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Abstract When treating perimembranous ventricular septal defect, median sternotomy leads to unsightly scar, right subaxillary thoracotomy requires cardiopulmonary bypass, and transcatheter device closure constrained by vascular condition. Using small left intercostal incision, we employed transthoracic device closure to get around these issues. During this study, right subaxillary thoracotomy was used for surgical repair in 117 patients (Surgical group), whereas small left intercostal incision was used for transthoracic device closure in 131 patients (Device group). Retrospective data collection and analysis were conducted. The success rate was comparable (117/117 vs. 130/131, P = 1.000). The device group experienced notably reduced operating time, mechanical ventilation duration, ICU stay, and postoperative hospital stay (All P

ObjectiveThis study strives to the variation and significance of microRNA-21 (miR-21) in children with congenital heart disease (CHD)-related pulmonary artery hypertension (PAH).MethodsChildren with CHD (n = 179) were selected as subjects, including 101 children without PAH and 78 children with PAH. All children underwent general data collection, laboratory examination, echocardiography and cardiac catheterization. After detection of serum miR-21 expression, the predictive value and the impacts of serum miR-21 for PAH and postoperative critical illness were analyzed.ResultsSerum creatine kinase isoenzyme (CK-MB), B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) and miR-21 were elevated, but ejection fraction (EF) and cardiac index (CI) were decreased in the CHD-PAH group. Serum miR-21 assisted in predicting PAH in CHD children, with the area under curve (AUC) of 0.801 (95% CI of 0.735∼0.857), a cut-off value of 2.56, sensitivity of 73.08, and specificity of 72.28%. Serum miR-21 in children with CHD-PAH was correlated with clinicopathological indicators such as systolic pulmonary artery pressure, mean pulmonary arterial pressure, BNP and CI. Serum miR-21 helped predict the development of postoperative critical illness in children with CHD-PAH, with an AUC of 0.859 (95% CI: 0.762–0.927, cut-off value: 4.55, sensitivity: 69.57%, specificity: 92.73%). Increased serum miR-21 was an independent risk factor of postoperative critical illness in children with CHD-PAH.ConclusionSerum miR-21 was upregulated in children with CHD-PAH, which may serve as a predictive biomarker for the onset of PAH and postoperative critical illness in CHD children.

Despite extensive research reveal rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is related to atherosclerosis (AS), common pathogenesis between these two diseases still needs to be explored. In current study, we explored the common pathogenesis between rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and atherosclerosis (AS) by identifying 297 Differentially Expressed Genes (DEGs) associated with both diseases. Through KEGG and GO functional analysis, we highlighted the correlation of these DEGs with crucial biological processes such as the vesicle transport, immune system process, signaling receptor binding, chemokine signaling and many others. Employing Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) network analysis, we elucidated the associations between DEGs, revealing three gene modules enriched in immune system process, vesicle, signaling receptor binding, Pertussis, and among others. Additionally, through CytoHubba analysis, we pinpointed 11 hub genes integral to intergrin-mediated signaling pathway, plasma membrane, phosphotyrosine binding, chemokine signaling pathway and so on. Further investigation via the TRRUST database identified two key Transcription Factors (TFs), SPI1 and RELA, closely linked with these hub genes, shedding light on their regulatory roles. Finally, leveraging the collective insights from hub genes and TFs, we proposed 10 potential drug candidates targeting the molecular mechanisms underlying RA and AS pathogenesis. Further investigation on xCell revealed that 14 types of cells were all different in both AS and RA. This study underscores the shared pathogenic mechanisms, pivotal genes, and potential therapeutic interventions bridging RA and AS, offering valuable insights for future research and clinical management strategies.

Combustion of herb residues (HRs) for heat recovery is a good way for their utilization, but there exists such a problem as high concentration NOx emission in flue gas. The alcohol extracted herb residue (AEHR), one special type of HRs, was chosen as the object and was subjected to immediate combustion in a fluidized bed reactor to investigate the characteristics of its resulting NOx emission. The results showed that, most of the NOx in the flue gas was produced from the char nitrogen (CN); as the fuel water content increased, the NOx emission concentration exhibited a trend of first decreasing and then increasing; and a properly low combustion temperature inhibited the NOx emission upon the premise of ensuring full combustion. Air staging combustion was adopted to effectively control NOx: the NOx emission concentration in the flue gas was reduced to 296 mg·m−3 and the NOx emission reduction rate reached 46.51 % compared to conventional combustion. Co-combustion by blending wasted activated coke (WAC) into the AEHR helped both stabilize the combustion state and reduce further the NOx emission. When the blending ratio of WAC fell within a proper range of 20–30 %, the NOx emission concentration in the flue gas was as low as 231.4 mg·m−3. In addition to the dilution effect of the combustion flue gas of the blended WAC, the local reducing atmosphere caused by its incomplete combustion as well as its strong absorbability and catalytical effect was accountable for the further decrease of the NOx emission concentration.

BackgroundIn children with perimembranous ventricular septal defect, surgical repair requires sternotomy and leaves unsightly scars, which can trigger long-term physical and psychological distress. However, transcatheter device closure is limited by vascular diameter, radiographic exposure, and expensive DSA equipment. We used an ultra-small left intercostal incision for transthoracic device closure to avoid the above problems and investigated its safety and feasibility by comparing it with surgical repair.MethodsThis study enrolled 358 children with perimembranous ventricular septal defect. Among them, 152 patients were treated by surgical closure and 206 by transthoracic device closure via an ultra-small left intercostal incision. Perioperative clinical data and postoperative follow-up results were collected and analyzed retrospectively.ResultsThe success rate was similar (P = 0.265) in the two groups: 203/206 patients in the device group vs. 152/152 patients in the surgical group. The operative time, intensive care unit time, mechanical ventilation time, and postoperative hospital stay were significantly shorter in the device group than in the surgical group. Although the incision length of the device group (1.1 ± 0.2 cm) was significant shorter (P

Accurate travel time prediction is one of the most promising intelligent transportation system (ITS) services, which can greatly support route planning, ride-sharing, navigation applications, and effective traffic management. Several factors, like spatial, temporal, and external, have big effects on traffic patterns, and therefore, it is important to develop a mechanism that can jointly capture correlations of these components. However, spatial sparsity issues make travel time prediction very challenging, especially when dealing with the origin-destination (OD) method, since the trajectory data may not be available. In this paper, we introduce a unified deep learning-based framework named joint spatial-temporal correlation (JSTC) mechanism to improve the accuracy of OD travel time prediction. First, we design a spatiotemporal correlation block that combines two modules: self-convolutional attention integrated with a temporal convolutional network (TCN) to capture the spatial correlations along with the temporal dependencies. Then, we enhance our model performance through adopting a multi-head attention module to learn the attentional weights of the spatial, temporal, and external features based on their contributions to the output and speed up the training process. Extensive experiments on three large-scale real-world traffic datasets (NYC, Chengdu, and Xi’an) show the efficiency of our model and its superiority compared to other methods.

Controlled release formulations have been proven to have potential in overcoming the drawbacks of conventional plant growth regulators. Novel controlled-release formulation of β-naphthoxyacetic acid (BNOA) intercalated MgAl-layered double hydroxides (LDHs) was prepared by co-precipitation method. The effects of temperature, pH value, and release medium on BNOA release were studied and the releasing mechanisms were discussed. The results of release show that the increase of temperature induces the increase of BNOA release extent. The release rate and accumulated release amount of BNOA are found to be dependent to the anion in the aqueous solution in the order of CO32− > SO42− > Cl−. Moreover, the pH is the key controlling factor for the BNOA release processes, and with strong acid medium, the release character of BNOA is different from those at pH 7 and 12, which accompanies with fast collapse of LDHs nanolayered structure. The nanohybrid of BNOA intercalated LDHs possessed good controlled release properties and the BNOA release character from the nanohybrid fitted pseudo-second-order model in neutral medium. Keywords: Controlled release, Layered double hydroxides, β-Naphthoxyacetic acid, Intercalation, Nanohybrids

The citywide crowd flow prediction is crucial for a city to ensure productivity, safety and management of its citizen. However, the crowd flow may be affected by many factors, such as weather, working times, events, seasons, and so on. In this paper, we proposed Attentive Spatio-Temporal Inception ResNet (ASTIR), which aims to address the difficulty of crowd flow prediction. The ASTIR is based on the Inception-ResNet structure combined with Convolution-LSTM layers and attention module to better capture pattern movement changes. We build our deep neural network framework consisting of four distinct parts, by which we can capture the short-term, long-term and period properties, as well as external factors that can affect crowd flow behaviors. To show the performance of the proposed method, we use the widely applied benchmarks for crowd flow prediction (Taxi Beijing and Bike New York), and obtain notable improvements over the state-of-the-art approaches.

Co-doped ZnAl layered double hydroxides (LDH) were papered by coprecipitation. The prepared samples were characterized by multiple techniques including X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Brunauer−Emmett−Teller (BET) surface area, Scanning Electronic Microscopy (SEM), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) and UV−Vis Diffuse-Reflectance Spectroscopy (UV−Vis DRS). The incorporation of Co2+ into the ZnAl LDH sheets as CrO6 octahedron forms a new energy level which contributes for the excitation of electrons under visible light. The doped Co2+ at a reasonable content also serves as photo-generated charges separator and improves the visible light photocatalytic activity of ZnAl LDH. A degradation mechanism based on the hydroxyl radical as the active species was proposed.

People have their own tastes on visual appearances of products from various categories. For many of them, the tastes are affected by the current fashion trend. Studying visual appearances and fashion trend makes us understand the composition of users’ preferences and their purchase choices. However, since the fashion is changing over time, it is complex to model time-aware and non-time-aware variables simultaneously. In this paper, we present VIsually-aware Temporal rAting modeL with topics using review text to help mine visual dynamics and non-visual features for rating prediction task. Understanding the reviews will help the Recommender Systems (RSs) know whether a user is attracted by the appearance of an item, and which aspect of an item’s appearance contributes most to its ratings. To achieve this, we incorporate the visual information into the rating predicting function and introduce a topic model that can automatically classify words in an item’s reviews into non-visual words that explain the coherent feature, and visual words that are associated with its visual appearances in each time period, respectively. We run experiments on eleven real-world public datasets and the results show that our model performs better on predicting ratings than many of the state-of-the-art RSs, such as PMF, timeSVD++, HFT, JMARS, ETDR, and TVBPR+.

The ZSM-5, g-Al2O3, SiO2 and MgO supported Pd-catalysts were prepared for the phenol hydrogenation to cyclohexanone in liquid-phase. The natures of these catalysts were characterized by XRD, N2 adsorption-desorption analysis, H2-TPR, CO2-TPD and NH3-TPD. The catalytic performance of the supported Pd-catalyst for phenol hydrogenation to cyclohexanone is closely related to nature of the support and the size of Pd nanoparticles. The Pd/MgO catalyst which possesses higher basicity shows higher cyclohexanone selectivity, but lower phenol conversion owing to the lower specific surface area. The Pd/SiO2 catalyst prepared by precipitation gives higher cyclohexanone selectivity and phenol conversion, due to the moderate amount of Lewis acidic sites, and the smaller size and higher dispersion of Pd nanoparticles on the surface. Under the reaction temperature of 135 oC and H2 pressure of 1 MPa, after reacting for 3.5 h, the phenol conversion of 71.62% and the cyclohexanone selectivity of 90.77% can be obtained over 0.5 wt% Pd/SiO2 catalyst. Copyright © 2016 BCREC GROUP. All rights reserved Received: 7th March 2016; Revised: 13rd May 2016; Accepted: 7th June 2016 How to Cite: Fan, L., Zhang, L., Shen, Y., Liu, D., Wahab, N., Hasan, M.M. (2016). Liquid-phase Hydrogenation of Phenol to Cyclohexanone over Supported Palladium Catalysts. Bulletin of Chemical Reaction Engineering & Catalysis, 11 (3): 354-362 (doi: 10.9767/bcrec.11.3.575.354-362) Permalink/DOI: http://doi.org/10.9767/bcrec.11.3.575.354-362

Vapour phase tert-butylation of toluene with tert-butylalcohol was studied over ultra-stable Y zeolite (USY) catalyst. The effects of reaction temperature, toluene/TBA molar ratio and liquid space velocity on conversion of toluene and selectivity for 4-tert-butyltoluene were studied. The deactivation and regeneration of the catalyst was also investigated. The results showed that the USY zeolite catalyst offered better toluene conversion of about 30 % and 4-tert-butyltoluene selectivity of about 89 % at the suitable reaction condition as follows: reaction temperature of 120 oC, toluene/TBA ratio of 2:1 and liquid space velocity of 2 ml/g·h. The clogging of mocropores by the formed carbon or oligomers was the main reason for the deactivation of the catalyst. By combustion at 550 oC, the catalyst just lost about 5 % in toluene conversion and about 2 % in PTBT selectivity. © 2015 by Authors, Published by BCREC Group. This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)