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BACKGROUND: Only a few studies to date have focused on the application of cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) in rheumatic heart disease (RHD); in particular, research on the application of T1-mapping CMR sequences is limited. This study aimed to investigate whether diffuse myocardial fibrosis evaluated using preoperative T1 mapping and extracellular volume (ECV) fraction measurement could predict the progression of adverse left ventricular remodeling (LVR) after surgery. METHODS: A total of 32 adult patients with RHD and 30 healthy controls were recruited. Baseline clinical characteristics, CMR findings, and T1 mapping measurements were compared between the two groups. Transthoracic echocardiography measurements were collected before and after surgery. Patients with an increase in left ventricular end-diastolic volume of >15% or a decrease in left ventricular ejection fraction of >10% were classified into the adverse remodeling group; otherwise, patients were categorized into the non-adverse remodeling group. RESULTS: Compared with the healthy controls, patients with RHD had impaired biventricular function, enlarged ventricular volume, and increased native T1 and ECV values. Patients in the adverse remodeling group had higher ECV values than those in the non-adverse remodeling group (33.25%±3.67% vs. 28.45%±4.46%, P=0.002). Binary logistic regression analysis showed that the ECV value was associated with adverse LVR (odds ratio: 1.273, P=0.045). ECV was found to be a sensitive biomarker for predicting adverse LVR (area under the curve: 0.78; sensitivity: 75.0%; specificity: 77.3%). CONCLUSIONS: ECV has potential value for predicting the progression of adverse LVR and for identifying non-responders among patients with RHD undergoing surgery.

BackgroundThe medical financial burden has become a key limitation to accessing healthcare in rural areas of China as healthcare expenses continue to rise. To ensure that low-income people have access to basic healthcare services, China has implemented medical financial assistance (MFA) policy, which provides social health insurance and medical cash assistance for low-income people.MethodsUsing data from the 2014 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), the propensity score matching (PSM) method was applied to estimate the impact of MFA on healthcare expenses and the medical financial burden.ResultsEmpirical results showed that the total annual healthcare expenditure of MFA beneficiaries is significantly higher than that of non-beneficiaries after matching. Although low-income individuals are now covered by MFA, neither the out-of-pocket expenditure to per capita household non-food expenditure ratio nor the likelihood of catastrophic healthcare expenditure (CHE) decrease significantly.ConclusionMedical financial assistance (MFA) has reduced the inequality in healthcare utilization to a certain extent by improving access to healthcare for low-income people. However, people with low income still face a heavy medical financial burden even when they are covered by MFA. Policymakers should pay attention to raising the standards of MFA in rural areas and providing higher subsidies for the reasonable healthcare expenditures of low-income people.

Additional file 1. Supplementary Methods and Materials. Table S2. Supplementary Table 2.

Potassium‐ion batteries (PIBs) are a promising candidate for next‐generation electric energy storage applications because of the abundance and low cost of potassium. However, the development of PIBs is limited by sluggish kinetics and huge volume expansion of anodes, leading to poor rate capability and cycling stability. Herein, an advanced superstructure anode, including Te-doped SnS2 nanosheets uniformly anchored on MXene surface (Te-SnS2/MXene), is rationally designed for the first time to boost K+ storage performance. Featuring with strong interface interaction and self-autoadjustable interlayer spacings, the Te-SnS2/MXene can efficiently accelerate electron/ion transfer, accommodate volume expansion, inhibit crack formation, and improve pseudocapacitive contribution during cycling. Thus, the novel Te-SnS2/MXene anode delivers a high reversible capacity (343.2 mAh g−1 after 50 cycles at 0.2 A g−1), outstanding rate capability (186.4 mAh g−1 at 20 A g−1), long cycle stability (165.8 mAh g−1 after 5000 cycles at 10 A g−1 with a low electrode swelling rate of only 15.4%), and reliable operation in flexible full battery. The present Te-SnS2/MXene becomes among the best transition metal-based anode materials for PIBs reported to date.

Confronting with the increased severe electromagnetic waves pollution, synthesis of perovskite-type oxides, like PrMnO3, microwave-absorbing materials with strong reflection loss (RL) and broad effective absorption bandwidth have attracted extensive attention because of their potential application in all kinds of areas. Herein, Pr1−xSrxMnO3 perovskites with different doping Sr-content were synthesized through the sol–gel strategy. The effects of Sr doping on microstructure and magnetic properties was studied by the corresponding equipment, respectively. Microwave absorption properties were investigated according to the transmission line theory. Simulation studies show that Pr0.9Sr0.1MnO3 sample in a wax matrix exhibits the strongest reflection loss of −50.21 dB at 12.08 GHz at a thickness of 2.5 mm. Its effective absorption bandwidth (RL

Omnidirectional image (ODI) data is captured with a 360x180 field-of-view, which is much wider than the pinhole cameras and contains richer spatial information than the conventional planar images. Accordingly, omnidirectional vision has attracted booming attention due to its more advantageous performance in numerous applications, such as autonomous driving and virtual reality. In recent years, the availability of customer-level 360 cameras has made omnidirectional vision more popular, and the advance of deep learning (DL) has significantly sparked its research and applications. This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive review and analysis of the recent progress in DL methods for omnidirectional vision. Our work covers four main contents: (i) An introduction to the principle of omnidirectional imaging, the convolution methods on the ODI, and datasets to highlight the differences and difficulties compared with the 2D planar image data; (ii) A structural and hierarchical taxonomy of the DL methods for omnidirectional vision; (iii) A summarization of the latest novel learning strategies and applications; (iv) An insightful discussion of the challenges and open problems by highlighting the potential research directions to trigger more research in the community., Comment: 31 pages

Additional file 1. Supplementary.

Additional file 2. The codes of this article.

Additional file 2. Comparison between ES patients with and without LGE. ES, Eisenmenger syndrome; BMI, body mass index; HR, heart rate; SpO2, peripheral arterial oxygen saturation; WHO, World Health Organization; 6MWD, 6-min walking distance; NT-pro BNP, N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide; Hct, hematocrit; mPAP, mean pulmonary artery pressure; PVRi, pulmonary vascular resistance index; LV, left ventricular; RV, right ventricular; EDVi, end-diastolic volume index; ESVi, end-systolic volume index; EF, ejection fraction; massi, mass index; SVi, stroke volume index.

Additional file 1. The risk stratification approach. Low risk: at least three low-risk criteria and no high-risk criteria; Intermediate risk: definitions of low or high risk not fulfilled; High risk: at least two high-risk criteria including CI or SvO2. WHO, World Health Organization; 6MWT, 6-min walking distance; NT-pro BNP, N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide; BNP, brain natriuretic peptide; RAP, right atrial pressure; CI, cardiac index; SvO2, mixed venous oxygen saturation.

Additional file 1. Additional tables.

Most of the existing self-supervised feature learning methods for 3D data either learn 3D features from point cloud data or from multi-view images. By exploring the inherent multi-modality attributes of 3D objects, in this paper, we propose to jointly learn modal-invariant and view-invariant features from different modalities including image, point cloud, and mesh with heterogeneous networks for 3D data. In order to learn modal- and view-invariant features, we propose two types of constraints: cross-modal invariance constraint and cross-view invariant constraint. Cross-modal invariance constraint forces the network to maximum the agreement of features from different modalities for same objects, while the cross-view invariance constraint forces the network to maximum agreement of features from different views of images for same objects. The quality of learned features has been tested on different downstream tasks with three modalities of data including point cloud, multi-view images, and mesh. Furthermore, the invariance cross different modalities and views are evaluated with the cross-modal retrieval task. Extensive evaluation results demonstrate that the learned features are robust and have strong generalizability across different tasks.

This paper presents an image classification based approach for skeleton-based video action recognition problem. Firstly, A dataset independent translation-scale invariant image mapping method is proposed, which transformes the skeleton videos to colour images, named skeleton-images. Secondly, A multi-scale deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is proposed which could be built and fine-tuned on the powerful pre-trained CNNs, e.g., AlexNet, VGGNet, ResNet etal.. Even though the skeleton-images are very different from natural images, the fine-tune strategy still works well. At last, we prove that our method could also work well on 2D skeleton video data. We achieve the state-of-the-art results on the popular benchmard datasets e.g. NTU RGB+D, UTD-MHAD, MSRC-12, and G3D. Especially on the largest and challenge NTU RGB+D, UTD-MHAD, and MSRC-12 dataset, our method outperforms other methods by a large margion, which proves the efficacy of the proposed method.

Phosphorescent materials are crucial to improve the luminescence and efficiency of organic light emitting diodes (OLED), because its internal quantum efficiency can reach 100%. So the studying of optical and electrical properties of phosphorescent materials is propitious for the further development of phosphorescent OLED. Phosphorescent materials were generally doped into different host materials as emitting components, not only played an important role in emitting light but also had a profound influence on carrier transport properties. We studied the optical and electrical properties of the blue 4,4′-bis(2,2-diphenylvinyl)-1,1′-biphenyl (DPVBi)-based devices, adding a common yellow phosphorescent material bis[2-(4-tert-butylphenyl)benzothiazolato-N,C2′] iridium(acetylacetonate) [(t-bt)2Ir(acac)] in different positions. The results showed (t-bt)2Ir(acac) has remarkable hole-trapping ability. Especially the ultrathin structure device, compared to the device without (t-bt)2Ir(acac), had increased the luminance by about 60%, and the efficiency by about 97%. Then introduced thin 4,4′-bis(carbazol-9-yl)biphenyl (CBP) host layer between DPVBi and (t-bt)2Ir(acac), and got devices with stable white color.

The manner of straw returning is a double-edged sword for cropland ecosystems because it can not only return nutrients for crop,enhance the soil fertility and lessen the use of chemical manures correspondingly,but also it may result in nonpoint source pollutants such as N,P and COD,which were released to water system in the process of its decomposition.How huge is the potential effect of the nonpoint source pollution when straws were applied to paddy fields? In this research,the simulated experiment under submerging condition was conducted to investigate the direct releasing characteristic of nonpoint source pollutants involving N,P and COD in the process of two methods about returned strew to soil such as surface cover(SC) and strew burying(SB).The results taking a period of 38 days showed that under submerging condition,the concentration of TN in surface water was decreased continuously,while TP,COD was increased urgently or slowly and then decreased continuously,respectively.The releasing intensity of TN was higher than that of TP,while the releasing speeds of TN and COD decreased continuously,except that the releasing speed of TP increased slightly at the beginning of submerging.The concentration of nonpoint source pollutants in the covering water of SC was more than that of SB,and it was increasing with the application amount.From the perspective of controlling the agricultural nonpoint source pollution,the appropriate time for TN prevention was in the initial stage of submerging,while the time for the TP and COD prevention was in 1—3 weeks after submerging.The strew burying was the friendly method.The above conclusion could provide the scientific basis for determining the negative effect of straw manure reasonably and limiting the nonpoint source pollution resulted from the returned straws to soil.

Background Cardiotrophin-1 (CT-1) is a cytokine involved in the growth and survival of cardiac cells that stimulates cardiomyogenesis in pluripotent murine embryonic stem (ES) cells. But it is not known whether CT-1 is responsible for the fate of differentiated bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMMSCs). Methods We investigated the effects of CT-1 on differentiation and maturation of BMMSCs in vitro induced with 5-azacytidine. BMMSCs isolated from femur of rats were induced by CT-1 only, by 5-azacytidine with or without CT-1,and an untreated control group was also set. After 4 weeks of induced culturing, we observed the levels of alpha-cardiac actin and troponin-I by immunohistochemical staining, the ultrastructure of induce-cultured BMMSCs, and the expression of GATA4 , Nkx2.5 , beta-myosin heavy chain ( beta-MHC ) and alpha-cardiac actin mRNA by real time RT-PCR analysis. Results Differentiated BMMSCs treated by 5-azacytidine and CT-1 distinctly showed formations of myofilaments and myotube-like structures—morphological characteristics of myocyte like cells, and spontaneous contraction of a few cells was observed. The protein levels of alpha-cardiac actin and troponin-T were significantly higher than control. Furthermore, mRNA expression of GATA4 , Nkx2.5 , alpha-cardiac actin and beta-MHC was increased remarkably. Conclusions This study suggests that induced culturing of BMMSCs in the presence of 5-azacytidine combined with CT-1 can enhance cardiomyocytic characteristics. CT-1 upregulates the expression of GATA4 , Nkx2–5 , alpha-cardiac actin and beta-MHC mRNA, and rapidly promotes the differentiation and maturation of cardiomyocyte-like cells differentiated from BMMSCs induced with 5-azacytidine.

Objectives Recent studies have demonstrated LGE characteristics had a great role in diagnosis and evaluation of heart disease and provide risk stratification for cardiovascular disease. In the present study, we were sought to explore the prevalence of LGE in a large clinical population and its influence on left ventricular remodelling. Methods During Jan, 2012 to Mar 2013, a consecutive series of patients with heart disease referred for clinical contrast–enhanced CMR investigation was included this study. Cases with poor image quality or without qualitative ventricular functional data were excluded. LGE prevalence rate was calculated according to different heart disease types. Associations between existence of LGE and LV remodelling parameters were analysed. Results Five hundred and forty three cases (543; female 202 and male 341) with different heart disease had adequate CMR imaging. The average age was 46.5 ± 19.3 years old. Tthe prevalence of LGE in the whole patients population was 41% and the prevalence of LGE wass significantly different in diverse heart disease classification (P Conclusions LGE was a common characteristic of structural heart disease. It is a strong indicator of bad left ventricular remodelling. It could be possible to use LGE as a new clinical indicator to monitor the remodeling process of LV in heart disease.

Objectives Echocardiography is routinely recommended to evaluate structural abnormalities in patients with ventricular tachycardia. However, the performance of cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in the evaluation of patients with hemodynamic stable ventricular arrhythmia (VA) has not been verified. In the present study, we investigated the diagnostic yield of cardiac MRI in identifying potential cardiac abnormalities in patients referred for ablation of VA. Methods Cardiac MRI (CMR) was performed in 78 consecutive patients (average age 43.6 ± 16.5 years) with premature ventricular contraction or hemodynamic stable paroxysmal ventricular tachycardia referred for transcatheter ablation. Patients with prior known structural heart disease were excluded. All the patients received standard clinical non-CMR evaluation before CMR examination. Results Cardiac MRI findings were abnormal in 48 patients (61.5%), including late gadolinium enhancement (LGE) in 23.1%. The diagnostic yield of cardiac MRI was significantly greater than that of routine non-CMR modalities, with which findings were positive in 28.2% of patients. Cardiac MRI detected 31 cases (55.4%) of abnormalities in 56 patients in whom echocardiography was negative. LGE patterns in patients with VA were variable and LGE in myocardium was associated with worse right and left ventricular function. Conclusions Cardiac MRI was a more effective tool than routine echocardiography in identifying potential structural abnormalities in patients with stable VA before ablation. Comprehensive cardiac MRI should be considered a routine screening examination before VA ablation even in patients without prior known structural heart disease.