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What is known and objective A large proportion of recurrent cervical cancer (RCC) patients present with poor performance status (PS) after comprehensive treatments, which usually prevents them from opting for clinical trials. We retrospectively analysed the effect and safety of low-dose apatinib and tegafur-gimeracil-oteracil (TGO) in the treatment of these patients. Case summary Six patients treated with low-dose apatinib and TGO showed a disease control rate of 83.3% and grade 1-2 adverse events (AEs). What is new and conclusion This case series indicates that low-dose apatinib and TGO could be considered as palliative therapy for RCC patients with poor PS.

Background Re-irradiation (re-RT) has the active effect of relieving clinical symptoms and prolonging the survival of patients with recurrent esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC). However, the optimal re-RT dose is still uncertain. Here, we analyzed the prognostic factors associated with survival and explored the optimal re-RT dose for patients with recurrent ESCC following definitive radiotherapy. Patients and methods The data of 47 patients with recurrent ESCC who were retreated between 2010 and 2014 were retrospectively analyzed. All patients received a radiation dose > 50 Gy during the primary treatment. The median time to recurrence after primary radiotherapy was 26 months (range 6–120 months). All patients had in-field recurrence in the esophagus. Recurrence within the local site was observed in 37 patients (78.7%), and recurrence in both the local site and regional nodes were observed in 10 patients (21.3%). All patients received 3D conformal re-RT with a median dose of 58 Gy (range 26–64 Gy). Chemotherapy was sequentially used in 27.7% of the patients. Survival curves were constructed according to the Kaplan-Meier method and were compared by log-rank tests. The factors predictive of survival were identified with univariate and multivariate analyses. Results Dysphagia relief after re-RT was achieved in 20 of the 35 symptomatic patients (57.1%). The median survival time (MST) of all patients was 17 months, and the 1-, 2-, 3- and 5-year overall survival (OS) rates were 72.3, 25.5, 17.0 and 2.1%, respectively. In the univariate analysis, an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group Performance Status (ECOG-PS) of 0–1 (P = 0.014), recurrence at the local site (P = 0.048), time to recurrence ≥24 months (P = 0.006) and re-RT dose ≥50 Gy (P P = 0.007). Severe complications were observed in 7 patients, two of whom received a re-RT dose > 60 Gy. Conclusion Our results demonstrated that patients with recurrent ESCC following definitive radiotherapy had unfavorable OS. Re-RT could be considered a feasible and effective treatment modality. A re-RT dose > 50 Gy could improve the survival outcomes, and a dose > 60 Gy should be administered with caution due to the risk of severe complications.

Chitosan supported palladium nanoparticles (Pd NPs/CS) catalysts were facilely prepared via an in-situ reduction of PdCl2 method and characterized by various techniques. The results showed that the palladium particles were in the range of 4–8 nm and evenly dispersed on chitosan. Furthermore, the resulting Pd NPs/CS catalysts showed high catalytic activity for the hydrolytic dehydrogenation of ammonia borane (NH3BH3, AB) in aqueous solution. As for the catalytic reaction with an activation energy (Ea) of 36.25 kJ mol−1, the orders of palladium and AB concentrations were 0.81 and 0.45, respectively. The maximum turnover frequency was as high as 24.76 mol H 2 · mol Pd -1 · min -1 at 30 °C. In addition, the Pd NPs/CS catalysts still kept satisfied catalytic activity even after eleven runs.

Herein, a soluble graphene-based material exhibiting the aggregation-induced emission (AIE) feature was prepared for the first time via wet chemistry by the chemical reduction of graphene oxide (GO). Moreover, three conjugated polymers containing tetraphenylethylene, carbazole and phenyl groups were used as stabilizers during the reduction of GO in tetrahydrofuran (THF) solution due to the π–π interaction and polymer wrapping effect; the resultant graphene composites containing different amounts of rGO were soluble in organic solvents. Among the three polymers, P1 exhibits the strongest affinity towards rGO, and rGO–P1 in THF solution is stable for months at the concentration of 1.5 mg mL−1. Furthermore, rGO–P1 is AIE-active and its PL intensity is 6.3-fold that of P1 under the same conditions (THF/H2O = 10/90, v/v). The distinguished optical properties and AIE effect of rGO–P1 allow it to act as a chemosensor for the detection of explosives in both the aggregate and solid state with high sensitivity. In the aggregate state, the detectable concentration is as low as 1.3 ppb and the quenching constant is up to 4.16 × 106 M−1, which enable its trace detection of picric acid.

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to represent entities and relations of knowledge graph in a low-dimensional continuous vector space. Recent works focus on incorporating structural knowledge with additional information, such as entity descriptions, relation paths and so on. However, common used additional information usually contains plenty of noise, which makes it hard to learn valuable representation. In this paper, we propose a new kind of additional information, called entity neighbors, which contain both semantic and topological features about given entity. We then develop a deep memory network model to encode information from neighbors. Employing a gating mechanism, representations of structure and neighbors are integrated into a joint representation. The experimental results show that our model outperforms existing KGE methods utilizing entity descriptions and achieves state-of-the-art metrics on 4 datasets., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures

Covalent functionalization of reduced graphene oxide (rGO) was performed by using conjugated polymers with different monomers through nucleophilic addition of nitrogen anions to rGO. Three conjugated polymers containing tetraphenylethylene, carbazole, and phenyl groups were used, and as a result of π-π interactions and the "polymer-wrapping" effect, the dispersion stability of rGO was improved. Even if the reaction site in the polymers was the same, there were great differences in the reactivities of the polymers, the dispersion stabilities of the resultant composites, and also the optical limiting (OL) performances of the resultant composites. The differences may be attributed to the π-conjugated structure and steric hindrance of the moiety in the polymer skeleton, which has scarcely been reported. Besides, the resultant rGO-P1 and rGO-P3 materials both showed excellent OL responses, even at 4 μJ. This behavior should enable their potential application in photonic and optoelectronic devices to protect human eyes or optical sensors from damage by intense laser irradiation.

Chitosan-ionic liquid conjugation (CILC), which was prepared through the reaction of 1-(4-bromobutyl)-3-methylimidazolium bromide (BBMIB) with chitosan, was firstly used to prepare functionalized graphene composite via the chemical reduction of graphene oxide (GO). The obtained water soluble graphene-based composite was characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), ultraviolet-visible (UV–Vis) spectroscopy and so on. CILC-RGO showed excellent dispersion stability in water at the concentration of 2.0 mg/mL, which was stable for several months without any precipitate. This may be ascribed to the electrostatic attraction and [Formula: see text]–[Formula: see text] interaction between CILC and graphene.

Numerical analysis is an important basis of science and engineering professional courses in higher education system. The course not only can train the thinking ability in mathematics, but also be able to train students to apply scientific methodology and computer technology to analyze and solve practical problems. Based on the teaching practice in the past decade, we have made the multi-level researches and reform on the teaching mode, teaching content, teaching methods and so on. The multi-dimensional teaching platform which can effectively support series of numerical analysis courses gradually formed. This article focuses on introducing the multi-dimensional design and teaching practice of the platform.

The microeconomic framework for data mining assumes that an enterprise chooses a decision maximizing the overall utility over all customers. In item selection problem, the store wants to select J item set S that maximizes the overall profit. Based on the microeconomic view, we propose a novel algorithm ItemRank to solve the problem of item selection with the consideration of cross-selling effect which has two major contributions. First, we propose customer behavior model, and demonstrate it with the data of customer-oriented business. Second, we propose the novel algorithm ItemRank which is implemented on the basis of customer behavior model. According to the cross-selling effect and the self-profit of items, ItemRank algorithm could solve the problem of item order objectively and mechanically. We conduct detailed experiments to evaluate our proposed algorithm and experiment results confirm that the new methods have an excellent ability for profit mining and the performance meets the condition which requires better quality and efficiency

The acid-catalyzed Mannich reaction of acetophenones with benzaldehyde derivatives and aromatic amines gives 1,3-diaryl-3-(arylamino)propanones in high yield