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Longguo Zhao, Minglong Xin, Xianji Piao, Shengming Zhang, Yanglong Li, Xian Wu Cheng Department of Cardiology and Hypertension, Yanbian University Hospital, Yanji, Jilin, 133000, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Xian Wu ChengDepartment of Cardiology and Hypertension, Yanbian University Hospital, 1327 Juzijie, Yanji, 133000, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail chengxw0908@163.com; xianwu@med.nagoya-u.ac.jpMinglong XinDepartment of Cardiology and Hypertension, Yanbian University Hospital, 1327 Juzijie, Yanji, 133000, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail xml.vvv@163.comBackground: The prognostic implications of the admission cTnI level and D2B time combined on in-hospital and 1-year heart failure (HF) and mortality in STEMI patients undergoing a primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) are remain uncertain.Methods and Results: We divided the consecutive 1485 STEMI patients who underwent PCI from January 2015 to October 2019 at our hospital into three groups based on their admission cTnI levels: normal group (< 0.1 ng/mL), middle group (0.1 to less than 3 ng/mL), and high group (≥ 3 ng/mL) and into two groups by their D2B times: > 90 min (> 90-D2B) and ≤ 90 min (≤ 90-D2B). During the in-hospital and 1-year follow-up periods, the incidence of composite clinical events increased significantly with the increase in the admission cTnI level (p < 0.05). In-hospital, the composite rate of death and HF events was significantly higher in the > 90-D2B group compared to the ≤ 90-D2B group (p = 0.006), but its influence disappeared in the 1-year follow-up (p > 0.05). A multivariable logistic analysis revealed that, in the ≤ 90-D2B group, with the exception of the cTnI ≥ 3 ng/mL patients, the cTnI level had no effect on in-hospital or 1-year outcomes; in > 90-D2B group, cTnI ≥ 3ng/mL increased outcomes in both periods.Conclusion: High cTnI levels (≥ 3 ng/mL) on admission are independent of the D2B time for predicting in-hospital and 1-year cardiac events in STEMI patients undergoing PCI.Keywords: cardiac troponin I, acute myocardial infarction, door-to-balloon time, cardiac death, heart failure

Rong-yun Mai,1– 3,* Jie Zeng,2,3,* Yi-shuai Mo,1,3,* Rong Liang,3,4 Yan Lin,3,4 Su-su Wu,2,3 Xue-min Piao,2– 4 Xing Gao,2– 4 Guo-bin Wu,1,3 Le-qun Li,1,3 Jia-zhou Ye1,3 1Department of Hepatobilliary & Pancreatic Surgery, Guangxi Medical University Cancer Hospital, Nanning 530021, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Experimental Research, Guangxi Medical University Cancer Hospital, Nanning 530021, People’s Republic of China; 3Guangxi Liver Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment Engineering and Technology Research Center, Nanning 530021, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of First Chemotherapy, Guangxi Medical University Cancer Hospital, Nanning 530021, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Jia-zhou Ye; Le-qun LiDepartment of Hepatobilliary & Pancreatic Surgery, Guangxi Medical University Cancer Hospital, 71 He Di Road, Nanning 530021, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86-0771-5310045Fax +86-0771-5312000. Email yejiazhou2019@163.com; lequn_li001@163.comBackground: Testing for the presence of liver cirrhosis (LC) is one of the most critical diagnostic and prognostic assessments for patients with hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). More non-invasive tools are needed to diagnose LC but the predictive abilities of current models are still inconclusive. This study aimed to develop and validate a novel and non-invasive artificial neural network (ANN) model for diagnosing LC in patients with HBV-related HCC using routine laboratory serological indicators.Methods: A total of 1152 HBV-related HCC patients who underwent hepatectomy were included and randomly divided into the training set (n = 864, 75%) and validation set (n = 288, 25%). The ANN model was constructed from the training set using multivariate Logistic regression analysis and then verified in the validation set.Results: The morbidity of LC in the training and validation sets was 41.2% and 46.8%, respectively. Multivariate analysis showed that age, platelet count, prothrombin time and total bilirubin were independent risk factors for LC (P < 0.05). The area under the ROC curve (AUC) analyses revealed that the ANN model had higher predictive accuracy than the Logistic model (ANN: 0.757 vs Logistic: 0.721; P < 0.001), and other scoring systems (ANN: 0.757 vs CP: 0.532, MELD: 0.594, ALBI: 0.575, APRI: 0.621, FIB-4: 0.644, AAR: 0.491, and GPR: 0.604; P < 0.05 for all) in diagnosing LC. Similar results were obtained in the validation set.Conclusion: The ANN model has better diagnostic capabilities than other commonly used models and scoring systems in assessing LC risk in patients with HBV-related HCC.Keywords: chronic hepatitis B, hepatocellular carcinoma, liver cirrhosis, serological indicators, non-invasive assessment, artificial neural network

Rong Liang, Ziyu Liu, Xuemin Piao, Mingtang Zuo, Jinyan Zhang, Zhihui Liu, Yongqiang Li, Yan Lin Department of Medical Oncology, Affiliated Tumor Hospital of Guangxi Medical University, Nanning, Guangxi 530021, People’s Republic of China Abstract: Malignant cancer is one of the most serious diseases that currently endanger human health. As most tumors are diagnosed at an advanced stage, the current treatments show poor therapeutic efficacy, and the patients have poor prognosis. However, a 5-year survival rate higher than 80% could be achieved if tumors are diagnosed at an early stage. Therefore, early diagnosis and treatment play important roles in the prevention and treatment of malignant tumors, and serum tumor markers are important for the early diagnosis of malignant cancers. Recent studies have shown that GP73, a transmembrane protein, has greater diagnostic value in primary liver cancer than in other types of cancers, and research on the regulation of GP73 expression has unveiled broad prospects in anticancer targeted therapy. Thus, GP73, as a new tumor marker, deserves further study. Keywords: GP73, malignant tumors, tumor marker, diagnosis, prognosis

Carbon-doped copper ferrite (C–CuFe2O4) was synthesized by a simple two-step hydrothermal method, which showed enhanced tetracycline hydrochloride (TCH) removal efficiency as compared to the pure CuFe2O4 in Fenton-like reaction. A removal efficiency of 94% was achieved with 0.2 g L−1 catalyst and 20 mmol L−1 H2O2 within 90 min. We demonstrated that 5% C–CuFe2O4 catalyst in the presence of H2O2 was significantly efficient for TCH degradation under the near-neutral pH (5–9) without buffer. Multiple techniques, including SEM, TEM, XRD, FTIR, Raman, XPS Mössbauer and so on, were conducted to investigate the structures, morphologies and electronic properties of as-prepared samples. The introduction of carbon can effectively accelerate electron transfer by cooperating with Cu and Fe to activate H2O2 to generate ·OH and ·O2−. Particularly, theoretical calculations display that the p, p, d orbital hybridization of C, O, Cu and Fe can form C–O–Cu and C–O–Fe bonds, and the electrons on carbon can transfer to metal Cu and Fe along the C–O–Fe and C–O–Cu channels, thus forming electron-rich reactive centers around Fe and Cu. This work provides lightful reference for the modification of spinel ferrites in Fenton-like application.

Mitochondrial dysfunction is proposed to be substantially associated with ageing and ageing-related diseases like Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, it is unclear whether different mouse models with mitochondrial-related diseases have similar changes in mitochondrial morphology of the same tissues. Moreover, whether similarities in mitochondrial morphology can be a suitable marker for screening and/or discovering mitochondrial-protective substances remains unknown. Mitochondria morphology in different tissues of a novel mitochondrial outer membrane protein Slc25a46 knockout mouse and a traditional APPSWE/PS1ΔE9 transgenic mouse were examined using transmission electron microscope (TEM). Both young Slc25a46 knockout mice and aged APPSWE/PS1ΔE9 mice models showed similar mitochondrial damage in cerebellum tissues. The results indicated that different mitochondrial-related diseases shared similar alteration and defects in mitochondrial morphology. Furthermore, Lycium ruthenicum Murr. extract, a bioactive food substance with cognition-improving property, could effectively improve muscle strength and increase body weight in the Slc25a46 knockout mice. These findings suggest that mitochondrial morphology defects in mice models, particularly in the mitochondrial compartment, represent a unified and effective marker for screening and validating natural product-derived functional substances with mitochondrial protective properties. It also holds potential application in mitochondrial-impaired senile neurodegenerative diseases, especially in AD.

ObjectiveSaposhnikovia divaricata (Turcz.) Schischk is a kind of traditional Chinese medicine. Currently, the methods of identifying the origin and quality of Saposhnikovia divaricata (Turcz.) Schischk are mainly based on their physical or chemical characteristics, which is impossible to make an accurate measurement of Groundness identification. With the continuous development of deep learning, its advantages of no manual extraction and high classification accuracy are widely used in different fields, and an attention-embedded ShuffleNet V2-based model was proposed in this study to address the problems of large computation and low accuracy of most convolutional neural network models in the identification of Chinese herbal medicine Saposhnikovia divaricata (Turcz.) Schischk.MethodsThe model architecture was adjusted to reduce the number of model parameters and computation without degrading the network performance, and the traditional residual network was replaced by the Hourglass residual network, while the SE attention mechanism was introduced to embed the hourglass residual network with additional channel attention into ShuffleNet V2. The important features were enhanced and the unimportant features were weakened by controlling the size of the channel ratio to make the extracted features more directional by SE attention. The SiLU activation function was used to replace the ReLU activation function to enhance the generalization ability of the model Enriching local feature learning. Therefore, a lightweight Shuffle-Hourglass SE model was proposed. The samples of Saposhnikovia divaricata (Turcz.) Schischk used in this research were samples from the main production areas, including more than 1000 samples from five production areas in Heilongjiang, Jilin, Hebei, Gansu and Inner Mongolia. A total of 5234 images of Saposhnikovia divaricata (Turcz.) Schischk were obtained by using cell phone photography indoors under white daylight, fully taking into account the geographical distribution differences of different Saposhnikovia divaricata (Turcz.) Schischk. The data set of Saposhnikovia divaricata (Turcz.) Schischk images was expanded to 10,120 by using random flip, random crop, brightness and contrast enhancement processes. In order to verify the effectiveness of the model proposed, four classical network models, VGG16, MobileNet V2, ShuffleNet V2 and SqueezeNet V2, were selected for comparison experiments, ECA ( Efficient Channel Attention ) attention mechanism, CBAM ( Convolutional Block Attention Module ) attention mechanism and CA attention mechanism were chosen to compare with SE. All attention mechanisms were introduced into the same position in the ShuffleNet V2 model, and ReLU, H-swish and ELU activation functions were selected for contrast experiments under the condition in which other parameters unchanged. In order to explore the performance improvement of ShuffleNet V2 model by using the attention mechanism of SE module, Hourglass residual block and activation function, Shuffle-Hourglass SE model ablation experiment was carried out. Finally, loss, accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score in test set and training set were used as evaluation indexes of model performances.Results and DiscussionsThe results showed that the Shuffle-Hourglass SE model proposed achieved the best performances. An accuracy of 95.32%, recall of 95.28%, and F1 score of 95.27% were obtained in the test set, which was 2.09%, 2.1 %, and 2.19 % higher than the ShuffleNet V2 model, respectively. The test duration and model size were 246.34 ms and 3.23 M, respectively, which were not only optimal among Traditional CNN such as VGG and Desnet,but had great advantages among lightweight networks such as MobileNet V2、SqueezeNet V2 and ShufffleNet V2. Compared with the classical convolutional network VGG, 7.41% of the accuracy was improved, 71.89% of the test duration was reduced, and 96.76% of the model size was reduced by the Shuffle-Hourglass SE model proposed in this study. Although the test duration of ShuffleNet V2 and MobileNet V2 were similar, the accuracy and speed of the Shuffle-Hourglass SE model improved, which proved its better performance. Compared with MobileNet V2, the test duration was reduced by 69.31 ms, the model size was reduced by 1.98 M, and the accuracy was increased by 10.5 %. In terms of classification accuracy, the improved network maintains higher recognition accuracy and better classification performance.ConclusionsThe model proposed in this research is able to identify the Saposhnikovia divaricata (Turcz.) Schischk originality well while maintaining high identification accuracy and consuming less storage space, which is helpful for realizing real-time identification of Saposhnikovia divaricata (Turcz.) Schischk originality in the future low performance terminals.

Antioxidants have been always used to improve post-slaughter meat quality in broilers subjected to stress. Forsythia suspensa extract (FSE), a traditional Chinese herbal medicine, is generally regarded as a natural source of antioxidants. Therefore, the objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that FSE could protect post-slaughter breast muscles against oxidative injury induced by dexamethasone (DEX) mimicking chronic physiological stress in poultry production. Average daily gain and feed efficiency of poultry were suppressed by DEX and improved by FSE (P < 0.05). Dexamethasone caused the decrease in the redness value and the increase in the lightness and yellowness values and drip loss of the breast muscles (P < 0.05), and FSE had the converse effects (P < 0.05). Dietary FSE supplementation decreased monounsaturated fatty acid (FA) and increased polyunsaturated FA in breast muscles of broilers (P < 0.05). In addition, FSE decreased malondialdehyde and carbonyl content in the breast muscles of DEX-treated broilers (P < 0.05). The inhibition of 1,1-diphenyl-2-picryl-hydrazyl in the breast muscles was decreased by DEX and increased by FSE (P < 0.05). Total-antioxidant capacity and glutathione peroxidase activity in the breast muscles were decreased in birds subjected to DEX and increased in birds supplemented with FSE (P < 0.05). Totally, DEX suppressed growth performance and induced breast muscle oxidative injury in broilers, and FSE supplementation improved antioxidant capacity to attenuate these adverse effects. Therefore, FSE could be a potential natural antioxidant to alleviate oxidative injury of the breast muscles in broilers and to improve the meat quality for human consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intrinsic geometry of wavevector diagrams describes electronic or photonic transport at a given energy level. Lifshitz transition is an intriguing example of the topological transition in wavevector diagrams, which plays a critical role in abnormal transport with enhanced magnetoresistance or superconductivity. Here, we develop the spatial analogy of the Lifshitz transition, which provides a comprehensive topological perspective on transverse-spin interface states. We establish the excitation conditions of transverse-spin interface states, which require the “Lifshitz interface” – the interface between different topologies of wavevector diagrams – along with the gap in wavevector diagrams. Based on the detailed analysis of this topological phenomenon with respect to the dimensionality and gaps of wavevector diagrams across the Lifshitz interface, we show distinct parity of transverse spins and power flows in transverse-spin modes. The unique symmetry of interface states realizing Abraham-spin-momentum locking represents the gauge induced by the Lifshitz interface, which provides a novel insight into the Abraham–Minkowski controversy.

A triplex DNA electrochemical sensor based on reduced graphene oxide (rGO) and electrodeposited gold nanoparticles (EAu) was simply fabricated for Pb2+ detection. The glass carbon electrode (GCE) sequentially electrodeposited with rGO and EAu was further modified with a triplex DNA helix that consisted of a guanine (G)-rich circle and a stem of triplex helix based on T-A•T base triplets. With the existence of Pb2+, the DNA configuration which was formed via the Watson–Crick and Hoogsteen base pairings was split and transformed into a G-quadruplex. An adequate electrochemical response signal was provided by the signal indicator methylene blue (MB). The proposed sensor demonstrated a linear relationship between the differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) peak currents and the logarithm of Pb2+ concentrations from 0.01 to 100.00 μM with a detection limit of 0.36 nM. The proposed sensor was also tested with tap water, river and medical wastewater samples with qualified recovery and accuracy and represented a promising method for Pb2+ detection.

Semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (s-SWCNTs) with large diameters are highly desired in the construction of high performance optoelectronic devices. However, it is difficult to selectively prepare large-diameter s-SWCNTs since their structure and chemical stability are quite similar with their metallic counterparts. In this work, we use SWCNTs with large diameter as a raw material, conjugated polymer of regioregular poly-(3-dodecylthiophene) (rr-P3DDT) with long side chain as a wrapping agent to selectively separate large-diameter s-SWCNTs. It is found that s-SWCNTs with a diameter of ~1.9 nm are effectively enriched, which shows a clean surface. By using the sorted s-SWCNTs as a channel material, we constructed thin-film transistors showing charge-carrier mobilities higher than 10 cm2 V−1 s−1 and on/off ratios higher than 103.