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To investigate the influence of organic cation transporter 3 (OCT3) expression on the effect of the combination regimen of 5-fluorouracil, folinic acid and oxaliplatin ((m)FOLFOX6) in colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. This is a retrospective study conducted at a single centre (Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences & Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, China). Patients with stage IIb-IV resectable CRC who were being postoperatively treated with (m)FOLFOX6 as a first-line adjuvant chemotherapy regimen for at least 5 cycles and had resected primary tumour samples available were eligible for the study. Patients who preoperatively received chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy or were treated with targeted drugs or other anticancer drugs were excluded from the study. Immunohistochemical staining and digital image analysis were used to assess OCT3 expression in tumour samples. According to OCT3 expression level, the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC curve) was used to divide the patients into two groups. Cox proportional risk regression was performed with the forward LR (forward stepwise regression based on maximum likelihood estimation) method using SPSS17.0 software. The primary endpoint was the 2-year progression-free survival. In total, 57 patients were included between 2014 and 2016 according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria (22 had low OCT3 expression, and 35 had high OCT3 expression). The mean age was 55.7 (30–74) years, and 37 of the total patients were male. According to TNM stage, 5 patients had stage IV disease, 44 patients had stage III disease, and 8 patients had stage II disease. Through Cox regression analysis, we found that among patients receiving the (m)FOLFOX6 regimen, those with higher OCT3 expression had a higher two-year progression-free survival rate than those with lower OCT3 expression (P = 0.038). The hazard ratio of patients with high OCT3 expression compared with patients with low OCT3 expression was 0.247. Besides, it was found that the age of patients was negatively correlated with expression level of OCT3, which can explain why patients over 70 years do not benefit from oxaliplatin-containing chemotherapy. High OCT3 expression in CRC tissues may be a protective factor for CRC patients treated with (m)FOLFOX6.

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been very successful in image denoising. However, with the growth of the depth of plain networks, CNNs may result in performance degradation. The lack of network depth leads to the limited ability of the network to extract image features and difficults to fuse the shallow image features into the deep image information. In this work, we propose an improved deep convolutional U-Net framework (RatUNet) for image denoising. RatUNet improves Unet as follows: (1) RatUNet uses the residual blocks of ResNet to deepen the network depth, so as to avoid the network performance saturation. (2) RatUNet improves the down-sampling method, which is conducive to extracting image features. (3) RatUNet improves the up-sampling method, which is used to restore image details. (4) RatUNet improves the skip-connection method of the U-Net network, which is used to fuse the shallow feature information into the deep image details, and it is more conducive to restore the clean image. (5) In order to better process the edge information of the image, RatUNet uses depthwise and polarized self-attention mechanism to guide a CNN for image denoising. Extensive experiments show that our RatUNet is more efficient and has better performance than existing state-of-the-art denoising methods, especially in SSIM metrics, the denoising effect of the RatUNet achieves very high performance. Visualization results show that the denoised image by RatUNet is smoother and sharper than other methods.

In mobile Ad Hoc network, nodes move freely, this can lead to frequent changes of network topology. Routing protocol algorithm is the strategy to establish communication links for network nodes, and its performance influences the availability of Ad Hoc network directly. By using wireless channel to transmit data in Ad Hoc network, the invaded malicious nodes will cause various attacks, aim to steal the transmission data or destroy the network. Based on the traditional proactive routing protocol for Ad Hoc network, an improved safe routing strategy SDSDV is put forward to resist attacks against routing protocols. The safe proactive routing protocol includes route request and route response two stages. When the network initialization is complete, after successful identity authentication by each other, secure communication paths are established between nodes and the encrypted data will be transmission through the path. The protocol integrates distributed authentication, encryption algorithm, hash check, and other security policy together. SDSDV protocol reduces the risk of malicious manipulation of routing information and ensures the safe and reliable routing between the source and destination nodes.

Objectives Antidepressants need to penetrate the blood–brain barrier (BBB) to exert their functions in the central nervous system. Breast cancer resistance protein (BCRP), an efflux transporter abundantly expressed in the BBB, prevents the accumulation of many drugs in the brain. This study aimed to identify whether five commonly used antidepressants (sertraline, duloxetine, fluoxetine, amitriptyline and mirtazapine) are BCRP substrates. Methods A combination of bidirectional transport and intracellular accumulation experiments was conducted on BCRP-overexpressing MDCKII and wild-type (WT) cells, and in situ brain perfusion was conducted in rats. Key findings The bidirectional transport study revealed that the net efflux ratio (NER) of sertraline reached 2.08 but decreased to 1.06 when co-incubated with Ko143, a selective BCRP inhibitor. Conversely, the other four antidepressants did not appear to be BCRP substrates, due to their low NER values ( Conclusions Taken together, BCRP is involved in sertraline efflux.

The CoFe-based amorphous and Fe-based nanocrystalline alloys possess excellent soft magnetic properties due to their nearly zero-magnetostriction and very low magnetic anisotropy. So they are good candidate materials for power electronics and giant magneto-impedance (GMI) sensor applications. As an indication of their AC performance, energy losses were determined by the measurements of impedance for Co68.2Fe4.3Si12.5B15 amorphous wire and Fe73.5Cu1Nb3Si13.5B9 nanocrystalline wires with different domain structure. The measurements were carried out at a frequency range of 10 – 104 Hz and induction amplitudes of 0.1 – 1.2 T. Although the measured results show good agreement with the scale theory model of energy loss, different origins of energy loss in the investigated samples have been concluded by comparing the experimental data with the Bertotti’s statistical model. The differences of energy loss in these samples could be explained by considering the magnetic structure and circular technical magnetization processes.

The effects of solution treatment and aging on microstructure, mechanical properties and damping capacity of as-cast Mg–3%Zn–0.9%Y–0.6%Nd–0.6%Zr (wt%) (ZW30N) magnesium alloy were investigated. The as-cast alloy is comprised of α-Mg matrix and W-phase. After solution treatment at 540 °C for 8 h, the net-like interdendritic W-phase dissolves into the matrix and small Zr-containing particles precipitate at grain interiors. Due to the precipitation of fine W, β1′ and β2′ phases during the subsequent aging treatment, the ultimate tensile strength, yield strength and elongation of the alloy significantly improved from 180 MPa, 119 MPa and 12.3% in as-cast alloy to 262 MPa, 161 MPa and 15.2%, respectively. The damping capacity of heat-treated Mg–Zn–Y–Nd–Zr alloys decreases dramatically with respect to that of as-cast condition. In the solution-treated alloy, increasing number of Zr-containing particles and solute atoms in the matrix is responsible for the damping decline. For the peaked-aged alloy, the favorable damping and unusual damping growth at high strain amplitude stage are believed to be closely related to the formation of a twin dislocation, which produces new energy-dissipation source besides dislocation damping.

Sr3Al2O6:Ce3+ powders were synthesized using a solid state reaction method in air with addition of H3BO3. The effects of Ce3+ dopant concentrations and the weight ratio (wt) of H3BO3 to total raw materials weight on the formation of Sr3Al2O6:Ce3+ samples were investigated. Single-phase and well-crystallized Sr3Al2O6:Ce3+ samples can be obtained when the addition of H3BO3 is lower than 7 wt%. The excitation spectrum indicates that Sr3Al2O6:Ce3+ phosphor powders exhibit two excitation bands centered at 345 and 462 nm. The emission spectrum shows that Sr3Al2O6:Ce3+ phosphor powders exhibit an emission band peaked at 536 nm when excited at 462 nm. Sr3Al2O6:Ce3+ sample at the Ce3+ concentration of 5 mol% shows the strongest emission intensity. The addition of H3BO3 has obvious influence on phase and emission intensity of Sr3Al2O6:Ce3+ phosphors. The results show that the Sr2.95Ce0.05Al2O6 sample with the 7 wt% addition of H3BO3 has the highest emission intensity and the longest lifetime.

Neuropathic pain is one of the most common chronic complications of diabetes mellitus, one hallmark of which is tactile allodynia. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying tactile allodynia are not well understood. It has been demonstrated that microRNAs (miRNAs) are essential regulators of gene expression in the nervous system where they contribute to neuronal plasticity. Thus, in this study, we investigated the differentially expressed microRNAs in the lumbar spinal dorsal horn of streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic neuropathic pain (DNP) mice and vehicle controls. Results from miRNA microarrays showed that 42 miRNAs were significantly altered in DNP spinal cord tissue (P0.05, fold change: ⩾ 2) compared with control sample. Among them, 21 miRNAs were significantly up-regulated while the other 21 down-regulated. Further validation by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) indicated that the 2 significant differentially expressed candidate miRNAs (miR-184-5p and miR-190a-5p) in DNP tissue showed the same changes as in the microarray analysis. The bioinformatics analysis revealed that some of the differentially expressed miRNAs after DNP were potential regulators of some inflammation associated with genes that are known to be involved in the pathogenesis of DNP. These findings suggest that aberrant expression of miRNAs may contribute to the pathogenesis of DNP and are potential targets for therapeutic interventions following DNP.