Search

This study used Actinidia arguta 'Kuilv' as raw material to produce wine by two different methods: whole pulp and clear juice fermentation. The basic physicochemical properties, nutrients, antioxidant capacity, volatile flavor compounds, and sensory evaluation of Actinidia arguta wine were detected. The results indicated that clear juice fermentation increased the ethanol content and color quality, and decreased the residual sugar content. Whole pulp fermentation reduced the total acid content and the total amount of organic acid and increased the pH value, antioxidant active ingredients, antioxidant activity, and the volatile flavor substances of the wine. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) analysis showed that citric acid and quinic acid were the main organic acids in the wine. Headspace gas chromatography–ion mobility spectrometry (HS-GC–IMS) analysis detected 55 volatile flavor compounds in the wine, including 26 esters, 13 alcohols, 10 aldehydes, 3 ketones, 1 acid, 1 terpene, and 1 pyrazine. Fourteen key volatile flavor substances were identified based on P-value < 0.05 and VIP value > 1: 2-pentanone, isoamyl alcohol, propionaldehyde, ethyl isobutyrate, 4-methyl-1-pentanol, butanal, butyl acetate, 2-heptanone, ethyl isovalerate, acetal M, 3-methyl-3-buten-1-ol M, ethyl butyrate, 1-penten-3-ol, octanal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cytochrome P450s represent one of the largest protein families across all domains of life. In plants, biotic stress can regulate the expression of some P450 genes. However, the CYPome (cytochrome P450 complement) in Solanum tuberosum and its response to Phytophthora infestans infection remains unrevealed. In this study, 488 P450 genes were identified from potato genome, which can be divided into 41 families and 57 subfamilies. Responding to the infection of P. infestans , 375 potato P450 genes were expressed in late blight resistant or susceptible cultivars. A total of 14 P450 genes were identified as resistant related candidates, and 81 P450 genes were identified as late blight responsive candidates. Several phytohormone biosynthesis, brassinosteroid biosynthesis, and phenylpropanoid biosynthesis involved P450 genes were differentially expressed during the potato-pathogen interactions. This study firstly reported the CYPome in S. tuberosum , and characterized the expression patterns of these P450 genes during the infection of P. infestans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite significant advancements in deep learning-based video–text retrieval methods, three challenges persist: the alignment of fine-grained semantic information from text and video, ensuring that the obtained textual and video feature representations capture primary semantic information while maintaining good discriminability, and measuring the semantic similarity between different instances. To tackle these issues, we introduce an end-to-end video–text retrieval framework which exploit Multi-Modal Masked Transformer and Adaptive Attribute-Aware Graph Convolutional Network (M 3 Trans-A 3 GCN). Specifically, the features extracted from videos and texts are fed into M 3 Trans to jointly integrate the multi-modal content and mask irrelevant multi-modal context. Subsequently, a novel GCN with an adaptive correlation matrix (i.e., A 3 GCN) is constructed to obtain discriminative video representation for video–text retrieval. To better measure the semantic similarity between video–text pairs during training, we propose a novel Text-semantic-guided Multi-Modal Cross-Entropy (TMCE) loss function. Here, the similarity between different video–text pairs within a batch is computed based on the features of the corresponding text rather than their instance labels. Comprehensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets, MSR-VTT, MSVD and LSMDC, demonstrate the superiority of M 3 Trans-A 3 GCN, compared with the state-of-the-art methods in video–text retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A coupled model is proposed integrating a 2D double layer-averaged model for reservoir and a 1D model for bottom tunnel. • High water level, small cover layer thickness, short tunnel length and steep tunnel slope favour the occurrence of sediment flushing. • Low water level, large cover layer thickness, long tunnel length and gentle tunnel slope are more likely to cause tunnel blockage. Sediment flushing through a bottom tunnel is one of the most effective methods to alleviate reservoir sedimentation. However, the multi-physical hydro-sediment-morphological processes of reservoir sediment flushing through an initially covered bottom tunnel intake have remained poorly understood, and a physically enhanced and practically viable mathematical model is required. The present study uses an integrated model to resolve sediment flushing through an initially covered bottom tunnel intake. The proposed model couples a two-dimensional double layer-averaged model for the reservoir with a one-dimensional model for the bottom tunnel by means of numerical fluxes calculations at the inner boundary. The governing equations are solved synchronously using a well-balanced finite volume method. Several parameters related to boundary resistances and sediment exchange flux need to be determined for model closure. The model is tested against data from a series of physical experiments on reservoir sediment flushing, with sound agreement achieved between computed and measured scour hole geometries. Moreover, the present model successfully predicts the occurrence of tunnel blockage. The results prove that reservoir sediment flushing is best accomplished for high reservoir water level, small cover layer thickness, short tunnel length and steep tunnel slope. The present model facilitates reservoir design and operation to help preserve reservoir capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Miss rate of colorectal neoplasia is associated with lesion histology, size, morphology, or location. Objectives: We aim to compare the efficacy of Linked color imaging (LCI) versus white light imaging (WLI) for adenoma detection rate (ADR), the detection of sessile serrated lesions (SSLs), serrated lesions (SLs), advanced adenomas (AAs), diminutive lesions (DLs), and flat lesions (FLs) by using per-patient and per-lesion analysis based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Design: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Data sources and methods: PubMed, Embase, and Cochrane databases were searched through May 1st, 2023. We calculated risk ratio for dichotomous outcomes and mean difference for continuous outcomes, and performed sensitivity analyses and subgroup analyses. Results: Overall, 17 RCTs (10,624 patients) were included. In per-patient analysis, ADR was higher in the LCI group versus the WLI group (p < 0.00001). This effect was consistent for SSL (p = 0.005), SLs (p = 0.01), AAs (p = 0.04), DLs (p < 0.00001), and FLs (p < 0.0001). In per-lesion analysis, LCI showed a significant superiority over WLI with regard to the mean number of adenomas per patient (p < 0.00001). This effect was in accordance with mean SSL (p = 0.001), mean SLs (p < 0.00001), and mean DLs (p < 0.0001) per patient. A subgroup analysis showed that the beneficial effect of the LCI group on the detection of AAs, SSL, and FLs was maintained only for studies when experts and trainees were included but not for experts only. Conclusions: Meta-analyses of RCTs data support the use of LCI in clinical practice, especially for trainees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power line interference (PLI) is a major source of noise in sEMG signals. As the bandwidth of PLI overlaps with the sEMG signals, it can easily affect the interpretation of the signal. The processing methods used in the literature are mostly notch filtering and spectral interpolation. However, it is difficult for the former to reconcile the contradiction between completely filtering and avoiding signal distortion, while the latter performs poorly in the case of a time-varying PLI. To solve these, a novel synchrosqueezed-wavelet-transform (SWT)-based PLI filter is proposed. The local SWT was developed to reduce the computation cost while maintaining the frequency resolution. A ridge location method based on an adaptive threshold is presented. In addition, two ridge extraction methods (REMs) are proposed to fit different application requirements. Parameters were optimized before further study. Notch filtering, spectral interpolation, and the proposed filter were evaluated on the simulated signals and real signals. The output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ranges of the proposed filter with two different REMs are 18.53–24.57 and 18.57–26.92. Both the quantitative index and the time–frequency spectrum diagram show that the performance of the proposed filter is significantly better than that of the other filters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we establish some new weakly singular Volterra type integral inequalities that include the maxima of the unknown function of two variables. We also use the results to research the boundedness of solutions to retarded nonlinear Volterra type integral equations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To investigate the predictive factors of pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients. Method: This chart review study included 408 SLE patients. We defined PAH as 2 consecutive systolic pulmonary arterial pressure (PAP) values ≥40 mm Hg by echocardiography. Demographic characteristics, clinical symptoms, autoantibodies, and laboratory tests were studied. Results: Thirty‐four patients in the SLE/PAH+ group and 374 patients in the SLE/PAH− group were analyzed. The prevalence of PAH in SLE is 8.3% in this study. The occurrences of interstitial pneumonitis, polyserositis and myocardial damage were higher in the SLE/PAH+ group (P =.001, P =.033 and P <.001, respectively). The occurrence of anti‐double‐stranded DNA and anti‐ribosomal RNA protein (anti‐rRNP) antibodies were lower in the SLE/PAH+ group (P =.003,.010). Positive rates of anti‐Sjögren's syndrome antigen A (anti‐SSA)/Ro52 antibodies and anti‐SSB antibodies were higher in the SLE/PAH+ group (P =.046,.021). C‐reactive protein and immunoglobin G (IgG) were higher in the SLE/PAH+ group (P =.009,.005). Ejection fraction and SLE disease activity index between the 2 groups had no differences. Multivariable logistic regression indicated that interstitial pneumonitis, myocardial damage and high IgG are predictive factors for SLE‐associated PAH patients. Conclusion: From this study, we found that interstitial pneumonitis, myocardial damage, and high IgG were predictive factors of PAH in SLE patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The medical literature contains valuable knowledge, such as the clinical symptoms, diagnosis, and treatments of a particular disease. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the initial step in extracting this knowledge from unstructured text and presenting it as a Knowledge Graph (KG). However, the previous approaches of NER have often suffered from small-scale human-labelled training data. Furthermore, extracting knowledge from Chinese medical literature is a more complex task because there is no segmentation between Chinese characters. Recently, the pretraining models, which obtain representations with the prior semantic knowledge on large-scale unlabelled corpora, have achieved state-of-the-art results for a wide variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, the capabilities of pretraining models have not been fully exploited, and applications of other pretraining models except BERT in specific domains, such as NER in Chinese medical literature, are also of interest. In this paper, we enhance the performance of NER in Chinese medical literature using pretraining models. First, we propose a method of data augmentation by replacing the words in the training set with synonyms through the Mask Language Model (MLM), which is a pretraining task. Then, we consider NER as the downstream task of the pretraining model and transfer the prior semantic knowledge obtained during pretraining to it. Finally, we conduct experiments to compare the performances of six pretraining models (BERT, BERT-WWM, BERT-WWM-EXT, ERNIE, ERNIE-tiny, and RoBERTa) in recognizing named entities from Chinese medical literature. The effects of feature extraction and fine-tuning, as well as different downstream model structures, are also explored. Experimental results demonstrate that the method of data augmentation we proposed can obtain meaningful improvements in the performance of recognition. Besides, RoBERTa-CRF achieves the highest F1-score compared with the previous methods and other pretraining models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper established some new Hermite–Hadamard type inequalities for ψ -Riemann–Liouville fractional integrals via convex functions. As applications, we applied the inequalities to special means of real numbers and constructed inequalities for the beta function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fault detection plays an important role in providing reliable operation for permanent‐magnet synchronous machine (PMSM). The inter‐turn fault is one of the most common faults for the PMSM. Hence, this study focuses on the incipient stage inter‐turn fault detection. An improved zero‐sequence voltage component‐based (ZSVC) inter‐turn fault detection method is proposed. In the proposed method, discrete wavelet transform is first applied to remove the noise and harmonic components in the ZSVC for highlighting the fault characteristic component. Then, fast Fourier transform is used to analyse the obtained signal for the inter‐turn fault detection. In addition, to show the performance of the proposed method, the commonly used fault detection based on stator current is studied. The effectiveness of the proposed fault diagnosis method is validated by the simulation and experimental results, showing that the proposed method has good performance for the incipient stage inter‐turn fault diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient detection of chemical oxygen demand (COD) is crucial for effective pollution prevention. Traditional Cu‐based electrodes, widely utilized for COD sensors suffer from issues related to low activity and stability. This study introduced a novel approach by employing a copper foam‐supported metal‐organic frameworks (Cu‐MOF), synthesized through a solvothermal method, which is subsequently pyrolyzed to yield a carbon‐capsulated CuOx/Cu foam electrode. Cyclic voltammetry analysis demonstrated that the carbon‐capsulated CuOx/Cu foam electrode exhibited superior redox activity, notably generating an increased amount of Cu(III) species. This enhancement significantly contributed to the electrocatalytic oxidation of organic compounds. The developed electrode demonstrated a wide linear detection range of 5–600 ppm, with a low detection limit of 0.96 ppm (S/N=3) for COD sensing. Notably, the sensor exhibited excellent anti‐interference capabilities, desirable reproducibility, and stability. The proposed method was successfully applied to determine COD in real water samples. Comparative analysis with the standard potassium dichromate method revealed high accuracy and a low relative error (2.89 %–6.72 %). This innovative approach holds promise for rapid and accurate COD detection, presenting a valuable contribution to environmental monitoring and water quality assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Text image captioning aims to understand the scene text in images for generating image captions. The key challenge of this task is to accurately and comprehensively understand the OCR tokens of scene text. Due to the dual modal of visual and textual features of scene text, expressing the multimodal semantic features of OCR tokens accurately is a challenging task. Additionally, since scene text cannot exist independently of specific objects and is always associated with its surroundings, establishing a scene graph centered around OCR tokens is also an important approach to understand its relationship with other objects in the image. In this paper, we propose a novel model named C lip- O CR and M aster Obj E ct (dubbed as COME) for text image captioning. First, we introduce a CLIP-OCR module to enhance the multimodal representation of OCR tokens. We separate the OCR representation into visual and textual items and narrow the similarity by contrastive learning. With the assistance of the CLIP-OCR module, we realize correlation alignment between different modes. Next, we propose the concept of master object for each OCR text and purify the OCR-oriented scene graph with it. The master object is defined as the object to which the OCR is attached, which bridges the semantic relationship between the OCR tokens and the image. We consider the master object as a proxy that connects OCR tokens and other regions in the image. By exploring the master object for each OCR token, we build a purified scene graph based on the master object and then enrich the visual embedding by the Graph Convolution Network (GCN). Furthermore, we cluster the OCR tokens and append the hierarchical information on the input embedding to provide a complete representation. Experiments on the TextCaps validation set and test set demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. • A new framework COME for text image captioning that understands OCR tokens of scene text. • A CLIP-OCR module to enhance the multimodal representation of OCR tokens. • The concept of master object to purified the relationships of OCR token. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the task of visual grounding (VG), which aims to localize regions of an image through sentence queries. The development of VG has significantly advanced with Transformer-based frameworks, which can capture image and text contexts without proposals. However, previous research has rarely explored hierarchical semantics and cross-interactions between two uni-modal encoders. Therefore, this paper proposes a Hierarchical Cross-modal Contextual Attention Network (HCCAN) for the VG task. The HCCAN model utilizes a visual-guided text contextual attention module, a text-guided visual contextual attention module, and a Transformer-based multi-modal feature fusion module. This approach not only captures intra-modality and inter-modality relationships through self-attention mechanisms but also captures the hierarchical semantics of textual and visual content in a common space. Experiments conducted on four standard benchmarks, including Flickr30K Entities and RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The code is publicly available at https://www.github.com/cutexin66/HCCAN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Higher temperatures produced higher thermal stability biochars. [•] Production method showed strong effect on biochar properties. [•] Biochars showed no statistically significant effects on plant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Ce3+ and Tb3+ co-doped Sr3Gd(PO4)3 phosphors were synthesized by the solid-state method. The phase structure and luminescence properties of the phosphor samples were characterized by using powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), photoluminescence (PL) excitation and emission spectra, decay time, respectively. The obtained phosphor exhibits a strong excitation band between 200 and 400nm, matching well with the dominant emission band of a ultraviolet (UV) light-emitting-diode (LED) chip. Effective energy transfer occurred from Ce3+ to Tb3+ in Sr3Gd(PO4)3 hosts due to the spectra overlap between the PL emission spectrum of Ce3+ ion and the PL excitation spectrum of Tb3+ ion. The energy transfer from Ce3+ and Tb3+ in Sr3Gd(PO4)3 host was demonstrated to be resonant type via a dipole–dipole interaction mechanism with the energy transfer critical distance of 1.87nm. Furthermore, Sr3Gd(PO4)3:Ce3+,xTb3 can be systematically tuned to generate blue light to yellow–greenish light under UV excitation. It can serve as a potential color-tunable UV phosphor for white-light LED (w-LEDS) devices. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

An efficient near-infrared (NIR) quantum cutting (QC) by converting ultraviolet into NIR via cooperative downconversion (DC) for the (Nd, Yb) couple in CaWO is studied since efficient two-step energy transfer occurs from the G level of Nd to two neighboring Yb:F level. The authors have analyzed the measured luminescence spectra and decay lifetimes for different Yb concentrations and proposed a mechanism to rationalize the DC effect. The maximum quantum efficiency (QE) of Nd is up to 164.03 %. Application of the broadband NIR-QC phosphors might enhance the performance of silicon-based solar cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Ce3+ and Tb3+ co-doped BaAl2B2O7 phosphors were synthesized by the solid-state method. X-ray diffraction (XRD) was used to characterize the phase structure. The photoluminescent properties of Ce3+ and Tb3+ co-doped BaAl2B2O7 phosphors were investigated by using the photoluminescence emission and excitation spectra. Under the excitation of near ultraviolet (n-UV) light, BaAl2B2O7:Ce3+,Tb3+ phosphors exhibited blue emission corresponding to the f–d transition of Ce3+ ions and green emission bands corresponding to the f–f transition of Tb3+ ions, respectively. Effective energy transfer occurred from Ce3+ to Tb3+ in BaAl2B2O7 host due to the observed spectra overlap between the emission spectrum of Ce3+ ion and the excitation spectrum of Tb3+ ion. The energy transfer efficiency from Ce3+ ion to Tb3+ ion was also calculated to be 71%. Furthermore, the concentration quenching and critical distance of BaAl2B2O7:Ce3+,Tb3+ phosphors were also discussed. The energy transfer from Ce3+ to Tb3+ in BaAl2B2O7 host was demonstrated to be resonant type via a dipole–dipole interaction mechanism with the energy transfer critical distance of 16.13Å. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Surface electromyography (sEMG) has great potential in investigating the neuromuscular mechanism for knee pathology. However, due to the complex nature of neural control in lower limb motions and the divergences in subjects' health and habits, it is difficult to directly use the raw sEMG signals to establish a robust sEMG analysis system. To solve this, muscle synergy analysis based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) of sEMG is carried out in this manuscript. The similarities of muscle synergy of subjects with and without knee pathology performing three different lower limb motions are calculated. Based on that, we have designed a classification method for motion recognition and knee pathology diagnosis. First, raw sEMG segments are preprocessed and then decomposed to muscle synergy matrices by NMF. Then, a two-stage feature selection method is executed to reduce the dimension of feature sets extracted from aforementioned matrices. Finally, the random forest classifier is adopted to identify motions or diagnose knee pathology. The study was conducted on an open dataset of 11 healthy subjects and 11 patients. Results show that the NMF-based sEMG classifier can achieve good performance in lower limb motion recognition, and is also an attractive solution for clinical application of knee pathology diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coreference resolution is a key task in Natural Language Processing. It is difficult to evaluate the similarity of long-span texts, which makes text-level encoding somewhat challenging. This paper first compares the impact of commonly used methods to improve the global information collection ability of the model on the BERT encoding performance. Based on this, a multi-scale context information module is designed to improve the applicability of the BERT encoding model under different text spans. In addition, improving linear separability through dimension expansion. Finally, cross-entropy loss is used as the loss function. After adding BERT and span BERT to the module designed in this article, F1 increased by 0.5% and 0.2%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was conducted in the purpose of investigating the effect of Tai Chi on drug craving for women with drug disorders. One hundred and twelve women were recruited from a drug rehabilitation center in China, and 47 and 48 were finally analyzed in the control group and exercise group, respectively. The exercise group underwent a 3-month Tai Chi training, whereas the control group experienced no exercise intervention during the same time period. The drug craving was measured by the visual analog scale. In data analysis, repeated-measures were utilized to test the differences between the control and exercise group over the course of the experiment time. The mean of the craving score significantly dropped from pre-test (control: mean = 5.38, SD = 3.04; exercise: mean = 4.68, SD = 2.93) to post-test (control: mean = 4.03, SD = 2.73; exercise: mean = 1.91, SD = 1.90) in both groups (control group: t = 3.84, df = 46, p < 0.001; exercise group: t = 5.941, df = 47, p < 0.001), with more decrease witnessed in the exercise group. Repeated-measures analysis with a Huynh–Feldt correction showed the significant effect of time (F = 27.383, p < 0.001) as well as the study group by time interaction (F = 3.52, p = 0.024). Tai Chi can ameliorate the drug craving in women and it could be a supportive treatment for drug addiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human activity recognition (HAR) is essential in many health-related fields. A variety of technologies based on different sensors have been developed for HAR. Among them, fusion from heterogeneous wearable sensors has been developed as it is portable, non-interventional and accurate for HAR. To be applied in real-time use with limited resources, the activity recognition system must be compact and reliable. This requirement can be achieved by feature selection (FS). By eliminating irrelevant and redundant features, the system burden is reduced with good classification performance (CP). This manuscript proposes a two-stage genetic algorithm-based feature selection algorithm with a fixed activation number (GFSFAN), which is implemented on the datasets with a variety of time, frequency and time-frequency domain features extracted from the collected raw time series of nine activities of daily living (ADL). Six classifiers are used to evaluate the effects of selected feature subsets from different FS algorithms on HAR performance. The results indicate that GFSFAN can achieve good CP with a small size. A sensor-to-segment coordinate calibration algorithm and lower-limb joint angle estimation algorithm are introduced. Experiments on the effect of the calibration and the introduction of joint angle on HAR shows that both of them can improve the CP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: An efficient Near-Infrared (NIR) quantum cutting (QC) in Eu2+–Yb3+ co-doped Sr3Gd(PO4)3 phosphor has been investigated. Upon excitation of Eu2+ with an ultraviolent (UV) photon at 343nm, two NIR emissions have been obtained from 2F7/2 → 2F5/2 transition of Yb3+. The luminescence spectra both in visible (VIS) and NIR regions and decay lifetime curves of Eu2+ have been measured to prove energy transfer (ET) from Eu2+ to Yb3+. The highest energy transfer efficiency (ETE) related to Yb3+ concentration was found to be 85.3%. So that the Sr3Gd(PO4)3 co-doped with Eu2+ and Yb3+ may be candidates to modify the spectral and improve the solar cell efficiency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• A novel three-equation two-phase flow model is proposed for sedimentation and consolidation. • Fluid pressure increases with initial sediment concentration, necessitating incorporation of non-hydrostatic pressure. • Inertial effects become significant with larger grains, indicating the need to incorporate inertial forces. Sedimentation and consolidation, a multi-physical phenomenon of great significance in aquatic environments, usually involves dynamic pore pressure, inertial effects, fluid-particle interphase interaction and solid stress. However, simplified models for sedimentation and consolidation typically assume hydrostatic mixture pressure and neglect inertial effects without proper justifications. Here, a one-dimensional three-equation two-phase flow model (TTP) is proposed for sedimentation and consolidation, which directly resolves dynamic fluid pressure and inertial terms. The present TTP model is benchmarked against a series of experimental cases and two existing four-equation two-phase flow (FTP) models. It features encouraging performance as compared to measured data and computed results of the existing FTP model. Furthermore, the present TTP model shows superior computing efficiency over the FTP models. To investigate the influences of inertial effects and non-hydrostatic mixture pressure, two simplified versions of the TTP model are constructed and compared with the TTP model. It is shown that incorporating inertial effects and non-hydrostatic fluid pressure are important for accurately predicting the sedimentation-consolidation process. The present study facilitates a promising framework for modelling sedimentation and consolidation, thereby supporting effective sediment management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Injectable hydrogel is a kind of in situ gelling system but has its specificity on the process procedure, which requires a better control of gelation kinetics. Hydrogels with injectability under mild condition are preferred in the field of biomedicine, especially for drug delivery and tissue engineering, because of the favorable carrier property in three-dimension, biocompatibility, low invasive and adaptable shape for administration. Despite the advantages, the development of injectable hydrogels may also face some challenges to meet the various clinical requirements. In this review, we provide a brief summary on the recent progresses on the design, synthesis and evaluation of injectable hydrogels towards biomedical applications. • Review on the development of injectable hydrogel for biomedical applications. • The use of dynamic covalent bonding is an efficient route for the synthesis of injectable hydrogel. • Injectable hydrogels show promising properties as carrier for topical and localized drug delivery. • The ability of 3D encapsulation contributes the functions of injectable hydrogel for tissue engineering. • The balance among mechanical property, carrier capacity and processability is of important to an injectable hydrogel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cation-disordered rocksalt (DRX) oxides show promise as lithium-ion battery cathodes due to their high theoretical capacity derived from anionic redox. However, the challenges of poor anionic redox reversibility, causing oxygen loss and voltage hysteresis, lead to rapid capacity decay. This study employs a dual-functional urea treatment on Li1.2Ti0.4Mn0.4O2 DRX cathodes, generating oxygen vacancies in the subsurface and a protective carbon nitride layer on the surface through interface reactions. Characterization via X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy confirms these alterations. The presence of oxygen vacancies reduces the average Mn valence, increasing the capacity contributed by Mn and enhancing the reversibility of anionic oxygen redox, thus curbing oxygen loss. Additionally, the carbon nitride layer curtails the parasitic reaction between active oxygen species and the electrolyte. Urea-treated Li1.2Ti0.4Mn0.4O2 exhibits enhanced electrochemical performance, retaining a higher capacity (151 mAh⋅g−1, 80.3% of capacity retention) after 50 cycles compared to neat Li1.2Ti0.4Mn0.4O2 (117 mAh⋅g−1, 64.6% retention). Furthermore, the treatment improves lithium-ion diffusion and rate capability. This dual-functional urea approach presents a promising strategy for enhancing DRX cathode materials and advancing high-performance lithium-ion batteries.Graphical Abstract: Cation-disordered rocksalt (DRX) oxides show promise as lithium-ion battery cathodes due to their high theoretical capacity derived from anionic redox. However, the challenges of poor anionic redox reversibility, causing oxygen loss and voltage hysteresis, lead to rapid capacity decay. This study employs a dual-functional urea treatment on Li1.2Ti0.4Mn0.4O2 DRX cathodes, generating oxygen vacancies in the subsurface and a protective carbon nitride layer on the surface through interface reactions. Characterization via X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy confirms these alterations. The presence of oxygen vacancies reduces the average Mn valence, increasing the capacity contributed by Mn and enhancing the reversibility of anionic oxygen redox, thus curbing oxygen loss. Additionally, the carbon nitride layer curtails the parasitic reaction between active oxygen species and the electrolyte. Urea-treated Li1.2Ti0.4Mn0.4O2 exhibits enhanced electrochemical performance, retaining a higher capacity (151 mAh⋅g−1, 80.3% of capacity retention) after 50 cycles compared to neat Li1.2Ti0.4Mn0.4O2 (117 mAh⋅g−1, 64.6% retention). Furthermore, the treatment improves lithium-ion diffusion and rate capability. This dual-functional urea approach presents a promising strategy for enhancing DRX cathode materials and advancing high-performance lithium-ion batteries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schisandra chinensis, as a traditional Chinese herbal medicine, has clear pharmacological effects such as treating asthma, protecting nerves and blood vessels, and having anti-inflammatory properties. Although the Schisandra chinensis fruit contain multiple active components, the lignans have been widely studied as the primary pharmacologically active compound. The volatile chemical components of Schisandra chinensis include a large amount of terpenes, which have been proven to have broad pharmacological activities. However, when to harvest to ensure the highest accumulation of pharmacologically active components in Schisandra chinensis fruits is a critical issue. The Schisandra chinensis fruit trees in the resource nursery were all planted in 2019 and began bearing fruit in 2021. Their nutritional status and tree vigor remain consistently good. The content of lignans and organic acids in the fruits of Schisandra chinensis over seven different harvest periods was tested, and the results of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) indicated that the lignan content was higher, at 35 mg/g, in late July, and the organic acid content was higher, at 72.34 mg/g, in early September. If lignans and organic acids are to be selected as raw materials for pharmacological development, the harvest can be carried out at this stage. Using HS-GC-IMS technology, a total of 67 volatile flavor substances were detected, and the fingerprint of the volatile flavor substances in the different picking periods was established. It was shown by the results that the content of volatile flavor substances was the highest in early August, and 16 flavor substances were selected by odor activity value (OAV). The variable importance in projection (VIP) values of 16 substances were further screened, and terpinolene was identified as the key volatile flavor substance that caused the aroma characteristics of Schisandra chinensis fruit at different harvesting periods. If the aroma component content of Schisandra chinensis fruit is planned to be used as raw material for development and utilization, then early August, when the aroma component content is higher, should be chosen as the time for harvest. This study provides a theoretical basis for the suitable harvesting time of Schisandra chinensis for different uses, and promotes the high-quality development of the Schisandra chinensis industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this present study, we proposed a smart biomineralization method for creating hybrid organic–inorganic nanoflowers using a Co2+-dependent enzyme (D-psicose 3-epimerase; DPEase) as the organic component and cobalt phosphate as the inorganic component. The prepared nanoflowers have many separated petals that have a nanometer size. Under optimum conditions (60 °C and pH of 8.5), the nanoflower can display its maximum activity (36.2 U/mg), which is about 7.2-fold higher than free DPEase. Furthermore, the immobilized DPEase presents enhanced pH and thermal stabilities. The DPEase-nanoflower maintained about 90% of its activity after six reaction cycles, highlighting its excellent reusability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bone metastasis is of common occurrence in renal cell carcinoma with poor prognosis, but no optimal treatment approach has been established for bone metastatic renal cell carcinoma. To explore the potential therapeutic targets for bone metastatic renal cell carcinoma, we profile single cell transcriptomes of 6 primary renal cell carcinoma and 9 bone metastatic renal cell carcinoma. We also include scRNA-seq data of early-stage renal cell carcinoma, late-stage renal cell carcinoma, normal kidneys and healthy bone marrow samples in the study to better understand the bone metastasis niche. The molecular properties and dynamic changes of major cell lineages in bone metastatic environment of renal cell carcinoma are characterized. Bone metastatic renal cell carcinoma is associated with multifaceted immune deficiency together with cancer-associated fibroblasts, specifically appearance of macrophages exhibiting malignant and pro-angiogenic features. We also reveal the dominance of immune inhibitory T cells in the bone metastatic renal cell carcinoma which can be partially restored by the treatment. Trajectory analysis showes that myeloid-derived suppressor cells are progenitors of macrophages in the bone metastatic renal cell carcinoma while monocytes are their progenitors in primary tumors and healthy bone marrows. Additionally, the infiltration of immune inhibitory CD47+ T cells is observed in bone metastatic tumors, which may be a result of reduced phagocytosis by SIRPA-expressing macrophages in the bone microenvironment. Together, our results provide a systematic view of various cell types in bone metastatic renal cell carcinoma and suggest avenues for therapeutic solutions. Single-cell profiling of primary and bone metastatic renal cell carcinoma suggests variation in intratumoral heterogeneity between samples and the is a valuable resource for examining the underlying pathogenic mechanisms for these cancers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Actinidia arguta is a fruit crop with high nutritional and economic value. However, its flavor quality depends on various factors, such as variety, environment, and post-harvest handling. We analyzed the composition of total soluble sugars, titratable acids, organic acids, and flavor substances in the fruits of ten A. arguta varieties. The total soluble sugar content ranged from 4.22 g/L to 12.99 g/L, the titratable acid content ranged from 52.55 g/L to 89.9 g/L, and the sugar–acid ratio ranged from 5.39 to 14.17 at the soft ripe stage. High-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) showed that citric, quinic, and malic acids were the main organic acids in the A. arguta fruits. Headspace gas chromatography–ion mobility spectrometry (HS-GC-IMS) detected 81 volatile compounds in 10 A. arguta varieties, including 24 esters, 17 alcohols, 23 aldehydes, 7 ketones, 5 terpenes, 2 acids, 1 Pyrazine, 1 furan, and 1 benzene. Esters and aldehydes had the highest relative content of total volatile compounds. An orthogonal partial least squares discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) based on the odor activity value (OAV) revealed that myrcene, benzaldehyde, methyl isobutyrate, α-phellandrene, 3-methyl butanal, valeraldehyde, ethyl butyrate, acetoin, (E)-2-octenal, hexyl propanoate, terpinolene, 1-penten-3-one, and methyl butyrate were the main contributors to the differences in the aroma profiles of the fruits of different A. arguta varieties. Ten A. arguta varieties have different flavors. This study can clarify the differences between varieties and provide a reference for the evaluation of A. arguta fruit flavor, variety improvement and new variety selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A signal injection method without torque ripple is presented to estimate the stator winding temperature of a surface-mounted permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM), where the temperature is estimated based on the stator resistance. First, the current signal (Δid*) is injected into the current control loop to produce DC current offsets used to calculate the stator resistance, where the injected signal cannot lead to extra torque ripple. Then the temperature can be obtained based on the relationship between the stator winding temperature and the stator resistance. Finally, the proposed method is validated by simulation and experimental results. In addition, no extra equipment is needed for the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations contain various errors, the separation and measurement of which is a popular research topic. Multipath effect on code measurements is investigated through the multipath combination, but carrier multipath error is small, and it is difficult to distinguish from other errors, such as hardware delay, carrier noise and satellite inherent biases. However, as the number of frequency points increases during the rapid development of GNSSs, it is possible to analyse the abovementioned errors in detail. Triple-frequency combination can be used to eliminate the first order ionospheric error, and a quad-frequency combination has one degree of freedom, which may be used to minimise carrier error effects. For this reason, an optimum method has been developed for multi-frequency GNSS code-multipath combination measurements, which has been verified by exploiting BeiDou System (BDS), three frequency data from an International GNSS Service (IGS) station and a city canyon as well as actual sampled quad-frequency data. By comparative analysis, we found that the fluctuations of an optimum triple-frequency combination are smaller than that of the non-optimum combination, which decreases the influence of inherent errors and biases on carrier phase. At the same time, second-order ionospheric error can be effectively eliminated as well. This provides a new code-multipath combination measurement optimisation methodology for future multi-frequency BDS and other GNSSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an association between drug use and psychological disorders. The correlation between drug craving and psychological symptoms has been studied during drug use and acute withdrawal. However, this correlation has not been researched during non-acute withdrawal. This study recruited 175 females who had long-term drug use history and their abstinent time was at least 30 days. Psychiatric symptoms were tested by Symptoms Checklist-90 (SCL-90) and Visual Analog Scale was utilized to present subjects' craving intensity. The craving intensity was positively associated with SCL-90 total score and its ten subscales, p < 0.01. SCL-90 total score, somatization, obsessive compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, psychotic symptoms, and additional items were negatively linked to abstinent time, p < 0.05. Moreover, with the increasing abstinent time, the correlation between craving severity and SCL-90 and its subscales was weakening. The craving was positively associated with psychiatric symptoms in non-acute withdrawal women. This association might weaken and the severity of some psychiatric symptoms may ameliorate over time. Women who have drug use disorders would benefit from psychiatric treatment to reduce drug craving and to subsequently decrease relapse rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This study aimed to develop an interpretable machine learning model to predict the onset of myopia based on individual daily information. Method: This study was a prospective cohort study. At baseline, non-myopia children aged 6–13 years old were recruited, and individual data were collected through interviewing students and parents. One year after baseline, the incidence of myopia was evaluated based on visual acuity test and cycloplegic refraction measurement. Five algorithms, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines, Gradient Boosting Decision Tree, CatBoost and Logistic Regression were utilized to develop different models and their performance was validated by area under curve (AUC). Shapley Additive exPlanations was applied to interpret the model output on the individual and global level. Result: Of 2221 children, 260 (11.7%) developed myopia in 1 year. In univariable analysis, 26 features were associated with the myopia incidence. Catboost algorithm had the highest AUC of 0.951 in the model validation. The top 3 features for predicting myopia were parental myopia, grade and frequency of eye fatigue. A compact model using only 10 features was validated with an AUC of 0.891. Conclusion: The daily information contributed reliable predictors for childhood's myopia onset. The interpretable Catboost model presented the best prediction performance. Oversampling technology greatly improved model performance. This model could be a tool in myopia preventing and intervention that can help identify children who are at risk of myopia, and provide personalized prevention strategies based on contributions of risk factors to the individual prediction result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Radiation‐induced hepatic stellate cell (HSC) activation promotes radiation‐induced liver fibrosis (RILF), a complication for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) radiotherapy. The demethylase alpha‐ketoglutarate‐dependent dioxygenase alkB homolog 5 (ALKBH5) decreases N6‐methyladenylate methylation (m6A) modification of RNA, while its role in regulating RILF pathogenesis and HCC radiosensitivity remains unknown. Methods: Methylated RNA immunoprecipitation sequencing (MeRIP‐seq) and RNA‐sequencing (RNA‐seq) were used to screen target genes regulated by ALKBH5. HSC with altered ALKBH5 expression was used to assess irradiation‐induced HSC activation and the effect of HSC on recruitment and polarisation of monocytes. Key cytokines in medium from irradiated HSC‐educated monocytes were identified by cytokine array detection. The effects of blocking ALKBH5 and key cytokines on RILF and HCC radiosensitivity were also evaluated. Results: Radiation‐induced ALKBH5 expression in HSC mediated m6A demethylation of toll‐interleukin 1 receptor domain containing adaptor protein (TIRAP) mRNA and activated its downstream NF‐κB and JNK/Smad2 pathways to promote HSC activation. Additionally, ALKBH5 regulated CCL5 secretion by irradiated HSC to promote monocyte recruitment and M2 macrophage polarisation. Notably, polarised monocytes secreted CCL20 to up‐regulate ALKBH5 expression in HSC, and reduce HCC radiosensitivity by activating ALKBH5/TIRAP axis in HCC cells. ALKBH5 knockdown‐combined CCR6 (CCL20 receptor) inhibitor significantly alleviated RILF and improved HCC radiosensitivity in mice. HCC patients with high ALKBH5 and TIRAP expression were prone to radiation‐induced liver injury and poor tumour response to radiotherapy. Conclusions: Collectively, irradiation up‐regulates ALKBH5 in HSC to mediate monocyte recruitment and M2 polarisation and form positive feedback to promote RILF and reduce HCC radiosensitivity. The dual roles of ALKBH5 as a microenvironmental regulator and radiosensitisation target provide new ideas for RILF prevention and radiosensitisation of HCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Olfactory dysfunction indicates a higher risk of developing dementia. However, the potential structural and functional changes are still largely unknown. A total of 236 participants were enrolled, including 45 Alzheimer's disease (AD) individuals and 191dementia-free individuals. Detailed study methods, comprising neuropsychological assessment and olfactory identification test (University of Pennsylvania smell identification test, UPSIT), as well as structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were applied in this research. The dementia-free individuals were divided into two sub-groups based on olfactory score: dementia-free with olfactory dysfunction (DF-OD) sub-group and dementia-free without olfactory dysfunction (DF-NOD) sub-group. The results were analyzed for subsequent intergroup comparisons and correlations. The cognitive assessment was conducted again three years later. (i) At dementia-free stage, there was a positive correlation between olfactory score and cognitive function. (ii) In dementia-free group, the volume of crucial brain structures involved in olfactory recognition and processing (such as amygdala, entorhinal cortex and basal forebrain volumes) are positively associated with olfactory score. (iii) Compared to the DF-NOD group, the DF-OD group showed a significant reduction in olfactory network (ON) function. (iv) Compared to DF-NOD group, there were significant functional connectivity (FC) decline between PCun_L(R)_4_1 in the precuneus of posterior default mode network (pDMN) and the salience network (SN) in DF-OD group, and the FC values decreased with falling olfactory scores. Moreover, in DF-OD group, the noteworthy reduction in FC were observed between PCun_L(R)_4_1 and amygdala, which was a crucial component of ON. (v) The AD conversion rate of DF-OD was 29.41%, while the DF-NOD group was 12.50%. The structural and functional changes in the precuneus were also observed in AD and were more severe. In addition to the olfactory circuit, the precuneus is a critical structure in the odor identification process, whose abnormal function underlies the olfactory identification impairment of dementia-free individuals. • The olfactory circuit is impaired in olfactory dysfunction among dementia-free. • Abnormal function of precuneus causes olfactory dysfunction in dementia-free. • The precuneus's structure and function also change in Alzheimer's disease. • Olfactory identification ability can be a clinical marker for Alzheimer's disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attacks the two challenging problems of image-based crowd counting, that is, scale variation and complex background. To that end, we present a novel crowd counting method, called the Scale and Background aware Asymmetric Bilateral Network (SBAB-Net), which is able to handle scale variation and background noise in a unified framework. Specifically, the proposed SBAB-Net contains three main components, a pre-trained backbone convolutional neural network (CNN) as the feature extractor and two asymmetric branches to generate a density map. These two asymmetric branches have different structures and use features from different semantic layers. One branch is densely connected stacked dilated convolution (DCSDC) sub-network with different dilation rates, which relies on one deep feature layer and can handle scale variation. The other branch is parameter-free densely connected stacked pooling (DCSP) sub-network with various pooling kernels and strides, which relies on shallow feature and can fuse features with several receptive fields to reduce the impact of background noise. Two sub-networks are fused by the attention mechanism to generate the final density map. Extensive experimental results on three widely-used benchmark datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method: (1) We achieve competitive counting performance compared to state-of-the-art methods; (2) Compared with baseline, the MAE and MSE are decreased by at least 6.3 % and 11.3 % , respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Tri-doped Sr3AlO4F phosphors with Ce3+, Tb3+ and Yb3+ were synthesized. [•] The luminescence spectra and decay lifetime curves have been measured. [•] Energy transfer processes from Ce3+ →Tb3+ →Yb3+ were observed. [•] The energy transfer efficiency was also calculated. [•] The energy transfer mechanism was also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Ce3+ and Tb3+ co-doped Sr3AlO4F phosphors were synthesized by the conventional high temperature solid-state method. X-ray diffraction (XRD) was used to characterize the phase structure. The luminescence spectra and decay lifetime curves of Ce3+ have been measured to prove energy transfer (ET) from Ce3+ to Tb3+. Under the excitation of near-ultraviolet light, Sr3AlO4F:Ce3+,Tb3+ phosphors exhibited blue emission corresponding to the f–d transition of Ce3+ ions and green emission bands corresponding to the f–f transition of Tb3+ ions, respectively. Effective energy transfer occurred from Ce3+ to Tb3+ in Sr3AlO4F host due to the observed spectra overlap between the emission spectrum of Ce3+ ion and the excitation spectrum of Tb3+ ion. The energy transfer efficiency from Ce3+ ion to Tb3+ ion was also calculated to be 51%. Furthermore, the energy transfer from Ce3+ to Tb3+ in Sr3AlO4F host was demonstrated to be resonant type via a dipole–dipole interaction mechanism. The present Ce3+ and Tb3+ co-doped Sr3AlO4F phosphor may have potential use in the technology of white light-emitting diodes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The release of isoprene by plants is considered to be an adaptation to the environment. Herein, a highly selective coumarin fluorescent probe (DMIC) was designed for detecting isoprene. When isoprene came into contact with the maleimide of DMIC, an electrophilic addition process took place. The powerful push-pull effect of DMIC was disrupted. Simultaneously, intramolecular charge transfer was initiated. This enabled DMIC to achieve rapid detection of isoprene within 5 min. Furthermore, excellent linearity was observed in the concentration range of 1–560 ppm (R2 = 0.996). A limit of detection is 1.6 ppm. DMIC was applied to in vitro studies of plant release of liberated isoprene. By monitoring the release of isoprene from different tree species throughout the day, the dynamics of isoprene release from plants throughout the day have been successfully revealed. In addition, the release of isoprene varied considerably among different tree species. In particular, the biocompatibility of DMIC allowed for the in vivo detection of isoprene using fluorescence imaging. The results successfully revealed the dynamics of isoprene release in plants under stress. The amount of isoprene that a plant produced increased with the severity of the stress it experienced. This suggested that the level of isoprene content in plants could be used as a preliminary indicator of the physiological health status of plants. This research demonstrates great potential for clarifying signal transduction in biological systems. It provided ideas for further understanding the biology of isoprene. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A series of new luminescent emission-tunable phosphors Sr3Gd(PO4)3(SGP):0.006Ce3+, xMn2+ have been synthesized by a high-temperature solid-state reaction. The energy transfer from Ce3+ to Mn2+ in SGP:Ce3+/Mn2+ phosphors has been validated and demonstrated to be a resonant type via a dipole–quadrupole mechanism based on the decay lifetime data, and the critical distance (R C ) calculated by quenching concentration method and spectral overlap method are 25.24 and 24.26Å, respectively. Tuning the Ce3+/Mn2+ ratio via the energy transfer varied the emission hue of from blue to white-light and eventually to yellow. These results indicate that the developed phosphor may be promising as a single-component white-light-emitting phosphor for white LEDs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Novel Y2Si4N6C:Sm3+ phosphors for white light-emitting diodes (w-LEDs) were prepared by a carbothermal reduction and nitridation method. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and photoluminescence spectra were utilized to characterize the structure and luminescence properties of the as-synthesized phosphors. The emission spectrum obtained by excitation into 291nm contains exclusively the characteristic emission of Sm3+ at 568, 607 and 654nm which correspond to the transitions from 4G5/2 to 6H5/2, 6H7/2, and 6H9/2 of Sm3+, respectively. The strongest one is located at 607nm due to 4G5/2–6H7/2 transition of Sm3+. It was found that concentration quenching occurred as a result of dipole–dipole interaction according to Dexter''s theory. The temperature dependence of photoluminescence properties was investigated from 25 to 300°C and the prepared Y2Si4N6C:Sm3+ phosphors showed superior thermal quenching properties. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Novel Ce3+- and Eu2+-coactivated Sr3Gd(PO4)3 phosphors were prepared by high temperature solid-state reactions. The Sr3Gd(PO4)3:Ce3+,Eu2+ phosphor showed two emission bands under 310nm excitation: the one observed at 374nm was assigned to the 4f 05d 1 →4f 1 transition of Ce3+ ion emission, and the other found at 518nm was attributed to the 4f 65d 1 →4f 7 transition of Eu2+ ions. The energy transfer from Ce3+ to Eu2+ in Sr3Gd(PO4)3 host matrix was studied and demonstrated to be a resonant type via a dipole–quadrupole mechanism. Furthermore, we have calculated the critical distance for Ce3+ →Eu2+ energy transfer to be about 32.02Å by the concentration-quenching method. Preliminary results indicate that the phosphor might be a promising green phosphor for UV-based white LEDs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Previous studies have used the anaerobic threshold (AT) to non-invasively predict muscle fatigue. This study proposes a novel method for the automatic classification of muscle fatigue based on surface electromyography (sEMG). The sEMG data were acquired from 20 participants during an incremental test on a cycle ergometer using sEMG sensors placed on the vastus rectus femoris (RF), vastus lateralis (VL), vastus medialis (VM), and gastrocnemius (GA) muscles of the left leg. The ventilation volume (VE), oxygen uptake (VO2), and carbon dioxide production (VCO2) data of each participant were collected during the test. Then, we extracted the time-domain and frequency-domain features of the sEMG signal denoised by the improved wavelet packet threshold denoising algorithm. In this study, we propose a new muscle fatigue recognition model based on the long short-term memory (LSTM) network. The LSTM network was trained to classify muscle fatigue using sEMG signal features. The results showed that the improved wavelet packet threshold function has better performance in denoising sEMG signals than hard threshold and soft threshold functions. The classification performance of the muscle fatigue recognition model proposed in this paper is better than that of CNN (convolutional neural network), SVM (support vector machine), and the classification models proposed by other scholars. The best performance of the LSTM network was achieved with 70% training, 10% validation, and 20% testing rates. Generally, the proposed model can be used to monitor muscle fatigue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Cytomegalovirus (CMV) reactivation is associated with adverse prognoses of critically ill patients. However, the epidemiology and predictors of CMV reactivation in immunocompetent patients receiving mechanical ventilation (MV) are not clear. The aim of this study was to investigate the epidemiology and predictors of CMV reactivation in immunocompetent patients requiring MV.Methods: A single-center, prospective observational study (conducted from June 30, 2017 to July 01, 2018) with a follow-up of 90 days (September 29, 2018) that included 71 CMV-seropositive immunocompetent patients with MV at a 37-bed university hospital general intensive care unit (ICU) in China. Routine detection of CMV DNAemia was performed once a week for 28 days (Days 1, 7, 14, 21, and 28). CMV serology, laboratory findings, and clinical data were obtained during hospitalization.Results: Among 71 patients, 13 (18.3%) showed CMV reactivation within 28 days in the ICU. The median time to reactivation was 7 days. CMV reactivation was related to various factors, including body mass index (BMI), sepsis, N-terminal pro-b-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP), blood urea nitrogen (BUN), and hemoglobin (Hb) levels (P < 0.05). In the multivariate regression model, BMI, Hb level, and sepsis were independently associated with CMV reactivation patients (P < 0.05). Moreover, the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) of BMI, Hb, and BMI combined with Hb was 0.69, 0.70, and 0.76, respectively. The duration of MV, hospitalization expense, length of ICU stay, and 90 day all-cause mortality rate in patients with CMV reactivation was significantly higher than in those without CMV reactivation (P < 0.05).Conclusions: Among immunocompetent patients with MV, the incidence of CMV reactivation was 18.3%. CMV reactivation was associated with several adverse prognoses. BMI, Hb, and sepsis were independent risk factors for CMV reactivation. BMI and Hb may predict CMV reactivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The signal injection method to measure capacitive current in the distribution network faces the problems of frequency selection and measuring precision. In this paper, the method of high frequency signal injection is analyzed and improved. The leakage inductance value of voltage transformer (TV) is obtained by injecting 5000 Hz high frequency signals, and the resonance frequency of the grounding capacitance in the distribution network is determined through the sweeping frequency method. The grounding capacitance can be calculated, and the improved series capacitor method is used to reduce the total capacitance of the experimental system, which can accurately measure the capacitance current. Finally, the experiments have been set up and verified to prove the practical feasibility of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corneal neovascularization (CNV) is a vision-threatening disease that is becoming a growing public health concern. While Yes-associated protein (YAP) plays a critical role in neovascular disease and allow for the sprouting angiogenesis. Verteporfin (VP) is a classical inhibitor of the YAP-TEAD complex, which is used for clinical treatment of neovascular macular degeneration through photodynamic therapy. The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of verteporfin (VP) on the inhibition of CNV and its potential mechanism. Rat CNV model were established by suturing in the central cornea and randomly divided into three groups (control, CNV and VP group). Neovascularization was observed by slit lamp to extend along the corneal limbus to the suture line. RNA-sequencing was used to reveal the related pathways on the CNV and the results revealed the vasculature development process and genes related with angiogenesis in CNV. In CNV group, we detected the nuclear translocation of YAP and the expression of CD31 in corneal neovascular endothelial cells through immunofluorescence. After the application of VP, the proliferation, migration and the tube formation of HUVECs were significantly inhibited. Furthermore, VP showed the CNV inhibition by tail vein injection without photoactivation. Then we found that the expression of phosphorylated YAP significantly decreased, and its downstream target protein connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) increased in the CNV group, while the expression was just opposite in other groups. Besides, both the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (VEGFR2) and cofilin significantly increased in CNV group, and decreased after VP treatment. Therefore, we conclude that Verteporfin could significantly inhibited the CNV without photoactivation by regulating the activation of YAP. • YAP plays a critical role in neovascular disease and allow for the sprouting angiogenesis. • Verteporfin could significantly inhibited the CNV without photoactivation. • Verteporfin could inhibited the CNV based on the regulation of VEGF, CTGF and cofilin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early detection of arrhythmia and effective treatment can prevent deaths caused by cardiovascular disease (CVD). In clinical practice, the diagnosis is made by checking the electrocardiogram (ECG) beat-by-beat, but this is usually time-consuming and laborious. In the paper, we propose an automatic ECG classification method based on Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). CWT is used to decompose ECG signals to obtain different time-frequency components, and CNN is used to extract features from the 2D-scalogram composed of the above time-frequency components. Considering the surrounding R peak interval (also called RR interval) is also useful for the diagnosis of arrhythmia, four RR interval features are extracted and combined with the CNN features to input into a fully connected layer for ECG classification. By testing in the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database, our method achieves an overall performance of 70.75%, 67.47%, 68.76%, and 98.74% for positive predictive value, sensitivity, F1-score, and accuracy, respectively. Compared with existing methods, the overall F1-score of our method is increased by 4.75~16.85%. Because our method is simple and highly accurate, it can potentially be used as a clinical auxiliary diagnostic tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: An efficient broadband near-infrared (NIR) quantum cutting was demonstrated in Eu2+–Yb3+ codoped Ca9Y(PO4)7 phosphor. Upon excitation of Eu2+ ions to the 4f 65d 1 level with an ultraviolet photon at 322nm, emissions of two NIR photons at 983nm of Yb3+were achieved. The dependences of the visible and NIR emissions, the decay lifetime, the energy transfer efficiency (ETE), and the quantum efficiency (QE) on the Yb3+ doping content were investigated in detail. The results indicated that the maximum ETE and the corresponding downconversion QE can reach between 80% and 179%, respectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The aim of this study was to investigate whether changes on foot-stretcher height were associated with characteristics of better rowing performance. Ten male rowers performed a 200 m rowing trial at their racing rate at each of three foot-stretcher heights. A single scull was equipped with an accelerometer to collect boat acceleration, an impeller with embedded magnets to collect boat speed, specially designed gate sensors to collect gate force and angle, and a compact string potentiometer to collect leg drive length. All sensor signals were sampled at 50 Hz. A one-way repeated measures ANOVA showed that raising foot-stretcher position had a significant reduction on total gate angle and leg drive length. However, a raised foot-stretcher position had a deeper negative peak of boat acceleration at the catch, a lower boat fluctuation, a faster leg drive speed, a larger gate force for the port and starboard side separately. This could be attributed to the optimisation of the magnitude and direction of the foot force with a raised foot-stretcher position. Although there was a significant negative influence of a raised foot-stretcher position on two kinematic variables, biomechanical evidence suggested that a raised foot-stretcher position could contribute to the improvement of rowing performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]