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Purpose: To explore new treatment options for bladder cancer (BC) based on topiramate (TPM).Methods: The MTT assay and flow cytometry were used to determine the effect of topiramate on partial growth-related malignant phenotype of BC cells. Expression levels of apoptosis-related biomarkers and signaling pathway-related factors were analyzed using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) and Western blotting. In vivo experiments were conducted to investigate the role of TPM on tumor growth in mice with bladder cancer.Results: The MTT results showed that topiramate blocked the growth of BC cells (p < 0.05). Growth inhibition was positively correlated with TPM concentration. Flow cytometry results revealed that bladder cancer cell apoptosis rose with increase in TPM concentration, while the mRNAs of apoptosisassociated factors Bcl-2 and Mcl-1 were down-regulated in a concentration-based manner by TPM (p < 0.05). Western blot assay indicated that Bax and Caspase-3 proteins were up-regulated, and the higher the concentration of TPM, the more significant the protein expression levels (p < 0.05).Conclusion: Topiramate (TPM) slows down the rate of growth of BC cells and accelerates their rate of apoptosis through the regulation of P13K/AKT/mTOR signaling pathway. Thus, the compound has potentials for development as an anti-bladder cancer agent.

Background Thulium laser (Tm:YAG) prostate surgery is a safe and effective procedure with low morbidity and comparable clinical outcomes to those of transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP). However, the sexual function outcomes (erectile and ejaculatory function) have been scarcely studied. Aim We aimed to assess the impact of Tm:YAG prostate surgery on sexual outcomes (erectile and ejaculatory function) and compare them with those patients undergoing TURP. Material and Methods We searched digital databases like PUBMED, SCOPUS, CENTRAL and EMBASE using relevant keywords to identify comparative studies on TURP and non-comparative studies on Tm:YAG prostate surgery that assessed sexual outcomes. We performed qualitative and quantitative analyses with the extracted data. We carried out a meta-analysis to compare postoperative International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF-5) scores and incidences of retrograde ejaculation (RE) in patients undergoing either Tm:YAG or TURP. The pre-operative and post-operative IIEF-5 scores were pooled to estimate overall scores. Results We included 5 comparative and 8 non-comparative studies in this review. We found the postoperative IIEF-5 score improvements to be significantly higher in the Tm:YAG prostate surgery group than in the TURP group with a significant mean difference (MD) of 0.45 (95% CI, 0.18 to 0.72; P = .001). We found no significant associations between the procedures. The pooled OR for the association of RE was estimated at 0.90 (95% CI, 0.50 to 1.60; P = .71; I2 = 0%). Conclusion Tm:YAG prostate surgery improves erectile function more than TURP, according to our findings. Tm:YAG prostate aided surgery also outperforms TURP in terms of preserving sexual function following surgery.However, We found similar or no difference in incidence of RE between Tm:YAG prostate surgery and TURP.

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion label for each utterance. Motivated by recent studies which have proven that feeding training examples in a meaningful order rather than considering them randomly can boost the performance of models, we propose an ERC-oriented hybrid curriculum learning framework. Our framework consists of two curricula: (1) conversation-level curriculum (CC); and (2) utterance-level curriculum (UC). In CC, we construct a difficulty measurer based on "emotion shift" frequency within a conversation, then the conversations are scheduled in an "easy to hard" schema according to the difficulty score returned by the difficulty measurer. For UC, it is implemented from an emotion-similarity perspective, which progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the confusing emotions. With the proposed model-agnostic hybrid curriculum learning strategy, we observe significant performance boosts over a wide range of existing ERC models and we are able to achieve new state-of-the-art results on four public ERC datasets., Accepted by AAAI-2022

Introduction There have been problems with low qualification operator-related complications and failures of transurethral seminal vesiculoscopy (TSV) in China. Aim To study the guiding role of seminal tract anatomical study (STAS) in TSV. Material and methods We performed STAS to study the structure, morphology, duct trajectory, and anatomical relationships between the seminal vesicles and the adjacent tissue in pelvic specimens from 12 adult cadavers. Then the surgical effects and complications of 82 cases of TSV performed by 3 doctors were retrospectively studied to compare the difference between the two groups of before and after the anatomical study. Results The anatomical studies of the 12 adult cadaveric pelvis specimens identified the lengths and widths of the right- and left-side seminal vesicles and tracts. The TSV can treat lesions located in the distal seminal tract and vesicle, but proximal lesions cannot be reached, which is an anatomical limitation of this technique. There were significant differences in the surgical times and the surgical validity rates between the 2 groups. Conclusions Our anatomical study of the seminal tract and seminal vesicles is valuable for guiding TSV in clinical practice.

Background This study aimed to determine whether the enhancer of the rudimentary homolog (ERH) gene regulates cell migration and invasion in human bladder urothelial carcinoma (BUC) T24 cells and the underlying mechanism. Methods First, we knocked down ERH in BUC T24 and 5637 cells by shRNA and then used wound healing cell scratch migration assays, transwell cell migration assays, transwell cell invasion chamber experiments and nude mouse tail vein transfer assays to determine the migration and invasion ability after ERH was knocked down. Moreover, we used gene expression profiling chip analysis and further functional experiments to explore the possible mechanism through which ERH knockdown downregulated metastasis ability in T24 cells. Results Wound healing cell scratch migration assays, transwell cell migration assays, transwell cell invasion chamber experiments and nude mouse tail vein transfer assays all showed that the metastasis ability was significantly inhibited in human BUC T24 and 5637 cells with ERH knockdown. A gene expression profiling chip analysis in T24 cells showed that the MYC gene may be an important downstream target of the ERH gene, and the functional experiments showed that MYC is a functional target of ERH in BUC T24 cells. Conclusion ERH knockdown could inhibit the metastasis of BUC T24 cells in vitro and in vivo. This study further explored the mechanism of the ERH gene in the metastasis of the T24 human bladder cancer cell line and found that ERH may regulate MYC gene expression. The results of this research provide a basis for the clinical application of ERH as a potential target for BUC treatment. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12885-019-5423-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Recognizing the emotional state of people is a basic but challenging task in video understanding. In this paper, we propose a new task in this field, named Pairwise Emotional Relationship Recognition (PERR). This task aims to recognize the emotional relationship between the two interactive characters in a given video clip. It is different from the traditional emotion and social relation recognition task. Varieties of information, consisting of character appearance, behaviors, facial emotions, dialogues, background music as well as subtitles contribute differently to the final results, which makes the task more challenging but meaningful in developing more advanced multi-modal models. To facilitate the task, we develop a new dataset called Emotional RelAtionship of inTeractiOn (ERATO) based on dramas and movies. ERATO is a large-scale multi-modal dataset for PERR task, which has 31,182 video clips, lasting about 203 video hours. Different from the existing datasets, ERATO contains interaction-centric videos with multi-shots, varied video length, and multiple modalities including visual, audio and text. As a minor contribution, we propose a baseline model composed of Synchronous Modal-Temporal Attention (SMTA) unit to fuse the multi-modal information for the PERR task. In contrast to other prevailing attention mechanisms, our proposed SMTA can steadily improve the performance by about 1\%. We expect the ERATO as well as our proposed SMTA to open up a new way for PERR task in video understanding and further improve the research of multi-modal fusion methodology.

Guaranteed-Delivery (GD) is one of the important display strategies for the IP videos in video service platform. Different from the traditional recommendation strategy, GD requires the delivery system to guarantee the exposure amount (also called impressions in some works) for the content, where the amount generally comes from the purchase contract or business consideration of the platform. In this paper, we study the problem of how to maximize certain gains, such as video view (VV) or fairness of different contents (CTR variations between contents) under the GD constraints. We formulate such a problem as a constrained nonlinear programming problem, in which the objectives are to maximize the total VVs of contents and the exposure fairness between contents. In order to capture the trends of VV versus the impression number (page views, PV) for each video content, we propose a parameterized ordinary differential equation (ODE) model, and the parameters of the ODE are fitted by the video historical PV and CLICK datas. To solve the constrained nonlinear programming, we use genetic algorithm (GA) with a specific design of coding scheme considering the ODE constraints. The empirical study based on real-world data and online test on Youku.com verifies the effectiveness and superiority of our approach compared with the state of the art in the industry practice.

Facing fast changing and more diversified customers, specific customer oriented industries' executives should continuously make customer oriented strategic transformation decisions faster than competitors to obtain sustained growth. However, due to higher transformation cost per facility, increased frequency of transformation efforts, and greater complexity associated with rolling out quickly across large diverse facility networks, enterprises invest heavily yet often fail to deliver the required impacts. Executives in these industries are eager to have a quantitative method and tool to help them derive more scientific strategic transformation suggestions. In this paper, we describe a general analytics and optimization solution designed to provide strategic analysis services for those specific industries to adapt to the fast changing needs. The data model design is elaborated for efficient communication and quick solution development, and an implementation case study on intelligent facility network analytics and optimization services design in retailing industry is finally presented to illustrate how the proposed data model improves the flexibility of solutions across industries.