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As a major economic crop, strawberry (Fragaria × ananassa Duch.) has been widely planted in the world because of their adaptability and high economic efficiency. In the process of strawberry production, the traditional techniques of furrow irrigation, irrigating irrigation and water and fertilizer management are still relatively common, resulting in secondary salinization of the soil and an imbalance of nutrient ratio, resulting in a decrease in strawberry yield and quality. A total of 2334, 2718 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in the 3-day, 6-day salt-treated leaf tissues compared with the controls, respectively. Based on the analysis of DEG function annotation and enrichment, a pattern of strawberry leaves response to NaCl stress was proposed. The processes related to plant hormone signal and lipid metabolism pathway were noted in the response of strawberry leaves to NaCl. Our transcriptome data provides valuable insights into genes involved in the growing process of strawberry seedlings under salt stress, and may help in developing seedlings with enhanced responses to salt stress in the years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pemphigus is a severe autoimmune bullous dermatosis that affects the skin and/or mucosa, and it may be life-threatening without proper treatment. The guidelines and/or consensus statements for treatment vary widely between groups. We selected 6 guidelines and consensus statements established by different associations about the management of pemphigus vulgaris (PV) and/or pemphigus foliaceus (PF) to review, compare, and contrast the similarities and differences of these recommendations and provide optimal management suggestions to physicians. Corticosteroids remain a first-line therapy for pemphigus, but there are many differences in initial dose, tapering schedule, and management of relapse between different guidelines. Rituximab is a monoclonal antibody targeting CD20-positive B lymphocytes that is approved as a first-line therapy in moderate-to-severe pemphigus. Immunosuppressive agents, such as azathioprine (AZA) and mycophenolate mofetil (MMF), are also widely used as corticosteroid-sparing drugs, but the adjuvant applications and dosage regimens of different recommendations are not standardized. We attribute these differences to the clinical scoring adopted, the standards for disease severity evaluation, the publication year of each guideline, and local and regional healthcare differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multi-level per cell (MLC) technique has been widely used to improve the storage density of NAND flash memory. In current design practice, bits stored in one cell are mapped to different pages, and all pages are protected with the same error correction code (ECC). However, those bits in one MLC flash memory cell have different error rates, and such unbalance increases with the number of bits in one cell. To guarantee the storage integrity, ECC should be tuned to cover the worst case page, which results in over-protection and redundancy waste for other pages and hence reduces storage capacity. This bit-to-cell mapping scheme also limit the number of bits in one cell to be integer. This paper proposes an aggregated page programming scheme, which maps all bits in one cell into the same page, to balance all pages to experience the same but lower overall bit error rates, so that the weaker ECC with higher coding rate can be employed. Furthermore, the noise margin of NAND flash memory cell decreases with program/erase cycling. To exploit such noise margin dynamics, this paper proposes to accommodate more storage levels in one cell during its early lifetime and dynamically modulate the number of storage levels to increase the overall effective storage capacity. Not-a-power-of-2 storage levels in one cell should be used to exploit the storage capacity aggressively, which can be enabled through proposed aggregated page programming scheme. Simulation results show the program capacity can be increased by more than 50 %. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns a decoding strategy to improve the throughput in NAND flash memory using low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. As the reliability of NAND flash memory continues degrading, conventional error correction codes have become increasingly inadequate. LDPC code is highly desirable, due to its powerful correction strength. However, in order to maximize the correction strength, LDPC codes demand fine-grained memory sensing, leading to a significant read latency penalty. To address the drawbacks caused by soft-decision LDPC decoding, this paper proposes a hybrid hard-/soft-decision LDPC decoding strategy. Simulation results show that the proposed approach could reduce the read latency penalty and hence improve the decoding throughput up to 30 %, especially in early lifetime of NAND flash memory, compared with the conventional decoding with equivalent area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new implementation of a high-definition image-processing engine, which mainly targets the 3-dimensional (3D) visualization and stereo video stream display of binocular display equipment. The engine is compatible with the mainstream analog and digital stereo videos in component format and is able to receive stereo composite video broadcast signals using an integrated analog stereo video decoder. The four modules include a spatiotemporal scaling transform engine, a 2D-3D converter, an image animating engine, and a 2D scalar operating in pipeline architecture to implement the video format conversion and the stereo effect enhancement. Furthermore, the data access, hardware structure, and system-level configurations are optimized. Finally, the proposed architecture is realized by 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The application-specific integrated circuit verification results show that the engine can generate a strong feeling of 3D immersion and high-definition image quality with minimal flicker. The chip has wide compatibility and an uppermost 1080P-processing capacity, which has approximately 3.5 million gates with about 43 mm die size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Various fusion strategies (feature-level fusion, matrix-level fusion, and image-level fusion) were used to fuse PET and MR images, which might lead to different feature values and classification performance. The purpose of this study was to measure the classification capability of features extracted using various PET/MR fusion methods in a dataset of soft-tissue sarcoma (STS)., Methods: The retrospective dataset included 51 patients with histologically proven STS. All patients had pre-treatment PET and MR images. The image-level fusion was conducted using discrete wavelet transformation (DWT). During the DWT process, the MR weight was set as 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, …, 0.9. And the corresponding PET weight was set as 1- (MR weight). The fused PET/MR images was generated using the inverse DWT. The matrix-level fusion was conducted by fusing the feature calculation matrix during the feature extracting process. The feature-level fusion was conducted by concatenating and averaging the features. We measured the predictive performance of features using univariate analysis and multivariable analysis. The univariate analysis included the Mann-Whitney U test and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. The multivariable analysis was used to develop the signatures by jointing the maximum relevance minimum redundancy method and multivariable logistic regression. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) value was calculated to evaluate the classification performance., Results: By using the univariate analysis, the features extracted using image-level fusion method showed the optimal classification performance. For the multivariable analysis, the signatures developed using the image-level fusion-based features showed the best performance. For the T1/PET image-level fusion, the signature developed using the MR weight of 0.1 showed the optimal performance (0.9524(95% confidence interval (CI), 0.8413-0.9999)). For the T2/PET image-level fusion, the signature developed using the MR weight of 0.3 showed the optimal performance (0.9048(95%CI, 0.7356-0.9999))., Conclusions: For the fusion of PET/MR images in patients with STS, the signatures developed using the image-level fusion-based features showed the optimal classification performance than the signatures developed using the feature-level fusion and matrix-level fusion-based features, as well as the single modality features. The image-level fusion method was more recommended to fuse PET/MR images in future radiomics studies., (© 2021. The Author(s).)