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Background: This study aimed to investigate the safety and efficacy of minimally invasive total mesoesophageal excision (TME) for esophageal cancer.Methods: We retrospectively collected data from patients with esophageal cancer who underwent esophagectomy at our center between January 2011 and June 2017. Among 611 eligible patients, 302 underwent minimally invasive total mesoesophageal excision (the TME group) and 309 underwent non-total mesoesophageal excision (the NME group). Outcomes were compared after 1-to-1 propensity score matching, and subgroup analyses were performed for cases involving pT1-2 or pT3-4a disease.Results: The propensity score matching produced 249 pairs of patients. The TME group had a shorter operative time (P < 0.001), lower intraoperative bleeding (P < 0.001), and a shorter postoperative hospital stay (P < 0.001). There were no significant differences between the two groups in the number of removed lymph nodes, 30-day mortality, or postoperative complications. In addition, both groups had similar 3-year rates of overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS). However, the 3-year recurrence rate in the esophageal bed was significantly lower in the TME group (P = 0.033). Furthermore, among patients with pT3-4a disease, the TME group had better 3-year rates of OS, DFS, and recurrence.Conclusion: Minimally invasive total mesoesophageal excision appears to be a safe technique that can reduce tumor recurrence in the esophageal bed. Furthermore, this technique provided survival benefits for patients with pT3-4a disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The polymerization of fused-ring acceptors (FRAs) to afford their corresponding polymeric acceptors for high-performance all-polymer solar cells (all-PSCs) has achieved remarkable progress in the past few years. However, due to the high degree of synthetic complexity for the monomer, the high-cost of these polymeric acceptors may limit their commercial applications. Thus, it is urgent to develop inexpensive and high-performance polymeric acceptors for all-PSCs. Herein, two novel polymeric acceptors (PBTzO and PBTzO-2F) have been designed and synthesized by copolymerization of noncovalently fused ring acceptors (NFRAs), which were employed in all-PSCs for the first time. Upon introducing the "noncovalently conformational locks (NoCLs)" in the backbone and selective fluorination of the end-group, photophysical and electrical properties, and solid-state packing properties of the NFRAs have been rationally tuned. As a result, the PBDB-T:PBTzO-2F based devices presented an excellent power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 11.04%, much higher than that of PBTzO based ones due to the increased charge generation and extraction, improved hole transfer and carrier mobilities, and reduced energy loss. More importantly, PBTzO-2F exhibited a much lower synthetic complexity (SC) index and higher figure-of-merit (FOM) values than the highperformance fused-ring acceptor based polymer acceptors (FRA-PAs) due to the simpler structures and more effective synthesis. This contribution provided a novel idea to achieve low-cost and high-performance all-PSCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of deep learning, the performance on facial expression recognition (FER) has been greatly improved. However, multi-view FER, where the facial information is difficult to be fully acquired due to pose deflections, remains challenging. This paper presents a generative adversarial network (GAN) based three-stage-training algorithm for multi-view FER. Specifically, the frontal-view faces are firstly adopted to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) in an efficient way. Then, the pre-trained CNN is embedded in a well-designed GAN such that the faces with different deflections can be synthesized as the frontal-view ones containing expression features. The original and synthesized faces are finally fused and employed to retrain the CNN classifier such that the multi-view FER problem is efficiently resolved. Experimental results demonstrate that the three-stage-training algorithm can achieve better performance than some existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a germanium (Ge) photonic crystal thin slab to achieve perfect absorption efficiency in telecom band. The maximum absorption is increased 14-fold compared to a planar cell with the same thickness at normal incidence. The absorption enhancement is attributed to the critical coupling with guided resonances by introducing an airhole photonic crystal on the thin slab. This novel design constitutes an important step towards high responsivity and high-speed photodetection with strong energy harvesting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Near-infrared perfect wave harvesting of graphene is theoretically and numerically obtained in a hybrid dielectric configuration without assistance of a reflecting mirror. The absorption is increased 43-fold compared to a suspended graphene layer at normal incidence. The mechanism of perfect absorption is based on critical coupling with a guided resonance introduced by a silicon bar array and Fabry–Perot (FP) effect of a silicon oxide layer. This lossless design is expected to find applications to allow the active area with effective generation and fast transport of photocarriers, paving a new way for on-chip small-footprint ultrahigh responsivity and ultrahigh-speed photodetection in silicon photonics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]