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Abstract Ocular metastasis is a rare type of distant metastasis of lung cancer. Limited information is available regarding ocular symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis. We reported 16 patients diagnosed with ocular metastasis from lung cancer treated at our hospital from January 1988 to March 2024 and conducted a systematic review of 100 patients retrieved from the PubMed database from January 2014 to December 2023. A pooled analysis was performed using individual‐level patient data to generate the hazard ratio (HR) of the association between patient characteristics and overall survival. A total of 116 patients, 100 patients from the literature and 16 patients from our center, diagnosed with ocular metastasis from lung cancer were included in this study. Choroid metastasis was presented in 77 (66.4%) patients and was significantly associated with the onset of lung cancer with ocular symptoms and decreased vision; iris metastasis was significantly associated with small cell lung cancer (SCLC), high intraocular pressure, and ocular pain. Multivariate analyses revealed that males (HR, 2.488; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.127–5.495), age ≥ 60 years (HR, 3.196; 95% CI, 1.391–7.341), and onset with ocular symptoms (HR, 4.312; 95% CI, 1.675–11.099) were significantly associated with overall survival. For non‐SCLC (NSCLC) patients, compared with chemotherapy, targeted therapy (HR, 0.238; 95% CI, 0.087–0.651) and combined therapy (HR, 0.133; 95% CI, 0.017–0.822) have greater therapeutic efficacy. Chemotherapy combined with immunotherapy and targeted therapy are more effective than chemotherapy alone for ocular metastatic NSCLC patients. For patients with targetable mutations, new‐generation tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) are preferred.

The optimal corticosteroids dose in patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) requiring high oxygen remains unknown. In this retrospective study of patients with COVID-19 requiring high oxygen and receiving corticosteroids, the efficacy, safety, and duration of high-dose treatment were evaluated. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality during follow-up. Safety outcomes included infection, gastrointestinal bleeding, and venous thromboembolic events. 210 patients were included, with 126 in Group A (corticosteroids at a equivalent dose 5 days). The all-cause mortality risk was lower in Group C but higher in Group B than in Group A. Safety outcomes did not differ significantly, except for Group C, which had the highest venous thromboembolism rate. Our results suggest that high-dose corticosteroids for a longer course decrease mortality with comparable safety outcome.

The battery energy storage (BES) is recognized as a key resource for the power fluctuations smoothing, peak load shaving and frequency regulation, and its performance depends heavily on the available capacity. It is meaningful to investigate the influence of the BES capacity on the power system operation cost. This paper focuses on the marginal utility of BES capacity in the day-ahead power system operation cost. Firstly, the day-ahead economic dispatch problem is formulated as a constrained quadratic programming problem, with the consideration of the BES degradation cost. Then, the relationship between the BES-related shadow prices and the marginal electricity price is derived from the KKT conditions of the dispatch problem. Based on it, the marginal utility of BES capacity is modeled to evaluate the effect of BES capacity on the system day-ahead operation cost. Finally, the numerical results demonstrate that the proposed marginal utility can manifest the influence of BSS capacity on the power system operation.

With the development of information and communication technologies, traditional telecom business support systems (BSS) are facing the challenge of agilely meeting the flexible needs from business.Application scenarization, service standardization, technology componentization and resource sharing have gradually become the consensual features among the evolution of telecom BSS architectures.A business function virtualization (BFV)-based BSS architecture, which is based on cloud-native, micro-services, containers, and DevOps technologies, was proposed.By embedding four components into the architecture, including standardized virtual network functions, modular design orchestrator, micro-service management framework, and multi-plane elastic computing controller, the system is able to deploy unitized system and distributed cloud.Therefore, the requirements of flexible telecom business development and frequent evolution of the system could be satisfied by the proposed BFV-based BSS architecture.In other words, the lightweight delivery of IT technologies and agile business support could be fulfilled by using the proposed BFV-based BSS architecture, and the proposed architecture will eventually become the standard architecture of next generation telecom BSS.

With the development of the mobile communication and Internet technology, the traditional communication business has been developed from voice communication services to diversified and personalized information services, and the value chain structure of the communication industry has been changed from the mobile network operator (MNO)-centered mode to the user experience-centered mode.With the concept of “content-driven”, Internet content providers update their products actively to satisfy the users’ needs, which results in a rapid increase in the market share, while the MNOs are gradually being “pipelined” in the industry value chain.In the process of the digital transformation, MNOs have achieved the on-demand scheduling, flexible adaptation, and rapid deployment by reconfiguring and abstracting 5G network functions, and have enhanced the user experience using a user centric operation model based on the business support system (BSS)/operation support system(OSS)(BO) consolidation to ultimately achieve the enhancement in the value chain.On the basis of reviewing the development of the communication industry’s value chain, the challenges for MNOs to promote their values were analyzed.Meanwhile, a 5G value plane architecture based on embedded services in 5G networks was proposed, and the typical application scenarios were given.Path suggestions for the evolution of the 5G value plane were provided, which help MNOs to build the next generation of BSS/ OSS consolidation.

Automatic medical image detection aims to utilize artificial intelligence techniques to detect lesions in medical images accurately and efficiently, which is one of the most important tasks in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems, and can be embedded into portable imaging devices for intelligent Point of Care (PoC) Diagnostics. The Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN) based models are widely used deep-learning-based solutions for automatic medical image detection. However, FPN-based medical lesion detection models have two shortcomings: the object position offset problem and the degradation problem of IoU-based loss. Therefore, in this work, we propose a novel FPN-based backbone model, i.e., Multi-Pathway Feature Pyramid Networks with Position Attention Guided Connections and Vertex Distance IoU (abbreviated as PAC-Net), to replace vanilla FPN for more accurate lesion detection, where two innovative improvements, a position attention guided connection (PAC) module and Vertex Distance IoU Vertex Distance Intersection over Union loss, are proposed to address the above-mentioned shortcomings of vanilla FPN, respectively. Extensive experiments are conducted on a public medical image detection dataset, i.e., Deeplesion, and the results showed that i) PAC-Net outperforms all state-of-the-art FPN-based depth models in both evaluation metrics of lesion detection on the DeepLesion dataset, ii) the proposed PAC module and VDIoU loss are both effective and important for PAC-Net to achieve a superior performance in automatic medical image detection tasks, and iii) the proposed VDIoU loss converges more quickly than the existing IoU-based losses, making PAC-Net an accurate and also highly efficient 3D medical image detection model.

In recent decades, damming has become one of the most important anthropogenic activities for river regulation, and reservoirs have become hotspots for biogeochemical cycling. The construction of dams changes riverine hydrological conditions and alters the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of rivers, eventually leading to significant variations in nutrient cycling. This review mainly explores the effects of river damming on nutrient transport and transformation, including i) nutrient (N, P, Si, and C) retention in reservoirs, ii) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and iii) interactions between the nutrient stoichiometry ratio and the health of the reservoir ecosystem. The important drivers of nutrient transport and transformation, such as river connectivity, hydraulic residence time, hydropower development mode, microbial community variation, and anthropogenic pollution, have also been discussed. In addition, strategies to recover from the negative effects of damming on aquatic ecosystems are summarized and analyzed. To provide theoretical and scientific support for the ecological and environmental preservation of river-reservoir systems, future studies should focus on nutrient accumulation and GHG emissions in cascade reservoirs.

Reconstructing chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) vertical profile is a promising approach for investigating the internal structure of marine ecosystem. Given that the process of profile classification in current process-oriented profile inversion methods are either too subjective or too complex, a novel Chl-a profile reconstruction method was proposed incorporating both a novel binary tree profile classification model and a profile inversion model in the Mediterranean Sea. The binary tree profile classification model was established based on a priori knowledge provided by clustering Chl-a profiles measured by BGC-Argo floats performed by the profile classification model (PCM), an advanced unsupervised machine learning clustering method. The profile inversion model contains the relationships between the shape-dependent parameters of the nonuniform Chl-a profile and the corresponding Chl-a surface concentration derived from satellite observations. According to quantitative evaluation, the proposed profile classification model reached an overall accuracy of 89%, and the mean absolute percent deviation (MAPD) of the proposed profile inversion model ranged from 12%–37% under different shape-dependent parameters. By generating monthly three dimensions Chl-a concentration from 2011 to 2018, the proposed process-oriented method exhibits great application potential in investigating the spatial and temporal characteristics of Chl-a profiles and even the water column total biomass throughout the Mediterranean Sea.

We propose a novel tapstroke inference attack method, called TapSnoop, that precisely recovers what user types on touchscreen devices. Inferring tapstrokes is challenging owing to 1) low tapstroke intensity and 2) dynamically-changing noise. We address these challenges by revealing the unique characteristics of tapstrokes from audio recordings exploited by TapSnoop as a side channel of tapstrokes. In particular, we develop tapstroke detection and localization algorithms that collectively leverage audio features obtained from multiple microphones, which are designed to reflect the core properties of tapstrokes. Furthermore, we improve its robustness against environmental changes, by developing environment-adaptive classification and noise subtraction algorithms. Extensive experiments with ten real-world users on both number and QWERTY keyboards show that TapSnoop can achieve an inference accuracy of 85.4% and 75.6% (96.2% and 90.8% in best case scenarios) in stable environments, respectively. TapSnoop can also achieve a reasonable accuracy even with varying noise. For example, it shows an inference accuracy of 84.8% and 72.7% in a numeric keyboard when the noise level is varied from 37.9 to 51.2 dBA and 46.7 to 60.0 dBA, respectively.

BackgroundVirtual reality (VR) has gained popularity in daily life, and VR food cues seem to elicit food cravings, similar to real food cues. However, little is known about the impact of VR food cues on actual food intake. ObjectiveIn real life (RL), exposure to food cues in a situation in which the desire to eat food interferes with the completion of a food-related task reduces the subsequent food intake (ie, the pre-exposure effect). In this study, we examine, on the one hand, whether the pre-exposure effect could be replicated in RL and, on the other hand, whether this effect could be extended to VR contexts. MethodsThe study used a 2 (stimulus type: food vs nonfood) × 2 (mode: VR vs RL) between-subject design (n=175). Participants were randomly assigned to 1 of the 4 conditions. ResultsWe found the main effect of mode on food intake, with a higher food intake after both VR conditions than after RL conditions (P=.02). In addition, among female participants, we found that exposure to both food cues (ie, VR and RL) resulted in lower food intake than exposure to both nonfood cues (P=.05). In contrast, this effect was not observed among male participants (P=.34). Additionally, VR and RL cues generated similar emotional and behavioral responses (eg, arousal and game difficulty). ConclusionsWe were unable to replicate the exposure effect in our complete sample. Subgroup analyses, however, showed that for women, exposure to food cues (either in VR or in RL) reduces food intake, indicating that a VR pre-exposure procedure may effectively be applied exclusively for women. Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT05169996; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05169996

A novel and high-performance four-element ultra-wideband (UWB) multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) antenna is proposed in the paper. The proposed antenna is designed by using a novel integration technology of the symmetric layout, orthogonal structure, four-directional staircase-shaped decoupling, and multi-slit and multi-slot techniques. The mutual couplings among the antenna elements are significantly reduced by introducing the symmetric orthogonal and separated four-directional staircaseshaped structure. Furthermore, the antenna size is effectively miniaturized, and its impedance bandwidth is broadened by using a two-sided symmetric layout, partial and defected ground structure, the decoupling structure, and multi-slot and multi-slit techniques. Therefore, the antenna has the low-profile structure and a small dimension of 39mm×39mm×1.6mm. Moreover, the proposed antenna achieves triple band-notched characteristics by embedding different type slots and slits on the square radiating elements, default ground structure, and the decoupling structure, respectively. As a result, the antenna obtains the wider bandwidth of 2.30-13.75 GHz with the notched bands of 3.25-3.75 GHz, 5.08-5.90 GHz, and 7.06-7.95 GHz. The three notched bands are good in agreement with the existing interference bands of WiMAX (3.3-3.7 GHz), WLAN (5.15-5.875 GHz), and X-band (7.1-7.9 GHz), respectively. In addition, the proposed antenna also has a lower mutual coupling (mux >-3.0dB), stable gain, and quasi-omnidirectional radiation patterns at the entire impedance bandwidth. Therefore, a good tradeoff of the performance is obtained for the proposed antenna. The proposed antenna can be a good candidate for UWB-MIMO wireless communication applications, and especially for portable UWB-MIMO systems.