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Xin Xu,1,2,&ast; James Jiqi Wang,1,2,&ast; Hu Zhao,1,2 Kun Miao,1,2 Guanglin Cui,1,2 Yuxuan Zhang,1,2 Xiaoyun Yang,1,2 Luyun Wang,1,2 Junfang Wu,2 Dao Wen Wang1,2 1Division of Cardiology, Department of Internal Medicine, Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China; 2Hubei Key Laboratory of Genetics and Molecular Mechanism of Cardiological Disorders, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Dao Wen Wang; Junfang Wu, Division of Cardiology, Department of Internal Medicine Tongji Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 1095# Jiefang Ave, Wuhan, 430030, People’s Republic of China, Tel/Fax +86-278366-3280, Email dwwang@tjh.tjmu.edu.cn; junfang.wu@tjh.tjmu.edu.cnBackground: Vasospastic angina (VSA) is caused by severe diffuse or segmental coronary artery spasms. Patients with variant angina have poor clinical outcomes, although nitrates and calcium blockers help improve patient symptoms because there is no understanding of the etiology and causal treatment. The present study investigated whether VSA is associated with inflammation of the heart.Patients and Methods: A total of 109 patients with VSA diagnosed by the presence of recurrent angina pectoris, typical electrocardiography, and coronary angiography were recruited, and 61 normal participants and 61 patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and coronary artery stenosis were recruited as controls. The plasma levels of 24 cytokines were measured using a magnetic Luminex assay, and endothelin-1 and histamine levels tested using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay and mass-spectrometry, respectively, for all participants. Furthermore, four patients with VSA underwent 18-fluorine fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT).Results: The plasma levels of interleukin (IL)-12p70, IL-13, PDL-1, IL-10, IL-6, IL-15, macrophage inflammatory protein (MIP)-1α, and MIP-1β in patients with VSA were significantly higher than those in both normal controls and patients with AMI (p< 0.001) but did not differ between normal controls and patients with AMI. 18F-FDG PET/CT showed that the left ventricle, coronary perivascular tissue volume, and coronary perivascular FDG uptake were significantly increased in all four patients.Conclusion: Our findings demonstrate that VSA patients have significantly elevated plasma cytokine levels and myocardial and pericoronary inflammation, suggesting that VSA is associated with myocarditis. This study provides novel insights into the etiology and treatment of VSA.Keywords: variant angina, myocarditis, cytokines, inflammation

This study investigates the planning problem of fast-charging stations for electric vehicles with the consideration of uncertain charging demands. This research aims to determine where to build fast-charging stations and how many charging piles to be installed in each fast-charging station. Based on the multicommodity flow model, a chance-constrained programming model is established to address this planning problem. A scenario-based approach as well as a big-M coefficients generation algorithm are applied to reformulate the programming model into tractable one, then the Dantzig–Wolfe decomposition method is leveraged to find its optimal solution. Finally, a numerical experiment is conducted in a 25-node network to assess the efficiency of the proposed model and solution approach.

PURPOSE: Congenital bilateral absence of the vas deferens (CBAVD) is a major cause of obstructive azoospermia and male factor infertility. CBAVD is mainly caused by mutations in the genes encoding CFTR (cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator) and ADGRG2 (adhesion G protein-coupled receptor G2). This study aimed to describe CFTR and ADGRG2 variations in 46 Chinese CBAVD patients and evaluated sperm retrieval and assisted reproductive technology outcomes. METHODS: The CFTR and ADGRG2 genes were sequenced and analyzed by whole-exome sequencing (WES), and variations were identified by Sanger sequencing. Bioinformatic analysis was performed. We retrospectively reviewed the outcomes of patients undergoing sperm retrieval surgery and intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). RESULTS: In total, 35 of 46 (76.09%) patients carried at least one variation in CFTR, but no copy number variants or ADGRG2 variations were found. In addition to the IVS9-5 T allele, there were 27 CFTR variations, of which 4 variations were novel and predicted to be damaging by bioinformatics. Spermatozoa were successfully retrachieved in 46 patients, and 39 of the patients had their own offspring through ICSI. CONCLUSION: There are no obvious hotspot CFTR mutations in Chinese CBAVD patients besides the IVS9-5 T allele. Therefore, WES might be the best detection method, and genetic counseling should be different from that provided to Caucasian populations. After proper counseling, all patients can undergo sperm retrieval from their epididymis or testis, and most of them can have their own children through ICSI.

The band structure properties of phononic crystal is important to evaluate the vibration and noise reduction of acoustic metamaterials. Taking the 2D hexachiral phononic crystal as an example, the band structure and Dirac cone properties were investigated by numerical analysis, and the four-fold accidental degenerate Dirac point was obtained in the center of Brillouin zone. By adjusting the design parameters of ligament structure, a double Dirac cone was broken and a novel directional band gap was formed. The influence of geometric parameters on the directional band gaps width was investigated, and the band structure inversion problem was further discussed. This research can provide support for the application of hexachiral phononic crystal in elastic wave manipulation and acoustic topological insulator.

Obesity-driven cardiac lipid accumulation can progress to lipotoxic cardiomyopathy. Soluble epoxide hydrolase (sEH) is the major enzyme that metabolizes epoxyeicosatrienoic acids (EETs), which have biological activity of regulating lipid metabolism. The current study explores the unknown role of sEH deficiency in lipotoxic cardiomyopathy and its underlying mechanism. Wild-type and Ephx2 knock out (sEH KO) C57BL/6 J mice were fed with high-fat diet (HFD) for 24 weeks to induce lipotoxic cardiomyopathy animal models. Palmitic acid (PA) was utilized to induce lipotoxicity to cardiomyocytes for in vitro study. We found sEH KO, independent of plasma lipid and blood pressures, significantly attenuated HFD-induced myocardial lipid accumulation and cardiac dysfunction in vivo. HFD-induced lipotoxic cardiomyopathy and dysfunction of adenosine 5′-monophosphate-activated protein kinase-mammalian target of rapamycin complex (AMPK-mTORC) signaling mediated lipid autophagy in heart were restored by sEH KO. In primary neonatal mouse cardiomyocytes, both sEH KO and sEH substrate EETs plus sEH inhibitor AUDA treatments attenuated PA-induced lipid accumulation. These effects were blocked by inhibition of AMPK or autophagy. The outcomes were supported by the results that sEH KO and EETs plus AUDA rescued HFD- and PA-induced impairment of autophagy upstream signaling of AMPK-mTORC, respectively. These findings revealed that sEH deficiency played an important role in attenuating myocardial lipid accumulation and provided new insights into treating lipotoxic cardiomyopathy. Regulation of autophagy via AMPK-mTORC signaling pathway is one of the underlying mechanisms.

Cholesterol homeostasis plays a significant role in cardiovascular disease. Previous studies have indicated that ATP-binding cassette transporter A1 (

In agricultural production with small farmers as the main body, the service scale operation is one of the ways to obtain scale operation benefits. This paper constructs a tripartite evolutionary game model of agricultural scale service providers (integrators), demand subjects (farmers), and agriculture-related government departments and analyzes the influencing factors, influencing relations, and evolutionary stable equilibrium results of each participant’s strategy choice. The results show that improving rewards and punishments and strengthening supervision by agriculture-related government departments will help integrators provide high-quality services and encourage farmers to actively produce and reduce speculation; when the cost difference between high-quality service and low-quality service is large, the probability of high-quality service provided by integrators will be reduced, and the evolution result of low Pareto efficiency may appear in the system; when the speculative cost of farmers is not high, the lobbying efforts of integrators will increase the speculative behavior of farmers. Finally, MATLAB2018a is used to simulate and analyze the validity of the model results, which provides a theoretical reference for the scale operation of agricultural services.

Determining the association between genetic variation and phenotype is a key step to study the mechanism of Alzheimer's disease (AD), laying the foundation for studying drug therapies and biomarkers. AD is the most common type of dementia in the aged population. At present, three early-onset AD genes (APP, PSEN1, PSEN2) and one late-onset AD susceptibility gene apolipoprotein E (APOE) have been determined. However, the pathogenesis of AD remains unknown. Imaging genetics, an emerging interdisciplinary field, is able to reveal the complex mechanisms from the genetic level to human cognition and mental disorders via macroscopic intermediates. This paper reviews methods of establishing genotype-phenotype to explore correlations, including sparse canonical correlation analysis, sparse reduced rank regression, sparse partial least squares and so on. We found that most research work did poorly in supervised learning and exploring the nonlinear relationship between SNP-QT.

A novel SPECT model with an elliptical orbit and multiple detectors is proposed for detecting the metabolism of the human heart. Under the structure of the proposed model, the distance between the ...

Background: Blood purification therapy has not been applied in the detoxification of germanium compounds. This report described a case of germanium poisoning with renal failure, liver dysfunction, ...

Microalgae are the most abundant microorganisms in aquatic environments, and many possess the ability to remove organic contaminants. The presence of endocrine disruption compounds (EDCs) in many coastal marine systems and their associated risks have elicited great concern, especially in the case of nonylphenol (NP), which is classified as a priority contaminate by the U.S. EPA. In this context, batch experiments were conducted to investigate the intracellular absorption, extracellular adsorption and biodegradation of NP by four species of marine microalgae: Phaeocystis globosa, Nannochloropsis oculata, Dunaliella salina and Platymonas subcordiformis. The results showed a sharp reduction of NP in medium containing the four microalgal species during the first 24 h of incubation, and the four species exhibited the greatest capacity for NP adsorption and absorption within 24 h of culture. However, the amount of NP absorbed and adsorbed by all four microalgae decreased with increasing time in culture, and intracellular absorption was greater than extracellular adsorption. After 120 h of exposure to NP, the four species could biodegrade most of the NP in the medium, with efficiencies ranging from 43.43 to 90.94%. In sum, we found that the four microalgae have high biodegradation percentages and can thus improve the bioremediation of NP-contaminated water.

Background we sought to describe the tendency and extent of high-sensitivity cardiac troponin I (hs-cTnI) changes in patients with fulminant myocarditis (FM) after admission, and to explore the relationship between in-hospital outcome of FM and the value of absolute and relative change of hs-cTnI within 24 h and 48 h after admission. Methods a total of 83 cases of FM patient admitted to our center from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2019 were included, 69 patients survived and 14 patients died. The absolute and relative change of hs-cTnI within 24 h and 48 h were described as range distribution. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and Cox analysis were performed to determine the relationship between in-hospital outcome of FM and hs-cTnI change. Results In survive group, 78% patients experienced the decline of hs-cTnI within 24 h, while 36% of death group had the declined tendency of hs-cTnI (P = 0.003). Absolute and relative change of hs-cTnI within 24 h and 48 h were displayed as range distribution. Multivariate analysis revealed that the decline tendency of hs-cTnI change within 24 h, in addition with time from onset to hospital, intravenous immunoglobulin treatment and abnormal of creatinine, were associated with the outcome of FM (for the decline tendency of hs-cTnI within 24 h, OR = 0.10, 95% CI = 0.02–0.68, P = 0.018). ROC curve revealed optimized cutoff values of -0.618 ng/ml for absolute change within 24 h (AUC = 0.800, P P P P

Background: In current pandemic of COVID-19, approximately 15% to 30% of critically ill COVID-19 patients developed acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) with a high mortality. Extracorporeal membrane of oxygenation (ECMO) provides direct support for both lung and heart in ARDS. However, the role of ECMO in COVID-19 related ARDS was still controversial. The aim of this study was to provide insights into the mortality, intensive care unit (ICU) management, risk factors for mortality, 180-day short term prognosis of the COVID-19 related severe ARDS patients receiving ECMO treatment. Methods: From Feb 2nd, 2020 to April 27th, 2020, we included adult COVID-19 related ARDS patients admitted to intensive care unit in Tongji Hospital. Totally, 53 patients were retrospectively analyzed. They were divided into ECMO (mechanical ventilation with ECMO, n=16) and non-ECMO group (mechanical ventilation, n=37). The primary outcome was all-cause 60-day mortality. The secondary outcomes were complications on ECMO, successful weaning from ECMO, and all-cause 180-day mortality. Results: The all-cause 60-day mortality was 37.5% (6/16) in ECMO group and 86.5% (32/37) in non-ECMO group (HR, 0.196; 95% CI, 0.053-0.721; p=0.014). 10 (62.5%) patients were successfully weaned from ECMO. The all-cause 180-day mortality was 56.3% (9/16) in ECMO group and 33 (89.2%, 33/37) in non-ECMO group (HR, 0.298; 95% CI, 0.130-0.680; p=0.004). All the patients in ECMO group suffered from at least one device-related complication with coagulopathy (81.3%) being most frequently seen. Up to 180-day follow up after disease onset, the ECMO-treated survivors maintained good quality of life without severe complications or disabilities. Hypercapnia, thrombopenia, myocardial injury and elevation of IL-8 and IL-10 during ECMO treatment were strongly associated with death.Conclusion: This study showed the COVID-19 patients significantly benefited from ECMO treatment during severe ARDS, which supported the application of ECMO as an indicated strategy in the management of COVID-19 related ARDS.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is an incurable neurodegenerative disease primarily affecting the elderly population. Early diagnosis of AD is critical for the management of this disease. Imaging genetics examines the influence of genetic variants (i.e., single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)) on brain structure and function and many novel approaches of imaging genetics are proposed for studying AD. We review and synthesize the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) genetic associations with quantitative disease endophenotypes including structural and functional neuroimaging, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), positron emission tomography (PET), and fluid biomarker assays. In this review, we survey recent publications using neuroimaging and genetic data of AD, with a focus on methods capturing multivariate effects accommodating the large number variables from both imaging data and genetic data. We review methods focused on bridging the imaging and genetic data by establishing genotype-phenotype association, including sparse canonical correlation analysis, parallel independent component analysis, sparse reduced rank regression, sparse partial least squares, genome-wide association study, and so on. The broad availability and wide scope of ADNI genetic and phenotypic data has advanced our understanding of the genetic basis of AD and has nominated novel targets for future pharmaceutical therapy and biomarker development.

ImportanceCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a pandemic with no specific drugs and high mortality. The most urgent thing is to find effective treatments.ObjectiveTo determine whether hydroxychloroquine application may be associated with a decreased risk of death in critically ill COVID-19 patients and what is potential mechanism.Design, Setting and PatientsThis retrospective study included all 568 critically ill COVID-19 patients who were confirmed by pathogen laboratory tests despite antiviral treatment and had severe acute respiratory distress syndrome, PAO2/FIO2 MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURESIn-hospital death and hospital stay time (day) were obtained, level of inflammatory cytokine (IL-6) was measured and compared between HCQ and NHCQ treatments.RESULTSThe median age of 568 critically ill patients is 68 (57, 76) years old with 37.0% being female. Mortalities are 18.8% (9/48) in HCQ group and 45.8% (238/520) in NHCQ group (pCONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCEHydroxychloroquine treatment is significantly associated with a decreased mortality in critically ill patients with COVID-19 through attenuation of inflammatory cytokine storm. Therefore, hydroxychloroquine should be prescribed for treatment of critically ill COVID-19 patients to save lives.Key PointsQuestionCould hydroxychloroquine administration be beneficial in the treatment of critically ill patients with COVID-19?FindingsIn this retrospective study, a total of 568 critically ill patients with COVID-19 all received basic therapy and additionally 48 of them received hydroxychloroquine for 7–10 days (200 mg twice per day). Hydroxychloroquine treatment is significantly associated with a decreased mortality in critically ill COVID-19 patients and attenuated inflammatory cytokine IL-6 level.MeaningOur data suggest that hydroxychloroquine could be used to treat critically ill patients with COVID-19 which may save a lot of lives.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a pandemic with no specific drugs and high fatality. The most urgent need is to find effective treatments. We sought to determine whether hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) application may reduce the death risk of critically ill COVID-19 patients. In this retrospective study, we included 550 critically ill COVID-19 patients who need mechanical ventilation in Tongji Hospital, Wuhan, from February 1, 2020 to April 4, 2020. All 550 patients received comparable basic treatments including antiviral drugs and antibiotics, and 48 of them were treated with oral HCQ treatment (200 mg twice a day for 7-10 days) in addition to the basic treatments. Primary endpoint is fatality of patients, and inflammatory cytokine levels were compared between HCQ and non-hydroxychloroquine (NHCQ) treatments. We found that fatalities are 18.8% (9/48) in HCQ group, which is significantly lower than 47.4% (238/502) in the NHCQ group (P

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a highly contagious disease and a serious threat to human health. COVID-19 can cause multiple organ dysfunction, such as respiratory and circulatory failure, liver and kidney injury, disseminated intravascular coagulation, and thromboembolism, and even death. The World Health Organization reports that the mortality rate of severe-type COVID-19 is over 50%. Currently, the number of severe cases worldwide has increased rapidly, but the experience in the treatment of infected patients is still limited. Given the lack of specific antiviral drugs, multi-organ function support treatment is important for patients with COVID-19. To improve the cure rate and reduce the mortality of patients with severe- and critical-type COVID-19, this paper summarizes the experience of organ function support in patients with severe- and critical-type COVID-19 in Optical Valley Branch of Tongji Hospital, Wuhan, China. This paper systematically summarizes the procedures of functional support therapies for multiple organs and systems, including respiratory, circulatory, renal, hepatic, and hematological systems, among patients with severe- and critical-type COVID-19. This paper provides a clinical reference and a new strategy for the optimal treatment of COVID-19 worldwide.

A 360-area surface-based cortical parcellation is extended to study mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) from healthy control (HC) using the joint human connectome project multi-modal parcellation (JHCPMMP) proposed by us. We propose a novel classification method named as JMMP-LRR to accurately identify different stages toward AD by integrating the JHCPMMP with the logistic regression-recursive feature elimination (LR-RFE). In three-group classification, the average accuracy is 89.0% for HC, MCI, and AD compared to previous studies using other cortical separation with the best classification accuracy of 81.5%. By counting the number of brain regions whose feature is in the feature subset selected with JMMP-LRR, we find that five brain areas often appear in the selected features. The five core brain areas are Fusiform Face Complex (L-FFC), Area 10d (L-10d), Orbital Frontal Complex (R-OFC), Perirhinal Ectorhinal (L-PeEc) and Area TG dorsal (L-TGd, R-TGd). The features corresponding to the five core brain areas are used to form a new feature subset for three classifications with the average accuracy of 80.0%. Results demonstrate the importance of the five core brain regions in identifying different stages toward AD. Experiment results show that the proposed method has better accuracy for the classification of HC, MCI, AD, and it also proves that the division of brain regions using JHCPMMP is more scientific and effective than other methods.

Background: Overall death cause of COVID-19 patients has been reported but attribution of myocardial injury remains undetermined br br Methods: We extracted d

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been pandemic and is leading to many deaths due to refractory respiratory failure Here, we report our experience of tre

Functional brain networks were constructed from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data originating from 96 healthy adults. These networks possessed a total of 360 nodes, derived from the latest multi-modal brain parcellation method. A novel group network (overlay network) analysis model is proposed to study common attributes as well as differences found in the human brain by analysis of the functional brain network. Currently, the mean network is generally used to represent the group network. But mean networks have a modularity problem making them distinct from real networks. The overlay network is constructed by calculating the connections between the whole brain network regions, and then filtering the connections by limiting the threshold value. We find that the overlay network is closer to the real network condition of the group in terms of network characteristics related to modularity. Multiple network features are applied to investigate the discrepancies between the new group network and the mean network. Individual divergences between brain regions of everyone are also explored. Results show that the brain network of different people has a high consistency in the global measures, while there exist great differences for local measures in brain regions. Some brain regions show variability over other brain regions on most measures. In addition, we explored the impact of different thresholds on the overlay network and find that different thresholds have a greater impact on the clustering coefficient, maximized modularity, strength, and global efficiency.

Evaluating the effect of stroke rehabilitation based on electroencephalogram (EEG) is still a challenging problem. This paper presents a novel nonlinear dynamic complexity method for the evaluation of stroke rehabilitation effect from EEG signal. Our method calculates the nonlinearly separable degree ( NLSD ) of EEG signal, and then employs an indicator, called mean nonlinearly separable complexity degree ( Mean_NLSD ), to efficiently and accurately evaluate therapy effect of stroke patients. This paper under twelve stimuli conditions on eleven patients and eleven control subjects indicates that in general Mean_NLSD is smaller at the lesion regions and that the Mean_NLSD of the control subjects is stochastic. Compared with conventional spectral methods, such as mean power spectral density ( PSD ), Mean_NLSD is more sensitive and robust. Overall Mean_NLSD may offer a promising approach to facilitate the evaluation of stroke rehabilitation effect.

1. In the abstract, we missed a piece of information. The correct sentence should be "In this retrospective study, we included 550 critically ill COVID-19 patients who need mechanical ventilation (63.5%) and oxygen therapy (35.6%) in Tongji Hospital, Wuhan, from February 1, 2020 to April 4, 2020." 2. We mistakenly put an approval number from Tongji Hospital ethics committee in the paper (IRBID: TJ-C20200113). The correct number should be TJ-IRB20200229. 3. We mistakenly filled some data in Table 1 and the correct Table 1 (the corrected data are in boldface) should be as follows.

The maximally decimated filter banks have been popularly employed in various applications. The non-maximally decimated filter banks allows the decimation factor being smaller than the number of parallel outputs to support applications requiring oversampling outputs of the filter bank. This paper presents a hardware structure of non-maximally decimated filter bank based on polyphase filtering and fast Fourier transform. This structure is derived by manipulating multirate signal flow graphs and is proven to require the same hardware complexity as that reported in the literature. The proposed structure also achieves a flexibility to allow processing different number of channels with the same hardware system.