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Objective To investigate the roles of electroacupuncture (EA) in the upregulation of zinc finger protein Cezanne and in its neuroprotective effect on inflammatory injury induced by focal cerebral ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) in rats. Methods SD rats were randomized into sham group, EA group, I/R group and I/R+EA group. Cezanne silencing lentivirus (LV-shCezanne) was injection into the cerebral cortex to study the possible effect of Cezanne silencing on I/R injury, and injection of blank lentivirus (vehicle) as the control. The I/R model was established by conventional method of middle cerebral artery occlusion with ischemia for 2 h followed by reperfusion for 6, 12, 24, 48 and 72 h and 7 d, respectively, and then EA was adopted to stimulate the Baihui acupoint and the Hegu and Taichong acupoints on the affected side. Garcia score, TTC staining, Western blotting, cell counting and immunofluorescence assay were performed in each group, so as to detect the neurological deficit score (NDS), infarct size, Cezanne expression in the ischemic cerebral cortex, number and distribution of Cezanne positive cells, and expression of nuclear factor kappa B (NF- κB) p65 in the nucleus and cytoplasm. Results Compared with the sham group, the protein level of Cezanne was increased in EA group at 6 and 48 h (P

With the advancement of technology and growing social demand, large scale group decision making has gained significant importance in the field of decision making. Clustering analysis plays a crucial role in enhancing the efficiency of large scale group decision making processes. Linguistic evaluation is more in line with people's cognitive and expressive habits. The hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) offers more flexibility in expressing evaluation information. This paper is dedicated to designing a fuzzy C-means clustering model that is specifically applicable for the hesitant fuzzy linguistic preference relation (HFLPR). The objective function of the model is built based on the dissimilarity between HFLPRs and the initial cluster centers to obtain the fuzzy membership matrix and cluster centers. Since initializing cluster centers is a crucial step to produce a reasonable cluster result, three methods are proposed for generating initial centers for HFLPRs. The first and second methods are improvements over existing approaches that dealt with the clustering problem with numerical values. The third approach considers both the preference relation of preferring an alternative and the distribution of the actual preference relations. Based on this, a fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm with HFLPR is designed to obtain the cluster centers and membership matrix for there types of initializing clustering centers. Finally, based on the quality and speed of clustering, a numerical example and comparative analyses illustrate that the proposed clustering algorithm is efficient and effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Shuiping. Yu, Tang. Bo, Binzong. Hou, Jiangfa. Li, Xueling. Zhou Introduction: Laparoscopic repeat liver resection (LRLR) is a safe and effective treatment in recurrent hepatocellular carcinoma (rHCC) in particular [...]

This paper is intended to probe into the mechanism and environmental effects of modified chitosan, a kind of new materials, on heavy-metal contaminated soil under acid rain condition. Thereby, a leaching experiment of soil-column with simulated acid-rain trickling was conducted, leachate being collected from the soil-column, and ephehydrin modified chitosan-biochar composite (ECS-B) and protochitosan were used as stabilizers. The parameters of pH, conductivity and heavy metals (Cu, Pb, Zn and CD) of the leachate were analyzed in terms of contents and morphological change, and an accumulation-release model of heavy metals under leaching condition were put forward. The results of the experiment showed that compared with the control group, the pH value of leachae increased by 1.32 when ECS-B stabilizer had been added. EC changed significantly, rising up to 1.75 times of that of the control group; compared with the control group, the accumulative contents of Cu, Pb, Zn and Cd were decreased by 82.35%, 71.47%, 61.88% and 90.44%, respectively; and after leaching, the residual state of each heavy metal was 2.59 times higher than that of the control group. As to the study on the release of heavy metals from soil, it was considered involving a complex reaction process controlled by a variety of diffusion mechanisms. Besides, ECS-B stabilizer can inhibit the acid-rain leaching of heavy metals in soil by the increase of soil base ions, and the actions of surface complexation, precipitation and ion exchange, thus effectively reducing the ecological environment risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the designs of the periodic window functions in the filter window banks. First, the filter window bank with the constant synthesis periodic window functions is considered. The total number of the nonzero coefficients in the impulse responses of the analysis periodic window functions is minimized subject to the near perfect reconstruction condition. This is an norm optimization problem. To find its solution, the norm optimization problem is approximated by the norm optimization problem. Then, the column of the constraint matrix corresponding to the element in the solution with the smallest magnitude is removed. Next, it is tested whether the feasible set corresponding to the new norm optimization problem is empty or not. By repeating the above procedures, a solution of the norm optimization problem is obtained. Second, the filter window bank with the time varying synthesis periodic window functions is considered. Likewise, the design of the periodic window functions in both the analysis periodic window functions and the synthesis periodic window functions is formulated as an optimization problem. However, this norm optimization problem is subject to a quadratic matrix inequality constraint. To find its solution, the set of the synthesis periodic window functions is initialized. Then, the set of the analysis periodic window functions is optimized based on the initialized set of the synthesis periodic window functions. Next, the set of the synthesis periodic window functions is optimized based on the found set of the analysis periodic window functions. Finally, these two procedures are iterated. It is shown that the iterative algorithm converges. A design example of a filter window bank with the constant synthesis periodic window functions and a design example of a filter window bank with the time varying synthesis periodic window functions are illustrated. It is shown that the near perfect reconstruction condition is satisfied, whereas this is not the cases for the nonuniform filter banks with the conventional samplers and the conventional block samplers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]