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This study aimed to evaluate the survival outcomes of neoadjuvant radiochemotherapy (NARCT) for early breast cancer. Female patients ≤ 80 years old with unilateral T1-T4 invasive ductal breast cancer treated with neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) and radiation therapy (RT) between 2006 and 2015 were enrolled from SEER database. Baseline differences in clinical and pathological characteristics were evaluated using chi-square test. The survival outcomes were estimated by Kaplan–Meier analysis and compared using Cox hazards models. The effects of baseline differences on survival outcome in patients treated with neoadjuvant radiation therapy (NART) and post-operation radiation therapy (PORT) were circumvented by propensity score matching (PSM). Altogether 14,151 patients receiving NAC and RT were enrolled, among whom 386 underwent NART. Based on a 1:4 PSM cohort, NART was an independent unfavorable prognostic factor for breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS) and overall survival (OS) for the whole cohort. However, among patients receiving breast conserving surgery (BCS) (HR 1.029, P = 0.915 for BCSS; HR 1.003, P = 0.990 for OS) or implant-based immediate breast reconstruction (IBR) (HR 1.039, P = 0.921 for BCSS; HR 1.153, P = 0.697 for OS), those treated with NART had similar survival outcomes compared with patients treated with PORT. In conclusion, NARCT was a safe and feasible approach for patients undergoing BCS and IBR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to evaluate the significance of chemotherapy (CT) among metaplastic breast cancer (MpBC), and to compare the survival outcomes between triple negative MpBC (MpBC-TNBC) and triple negative invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC-TNBC). SEER database was indexed to identify female unilateral primary MpBC diagnosed from 2010 to 2017. Patients were classified into neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) with response (NAC-response), NAC-no response, adjuvant chemotherapy, and no CT. Breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS) and overall survival (OS) was estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method and compared by log-rank test. Cox regression was used to evaluate the independent prognostic factors. A 1:4 propensity score matching method was adopted to balance baseline differences. Altogether 1186 MpBC patients were enrolled, among them 181 received NAC, 647 received adjuvant CT and 358 did not receive any CT. Chemotherapy was an independent favorable prognostic factor. NAC-response and adjuvant CT had a significant or an obvious trend of survival improvement compared with NAC-no response or no CT. MpBC-TNBC was an independent unfavorable prognostic factor compared with IDC-TNBC. Among them, there was significant or trend of survival improvement among all TNBCs receiving NAC or adjuvant CT compared with no CT. Chemotherapy was of important significance to MpBC prognosis and should be integrated in comprehensive treatment for MpBC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achieving the desired color temperature and color rendering index in light sources is challenging because of the deficiency of certain color components, notably cyan in the illumination spectra. In this investigation, we successfully synthesized orthogonal Ca5Ga6O14: Bi3+ (CGO: Bi3+) phosphors with space group Cmc21, featuring two distinct Ca(1) and Ca(2) sites. Under the excitation of 335 nm, a broad cyan emission with a 495 nm peak was observed. Gaussian peak fitting revealed two sub-peaks at 445 and 500 nm, originating from the emission of Bi3+ occupying Ca(1) and Ca(2) sites, respectively. As Bi3+ doping concentration increased, the luminescence experienced a red shift, attributed to the cooperative impact of crystal field splitting and electron cloud rearrangement. Through the substitution of Sr2+ ions, we achieved a 2.15 times enhancement in emission intensity and an increase in lifetime from 0.451 to 0.551 μs. This substitution also led to a consistent increase in the relative emission percentage of Bi(1) from 46.5% to 73.1%, while that of Bi(2) decreased from 70.5% to 44.9%. It is likely a result of some Bi3+ ions originally situated in the Ca(2) site migrating to the Ca(1) site. Finally, the introduction of Na+ ions for charge compensation resulted in a 20.18% increase in the luminescence intensity and an enhanced quantum efficiency of 84.21%. This CGO: Bi3+ phosphor holds promise as a potential cyan phosphor for white light sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Prognostic prediction based on prognostic stage (PS) with the Oncotype DX recurrence score (RS) has not been validated in stage III ER+/HER2− breast cancer. This study aimed to evaluate the added prognostic significance of RS incorporated with the PS system and to compare the prognostic prediction improvement with anatomic TNM stage (AS) using nomogram construction. Methods: The SEER database was indexed to identify ER+/HER2− invasive ductal or lobular breast cancer in AS IIIA–IIIC with RS results diagnosed from 2004 to 2013. Patients with RS < 18, 18–30 and > 30 were categorized into low-, intermediate- and high-risk RS groups. Comparisons of the distribution of clinical-pathologic characteristics among RS risk groups were performed using Pearson's chi-square test. Breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS) was estimated using the Kaplan-Meier method and compared across RS or PS by log-rank test. Cox regression was used to evaluate the factors independently related to BCSS. A nomogram comprised of PS and RS was constructed with discrimination, calibration and clinical benefit evaluated. Results: Altogether 629 patients who received RS were enrolled. There were 326 cases (51.8%) with low-risk RS, 237 (37.7%) with intermediate-risk RS and 66 (10.5%) with high-risk RS; 344 patients (54.7%) had PS IB, 84 (13.4%) had IIB, 150 (23.8%) had IIIA, 46 (7.3%) had IIIB, and only 5 had (0.8%) IIIC. Both PS and RS were independent prognostic factors for BCSS. There were significant or trends of differences in survival among RS within subtypes stratified by PS. There were significant differences in survival among PS only within intermediate-risk RS. A nomogram prediction 5-year BCSS was constructed with a c-index of 0.811. Lower histologic grade, positive PR and fewer positive lymph nodes were independently correlated with low-risk RS. Conclusion: PS incorporated with RS had improved prognostic significance for stage III ER+/HER 2− breast cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convolutional neural network (CNN) is a natural structure for video modelling that has been successfully applied in the field of action recognition. The existing 3D CNN-based action recognition methods mainly perform 3D convolutions on individual cues (e.g. appearance and motion cues) and rely on the design of subsequent networks to fuse these cues together. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-cue 3D convolutional neural network (M3D), which integrates three individual cues (i.e. an appearance cue, a direct motion cue, and a salient motion cue) directly. Different from the existing methods, the proposed M3D model directly performs 3D convolutions on multiple cues instead of a single cue. Compared with the previous methods, this model can obtain more discriminative and robust features by integrating three different cues as a whole. Further, we propose a novel residual multi-cue 3D convolution model (R-M3D) to improve the representation ability to obtain representative video features. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of proposed M3D model, and the proposed R-M3D model (pre-trained on the Kinetics dataset) achieves competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-art models on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the attack-resilient control problem for Markov jump systems (MJSs) with additive attacks. Both the sensor attacks and actuator attacks are taken into account in this paper, which make the attack-resilient control problem particularly complex. Moreover, different from multiplicative sensor attacks, the additive attacks are addressed in this paper. The adaptive laws based on projection operation are designed to ensure that the estimations of the unknown parameters are bounded. Based on the adaptive laws, the novel adaptive attack-resilient control strategy is proposed. Then, through combining the adaptive method and tracking control method, where the target tracking trajectories are the estimate values from adaptive laws, the boundedness and stability of system states are guaranteed in this paper. Finally, the adaptive attack-resilient control strategy is applied into an application example to illustrate the effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the long-term survival outcomes of breast-conserving surgery (BCS) in centrally located breast cancer (CLBC) compared with mastectomy in CLBC and BCS in non-CLBC, based on the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database. Methods: Female patients aged < 80 years with unilateral T1-T2 invasive ductal or lobular breast cancer undergoing BCS or mastectomy were enrolled. The differences in clinical-pathological characteristics were evaluated using Chi square tests. Multivariate logistic regression was used to measure the relationship between predictive variables and performing BCS in CLBC. Survival outcomes were estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method and compared using Cox proportional hazards models. To overcome the effects of baseline differences on survival outcome in patients treated with BCS in the central and upper-outer locations, a 1:1 ratio propensity score matching method was performed. Results: Overall, among 16,522 CLBC patients, 7982 cases (48.3%) underwent BCS between 1998 and 2015. Factors such as older age, Black race, invasive ductal carcinoma (IDC), grade I, small tumor size, none or limited lymph node metastasis, positive progesterone receptor status, and receiving chemotherapy were independently correlated with BCS. BCS was an independent favorable prognostic factor among CLBC patients, based on multivariate Cox analysis. It was also shown that CLBC had similar survival outcomes compared with tumors in the upper-outer quadrant, and had a better breast cancer-specific survival compared with tumors in the lower quadrants, based on multivariate Cox analysis. Conclusions: BCS should be an acceptable and preferable alternative to mastectomy for well-selected, early-stage T1 or T2 CLBC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific and precise dynamic navigation is the key to improving Beidou positional accuracy of agricultural machinery. Aiming at the gross error of agricultural machinery location. First, the paper deeply explores the principle of Beidou navigation. Second, according to the PVT information (position, velocity and time) solutions of Beidou navigation system, the least square method, Kalman filter method and extended Kalman filter method were studied. Based on their own advantages, algorithms were proposed that combines the differential adaptation and extended Kalman filter. Then, based on the equivalent gain matrix and iterative solution, a robust adaptive Kalman filter model is built to verify its effectiveness in reducing gross errors. At last, the four algorithms were simulated in MATLAB and the simulation results were compared to verify that the newly-proposed method is the optimal solution algorithm. The absolute error remained 5.2 cm, meeting the preciseness limit of the agricultural machinery navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Although it is well accepted that the survival outcome is most probably unaffected by immediate breast reconstruction (IBR) for T1–T3 tumors, the safety of IBR in T4 locally advanced breast cancer (LABC) remains unclear. Methods: By using data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, the trend of IBR for female T4 LABC patients undergoing mastectomy, chemotherapy and radiotherapy was explored. The predictors of IBR in T4 LABC were evaluated by multivariate logistic regression. The survival outcomes were compared by means of Cox hazards models adjusting for known clinicopathological variables and stratifying on the T stage and contralateral prophylactic mastectomy (CPM). Results: Altogether 714 cases underwent IBR between 1998 and 2015. The IBR cohort had a lower percentage of cases with T4d disease whereas higher percentage with CPM. The IBR rate was 10.1% and increased from 4.1% in 1998 to 17.7% in 2015. Since 2009, the rate of implant-based IBR exceeded that of the autologous tissue method. An age less than 45 years (OR 2.930, 95% CI 2.299–3.735) and CPM (OR 2.758, 95% CI 2.306–3.299) were the strongest predictors of IBR. In the 1:2 matched case–control analysis, IBR was not an independent prognostic factor for breast cancer specific-survival (BCSS) (HR 0.893, p = 0.236, 95% CI 0.741–1.077) and overall survival (OS) (HR 0.886, p = 0.183, 95% CI 0.741–1.059). BCSS and OS were similar among patients undergoing IBR whether they underwent CPM or not and whether they were inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) or not. Conclusions: IBR is oncologically safe in well-selected T4 LABC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: This study aimed to evaluate the prognostic significance of the Oncotype DX recurrence score (RS) in T1-2N1M0 estrogen receptor (ER)-positive, human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-negative breast cancer based on the prognostic stage in the updated American Joint Commission on Cancer, 8th edition. Methods: The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database was searched to identify ER-positive invasive ductal breast cancer in T1-2N1M0 with RS results diagnosed between 2004 and 2012. Patients with RS were categorized into low-risk (RS < 11), intermediate-risk (RS 11–25), and high-risk (RS > 25) groups. The distributions of clinical-pathological characteristics were compared among the RS risk groups using Pearson's Chi square. Breast cancer-specific survival (BCSS) and overall survival (OS) were estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method and compared across RS groups using the log-rank statistic. Cox models were fitted to assess the factors independently associated with survival. Results: The study enrolled 4059 cases categorized into prognostic stages IA to IIB. The RS risk groups were positively correlated with pathological prognostic stages (P < 0.001). The RS risk groups differed significantly in terms of BCSS and OS (P < 0.001). According to the multivariate analysis, RS risk group was an independent prognostic factor for BCSS and OS together with the pathological prognostic stage. The subgroup analysis showed similar survival rates across pathological prognostic stages in the RS low-risk group but significant differences in survival rates among pathological prognostic stages in the RS intermediate-risk group. The survival rates among the RS risk groups also differed significantly in pathological prognostic stage IA. Conclusions: Oncotype DX RS provided independent prognostic significance to complement the prognostic staging system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the data fusion of multi-sensors, the determination of weight directly affects the accuracy and performance of the fusion algorithm. In order to improve the accuracy of fusion algorithm, an adaptive weighted algorithm based on fuzzy preference relations is proposed. The degree of preference between signals is represented by introducing the improved logsig function, and then, the weight is calculated by fuzzy preference relations. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is significantly better than the mean value method, and the accuracy is basically equivalent to the method based on correlation function. The analysis of the actual vibration signals in axis system verifies the validity of the algorithm in the practical application. The algorithm in this paper has good dynamic performance and is easy to be implemented. It can be applied to the actual multi-vibration signal estimation to provide more accurate parameters for the next step of fault diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an adaptive tracking control scheme is presented for a class of nonlinear systems using nonlinearly parameterized first-order Sugeno fuzzy approximator. The parameters in the first-order Sugeno consequents and Gaussian basis functions are assumed to be unknown. First, based on the parameterization of the exponential function, a new parameterization model of first-order Sugeno fuzzy system is developed. The new representation of unknown system function is constructed by exploiting the signal replace approach. Then, unknown fuzzy parameters and known functions with the tracking elements being arguments are collected, respectively, and some new parameters and useful functions are defined, respectively. Furthermore, adaptive controller is designed and analyzed. Global boundedness of the closed-loop system is established, and asymptotic tracking is achieved. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a new adaptive backstepping control design method to solve the overparametrization problem in parameter estimation. Unlike the existing schemes, the concept of tuning functions is not introduced. However, the number of parameter estimates is reduced to be minimal, which is exactly the same as that of unknown parameters. Subsequently, it is shown that the proposed control schemes are equivalent to the tuning functions design. Two class of common nonlinear systems, that is, parametric strict-feedback system and parametric output-feedback system are employed to illustrate our design procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three kinds of star-shaped nylon 6 samples with different branched-chain length were prepared by the hydrolytic polymerization of ε-caprolactam using trimesinic acid as trifunctional reactant. The structure of prepared star-shaped nylons was characterized by infrared spectroscopy and H-NMR. Compared with linear-chain nylon 6, star-shaped nylons with the equivalent molecular weight present higher melt flow indices and lower relative viscosities due to decreased molecular dimensions and reduced hydrogen bond interactions between neighboring molecules. The molecular weights of the products were determined by end-group titration and H-NMR, and the molecular weight distributions (MWDs) were evaluated by gel permeation chromatography. The results show that the molecular weight decreased and the MWD narrowed as the concentration of trimesinic acid increased. Wide-angle X-ray diffraction patterns of star-shaped and linear-chain nylons show that increasing the concentration of trimesinic acid leads to good symmetry and high crystallizability, but this also degrades crystal perfection as observed using a polarized optical microscope. The viscosity of nylon 6 can be significantly reduced while maintaining its mechanical performance through the use of star-branching and an appropriate concentration of trimesinic acid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]