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Atherosclerosis, a multifactorial vascular disease resulting from lipid metabolism disorders, features chronic inflammatory damage resulting from endothelial dysfunction, which usually affects multiple arteries. The carotid artery is a common site for clinical atherosclerosis evaluation. The aortic root is the standard site for quantifying atherosclerosis in mice. Due to the adverse reactions of first-line drugs, it is necessary to discover new drugs to prevent and treat atherosclerosis. Berberine (BBR) is one of the most promising natural products derived from herbal medicine Coptidis Rhizoma (Huanglian) that features significant anti-atherosclerosis properties. However, overall BBR mechanism against carotid atherosclerosis has not been clearly discovered. Our work aimed to investigate potential BBR mechanism in improving carotid atherosclerosis in ApoE knockout mice. Here, we proved that in ApoE −/− mice receiving high-fat diet for 12 weeks, BBR can reduce serum lipid levels, improve intimal hyperplasia, and antagonize carotid lipid accumulation, which may be achieved through regulating the PI3K/AKT/mTOR signaling pathway, regulating autophagy, promoting cell proliferation and inhibiting cell apoptosis. In summary, these data indicate that BBR can ameliorate carotid atherosclerosis. Therefore, it could be a promisingly therapeutic alternative for atherosclerosis.

Using data from Taiwan, where listed firms are required to disclose monthly revenues, this paper examines the information value of mandatory interim revenue disclosures. We find that monthly revenue surprises have a significant effect on analysts’ earnings forecasts, suggesting that analysts incorporate such information into their earnings forecasts once the information is available. In addition, monthly revenue surprises significantly predict future earnings surprises, and their predictive power goes beyond the information provided by analysts’ earnings forecasts, suggesting that monthly revenue surprises provide leading information about future earnings growth but analysts do not fully reflect this information. Stock prices drift positively with monthly revenue surprises during the period prior to the quarterly earnings announcement. However, when quarterly earnings are finally announced, stock prices are no longer driven by monthly revenue surprises, suggesting that monthly revenue surprises have been fully incorporated into the stock prices. Overall, our results suggest that interim accounting information helps investors increase the speed of adjustments to fundamental news.

Using a series of DNA methylation analysis, pathogenesis was investigated to identify the specific DNA methylation markers for diagnosing atherosclerosis. Firstly, with the chip platform of Illumina Human Methylation 450 BeadChip, a total of 1,458 CpGs, covering 971 differential methylated genes were extracted with stringent filtering criteria. Secondly, hierarchical clustering as a heat map was used to check on the dependability of differential methylated genes. Thirdly, the related GO terms and pathways were enriched by up- and down-methylated genes, respectively, after verifying the capacity of these differential methylated genes to distinguish between atherosclerosis and healthy controls. In total, 971 differential DNA methylated genes were identified (1,458 CpGs). Several important function regions were also identified, including cell adhesion, PI3K-Akt signaling pathway and transcription from RNA polymerase II promoter. This study indicates that patients with atherosclerosis have high levels of DNA methylation, which is promising for early diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis.

Using U.S. banking data between 1993 and 2014, this paper investigates the relationship between CEO optimism and bank liquidity creation. It finds that banks with optimistic CEOs create more liquidity over the entire sample period. In addition, the positive effect of CEO optimism on liquidity creation became stronger during the subprime crisis of 2007‒2009, and this stronger effect was mainly driven by banks with high capital ratios and large banks. These results imply that CEO optimism is likely to encourage banks to create liquidity, especially during banking crises. The results presented in this paper hold when subjected to various robustness checks.

Using U.S. bank data from 1996 to 2013, this paper studies how liquidity risk affects bank performance in financial crises. It finds that during the subprime crisis of 2007–09, liquidity risk reduced a bank’s survival probability, ROA, and net interest margin, and increased its loan-loss-provision expenses. This adverse effect was more severe for banks with lower capital ratios and higher credit risk. In contrast, there is no strong evidence that liquidity risk hurts bank performance in market crises. The results in this paper imply that liquidity risk is not merely a symptom of banks’ insolvency problems; it has an independent effect on bank performance in banking crises.

The study presents the auto-calibration architecture for the RO-based Time-to-Digital Converter equipped with Avalon bus interface (TDC-AVB), which can communicate with an embedded NIOS II processor to predict the output frequencies of ring oscillators precisely. Additionally, the dedicated pattern generator configured by the processor can generate any given signal width to a TDC device in order to compensate for process-voltage-temperature (PVT) variations. The real measured results show that the Differential Non-Linearity (DNL) is between [0.98, -0.8] LSB. For 21.14 ns time interval, the TDC can achieve 4.03 ps resolution on average. The proposed system consumes 2346 adaptive LUTs and 2122 registers for the embedded system, and hardware resources of TDC-AVB are only 499 adaptive LUTs and 252 registers.

In this study, a prototype of a smart mousetrap system is presented, which features that the portable remote devices based on a LoRa module plus SOC for Bluetooth attempt to lure rodents into a trap and then inform the base station. Mealtimes, all remote devices transmit information on including sensors, the battery status and the GPS coordinates to the base station. Preliminary experiments demonstrate that the system has 5260 meters long distance transmission ability under None-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) conditions

Cantharidin (CTD), a component of Mylabris (blister beetle), is a traditional Chinese medicine that exerts an anticancer effect in multiple types of cancer cells. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether CTD exhibited anti-metastatic and inhibitory cell proliferation effects against human non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) A549 cells, and the possible underlying mechanism by which this occurs. The results of the present study demonstrated that CTD arrested proliferation, suppressed invasion and migration and induced apoptosis in A549 cells in vitro. Alterations of apoptosis-associated protein levels, including B-cell lymphoma-2 (Bcl-2), Bcl-associated X (Bax) and active caspase-3, were detected. Furthermore, the present study demonstrated that CTD activated autophagy through downregulation of p62 expression and upregulation of microtubule-associated proteins 1A/1B light chain 3B and Beclin-1 expression. Additionally, western blot analysis identified that CTD inhibited the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/RAC serine/threonine protein kinase (Akt)/mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway in NSCLC, demonstrating that the levels of phosphorylated (p-)Akt, p-mTOR, phosphorylated ribosomal p70S6 protein kinase (p-p70-S6K) and cyclin D1 were significantly decreased following treatment with CTD. In conclusion, the results of the present study indicated that CTD impeded cell growth and migration by inhibiting PI3K/Akt/mTOR signaling in NSCLC, and promoted autophagy and apoptosis. CTD exhibited anticancer activity against NSCLC in vitro, revealing it as a potential candidate for the treatment of NSCLC.

Geometric Mean Decomposition (GMD) is considered an efficient precoding scheme in joint MIMO transceiver designs capable of facilitating asymptotically equivalent performance of maximum likelihood detector (MLD). In this paper, a low complexity and non-iterative GMD computing scheme featuring a divide-and-conquer approach is presented. It requires no iterative singular value decomposition (SVD) as pre-processing and is thus exempted from the convergence problem adverse to a constant throughput hardware implementation. The divide-and-conquer approach reduces the computing complexity and provides abundant computing parallelism. The basic operation of the proposed scheme is a real valued Givens rotation, which can be efficiently implemented using CORDIC algorithm. Computing complexity analyses indicate that the proposed scheme is at least 30% more computing efficient than other SVD based GMD computing schemes. Finally, a unified GMD/QRD design using a fully parallel and deeply pipelined architecture is presented. One GMD or QRD computation on a 4x4 complex-valued matrix can be accomplished every 4 clock cycles. Chip implementation in TSMC 90 nm CMOS technology shows that, with a maximum clock frequency up to 170 MHz, the design can perform 42.5 M GMD computations per second. The equivalent data rate is 1.02 Gbps for a 64 QAM modulation scheme.

The distribution and content of fibronectin is closely related to the occurrence and development of tumors. Fibronectin is widely involved in cell migration, adhesion, proliferation, hemostasis, and tissue repair. Fibronectin type III domain containing 1, as a primary component of the structural domain of fibronectin, is closely related to the occurrence of some cancers. However, the molecular mechanism of fibronectin type III domain containing 1 in gastric cancer has not been elaborated. In this study, we analyzed the expression and prognosis of fibronectin type III domain containing 1 by collecting data from Oncomine and GEPIA database. The expression of fibronectin type III domain containing 1 in gastric cancer cells was detected by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction in vitro. After knockdown of fibronectin type III domain containing 1 by small interfering RNA, the proliferation, invasion, and migration of AGS (human gastric adenocarcinoma cell line) cells and the function of epithelial–mesenchymal transition were measured by Cell Counting Kit-8, colony formation, transwell, and Western blot. The results showed that fibronectin type III domain containing 1 was highly expressed in gastric cancer tissues and its overexpression was significantly correlated with the prognosis of gastric cancer. In vitro, experiments revealed that knockdown of fibronectin type III domain containing 1 could inhibit the proliferation, migration, and invasion of gastric cancer cells, possibly by changing the epithelial–mesenchymal transition pathway. The findings elaborated the biological role of fibronectin type III domain containing 1 in gastric cancer and potential mechanism of action, possibly providing a new insight for future clinical diagnosis or even molecular therapy.

The geometric mean decomposition (GMD) algorithm is a popular approach in developing a precoding scheme for joint multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) transceiver designs. In this paper, the adverse effects of conventional GMD algorithms on hardware implementations are first reviewed. Then, a constant throughput modified GMD algorithm is presented. The proposed GMD scheme is constructed on a QR decomposition framework and requires no singular value decomposition (SVD) preprocessing. The new scheme is exempt from the convergence problem, which may seriously degrade throughput performance. It also features lower computational complexity and permutation-free operations and supports hardware sharing between precoding and signal detection modules. Quantitative analysis shows that, under similar symbol-error-rate (SER) performance, the proposed scheme possesses a computational complexity edge over conventional schemes by a margin of 30%. The complexity breakdown indicates that the SVD nullification sweep is the dominant factor of the SVD-based GMD schemes. Even when the sweep number is set to twice the matrix size (2N), the implementation loss is still 0.5 dB inferior to the proposed scheme. Finally, an architecture design of the proposed scheme is given to demonstrate a constant throughput implementation and the feasibility of hardware sharing between precoding and signal detection modules.

This paper investigates the robust H∞ control for Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy systems with time-varying delays and nonlinear perturbations. Delay-dependent criteria for uncertain fuzzy systems have been proposed. The LMI optimization approach is applied to solve the H∞ control problem and find the minimization of H∞ norm bound. Computer simulations show that significant improvement over the previous results can be obtained.

Non-polar (1 1 2¯ 0) GaN has been successfully grown on (0 0 1) LaAlO 3 (LAO) substrate by pulsed laser deposition method. The nitrogen plasma is essential to grow pure a -plane GaN films. The insertion of a ZnO buffer layer improves the quality of GaN thin film as shown by X-ray diffraction. Reflection high energy electron diffraction and cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy with selected area diffraction reveal two types of a -plane GaN domains perpendicular to each other in orientation relationships of [0 0 0 1] GaN ∥[1 1¯ 0] LAO and [1 1¯ 00] GaN ∥[1 1¯ 0] LAO .

To evaluate the value of echocardiography in the diagnosis of noncompaction of the ventricular myocardium (NCVM) and to elucidate the echocardiographic characteristics of NCVM.This study included 53 patients (28 boys and 25 girls), with an age for initial diagnosis of 15 days to 18 years, who were diagnosed with NCVM by echocardiography between May 2006 and May 2015. Transthoracic two-dimensional echocardiography and color Doppler were performed for qualitative diagnosis, and the end-diastolic non-compacted layer/compacted layer (N/C) ratio measured in the parasternal ventricular short-axis sectional view was selected as the criterion for quantitative diagnosis.The excessively prominent ventricular trabeculae and deep inter-trabecular recesses were all seen in 53 cases, and the blood flow in the cardiac chambers was connected to the inter-trabecular recesses. The areas involved in NCVM were mainly the apex (100%) and the middle segment of the left ventricular lateral wall (98%), followed by the middle segment of the left ventricular posterior wall (49%) and the middle segment of the left ventricular inferior wall (42%). In 53 children with NCVM, the N/C ratio was 4.3±1.9 (2.1-10.0). Cardiac insufficiency was found in 83% (44/53) of the children with NCVM, and the left ventricular ejection fraction for these children was (43±9)%.Echocardiography can be used in the qualitative and quantitative diagnosis of NCVM and in the evaluation of cardiac function. The apex and the middle segment of the left ventricular lateral wall are often involved in NCVM, accompanied by decrease in the left ventricular ejection fraction.

Background Real-time three-dimensional echocardiography (RT-3DE) has made revolutionized improvements of cardiac imaging during the past few years. However, there is no standard examination method for RT-3DE so far. This study aimed to establish the diagnostic method of RT-3DE and evaluate its application in the diagnosis of complex congenital heart diseases (CHD). Methods Fifty patients with complex CHD were examined by RT-3DE with modes of Live 3DE and Full Volume. A series of novel volumetric views combined with Van Praagh sequential segmental approach were introduced to reveal the pathological morphology of the hearts, which were compared with the findings of two-dimensional echocardiography (2DE), angiography and cardiac surgery. Results In 50 patients, 190 image acquisitions of Full Volume were performed at several acoustic windows including subcostal, apical and parastemal regions. Among them, 94.2% (179/190) of image acquisitions were successful. Most sectional volumetric views could be clearly displayed in 92.6% of the successful image acquisitions. However, sectional volumetric views could not be clearly displayed in 7.4%, which was mainly due to poor perspective conditions of examination location, improper instrument multi-parameter setting and insufficient information of whole heart captured in Full Volume acquisitions. As compared with surgical findings and angiography, RT-3DE made correction to the diagnoses in 2 cases including 1 with corrected transposition of the great arteries and the other with single atrium and mitral cleft. The diagnoses initially made by 2DE for these 2 patients were double outlet right ventricle with transposition of the great arteries and complete atrio-ventricular septal defect. Conclusions RT-3DE can clearly display the pathological morphology of complex CHD by a series of novel volumetric views combined with sequential segmental approach through providing more spatial informative cardiovascular structures, which provides a practical method for RT-3DE diagnosis.

In this paper, we discussed the disassembly line balancing problem (DLBP) in the presence of uncertain cycle time. A multi-objective mathematical optimization model was established to minimize workstation equilibrium index and demand index. And Genetic Algorithm (GA) was developed to solve this model. Some works were done as follows: firstly, generating initialized populations combining heuristic with stochastic methods; Secondly, developing a unique principle for gene decoding, which leads to efficient disassembly line balancing; Additionally, converting iteration process to matrix operators based on precedence matrix, which makes it quickly to find the optimal solutions. Finally, given a simulation experiment to get the optimal solutions in Matlab 7 and verify the efficiency of this proposed algorithm.

Background: Double-chambered right ventricle (DCRV) is a rare congenital anomaly. From January 1990 to February 1993, 60 patients with DCRV were identified among 1,094 patients with congenital defects of the heart who had open-heart surgery in our hospital. Thirty-six patients were males, and 24 were females, with a mean age of 9.3 years (from 3 to 28 years). Various cardiac anomalies were found to be associated with DCRV. The most common was ventricular septal defect (VSD); 52 patients (86.7%) had VSD, and 6 (10%) had other cardiac lesions. Aims: This study summarises our experience in diagnosing DCRV and surgical correction of the anomaly. Methods: Preoperative diagnosis of DCRV depended mainly on 2-dimensional echocardiography, cardiac catheterisation and cineangiography. Surgical correction consisted of resection of anomalous muscle bundles and correction of associated anomalies through a right ventriculotomy. Results: There was 1 hospital death (1.7%); 59 patients survived (98.3%). The pressure gradient of the right ventricle decreased from 49±23 mmHg (mean±SD) preoperatively to 16±6 mmHg postoperatively (p

To explore the endothelial function, carotid artery stiffness index and carotid intima-media thickness in children with a history of Kawasaki disease (KD).A cohort of 204 children was studied, which comprised 51 patients with Kawasaki disease with coronary artery lesion (CAL group), 50 patients with Kawasaki disease with normal coronary arteries (normal coronary arteries group), and 103 healthy age matched children (control group). Their systemic blood pressure, fasting cholesterol concentrations, flow-mediated dilation (FMD) of the brachial artery, carotid artery stiffness index and carotid intima-media thickness (IMT) were compared.FMD of the brachial artery in CAL group (5.2% +/- 1.9%) and normal coronary arteries group (6.8% +/- 2.0%) were significantly lower than that of control group (13.2% +/- 4.1%, both P0. 01); carotid artery stiffness index in CAL group (4.0 +/- 0.6) was significantly greater than that of normal coronary arteries group (3.6 +/- 0.6) and control group (3.4 +/- 0.5, P = 0.05, P0.01); likewise, IMT in CAL group (0.447 mm +/- 0.024 mm) was significantly higher than that of normal coronary arteries group (0.426 mm +/- 0.016 mm) and control group (0.424 mm +/- 0.016 mm, both P0.01). In multiple linear regression analysis, age and patient grouping were significant determinants of carotid artery stiffness index, FMD and IMT. There were significant correlations between carotid artery stiffness index, FMD and IMT in both healthy group and KD group after adjustment of age.There were endothelial dysfunction and increased systemic arterial stiffness and IMT late after the acute phase of Kawasaki disease. flow-mediated dilation of the brachial artery, carotid artery stiffness index combined carotid intima-media thickness can evaluated completely the prognosis of vascular lesion in convalescence after KD.

In this paper, we propose a novel scalable FFT processor design capable of handling various transform sizes and data channels for multi-standard MIMO processing. The basic building blocks are split-radix 2/4/8 FFT modules in a modified MDC (multi-path delay commutator) form, pre- ordering data buffer, radix-2 butterfly module and twiddle factor module. Via proper data flow reconfiguration plus two alternative working frequencies, the processor can support 64, 128, 512, 1024-point transforms plus 1 to 4 MIMO channels. The hardware utilization is kept as 100% under various working modes. The implementation results in TSMC 0.18 um process indicate the design has a core size of about 5.5 mm2, and a power consumption of 320 mW at 100 MHz. The delivered performance qualifies the proposed design for 802.1 In and 802.16e applications.

Canine parvovirus (CPV) is a non-enveloped virus with a single-stranded DNA genome and causes infectious enteritis in dog. In this study, 36 isolates of CPV infection were obtained in Taichung, Taiwan from 2003 to 2004. Using primers that can distinguish subtypes of CPV, we amplified part of viral VP2 gene by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and the PCR product was sequenced; results demonstrated that two isolates could be classified as type 2a of CPV and the others were type 2b. The complete coding region of VP2 gene of type 2b was also sequenced, and phylogenetic analysis of these DNA sequences revealed that our Taichung isolate was close to the V-120, FPV-314, 97-008, Taiwan 9, LCPV-T1, and T4 isolates; however, because of the degeneracy of codons, the amino acid sequences of Taichung isolate was similar to that of the 97-008 isolate from Japan. It is known that two important amino acid residues (Asn-426 in type 2a and Asp-426 in type 2b; Ile-555 in type 2a and Val-555 in type 2b) are the determinants for the discrimination of type 2a or type 2b. After scrutinizing the complete VP2 gene of our Taichung isolate, we found the VP2 protein of the Taichung isolate did possess this molecular feature of type 2b virus. Previous studies reported that type 2a virus was the major type in Taiwan; our finding showed that CPV type 2b was the predominant type in the middle part of Taiwan. Moreover, a unique Ala-489 in VP2 of our Taichung isolate was found, contrasting to a Val-489 in the VP2 of other strains.

Complex QR factorisation is a fundamental operation used in various applications such as adaptive beamforming and MIMO signal detection. In this paper, based on Givens rotation scheme, a high-throughput, fully parallel complex-valued QR factorisation (CQRF) design is presented. It features the lowest computing complexity in various factorising schemes and indicates no BER performance loss when applied to a MIMO signal detection system. Via carefully plotted scheduling, one CQRF computation can be completed in eight clock cycles. In hardware design, a low complexity and look-up-table-free CORDIC algorithm is employed to implement the rotation operations. Further design optimisations, such as hardware sharing of common modules and reduction of register usage by shortening the variable's life span, are also applied. Sized 2×2 and 4×4 chip designs largely following the IEEE 802.11n standard are developed. The implementation results in TSMC 0.18 um process technology show that the proposed 4×4 design, with a gate count of only 134.6 K, is capable of performing 15 M CQRFs per second. The measured power consumption is 196.3 mW at 120 MHz. Compound performance indexes such as area-time product and energy consumption per CQRF also indicate significant performance edges of the proposed designs.