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Androgenetic alopecia (AGA) is a common type of hair loss in men and efficacy and safety of current medical treatment remain limited. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the efficacy and safety of botulinum toxin type A (BTA) combined with Minoxidil in patients with AGA. 60 male patients were included in this study and control group received topical 5% Minoxidil and the treatment group received BTA combined with topical 5% Minoxidil. BTA injections (60–70 U) were administered at 30–35 scalp sites. Head photographs were taken at baseline, 2nd, 4th, and 6th months. Clinical descriptions recorded scalp conditions, and patient satisfaction along with Dermatology Life Quality Index scores were documented. The treatment group (TG) showed significant hair growth differences compared to the control group (CG) at the 4th month (P < 0.001) and 6th month (P = 0.0046) post-treatment. TG had improved Investigator Global Assessment (IGA) scores in the 4th month (P = 0.0001) and 6th month (P = 0.0259) compared to CG. Patient satisfaction in TG for hair growth and scalp improvement was higher than CG (all P < 0.05). TG exhibited substantial quality of life improvement at the 4-month (P = 0.0009) and 6-month (P = 0.0099). No adverse reactions were observed post-botulinum toxin injection. BTA combined with Minoxidil effectively promotes hair growth, enhances the quality of life, and alleviates scalp symptoms in male AGA patients at 4th and 6th months, with no adverse effects compared to Minoxidil alone. Trial registration number: Ethics Committee of Shanghai Tongji Hospital (ID: K-2018-026). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disassembly lines are widely utilized to disassemble end-of-life products. Most of the research focuses on the complete disassembly of obsolete products. However, there is a lack of studies on profit and on carbon emission saved. Hence, this study considers the multi-objective partial disassembly line balancing problem with AND/OR precedence relations to optimize profit, saved carbon emission and line balance simultaneously. Firstly, a multi-objective mixed-integer programming model is formulated, which could optimally solve the small number of instances with a single objective. Meanwhile, an improved multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm is developed to generate a set of high-quality Pareto solutions. This algorithm utilizes two-layer encoding of the task permutation vector and the number of selected parts, and develops two-phase decoding to handle the precedence relation constraint and cycle time constraint. In addition, the modified employed bee phase utilizes the neighborhood operation, and the onlooker phase utilizes the crossover operator to achieve a diverse population. The modified scout phase selects a solution from the Pareto front to replace the abandoned individual to obtain a new high-quality solution. To test the performance of the proposed algorithm, the algorithm is compared with the multi-objective simulated annealing algorithm, the original multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm and the well-known fast non-dominated genetic algorithm. The comparative study demonstrates that the proposed improvements enhance the performance of the method presented, and the proposed methodology outperforms all the compared algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cervical human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is believed to increase the risks of pregnancy failure and abortion, however, whether the uterine cavity HPV infection reduces pregnancy rate or increases miscarriage rate remains unclarified in infertile women undergoing assisted reproductive technology (ART) treatment. Therefore, we aimed to assess ART outcomes in the presence of intrauterine HPV. This was a hospital‐based multicenter (five reproductive medicine centers) matched cohort study. This study involved 4153 infertile women undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) or intracytoplasmic sperm injection treatment in five reproductive medicine centers between October 2018 and 2020. The spent embryo transfer media sample with endometrium tissue were collected and performed with flow‐through hybridization and gene chips to detect HPV DNA. According to basic characteristics, HPV‐positive and negative patients were matched in a ratio of 1:4 by age, body mass index transfer timing, transfer type, and number of embryos transferred. The primary outcome was pregnancy and clinical miscarriage rates in the transfer cycle underwent HPV detection. 92 HPV‐positive and 368 HPV‐negative patients were screened and analyzed statistically. Univariate analysis showed uterine cavity HPV infection resulted in lower rates of ongoing pregnancy (31.5% vs. 44.6%; p = 0.023), implantation (32.3% vs. 43.1%; p = 0.026), biochemical pregnancy (47.8% vs. 62.5%; p = 0.010), and clinical pregnancy (40.2% vs. 54.3%; p = 0.015) compared with HPV negative group. The infertile female with positive HPV also had a slightly higher frequency of biochemical miscarriage (15.9% vs. 13.0%; p = 0.610) and clinical miscarriage (24.3% vs. 15.5%; p = 0.188). These findings suggest that HPV infection in the uterine cavity is a high risk for ART failure. HPV screening is recommended before ART treatment, which may be benefit to improving pregnancy outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of image classification faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of target samples, leading to model overfitting and difficult training. To address these issues, few-shot learning has emerged as a promising approach. However, current methods do not fully utilize the correlations among samples and external semantic information, resulting in poor recognition accuracy. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new few-shot classification method that incorporates both attributes and attention guided approach. The method leverages the attention mechanism to extract discriminative features from the images. By exploring regional correlations among samples, it assists in generating visual representations by utilizing predicted attribute features. As a result, accurate prototypes are generated. Extensive experiments were conducted on two attribute-labeled datasets, namely Caltech-UCSD Birds-200–2011(CUB) and SUN Attribute Database (SUN) Attribute Dataset. With the Resnet12 backbone, the method achieves remarkable accuracies of 79.95% and 89.34% for 1-shot and 5-shot, respectively, on the CUB dataset. Similarly, with the Conv4 backbone, the method achieves notable accuracies of 67.21% and 80.87% for 1-shot and 5-shot, respectively, on the SUN Attribute dataset. The achieved accuracies highlight the robustness and generalizability of our method, and show the capability of our method to accurately classify samples with limited training data, which is a significant advantage in real-world scenarios where labeled data are often scarce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective To investigate whether shikonin can regulate autophagy and promote wound healing in diabetic rats by upregulating C-X-C chemokine receptor type 4 (CXCR4). Methods A total of 24 Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats were assigned to control, diabetic, diabetic+ Shikonin, and diabetic+Shikonin+sh-CXCR4 groups (6 rats in each group) using random number table method. A diabetic rat model was established by intraperitoneal injection of streptozotocin, and a 1 cm-diameter skin punch was used to create an ulcer model on the back of the rat. Wound healing rates were calculated on days 0, 7, 14, and 21 after wounding. On day 21 after wounding, skin tissues were collected for hematoxylin & eosin and Masson trichrome staining to analyze the pathological changes of the wound. CD31 immunohistochemistry was performed to analyze the microvascular density of the wound and Western blotting was used to detect the expression of CXCR4 and cell autophagy-related proteins microtubule-related proteins light chain 3 (LC3) II/ LC3 I, Beclin1, and soluble p62 in the wound tissue. Autophagosomes were observed by transmission electron microscopy. One-way analysis of variance was used for comparison between groups. Results Compared with the control group, the diabetic group had reduced wound healing rate (on day 21: 72.44%±6.21% vs. 93.71%±6.76%), neovascularization, collagen deposition, microvascular density, levels of CXCR4, LC3 II /LC3 I, and Beclin, and increased p62 levels in the wound tissue, as well as decreased autophagosomes (P<0.05). Compared with the diabetic group, wound healing rate (on day 21: 86.74%±4.86% vs. 72.44%±6.21%), neovascularization, collagen deposition, microvascular density, levels of CXCR4, LC3 II/LC3 I, and Beclin, and autophagosomes were increased, but p62 levels were decreased in the diabetic+Shikonin group (P<0.05). Compared with the diabetic+Shikonin group, the diabetic+Shikonin group had decreased wound healing rate (on day 21: 76.15%±3.85% vs. 86.74%±4.86%), neovascularization, collagen deposition, microvascular density, levels of CXCR4, LC3 II/LC3 I, and Beclin, and autophagosomes in the wound tissue, as well as increased p62 levels (P<0.05). Conclusion Shikonin promotes the healing of diabetic ulcer wounds by upregulating CXCR4 expression and activating cell autophagy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given that a U-shaped assembly line is usually regarded as a serial flow production system, preventive maintenance (PM) on machines in any station of the line may lead to stoppage of the whole line and sequentially cause great loss of production cost. To improve production continuity during PM, this paper proposes multiple alternative assignment plans with interchangeable abilities to ascertain the production recovery from changes of line structure. A mixed-integer mathematical model is further formulated to make decisions on alternative assignment plans. In this model, cycle time and total assignment plan alteration cost are minimised simultaneously. And an enhanced JAYA algorithm is developed to obtain well-distributed Pareto frontier solutions effectively and efficiently. The proposed algorithm suggests a similarity-based selection and various crossover/neighbourhood search operators to enhance its search ability for global optima. Numerical experiment results prove the effectiveness of the proposed model and enhanced JAYA. This novel methodology of integration optimisation bridges assembly line balancing and PM, and thus promotes production continuity and achieves economic benefits under maintenance within large-scaled assembly lines in real situations. Furthermore, a real-world case study is conducted to illustrate the significance of this novel methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the disaster characteristics and the geo-conditions at the scene, in this study, the occurrence mechanism of a serious rock burst accident that occurred in the Tangshan Coal Mine, China, was analysed. Ground stress measurements showed that the mine is in a high ground stress area dominated by horizontal tectonic stress around 33 MPa. Laboratory testing revealed that the coal was a hard seam of 8.3 MPa over bedded by a thick and hard roof stratum with uniaxial compressive strength of 66 MPa. The calculation results indicated that the accident occurred in the roof rebounding area. It is proposed that the hard roof and the hard coal seam formed a seesaw structure around the working face. The vertical pressure relief caused the rib coal mass to lose its clamping forces from the roof and floor and rush into the roadway, resulting in a rock burst accident. Based on the causality mechanism of the rock burst disaster developed in this study, pertinent coal bump prevention measures have been undertaken in practice. Large-diameter boreholes were drilled to eliminate the pivot effect of the seam. Roof blasting was undertaken to prevent the roof from forming a seesaw plank. To summarize, a new causality mechanism for rock burst in coal mines under hard roof and hard seam geo-conditions was developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mixed-model assembly line balancing and sequencing problem (MALBSP), workstations are assumed to be constantly available. The failure of any workstation will make the entire assembly line stop working. Preventive maintenance (PM) is a way to maintain the workstation before its failure, reduce unexpected downtime, and prolong its useful life. Previous studies have considered PM scenarios (PMS) in the simple and U-shaped assembly line to improve production efficiency and smoothness effectively, but not in the mixed-model assembly line. This paper fills this research gap, and the MALBSP considering PMS (MALBSP_PMS) is studied in this paper. A mixed-integer linear programming model is proposed to minimize makespan and task alteration. A migrating birds optimization algorithm is improved (IMBO) to obtain well-distributed Pareto frontier solutions. This algorithm designs a restart mechanism and an intra-population crossover operator to avoid falling into the local optimal and enhance its searchability. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of two improvements and the IMBO algorithm. In addition, a real-world case study is introduced to illustrate the importance of considering PM scenarios in MALBSP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a rising global concern with an increasing prevalence. This study aimed to evaluate the relationship between serum uric acid to creatinine ratio (SUA/Cr) and MetS in adults with overweight/obesity in China.Patients and Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study comprising 4699 participants with overweight/obesity who underwent physical examinations. Their serum levels of various components, including total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-c), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-c), fasting plasma glucose (FPG), creatinine (Cr), and uric acid (UA) were measured. Renal function-normalized SUA was calculated using SUA/Cr. Logistic regression analysis was employed to investigate the association between SUA/Cr and MetS in adults with overweight/obesity.Results: SUA/Cr levels were lower in non-MetS participants (OR: 2.159, 95% CI: 1.82 to 2.56; p < 0.001), and tended to rise with the increasing number of MetS components. Additionally, elevated SUA/Cr levels were associated with a higher risk of hypertension, hyperglycemia, and dyslipidemia.Conclusion: SUA/Cr levels were significantly associated with MetS and its components in Chinese adults with overweight/obesity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While solving the shunting scheduling of EMU first-level maintenance (SSEFM), most existing literature assumed a single maintenance route for all trains and considered only a through depot. It neglects the problem-specific characteristics in terms of varied maintenance routes and a stub-end depot, causing the infeasibility of the generated schedule in such particular circumstances. Therefore, the SSEFM problem with flexible maintenance routes in a stub-end depot with a transversal yard configuration is considered in this work. First, a multi-objective mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is formulated to maximize the reservation time in the storage area, and minimize the overstay time in the cleaning and inspecting areas. The relationship between constraints including flexible maintenance routes, train shunting conflicts, track occupation conflicts, and train arrival/departure times, are coordinated. Subsequently, a heuristic-based enhanced particle swarm optimization algorithm (EPSO) with two improvements is proposed to tackle this NP-hard problem. Specifically, three heuristic rules about the depth-first operation track allocation, the conflict-free bottleneck track allocation, and the right-shift track occupancy repair are designed to ensure the feasibility of the shunting schedule. Accordingly, a three-level decoding mechanism is designed to achieve a near-optimal shunting schedule with great train and route sequences. Two improvements on crossover and mutation operators are developed to enhance the exploration and exploitation ability. Finally, a real-world instance in China is solved to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model and algorithm. Experimental results show that EPSO is relatively more effective than all the compared algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entry retaining via roof cutting is a new longwall mining method that has emerged in recent years, and is characterized by high resource utilization and environmental friendliness. Due to the complexity of this method, a field study is commonly employed for process optimization. Roof blasting is a key operation for retaining the entry, and the current practice involves dynamically adjusting blasting parameters through on-site testing and postblasting monitoring. However, the existing literature lacks detailed descriptions of blasting operations, making it difficult for field engineers to replicate the results. In this study, based on a roof cutting project for entry retaining, a preliminary design of blasting parameters is made based on theories and on-site geological conditions. The on-site test methods and equipment for roof-cutting blasting are described in detail, and the fractural patterns under different blasting parameters are analyzed. After the retreat of the working face, the state of roof caving in the goaf is analyzed based on monitoring data, and the effectiveness of top cutting is evaluated through reverse analysis, leading to dynamic adjustments of the blasting parameters. This research provides a reproducible construction method for roof-cutting operations and establishes the relationship between blasting parameters and post-mining monitoring data. It contributes to the development of fundamental theories and systematic technical systems for entry retaining via roof cutting, offering high-quality case studies for similar geological engineering projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collaborative robots (cobots) are increasingly being utilized in industries due to the advancement in the field of robotic technology and also due to the increase in labor costs. The cobots on the assembly line can be utilized to complete the tasks independently or assist the workers to complete the tasks. This study considers the U-shaped assembly line balancing problem with cobots, where several cobots with different purchasing costs are selected under the budget constraint. Three mixed-integer programming models are formulated to optimize the cycle time, and the built models are capable of solving the small-sized instances optimally. Two algorithms, artificial bee colony algorithm and migrating bird optimization algorithm, are developed and improved to tackle the large-sized instances, where new encoding scheme and decoding procedure are developed for this new problem. The computational tests demonstrate that the utilization of collaborative robots reduces the cycle time effectively in the assembly line. The comparative study on a set of instances shows that the proposed methodologies obtain competing performance in comparison with other 12 implemented algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective of this study was to employ machine learning (ML) models utilizing non-invasive factors to achieve early and low-cost identification of MetS in a large physical examination population.Patients and Methods: The study enrolled 9171 participants who underwent physical examinations at Northern Jiangsu People's Hospital in 2009 and 2019, to determine MetS based on criteria established by the Chinese Diabetes Society. Non-invasive characteristics such as gender, age, body mass index (BMI), systolic blood pressure (SBP), and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) were collected and used as input variables to train and evaluate ML models for MetS identification. Several ML models were used for MetS identification, including logistic regression (LR), k-nearest neighbors algorithm (k-NN), naive bayesian (NB), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), artificial neural network (ANN), and support vector machine (SVM).Results: Our ML models all showed good performance in the 10-fold cross-validation except for the SVM model. In the external validation, the NB model exhibited the best performance with an AUC of 0.976, accuracy of 0.923, sensitivity of 98.32%, and specificity of 91.32%.Conclusion: This study proposed a new non-invasive method for early and low-cost identification of MetS by using ML models. This approach has the potential to serve as a highly sensitive, convenient, and cost-effective tool for large-scale MetS screening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In multi-manned assembly lines, more than one operator is allowed on the same workstation. Limited research has been carried out on sequence-dependent set-up times. Therefore, this article optimizes the multi-manned assembly line balancing problem with sequence-dependent set-up times using an enhanced migrating birds optimization (EMBO) algorithm. Sequence-dependent set-up times are embedded in two ways: forward and backward set-ups. EMBO designs a mixed neighbourhood search and acceptance criteria to help it escape from local optima, and a diversification mechanism to enhance the global exploration ability. Three types of experiment and two scenarios, with low and high set-up times, are conducted to test the performance of the mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model and EMBO. The first experiment compares three MILP models (no, low and high set-up times) to illustrate the significance of set-up times. The final two experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EMBO by comparison with the MILP model and six state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rock bursts and coal and gas outbursts are geodynamic disasters in underground coal mines. Laboratory testing of raw coal samples is the dominant research method for disaster prediction. However, the reliability of the experimental data is low due to the inconsistency of the mechanical properties of raw coal materials. The utilization of structural coal resources and the development of new coal-like materials are of significance for geodynamic disaster prediction and prevention. This paper studies the failure characteristics and dynamic disaster propensities of coal-like burst-prone briquettes under different gas pressures. A self-made multi-function rock–gas coupling experimental device was developed and burst-prone briquettes were synthesized, which greatly improved the efficiency and precision of the experimental data. The results showed that the burst proneness of the briquette was thoroughly reduced at a critical gas pressure of 0.4 MPa. When the gas pressure was close to 0.8 MPa, both the bearing capacity and the stored burst energy reduced significantly and the dynamic failure duration extended considerably, indicating the typical plastic-flow failure characteristics of coal and gas outbursts. The acoustic emission monitoring results showed that with the increase in gas pressure, the post-peak ringing and the AE energy ratio of coal samples increased, suggesting that the macroscopic damage pattern changed from bursting-ejecting of large pieces to stripping–shedding of small fragments adhered to mylonitic coal. In addition, the transformation and coexistence of coal failure modes were discussed from the perspectives of coal geology and gas migration. This study provides a new method for the scientific research of compound dynamic disaster prevention in burst coal mines with high gas contents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coal contains cracks and has strong heterogeneity, so the data dispersion is large in laboratory tests. In this study, 3D printing technology is used to simulate hard rock and coal, and the rock mechanics test method is used to carry out the coal–rock combination experiment. The deformation characteristics and failure modes of the combination are analyzed and compared with the relevant parameters of the single body. The results show that the uniaxial compressive strength of the composite sample is inversely proportional to the thickness of the weak body and directly proportional to the thickness of the strong body. The Protodyakonov model or ASTM model can be used as a verification method for the results of a uniaxial compressive strength test of coal–rock combination. The elastic modulus of the combination is the equivalent elastic modulus, and the elastic modulus of the combination is between the elastic modulus of the two constituent monomers, which can be analyzed using the Reuss model. The failure of the composite sample occurs in the low-strength material, while the high-strength section is rebounding as an extra load on the low-strength body, which may cause a sharp increase in the strain rate of the weak body. The main failure mode of the sample with a small height–diameter ratio is splitting, and the failure mode of the sample with a large height–diameter ratio is shear fracturing. When the height–diameter ratio is not greater than 1, it shows pure splitting, and when the height–diameter ratio is 1~2, it shows a mixed mode of splitting and shear fracture. The shape has a significant effect on the uniaxial compressive strength of the composite specimen. For the impact propensity, it can be determined that the uniaxial compressive strength of the combination is higher than that of the single body, and the dynamic failure time is lower than that of the single body. It can hardly determine the elastic energy and the impact energy of the composite with the relationship to the weak body. The proposed methodology provides new cutting-edge test technologies in the study of coal and coal-like materials, with an exploration of their mechanical properties under compression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The longwall mining method with gob-side entry retaining via roof cutting is a new underground coal mining method which has the characteristics of a high resource recovery ratio and environmental friendliness. Due to the complexity of this method, the research method of case-based dynamic on-site monitoring, analysis, adjustment, and optimization is usually adopted. Based on a roadway retaining via roof cutting project, in addition to the traditional indirect monitoring method of hydraulic support pressure, this study innovatively establishes a direct monitoring method for roof caving by monitoring the gangue pressure in the goaf, which provides data for the roof cutting effect and offers a new method for studying the overlying strata movement. In the project, a comprehensive monitoring and analysis system was established, including gangue pressure, cable bolt stress, bracket pressure, roadway deformation, and roof separation, which was used to dynamically analyze the effect of roof cutting and optimize the support design. The results show that the pressure of the hydraulic support close to the roof cutting is low, indicating that roof cutting is favorable in the roadway retaining mining method. The roadway deformation in the advanced abutment pressure area of the working face is small. The mining-induced stress caused by the collapse and compaction of the overlying strata in the goaf is the dominant factor affecting the effect of roadway retaining, especially in the 50–100 m range behind the working face, where the dynamic load causes high bearing capacity of the support elements, large roadway convergence, and roof separation. Temporary support and supplementary reinforcement should be added when necessary. The monitoring system presented in this study is highly comprehensive, simple, reliable, and low in cost, providing a reference for roof cutting roadway retaining projects and roof caving-related studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Androgenetic alopecia (AGA) affects the quality of life (QoL) and has a negative psychological impact on patients. We sought to investigate the frequency of anxiety and depression in AGA patients and explore their relationship with patients' QoL. This cross-sectional survey enrolled 192 participants with AGA. Hairdex, World Health Organization Quality of life Brief Version (WHOQOL-BREF), and dermatology life quality index (DLQI) instruments were used to assess the QoL of patients, and hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS) was used to evaluate patients' anxiety symptom and depression symptom. HADS, WHOQOL-BREF, and DLQI scores and domains of the Hairdex score were analyzed using linear regression and Pearson correlation. Apart from self-confidence, all four domains of Hairdex were significantly correlated with depression scores and anxiety scores. All four domains of WHOQOL-BREF were significantly correlated with depression and anxiety scores. While all six domains of DLQI were also significantly correlated with anxiety scores only. This study demonstrates a significant correlation between psychiatric morbidity and QoL in individuals with AGA. Hence, psychiatric treatment evaluations should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disassembly is the first and vital step in recycling and remanufacturing end-of-life products. Disassembly lines are utilized frequently due to high productivity and suitability. This research studies the disassembly line balancing problem on the U-shaped disassembly lines, which have higher flexibility than the traditional straight disassembly lines. A mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to formulate the AND/OR precedence relationships with the objective of minimizing the number of stations. This model is also extended to a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model to optimize four objectives. To tackle this NP-hard problem effectively, a two-phase artificial bee colony algorithm and a bee algorithm are proposed and improved. In these algorithms, the first phase selects the stations with less loads on the last two stations for the purpose of achieving the optimal number of stations. The second phase hierarchically optimizes multiple objectives to achieve better line balances. Case studies show that the proposed MILP model obtains optimal solutions in terms of station number for the small-size instances, and the U-shaped disassembly lines obtain better fitness values than the straight disassembly lines. The comparative study demonstrates that the proposed methodologies perform competing performances in comparison with other 13 re-implemented algorithms, including tabu search algorithm, iterated local search algorithm, genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, three artificial bee colony algorithms and the original bee algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within U-shaped assembly lines, the increase of labour costs and subsequent utilisation of robots has led to growing energy consumption, which is the current main expense of auto and electronics industries. However, there are limited researches concerning both energy consumption reduction and productivity improvement on U-shaped robotic assembly lines. This paper first develops a nonlinear multi-objective mixed-integer programming model, reformulates it into a linear form by linearising the multiplication of two binary variables, and then refines the weight of multiple objectives so as to achieve a better approximation of true Pareto frontiers. In addition, Pareto artificial bee colony algorithm (PABC) is extended to tackle this new complex problem. This algorithm stores all the non-dominated solutions into a permanent archive set to keep all the good genes, and selects one solution from this set to overcome the strong local minima. Comparative experiments based on a set of newly generated benchmarks verify the superiority of the proposed PABC over four multi-objective algorithms in terms of generation distance, maximum spread, hypervolume ratio and the ratio of non-dominated solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of androgenetic alopecia patients has become increasingly important, but the influencing factors associated with the different domains are poorly understood. Objective: This study aimed to investigate the influencing factors in HRQoL of androgenetic alopecia patients and identify its strongly associated domains. Patients and Methods: We enrolled 170 androgenetic alopecia patients. HRQoL was measured using the World Health Organization Quality of Life Brief Version (WHO-BREF), and Hairdex. Results: HRQoL was significantly impaired in patients < 30 years, (WHO-BREF: P=0.022, Hairdex: P=0.004), less educated (WHO-BREF: P=0.021, Hairdex: P=0.003), single patients (Hairdex: P=0.023), and urban residence (Hairdex: P=0.043). By domains, those < 30 years were impaired by physical health (P=0.038) and psychological (P=0.030) by WHO-BREF, and symptoms (P=0.002) and emotions (P=0.002) by Hairdex. Singles were impaired by symptoms (P=0.020), and emotions (P=0.009) by Hairdex. Less-educated individuals had impaired all domains in the WHO-BREF and Hairdex, except for physical health. Women had impaired symptoms (P=0.013) and stigmatization (P=0.041) in Hairdex. Conclusion: Androgenetic alopecia is associated with significantly reduced HRQoL in young, less educated, and single patients. Dermatologists should inquire about Quality of Life and appropriately support androgenetic alopecia patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Gastric cancer is one of the leading cancer-related death causes. Enormous efforts have been focused on this field in these years. However, clinical trial failure is becoming a massive obstacle for researchers to apply their research results for clinical use. This study aimed to analyze the reasons behind clinical failures and identify potential risk factors of clinical trial failures.Methods: On December, 1, 2021, we queried ClinicalTrials.gov for gastric cancer listed in phase II/III. We included trials specifying their interests in "stomach cancer", "Stomach Neoplasms", "Gastric Cancer", "Gastric Neoplasms", "Gastric Carcinoma", "Stomach Carcinoma", "Gastroesophageal Junction Cancer". Exclude criteria are: (1) Trials that start prior to 01/01/2007 and start after 12/01/2020; (2) Trials with "not yet recruiting", "suspended", "withdrawn", or "unknown" status; (3) Trials do not provide an anticipated accrual number or a start date.Results: A total of 567 trials are included. 10.2% of these trials are failed. 16 (2.82%) were terminated for good reasons, and 42 (7.41%) were terminated for bad reasons. Multi-centre (P-value = 0.088) and anticipated accrual (P-value = 0.099) are potential risk factors for clinical failures in the simple logistic regression model. After considering the interaction between multi-centre and anticipated accrual, the odds ratio of anticipated accrual is 0.60 (P-value = 0.009) in single centre trials. In multi-centre trials, the odds ratio of anticipated accrual is 0.72 (P-value = 0.025). The primary reason for gastric cancer trial terminations is recruitment failure.Conclusion: The rate that trials terminated in gastric cancer has decreased compared to previous studies. Comparing to other types of oncology trials, poor accrual continues to be the predominant reason, followed by business or sponsor reasons. Single-center trials with smaller anticipated accrual number are more likely to be terminated which may resulted by limited resources invested to the trial. Single-center design exacerbated the difficulty of participant recruitment. Future studies need to continue tracking the rate of trial termination across oncology and whether the reasons behind them have changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malware detection is a vital task for cybersecurity. For malware dynamic behavior, threats come from a small number of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) embedded in the API sequences, which are easily ignored or obfuscated in the detection process. Prior works proposed graph‐based learning methods to solve this problem using API‐level behavior relations. However, the malware detection is still challenging, due to the ignore of the temporal correlation between malicious behaviors. In this study, we model the software behaviors with multiscaled API graph sequences to represent API‐level behaviors as well as graph‐level temporal behavior correlations. We then propose a novel Dynamic Evolving Graph Convolutional Network (DEGCN) model to capture dynamic evolving pattern of both local API‐level and global graph‐level software behaviors. In particular, we first extract the API‐level (node) representations to capture the directed graph representations for each time slot. We then propose a Graph‐encoding‐based Gate Recurrent Unit (GGRU) network to capture the graph‐level evolving features and their evolving status. The graph features of different time slots and different graph scales are concatenated to detect whether the software is benign or malicious. Our evaluation with two public benchmarks reports that DEGCN achieves the best performance compared with state‐of‐the‐art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decentralized storage of data is one of the typical applications in the blockchain network. However, most of the existing works neglected the storage balancing problem in the blockchain network, which has an immediate impact on the availability and stability of the network. Therefore, this paper proposes a storage balancing problem for non-local data storage in the blockchain network and proves that the problem is non-deterministic polynomial (NP)-hard. The criterion of the storage balance is established by a balanced coefficient in the proposed scheme. A heuristic matching algorithm (HMA), a genetic algorithm (GA) and a tabu search algorithm (TSA) are customized to solve the problem of imbalanced storage formalized in this paper. Compared with our previous algorithm fast matching algorithm (FMA), experimental results demonstrate that HMA achieves better performance in terms of accuracy, computation overhead and storage overhead. Specifically, the computation overhead of HMA is lower than that of FMA by 84.45% on average, whereas the storage overhead of HMA is lower than that of FMA by 32.26% on average. By using the initial solution of HMA, TSA achieves the highest accuracy among GA, TSA and moth-flame optimization (MFO). Meanwhile, by using the initial solution of FMA, TSA achieves the highest accuracy among GA, TSA and MFO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, flexible preventive maintenance (PM) activities are incorporated into two-stage assembly flow shop scheduling where m dedicated machines in the fabrication stage and one machine in the assembly stage. The operational status of each machine is described by a continuous variable, maintenance level. The maintenance level value is inversely proportional to the processing time. Once a PM activity is performed, this value will return to the initial value. Different from the PM at fixed predefined time intervals, flexible PM can be carried out at any time point, but the maintenance levels are not less than 0. Hence, a MILP model with maintenance level constraints is formulated to minimize the total completion time and maintenance time. Regarding the methods, a latest PM decision strategy is proposed to determine the execution time of PM activities. This new strategy is embedded into 15 constructive heuristics and 7 meta-heuristics (three variants of iterated local search, three variants of Q-learning-based ant colony system with local search and a Q-learning-based hyper-heuristics) to address this new problem. The final experimental analysis demonstrates the significance of the integrated model and the effectiveness of the proposed constructive heuristics and meta-heuristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) play an important role in cell therapy and regenerative medicine. However, local nutritional deficiency often limits therapeutical effect of the transplanted cells. Acetyl l-carnitine (ALC) is a common energy metabolism regulator and free radical scavenger. This study investigated the effect of ALC on ADSCs exposed to severe serum-deprivation and explored the relative machanisms. Treating with 1 mM ALC improved proliferation and alleviated senescence of starved cells, accompanied with reduced reactive oxygen species (ROS) and increased protein expression of SOD1 and catalase. In addition, ALC inhibited apoptosis but increased starvation-induced autophagy, which might be related to the regulation of phases of dissociation of Bcl-2-Beclin1 and Bcl-2-Bax complexes. Evidence obtained by replacing ALC with N-acetylcysteine (N-AC) suggested that ROS might be the central inducer of autophagy, apoptosis and senescence. There was a difference between ALC and N-AC in the protection mechanism, that was, compared with N-AC, ALC maintained autophagy well at the same time as anti-oxidation. Inhibition of autophagy by 3-methyladenine (3-MA) partially offset the protective effect of ALC. However, despite low-level ROS and enhanced autophagy, ALC with high concentration (10 mM) markedly aggravated cell apoptosis and senescence, thus losing cytoprotection and even causing damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) are easily available and play an important role in regenerative medicine. In recent years, Cell spheroid models have been in the spotlight because of their various advantages and physiological proximity. Promoting the spreading of ADSCs spheroids may improve the therapeutic effect the transplanted ADSCs. In this study, we prepared autologous decellularized extracellular matrix (d-ECM) and ADSCs spheroids, and investigated in vitro spreading of the spheroids on the d-ECM-coated substrate. In addition, the effect of d-ECM powder (ECM-P) on the aggregation of ADSCs was analyzed in a three-dimensional (3D) culture system. The results showed that d-ECM accelerated the spreading of spheroids, and promoted the migration and proliferation of the surrounding monolayer cells, accompanied by ERK1/2 activation and an increase in the expression of MMP2 and MMP9. In addition, ECM-P facilitated the aggregation of free cells in 3D culture in a concentration-dependent way. The spheroid spreading and cell aggregation were both prevented by ERK1/2 selective inhibitor PD98059. Our data suggest that the d-ECM substrate and its derivant may regulate the transformation between ADSCs spheroids and the monolayer or free cells, and ERK1/2 signalling pathway may be involved in these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing algorithms of dish recognition mainly focus on accuracy with predefined classes, thus limiting their application scope. In this paper, we propose a practical two-stage dish recognition framework (DRNet) that yields a tradeoff between speed and accuracy while adapting to the variation in class numbers. In the first stage, we build an arbitrary-oriented dish detector (AODD) to localize dish position, which can effectively alleviate the impact of background noise and pose variations. In the second stage, we propose a dish reidentifier (DReID) to recognize the registered dishes to handle uncertain categories. To further improve the accuracy of DRNet, we design an attribute recognition (AR) module to predict the attributes of dishes. The attributes are used as auxiliary information to enhance the discriminative ability of DRNet. Moreover, pruning and quantization are processed on our model to be deployed in embedded environments. Finally, to facilitate the study of dish recognition, a well-annotated dataset is established. Our AODD, DReID, AR, and DRNet run at about 14, 25, 16, and 5 fps on the hardware RKNN 3399 pro, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High viability and further adipogenic differentiation of adipose-derived stem cells (ADSCs) are fundamental for engraftment and growth of the transplanted adipose tissue. It has been demonstrated that extracellular matrix (ECM) regulates cell proliferation and differentiation by interacting with ERK1/2 signalling pathway. In this study, we prepared autologous decellularized extracellular matrix (d-ECM) and explored its effect on the proliferation and adipogenic ability of ADSCs in low serum culture. We found that 2% foetal bovine serum (FBS) in growth medium inhibited cell viability and DNA replication, and decreased mRNA and protein levels of PPARγ and C/EPBα compared with 10% FBS. Correspondingly, after 14-days adipogenic induction, cells cultured in 2% FBS possessed lower efficiency of adipogenesis and expressed less adipocyte differentiation markers ADIPOQ and aP2. On the contrary, the d-ECM-coated substrate continuously promoted the expression of PPARγ, and regulated the phosphorylation of ERK1/2 in different manners during differentiation. Pretreatment with ERK1/2 inhibitor PD98059 neutralized the effects of d-ECM, which suggested d-ECM might regulate the adipogenesis of ADSCs through ERK1/2-PPARγ pathway. In addition, d-ECM was revealed to regulate the transcription and expression of stemness-associated genes, such as OCT4, NANOG and SOX2, in the undifferentiated ADSCs, which might be related to the initiation of differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fast and accurate estimation of makespan is essential for the determination of the delivery date and the sustainable development of the enterprise. In this paper, a high-quality training dataset is constructed and an adaptive ensemble model is proposed to achieve fast and accurate makespan estimation. First, both the logistics features extracted by the Pearson correlation coefficient and the new meaningful nonlinear combination features dug out by gene expression programming are first involved in this paper for constructing a high-quality dataset. Secondly, an improved clustering with elbow criterion and a resampling operation are applied simultaneously to generate representative subsets; and correspondingly, several back propagation neural network (BPNN) with the architecture optimized by genetic algorithm are trained by these subsets respectively to generate effective diverse learners; and then, a K-nearest neighbor based dynamic weight combination strategy which is sensitive to current testing sample is proposed to make full use of the learner's positive effects and avoid its negative effects. Finally, the results of effective experiments prove that both the newly involved features and the improvements in the proposed ensemble are effective. In addition, comparison experiments confirm that the proposed enhanced ensemble of BPNNs outperforms significantly the prevailing approaches, including single, ensemble and hybrid models. And hence, the proposed model can be utilized as a convenient and reliable tool to support customer order acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

U-shaped assembly lines have been popularly adopted in electronics and appliances to improve their flexibility and efficiency. However, most past studies assumed that the processing time of each task is fixed and hence just considered the task allocation but ignored worker assignment. In this paper, the processing time of each task depends on the workers and then the cooperative optimization of task allocation and workers assignment is considered in U-shaped assembly line balancing problems to optimize the cycle time. Later, an enhanced migrating birds optimization algorithm (EMBO) is proposed to solve it. In the EMBO algorithm, since this new problem has two subproblems: task allocation and worker assignment, the prevent work designs two neighborhood structures to improve the leader and following birds. Furthermore, the temperature acceptance criteria, to judge whether the neighbor replaces current following bird, are developed to ensure the diversity of population and avoid being trapped in the local optimum. And a competitive mechanism is introduced to increase the probability of the promising birds locating in the front of the line. The proposed algorithm is compared with other well-known algorithms in the literature, and the numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The task offloading problem, which aims to balance the energy consumption and latency for Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), is still a challenging problem due to the dynamic changing system environment. To reduce energy while guaranteeing delay constraint for mobile applications, we propose an access control management architecture for 5G heterogeneous network by making full use of Base Station's storage capability and reusing repetitive computational resource for tasks. For applications that rely on real-time information, we propose two algorithms to offload tasks with consideration of both energy efficiency and computation time constraint. For the first scenario, i.e. the rarely changing system environment, an optimal static algorithm is proposed based on dynamic programming technique to get the exact solution. For the second scenario, i.e. the frequently changing system environment, a two-stage online algorithm is proposed to adaptively obtain the current optimal solution in real time. Simulation results demonstrate that the exact algorithm in the first scenario runs 4 times faster than the enumeration method. In the second scenario, the proposed online algorithm can reduce the energy consumption and computation time violation rate by 16.3% and 25% in comparison with existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reference 1 Zhang Z. Assessing clinical trial failure risk factors and reasons in gastric cancer. The original article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1186/s12876-022-02592-4. [Extracted from the article]

The original article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1186/s12876-022-02592-4. Reference 1 Zhang Z. Assessing clinical trial failure risk factors and reasons in gastric cancer. [Extracted from the article]

Steelmaking and the continuous-casting (SCC) scheduling problem is a realistic hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with continuous-casting production at the last stage. This study considers the SCC scheduling problem with diverse products, which is a vital and difficult problem in steel plants. To tackle this problem, this study first presents the mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model to minimize the objective of makespan. Then, an improved migrating birds optimization algorithm (IMBO) is proposed to tackle this considered NP-hard problem. In the proposed IMBO, several improvements are employed to achieve the proper balance between exploration and exploitation. Specifically, a two-level decoding procedure is designed to achieve feasible solutions; the simulated annealing-based acceptance criterion is employed to ensure the diversity of the population and help the algorithm to escape from being trapped in local optima; a competitive mechanism is developed to emphasize exploitation capacity by searching around the most promising solution space. The computational experiments demonstrate that the proposed IMBO obtains competing performance and it outperforms seven other implemented algorithms in the comparative study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]