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Fatigue is one of the most common and debilitating non-motor symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), which could manifest during the early stage of the disease and persist through the disease course. However, the treatment options for fatigue remain limited for patients with PD.Using seed-based resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored the fatigue-related functional deficiencies in the anterior caudate nucleus, anterior putamen, and posterior putamen in a cohort of early-stage drug-naïve patients with PD. Thirty-eight patients with PD, 19 with and 19 without fatigue, and 31 matched healthy controls were selected. The fatigue status was defined based on the score obtained from the fatigue severity scale (FSS).Patients with PD with fatigue exhibited a decreased connectivity in the cerebellar-striatal, cortico-striatal, and mesolimbic-striatal loops. No increased functional connectivity was observed. The abnormal connections of the dorsal striatum subdivisions overlapped to extensive brain regions, including the cerebellum, inferior frontal gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus, lingual gyrus, rolandic operculum, insular, and hippocampus.Our findings revealed that the widespread functional deficiency in the striatal-cerebellar-cerebral cortical network may be critical to the pathology underlying fatigue in the early-stage PD. The key feature of fatigue-related connectivity was observed between the caudate nucleus and the cerebellum, which could serve as a potential biomarker or treatment target for fatigue in early-stage patients with PD in future studies.

Limited studies have focused on non-motor symptoms (NMS) in patients with Writer's cramp (WC). The current study aimed to examine the frequency of NMS and their association with health-related quality of life (HR-QoL) in patients with WC.A total of 80 patients with WC and 69 healthy controls (HCs) were enrolled. Motor symptoms was assessed by Burke-Fahn-Marsden dystonia rating scale and NMS was evaluated through several specific scales, including Hamilton depression rating scale-24 items (HDRS-24), Hamilton anxiety rating scale, Epworth sleepiness scale, Pittsburgh sleep quality index, fatigue severity scale (FSS), numerical rating scale for pain, and Montreal cognitive assessment. The HR-QoL was assessed using 36-item short form health survey (SF-36), which can be divided into physical component summary (PCS) and mental component summary (MCS). Multiple linear regression was used to analysis the association between each NMS and HR-QoL.The patients presented more symptoms of depression, anxiety, poor quality of sleep, excessive daytime sleepiness, and fatigue than the HCs. The most frequent NMS in patients with WC was anxiety (51.25%) and depression (46.25%) symptoms. We found that motor symptoms had no association with HR-QoL. Higher scores of HDRS-24 were associated with lower scores of SF-36 in PCS and MCS. Meantime, higher scores of FSS were significantly associated with lower scores of SF-36 in MCS.The NMS was prevalent in patients with WC, with frequent anxiety and depression symptoms. Depression symptoms and fatigue had a strongly negative impact on HR-QoL and deserve attention in clinic practice.

A metal–organic framework (MOF) thin film constructed from Zn nodes and naphthalenediimide (NDI) linkers was grown in-situ uniformly on a transparent conducting glass substrate. This transparent thin film exhibits intriguingly high-contrast electrochromic (EC) switching between canary yellow and dark brown by means of a one-electron redox reaction at its NDI linkers. The findings provide a basic comprehension of the relations between redox state and electrochromism and enrich the application of MOF in the field of optoelectronic materials.

In this paper, we study the doubling conditions for the stationary and dynamical Q-tensor system which describes the motion of nematic liquid crystals in dimension three, and then establish the unique continuation respectively.

Here we present the design and synthesis of a new robust microporous organic polymer (TPBP) decorated with phenazine groups which endowed reversibly redox-active properties. The obtained TPBP possesses relatively high surface area (359 m2/g) and good thermal stability. TPBP exhibits excellent catalytic capability for the oxidative homocoupling of amines with high activity and selectivity toward target products. Besides, this metal-free catalyst demonstrated excellent recyclability after 6 cycles under the investigated conditions. By means of EPR and UV-vis spectroscopy, a plausible mechanism of the amine oxidative coupling reaction was deduced via a single electron transfer from TPBP radical cations to amine substrates.

Variants in the annexin A11 gene (ANXA11) have been reported to be associated with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). These variants may be involved in the pathogenesis of ALS by causing defects in intracellular protein trafficking. However, the genetic spectrum and clinical characteristics of ALS patients with ANXA11 variants are largely unknown.Genetic analysis was performed on 1587 Chinese patients with ALS. Eight software packages were used to predict the deleteriousness of missense variants. In addition, we searched PubMed, Embase, and Web of Science for relevant literature and meta-analysed variant frequencies.In our ALS cohort, we identified 20 non-synonymous variants in 29 ALS patients, including one stop-gain, one frameshift, and 18 rare missense variants with seven predicted pathogenic variants. In a literature review of 11 reported studies that included 69 patients, 37 ANXA11 variants were reported, with a frequency of 1.7%, which was similar to that in our cohort (1.8%). Both our cohort and previous reports showed that ANXA11 carriers were more commonly males than females (12/17 vs. 19/31). Patients carrying ANXA11 variants affecting the C-terminal of the protein had earlier disease onset and shorter survival times than those carrying variants affecting the N-terminal. We found a relatively longer median survival time than that previously reported (53.6 months vs. 46.0 months). Additionally, Caucasian ANXA11 carriers were more likely to have cognitive impairment, typically frontotemporal dementia (FTD) than their Asian counterparts (20.0% vs. 14.3%). While more than half of the patients in our cohort had cognitive impairment, none had FTD.In our and previously published cases, ALS-associated ANXA11 variants predominantly affected the N- and C-terminal conserved domains. ANXA11 variant carriers are typically male and cognitively impaired. Our study extends the genotypic and phenotypic spectra of ALS patients with ANXA11 variants. Further expansion of the sample size is needed to analyse the clinical and non-motor symptom characteristics of patients and to deepen the understanding of the pathogenesis of ANXA11-associated ALS.

Heptazine units with highly rich nitrogen sites were employed to fabricate a new porous organic polymer (POP-HE) via direct coupling of 2,5,8-trichloro-s-heptazine and 4,4′,4″,4‴-(ethene-1,1,2,2-tetrayl)tetraaniline with the mild base N, N′-diisopropylethylamine (DIPEA) in tetrahydrofuran (THF) solution. POP-HE displays good CO2 uptake capacity (50.6 cm3 g−1, 10 wt%, 1 bar/273 K) and highly selectively adsorptive separation of CO2 over CH4 under ambient conditions. Impressively, at 273 K, the predicted IAST selectivity of POP-HE is 47.0-13.4 for the natural gas mixture (CO2/CH4 = 5:95) at pressures varying from 0 to 1 atm. Meanwhile, the result of calculated band gap value based on Tauc plot motivated us to investigate its photocatalytic activity. POP-HE was applied as heterogeneous photocatalyst for visible light-induced selective oxidation of benzyl alcohol to benzaldehyde, and exhibited great conversion of 33.6% under irradiation of white LED light, which is much higher than that of g-C3N4. Moreover, POP-HE can be recycled up to three times without significant decrease in catalytic activity.

The angioarchitecture of the spinal cord and microvascular changes after acute and subacute spinal cord injury (SCI) have been reported in rodents. Microvascular changes after chronic SCI have not been explored. We characterized three-dimensional microvascular changes during the chronic phase of cervical hemicontusion SCI in rats.At 12 weeks after 1.2-mm hemicontusion injury, microvascular parameters, including vascular volume, ratio of vascular volume to tissue volume, vascular number, and vascular separation, were measured at the epicenter and each cord segment, and the percentage and volume of spinal vessels with different diameters were measured by micro computed tomography at the injury segment.The 1.2-mm hemicontusion injury applied a compressive force of 1.050 ± 0.103 N to the cord, resulting in a cavity and a significant decrease in microvasculature at the epicenter. The vascular volume, ratio of vascular volume to tissue volume, and vascular number of the C5 cord decreased by 40%, 38%, and 36% at 12 weeks after SCI, whereas vascular separation increased by 54% compared with the control group. In the chronic phase after SCI, the percentage and volume of spinal microvessels at the contusion segment decreased significantly (especially vessels with diameters40 μm).Blood supply to the cervical spinal cord is insufficient during the chronic phase of cervical hemicontusion SCI, especially in microvessels with diameters40 μm. These results may provide a basis to explore microvascular changes of SCI during the chronic phase.

This paper investigates the Minimizing-Interference-for-Multiple-Paths (MIMP) problem for routing with minimum interference in wireless sensor networks, which is defined as: Given k routing requests { s 1 , t 1 } , … , { s k , t k } , find k paths connecting these routing requests with minimum (wireless) interference. A key point to solve this problem is how to quantify interference level among multiple routing paths. However, all the existing metrics cannot measure interference precisely under some certain circumstances, e.g., some of the routing paths have common nodes or links. This paper proposes a metric that can measure interference precisely among any set of paths, even though these paths have some nodes or links in common. For this proposed metric, the MIMP problem is NP-hard even for k = 2 . A heuristic Distributed On-line Algorithm for Minimizing Interference (DOAMI) is given to solve the MIMP problem. DOAMI has good communication and time complexity in theory, whose efficiency is also verified by simulation results.

Background: Levodopa-induced dyskinesias (LIDs) is one of important motor complications, which negatively affect the quality of life of patients with Parkinson disease (PD).Objects: This study aims to establish clinical-genetic models of LIDs prediction and explore clinical and genetic predictors of LIDs in early-onset PD (EOPD). Methods: A prospective cohort design including 279 EOPD patients were followed-up about 9.2 years. Clinical and genetic data were investigated. LIDs prediction was evaluated by the area under the curve (AUC) of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. A multivariable logistic regression model was conducted to discriminate the independent predictive factors of LIDs incident. An independent cohort including 144 EOPD was used as the validation group to confirm the developed prediction models. Results: The incidence of LIDs in EOPD at the first 5 years of duration and at the first 5 years after receiving dopamine replacement therapy (DRT) were 15.4% and 29.7%, respectively. In two clinical-genetic models, adding genotypes from 11 candidate variants significantly increased LIDs predictability compared to prediction based on clinical variables only (p

We study the problem of broadcasting scalable video coded (SVC) streams in cellular networks, where all user equipments (UEs) require the same video content and cooperate with each other. To take the advantage of channel diversity gains, the base station (BS) uses network coding to generate linear combinations of video packets for broadcasting in the downlink. Once receiving sufficient number of the combinations, a UE can relay packets to others via device-to-device (D2D) connections. The optimal downlink and D2D transmission arrangement problem is formulated as a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem, which becomes difficult to solve when the number of UEs increases. Then we convert the MINLP problem to a quasi-convex optimization problem using a continuous step function, and a primal-dual decomposition approach is used to solve it in a distributed way. In addition, we consider the influence of the transmission energy consumption to the optimal solution. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves near-optimal performance.

Applications of heterogeneous wireless networks can help to achieve ubiquitous services. Cooperative downloading is a download technique used on cellular networks and wireless self-organized networks. It helps wireless users who are nearing the limits of their data plan to download data from the Internet. However, the existing studies on cooperative downloading techniques omit the problem of data disorder. Data disorder can decrease the quality of services experienced by users and increase memory usage. In this paper, we model cooperative downloading using queue theory and propose a calculation method for solving data disorder and decreasing download time. Based on the calculation method, an adaptive disorder-avoidance cooperative downloading method is proposed. The method consists of two parts: an adaptive task dissemination algorithm and a dynamic task delay prediction mechanism. The algorithm is implemented based on the calculation method that takes into account the dynamic features of wireless networks. We also propose a prediction model based on neural network learning and moving average, then use the model in the prediction mechanism to enhance the performance of the proposed method in scenarios with dynamic download rates. We used Network Simulation version 2 for the simulation, and simulation results show that the proposed method can solve the data disorder problem and be adapted to mobile scenarios. Furthermore, it can decrease the download time.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are being used in various daily tasks such as object detection, speech processing, and machine translation. However, it is known that DNNs suffer from robustness problems -- perturbed inputs called adversarial samples leading to misbehaviors of DNNs. In this paper, we propose a black-box technique called Black-box Momentum Iterative Fast Gradient Sign Method (BMI-FGSM) to test the robustness of DNN models. The technique does not require any knowledge of the structure or weights of the target DNN. Compared to existing white-box testing techniques that require accessing model internal information such as gradients, our technique approximates gradients through Differential Evolution and uses approximated gradients to construct adversarial samples. Experimental results show that our technique can achieve 100% success in generating adversarial samples to trigger misclassification, and over 95% success in generating samples to trigger misclassification to a specific target output label. It also demonstrates better perturbation distance and better transferability. Compared to the state-of-the-art black-box technique, our technique is more efficient. Furthermore, we conduct testing on the commercial Aliyun API and successfully trigger its misbehavior within a limited number of queries, demonstrating the feasibility of real-world black-box attack., 29 pages, 8 figures

In this work, a new amino-decorated porous metal-organic framework [Ni(NH2-pba)2]·2H2O·2DMF (NH2-Hpba = 3-amino-4-(pyridin-4-yl)benzoic acid) (1) has been synthesized and structurally characterized. This compound exhibits a class IIIa interpenetration of dia net with a [2 + 2] mode. For its high porosity and amino-decorated channel, this compound shows efficient CO2/N2, C2H4/CH4 and C2H2/CH4 selectivity and high iodine adsorption.

In this paper, we are concerned with the regularity of solutions to the liquid crystal flows with rough initial data in R n . We prove that the solution constructed by Wang (2011) in [23] has higher regularity. Moreover we obtain a decay estimate in time for any space derivative.

The present paper is concerned with the existence, uniqueness and singularities of the Landau–Lifshitz equation coupled with Maxwell equations on Riemannian manifold in two dimensions. It is shown that there exists a weak solution which is regular with exception of at most finitely many singular points.