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Huaiyu Duan,1,* Li Li,2,* Shiming He1 1School of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, Anhui University of Chinese Medicine, Hefei, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Hepatobiliary Pancreatic Oncology, Hefei Cancer Hospital, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Shiming He, Email hesm@ahtcm.edu.cnAbstract: Pancreatic cancer is a highly malignant and incurable disease, characterized by its aggressive nature and high fatality rate. The most common type is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), which has poor prognosis and high mortality rate. Current treatments for pancreatic cancer mainly encompass surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, targeted therapy, and combination regimens. However, despite efforts to improve prognosis, and the 5-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer remains very low. Therefore, it’s urgent to explore novel therapeutic approaches. With the rapid development of therapeutic strategies in recent years, new ideas have been provided for treating pancreatic cancer. This review expositions the advancements in nano drug delivery system, molecular targeted drugs, and photo-thermal treatment combined with nanotechnology for pancreatic cancer. It comprehensively analyzes the prospects of combined drug delivery strategies for treating pancreatic cancer, aiming at a deeper understanding of the existing drugs and therapeutic approaches, promoting the development of new therapeutic drugs, and attempting to enhance the therapeutic effect for patients with this disease.Keywords: pancreatic cancer, nano drug delivery system, molecular targeted drugs, photo-thermal treatment

In skull base surgery, zygomaticectomy is an effective method to increase surgical exposure and reduce brain retraction. However, the traditional zygomaticectomy methods are complicated and more invasive.To improve the procedure of zygomaticectomy, we introduced a modified technique to harvest integrated zygomatic arch-temporal bone flap.A modified technique to section the zygomatic arch integrated with the temporal bone flap was described in the present work. This technique was applied in eight skull base lesion patients. The improved surgical angle was measured using Osirix software.The surgical exposure is satisfied and no temporal lobe contusion or severe complications occurred in the patients. An increased surgical angle was obtained by zygomatic arch removing, with a mean value of 13.31°.This integrated zygomatic arch-temporal bone flap technique achieved increased exposure, decreased temporal lobe retraction, and minimal bone loss, leading to better cosmetics and functional reconstructions.

Inclination and horizontal wells are commonly used to develop petroleum and natural gas reservoirs. Cuttings bed buildup is inevitable in an eccentric annulus because of the high inclination angle ...

Accurately predicting pressure gradient with inner pipe rotation in concentric or eccentric annuli can provide a theoretical foundation to evaluate equivalent mud weight for avoiding downhole probl...

Yak milk, a high-quality milk, is one of the best raw materials for dairy products and economically important to pastoral herdsmen. To make a further understanding of the molecular differences in mammary tissues of the yaks with different milk production during lactation, in this study, we took the use of RNA-seq to perform high-throughput sequencing and analysis of the mammary gland transcriptomes of both high-yielding yak and low-yielding yaks during lactation. By the comparison and analysis of the transcriptome data for the mammary gland tissue of high-yielding yak and low-yield yak, 144 differential genes were screened out, of which 49 were upregulated and 95 were downregulated. Further functional analysis indicated that these differential genes involved in multiple classes based on Gene Ontology (GO) and multiple Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways. The GO analysis showed that the functions of the differential genes are closely related to the carbohydrate metabolism and other biological processes. KEGG pathway analysis revealed that these genes are mostly enriched in the pathway of antigen processing and presentation, phagosome pathway and type I diabetes pathway and enriched followed by extracellular matrix receptor interaction pathway. Moreover, several other pathways related to amino acid metabolism also showed significant enrichment. Here, the mammary gland transcriptomes of high-yielding yak and low-yielding yaks during lactation have for the first time been compared, and the related differential genes have been screened out and analyzed. Our study paves a way for the further elucidation of the basic molecular mechanism of yak mammary gland tissue, and at the same time provides new ideas for improving the milk production of yaks.

Zhengqing Bao,1–3,* Yonghao Zhan,1–4,* Shiming He,1–3 Yifan Li,1–3 Bao Guan,1–3 Qun He,1–3 Xinyu Yang,1–3 Xuesong Li,1–3 Dong Fang,1–3,5Liqun Zhou1–3 1Department of Urology, Peking University First Hospital, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 2Institute of Urology, Peking University, National Urological Cancer Centre, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 3Beijing Key Laboratory of Urogenital Diseases (Male), Molecular Diagnosis and Treatment Center, Beijing, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Urology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan 450003, People’s Republic of China; 5Andrology Center, Peking University First Hospital, Beijing 100034, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Dong Fang; Liqun ZhouDepartment of Urology, Peking University First Hospital, No. 8 Xishiku St, Xicheng District, Beijing 100034, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86-10-83575006Fax +86-10-66551726Email fdmailbox@126.com; zhoulqmail@sina.comBackground: The transcription factor SRY-related HMG-box 2 (SOX2) plays important regulatory roles in diverse biological processes (cell proliferation, migration, invasion and tumorigenicity). However, the relationship between SOX2 and upper tract urothelial carcinoma (UTUC) have not been intensively investigated. This study aims to analyze the expression of SOX2 in UTUC as well as the predictive value for prognosis and the effect on tumor aggressiveness of SOX2.Methods: Formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded blocks containing samples from 341 patients with UTUC who underwent radical nephroureterectomy (RNU) at our institute were analyzed for SOX2 expression by immunohistochemistry (IHC). Associations between the SOX2 expression level and clinicopathological characteristics, disease-free survival (DFS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) were analyzed. SOX2 expression in a normal urothelial cell line, urothelial carcinoma cell lines, 16 UTUC tissues and their pair-matched adjacent normal tissues was evaluated by RT-qPCR. Using RNA interference in vitro, the effects of SOX2 inhibition on cell proliferation, migration, invasion and tumorigenicity were determined.Results: SOX2 expression was significantly upregulated in UTUC tissue samples compared with paired-adjacent nontumorous tissue samples. SOX2 expression was correlated with important clinicopathological features, including tumor stage, tumor grade, tumor architecture and the presence of glandular or sarcoma differentiation, and was an independent predictor of poor DFS and CSS. Further experiments indicated that SOX2 expression was higher in UTUC cell lines than in a normal urothelial cell line. Knocking down SOX2 expression could inhibit malignant phenotypes (cell proliferation, stemness, migration, invasion and tumorigenicity) in UTUC cells.Conclusion: SOX2 is an independent prognostic marker of poor DFS and CSS in UTUC patients who have undergone RNU. Moreover, these data suggest that SOX2 may be a promising therapeutic target in UTUC.Keywords: SRY-related HMG-box 2, upper tract urothelial carcinoma, biomarker, prognosis, stemness

Opportunistic routing (OR) has been proposed to improve the performance of wireless networks by exploiting the multi-user diversity and broadcast nature of the wireless medium. It involves multiple candidate forwarders to relay packets every hop. The existing OR doesn’t take account of the traffic load and load balance, therefore some nodes may be overloaded while the others may not, leading to network performance decline. In this paper, we focus on opportunities routing selection with node load balance which is described as a convex optimization problem. To solve the problem, by combining primal-dual and sub-gradient methods, a fully distributed Node load balance Multi-flow Opportunistic Routing algorithm (NMOR) is proposed. With node load balance constraint, NMOR allocates the flow rate iteratively and the rate allocation decides the candidate forwarder selection of opportunities routing. The simulation results show that NMOR algorithm improves 100 %, 62 % of the aggregative throughput than ETX and EAX, respectively.

Horizontal wells are increasingly being utilized in the exploration and development of oil and gas resources. However, the high temperature that occurs during drilling processes leads to a number of problems, such as the deterioration of drilling fluid properties and borehole instability. Therefore, the insight into heat transfer behaviors in horizontal wells is certainly advantageous. This study presents an integrated numerical model for predicting the temperature distribution during horizontal wells drilling considering the effects of drill pipe rotations, and hydraulic (i.e., circulating pressure losses) and mechanical frictions. A full implicit finite difference method was applied to solve this model. The results revealed that the mechanical frictions affect more on wellbore temperature variation than the effects of heat transfer intensification and circulating pressure losses, Moreover, the drilling fluid temperature was found higher than the stratum temperature at horizontal section, the temperature difference at the bottom hole reached up to 16 &deg, C if pressure drops, heat transfer strengthened by rotations and mechanical frictions were all taken into account. This research could be utilized as a theoretical reference for predicting temperature distributions and estimating risks in horizontal wells drilling.

Cooperative communication has attracted many research interests in recent years because it can take advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless communications and spatial diversity to improve the network performance. Although relay nodes in cooperative communications can help improve the performance, relay nodes may cause the serious competition on wireless channel accessing, which makes the channel access problem in cooperative communications challenging. To solve this problem, based on cooperative triple busy tone multiple access, this paper proposes a media access control scheme that concurrently combines the request to send/clear to send and busy tone with a proper tone duration timer. In the scheme, three busy tones are proposed to coordinate the nodes in the network to transmit packets, which is further utilised to solve the hidden terminal and exposed terminal problems in cooperative communications. Among the three busy tones, the cooperative busy tone is set according to the relay's signal-to-noise ratio. Based on the busy tone, this paper also proposes a bandwidth efficient relay selection algorithm, in which the source node can select the best relay in a distributed way by monitoring the busy tone. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can largely reduce the blocking time and improve the channel utilisation in wireless cooperative networks. Copyright (c) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., The work is supported by the National Key Technology R&D Program of China under grant no. 2012BAD35B06, the open Foundation of State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology (Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications) under grant no. SKLNST-2013-1-04, the Prospective Research Project on Future Networks (Jiangsu Future Networks Innovation Institute) under grant no. BY2013095-4-06, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant nos. 6113305, 61173167 and 61103182, the Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation (No. 142006), and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2100219043).

Opportunistic routing (OR) involves multiple forwarding candidates to relay packets by taking advantage of the broadcast nature and multi-user diversity of the wireless medium. Compared with Traditional Routing (TR), OR is more suitable for the unreliable wireless link, and can evidently improve the end to end throughput of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs). At present, there are many achievements concerning OR in the single radio wireless network. However, the study of OR in multi radio wireless network stays the beginning stage. In this paper, we focus on OR in multi-radio multi-channel WMNs. We validate the advantage of OR in multi-radio multi-channel WMNs, and propose a Simple Channel Assignment for Opportunistic Routing (SCAOR), which assigns channel to flows. According to interference state of every node, SCAOR assigns a channel with minimum interference to each flow to balance channel load. The simulation result shows OR of dual-radio dual-channel WMNs can promote throughput evidently, specifically, 16.8% higher than throughput of TR in the dual-radio dual-channel WMNs, 87.11% and 111.8% higher than throughput of OR and TR in single-radio single-channel, respectively.