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Xiaohong Xu,1,* Rongping Zhu,1,* Siyan Lian,1 Hui Zhang,2 Xin Chen,2 Lingfang Fan,1 Peisong Chen,2 Yingping Cao1 1Department of Clinical Laboratory, Fujian Medical University Union Hospital, Fuzhou, Fujian, People’s Republic of China; 2Medical Technology and Engineering, Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou, Fujian, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Yingping Cao, Department of Clinical Laboratory, Fujian Medical University Union Hospital, Fuzhou, Fujian, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86-133-6591-0806, Email caoyingping@aliyun.comBackground: The emergence of polymyxin B resistance among carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae (CRKP) causes clinical treatment to be more difficult. We aimed to investigate the risk factors and resistance mechanisms in the polymyxin resistant CRKP (PR-CRKP) strains.Methods: From January 2021 to January 2022, 239 CRKP strains were selected, all of which were analyzed using antimicrobial susceptibility testing and clinical data. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was performed for the detection of resistance genes. RT-qPCR was used to quantify transcriptional levels of polymyxin resistance genes. Risk factors for polymyxin B resistant isolates were identified by logistic regression analysis.Results: The resistance rate of polymyxin B was 5.02%. In all CRKP strains, 41.84% came from the ICU. The percentage of carbapenemase producing strains was 93.72%. The main carbapenem resistance gene was blaKPC (90.79%). In the 12 strains of PR-CRKP screened, pmrB and pmrK were overexpressed in all samples which were linked with polymyxin B resistance. Multivariate analysis showed that coronary heart disease may be an independent risk factor predisposing patients to polymyxin B resistance.Conclusion: We determine the multifaceted mechanism and risk factors of polymyxin B resistance in CRKP. Polymyxin resistance is a complex and changing problem, and more research is required.Keywords: polymyxin B resistance, carbapenem-resistantKlebsiella pneumoniae, risk factors, mechanism

Bin Zhu,1 Junrong Zhang,2 Qingzhu Zheng,1 Binhua Dong,3 Meihua Wang,1 Jin Liu,1 Yingping Cao1 1Department of Clinical Laboratory, Fujian Medical University Union Hospital, Fuzhou, 350001, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Emergency Surgery, Fujian Medical University Union Hospital, Fuzhou, 350001, People’s Republic of China; 3Laboratory of Gynecologic Oncology, Fujian Provincial Maternity and Children’s Hospital, Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou, 350001, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Yingping CaoDepartment of Clinical Laboratory, Fujian Medical University Union Hospital, No. 29, Xinquan Road, Fuzhou City, Fujian Province, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail caoyingping918@sina.comPurpose: The aim of our study was to identify the diagnostic ability of free fatty acids (FFAs) in younger colorectal cancer (CRC) patients by comparing carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA19-9).Methods: Patients screened for CRC at Fujian Medical University Union Hospital from January 2011 to December 2014 were recruited. Patients pathologically diagnosed with CRC or colorectal adenoma (CA) and healthy control participants were included. The enzyme endpoint method was applied to measure FFA levels. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed to further evaluate the diagnostic ability of FFAs.Results: FFA levels in late-stage patients (tumour-node-metastasis (TNM) stages III–IV) were higher than those in early-stage patients (TNM stages I–II) (P=0.02). The FFA levels in CRC patients were higher than those in controls of all ages, those younger than 50 years, males and females (P< 0.001), and this difference was larger for patients younger than 50 years and females than for the all ages group. There was no significant difference in the FFA level between CA patients and healthy participants (P=0.53). The area under the curve (AUC) values of FFA, CEA, CA19-9, FFA+CEA, FFA+CA19-9 and FFA+CEA+CA19-9 distinguished CRC patients from controls at all ages, with values of 0.604, 0.731, 0.640, 0.754, 0.678 and 0.758, respectively; however, in the younger CRC patients (age≤ 50), the AUC values were 0.701, 0.735, 0.669, 0.798, 0.749, and 0.801. The AUC in female patients younger than 50 years was larger than that in males (0.769 vs 0.660), and this value was greater than the value for CEA in males (0.739) and females (0.729).Conclusion: The FFA level not only can complement the predictive ability of the CEA and CA19-9 levels but also has a superior predictive ability in female and younger patients with CRC. FFA levels may have a potential role in triage screening of early CRC.Keywords: free fatty acid, colorectal cancer, colorectal adenoma, sex, younger patients

Video plays a great important role in online apparel sales, which is a vital tool for publicity and to provide consumers with space of imagination. However, as the apparel market rapidly updates in large amounts every day, creating videos for fast increasing clothes can be challenging and labor-consuming. Considering this, we present ApVideor, a music-driven video generation system customized for displaying clothes. This system consists of two main modules: music recommendation module and audio-visual synthesis module. The former assists users in searching background music that matches the apparel style, while the latter combines the audio and visuals into a video by music-driven approaches. Our user study suggests that this system makes the video creation process significantly easier and faster than manual creation. Meanwhile, the viewer test suggests that apparel-displaying videos created using our system are of comparable quality to those created manually by people who have worked with video editing.

BACKGROUND: Mindray’s newly developed BC-7500 CRP auto hematology analyzers can simultaneously measure the routine blood and C-reactive protein (CRP) results, thereby significantly improving the efficiency and quality of clinical examination. This study was designed to evaluate the basic performance of the BC-7500 CRP as well as the performance characteristics of the new measurement mode combines routine blood and CRP. METHODS: Venous whole blood samples with the anticoagulant ethylene diamine tetraacetic acid K2 (EDTA-K2) were collected at the Fujian Medical University Union Hospital according to the guidelines of the American Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) and International Standards Committee for Hematology (ISCH). We analyzed and evaluated the performance of blank counts, carryover contamination rate, precision, comparability, flagging capability, sample stability, and automatic micro-whole blood (MWB) mode analysis in the BC-7500 CRP hematology analyzer. RESULTS: All parameters measured by the BC-7500 CRP showed good blank counts (CRP, 0.008–0.02 mg/L). The carryover contamination rates for each mode combination did not exceed 1%, it indicates a low carryover effect. The CRP showed high precision while the within-laboratory precision is 6.91% and 4.38% in two different levels. Relatively good correlation was found for the routine blood results between the BC-7500 CRP and Sysmex-XN (r=0.99), and CRP result between the BC-7500 CRP and IMMAGE 800 (r=0.99). The sensitivities of abnormal cell flagging for Blast, Immature Gran, and nucleated red blood cell (NRBC) were 93.9%, 91.6%, and 86.7%, while their specificities were 83.9%, 62.7%, and 97.5%. The test results of CRP at room temperature for 24 hours and refrigerated for 48 hours were −0.04% and −2.94%, which showed very stable changes. Also, the automatic micro-whole blood mode performed well (P=0.2014), which was very close to the test results of the automatic mixing test of peripheral blood and the manual mixing of open sampling. CONCLUSIONS: The BC-7500 CRP analyzer provided reliable results on routine blood and CRP, which can meet the testing requirements of routine blood and CRP items in clinical whole blood samples and provide a guarantee for rapid and accurate laboratory diagnosis.

This paper proposes a multi-level multi-energy management framework for the coordinated and interactive operation of heterogeneous multi-microgrids (MMGs) based on many-criteria optimality. With the proposed framework, the highly nonlinear and complex MMG multi-energy management (MMGMEM) problem is formulated into tri-level scheduling subproblems with multi-energy couplings and multi-level interactions, in which the multi-energy trading with energy networks and multi-energy couplings within MGs are optimized in the upper and middle level, and a middle level is added to correct scheduling decisions of the upper level for coordinating the MMG multi-energy sharing. Then, a multi-step matrix decomposition technique is developed to decompose the high dimensional multi-energy coupling matrix of MMGs into the sum of three linear and sparse submatrices for improving the computation efficiency and scalability. Furthermore, a many-criteria decision making (MCDM) model is proposed for the multi-energy sharing problem to achieve an optimum tradeoff in which all microgrids (MGs) can benefit from electricity-gas exchanges, and an evolutionary many-objective optimization based on hyperplane transformation algorithm is used to solve the MCDM problem. Simulation results verify that the proposed framework can achieve a cost saving for each MG (over 19%), and validate its scalability in solving large-scale MMGMEM problems.

This paper proposes a bilevel multi-house energy management (MHEM) framework to coordinate the residential demand response (DR) of heterogeneous households based on many-criteria optimality. In the upper level, the loss of life (LOL) cost of transformers is formulated into the DR cost model, and a stochastic scheduling is implemented to determine the optimum amount of transformer load deferment and curtailment. The lower level aims to optimally allocate the transformer load from the aggregator to individual households, and a many-criteria DR optimality model is proposed to maximize the multi-house benefits from DR while achieving coordination of the DR participation. Furthermore, a hypercube spatial transformation based classification and sorting scheme is developed to form an evolutionary many-objective (EMO) algorithm in order to solve the many-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem of coordinated DR with numerous participants. The performance of the proposed method was benchmarked and validated on different scaled neighborhood systems over a 24-h scheduling horizon, and comparative results demonstrated its superiority and optimality in solving many-house DR problems.