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Objective Glioma is the most common malignant brain tumor that has high aggressiveness. The aim of this study was to investigate the potential therapeutic targets for gliomas. Materials and Methods Real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) was employed to calculate the expression of miRNA and genes. The connection between the expression of miR-483 and patients' overall survival rate was evaluated using Kaplan-Meier analysis. In addition, the underlying mechanism was detected using luciferase assay. Results The expression level of miR-483 was significantly decreased in glioma tissue samples and cell lines, compared to the adjacent tissues and normal cell lines. Downregulation of miR-483 or upregulation of SOX3 was associated with overall survival of glioma patients. Additionally, overexpression of miR-483 promotes cell invasion and migration and inhibits apoptosis. In addition, miR-483 directly targeted to SOX3, and the expression of miR-483 has a negative correlation with SOX3 in glioma tissues. SOX3 reversed partial functions of miR-483 on cell migration, invasion, and promoted cell apoptosis in glioma. Conclusion MiR-483 inhibited glioma cell migration, invasion, and promoted glioma cell apoptosis by targeting SOX3. MiR-483 maybe acted as a potential target for the treatment of glioma.

Acutemyeloidleukaemia(AML) is an illness of varied origin and unpredictable prognosis. Pyroptosis, a novel class of gasdermin-mediated programmed cell death (PCD), serves a critical function in anti-leukemia. But, the correlation between pyroptosis-related genes (PRGs) and AML prognosis is undetermined. Here, we obtained the RNA profile and matched clinical information of AML patients from the TCGA and GEO databases. 6 PRGs were identified to be strongly related to AML prognosis via univariate COX analysis. Next, the LASSO regression analysis was used to develop a PRG signature for AML prognosis, which was then employed for the stratification of patients into a low- (LR) or high-risk (HR) group. Kaplan-Meier analysis revealed that the HR group, but not the LR group, had worse prognosis. In addition, ROC curve analysis revealed that our prognotic model had good predictive value. Functional enrichment analysis indicated that the immune status was remarkably different between the two risk groups. In vitro experiments demonstrated that pyroptosis serves an essential function in anti-leukemia treatment. In summary, our newly developed model has good predictive value and can offer guidance into the precise estimation of AML prognosis and targeting pyroptosis is a potential therapeutic alternative for AML.

Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) is a heterogeneous disease with a difficult to predict prognosis. Ferroptosis, an iron‐induced programmed cell death, is a promising target for cancer therapy. Nevertheless, not much is known about the relationship between ferroptosis‐related genes and AML prognosis. Herein, we retrieved RNA profile and corresponding clinical data of AML patients from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) databases. Univariate Cox analysis was employed to identify ferroptosis‐related genes significantly associated with AML prognosis. Next, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression was employed to establish a prognostic ferroptosis‐related gene profile. 12 ferroptosis‐related genes were screened to generate a prognostic model, which stratified patients into a low‐ (LR) or high‐risk (HR) group. Using Kaplan‐Meier analysis, we demonstrated that the LR patients exhibited better prognosis than HR patients. Moreover, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis confirmed that the prognostic model showed good predictability. Functional enrichment analysis indicated that the infiltration of regulatory T cells (Treg) differed vastly between the LR and HR groups. Our prognostic model can offer guidance into the accurate prediction of AML prognosis and selection of personalized therapy in clinical practice.

Acceptor halogenation is an excellent modification method for modulating molecular energy levels, improving optical absorption, shortening the intermolecular packing distance thus ameliorating morphologies and achieving effective exciton dissociation and charge transfer of organic photovoltaic device. In this work, F, Cl and Br terminated ITIC small molecule acceptor (SMA) derivatives (IT-2F, IT-2Cl and IT-2Br) are designed and synthesized to compare the halogen substitution effect. Among these three acceptors, IT-2F based PSCs devices show the highest power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) around 12.08%, but Br terminated ITIC show downshifted LUMO energy level. Brominated ITIC show comparable PCEs with Cl and F terminated compound, and moreover chlorinated and brominated ITIC show low synthesis cost and easy purification than fluorinated materials, which may be favorable for future commercialization.

The rapid development of technology in the field of Internet of Things has ushered in new changes in traditional agriculture. Blockchain has attracted the attention of various industries due to its unique characteristics of decentralized trust and distribution. The emergence of blockchain provides new possibilities for breaking down the barriers to data sharing and realizing the trusted interconnection of data. This article introduces the data quantification and isomerization problems presented by the progress in the agricultural IoT industry and the solutions provided by the blockchain technology. Designed a blockchain-based agricultural data sharing model and system architecture. The key mechanisms of system process design and data sharing were studied.

In this paper, we adopt variable frequency control strategy for resonant converters with LLC and LCC resonant structures, which work in the zero voltage switch (ZVS) region. Based on the fundamental wave analysis (FWA) method, we obtain some theoretical research results. The saber simulations using current continuous mode are provided to verify the correctness of these theoretical research results. Compared with the results of LLC and LCC resonant structures, we find that LLC resonant structure is suitable for working in low-voltage and high-current pattern whereas LCC is suitable for highvoltage and low-current pattern. We present a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of the two resonance control structures. By changing the values of resonant inductance and distributed capacitance, we can adjust the resonant power supply with the corresponding resonant structures to work in the required area.

The modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) is an effective classifier for handwritten Chinese character recognition (HCCR). However, it suffers from high memory requirement for the storage of its parameters, which makes it impractical to be embedded in memory limited hand-held devices. In this paper, we explore the applicability of sparse coding to build compact MQDF classifiers. To be specific, we use sparse coding to compact the parameters of MQDF. Two methods of sparse coding, viz., the maximum likelihood-based method and the K-SVD method, are adopted to build two compact MQDF classifiers, namely, MQDF-ML classifier and MQDF-KSVD classifier. Furthermore, we learn multiple dictionaries rather than single dictionary for sparse coding, because the multiple dictionary learning is capable of not only greatly reducing the computational complexity, but also alleviating the degradation of recognition accuracy, compared to the single dictionary learning. Experiments and comparison with the existing method have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method for the issue of unconstrained handwritten Chinese character recognition.

We synthesize three fused-ring electron acceptors (m-ITBr, o-ITBr and IT-2Br) based on indacenodithieno[3,2-b]thiophene as the core unit and 2-(3-oxo-2,3-dihydroinden-1-ylidene)malononitrile with 1 or 2 bromine substituents as the end-capped unit. The effects of bromine atom number and substituted position on molecular film absorption, energy level, photovoltaic performance, charge transport and film morphology are systematically carried out. Compared with ITIC, m-ITBr, o-ITBr and IT-2Br all show red-shifted film absorption (550–750 nm) and downshifted highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) energy levels. The PM6:IT-2Br based devices exhibit power conversion efficiency (PCE) of up to 12.92%, which is much higher than the reference devices based on ITIC (8.98%). In addition, all three brominated devices achieve high efficiency over 11% (11.84% for m-ITBr devices and 11.14% for o-ITBr devices). Herein, it is also concluded that bromination on terminal groups plays a vital role in enhancing the photovoltaic performance of IDTT-based FREAs.

High-voltage AC power supply is widely used in the field of insulation analysis of electrical equipment materials, but the insulation analysis of electrical equipment materials requires the use of high-voltage alternating current in a certain frequency band to better obtain the frequency domain characteristics and insulation characteristics of electrical equipment insulation materials. In this paper, a precision digital AC power supply is designed, whose frequency is adjustable from 50Hz to 400Hz, and the voltage is adjustable from 10V to 5000V. This power system is based on SPWM switching power supply. In hardware design, RCD absorption circuit is used to suppress peak voltage and surge current, multi-level LC filter is designed to achieve wide-band voltage filter output, Buck-Boost PFC circuit is used to obtain high quality DC bus voltage, and double closed-loop voltage and current feedback circuit is used to detect output voltage and current. In software design, repetitive control algorithm and PID control algorithm are used to ensure the accuracy and dynamic characteristics of the output AC voltage.

Normative Chinese addresses are organized as a word-level-tree (WLT).An address image with writing variations is mapped to its corresponding normative address stored in the WLT paths.Experiments demonstrate the validation of the proposed method. Handwritten Chinese address recognition is a challenging task, not only because of the large quantity of Chinese characters and unconstraint of handwriting, but also due to irregularities of various address formats. The existing techniques generally solve the problem by transforming the address database to a large scale character-level-tree (CLT) and then utilizing the nodes of the generated CLT to match with the candidate patterns. However, the CLT is unable to cover all the variations of address formats. A more compact tree is proposed in this paper to cover the variations of address formats as many and complete as possible by building the structure tree at word level. Specifically, the segment candidate patterns are firstly recognized by a character classifier, then are mapped to candidate address words by matching with the proposed word-level-tree (WLT) address database. Finally, the address recognition result is obtained in the path matching phase by summing the scores of candidate address words in each match path. The proposed scheme was tested with real mail address images captured by an automatic letter sorting machine. Experimental results have demonstrated that the performance of the proposed WLT based method outperforms the four benchmarking methods.

Aim Ginsenosides, a class of ginseng compounds of herbal medicine, have been shown to have therapeutic potential for the neuroprotection of brain damage after cerebral ischemia because of their activities including anti-oxidant and anti-inflammation. In the elderly population, aging-induced oxidative stress has been implicated in exacerbating brain injury, which might also be ameliorated by anti-oxidants, such as ginsenosides. However, this hypothesis has yet to be explored. Methods Here we present in vivo studies highlighting a protective function of ginsenoside Rb1, a natural steroid glycoside derivative purified from saponin of Panax ginseng, in neurological injury during aging. Results Compared with young mice, the recovery of brain damage after middle cerebral artery occlusion is significantly impaired in aged mice, whereas the long-term pretreatment with ginsenoside Rb1 through oral administration can greatly prevent the injury in a dose-dependent manner. In addition, we further explored the involvement of oxidative stress and extracellular signal-regulated kinase activation in aged mice stimulated by cerebral ischemia, both of which were found to be blocked by ginsenoside Rb1. Conclusions These observations suggest that ginsenoside Rb1 could represent promising applications as anti-oxidants for the anti-aging treatment of neurological disorders, such as stroke, in elderly patients. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2015; ●●: ●●–●●.

In this paper, the liquid structure of Sn100 − xBix alloys (x = 0, 7, 30, 43, 80, 100) was studied with resistivity and viscosity method. The resistivity of liquid alloy increases with the increase of the temperature and Bi content, and obvious turning point is observed on resistivity–temperature and viscosity–temperature curves of different Sn–Bi alloy, while the resistivity increases linearly with increasing temperature before the turning point. Moreover, different compositions of alloy show different turning temperatures. These results indicate that temperature-induced liquid–liquid structure change occurs at 700–800 °C and is reversible, which may be formed by large cooperative motions for molecular rearrangements. Based on these results explored the melt structure from different aspects, Sn–Bi melt structure can be described and the nature of discontinuity of structural phase transition can be explored.

Although the effect of overheating treatment on solidification is due to the liquid structure state, its nature and rule are still unclear. In this article, the effect of melt overheating on the melt structure transition and solidified structures of Al100−x La x alloys (x = 2, 3, 5) was mainly studied with resistivity and rapid solidification methods. The resistivity of liquid Al-La alloy increases with the temperature and La content, and it shows the linear and nonlinear changes successively. The corrosion resistance and hardness of melt-spun alloy improves with the increase in melt temperature and La content. These results indicate that the melt structure becomes homogeneous, dense, and disordered with the increase in melt temperature, and a temperature-induced liquid–liquid structure change occurs at 880–960°C. The homogeneous and dense melt structure features are remained partly in this melt-spun alloy and have a beneficial influence on its corrosion resistance and hardness. It is useful to study on the melt structure and solidified structures with the rapid solidification and resistivity method.

A novel method is proposed for text extraction from mail images with complex background. Firstly, wavelet transform and Laplacian operator are applied to generate the features of regions which are obtained by dividing input image with sliding window. Then, support vector machine (SVM) is utilized to classify these regions into texts and non-texts according to the features. Bootstrap strategy is used to build the training database. Finally, connected components analysis (CCA) is employed to merge text regions into text candidates which can be processed by following steps to get the delivery address. Experimental results involving 534 mail images show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, and comparison results with other methods demonstrate the advantages of the selected features.

This article will discuss the influence of the rare earth Y on the microstructure and mechanical properties of Zn-Al alloys (ZA27, ZA35, and ZA40), and it will provide reference to rare-earth microalloying through the cast ingot metallurgy process. The results also suggest that the microstructure can be refined and mechanical properties can be improved obviously when adding the right amount of Y, and its tensile strength and brinell hardness increased by 9.1% and 11.7% compared with the unmodified ZA27 alloys, respectively. Compared with non-Y addition, the alloys will form dispersed YZn12 phase, which can strongly pin dislocations and subgrain boundary, inhibiting further recrystallization. On this basis, the impacts of Y on the microstructure and mechanical properties of ZA27, ZA35, and ZA40 have been explored. After adding Y, the microstructures of as-cast Zn-Al alloys are refined at different degree. However, with the increase of Al content, the microstructure shows a certain coarsening and the segregation and shrinkage porosity occur. The most effective refining appears in ZA27-0.4%Y.

The modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) is a very popular handwritten Chinese character classifier thanks to its high performance with low computational complexity. However, it suffers from high memory requirement for the storage of its parameters. This paper proposes a compact MQDF classifier developed by integrating sparse coding and vector quantization (VQ) technique. To be specific, we use sparse coding to represent the parameters of MQDF in sparsity first, and then employ the VQ technique to further compress the sparse coding. The proposed method is evaluated by comparing the performance with three models, i.e., the original MQDF classifier, the compact MQDF classifier using the VQ technique, and the compact MQDF classifier using sparse coding. The effectiveness of our proposed approach has been confirmed and demonstrated by comparative experiments on ICDAR2013 competition dataset.

In this paper, the melt structure and its change of Al 100 − x Ni x alloy (x = 0, 2.7, 5) were investigated with high-temperature X-ray diffraction and resistivity. The results of high-temperature X-ray diffraction measurements give the specific parameters at some temperature points, S ( Q ) and g ( r ), that can characterize the melt structure directly; the results of resistivity reflect that the melt structure of Al–Ni alloy melts changes with rising temperature and this change tendency is nonlinear. Based on these results of the melt structure explored from different aspects, we describe the simple view of this melt structure and analyze the structure change depending on temperature detailedly.

We propose an efficient method for automatically extracting express waybills from parcel images, which is challenging due to varied resolution of parcel images, arbitrary direction of waybills and different information filled by senders. To address these challenges, logo matching is employed to extract the waybills. We begin by extracting scale-invariant feature-transformation (SIFT) keypoints from both the reference logo image and a parcel image, and matching them subject to a consistent projective transformation (homography) by using random sample consensus (RANSAC). Once the homography matrix is computed, we extract the waybill of parcel image by mapping all pixels from a standard waybill image to the parcel image. Experimental results on test datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Background Thalidomide was originally marked as a sedative and anti-emetic, but was withdrawn after severe teratogenic effects had been discovered. More recently it has been claimed to alleviate a wide range of inflammatory disorders and malignancies. Studies showed that thalidomide might play a role in the management of some oral premalignant conditions and its potential to be an adjunct in the prevention of oral cancer. Aim The aim of this study is to summarize the characteristics and feasibility of thalidomide in the development and prevention of oral precancerosis, and to draw attentions of researchers to its therapeutic potential in oral cancer. Methods Databases were searched on the basis of PubMed and EMbase. Thalidomide associated with the oral lichen planus, chronic discoid lupus erythematosus (CDLE) and oral cancer were assessed. Results We have summed up the structure and pharmacokinetics of thalidomide, possible role of thalidomide in cancer prevention, as well as the recent data concerning its effects in prevention of oral premalignant conditions and potential for the treatment of oral cancer. Conclusions Therapeutic effects of thalidomide in oral lichen planus and CDLE have been discussed by clinical trials. And increasing evidences from in vitro and in vivo experiments show that thalidomide is a promising anticancerous agent for oral cancer, which should be paid attention to. It is necessary to perform more studies and clinical trials of large sample size to clarify underlying mechanisms and demonstrate the potential roles of thalidomide in clinical routine management of oral diseases.

Ginsenosides, a class of ginseng compounds of herbal medicine, have been shown to have therapeutic potential for the neuroprotection of brain damage after cerebral ischemia because of their activities including anti-oxidant and anti-inflammation. In the elderly population, aging-induced oxidative stress has been implicated in exacerbating brain injury, which might also be ameliorated by anti-oxidants, such as ginsenosides. However, this hypothesis has yet to be explored.Here we present in vivo studies highlighting a protective function of ginsenoside Rb1, a natural steroid glycoside derivative purified from saponin of Panax ginseng, in neurological injury during aging.Compared with young mice, the recovery of brain damage after middle cerebral artery occlusion is significantly impaired in aged mice, whereas the long-term pretreatment with ginsenoside Rb1 through oral administration can greatly prevent the injury in a dose-dependent manner. In addition, we further explored the involvement of oxidative stress and extracellular signal-regulated kinase activation in aged mice stimulated by cerebral ischemia, both of which were found to be blocked by ginsenoside Rb1.These observations suggest that ginsenoside Rb1 could represent promising applications as anti-oxidants for the anti-aging treatment of neurological disorders, such as stroke, in elderly patients. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2017; 17: 338-345.

Different recognizers may result in different mistakes when they are used to recognize a Chinese address. In this paper, we present a method of combining multiple Chinese address recognition outputs to improve Chinese address recognition accuracy. The method first employs multiple sequence alignment to generate a lattice of candidate hypotheses from multiple different recognizer outputs and then applies statistical language model to choose the maximum likelihood candidate sequence. Taking the maximum as the final decision, the performance of our method is superior, compared to the single recognizers and Miyao's method. The experiments on the address images of real envelopes demonstrate that the proposed method increases the character recognition accuracy rate from 95.80% to 98.38%, with 61.30% error reduction. Furthermore, the corrected sorting rate of an automatic mail sorting system increases from 84.11% to 93.72%.

In the past several years, wepsilave been developing a high performance two-layer SOM classifier for handwritten Bangla numeral recognition. We have reported previously the structure and the learning algorithm of the two-layer SOM. In this paper, we fuse the outputs of the second layer SOMs to improve the classification ability, based on confidence coefficient of the SOMs in the second layer. Experimental results on the numeral images obtained from real Bangladesh envelopes have proved the validity of the proposed method.

Mail sorting machines play an important role in postal automation. In this paper, we give a brief overview of mail sorting machines in China Post from a pattern recognition point of view. OCR techniques such as postcode recognition and address recognition are essential for mail sorting machines, which are considered as class imbalance problems in our study. In addition to OCR that mainly focuses on the characters in the image, some image-level features are exploited for near-duplicate envelope image matching, which is helpful in tracking pieces of mail in the network environment.

We propose a hybrid system for Bangla handwritten numeral recognition based on partially labeled two-layer SOM and MLP classifiers. Partially labeled mechanism is introduced to the Kohonen’s SOM for reducing recognition error rate, and two-layer structure is applied for improving the performance of the SOM classifier. The directional and density features are utilized in our system, and the partially labeled SOM is applied first. In the case that the character cannot be recognized by the partially labeled SOM, it will be feed to a multi-layer perceptron classifier for further processing. The experiments on the Bangla handwritten numeral samples captured from real envelopes have found that the hybrid system achieves 96.7% correct recognition rate.

Most traditional postcode recognition systems implicitly assumed that the distribution of the 10 numerals (0–9) is balanced. However it is far from a reasonable setting because the distribution of 0–9 in postcodes of a country or a city is generally imbalanced. Some numerals appear in more postcodes, while some others do not. In this paper, we study cost-sensitive neural network classifiers to address the class imbalance problem in postcode recognition. Four methods, namely: cost-sampling, cost-convergence, rate-adapting and threshold-moving are considered in training neural networks. Cost-sampling adjusts the distribution of the training data such that the costs of classes are conveyed explicitly by the appearances of their instances. Cost-convergence and rate-adapting are carried out in training phase by modifying the architecture of training algorithms of the neural network. Threshold-moving tries to increase the probability estimations of expensive classes to avoid the samples with higher costs to be misclassified. 10,702 postcode images are experimented using five cost matrices based on the distribution of numerals in postcodes. The results suggest that cost-sensitive learning is indeed effective on class imbalanced postcode analysis and recognition. It also reveals that cost-sampling on a proper cost matrix outperforms others in this application.