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Liang Tan,1,* Feilong Wang,1,* Yi Huang,2 Chuhua Fu,3 Haijun Zhang,4 Jianfei Feng,5 Yincai Xu,6 Xinzhen Ye,7 Rongrui Tang,8 Yinglian Chen,9 Liansheng Mou,10 Ronghao Li,11 Jingyu Chen,1 Jishu Xian1 1Department of Neurosurgery, Southwest Hospital, Army Medical University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Neurosurgery, The Ninth People’s Hospital of Chongqing, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Neurosurgery, Xiangyang No.1 People’s Hospital, University of Medicine, Xiangyang, Hubei, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Neurosurgery, Kaifeng Central Hospital, Kaifeng, Henan, People’s Republic of China; 5Department of Encephalopathy, Beibei Traditional Chinese Medical Hospital, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 6Department of Neurosurgery, Zheng Coal General Hospital, Zhengzhou, Henan Province, People’s Republic of China; 7Department of Neurosurgery, Songshan General Hospital, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 8Department of Neurosurgery, University-Town Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 9Zhuhai Brainlightning Research Institute, Zhuhai City, Guangdong, People’s Republic of China; 10Department of Neurosurgery, Liangping District People’s Hospital, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China; 11Department of Basic Medicine, Army Medical University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Jingyu Chen; Jishu Xian, Email Cjy1_2001@Hotmail.com; 1370321419@qq.comPurpose: The SARS-CoV-2 infection cases are increasing rapidly in neuro-intensive care units (neuro-ICUs) at the beginning of 2023 in China. We aimed to characterize the prevalence, risk factors, and prognosis of critically ill patients treated in neuro-ICUs.Materials and Methods: In the prospective, multicenter, observational registry study, critically ill patients with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), subarachnoi

Juan Chen,1,* Qiqiang Liang,1,* Shuo Ding,1 Yongshan Xu,1 Yanting Hu,1 Jingyu Chen,2,3 Man Huang1,3 1Department of General Intensive Care Unit, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China; 2Wuxi Lung Transplant Center, Wuxi People’s Hospital affiliated to Nanjing Medical University, Wuxi, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Lung Transplantation, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Man Huang, Department of General Intensive Care Unit, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China, Tel/Fax +86 571 89713427, Email huangman@zju.edu.cn Jingyu Chen, Wuxi Lung Transplant Center, Wuxi People’s Hospital affiliated to Nanjing Medical University, Wuxi, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China, Email chenjy@wuxiph.comBackground: Experience of ceftazidime-avibactam (CAZ/AVI) for carbapenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa (CRPA) infection in recipients after lung transplantation (LT) is relatively limited.Methods: A retrospective observational study was conducted on lung transplant recipients receiving CAZ/AVI therapy for CRPA infection. The primary outcomes were the 14-day and 30-day mortality. The secondary outcomes were clinical cure and microbiological cure.Results: Among 183 LT recipients, a total of 15 recipients with CRPA infection who received CAZ/AVI therapy were enrolled in this study. The mean age of recipients was 54 years and 73.3% of recipients were male. The median time from infection onset to initiation of CAZ/AVI treatment was 4 days (IQR, 3– 7) and the mean duration of CAZ/AVI therapy was 10 days. CAZ/AVI was mainly administered as monotherapy in LT recipients (80%). Among these eligible recipients, 14-day and 30-day

Position based dynamics is a powerful technique for simulating a variety of materials. Its primary strength is its robustness when run with limited computational budget. We develop a novel approach to address problems with PBD for quasistatic hyperelastic materials. Even though PBD is based on the projection of static constraints, PBD is best suited for dynamic simulations. This is particularly relevant since the efficient creation of large data sets of plausible, but not necessarily accurate elastic equilibria is of increasing importance with the emergence of quasistatic neural networks. Furthermore, PBD projects one constraint at a time. We show that ignoring the effects of neighboring constraints limits its convergence and stability properties. Recent works have shown that PBD can be related to the Gauss-Seidel approximation of a Lagrange multiplier formulation of backward Euler time stepping, where each constraint is solved/projected independently of the others in an iterative fashion. We show that a position-based, rather than constraint-based nonlinear Gauss-Seidel approach solves these problems. Our approach retains the essential PBD feature of stable behavior with constrained computational budgets, but also allows for convergent behavior with expanded budgets. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on a variety of representative hyperelastic problems and show that both successive over relaxation (SOR) and Chebyshev acceleration can be easily applied.

SOX9 (Sex-determining region Y Box 9) is a well-characterized transcription factor that is a marker for progenitor cells in various tissues. In the liver, cells delineated by SOX9 are responsible for regenerating liver parenchyma when cell proliferation is impaired following chronic injury. However, whether these SOX9+ cells play a role in liver carcinogenesis has not been fully understood, although high SOX9 expression has been linked to poor survival outcome in liver cancer patients. To address this question, we developed a liver cancer mouse model (PtenloxP/loxP; Sox9-CreERT+; R26RYFP) where tumor suppressor Pten (phosphatase and tensin homolog deleted on chromosome ten) is deleted in SOX9+ cells following tamoxifen injection. In this paper, we employ lineage-tracing to demonstrate the tumorigenicity potential of the Pten-, SOX9+ cells. We show that these cells are capable of giving rise to mixed-lineage tumors that manifest features of both hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (CCA). Our results suggest that PTEN loss induces the transformation of SOX9+ cells. We further show that to activate these transformed SOX9+ cells, the presence of liver injury is crucial. Liver injury, induced by hepatotoxin 3,5-diethoxycarbonyl-1,4-dihydrocollidine (DDC) or high-fat diet (HFD), substantially increases tumor incidence and accelerates liver carcinogenesis from SOX9+ cells in Pten null mice but not in control mice. We further examine the mechanisms underlying tumor formation in this model to show that concurrent with the induction of niche signal (i.e., Wnt signaling), liver injury significantly stimulates the expansion of tumor-initiating cells (TICs). Together, these data show that (1) SOX9+ cells have the potential to become TICs following the primary transformation (i.e. Pten deletion) and that (2) liver injury is necessary for promoting the activation and proliferation of transformed SOX9+ cells, resulting in the genesis of mixed-lineage

In order to cope with the increasing demand for labeling data and privacy issues with human detection, synthetic data has been used as a substitute and showing promising results in human detection and tracking tasks. We participate in the 7th Workshop on Benchmarking Multi-Target Tracking (BMTT), themed on "How Far Can Synthetic Data Take us"? Our solution, PieTrack, is developed based on synthetic data without using any pre-trained weights. We propose a self-supervised domain adaptation method that enables mitigating the domain shift issue between the synthetic (e.g., MOTSynth) and real data (e.g., MOT17) without involving extra human labels. By leveraging the proposed multi-scale ensemble inference, we achieved a final HOTA score of 58.7 on the MOT17 testing set, ranked third place in the challenge., Comment: Third place solution for the MOTSynth-MOT-CVPR22 Challenge

Bird's eye view (BEV) representation is a new perception formulation for autonomous driving, which is based on spatial fusion. Further, temporal fusion is also introduced in BEV representation and gains great success. In this work, we propose a new method that unifies both spatial and temporal fusion and merges them into a unified mathematical formulation. The unified fusion could not only provide a new perspective on BEV fusion but also brings new capabilities. With the proposed unified spatial-temporal fusion, our method could support long-range fusion, which is hard to achieve in conventional BEV methods. Moreover, the BEV fusion in our work is temporal-adaptive and the weights of temporal fusion are learnable. In contrast, conventional methods mainly use fixed and equal weights for temporal fusion. Besides, the proposed unified fusion could avoid information lost in conventional BEV fusion methods and make full use of features. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the NuScenes dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed method and our method gains the state-of-the-art performance in the map segmentation task.

We present a novel deep learning approach to approximate the solution of large, sparse, symmetric, positive-definite linear systems of equations. These systems arise from many problems in applied science, e.g., in numerical methods for partial differential equations. Algorithms for approximating the solution to these systems are often the bottleneck in problems that require their solution, particularly for modern applications that require many millions of unknowns. Indeed, numerical linear algebra techniques have been investigated for many decades to alleviate this computational burden. Recently, data-driven techniques have also shown promise for these problems. Motivated by the conjugate gradients algorithm that iteratively selects search directions for minimizing the matrix norm of the approximation error, we design an approach that utilizes a deep neural network to accelerate convergence via data-driven improvement of the search directions. Our method leverages a carefully chosen convolutional network to approximate the action of the inverse of the linear operator up to an arbitrary constant. We train the network using unsupervised learning with a loss function equal to the $L^2$ difference between an input and the system matrix times the network evaluation, where the unspecified constant in the approximate inverse is accounted for. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on spatially discretized Poisson equations with millions of degrees of freedom arising in computational fluid dynamics applications. Unlike state-of-the-art learning approaches, our algorithm is capable of reducing the linear system residual to a given tolerance in a small number of iterations, independent of the problem size. Moreover, our method generalizes effectively to various systems beyond those encountered during training., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures

Jingyu Chen, Yanrong Yin, Yefa Zhang, Xiuquan Lin, Tiehui Chen, Ze Yang, Dengwei Wang, Wenling Zhong Fujian Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Fuzhou, Fujian Province, People’s Republic of China Correspondence: Wenling Zhong, Fujian Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, No. 386 Chong’an Road, Jin’an District, Fuzhou, Fujian Province, 350012, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86-591-87539007, Email mbzwl@163.comPurpose: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is one of many major public health problems in China, and its prevalence and associated risk factors in the southeast of China need to be determined to facilitate disease control and prevention.Methods: A multistage stratified cluster sampling method was used to select 5486 participants aged ≥ 40 years from nine COPD monitoring districts in Fujian Province during 2019– 2020. Participants were interviewed using a laptop-based questionnaire and underwent pulmonary function tests. COPD was diagnosed according to the 2019 Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) criteria.Results: Final analysis was conducted using data from 4999 participants with qualified post-bronchodilator results. The prevalence of COPD was 11.6% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 10.5– 12.7). Risk factors for COPD in the logistic regression model were being male (odds ratio [OR] = 2.83, 95% CI: 2.01– 3.98), > 70 years old (OR = 16.16, 95% CI: 8.14– 32.08), having a low body mass index (BMI) (OR = 1.81, 95% CI: 1.13– 2.89), parental history of respiratory disease (OR = 1.78, 95% CI: 1.50– 2.10), being a current (OR = 2.82, 95% CI: 1.83– 4.36) or former (OR = 2.47, 95% CI: 1.45– 4.19) smoker, and indoor exposure to biomass (OR = 1.28, 95% CI: 1.05– 1.58).Conclusion: The estimated prevalence of COPD in southeast China is high. COPD was strongly associated with sex, aging, a low BMI, parental history of respiratory diseases, smoking, and indoor exposure to biomas

The MYC oncogene is a potent driver of growth and proliferation but also sensitises cells to apoptosis, which limits its oncogenic potential. MYC induces several biosynthetic programmes and primary cells overexpressing MYC are highly sensitive to glutamine withdrawal suggesting that MYC-induced sensitisation to apoptosis may be due to imbalance of metabolic/energetic supply and demand. Here we show that MYC elevates global transcription and translation, even in the absence of glutamine, revealing metabolic demand without corresponding supply. Glutamine withdrawal from MRC-5 fibroblasts depletes key tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle metabolites and, in combination with MYC activation, leads to AMP accumulation and nucleotide catabolism indicative of energetic stress. Further analyses reveal that glutamine supports viability through TCA cycle energetics rather than asparagine biosynthesis and that TCA cycle inhibition confers tumour suppression on MYC-driven lymphoma in vivo. In summary, glutamine supports the viability of MYC-overexpressing cells through an energetic rather than a biosynthetic mechanism.

The bacterial cell envelope is a protective barrier at the frontline of bacterial interaction with the environment, and its integrity is regulated by various stress response systems. The Rcs (regulator of capsule synthesis) system, a non-orthodox two-component regulatory system (TCS) found in many members of the Enterobacteriaceae family, is one of the envelope stress response pathways. The Rcs system can sense envelope damage or defects and regulate the transcriptome to counteract stress, which is particularly important for the survival and virulence of pathogenic bacteria. In this review, we summarize the roles of the Rcs system in envelope stress responses (ESRs) and virulence regulation. We discuss the environmental and intrinsic sources of envelope stress that cause activation of the Rcs system with an emphasis on the role of RcsF in detection of envelope stress and signal transduction. Finally, the different regulation mechanisms governing the Rcs system's control of virulence in several common pathogens are introduced. This review highlights the important role of the Rcs system in the environmental adaptation of bacteria and provides a theoretical basis for the development of new strategies for control, prevention, and treatment of bacterial infections.

Recent studies employ advanced deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for monocular depth perception, which can hardly run efficiently on small drones that rely on low/middle-grade GPU(e.g. TX2 and 1050Ti) for computation. In addition, the methods which can effectively and efficiently produce probabilistic depth prediction with a measure of model confidence have not been well studied. The lack of such a method could yield erroneous, sometimes fatal, decisions in drone applications (e.g. selecting a waypoint in a region with a large depth yet a low estimation confidence). This paper presents a real-time onboard approach for monocular depth prediction and obstacle avoidance with a lightweight probabilistic CNN (pCNN), which will be ideal for use in a lightweight energy-efficient drone. For each video frame, our pCNN can efficiently predict its depth map and the corresponding confidence. The accuracy of our lightweight pCNN is greatly boosted by integrating sparse depth estimation from a visual odometry into the network for guiding dense depth and confidence inference. The estimated depth map is transformed into Ego Dynamic Space (EDS) by embedding both dynamic motion constraints of a drone and the confidence values into the spatial depth map. Traversable waypoints are automatically computed in EDS based on which appropriate control inputs for the drone are produced. Extensive experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our depth prediction method runs at 12Hz and 45Hz on TX2 and 1050Ti GPU respectively, which is 1.8X~5.6X faster than the state-of-the-art methods and achieves better depth estimation accuracy. We also conducted experiments of obstacle avoidance in both simulated and real environments to demonstrate the superiority of our method to the baseline

We present a novel Material Point Method (MPM) discretization of surface tension forces that arise from spatially varying surface energies. These variations typically arise from surface energy dependence on temperature and/or concentration. Furthermore, since the surface energy is an interfacial property depending on the types of materials on either side of an interface, spatial variation is required for modeling the contact angle at the triple junction between a liquid, solid and surrounding air. Our discretization is based on the surface energy itself, rather than on the associated traction condition most commonly used for discretization with particle methods. Our energy based approach automatically captures surface gradients without the explicit need to resolve them as in traction condition based approaches. We include an implicit discretization of thermomechanical material coupling with a novel particle-based enforcement of Robin boundary conditions associated with convective heating. Lastly, we design a particle resampling approach needed to achieve perfect conservation of linear and angular momentum with AffineParticle-In-Cell (APIC) [Jiang et al. 2015]. We show that our approach enables implicit time stepping for complex behaviors like the Marangoni effect and hydrophobicity/hydrophilicity. We demonstrate the robustness and utility of our method by simulating materials that exhibit highly diverse degrees of surface tension and thermomechanical effects, such as water, wine and wax.

Zizhen Zhang,1– 3,* Fangyu Ju,1– 3,* Fei Chen,1– 3 Haoyue Wu,4 Jingyu Chen,1– 3 Jing Zhong,1– 3 Liming Shao,1– 3 Sheng Zheng,1– 3 Liangjing Wang,1– 3 Meng Xue1– 3 1Department of Gastroenterology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, 310020, People’s Republic of China; 2Institution of Gastroenterology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310000, People’s Republic of China; 3Zhejiang University Cancer Center, Hangzhou, 310000, People’s Republic of China; 4Institute of Genetics and Department of Genetics, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Hangzhou, 310012, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Meng Xue; Liangjing Wang Email xuemeng@zju.edu.cn; wangljzju@zju.edu.cnAim: Chemoresistance to 5-fluorouracil (5-Fu) is common in colorectal cancer (CRC). Programmed necrosis (necroptosis) is an alternative form of programmed cell death regulated by receptor-interacting protein kinase (RIPK) 1 and 3, assumed as a novel target of cancer therapy. In this study, we aimed to explore whether a novel small molecular agent GDC-0326 could facilitate the effect of 5-Fu through necroptosis.Main Methods: Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) assay and colony formation were performed to confirm the function of GDC-0326 in CRC cells. Western blot and immunofluorescence were conducted to measure the altered expressions of RIPK1/RIPK3 induced by GDC-0326. Subcutaneous tumor models were used to evaluate the chemotherapeutic effects and concomitant side effects of GDC-0326 in vivo.Key Findings: We found that GDC-0326 effectively suppressed the growth of CRC cells in a dose-dependent manner. The induction of necroptosis by GDC-0326 was correlated with the modulation of RIPK1 and RIPK3. Necrostatin-1 and GSK-872, inhibitors of RIPK1 and RIPK3, respectively, could rescue the cell deat

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: [Cao, Z, Chen, J, Alonso, EE, et al. A constitutive model for the accumulated strain of unsaturated soil under high‐cycle traffic loading. Int J Numer Anal Methods Geomech. 2021; 45: 990– 1004.], which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/nag.3188. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving., The road base is normally situated above the water table and thus in unsaturated state. Experimental results show that the accumulated strains of the unsaturated road base aggregate under high-cycle traffic loads are significantly influenced by the matric suction. To predict the accumulated strain of unsaturated road base aggregate under high-cycle traffic loads, a constitutive model was developed based on the Barcelona Basic Model (BBM) and the shakedown concept. In this model, the shakedown and plastic creep boundaries of the aggregate under cyclic loads were supposed to exist and to have the same shape as the “static” yield surface in BBM. The strain accumulation rates were described as an exponential function of the distance between the peak cyclic stress point and the conjugated point at the current cyclic yield surface. An explicit calculation methodology was adopted to avoid large calculation errors and to improve the calculation efficiency of the model. Comparison between model predictions and testing results proved the accuracy of the proposed model, which can be used as a basic model to predict the long-term deformation of unsaturated road base aggregate under high-cycle traffic loads., The National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51978611, 51778571)., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (author's final draft)

Jingyu Chen,1 Tianyi Liu,2 Hui Wang,3 Zhipeng Wang,1 Yanju Lv,4 Yuying Zhao,1 Ning Yang,1 Xueli Yuan1 1Department of Oncology, The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province 150001, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Pathology, The Second Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province 150086, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Oncology, Shandong Cancer Hospital Affiliated to Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong Province 250117, People’s Republic of China; 4Department of Oncology, The Second Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province 150086, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Xueli YuanDepartment of Oncology, The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, No. 37, YiYuan Street, NanGang District, Harbin 150001, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86-451-85939760Email hmu_yuanxueli@hotmail.comPurpose: Glioma (GM) usually presents with an aggressive behavior and has a poor survival outcome. The abnormal expression of circular RNAs (circRNAs) has already been detected in GM, and circ_0079586 was found to have an increased expression in GM tumors.Patients and Methods: We assessed the differences in the expression of circ_0079586 in GM tissues (N=60) and cell lines (N=5) using qRT-PCR. The clinical value of circ_0079586 was measured by Fisher’s exact test and Kaplan–Meier and Cox regression analyses. Circ_0079586 siRNA and vector were transfected into LN229 and U251 cells, respectively, and the transfection was verified by qRT-PCR. Cell growth was evaluated by cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8). Cell apoptosis was measured using flow cytometric assay. Cell metastatic properties were measured by wound scratch and transwell experiments. Subcellular fractionation was used to identify the location of circ_0079586. Dual-luciferase reporter test was utilized to confirm the interaction between mi

Monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is a key enabling technique for many computer vision and robotics applications. However, existing methods either can obtain only sparse or semi-dense maps in highly-textured image areas or fail to achieve a satisfactory reconstruction accuracy. In this paper, we present a new method based on a generative adversarial network, named DM-GAN, for real-time dense mapping based on a monocular camera. Specifically, our depth generator network takes a semi-dense map obtained from motion stereo matching as a guidance to supervise dense depth prediction of a single RGB image. The depth generator is trained based on a combination of two loss functions, i.e. an adversarial loss for enforcing the generated depth maps to reside on the manifold of the true depth maps and a pixel-wise mean square error (MSE) for ensuring the correct absolute depth values. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our DM-GAN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of greater reconstruction accuracy and higher depth completeness. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.

Chronic inflammatory disorders are thought to arise due to an interplay between predisposing host genetics and environmental factors. For example, the onset of inflammatory bowel disease is associated with enteric proteobacterial infection, yet the mechanistic basis for this association is unclear. We have shown previously that genetic defiency in TLR1 promotes acute enteric infection by the proteobacteria Yersinia enterocolitica. Examining that model further, we uncovered an altered cellular immune response that promotes the recruitment of neutrophils which in turn increases metabolism of the respiratory electron acceptor tetrathionate by Yersinia. These events drive permanent alterations in anti-commensal immunity, microbiota composition, and chronic inflammation, which persist long after Yersinia clearence. Deletion of the bacterial genes involved in tetrathionate respiration or treatment using targeted probiotics could prevent microbiota alterations and inflammation. Thus, acute infection can drive long term immune and microbiota alterations leading to chronic inflammatory disease in genetically predisposed individuals.

Jing Li,1 Wen Wen,2 Shu Zhao,1 Jingxuan Wang,1 Jingyu Chen,1 Yanrong Wang,3 Qingyuan Zhang11Department of Internal Medicine, 2Department of Anesthesia, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, People’s Republic of China; 3Key Laboratory of Fertility Maintenance, Ministry of Education, Ningxia Medical University, Xingqing, Yinchuan, Ningxia, People’s Republic of ChinaBackground: HOX transcript antisense intergenic RNA (HOTAIR), a long non-coding RNA transcribed from the antisense strand of the HOXC gene locus, has been shown to be overexpressed in various carcinomas and is thought to be an indicator of poor prognosis. Recently, HOTAIR was found to be an estrogen-responsive gene. We therefore conducted a meta-analysis to systematically summarize and clarify the association between HOTAIR expression and prognosis in the four main estrogen-dependent tumors.Methods: A systematic search of studies that examined the association and prognostic impact of HOTAIR in four of the main estrogen-dependent tumors was conducted in PubMed and Embase. Hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) were calculated to pool the effect size.Results: A total of 1,200 patients from eight eligible studies were included. The current study found an association between HOTAIR expression and overall survival (OS) in four estrogen-dependent tumor types (HR, 1.99; 95% CI: 1.02–3.90; PHeterogeneity=0.001). Subgroup analyses indicated that high HOTAIR expression appeared to be a potential prognostic biomarker in non-breast cancer patients (HR, 2.72; 95% CI: 1.65–4.48). There was also an increased risk in Asian populations (HR, 2.55; 95% CI: 1.62–4.00) compared with Caucasian populations (HR, 1.19; 95% CI: 0.16–8.83) and in patients without preoperative treatment (HR, 2.55; 95% CI: 1.62–4.00) compared with patients with preoperative treatment (HR, 1.19; 95% CI: 0.16&

Here, we monitor the dissolution of several natural protein fibres such as wool, human hair and silk, in various ionic liquids (ILs). The dissolution of protein-based materials using ILs is an emerging area exploring the production of new materials from waste products. Wool is a keratin fibre, which is extensively used in the textiles industry and as a result has considerable amounts of waste produced each year. Wool, along with human hair, has a unique morphology whereby the outer layer, the cuticle, is heavily cross linked with disulphide bonds, whereas silk does not have this outer layer. Here we show how ILs dissolve natural protein fibres and how the mechanism of dissolution is directly related to the structure and morphology of the wool fibre.

Hybrid surface micro-patterns composed of topographic structures of polyethylene glycol (PEG)-hydrogels and hierarchical lines of gold nanoparticles (Au NPs) were fabricated on silicon wafers. Micro-sized lines of Au NPs were first obtained on the surface of a silicon wafer via “micro-contact deprinting”, a method recently developed by our group. Topographic micro-patterns of PEG, of both low and high aspect ratio (AR up to 6), were then aligned on the pre-patterned surface via a procedure adapted from the soft lithographic method MIMIC (Micro-Molding in Capillaries), which is denoted as “adhesive embossing”. The result is a complex surface pattern consisting of alternating flat Au NP lines and thick PEG bars. Such patterns provide novel model surfaces for elucidating the interplay between (bio)chemical and physical cues on cell behavior.

We present an innovative and simple, soft UV lithographic method “FIll-Molding In Capillaries” (FIMIC) that combines soft lithography with capillary force driven filling of micro-channels to create smooth hydrogel substrates with a 2D micro-pattern on the surface. The lithographic procedure involves the molding of a polymer; in our case a bulk PEG-based hydrogel, via UV-curing from a microfabricated silicon master. The grooves of the created regular line pattern are consequently filled with a second hydrogel by capillary action. As a result, a smooth surface is obtained with a well-defined pattern design of the two different polymers on its surface. The FIMIC method is very versatile; the only prerequisite is that the second material is liquid before curing in order to enable the filling process. In this specific case we present the proof of principle of this method by applying two hydrogels which differ in their crosslinking density and therefore in their elasticity. Preliminary cell culture studies on the fabricated elasticity patterned hydrogels indicate the preferred adhesion of the cells to the stiffer regions of the substrates, which implies that the novel substrates are a very useful platform for systematic cell migration studies, e.g. more fundamental investigation of the concept of “durotaxis&rdquo

A general method for the generation of two-dimensional (2D) ordered, large-area, and liftable conducting polymer-nanobowl sheet has been demonstrated via chemical polymerization for the first time. The sheet is made using the monolayer self-assembled from polystyrene (PS) spheres at the aqueous/air interface as template, followed by depositing conducting polymer on the part of PS monolayer submerging in the aqueous phase via chemical polymerization, and core extraction. During the process of polymerization, no substrate is required, which caused the as-prepared patterned conducting polymer sheet can be easily lifted-off and deposited, in full size, on any flat substrate. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrum were used to characterize the products

Most of the ore-forming elements in this deposit were derived from the sedimentary manganese ore itself, except for a small proportion derived from the granite. The intrusion of the Weishan granite is the principal thermodynamic drive responsible for the transformation of the Tangganshan deposit from a sedimentary manganese ore deposit into a stratabound one. In addition to rhodochrosite, kutnahorite, alabandite and partschinite are the main manganese minerals. This is the major difference between this type of manganese ore deposit and other types., Most of the ore-forming elements in this deposit were derived from the sedimentary manganese ore itself, except for a small proportion derived from the granite. The intrusion of the Weishan granite is the principal thermodynamic drive responsible for the transformation of the Tangganshan deposit from a sedimentary manganese ore deposit into a stratabound one. In addition to rhodochrosite, kutnahorite, alabandite and partschinite are the main manganese minerals. This is the major difference between this type of manganese ore deposit and other types.