Search

Objective Data on preoperative immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy in potentially resectable lung squamous cell carcinoma (LUSC) remain scarce. This study was designed to investigate the safety and efficacy of preoperative immunotherapy and chemotherapy for stage IIIA-IIIB LUSC. Methods This study consecutively enrolled stage IIIA-IIIB LUSC who received preoperative immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy between January 2019 and July 2021. Patients received two to four cycles of immunotherapy combined with platinum-based doublet chemotherapy (platinum + paclitaxel) before surgery. Patients were assessed radiographically every one to two cycles until surgery. Postoperative pathological evaluation was also performed. Follow-up was performed until at least 3 months after surgery. Results Sixty-five patients with stage IIIA-IIIB LUSC were enrolled. The objective response rate was 78.46% (51/65), and no patients had progressive disease. Fifty-seven patients underwent surgery, and 55 patients achieved R0 resection. There were no perioperative deaths. The rate of pathological complete response (pCR) was 31.58% (18/57) and major pathological response was 68.42% (39/57). The incidence of grade 3 and 4 adverse reactions was 21.21 and 1.54%, respectively. Conclusion Perioperative immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy followed by surgical resection for male patients with stage IIIA-IIIB LUSC was effective with a tolerable toxicity profile.

People form impressions about others during daily social encounters and infer personality traits from others’ behaviors. Such trait inference is thought to rely on two universal dimensions, i.e., competence and warmth. These two dimensions can be used to construct a ‘social cognitive map’ organizing massive information obtained from social encounters efficiently. Originated from spatial cognition, the neural codes supporting representation and navigation of spatial cognitive map has been widely studied. Recent studies suggest similar neural mechanism subserves the map-like architecture in social cognition as well. Here we investigated how spatial codes operate beyond physical environment and support the representation and navigation of social cognitive map. We designed a social value space defined by two dimensions of competence and warmth. Behaviorally, participants were able to navigate to a learned location from random starting locations in this abstract social space. At neural level, we identified representation of distance in precuneus, fusiform gyrus and middle occipital gyrus. We also found grid-like representation patterns in medial prefrontal cortex and entorhinal cortex. Moreover, the intensity of grid-like response scaled with performance of navigating in social space and social avoidance trait scores. Our findings suggest a neurocognitive mechanism by which social information can be organized into a structured representation namely cognitive map and its relevance to social well-being.

Recovering missing values in time series is critical when performing time series analysis. And the blackouts issue studied in this paper, described as losing all the data during a certain period, is among the most urgent issues due to its devastating impact on service quality, and is challenging because of the absence of coevolving data sequences for reference. As a result, many existing approaches that rely on data from other coevolving sequences for missing value recovery are infeasible in handling blackouts. To address the issue, this work proposes a novel Hankel matrix factorization approach, HKMF-T, to recover missing values during blackouts for tagged time series, where a tagged time series consists of a data sequence and a corresponding tag sequence. Motivated by real-world observations, HKMF-T decomposes the data sequence into two components: 1) an internal, slowly-varying smooth trend, and 2) external impacts indicated by the tag sequence. By transforming a partially observed data sequence into a corresponding Hankel matrix, we learn the above two components and estimate the missing values under a unified framework of Hankel matrix factorization. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the practical performance of HKMF-T on real-world data sets. And the results suggest HKMF-T outperforms the baseline approaches for blackouts with long durations.

The selective infection of Xanthomonas citri pv. citri (Xcc) to citrus cultivars is universally known, but the relationship between endophytic bacteria and the resistance of host variety to canker disease remains unclear. In this study, endophytic bacterial populations of two citrus cultivars-the resistant satsuma mandarin and the susceptible Newhall navel orange-were analyzed through high-throughput sequencing. The results showed that endophytic bacterial community of satsuma mandarin was more abundant than that of Newhall navel orange. In addition, bacterial abundance was the highest in the spring samples, followed by that in summer and winter samples, in both the varieties. In all samples, the predominant phyla were Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Actinobacteria, and Bacteroidetes; the major genera were Bacillus and Stenotrophomonas, and the main species was Bacillus subtilis. According to the analysis of the predominant bacteria in the two citrus cultivars, B. subtilis with potential antagonistic characteristics against Xcc existed universally in all samples. However, the susceptible Newhall navel oranges were abundant in Bacillus subtilis and had a relatively large number of canker-causing cooperative bacteria such as Stenotrophomonas. The results suggested that endophytic bacterial community of the two citrus cultivars had some differences based on the season or plant tissue, and these differences were mainly in the quantity of bacteria, affecting citrus canker disease occurrence. In conclusion, the differences in endophytic bacteria on citrus cultivars might be related to host resistance or susceptibility to citrus canker disease.

One-dimensional carbon-based materials have emerged as promising electromagnetic wave absorption agents due to their outstanding conductivity, high stability, low weight, and easy availability. Properly optimizing their electromagnetic parameters is expected to further enhance the electromagnetic wave attenuation capacity. In this work, efficient Cu

Adolescence is a critical period for the maturation of neurobiological processes and hormone secretion. Recent studies on the dual-hormone hypothesis have indicated that basal cortisol and testosterone jointly affect dominant and aggressive behavior among adolescents and adults. Whether this hypothesis applies to prosocial-related understanding of others' mental states remains unclear. The present study investigated associations between basal testosterone, basal cortisol (and cortisol awakening response [CAR]), and the cognitive/affective theory of mind (ToM) in 243 adolescents (67.9 % male, aged 14 to 17 years, M

Transforming potentially resectable advanced esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) into resectable ESCC through preoperative induction therapy is an important component of ESCC comprehensive treatment. Immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy has been shown to have significant effects in the treatment of advanced ESCC, but its role in the neoadjuvant treatment of potentially resectable ESCC is unclear. This study aims to investigate the safety and effectiveness of camrelizumab combined with chemotherapy in the neoadjuvant treatment of ESCC.We recruited consecutive patients with potentially resectable ESCC who received preoperative camrelizumab in combination with chemotherapy. Data including demographic data, clinicopathological characteristics, neoadjuvant treatment regimens, lesion changes observed by imaging, and surgical details were retrospectively collected through specially designed forms. Toxic effects of neoadjuvant therapy on hematology, gastrointestinal tract, liver, kidney, skin, and thyroid were also collected. Imaging assessments were performed every 1-2 treatment cycles. Follow-up is based on the patient's regular admission to the hospital for examination and treatment, at least 3 months after surgery.A total of 66 patients with locally advanced ESCC were included in this study, including 8 patients with stage II, 29 patients with stage III, and 29 patients with stage IVA. The objective response rate (ORR) of the neoadjuvant immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy was 75.76% (50/66), and no one developed disease progression. A total of 60 patients underwent surgery, and the R0 resection rate was 98.3% (59/60). The pathological complete remission (pCR) rate and the major pathological response (MPR) rate was 6.7% (4/60) and 20% (12/60), respectively. There were 14 cases of treatment-related adverse reactions3, but no perioperative deaths occurred.Neoadjuvant immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy followed by surgical resection may be an available treatment for patients with locally advanced ESCC.

Background Surgery is a highly technical procedure relying on high mental acuity and manual dexterity. The possibility that surgical outcomes and post-operative complications could be subject to influence by fatigue and/or circadian rhythms in surgeons has been investigated with inconsistent results. Methods We conducted a retrospective study to assess the significance of operative timing on classifying surgical complications using an interpretable machine learning approach. We trained various linear, generative as well as tree models on the surgical record data collected from a university-affiliated, tertiary teaching hospital in China by performing parameter tuning using grid search cross-validation for optimizing the F1 score. Results The results indicated that XGBoost was the best-performing model overall and its feature importance was shown to provide insight into possible timing-related associations with postoperative complications. We observed that the duration of surgery acted as the strongest indicator, and while surgery initiated at night (between 9 pm and 7 am) also ranked higher on the feature importance scale, it bore less significance than other factors such as the patient's age, gender, and type of surgery performed. Conclusions We showed that surgical records could be used to demonstrate that operative timing might affect the occurrence of postoperative complications, but only in a relatively mild way while potentially entangling with multiple factors.

The selective infection of Xanthomonas citri pv. citri to citrus cultivars is universally known, but it is not clarified whether there is a relationship between endophytic bacteria and the resistance of host variety to canker disease. In order to explore the relationship, Satsuma mandarin and Newhall navel orange were collected respectively as samples of resistant or susceptible cultivars to citrus canker disease, and endophytic bacterial community of two citrus cultivars were analyzed by using a next-generation, Illumina-based sequencing approach. Simultaneously, the seasonal dynamics of endophytic bacterial community and dominant genera were analyzed. The results showed that there were four dominant groups including Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Actinobacteria and Bacteroidetes in all samples at phylum level. Endophytic bacteria were the most abundant in spring samples, then in summer and autumn samples. There were some differences between endophytic bacterial community of resistant citrus and that of susceptible citrus to canker disease, and the endophytic bacteria of Satsuma mandarin are more abundant than that of Newhall navel orange. According to the analysis of dominant bacteria in two citrus cultivars, it was found that some endophytic bacteria with antagonistic characteristics existed universally in all samples, although the dominant bacteria in different seasonal sample were different. However, in Newhall navel orange of susceptible citrus to canker disease, there were not only some bacteria against Xanthomonas citri pv. citri, but also some cooperative bacteria of canker occurrence like Stenotrophomonas.

Centrality is a measure index evaluating node and edge importance, and edge betweenness centrality is the most important among those. The length of shortest path between two nodes shows their relationship. When the path is longer, their relationship is weaker. Based on this idea, this paper think that two nodes have no relationship beyond some range. This paper introduces local edge betweenness centrality within K steps and weight of path length, and puts forward a new centrality evaluation method. Based on this, our method utilizes the core idea of GN algorithm, and puts forward a new community detection algorithm called Dist-K. Its performance and result are compared with other existing methods, as applied to different well-known instances of complex networks. Our method has better modularity, normalized mutual information, adjusted rand index and accuracy, which are widely used to measure community structures.

Aiming at the reliability problem of equipment power grid, the monitoring system of equipment power grid based on Internet of things was studied. On the basis of introducing the principle of system composition, the design scheme of the system is explained in detail. Finally, the function of the system is analyzed with the application of the case. The results show that the system can monitor the basic parameters, harmonics and voltage distortion of the equipment power grid in real time, and deal with the abnormal monitoring results in real time and quickly.

The local expansion method is a novel and promising community detection algorithm. Just based on part of network information, it can detect overlapping communities effectively, but some problems exist such as seed node aggregation, poor quality and inaccurate community coverage. Therefore, we propose a local expansion overlapping community detection algorithm based on dispersed seeds. There are four essential parts of this algorithm: 1) We firstly generate non-overlapping partitions of the network, and locate seed nodes with the largest influence in their own partition by using a new index of node influence, which combines the information centrality of nodes and the number of k-order neighbors. 2) Secondly, on the condition of the neighborhood overlap measure maximization, seed nodes merge unseeded nodes to generate a preliminary seed community; 3) Then based on the community conductance gain, the allocated nodes are screened and the free nodes are assigned to the seed community; 4) In the end, a node-community similarity based on common connection edge is proposed to re-allocate new free nodes and obtain the final community structure. This method can make the community distribution more proper and the coverage more reasonable. The experimental results on some artificial data and real network data show that the algorithm performs well on overlapping community indicators such as EQ and ONMI, while the community detection results are more stable.

Enantioselective cyclopropanation and C-H insertion reactions of α-substituted vinyl ketones with α-diazoesters have been accomplished using a N,N'-dioxide-scandium(iii) complex catalyst. Various tetrasubstituted cyclopropanes and E-enone derivatives bearing a chiral ester substituent were obtained simultaneously with good yields and excellent enantioselectivities.

This paper aims to introduce some prevalent techniques which have been used to solve linear systems. Firstly, we introduce the simplest method: how to eliminate variables in which the original systems would not be changed. We then introduce Gaussian eliminations, which work on the augmented matrix derived from a linear system. To the end, we present Cramer’s rule, which computes the solution to a linear system based on matrix determinants. These methods have their application scenarios. For instance, eliminating variables has no limited condition for its operations. However, Cramer’s rule needs to be under the condition of square matrices. At the same time, Gaussian elimination requires three elementary row operations, and Gaussian elimination paves the way for computing the rank of matrices. The choice between these methods depends on coefficient matrices in terms of dimensions and matrix properties such as singularity.

D-Galactose (D-Gal) promotes accumulation of reactive oxygen species and formation of advanced glycation end-products, ultimately resulting in oxidative stress. D-Gal has been widely used to induce accelerated aging in anti-aging medical research. Although thymic epithelial cells are particularly sensitive to oxidative stress, there are few reports on the thymus changes accompanying D-Gal-induced aging in mice. To study the effect of D-Gal on rodent thymus, we investigated the degree of thymus atrophy and changes in the atrophy relative index in C57BL/6J mice following subcutaneous injection of D-Gal at different doses (200, 500, 1000 mg/kg per day) for 60 days. Compared with the vehicle-treated (0.9% saline) and young controls, D-Gal at doses of 500 and 1000 mg/kg per day led to a significant thymic atrophy; the latter dose caused atrophy similar to that observed in naturally aged (18-20-month-old) mice. Mice treated with high-dose D-Gal exhibited greater immunosenescence, defective central immune tolerance, increased levels of activated splenic immune cell, and chronic low-grade inflammation, i.e., outcomes similar to those observed in natural aging in mice. Taken together, our results indicate that mice treated with high-dose D-Gal may be a valid model for studying induced thymic atrophy and effects of aging on the immune system.

Recovering missing values in time series is critical when performing time series analysis. And the blackouts issue studied in this paper, described as losing all the data during a certain period, is among the most urgent and challenging issues. While the existing approaches for missing value recovery in time series could not handle this issue properly, in this work, we proposes a Hankel matrix factorization-based approach for tagged time series called HKMF-T, following the idea of decomposing a data sequence into the smooth trend and the external impact components. By transforming the data sequence into its Hankel matrix form, HKMF-T models the smooth trend implied by high-order temporal correlations as the product of two low-rank matrices, and learns the external impacts indicated by a corresponding tag sequence. Through extensive experiments conducted on three real-world data sets, HKMF-T shows its effectiveness by outperforming all baseline methods for blackouts with durations longer than nine sampling intervals.

Adipocyte deposition is a key feature of age-related thymic involution, but the underlying mechanisms responsible for thymic adiposity remain to be elucidated. In the present study, we utilized rosiglitazone, a potent peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ agonist, to induce adipogenic differentiation of OP9-DL1 cells, and detected the metabolomics alterations during adipogenic differentiation by using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. The obtained metabolites were further processed by multivariate statistical analysis, including principal component analysis, partial least squares discriminant analysis, and orthogonal projection on latent-structures discriminant analysis. As a result, we identified a total of 33 significantly differential metabolites between dimethyl sulphoxide- and rosiglitazone-treated OP9-DL1 cells, which were closely related to the dysregulation of phospholipid metabolism pathway, oxidative stress, and associated amino acid metabolism. Meanwhile, two pathways including glycerophospholipid metabolism and nitrogen metabolism were significantly perturbed (P

The influence and underlying mechanisms of human adipose-derived stem cells (Hu-ADSCs) on breast cancer cells in the tumor microenvironment remain unclear. Understanding the association between Hu-ADSCs and cancer cells may provide targets for breast cancer treatment and reference for the clinical application of stem cells. Therefore, a Hu-ADSC and breast cancer MCF7 cell coculture system was established to investigate the paracrine effects of Hu-ADSCs on MCF7 cell migration and invasion, in addition to the potential mechanism of action by reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reaction and western blotting. Hu-ADSCs enhanced MCF7 cell migration and invasion by decreasing the expression of epithelial marker E-cadherin, and increasing the expression of interstitial marker N-cadherin and epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) transcription factors in vitro. The EMT effect of cocultured MCF7 cells was inhibited with the addition of anti-transforming growth factor (TGF)-β1 or phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) inhibitor LY294002, accompanied by a significant decrease in phosphorylated (p)-mothers against decapentaplegic homolog (Smad) and p-protein kinase B (AKT) expression. The data suggested that the paracrine effect of Hu-ADSCs in the tumor microenvironment promoted the EMT of MCF7 cells by cross interacting with the TGF-β/Smad and PI3K/AKT pathways.

Adipocyte deposition is believed to be a primary characteristic of age-related thymic involution. Herein, we cultured primary thymic stromal cells (TSCs), used rosiglitazone, a potent peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ (PPARγ) agonist, to induce adipogenic differentiation, and investigated the differentially expressed genes during adipogenic differentiation by using RNA-sequencing analysis. Furthermore, the effects of Notch1 on rosiglitazone-induced adipogenic differentiation of TSCs as well as the underlying mechanisms were also investigated. As a result, we identified a total of 1737 differentially expressed genes, among which 965 genes were up-regulated and 772 genes were down-regulated in rosiglitazone-treated cells compared with control cells. Gene ontology (GO) enrichment analysis showed that the GO terms were enriched in metabolic process, intracellular, and protein binding. Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes (KEGG) analysis showed that a number of pathways, including ubiquitin mediated proteolysis, PPAR signaling pathway, and mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway were predominantly over-represented. Meanwhile, overexpression of Notch1 suppressed and inhibition of Notch1 promoted rosiglitazone-induced adipogenic differentiation in TSCs, and the pro-adipogenic effects of the Notch inhibitor DAPT were associated with the activation of autophagy. Taken together, our results suggest that Notch1 is a key regulator in thymic adipogenesis and may serve as a potential target to hinder thymic adiposity in age-related thymic involution.

This paper presents the CARMUS framework for continuous activity recognition with missing values on smartphones. Besides the power and resource constraints discussed in existing work, our framework is proposed to further tackle the critical issue of missing values during data collection. We demonstrate the issue's impact on continuous recognition through a motivating example, and specify two challenges—blackouts and resource constraints-with respect to smartphone-based sensing and processing platforms. To address the challenges, CARMUS provides a novel framework which involves a light-weight admission control unit and a data imputation unit intuited by the daily repeated pattern and temporal smoothness of human activity data. Based on extensive experiments conducted on a real-world data set with 37% of the data missing, we show that the CARMUS framework is effective for achieving an 85.5% recognition accuracy by adopting the state-of-the-art imputation algorithms.

In this paper, an electrochemical DNA biosensor was prepared using electroreduced graphene oxide, titanium dioxide nanowires and chitosan modified carbon ionic liquid electrode as the substrate electrode, which was further used for the electrochemical detection of the specific tlh gene sequence from Vibrio parahaemolyticus. The presence of nanocomposite on the electrode surface can increase the surface area and fix the ssDNA probe sequence by electrostatic attraction. After the hybridization with the target ssDNA sequence under the selected conditions, methylene blue (MB) was used as the electrochemical indicator for monitoring the hybridization reaction. Under the optimal conditions, the reduction peak current of MB was proportional to the concentration of tlh gene sequence in the range from 1.0 × 10−12 to 1.0 × 10−6 mol L−1 with a detection limit as 3.17 × 10−13 mol L−1 (3σ). This electrochemical DNA sensor exhibited good ability to discriminate between one-base and three-base mismatched ssDNA sequences, and the polymerase chain reaction amplification product of the tlh gene from oyster samples was further detected with satisfactory results.

Adipocyte deposition is a key feature of age-related thymic involution, but the underlying mechanisms responsible for thymic adiposity remain to be elucidated. In the present study, we utilized rosiglitazone, a potent peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor γ agonist, to induce adipogenic differentiation of OP9-DL1 cells, and detected the metabolomics alterations during adipogenic differentiation by using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. The obtained metabolites were further processed by multivariate statistical analysis, including principal component analysis, partial least squares discriminant analysis, and orthogonal projection on latent-structures discriminant analysis. As a result, we identified a total of 33 significantly differential metabolites between dimethyl sulphoxide- and rosiglitazone-treated OP9-DL1 cells, which were closely related to the dysregulation of phospholipid metabolism pathway, oxidative stress, and associated amino acid metabolism. Meanwhile, two pathways including glycerophospholipid metabolism and nitrogen metabolism were significantly perturbed (P 0.05). Collectively, our results may provide some heuristic guidance for addressing the underlying mechanism of thymic adipogenesis, and future studies are warranted to unravel the functions of these altered metabolites in thymic adipogenesis.

Salvia miltiorrhiza (SM) is mainly used for the treatment of coronary heart disease in China, but previous studies demonstrated that it also shows anti‑inflammatory effects and the underlying mechanisms of these effects are not well understood. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of an injection of SM powder on the expression of transcription factor Foxp3 (Foxp3) in experimental colitis in mice. Mice were grouped and treated with SM powder for injection at the time of colonic instillation of trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid. Expression studies were performed by quantitative polymerase chain reaction and western blot analysis and histological studies were performed by hematoxylin and eosin staining. Myeloperoxidase activity was also tested for the evaluation of colitis. In the treated groups, the expression of Foxp3 mRNA and protein in the spleen were increased, the inflamed colonic lesions were relieved and the myeloperoxidase activity in the colon decreased significantly. Thus, it was demonstrated that SM exhibited its anti‑inflammatory by promoting Foxp3 expression. SM may be effective for the treatment of inflammatory disease, particularly for inflammatory bowel disease.