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IntroductionIn this study, we examined the natural course of untreated hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and identified predictors of survival in an area where hepatitis B is the predominant cause of HCC.MethodsWe identified 1,045 patients with HCC who did not receive HCC treatment and were registered in the Korean Primary Liver Cancer Registry between 2008 and 2014, and were followed-up up to December 2018. Thereafter, we analyzed the clinical characteristics of patients who survived for Results and discussionThe mean age of the untreated patients at HCC diagnosis was 59.6 years, and 52.1% of patients had hepatitis B. Most untreated patients (94.2%) died during the observation period. The median survival times for each Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) stage were as follows: 31.0 months for stage 0/A (n = 123), 10.0 months for stage B (n = 96), 3.0 months for stage C (n = 599), and 1.0 month for stage D (n = 227). Multivariate Cox regression analysis demonstrated that BCLC stage D (hazard ratio, 4.282; P < 0.001), model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) score ≥10 (HR, 1.484; P < 0.001), and serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) level ≥1,000 ng/mL (HR, 1.506; P < 0.001) were associated with poor survival outcomes in patients with untreated HCC. In untreated patients with HCC, advanced stage BCLC, serum AFP level ≥1,000 ng/mL, and MELD score ≥10 were significantly associated with overall survival.

Supplementary Material 1

We search for local extremely metal-poor galaxies (EMPGs), selecting photometric candidates by broadband color excess and machine-learning techniques with the SDSS photometric data. After removing stellar contaminants by shallow spectroscopy with Seimei and Nayuta telescopes, we confirm that three candidates are EMPGs with 0.05--0.1 $Z_\odot$ by deep Magellan/MagE spectroscopy for faint {\sc[Oiii]}$\lambda$4363 lines. Using a statistical sample consisting of 105 spectroscopically-confirmed EMPGs taken from our study and the literature, we calculate cross-correlation function (CCF) of the EMPGs and all SDSS galaxies to quantify environments of EMPGs. Comparing another CCF of all SDSS galaxies and comparison SDSS galaxies in the same stellar mass range ($10^{7.0}-10^{8.4} M_\odot$), we find no significant ($>1\sigma$) difference between these two CCFs. We also compare mass-metallicity relations (MZRs) of the EMPGs and those of galaxies at $z\sim$ 0--4 with a steady chemical evolution model and find that the EMPG MZR is comparable with the model prediction on average. These clustering and chemical properties of EMPGs are explained by a scenario of stochastic metal-poor gas accretion on metal-rich galaxies showing metal-poor star formation. Extending the broadband color-excess technique to a high-$z$ EMPG search, we select 17 candidates of $z\sim$ 4--5 EMPGs with the deep ($\simeq30$ mag) near-infrared JWST/NIRCam images obtained by ERO and ERS programs. We find galaxy candidates with negligible {\sc[Oiii]}$\lambda\lambda$4959,5007 emission weaker than the local EMPGs and known high-$z$ galaxies, suggesting that some of these candidates may fall in 0--0.01 $Z_\odot$, which potentially break the lowest metallicity limit known to date.

While recent text-to-speech (TTS) systems have made remarkable strides toward human-level quality, the performance of cross-lingual TTS lags behind that of intra-lingual TTS. This gap is mainly rooted from the speaker-language entanglement problem in cross-lingual TTS. In this paper, we propose CrossSpeech which improves the quality of cross-lingual speech by effectively disentangling speaker and language information in the level of acoustic feature space. Specifically, CrossSpeech decomposes the speech generation pipeline into the speaker-independent generator (SIG) and speaker-dependent generator (SDG). The SIG produces the speaker-independent acoustic representation which is not biased to specific speaker distributions. On the other hand, the SDG models speaker-dependent speech variation that characterizes speaker attributes. By handling each information separately, CrossSpeech can obtain disentangled speaker and language representations. From the experiments, we verify that CrossSpeech achieves significant improvements in cross-lingual TTS, especially in terms of speaker similarity to the target speaker., Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 2023

Supplementary Material 2

Supplementary Material 3

While generative adversarial networks (GANs) based neural text-to-speech (TTS) systems have shown significant improvement in neural speech synthesis, there is no TTS system to learn to synthesize speech from text sequences with only adversarial feedback. Because adversarial feedback alone is not sufficient to train the generator, current models still require the reconstruction loss compared with the ground-truth and the generated mel-spectrogram directly. In this paper, we present Multi-SpectroGAN (MSG), which can train the multi-speaker model with only the adversarial feedback by conditioning a self-supervised hidden representation of the generator to a conditional discriminator. This leads to better guidance for generator training. Moreover, we also propose adversarial style combination (ASC) for better generalization in the unseen speaking style and transcript, which can learn latent representations of the combined style embedding from multiple mel-spectrograms. Trained with ASC and feature matching, the MSG synthesizes a high-diversity mel-spectrogram by controlling and mixing the individual speaking styles (e.g., duration, pitch, and energy). The result shows that the MSG synthesizes a high-fidelity mel-spectrogram, which has almost the same naturalness MOS score as the ground-truth mel-spectrogram., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, Accepted paper in AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2021

Poster presentation

본 연구는 6차(2011년)～13차(2018년) ‘한국복지패널’ 자료를 활용하여 노인가구의 공적이전소득과 빈곤 및 소득불평등의 변화양상을 빈곤율과 엔트로피지수[GE(0)]를 적용하여 기초연금시행(2015년) 전후로 가구형태별 시계열 분석하여 이들 가구의 빈곤 및 소득불평등 개선에 필요한 기초자료를 제공하고자 실시하였다. 분석결과, 첫째, 공적이전소득의 절대적 빈곤 감소효과는 독거노인의 경우 2011년 -25.0%에서 2018년 -38.3%, 부부노인의 경우 2011년 -20.2%에서 2018년 -27.4%로 나타났다. 둘째, 공적이전소득의 상대적 빈곤 감소효과는 독거노인의 경우 2011년 -15.9%에서 2018년 -17.4%, 부부노인의 경우 2011년 -13.5%에서 2018년 -14.8%로 나타났다. 셋째, 엔트로피지수 측면에서 살펴본 시장소득 대비 공적이전소득에 의한 소득불평등 감소효과는 부부노인의 경우 2011년 -0.1142에서 2018년 -0.2335로 독거노인의 2011년 -0.0916에서 2018년 -0.1854보다 높게 나타났음에도 불구하고, 부부노인의 소득불평등도가 독거노인보다 기초연금 시행 이후에도 여전히 높게 유지되었다. 이러한 결과는 기초연금제도에서의 부부감액제도의 형평성 제고의 필요성을 시사한다.

Sulfate reduction is the quantitatively most important process to degrade organic matter in anoxic marine sediment and has been studied intensively in a variety of settings. Guaymas Basin, a young marginal ocean basin, offers the unique opportunity to study sulfate reduction in an environment characterized by organic-rich sediment, high sedimentation rates, and high geothermal gradients (100–958°C km−1). We measured sulfate reduction rates (SRR) in samples taken during the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 385 using incubation experiments with radiolabeled 35SO42− carried out at in situ pressure and temperature. The highest SRR (387 nmol cm−3 d−1) was recorded in near-surface sediments from Site U1548C, which had the steepest geothermal gradient (958°C km−1). At this site, SRR were generally over an order of magnitude higher than at similar depths at other sites (e.g., 387–157 nmol cm−3 d−1 at 1.9 mbsf from Site U1548C vs. 46–1.0 nmol cm−3 d−1 at 2.1 mbsf from Site U1552B). Site U1546D is characterized by a sill intrusion, but it had already reached thermal equilibrium and SRR were in the same range as nearby Site U1545C, which is minimally affected by sills. The wide temperature range observed at each drill site suggests major shifts in microbial community composition with very different temperature optima but awaits confirmation by molecular biological analyses. At the transition between the mesophilic and thermophilic range around 40°C–60°C, sulfate-reducing activity appears to be decreased, particularly in more oligotrophic settings, but shows a slight recovery at higher temperatures.

Question Answering (QA) is a task that entails reasoning over natural language contexts, and many relevant works augment language models (LMs) with graph neural networks (GNNs) to encode the Knowledge Graph (KG) information. However, most existing GNN-based modules for QA do not take advantage of rich relational information of KGs and depend on limited information interaction between the LM and the KG. To address these issues, we propose Question Answering Transformer (QAT), which is designed to jointly reason over language and graphs with respect to entity relations in a unified manner. Specifically, QAT constructs Meta-Path tokens, which learn relation-centric embeddings based on diverse structural and semantic relations. Then, our Relation-Aware Self-Attention module comprehensively integrates different modalities via the Cross-Modal Relative Position Bias, which guides information exchange between relevant entites of different modalities. We validate the effectiveness of QAT on commonsense question answering datasets like CommonsenseQA and OpenBookQA, and on a medical question answering dataset, MedQA-USMLE. On all the datasets, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at http://github.com/mlvlab/QAT., Comment: AAAI2023 (accepted)

Large diffuse galaxies are hard to find, but understanding the environments where they live, their numbers, and ultimately their origins, is of intense interest and importance for galaxy formation and evolution. Using Subaru's Hyper Suprime-Cam Strategic Survey Program, we perform a systematic search for low surface brightness galaxies and present novel and effective methods for detecting and modeling them. As a case study, we surveyed 922 Milky Way analogs in the nearby Universe ($0.01 < z < 0.04$) and build a large sample of satellite galaxies that are outliers in the mass-size relation. These ``ultra-puffy'' galaxies (UPGs), defined to be $1.5σ$ above the average mass-size relation, represent the tail of the satellite size distribution. We find that each MW analog hosts $N_{\rm UPG} = 0.31\pm 0.05$ ultra-puffy galaxies on average, which is consistent with but slightly lower than the observed abundance at this halo mass in the Local Volume. We also construct a sample of ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) in MW analogs and find an abundance of $N_{\rm UDG} = 0.44\pm0.05$ per host. With literature results, we confirm that the UDG abundance scales with the host halo mass following a sublinear power law. We argue that our definition for ultra-puffy galaxies, which is based on the mass-size relation, is more physically-motivated than the common definition of ultra-diffuse galaxies, which depends on surface brightness and size cuts and thus yields different surface mass density cuts for quenched and star-forming galaxies., 19 pages, 7 figures, submitted to ApJ

Additional file 1. Supplementary Note.

Ketamine is used widely in emergency departments for a variety of purposes, including procedural sedation for facial laceration in pediatric patients. The major benefits are its rapid onset of effects, relatively short half-life, and lack of respiratory depression. The known side effects of ketamine are hallucinations, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. Seizure is not a known side effect of ketamine in patients without a seizure history. Here, we present the case of a patient in whom ketamine likely induced a generalized tonic-clonic seizure when used as a single agent in procedural sedation for facial laceration repair. The aim of this article is to report a rare and unexpected side effect of ketamine used at the regular dose for procedural sedation. This novel case should be of interest to not only emergency physicians but also plastic surgeons.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to find out whether support activities in the Korean professional baseball can be classified as sincere leisure, and to examine the characteristics of Korean professional baseball supporters’ culture by interpreting them as sincere leisure. Method: The research period was conducted from May 21 to September 13, 2019. The analysis of the data was conducted using the conversation analysis method. The integrity of the data was secured through member check. Results: First, we have confirmed that all three forms of serious leisure activity appear in Korean professional baseball supporters’ activities. Supporters were carrying out the role of amateurs, hobbyist and volunteers. Second, Korean professional baseball supporters culture had six characteristics of sincere leisure. There are phenomena that are characterized by sincere leisure activities, from persevere, career, effort, durable benefits or rewards, identification, to equalization and unique emotion. Conclusion: The form and features of sincere leisure were confirming that Korean professional baseball supporters showed up, which can be seen as a way of establishing the culture of support as a sincere leisure.

BACKGROUND The main aim of this survey was to analyze how liver surgeons perform liver resections and to define their conception of anatomic procedures within the incorporation of minimally invasive liver surgery (MILS). METHODS The survey was distributed among liver surgeons. It mainly focused on personal experience on open and MILS, methods and landmarks, and experience on anatomic resections and Glissonean approach. RESULTS A total of 445 valid answers from 54 countries was obtained. Surgeons performing MILS mainly have below 10 years of experience (81.8% of responders) and one third has never done complex MILS. New techniques, including indocyanine green demarcation are marginally used (

BackgroundWith organismal aging, the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) activity gradually decreases, resulting in the systemic functional declines of the target tissues including skeletal muscles. Although the HPG axis plays an important role in health span, how the HPG axis systemically prevents functional aging is largely unknown.MethodsWe generated muscle stem cell (MuSC)-specific androgen receptor (Ar) and oestrogen receptor 2 (Esr2) double knockout (dKO) mice and pharmacologically inhibited (Antide) the HPG axis to mimic decreased serum levels of sex steroid hormones in aged mice. After short-term and long-term sex hormone signalling ablation, the MuSCs were functionally analysed, and their aging phenotypes were compared with those of geriatric mice (30-month-old). To investigate pathways associated with sex hormone signalling disruption, RNA sequencing and bioinformatic analyses were performed.ResultsDisrupting the HPG axis results in impaired muscle regeneration [wild-type (WT) vs. dKO, P&nbsp

The importance of tumor localization is increasing because the application of laparoscopic surgery in colon cancer surgery is on the rise and the incidence of early cancer is also rising. There are several methods of tumor localization, but the most popular method is preoperative colonoscopic tattooing. Various tattooing agents are used, and among them, India ink is the most widely used agent. However, it is impossible to use India ink in Korea. Therefore, research on other alternative agents is needed.

The intergalactic medium (IGM) at $z\sim$ 5 to 6 is largely ionized, and yet the main source for the IGM ionization in the early universe is uncertain. Of the possible contributors are faint quasars with $-26 \lesssim M_{\rm 1450} \lesssim -23$, but their number density is poorly constrained at $z\sim5$. In this paper, we present our survey of faint quasars at $z\sim5$ in the European Large-Area {\it ISO} Survey-North 1 (ELAIS-N1) field over a survey area of 6.51 deg$^2$ and examine if such quasars can be the dominant source of the IGM ionization. We use the deep optical/near-infrared data of the ELAIS-N1 field as well as the additional medium-band observations to find $z \sim 5$ quasars through a two-step approach using the broadband color selection, and SED fitting with the medium-band information included. Adopting Bayesian information criterion, we identify ten promising quasar candidates. Spectra of three of the candidates are obtained, confirming all of them to be quasars at $z\sim5$ and supporting the reliability of the quasar selection. Using the promising candidates, we derive the $z\sim5$ quasar luminosity function at $-26 \lesssim M_{\rm 1450} \lesssim -23$. The number density of faint $z\sim5$ quasars in the ELAIS-N1 field is consistent with several previous results that quasars are not the main contributors to the IGM-ionizing photons at $z\sim5$, Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ

We present element abundance ratios and ionizing radiation of local young low-mass (~$10^{6}$ M_sun) extremely metal poor galaxies (EMPGs) with a 2% solar oxygen abundance (O/H)_sun and a high specific star-formation rate (sSFR~300 Gyr$^{-1}$), and other (extremely) metal poor galaxies, which are compiled from Extremely Metal-Poor Representatives Explored by the Subaru Survey (EMPRESS) and the literature. Weak emission lines such as [FeIII]4658 and HeII4686 are detected in very deep optical spectra of the EMPGs taken with 8m-class telescopes including Keck and Subaru (Kojima et al. 2019, Izotov et al. 2018), enabling us to derive element abundance ratios with photoionization models. We find that neon- and argon-to-oxygen ratios are comparable to those of known local dwarf galaxies, and that the nitrogen-to-oxygen abundance ratios (N/O) are lower than 20% (N/O)_sun consistent with the low oxygen abundance. However, the iron-to-oxygen abundance ratios (Fe/O) of the EMPGs are generally high; the EMPGs with the 2%-solar oxygen abundance show high Fe/O ratios of ~90-140% (Fe/O)_sun, which are unlikely explained by suggested scenarios of Type Ia supernova iron productions, iron's dust depletion, and metal-poor gas inflow onto previously metal-riched galaxies with solar abundances. Moreover, these EMPGs have very high HeII4686/H$��$ ratios of ~1/40, which are not reproduced by existing models of high-mass X-ray binaries whose progenitor stellar masses are less than 120 M_sun. Comparing stellar-nucleosynthesis and photoionization models with a comprehensive sample of EMPGs identified by this and previous EMPG studies, we propose that both the high Fe/O ratios and the high HeII4686/H$��$ ratios are explained by the past existence of super massive ($>$300 M_sun) stars, which may evolve into intermediate-mass black holes ($\gtrsim$100 M_sun)., ApJ in press. 23 pages, 7 Figures, 6 Tables

As part of the AGORA High-resolution Galaxy Simulations Comparison Project (Kim et al. 2014, 2016) we have generated a suite of isolated Milky Way-mass galaxy simulations using 9 state-of-the-art gravito-hydrodynamics codes widely used in the numerical galaxy formation community. In these simulations we adopted identical galactic disk initial conditions, and common physics models (e.g., radiative cooling and ultraviolet background by a standardized package). Subgrid physics models such as Jeans pressure floor, star formation, supernova feedback energy, and metal production were carefully constrained. Here we release the simulation data to be freely used by the community. In this release we include the disk snapshots at 0 and 500Myr of evolution per each code as used in Kim et al. (2016), from simulations with and without star formation and feedback. We encourage any member of the numerical galaxy formation community to make use of these resources for their research - for example, compare their own simulations with the AGORA galaxies, with the common analysis yt scripts used to obtain the plots shown in our papers, also available in this release., Comment: AGORA links: http://www.AGORAsimulations.org/ and http://sites.google.com/site/santacruzcomparisonproject/blogs/quicklinks/

Purpose: The goal of this study was to determine the risk of malignancy of thyroid nodules with minimal cystic changes. Methods: A total of consecutive 1,000 thyroid nodules (≥1 cm) with final diagnoses from twoinstitutions were included in this study. The risk of malignancy of thyroid nodules was analyzed according to the internal content, which was categorized as purely solid, minimally cystic (cystic changes ≤10%), and partially cystic (cystic changes >10%). We also assessed the risk of malignancy of nodules with minimal cystic changes depending on echogenicity and presence of any suspicious ultrasonografic (US) features. Results: The overall frequency of purely solid, minimally cystic, and partially cystic noduleswas 730/1,000 (73%), 61/1,000 (6.1%), and 209/1,000 (20.9%), respectively, with risks ofmalignancy of 14.8% (108/730), 3.3% (2/61), and 3.3% (7/209), respectively. The risk ofmalignancy of nodules with minimal cystic changes was significantly lower than that of purelysolid nodules (P=0.013). The risk of malignancy of nodules with minimal cystic changes was also lower than that of purely solid nodules in the group of hypoechoic nodules (P=0.063) and in the group of nodules with suspicious US features (P=0.028), but was not significantly different from that of partially cystic nodules regardless of echogenicity or the presence of suspicious US features (P≥0.652). Conclusion: Thyroid nodules with minimal cystic changes have a low risk of malignancy, similar to that of partially cystic nodules regardless of echogenicity or the presence of suspicious US features. The US lexicon could define solid nodules as nodules with purely solid internal content in order to enhance the accuracy of estimated risks of malignancy.

We have initiated a new survey for local extremely metal-poor galaxies (EMPGs) with Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) large-area (~500 deg^2) optical images reaching a 5 sigma limit of ~26 magnitude, about 100 times deeper than the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). To select Z/Z_sun6 reported recently. We spectroscopically confirm that 3 out of 10 candidates are truly EMPGs with Z/Z_sun, 30 pages, 26 figures, and 8 tables; (Revision: metallicities changed due to the use of a more pricise dust correction method, but conclusion does not change, Minor: a table, some figures, and sentences are added for a clear explanation.)

Virtual private community (VPC) architecture efficiently and securely creates personal domains to share content only in the networked domains without external authentication/proxy systems. For that, a secure device clustering method consisting of a device identification and membership management system is required. However, existing certificate chain based association (CCA) scheme for VPC, one of device clustering schemes, has two unsolved problems. First, since it does not verify who is an original creator of a VPC domain, it makes VPC vulnerable to spoofing attacks. Second, it does not consider how to restrain revoked members from accessing VPC domains, which causes malicious users to illegally access VPC domains. Hence, to solve such problems, this paper proposes a member list chain and reputation based association (MLC-RbA) scheme, and then evaluates the performance/security of MLC-R b A to prove that MLC-R b A provides better reliability1.

Using in-situ X-ray and UV photoemission spectroscopy (XPS and UPS, respectively), we have investigated the electronic energy level alignment at the interface formed between a strongly electron withdrawing molecule 1,4,5,8,9,11-hexaazatriphenylene-hexacarbonitrile (HAT-CN) and indiumtin-oxide (ITO). The HAT-CN is an effective material for a hole injection layer in organic light emitting diodes, and ITO is widely used as an anode electrode. The deposition of a small amount of HAT-CN caused a surface work function reduction from 4.46 eV to 4.12 eV at a coverage of about 0.02 nm. However, when more HAT-CN was deposited, the work function started to increase and ends up at 5.95 eV at a thickness of 90 nm. The UPS spectra show that the highest occupied molecular orbital was at 3.80 eV below the Fermi level at this thickness. The XPS analysis of the carbon C 1s core level peak implied that the HAT-CN molecular layer did not completely cover the ITO surface at the initial stages of deposition. The measured work function and energy level alignment indicated that the holes could not be injected from the ITO to the HAT-CN layer. Instead, we suggest that electron-hole pairs were generated at the organic/HAT-CN interface.