Chemotherapy is one of the most effective treatments for cancer, but the efficacy of standard chemotherapy regimens is often limited by toxicities and the individual heterogeneity of cancers. Precise dosing is an important tool to improve efficacy and reduce significant differences in toxicity. However, most of the existing studies on chemotherapy optimization fail to fully consider the toxic side effects, drug resistance, and drug combinations, and thus the chemotherapy regimens obtained may face difficulty in achieving the expected efficacy and also affect the subsequent treatment. Therefore, this paper establishes a tumor growth model for the combination chemotherapy of cell cycle-specific and non-cycle-specific drugs and includes the factors of acquired drug resistance and toxic side effects, proposing an improved multi-objective Squirrel Search Algorithm, the TA-MOSSA, to solve the problem of accurate chemotherapy drug optimization. In this paper, experiments were conducted to analyze the efficacy of chemotherapy dosing regimens obtained by the TA-MOSSA based on the tumor growth model, and the results show that the TA-MOSSA can provide effective chemotherapy regimens for patients who take different treatment approaches.

With the enhancement of information volume, people are not satisfied with transmitting only a single secret image at a time but chase to hide multiple secret images in a single picture; however, the large-capacity steganographic scale can easily lead to the degradation of the quality of the image, which attracts the attention of eavesdroppers. In this paper, we propose a Chaotic mapping-enHanced imAge Steganography nEtwork (CHASE), which pioneers to hide colour images in grey images and reduces the difference between the container image and the cover image through the image permutation method, so as to enhance the security of the steganography. The method demonstrates excellent steganalysis resistance in experiments and introduces Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to improve the image fidelity in large-capacity steganographic scales. The fusion of chaotic mapping and GAN optimisation enables the steganographic network to simultaneously balance security and image quality. The experimental results show that CHASE can keep the secret image with good invisibility under large-capacity steganographic scales, and at the same time, it can reveal the secret image with high fidelity, and its steganalysis-resistant capability is much better than other state-of-the-art methods.

In the big data era, a tremendous volume of electronic documents is transmitted via the network, many of which include sensitive information about the country and businesses. There is a pressing need to be able to perform intelligent sensing of sensitive information on these documents in order to be able to discover and guarantee the security of sensitive information in this enormous volume of documents. Although the low effectiveness of manual detection is resolved by the current method of handling sensitive information, there are still downsides, such as poor processing effects and slow speed. This study creatively proposes the Text Sensitive Information Intelligent Perception algorithm (TSIIP), which detects sensitive words at the word level and sensitive statements at the statement level to obtain the final assessment score of the text. We experimentally compare this algorithm with other methods on an existing dataset of sensitive Chinese information. We use the metrics measuring the accuracy of the binary classification model, where the F1 score reaches 0.938 (+0.6%), and the F2 score reaches 0.946 (+1%), and the experimental results fully demonstrate the superiority of this algorithm.

Chemotherapy as an effective method is now widely used to treat various types of malignant tumors. With advances in medicine and drug dosimetry, the precise dose adjustment of chemotherapy drugs has become a significant challenge. Several academics have investigated this problem in depth. However, these studies have concentrated on the efficiency of cancer treatment while ignoring other significant bodily indicators in the patient, which could cause other complications. Therefore, to handle the above problem, this research creatively proposes a multi-objective deep reinforcement learning. First, in order to balance the competing indications inside the optimization process and to give each indicator a better outcome, we propose a multi-criteria decision-making strategy based on the integration concept. In addition, we provide a novel multi-indicator experience replay for multi-objective deep reinforcement learning, which significantly speeds up learning compared to conventional approaches. By modeling various indications in the body of the patient, our approach is used to simulate the treatment of tumors. The experimental results demonstrate that the treatment plan generated by our method can better balance the contradiction between the tumor’s treatment effect and other biochemical indicators than other treatment plans, and its treatment time is only one-third that of multi-objective deep reinforcement learning, which is now in use.

Health assessment is an important part of PHM technology, which is crucial to product state monitoring and management. With the complexity of product structure and diversification of functions, the product health presents uncertainty under the complex influence of multiple factors. Nowadays, the general health assessment method is relatively simple and only considers the product function completeness, and the assessment effect accuracy still needs to be strengthened in the actual working environment. Most assessment parameters and assessment methods are selected ignoring the impact of environmental changes and operating time performance. Therefore, a new health measurement method for the avionic radio-frequency power source based on a three-dimensional complex measurement model is proposed. Firstly, the product health definition is proposed, and the health connotation is analyzed from three-dimensional aspects containing functional integrity, environmental adaptability, and temporal sustainability. According to the function and structure characteristics of radio-frequency power source, the health characterization parameters are then obtained and the health assessment parameter system is established. Finally, the three-dimensional complex measurement model is given, and the RF power source health assessment is carried out comprehensively from integrity, stability, and reliability aspects. The three-dimensional health assessment method provides a new way to solve the uncertainty of product health state under multiple factor effects, which is conducive to the targeted optimization management strategy.

Imbalanced and excessive fertilizer application has resulted in low yields and reduced nutrient use efficiency for melon production in China. Estimating nutrient requirements is crucial for effectively developing site-specific fertilizer recommendations for increasing yield and profit while reducing negative environmental impacts. Relationships between the yield and nutrient uptake requirements of above-ground dry matter were assessed using 1127 on-farm observations (2000–2020) from melon production regions of China. The quantitative evaluation of fertility of tropical soils (QUEFTS) model was used to estimate nutrient requirements. It predicted a linear increase in yield at balanced nutrient uptake levels until the yield reached approximately 60–80% of the potential yield. In order to produce 1000 kg of fruit, 2.9, 0.4 and 3.2 kg/ha of N, P and K (7.2:1.0:7.8), respectively, were required for above-ground parts, while the corresponding nutrient internal efficiencies were 345.3, 2612.6 and 310.0 kg per kg N, P and K, respectively, whereas 1.4, 0.2 and 1.9 kg of N, P and K were required to replace nutrients removed after harvest. The corresponding fruit absorption rates were 47.0%, 59.5% and 58.2%, respectively. Field validation experiments confirmed the consistency between observed and simulated uptake rates, indicating that this model could estimate nutrient requirements. These findings will help develop fertilizer recommendations for improving melon yield and nutrient use efficiency.

(1) Background: We aimed to develop a transparent machine-learning (ML) framework to automatically identify patients with a condition from electronic health records (EHRs) via a parsimonious set of features. (2) Methods: We linked multiple sources of EHRs, including 917,496,869 primary care records and 40,656,805 secondary care records and 694,954 records from specialist surgeries between 2002 and 2012, to generate a unique dataset. Then, we treated patient identification as a problem of text classification and proposed a transparent disease-phenotyping framework. This framework comprises a generation of patient representation, feature selection, and optimal phenotyping algorithm development to tackle the imbalanced nature of the data. This framework was extensively evaluated by identifying rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and ankylosing spondylitis (AS). (3) Results: Being applied to the linked dataset of 9657 patients with 1484 cases of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and 204 cases of ankylosing spondylitis (AS), this framework achieved accuracy and positive predictive values of 86.19% and 88.46%, respectively, for RA and 99.23% and 97.75% for AS, comparable with expert knowledge-driven methods. (4) Conclusions: This framework could potentially be used as an efficient tool for identifying patients with a condition of interest from EHRs, helping clinicians in clinical decision-support process.

Plant specific NAC (NAM, ATAF1/2 and CUC2) transcription factors (TFs) play important roles in response to abiotic stress. In this study, we identified and characterized a NAC protein, ThNAC7, from Tamarix hispida. ThNAC7 is a nuclear localized protein and has transcriptional activation activity. ThNAC7 expression was markedly induced by salt and osmotic stresses. Transiently transformed T. hispida seedlings overexpressing ThNAC7 (OE) or with RNA interference (RNAi) silenced ThNAC7 were generated to investigate abiotic stress tolerance via the gain- and loss- of function. Overexpressing ThNAC7 showed an increased reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavenging capabilities and proline content, which was accomplished by enhancing the activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and peroxidase (POD) in transiently transformed T. hispida and stably transformed Arabidopsis plants. Additionally, ThNAC7 activated these physiological changes by regulating the transcription level of P5CS, SOD and POD genes. RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) comparison between wild-type and ThNAC7-transformed Arabidopsis showed that more than 40 known salt tolerance genes might regulated by ThNAC7, including stress tolerance-related genes and TF genes. The results indicated that ThNAC7 induces the transcription level of genes associated with stress tolerance to enhance salt and osmotic stress tolerance via an increase in osmotic potential and enhanced ROS scavenging.

Our previous study revealed that early application of electrical field stimulation (EFS) with the anode at the lesion and the cathode distal to the lesion reduced injury potential, inhibited secondary injury and was neuroprotective in the dorsal corticospinal tract after spinal cord injury (SCI). The objective of this study was to further evaluate the effect of EFS on protection of anterior horn motoneurons and their target musculature after SCI and its mechanism. Rats were randomized into three equal groups. The EFS group received EFS for 30 minutes immediately after injury at T10. SCI group rats were only subjected to SCI and sham group rats were only subjected to laminectomy. Luxol fast blue staining demonstrated that spinal cord tissue in the injury center was better protected; cross-sectional area and perimeter of injured tissue were significantly smaller in the EFS group than in the SCI group. Immunofluorescence and transmission electron microscopy showed that the number of spinal cord anterior horn motoneurons was greater and the number of abnormal neurons reduced in the EFS group compared with the SCI group. Wet weight and cross-sectional area of vastus lateralis muscles were smaller in the SCI group to in the sham group. However, EFS improved muscle atrophy and behavioral examination showed that EFS significantly increased the angle in the inclined plane test and Tarlov’s motor grading score. The above results confirm that early EFS can effectively impede spinal cord anterior horn motoneuron loss, promote motor function recovery and reduce muscle atrophy in rats after SCI.

The robust designs of broadband extreme ultraviolet multilayers based on the multiobjective genetic algorithm are validated experimentally. In order to reduce the influence of random layer thickness fluctuations on the great deformation of the experimental reflection of extreme ultraviolet multilayer with a wide angular band, the multiobjective genetic algorithm has been improved to optimize the multilayer system composed by the layer thicknesses which can be controlled precisely. The robust designs of broadband Mo/Si multilayers were fabricated, and the experimental results were presented and analyzed, and then the advantage of robust multilayer designs was demonstrated.