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OBJECTIVE: To prospectively evaluate the association between modifiable lifestyle factors and peripheral artery disease (PAD) among individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2D). RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We included 14,543 individuals with T2D from the UK Biobank. We defined a weighted healthy lifestyle score using nonsmoking, regular physical activity, high-quality diet, moderate alcohol consumption, optimal waist-to-hip ratio, and adequate sleep duration, and categorized into unfavorable, intermediate, and favorable lifestyles. We created a genetic risk score (GRS) using 19 single nucleotide polymorphisms previously found to be associated with PAD. We modeled the association between lifestyle score and PAD, overall and stratified by PAD genetic susceptibility. RESULTS: After a median 13.5 years of follow-up, 628 incident cases of PAD were documented. A linear inverse association between the weighted lifestyle score and PAD was observed, with a hazard ratio (HR) (95% CI) of 0.27 (0.19, 0.38) for favorable compared with unfavorable lifestyle (Ptrend < 0.0001). An estimated 58.3% (45.0%, 69.1%) of PAD in this population could be potentially avoidable if all participants attained a favorable lifestyle. Moreover, the PAD GRS was associated with increased PAD risk (HR [95% CI] per SD increment: 1.13 [1.03, 1.23]). A favorable lifestyle was able to partially mitigate the excess risk of PAD associated with higher GRS, albeit as a nonsignificant interaction. Several biomarkers in the lipid metabolism, hepatic/renal function, and systemic inflammation pathways collectively explained 13.3% (8.5%, 20.1%) of the association between weighted lifestyle score and PAD. CONCLUSIONS: A favorable lifestyle was associated with lower risk of PAD among individuals with T2D, independent of genetic predisposition to PAD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transient luminescent dynamics in low doped porphyrin side-chain polymer film, poly(porphyrin acrylate-styrene) (P[(por)A-S]), were measured by using time-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopic technology. At relative higher intrachain porphyrin comonomer concentration (0.27%), the transient luminescence relaxation becomes more rapid with the increase in the interchain polymer concentration, resulting in low luminescence efficiency. The origin has been analyzed according to the Förster-type bimolecular annihilation theory. However, at the porphyrin comonomer concentration (0.1%), the luminescence relaxation of the P[(por)A-S] film becomes faster with the decrease in the interchain polymer concentration, inducing lower luminescence efficiency. The luminescence quenching has been analyzed according to the theory of MM+ force field and exciton rotational diffusion. The theoretical analyses are in good agreement with the experimental results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to high efficiency, energy saving, environmental friendliness and safety, the air source heat pump (ASHP) has drawn much attention in the cold and serve cold climate areas of China. In recent years, the Chinese governments further promote the application of air source heat pump in the cold and server area in order to reduce conventional energy consumption and haze occurrence frequency in heating season. The outdoor air temperature is low and fluctuates greatly in these areas, which might lead to unstable running, low efficiency and frequent frost. In this paper, the development direction of ASHP in cold and serve cold was pointed out by analyzing the existing problems of air source heat pump under low temperature condition. These results could provide some references for promotion and application of ASHP in cold and serve cold area like Qinghai province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edge detection is one of the fundamental computer vision tasks. Recent methods for edge detection based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) typically employ the weighted cross-entropy loss. Their predicted results being thick and needing post-processing before calculating the optimal dataset scale (ODS) F-measure for evaluation. To achieve end-to-end training, we propose a non-maximum suppression layer (NMS) to obtain sharp boundaries without the need for post-processing. The ODS F-measure can be calculated based on these sharp boundaries. So, the ODS F-measure loss function is proposed to train the network. Besides, we propose an adaptive multi-level feature pyramid network (AFPN) to better fuse different levels of features. Furthermore, to enrich multi-scale features learned by AFPN, we introduce a pyramid context module (PCM) that includes dilated convolution to extract multi-scale features. Experimental results indicate that the proposed AFPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the BSDS500 dataset (ODS F-score of 0.837) and the NYUDv2 dataset (ODS F-score of 0.780). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work investigated a solar assisted heat pump system for drying Chinese wolfberry. The kinetic characteristic was firstly analyzed through a series of lab experiments. It was concluded that the Page model was the most suitable for predicting the heat and mass transfer of the wolfberry. Based on the wolfberry kinetic model, solar collector model and chamber air model, the coupled drying system model was developed. The accuracy of the mathematic model was determined through comparing with the preliminary experimental results. The influence of operating conditions on the thermal and energy performance of the dryer for the different operating mode was discussed. The drying weight of no more than 75 kg may be preferable in the stand-alone solar drying mode, and less than 15 h was needed to be dried. The electric energy consumption in the solar assisted the heat pump drying mode was lower than that in the stand-alone heat pump mode, and it was recommended that about 50 kg of wolfberry to be dried in the solar assisted heat pump system. Compared to the autumn drying, the reduction in the electric energy consumption was around 9.1 kWh during the 11 h summer drying process. The obtained results demonstrated the feasibility of the combined system for drying wolfberry, and also can provide the basic theoretical and experimental data support for the following research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been widely used in image denoising for their high performance. One difficulty in applying the CNN to medical image denoising such as speckle reduction in the optical coherence tomography (OCT) image is that a large amount of high-quality data is required for training, which is an inherent limitation for OCT despeckling. Recently, deep image prior (DIP) networks have been proposed for image restoration without pre-training since the CNN structures have the intrinsic ability to capture the low-level statistics of a single image. However, the DIP has difficulty finding a good balance between maintaining details and suppressing speckle noise. Inspired by DIP, in this paper, a sorted non-local statics which measures the signal autocorrelation in the differences between the constructed image and the input image is proposed for OCT image restoration. By adding the sorted non-local statics as a regularization loss in the DIP learning, more low-level image statistics are captured by CNN networks in the process of OCT image restoration. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art despeckling methods, in terms of objective metrics and visual quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to better release the heat generated by the electronic components, a novel heat dissipation system is proposed, which combines a microchannel heat pipe (MHP) with a high thermal conductivity and a radiative plate with a high emissivity at nighttime. First, a simple testing rig was made with an MHP and a radiative plate, where the radiative plate was made of acrylic resin, a curing agent, thinner, and aluminum plate, and had strong radiative cooling at nighttime. Second, the mathematical model was initially established and verified using experiments, where it was shown that the agreement between numerical and experimental data was well within experimental uncertainties. Comprehensive simulation investigations were conducted by varying wind speed, relative humidity, the cloudiness coefficient, dimension of the radiative plate, and tilted angle. The results show that: (1) the emissivity of the radiative plate was about 0.311 in the daytime and about 0.908 in the nighttime; (2) the influence of wind speed on reducing the component surface temperature was greater than the cloudiness coefficient and relative humidity; (3) the width of the radiative plate had a greater effect on heat dissipation than on its length, and the maximum size of radiative plate was recommended to be 400 mm × 400–500 mm (length × width), which was equipped with a single MHP (width: 60 mm). Additionally, the tilted angle of the radiative plate should be kept within 30° of the horizontal level. In conclusion, the novel heat dissipation system had a superior application value for providing assisted electronic component cooling in the nighttime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a fast algorithm for texture-less object recognition, which is designed to be robust to cluttered backgrounds and small transformations. At its core, the proposed method demonstrates a two-stage template-based procedure using an orientation compressing map and discriminative regional weight (OCM-DRW) to effectively detect texture-less objects. In the first stage, the proposed method quantizes and compresses all the orientations in a neighborhood to obtain the orientation compressing map which then is used to generate a set of possible object locations. To recognize the object in these possible object locations, the second stage computes the similarity of each possible object location with the learned template by using discriminative regional weight, which can effectively distinguish different categories of objects with similar parts. Experiments on publiclyavailable, texture-less object datasets indicate that apart from yielding efficient computational performance, the proposed method also attained remarkable recognition rates surpassing recent state-of-the-art texture-less object detectors in the presence of high-clutter, occlusion and scale-rotation changes. It improves the accuracy and speed by 8% and 370% respectively, relative to the previous best result on D-Textureless dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an efficient edge-based bilateral filter for real noisy image restoration. By dividing all pixels of a noisy image into edge region or non-edge region, the different strategies and parameters are adopted in the edgebased bilateral filter to balance the conservation of image features and the reduction of noise level. Extensive experimental results are shown that this filter achieves very competitive performance in restoring real noisy images, compared with other state-of-the-art denoising algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To promote the application of renewable energy in low-energy buildings in Alpine regions, a solar-air source heat pump (SASHP) system was investigated based on a low-energy residential building in Xining City. First, a solar fresh air (SFA) heating system simulation model was established in TRNSYS software, and the reliability of the model was verified with measured values. In addition, based on the SFA heating system model, a SASHP system model was further realized. The operating characteristics of the SASHP system were explored in depth and compared with those of the single-ASHP system in the heating season. The results show that the SFA heating system model is reliable, with relative errors that can be controlled within 15%. The indoor average temperature (T ave) can be maintained from 16.13 to 19.61 °C. The SASHP system can leads to T ave fluctuations within the range of 21.4–22.9 °C, and the solar fraction can reach 55% in the heating season. Furthermore, the SASHP system can reduce energy consumption by 55.38% compared to the ASHP system; additionally, the COP of the SASHP system is 109.43% higher than that of the ASHP system, and the annual cost is 9.7% lower. Moreover, the SASHP system produces 55.48% less carbon emissions than the ASHP system. These results provide guidance for the application of SASHP systems in Alpine regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A combined hydrothermal alkaline pretreatment method was optimized in this work. • The combined pretreatment method was helpful in shortening retention time. • Biogas yield was significantly improved under 175℃ hydrothermal +8% NaOH pretreatment condition. • Lignin removal caused by Alkali addition was the main reason in shortening digestion time and increasing methane yield. To alleviate the energy shortage and greenhouse effect, lignocellulosic biomass has received great attention for its sufficient produced in China rural areas. Miscanthus is a kind of effective energy crop for methane production due to its high organic content and biomass yield. While pretreatment is necessary before anaerobic digestion to improve the biodegradability of feedstock. A combination of hydrothermal and alkaline pretreatments was applied to reduce the recalcitrance of Miscanthus in this paper, and the results showed that the digestion performance was much better than single hydrothermally pretreated material. An 8% NaOH dosage at 175 °C was the best pretreatment condition and resulted in a 56.92% increase in biogas yield and a 45.4% reduction in digestion time compared to the control. Lignin was dissolved during hydrothermal alkaline pretreatment in a short retention time, causing destroyed structure of lignocellulose and high content of cellulose and hemicellulose maintaining. Delignification was examined an important factor for methane yield enhancing. Biodegradability, as measured by enzymatic hydrolysis, was markedly promoted. Under the optimal pretreatment condition, hydrolytic process was no longer a rate-limiting process in anaerobic digestion of Miscanthus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To evaluate associations of fish oil supplementation and plasma omega 3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 PUFAs) with risks of macrovascular and microvascular complications among people with type 2 diabetes, and to further explore the potential mediating role of metabolism-related biomarkers., Research Design and Methods: This study included 20,338 participants with type 2 diabetes from UK Biobank. Diabetic complications were identified through hospital inpatient records., Results: During 13.2 years of follow-up, 5,396 people developed macrovascular complications, and 4,868 people developed microvascular complications. After multivariable adjustment, hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for patients with fish oil were 0.90 (0.85, 0.97) for composite macrovascular complications, 0.91 (0.84, 0.98) for coronary heart disease (CHD), 0.72 (0.61, 0.83) for peripheral artery disease; and 0.89 (0.83, 0.95) for composite microvascular complications, 0.87 (0.79, 0.95) for diabetic kidney disease, and 0.88 (0.80, 0.97) for diabetic retinopathy. In addition, higher n-3 PUFA levels, especially docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), were associated with lower risks of macrovascular and microvascular complications. Comparing extreme quartiles of plasma DHA, the HRs (95% CIs) were 0.68 (0.57, 0.81) for composite macrovascular complications, 0.63 (0.51, 0.77) for CHD; and 0.59 (0.38, 0.91) for diabetic neuropathy. Moreover, biomarkers including lipid profile and inflammation collectively explained 54.4% and 63.1% of associations of plasma DHA with risks of composite macrovascular complications and CHD., Conclusions: Habitual use of fish oil supplementation and higher plasma n-3 PUFA levels, especially DHA, were associated with lower risks of macrovascular and microvascular complications among individuals with type 2 diabetes, and the favorable associations were partially mediated through improving biomarkers of lipid profile and inflammation., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Endocrine Society. All rights reserved. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com. See the journal About page for additional terms.)

Context: The relationship between the consumption of different beverages and the risk of microvascular complications in individuals with type 2 diabetes (T2D) is unclear., Objective: To investigate the association of individual beverage consumption, including artificially sweetened beverages (ASBs), sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs), tea, coffee, natural juice, and yogurt, with the risk of microvascular complications in adults with T2D., Methods: This cohort study included 6676 participants with T2D who were free of macrovascular and microvascular complications at baseline in the UK Biobank. Cox proportional hazard models were used to calculate hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs)., Results: During a median follow-up of 11.7 years, 1116 cases of composite microvascular complications were documented. After multivariable adjustment, a linear dose-response relationship was demonstrated between the consumption of ASBs and SSBs and the risk of microvascular complications. Compared with nonconsumers, those who consumed ≥2.0 units/day of ASBs and SSBs had an HR (95% CI) of 1.44 (1.18-1.75) and 1.32 (1.00-1.76) for composite microvascular complications, respectively. In addition, higher tea consumption was associated with a lower risk of diabetic retinopathy, with an HR (95% CI) of 0.72 (0.57-0.92) for whom consuming ≥4.0 units/day. There was no significant association between individual beverage consumption and the risk of diabetic neuropathy. No significant association was observed between the consumption of coffee, natural juice, or yogurt and the risks of microvascular complications. Moreover, substituting half units/day of ASBs or SSBs with tea or coffee was associated with a 16% to 28% lower risk of microvascular complications., Conclusion: Higher consumption of ASBs and SSBs was linearly associated with an increased risk of microvascular complications in adults with T2D., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Endocrine Society. All rights reserved. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Background: Evidence regarding the association between metabolism-related indicators and serum urate (SU) is limited. We aimed to obtain the incidence density of hyperuricemia and to explore the association between metabolism-related predisposing risk factors and SU., Methods: A total of 48,979 Chinese adults from the Beijing Physical Examination Center were included in the study. The partial least squares path model was used to explore the relationship between SU and metabolism-related risk factors. The generalized additive model was used for smooth curve fitting, showing the sex-specific associations of SU at follow-up with baseline fasting blood glucose (FBG) concentrations and age., Results: The incidence density of hyperuricemia was 78/1000 person-years. Baseline SU, age, sex, obesity, FBG, and lipid metabolism were significantly associated with SU at follow-up (all P values <0.05). Non-linear relationships were found between the baseline FBG concentrations and SU at follow-up, while U-shaped associations were observed between baseline age and SU at follow-up., Conclusions: The SU concentration is associated with several metabolism-related risk factors such as obesity and FBG. Recognition of these associations will aid in a deeper understanding of the multifaceted nature of SU regulation., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Liang, Zhang, Yu, Ding, Liu and Wang.)

What Is Already Known About This Topic?: Red and processed meat consumption has been positively related to an increased risk of diabetes in Western populations. However, the results remain inconclusive within Asian populations., What Is Added by This Report?: This dose-response meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies conducted in East Asian populations reveals a positive relation between the consumption of processed meat and increased risk of diabetes. Furthermore, a U-shaped association was identified between the consumption of unprocessed red meat and the risk of diabetes., What Are the Implications for Public Health Practice?: This research presents substantive evidence advocating for the reduction of processed and unprocessed red meat consumption as a viable strategy for mitigating the risk of diabetes in East Asian populations., Competing Interests: No conflicts of interest., (Copyright and License information: Editorial Office of CCDCW, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention 2023.)

Objective: To explore the correlation between the ideal cardiovascular health metrics (ICVHMs) and the incidence of colorectal cancer (CRC) among people aged 50 years or older., Design: Prospective cohort study., Setting: The UK Biobank, a prospective cohort of middle-aged participants recruited between 2006 and 2010., Participants: The study included 342 226 participants from the UK Biobank aged 50 years or older without prevalent cancer., Exposure: The ICVHMs consist of four behavioural factors (abstinence from smoking, ideal body mass index (BMI), physical activity at goal and consumption of healthy diet) and three cardiometabolic factors (untreated total cholesterol <200 mg/dL, untreated blood pressure <120/80 mm Hg and untreated fasting plasma glucose <100 mg/dL)., Main Outcomes: The outcome was ascertained by linkage to cancer and death registries using the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth codes C18-C20., Results: During a median follow-up time of 8.72 years, 3060 CRC cases were identified. Compared with the reference (participants with ICVHMs ≤2), the multivariable-adjusted HRs for subgroups with 3, 4, 5 and ≥6 ICVHM factors were 0.98 (95% CI 0.85 to 1.12), 0.90 (95% CI 0.77 to 1.02), 0.85 (95% CI 0.71 to 0.98) and 0.69 (95% CI 0.48 to 0.90), respectively. Among the seven ICVHM factors, lower BMI, healthier diet and ideal fasting plasma glucose were significantly associated with lower risk of CRC (HR: 0.86, 95% CI 0.78 to 0.95; HR: 0.92, 95% CI 0.84 to 0.99; HR: 0.90, 95% CI 0.80 to 0.99)., Conclusions: Adherence to the ICVHMs was associated with a lower risk of CRC among people aged 50 years or older. Among the seven ICVHM factors, BMI, diet and fasting plasma glucose played a more critical role in the prevention of CRC. These findings imply that adherence to ICVHMs should be encouraged to reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease as well as CRC., Competing Interests: Competing interests: None declared., (© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2022. Re-use permitted under CC BY-NC. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.)

We introduce a new class of twisted partially coherent beams with a non-uniform correlation structure. These beams, called twisted Hermite Gaussian Schell model (THGSM) beams, have a correlation structure related to Hermite functions and a twist factor in their degree of coherence. The spectral density and total average orbital angular momentum per photon of these beams strongly depend on the distortions applied to their degree of coherence. On propagation through free space, they exhibit both self-splitting and rotation of their spectral density profile, combining the interesting effects of twisted beams and non-uniformly correlated beams. We demonstrate that we can adjust both the beam order and the twist factor of THGSM beams to improve their resistance to turbulence.

In this paper, we proposed a fast algorithm for circle detection and measurement, which uses a lookup table and bitwise center accumulator (LUT-BCA). The LUT-BCA is a two-stage procedure. The first stage determines the candidate circle centers with normal lines produced by the lookup table and recorded by the bitwise center accumulator. The second stage computes the radius of each candidate circle center and validates these centers, which eliminates the false detections. The proposed LUT-BCA can also be easily implemented on massively parallel high-performance graphics hardware using the compute unified device architecture. Experimental results indicate that the LUT-BCA can locate circle centers and measure their radii accurately and is very suitable for real-time circle detection and measurement.

In this Letter, a probability-based non-local means filter is proposed for speckle reduction in optical coherence tomography (OCT). Originally developed for additive white Gaussian noise, the non-local means filter is not suitable for multiplicative speckle noise suppression. This Letter presents a two-stage non-local means algorithm using the uncorrupted probability of each pixel to effectively reduce speckle noise in OCT. Experiments on real OCT images demonstrate that the proposed filter is competitive with other state-of-the-art speckle removal techniques and able to accurately preserve edges and structural details with small computational cost.