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This study aimed to examine the effect of venetoclax coupled with azacytidine in treating older adults with relapsed and refractory (R/R) acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The clinical data of 10 senior patients with AML over 65 years old who were treated with venetoclax and azacytidine, including six patients with R/R AML, were retrospectively evaluated. This study comprised seven males and three females with a median age of 71 years. Five patients had at least one relapse, and one patient did not achieve remission after four cycles of azacytidine monotherapy, considering it resistant. AML with myelodysplasia-related changes was found in four cases. One of the 10 patients died early after 1-13 cycles of venetoclax plus azacytidine treatment due to a protracted period of neutropenia and severe lung infection induced by medications. Six of the remaining nine patients, including six R/R patients, achieved a complete remission (CR) or a CR with incomplete hematologic recovery (CRi). After two cycles of therapy, one patient did not react. Neutropenia lasted an average of 10.5 (6-15) days in all patients, with the most severe cases occurring in the second and third weeks of therapy. Three patients who tested positive for the TP53 gene mutation had the following outcomes: One relapsed patient has been in progression-free remission (PFS) for the past 24 months, whereas another has been in full remission but relapsed 2 months later. Another patient experienced complete remission in myelology for 4 months, but the variable allele fraction (VAF) value steadily rose, suggesting that the illness was on the verge of progressing. IDH2 gene alterations were found in three of four patients who obtained maintained CR for more than 18 months following recurrence. Venetoclax in combination with azacytidine is a successful and well-tolerated therapy for R/R AML in the elderly. Venetoclax and azacytidine may help patients with TP53 mutations and reduce VAF. The IDH2 mutation might be a good predictor of veneclax sensitivity. A notable adverse response in the treatment phase of the regimen is severe infection induced by neutropenia.

Accurately localizing and identifying vertebrae from CT images is crucial for various clinical applications. However, most existing efforts are performed on 3D with cropping patch operation, suffering from the large computation costs and limited global information. In this paper, we propose a multi-view vertebra localization and identification from CT images, converting the 3D problem into a 2D localization and identification task on different views. Without the limitation of the 3D cropped patch, our method can learn the multi-view global information naturally. Moreover, to better capture the anatomical structure information from different view perspectives, a multi-view contrastive learning strategy is developed to pre-train the backbone. Additionally, we further propose a Sequence Loss to maintain the sequential structure embedded along the vertebrae. Evaluation results demonstrate that, with only two 2D networks, our method can localize and identify vertebrae in CT images accurately, and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods consistently. Our code is available at https://github.com/ShanghaiTech-IMPACT/Multi-View-Vertebra-Localization-and-Identification-from-CT-Images., Comment: MICCAI 2023

The ability to reversibly toggle between two distinct states in a non-volatile method is important for information storage applications. Such devices have been realized for phase-change materials, which utilizes local heating methods to toggle between a crystalline and an amorphous state with distinct electrical properties. To expand such kind of switching between two topologically distinct phases requires non-volatile switching between two crystalline phases with distinct symmetries. Here we report the observation of reversible and non-volatile switching between two stable and closely-related crystal structures with remarkably distinct electronic structures in the near room temperature van der Waals ferromagnet Fe$_{5-\delta}$GeTe$_2$. From a combination of characterization techniques we show that the switching is enabled by the ordering and disordering of an Fe site vacancy that results in distinct crystalline symmetries of the two phases that can be controlled by a thermal annealing and quenching method. Furthermore, from symmetry analysis as well as first principle calculations, we provide understanding of the key distinction in the observed electronic structures of the two phases: topological nodal lines compatible with the preserved global inversion symmetry in the site-disordered phase, and flat bands resulting from quantum destructive interference on a bipartite crystaline lattice formed by the presence of the site order as well as the lifting of the topological degeneracy due to the broken inversion symmetry in the site-ordered phase. Our work not only reveals a rich variety of quantum phases emergent in the metallic van der Waals ferromagnets due to the presence of site ordering, but also demonstrates the potential of these highly tunable two-dimensional magnets for memory and spintronics applications.

Magnetism in two-dimensional (2D) materials has attracted considerable attention recently for both fundamental understanding of magnetism and their tunability towards device applications. The isostructural Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$ and Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ are two members of the Fe-based van der Waals (vdW) ferromagnet family, but exhibit very different Curie temperatures (T$_C$) of 210 K and 360 K, respectively. Here, by using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy and density functional theory, we systematically compare the electronic structures of the two compounds. Qualitative similarities in the Fermi surface can be found between the two compounds, with expanded hole pockets in Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ suggesting additional hole carriers compared to Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$. Interestingly, we observe no band shift in Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ across its T$_C$ of 360 K, compared to a small shift in Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$ across its T$_C$ of 210 K. The weak temperature-dependent evolution strongly deviates from the expectations of an itinerant Stoner mechanism. Our results suggest that itinerant electrons have minimal contributions to the enhancement of T$_C$ in Fe$_3$GaTe$_2$ compared to Fe$_3$GeTe$_2$, and that the nature of ferromagnetism in these Fe-based vdW ferromagnets must be understood with considerations of the electron correlations.

Qini curves have emerged as an attractive and popular approach for evaluating the benefit of data-driven targeting rules for treatment allocation. We propose a generalization of the Qini curve to multiple costly treatment arms, that quantifies the value of optimally selecting among both units and treatment arms at different budget levels. We develop an efficient algorithm for computing these curves and propose bootstrap-based confidence intervals that are exact in large samples for any point on the curve. These confidence intervals can be used to conduct hypothesis tests comparing the value of treatment targeting using an optimal combination of arms with using just a subset of arms, or with a non-targeting assignment rule ignoring covariates, at different budget levels. We demonstrate the statistical performance in a simulation experiment and an application to treatment targeting for election turnout.

For Ch\^atelet surfaces defined over number fields, we study two arithmetic properties, the Hasse principle and weak approximation, when passing to an extension of the base field. Generalizing a construction of Y. Liang, we show that for an arbitrary extension of number fields $L/K,$ there is a Ch\^atelet surface over $K$ which does not satisfy weak approximation over any intermediate field of $L/K,$ and a Ch\^atelet surface over $K$ which satisfies the Hasse principle over an intermediate field $L'$ if and only if $[L' : K]$ is even., Comment: This is a part of our paper "Ch\^atelet surfaces and non-invariance of the Brauer-Manin obstruction for $3$-folds" arXiv:2010.04919. It is interesting for us, but the editor of journal think there are too technical. So we reorganize it

Humans learn language via multi-modal knowledge. However, due to the text-only pre-training scheme, most existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) are hindered from the multi-modal information. To inject visual knowledge into PLMs, existing methods incorporate either the text or image encoder of vision-language models (VLMs) to encode the visual information and update all the original parameters of PLMs for knowledge fusion. In this paper, we propose a new plug-and-play module, X-adapter, to flexibly leverage the aligned visual and textual knowledge learned in pre-trained VLMs and efficiently inject them into PLMs. Specifically, we insert X-adapters into PLMs, and only the added parameters are updated during adaptation. To fully exploit the potential in VLMs, X-adapters consist of two sub-modules, V-expert and T-expert, to fuse VLMs' image and text representations, respectively. We can opt for activating different sub-modules depending on the downstream tasks. Experimental results show that our method can significantly improve the performance on object-color reasoning and natural language understanding (NLU) tasks compared with PLM baselines.

A Gram-negative, aerobic, rod-shaped, motile bacterium with multi-flagella, strain RST, was isolated from bacterial wilt of tobacco in Yuxi city of Yunnan province, China. The strain contains the major fatty acids of C16:0, summed feature 3 (C16:1ω7c and/or C16:1ω6c), and summed feature 8 (C18:1ω7c and/or C18:1ω6c). The polar lipid profile of strain RST consists of diphosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylglycerol, phosphatidylethanolamine, and unidentified aminophospholipid. Strain RST contains ubiquinones Q-7 and Q-8. 16S rRNA gene sequence (1,407 bp) analysis showed that strain RST is closely related to members of the genus Ralstonia and shares the highest sequence identities with R. pseudosolanacearum LMG 9673T (99.50%), R. syzygii subsp. indonesiensis LMG 27703T (99.50%), R. solanacearum LMG 2299T (99.28%), and R. syzygii subsp. celebesensis LMG 27706T (99.21%). The 16S rRNA gene sequence identities between strain RST and other members of the genus Ralstonia were below 98.00%. Genome sequencing yielded a genome size of 5.61 Mbp and a G + C content of 67.1 mol%. The genomic comparison showed average nucleotide identity (ANIb) values between strain RST and R. pseudosolanacearum LMG 9673T, R. solanacearum LMG 2299T, and R. syzygii subsp. indonesiensis UQRS 627T of 95.23, 89.43, and 91.41%, respectively, and the corresponding digital DNA–DNA hybridization (dDDH) values (yielded by formula 2) were 66.20, 44.80, and 47.50%, respectively. In addition, strains belonging to R. solanacearum phylotype I shared both ANIb and dDDH with strain RST above the species cut-off values of 96 and 70%, respectively. The ANIb and dDDH values between the genome sequences from 12 strains of R. solanacearum phylotype III (Current R. pseudosolanacearum) and those of strain RST were below the species cut-off values. Based on these data, we concluded that strains of phylotype I, including RST, represent a novel species of the genus Ralstonia, for which the name Ralstonia nicotianae sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain of Ralstonia nicotianae sp. nov. is RST (=GDMCC 1.3533T = JCM 35814T).

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Software trustworthiness measurement can provide evidence for increasing the trustworthiness of the design and implementation of software. We once studied the application of axiomatic approaches in software trustworthiness measurement, presented seven desirable properties of software trustworthiness measure based on attributes, and established three measures. However, none of the three measures can fully satisfy these seven properties. In this paper, we propose an improved software trustworthiness measure based on a partition which satisfies all of the seven properties. Meanwhile, we conduct an empirical validation of this measure by a real case. Comparative study shows that this measure is better than the three measures we once built. &nbsp

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is an exceptional public health crisis that demands the timely creation of new therapeutics and viral detection. Owing to their high specificity and reliability, monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have emerged as powerful tools to treat and detect numerous diseases. Hence, many researchers have begun to urgently develop Ab-based kits for the detection of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Ab drugs for use as COVID-19 therapeutic agents. The detailed structure of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is known, and since this protein is key for viral infection, its receptor-binding domain (RBD) has become a major target for therapeutic Ab development. Because SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus with a high mutation rate, especially under the selective pressure of aggressively deployed prophylactic vaccines and neutralizing Abs, the use of Ab cocktails is expected to be an important strategy for effective COVID-19 treatment. Moreover, SARS-CoV-2 infection may stimulate an overactive immune response, resulting in a cytokine storm that drives severe disease progression. Abs to combat cytokine storms have also been under intense development as treatments for COVID-19. In addition to their use as drugs, Abs are currently being utilized in SARS-CoV-2 detection tests, including antigen and immunoglobulin tests. Such Ab-based detection tests are crucial surveillance tools that can be used to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Herein, we highlight some key points regarding mAb-based detection tests and treatments for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in tabular data synthesis, under the presumption of direct accessible training data. Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) is a paradigm which allows to distributedly train machine learning model with clients possessing unique features pertaining to the same individuals, where the tabular data learning is the primary use case. However, it is unknown if tabular GANs can be learned in VFL. Demand for secure data transfer among clients and GAN during training and data synthesizing poses extra challenge. Conditional vector for tabular GANs is a valuable tool to control specific features of generated data. But it contains sensitive information from real data - risking privacy guarantees. In this paper, we propose GTV, a VFL framework for tabular GANs, whose key components are generator, discriminator and the conditional vector. GTV proposes an unique distributed training architecture for generator and discriminator to access training data in a privacy-preserving manner. To accommodate conditional vector into training without privacy leakage, GTV designs a mechanism training-with-shuffling to ensure that no party can reconstruct training data with conditional vector. We evaluate the effectiveness of GTV in terms of synthetic data quality, and overall training scalability. Results show that GTV can consistently generate high-fidelity synthetic tabular data of comparable quality to that generated by centralized GAN algorithm. The difference on machine learning utility can be as low as to 2.7%, even under extremely imbalanced data distributions across clients and different number of clients.

BackgroundWhether Triglyceride-glucose (TyG) index is associated with 10-year risk of a first hard atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) event in the United States remains unclear.MethodsIn this cross-sectional study, the participants, ranged from 40 to 79 years old, were from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1999 and 2018. TyG index was the independent variable and 10-year risk of a first hard ASCVD was the dependent variable. The other variables, such as age, gender, race, body mass index (BMI), hypertension treatment states, smoking states and low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) et al. were considered as the potential confounding factors. Multivariate linear regression models and smooth curve fittings were used to evaluate the association between TyG index and 10-year risk of a first hard ASCVD event.ResultsA total of 2,142 participants were included in the analysis. The results showed that TyG index was associated with an increased 10-year risk of a first hard ASCVD event [β = 2.208, 95% (1.716, 2.700), P < 0.00001]. The association had statistical significance in both men [β = 3.862 95% CI (3.274, 4.450), P < 0.00001] and women [β = 1.067, 95% CI (0.286, 1.849), P = 0.00756)] according to subgroup analysis. Smooth curve fittings revealed that TyG index was linearly associated with 10-year risk of ASCVD in both male and female.ConclusionTriglyceride-glucose index was associated with an increased 10-year risk of a first hard ASCVD event in the United States, suggesting it is necessary to monitor and control an appropriate range of TyG index.

Compared to news and chat summarization, the development of meeting summarization is hugely decelerated by the limited data. To this end, we introduce a versatile Chinese meeting summarization dataset, dubbed VCSum, consisting of 239 real-life meetings, with a total duration of over 230 hours. We claim our dataset is versatile because we provide the annotations of topic segmentation, headlines, segmentation summaries, overall meeting summaries, and salient sentences for each meeting transcript. As such, the dataset can adapt to various summarization tasks or methods, including segmentation-based summarization, multi-granularity summarization and retrieval-then-generate summarization. Our analysis confirms the effectiveness and robustness of VCSum. We also provide a set of benchmark models regarding different downstream summarization tasks on VCSum to facilitate further research. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/hahahawu/VCSum., Comment: Findings of ACL 2023 (long paper). GitHub: https://github.com/hahahawu/VCSum

Additional file 1: Fig. S1 Neutralization activity of B-S2-mAbs against pseudotyped Omicron BA.1. Indicated B-S2-mAbs were assessed at 1 µg/ml in a pseudotyped neutralization assay with Omicron BA.1 variant. Each assay was performed in triplicate.

Ghost imaging in the time domain opens new possibilities to reconstruct an unknown temporal object by correlating the multiple probing temporal intensity patterns with the integrated signal measured after transmission through the temporal object. By using the pre-programmed temporal patterns as the probe, computational temporal ghost imaging (TGI) can reconstruct the fast temporal object with only one slow photodetector and significantly reduce the number of measurement realizations. However, direct implementation of computational TGI requires the use of suitable instrumentation such as, e.g., ultrafast modulators to pre-program temporal patterns at the source wavelength, which are not necessarily available in all wavelength regions, such as mid-infrared region. Here, we experimentally demonstrated MIR computational TGI for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, based on the frequency down-conversion scheme. Instead of directly pre-programming temporal patterns at MIR light, in the frequency down-conversion temporal ghost imaging, the pre-programmed temporal patterns are modulated at 1.5 um light and then the pre-programmed 1.5 um light is interacted with another 1 um continuous-wave light to realize difference-frequency generation (DFG) process in periodically poled lithium niobate crystal. In this way, the pre-programmed temporal patterns can be transferred from 1.5 um light to the generated DFG light source at 3.4 um, and computational TGI could be performed to image a fast temporal object in MIR with a MIR slow detector. With the use of near-infrared optical modulator and wavelength-versatile near-infrared fiber lasers, the concept of frequency down-conversion based ghost imaging unlocks new possibilities to realized computational imaging in the spectral region where preprogrammed modulation is difficult to applied, such as the mid-infrared and THz regions.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-tej-10.1177_20417314231163168 for 3-D tissue-engineered epidermis against human primary keratinocytes apoptosis via relieving mitochondrial oxidative stress in wound healing by Shan He, Han Wu, Junqun Huang, Qingyan Li, Zijie Huang, Huangding Wen and Zhiqing Li in Journal of Tissue Engineering

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-tej-10.1177_20417314231163168 for 3-D tissue-engineered epidermis against human primary keratinocytes apoptosis via relieving mitochondrial oxidative stress in wound healing by Shan He, Han Wu, Junqun Huang, Qingyan Li, Zijie Huang, Huangding Wen and Zhiqing Li in Journal of Tissue Engineering

We systematically study the effects of higher-order interactions on the S = 3/2, 1 orthogonal dimer chains using exact diagonalization and density matrix renormalization group. Due to frustration and higher spin, there are rich quantum phases, including three Haldane phases, two gapless phases and several magnetically ordered phases. To characterize these phases and their phase transitions, we study various physical quantities such as energy gap, energy level crossing, fidelity susceptibility, spin correlation, entanglement spectrum and central charge. According to our calculations, the biquadratic term can enhance the Haldane phase regions. In particular, we numerically identify that a Haldane phase in S = 3/2 case is adiabatically connected to the exact AKLT point when adding bicubic term. Our study on the orthogonal dimer model, which is a 1D version of Shastry-Sutherland model, provides insights into understanding the possible S = 3/2, 1 Haldane phases in quasi-1D and 2D frustrated magnetic materials., Comment: 14 pages, 17 figures

For algebraic stacks over a number field, we define their Brauer-Manin pairings, Brauer-Manin sets, and extend the descent theory, originally developed by Colliot-Th\'el\`ene. By extending Sansuc's exact sequence, we show the torsionness of Brauer groups of stacks that are locally quotients of varieties by connected groups. With mild assumptions, for stacks that are locally quotients or Deligne-Mumford, the Brauer-Manin obstruction coincides with some other cohomological obstructions such as obstructions given by torsors under connected groups or abelian gerbes. For Brauer-Manin sets on these stacks, we show the properties such as descent along a torsor, product preservation are still correct. These results extend classical theories of those on varieties., Comment: 14 pages, sketch version, any comment is welcome (git: 20220302/8dccb3)

Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is the most widely used imaging method in dentistry. As hundreds of X-ray projections are needed to reconstruct a high-quality CBCT image (i.e., the attenuation field) in traditional algorithms, sparse-view CBCT reconstruction has become a main focus to reduce radiation dose. Several attempts have been made to solve it while still suffering from insufficient data or poor generalization ability for novel patients. This paper proposes a novel attenuation field encoder-decoder framework by first encoding the volumetric feature from multi-view X-ray projections, then decoding it into the desired attenuation field. The key insight is when building the volumetric feature, we comply with the multi-view CBCT reconstruction nature and emphasize the view consistency property by geometry-aware spatial feature querying and adaptive feature fusing. Moreover, the prior knowledge information learned from data population guarantees our generalization ability when dealing with sparse view input. Comprehensive evaluations have demonstrated the superiority in terms of reconstruction quality, and the downstream application further validates the feasibility of our method in real-world clinics.

We establish a Weyl-type subconvexity of $L(\tfrac{1}{2},f)$ for spherical Hilbert newforms $f$ with level ideal $\mathfrak{N}^2$, in which $\mathfrak{N}$ is required to be cube-free, and at any prime ideal $\mathfrak{p}$ with $\mathfrak{p}^2 \mid \mathfrak{N}$ the local representation generated by $f$ is not supercuspidal. The proof exploits a distributional version of Motohashi's formula over number fields developed by the first author, as well as Katz's work on hypergeometric sums over finite fields in the language of $\ell$-adic cohomology., Comment: A mistake in the earlier version on the quality of the result is corrected

The combination of transformers and masked image modeling (MIM) pre-training framework has shown great potential in various vision tasks. However, the pre-training computational budget is too heavy and withholds the MIM from becoming a practical training paradigm. This paper presents FastMIM, a simple and generic framework for expediting masked image modeling with the following two steps: (i) pre-training vision backbones with low-resolution input images; and (ii) reconstructing Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature instead of original RGB values of the input images. In addition, we propose FastMIM-P to progressively enlarge the input resolution during pre-training stage to further enhance the transfer results of models with high capacity. We point out that: (i) a wide range of input resolutions in pre-training phase can lead to similar performances in fine-tuning phase and downstream tasks such as detection and segmentation; (ii) the shallow layers of encoder are more important during pre-training and discarding last several layers can speed up the training stage with no harm to fine-tuning performance; (iii) the decoder should match the size of selected network; and (iv) HOG is more stable than RGB values when resolution transfers;. Equipped with FastMIM, all kinds of vision backbones can be pre-trained in an efficient way. For example, we can achieve 83.8%/84.1% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K with ViT-B/Swin-B as backbones. Compared to previous relevant approaches, we can achieve comparable or better top-1 accuracy while accelerate the training procedure by $\sim$5$\times$. Code can be found in https://github.com/ggjy/FastMIM.pytorch., Tech report

Technological advances in the smart home have created new opportunities for supporting well-being and facilitating citizen empowerment but have enabled new types of complex online harms to develop (Sovacool et a., 2021; Lopez-Neira et al., 2019; Chatterjee et al., 2018; Dragiewicz et al, 2018; Tanczer et al., 2018a, 2018b Henry and Powell 2016). Recent statistics have indicated that ‘smart’ technology ownership is increasing yearly, driven by lower costs and increased accessibility (Statista Survey, 2022). Research around smart homes has also developed incrementally, focusing on technology perspectives at the expense of a user-centric approach sensitive to the harms, risks, and vulnerabilities posed by the smart home. What remains unclear is the information available about these complex online harms and their relationship to ‘smart home’ technology. The scoping review protocol reported herein addresses this gap of information by mapping contemporary literature to identify existing gaps in knowledge. It is intended that this preliminary review will provide the foundations for a more detailed systematic review of ‘smart home’ literature and form the basis of future outputs. The objective of this protocol is to systematically map multidisciplinary smart home research, identify knowledge gaps, and explore opportunities for further research. It was designed based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) Statement. The design and methods for this scoping review comply with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) (Tricco et al., 2018). In addition, eligibility criteria were informed using the SPIDER guidelines (Methley et al., 2014).

An ultra-thin dual-band metamaterial absorber (DMMA) worked in S-band and X-band is proposed by this paper. It is polarization-insensitive to the incident wave and has high absorptivity under the wide incident angle. The proposed DMMA is designed based on a square ring (SR) and a double cross pattern (DCP) structure, and the thickness of the DMMA is merely 0.013 $${\lambda }_{\mathrm{min}}$$ . The calculation results indicate that the proposed DMMA has two absorption peaks at the frequency of 3.80 GHz and 8.63 GHz, and all its absorptivity can reach 99.99%, which is close to perfect absorption. The impedance matching is used to explain the absorption principle of the DMMA, and the electromagnetic resonance is used to reveal the absorbing mechanism. Also, the influence of various polarization angles, incident angles, and structure parameters on the absorption performance are discussed. The satisfactory properties of the DMMA can be applied in the fields of communication, meteorology, electromagnetic shielding, and earth satellites.

Purpose: Varicocele is a common problem among infertile men. Varicocele repair (VR) is frequently performed to improve semen parameters and the chances of pregnancy. However, there is a lack of consensus about the diagnosis, indications for VR and its outcomes. The aim of this study was to explore global practice patterns on the management of varicocele in the context of male infertility. Materials and Methods: Sixty practicing urologists/andrologists from 23 countries contributed 382 multiple-choice-questions pertaining to varicocele management. These were condensed into an online questionnaire that was forwarded to clinicians involved in male infertility management through direct invitation. The results were analyzed for disagreement and agreement in practice patterns and, compared with the latest guidelines of international professional societies (American Urological As- sociation [AUA], American Society for Reproductive Medicine [ASRM], and European Association of Urology [EAU]), and with evidence emerging from recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Additionally, an expert opinion on each topic was provided based on the consensus of 16 experts in the field. Results: The questionnaire was answered by 574 clinicians from 59 countries. The majority of respondents were urologists/ uro-andrologists. A wide diversity of opinion was seen in every aspect of varicocele diagnosis, indications for repair, choice of technique, management of sub-clinical varicocele and the role of VR in azoospermia. A significant proportion of the re- sponses were at odds with the recommendations of AUA, ASRM, and EAU. A large number of clinical situations were identi- fied where no guidelines are available. Conclusions: This study is the largest global survey performed to date on the clinical management of varicocele for male in- fertility. It demonstrates: 1) a wide disagreement in the approach to varicocele management, 2) large gaps in the clinical prac- tice guidelines from professional societies, and 3) the need for further studies on several aspects of varicocele management in infertile men.

Hyperuricemia (HC) was one of the important risk factors for gout, arteriosclerosis, and cardiovascular disease. Animal studies have shown that Lactobacillus plantarum can improve the microbiota, immune regulation, and inhibit the uric acid production. However, it was not clear whether L. plantarum can improve HC and intestinal microbiota. We used potassium oxonate (PO) to induce HC in male SD rats, and then treated L. plantarum TCI227 in a dose dependent (HC+LD, HC+MD, HC+HD) for 4 weeks, and examined weight organs, biochemical examination of blood and urine, and analyzed the intestinal microbiota in feces by 16s rDNA sequence analysis. In this study, TCI227 improved body weight, decreased creatinine, serum uric acid, and increased urine uric acid compared to the HC group. Furthermore, TCI227 increased short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). In fecal microbiota (family), TCI227 increased the level of Lactobacillaceae, and then decreased the level of Deferribacteres and Prevotellaceae compared to the HC group. Finally, in fecal microbiota (genus), TCI227 decreased the level of Prevotella, and then increased the level of Lactobacillus and Ruminococcus compared to the HC group. This study suggested that TCI227 can improve HC and change the compositions of the intestinal microbiota in PO induced male HC SD rats.

Black-box adversarial attacks can fool image classifiers into misclassifying images without requiring access to model structure and weights. Recently proposed black-box attacks can achieve a success rate of more than 95% after less than 1,000 queries. The question then arises of whether black-box attacks have become a real threat against IoT devices that rely on cloud APIs to achieve image classification. To shed some light on this, note that prior research has primarily focused on increasing the success rate and reducing the number of required queries. However, another crucial factor for black-box attacks against cloud APIs is the time required to perform the attack. This paper applies black-box attacks directly to cloud APIs rather than to local models, thereby avoiding multiple mistakes made in prior research. Further, we exploit load balancing to enable distributed black-box attacks that can reduce the attack time by a factor of about five for both local search and gradient estimation methods., 10 pages, 11 figures

Head and neck tumours are common malignancies that are associated with high mortality. The low rate of early diagnosis and the high rates of local recurrence and distant metastasis are the main reasons for treatment failure. Recent studies have established that the tumour microenvironment (TME) can affect the proliferation and metastasis of head and neck tumours via several mechanisms, including altered expressions of certain genes and cytokines. Increasing evidence has shown that epigenetic modifications, such as DNA methylation, histone modification, RNA modification, and non-coding RNAs, can regulate the head and neck TME and thereby influence tumour development. Epigenetic modifications can regulate the expression of different genes and subsequently alter the TME to affect the progression of head and neck tumours. In addition, the cell components in the TME are regulated by epigenetic modifications, which, in turn, affect the behaviour of head and neck tumour cells. In this review, we have discussed the functions of epigenetic modifications in the head and neck TME. We have further examined the roles of such modifications in the malignancy and metastasis of head and neck tumours.

Bio-integrated neuromorphic systems promise for new protocols to record and regulate the signaling of biological systems. Making such artificial neural circuits successful requires minimal circuit complexity and ion-based operating mechanisms similar to that of biology. However, simple leaky integrate-and-fire model neurons, commonly realized in either silicon or organic semiconductor neuromorphic systems, can emulate only a few neural features. More functional neuron models, based on traditional complex Si-based complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) or negative differential resistance (NDR) device circuits, are complicated to fabricate, not biocompatible, and lack ion- and chemical-based modulation features. Here we report a biorealistic conductance-based organic electrochemical neuron (c-OECN) using a mixed ion-electron conducting ladder-type polymer with reliable ion-tunable antiambipolarity. The latter is used to emulate the activation/inactivation of Na channels and delayed activation of K channels of biological neurons. These c-OECNs can then spike at bioplausible frequencies nearing 100 Hz, emulate most critical biological neural features, demonstrate stochastic spiking, and enable neurotransmitter and Ca2+-based spiking modulation. These combined features are impossible to achieve using previous technologies.

Objective: Serum magnesium (Mg2+) levels are associated with insulin resistance, hypertension, lipid abnormalities, and inflammation. However, limited studies have indicated the relationship between Mg2+ and multiple system indexes. The purpose of this study was to investigate the association between Mg2+ and allostatic load (AL) in hemodialysis patients.Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted on hemodialysis patients from different centers in Anhui Province, China, between January and December 2020. A total of 3,025 hemodialysis patients were recruited. Their clinical data were measured before hemodialysis. Information was collected by an online self-reported questionnaire and medical record. Serum Mg2+ was divided into three groups by tertiles. A score of AL greater than or equal to 3 was defined as high AL. A binary logistic regression model was applied to examine the relationship between serum Mg2+ and AL.Results: A total of 1,222 patients undergoing hemodialysis were included, 60% of whom were males (733/1,222). The mean (standard deviation) age of patients was 55.90 (12.75). The median level of serum Mg2+ was 1.22 mmol/L. The rate of high AL levels was 23.4%. Serum Mg2+ was negatively correlated with body mass index, fasting blood glucose (Glu), and C-reactive protein and positively correlated with high-density lipoprotein, low-density lipoprotein, total cholesterol, diastolic blood pressure (DBP), and serum phosphorus. After adjusting for gender, anxiety, diabetes, family residence, lipid-lowering agents, antihypertensive medications, albumin, and Glu, the binary logistic regression model showed that patients with lower levels of serum Mg2+ were more likely have high AL (OR for the T1 group of serum Mg2+:1.945, 95% CI: 1.365–2.773, and OR for the T2 group of serum Mg2+:1.556, 95% CI: 1.099–2.201).Conclusion: Our data support the hypothesis that higher serum Mg2+ concentrations may contribute to lower health risk in hemodialysis populations. Further randomized controlled trials and cohort studies are warranted to verify whether Mg2+ supplementation could be part of routine examinations in hemodialysis populations.

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a potentially powerful privacy-preserving machine learning methodology, since it avoids exchanging data between participants, but instead exchanges model parameters. FL has traditionally been applied to image, voice and similar data, but recently it has started to draw attention from domains including financial services where the data is predominantly tabular. However, the work on tabular data has not yet considered potential attacks, in particular attacks using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which have been successfully applied to FL for non-tabular data. This paper is the first to explore leakage of private data in Federated Learning systems that process tabular data. We design a Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)-based attack model which can be deployed on a malicious client to reconstruct data and its properties from other participants. As a side-effect of considering tabular data, we are able to statistically assess the efficacy of the attack (without relying on human observation such as done for FL for images). We implement our attack model in a recently developed generic FL software framework for tabular data processing. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed attack model, thus suggesting that further research is required to counter GAN-based privacy attacks., In the proceedings of The 33rd IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), November 2022

Intelligent robots rely on object detection models to perceive the environment. Following advances in deep learning security it has been revealed that object detection models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, prior research primarily focuses on attacking static images or offline videos. Therefore, it is still unclear if such attacks could jeopardize real-world robotic applications in dynamic environments. This paper bridges this gap by presenting the first real-time online attack against object detection models. We devise three attacks that fabricate bounding boxes for nonexistent objects at desired locations. The attacks achieve a success rate of about 90% within about 20 iterations. The demo video is available at https://youtu.be/zJZ1aNlXsMU., Accepted by IEEE Intelligent Vehicle Symposium, 2023

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are known for their large scale and knowledge inference ability, but are also notorious for the incompleteness associated with them. Due to the long-tail distribution of the relations in KGs, few-shot KG completion has been proposed as a solution to alleviate incompleteness and expand the coverage of KGs. It aims to make predictions for triplets involving novel relations when only a few training triplets are provided as reference. Previous methods have mostly focused on designing local neighbor aggregators to learn entity-level information and/or imposing sequential dependency assumption at the triplet level to learn meta relation information. However, valuable pairwise triplet-level interactions and context-level relational information have been largely overlooked for learning meta representations of few-shot relations. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical relational learning method (HiRe) for few-shot KG completion. By jointly capturing three levels of relational information (entity-level, triplet-level and context-level), HiRe can effectively learn and refine the meta representation of few-shot relations, and consequently generalize very well to new unseen relations. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets validate the superiority of HiRe against other state-of-the-art methods., 10 pages, 5 figures

Lipid metabolism is closely related to the improvement of vascular calcification (VC) in chronic kidney disease (CKD). Globular adiponectin (gAd) has been reported to be involved in the development of VC in CKD, but the detailed regulatory role remains unclear. The present study is aimed to investigate the biological function and the underlying regulation mechanism of gAd in the process of VC during CKD. Vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs) calcification was determined by Alizarin Red S staining. Protein signaling related with VC was tested by western blotting. The expression and intracellular localization of runt-related transcription factor 2 (Runx2) was detected by immunofluorescence and uraemic rat with VC was established by a two-step nephrectomy. Combined with the results of Alizarin Red S staining, we discovered that β-glycerophosphate (β-Gp)-induced the osteoblastic differentiation of VSMCs was significantly reversed by gAd treatment. Along with the VSMCs calcification and the increase of Runx2 in β-Gp-exposed VSMCs, the activities of protein kinase B (AKT) and Wnt/β-catenin pathway were enhanced, but that were counteracted by the exposure of gAd in rat and human VSMCs. After administration with agonists of the Wnt (SKL2001) and AKT (SC79), there appeared more osteoblastic differentiation and higher expression of Runx2 in gAd-treated VSMCs, but showing lower impact in the presence of SC79 than that in the presence of SKL2001. In the in vivo experiments, intravenous injection of gAd also significantly inhibited VC and Runx2 level in uraemic rat in a dose-dependent manner, possibly through regulating Wnt/β-catenin pathway. This study demonstrates that gAd ameliorates osteoblastic differentiation of VSMCs possibly by blocking PI3K/AKT and Wnt/β-catenin signaling transduction. The findings provide an important foundation for gAd in treating VC in kidney diseases. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10735-021-10012-2.

Peng Zhang, Xiu-Wu Han, Xin Zhang, Xu-Hui Zhu, Tao Li, Yan-Sheng Li, Yuan-Hao Chen, Gao Li Department of Urology, Beijing Chao-Yang Hospital, Beijing, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Xiu-Wu HanDepartment of Urology, Beijing Chao-Yang Hospital, Capital Medical University, 5 Jingyuan Road, Shijingshan District, Beijing, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 10-13501356960Email hanxiuwu47859@163.comObjective: The present study aimed to observe and discuss the effectiveness and safety of the UreTron single-probe ultrasonic intracorporeal lithotripter in ureteroscopic lithotripsy.Methods: The clinical data of patients with unilateral solitary ureteral calculi treated with ureteroscopic lithotripsy who were hospitalized at the Department of Urology (West District) of Beijing Chaoyang Hospital between March 2016 and August 2020 were selected for retrospective analysis. The patients were divided into the UreTron group (group U) and holmium laser group (group H) according to the lithotripsy method adopted. The operation duration, length of hospital stay, stone clearance rate, proportion of patients requiring flexible ureteroscopy-assisted lithotripsy, and complications were compared between the groups.Results: There was no statistical difference between the groups in terms of the general characteristics, operation duration, or length of hospital stay (P > 0.05). Regarding the stone clearance rate (group U=93.5%; group H=75%), proportion of patients requiring flexible ureteroscopy-assisted lithotripsy (group U=6.5%; group H=27.8%), and incidence of surgical complications (group U=1 case; group H=9 cases), group U was superior to group H, and the differences between the groups were statistically significant (P < 0.05). However, the differences in other complications (cardiocerebral complications and lower extremity thrombosis) were not statistically significant between the groups (P > 0.05).Conclusion: The UreTron system is a new lithotripsy apparatus that is safe and effective for ureteroscopic lithotripsy and has certain advantages in terms of the stone clearance rate, proportion of patients requiring flexible ureteroscopy-assisted lithotripsy, and surgical complications, making it worthy of clinical application.Keywords: UreTron, holmium laser, ureteral calculi, lithotripsy

BACKGROUND: Bladder surgery has a negative impact on patients’ mental health, sleep quality. Conventional nursing interventions failed to meet the clinical needs. Therefore, this parallel-group RCT was performed to assess the effect of individualized psychological intervention on patients’ negative emotions and sleep quality after bladder cancer surgery. METHODS: Patients with bladder cancer admitted to our hospital (from September 2018 to October 2020) and underwent surgical treatment were selected as the research objects. They were randomly allocated to a parallel control group or observation group based on a computer-generated random numbers table. Because our study included behavioral intervention, blinding was not possible for participants and care givers. The control group received conventional nursing care, and the observation group received strengthened individualized psychological intervention under the nursing measures of the control group. Sleep quality, anxiety, depression, nursing compliance, and the occurrence of bladder spasm were compared between the two groups. RESULTS: Seventy-eight eligible patients were included and randomly divided in two groups (n=39 for each group). The intervention procedure was completed without losses and exclusions of patients after randomization. Before the intervention, the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index Scale and the anxiety and depression scores were comparable between the two groups (P>0.05). After the intervention, the data of the two groups were significantly improved. The sleep quality, sleep time, sleep efficiency, the time to fall asleep, hypnotic drugs, sleep disorders, daytime dysfunction, anxiety score, and depression score of the observation group were lower than those of the control group, with significant differences (P0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Individualized psychological intervention applied to bladder cancer surgery can effectively improve patients’ negative emotions and improve their sleep quality. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR2100046468.

Thanks to the increasing power of CPUs and GPUs in embedded systems, deep-learning-enabled object detection systems have become pervasive in a multitude of robotic applications. While deep learning models are vulnerable to several well-known adversarial attacks, the applicability of these attacks is severely limited by strict assumptions on, for example, access to the detection system. Inspired by Man-in-the-Middle attacks in cryptography, we propose a novel hardware attack on object detection systems that overcomes these limitations. Experiments prove that it is possible to generate an efficient Universal Adversarial Perturbation (UAP) within one minute and then use the perturbation to attack a detection system via the Man-in-the-Middle attack. These findings raise serious concerns for applications of deep learning models in safety-critical systems, such as autonomous driving. Demo Video: https://youtu.be/OvIpe-R3ZS8., 7 pages, 8 figures

We consider a basic joint communication and sensing setup comprising a transmitter, a receiver and a sensor. The transmitter sends a codeword to the receiver through a discrete memoryless channel, and the receiver is interested in retrieving the underlying encoded message. On the other hand, the sensor picks up a noisy version of the transmitted codeword through one of two possible discrete memoryless channels. The sensor knows the codeword and wishes to discriminate between the two possible channels, i.e. to identify the channel that has generated the output given the input. We study the trade-off between communication and sensing in the asymptotic regime, captured in terms of the message coding rate against the two types of discrimination error exponents. We characterize the optimal trade-off between the rate and the exponents for general discrete memoryless channels with an input cost constraint., arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2202.01112

This study aimed to investigate the prevalence and characterization of tet(X4) in Escherichia coli isolates from a pig farm in Shanghai, China, and to elucidate tet(X4) dissemination mechanism in this swine farm. Forty-nine (80.33%) E. coli strains were isolated from 61 samples from a pig farm and were screened for the presence of tet(X). Among them, six (12.24%) strains were positive for tet(X4) and exhibited resistance to tigecycline (MIC ≥ 16 mg/L). They were further sequenced by Illumina Hiseq. Six tet(X4)-positive strains belonged to ST761 with identical resistance genes, resistance profiles, plasmid replicons, and cgMLST type except that additional ColE10 plasmid was present in isolate SH21PTE35. Isolate SH21PTE31, as a representative ST761 E. coli strain, was further sequenced using Nanopore MinION. The tet(X4) in SH21PTE31 was located on IncFIA18/IncFIB(K)/IncX1 hybrid plasmid pYUSHP31-1, highly similar to other tet(X4)-carrying IncFIA18/IncFIB(K)/IncX1 plasmids from ST761 E. coli and other E. coli lineages in China. These IncFIA18/IncFIB(K)/IncX1 plasmids shared closely related multidrug resistance regions, and could reorganize, acquire or lose resistance modules mediated by mobile elements such as ISCR2 and IS26. Phylogenetic analysis were performed including all tet(X4)-positive isolates obtained in this pig farm combined with 43 tet(X4)-positive E. coli from pigs, cow, pork, wastewater, and patients with the same ST from NCBI. The 50 tet(X4)-carrying E. coli ST761 isolates from different areas in China shared a close phylogenetic relationship (0-49 SNPs). In conclusion, clonal transmission of tet(X4)-positive E. coli ST761 has occurred in this swine farm. E. coli ST761 has the potential to become a high-risk clone for tet(X4) dissemination in China.

Multilayer piezoelectric ceramics must be sintered in a reducing atmosphere, preventing oxidation of the inner base metal. Plate-like textured (Ba, Ca)(Ti, Sn, Hf)O3 ceramics with a preferred orientation were successfully developed at a low oxygen partial pressure (PO2:10−8 atm) using a BaTiO3 (BT) template with sintering temperatures