Search

The influence of the curing methods on the flexural performances of the milling steel fiber reinforced ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) with a high fiber content was systematically evaluated in this study, alongside the flowability and compressive strength. The UHPC specimens were subjected to standard curing and steam curing, employing three steel fiber reinforcing schedules: single milling fiber, single straight fiber, and a combination of both. The flowability of the UHPC was found to be less affected by the milling fiber compared to the straight fiber. Steam curing significantly enhanced the compressive strength but had a slight negative effect on the flexural behavior. However, this adverse effect could be mitigated as the fiber content increased. The flexural strength and toughness of the UHPC with milling fiber were minimally influenced by steam curing, suggesting that standard curing was sufficient for the milling fiber-reinforced UHPC. Conversely, steam curing exhibited an improvement in the flexural behavior of the UHPC containing a hybrid combination of milling and straight fibers. In addition to developing an empirical model for compressive and flexural strengths, we proposed a data-driven model called Gaussian process regression (GPR) to predict the flexural behaviors of the UHPC with varying fiber content, types, and curing methods. The data-driven model demonstrated high accuracy, with an R2 value of 1.0 when compared to the experimental data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ultrahigh-performance concrete (UHPC) is susceptible to various forms of abrasion during its service life. This study is an investigation of the abrasion resistance of UHPC, focusing on two primary causes of wear: dynamic traffic loads and hydraulic impacts. To enhance the material's resistance to abrasion, milling steel fibres were utilised. For comparative purposes, straight steel fibres and hybrid milling–straight steel fibres were also employed. The protective function of the steel fibres primarily comes into effect once the concrete cover has experienced wear. When subjected to traffic and hydraulic loads, UHPC containing milling fibres exhibited superior resistance, compared with that containing straight fibres, while maintaining favourable workability. Notably, the UHPC incorporating hybrid steel fibres, which form a composite skeleton, owing to the presence of two fibre types, demonstrated even greater effectiveness in resisting external abrasion. Furthermore, the abrasion resistances observed under both traffic and hydraulic conditions displayed a positive linear correlation, with R2 > 0.8. These findings suggest the feasibility of evaluating the material's abrasion resistance under various wearing causes using a single test method. The outcomes of this study hold promise in advancing the development of UHPC and promoting its utilisation in conditions characterised by severe abrasion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Named Entity Recognition (NER) on Clinical Electronic Medical Records (CEMR) is a fundamental step in extracting disease knowledge by identifying specific entity terms such as diseases, symptoms, etc. However, the state-of-the-art NER methods based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) fail to exploit GPU parallelism fully under the massive medical records. Although a novel NER method based on Iterated Dilated CNNs (ID-CNNs) can accelerate network computing, it tends to ignore the word-order feature and semantic information of the current word. In order to enhance the performance of ID-CNNs-based models on NER tasks, an attention-based ID-CNNs-CRF model, which combines the word-order feature and local context, is proposed. Firstly, position embedding is utilized to fuse word-order information. Secondly, the ID-CNNs architecture is used to extract global semantic information rapidly. Simultaneously, the attention mechanism is employed to pay attention to the local context. Finally, we apply the CRF to obtain the optimal tag sequence. Experiments conducted on two CEMR datasets show that our model outperforms traditional ones. The F1-scores of 94.55% and 91.17% are obtained respectively on these two datasets, and both are better than LSTM-based models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This study leveraged milling steel fibers to enhance the flexural capacity of ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC). We assessed UHPC's flexural performance, measuring compressive strength and flowability, considering three fiber types: milling, straight, and a hybrid. UHPC with milling fibers displayed superior compressive strength and flowability compared to straight fiber. Milling fibers consistently enhanced UHPC’s flexural capacity by over 120%, with a flowability reduction below 15%. Hybrid fiber demonstrated a balanced and commendable performance. Data-driven and theoretical flexural models were developed for UHPC with both fibers. the Gaussian process regression data-driven model outperformed the other 18 models, with an error below 3.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The incidence of duodenal adenocarcinoma is increasing, with limited studies on this disease published. This multicenter retrospective study aimed to analyze the clinicopathologic features of duodenal adenocarcinoma and identify prognostic factors for postoperative survival., Methods: Demographic characteristics, clinicopathologic features, treatment outcomes, and survival of patients with duodenal adenocarcinoma undergoing surgical treatment at 16 Chinese medical centers from 2012 to 2023 were retrospectively analyzed., Results: Among the 2,189 patients with duodenal adenocarcinoma included, 50.07% had extra-ampullary duodenal adenocarcinoma and 49.93% had peri-ampullary duodenal adenocarcinoma. The 1-, 3-, and 5-year overall survival rates for patients who underwent radical surgery were 91.78%, 69.30%, and 55.86%, respectively. The median overall survival was 73 months (range, 64-84), and the median progression-free survival was 64 months (range, 52-76). No differences in survival were observed between the laparotomy and minimally invasive surgery groups (log-rank P = .562); furthermore, no significant between-group differences in operation time, lymph node dissection, postoperative complications, or in-hospital mortality were observed (P > .05). The minimally invasive surgery group experienced less intraoperative blood loss (250 mL vs 100 mL, P < .001), fewer intraoperative blood transfusions (24.97% vs 18.84%, P = .002), and shorter hospital stays (28 days vs 23 days, P < .001). Multivariate Cox regression analysis revealed that advanced age, advanced stage, longer operation time, intraoperative blood transfusion, and postoperative hemorrhage were independent risk factors for poor prognosis., Conclusion: Radical surgery was associated with favorable overall survival among patients with duodenal adenocarcinoma, and no difference in survival was observed between patients with extra-ampullary duodenal adenocarcinoma and peri-ampullary duodenal adenocarcinoma. Minimally invasive surgery is a reliable alternative for duodenal adenocarcinoma treatment., Competing Interests: Conflicts of Interest/Disclosure The authors have no relevant financial disclosures., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). This article has been retracted by the Editor-in-Chief because several results reported in the manuscript were plagiarized from the following article published in 2014 by Zhang et al.: Zhang Z, Zhang L, Zhou C, Wu H. Ketamine inhibits LPS-induced HGMB1 release in vitro and in vivo. Int Immunopharmacol 2014;23:14–26. The editor was contacted by the editor of International Immunopharmacology, who had been alerted regarding the presence of duplicate figures in the two articles. Examination of the articles confirmed that data in Figures 1, 2, and 11 in the paper by Wang et al. appeared to have been plagiarized from the paper by Zhang et al. The corresponding author of the paper by Wang et al. was not able to provide a satisfactory explanation or the original related data to refute the allegation., (Crown Copyright © 2015. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)