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Key Clinical Message: Good's syndrome (GS) presents with thymoma, hypogammaglobulinemia, and recurrent infection. The manifestations of patients diagnosed with GS and Cytomegalovirus (CMV) gastroenteritis are rare and non‐specific. Early diagnosis and treatment can improve the prognosis of the rare disease. Good's syndrome (GS), a rare acquired immunodeficiency condition, is characterized by thymoma, hypogammaglobulinemia, and low peripheral B‐lymphocyte count. GS tends to occur in individuals aged 40–60 years, resulting in increased risk of recurrent infections with various conditional pathogenic bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Cytomegalovirus (CMV) can cause pneumonia, retinitis, encephalitis, and enteritis in GS patient, but CMV infection in the alimentary tract is usually underestimated, delayed diagnosed and misdiagnosed. In this study, we reported a female patient with GS and chronic diarrhea due to CMV infection and reviewed the literature to conclude the characteristics of this rare condition to improve the clinical diagnosis and prognosis of CMV gastroenteritis in patients with GS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Oral Squamous Cell Carcinoma (OSCC) is one of the most severe cancers in the world, and its early detection is crucial for saving patients. There is an inevitable necessity to develop the automatic noninvasive OSCC diagnosis approach to identify the malignant tissues on Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) images. Methods: This study presents a novel Multi‐Level Deep Residual Learning (MDRL) network to identify malignant and benign(normal) tissues from OCT images and trains the network in 460 OCT images captured from 37 patients. The diagnostic performances are compared with different methods in the image‐level and the resected patch‐level. Results: The MDRL system achieves the excellent diagnostic performance, with 91.2% sensitivity, 83.6% specificity, 87.5% accuracy, 85.3% PPV, and 90.2% NPV in image‐level, with 0.92 AUC value. Besides, it also implements 100% sensitivity, 86.7% specificity, 93.1% accuracy, 87.5% PPV, and 100% NPV in the resected patch‐level. Conclusion: The developed deep learning system expresses superior performance in noninvasive oral squamous cell carcinoma diagnosis, compared with traditional CNNs and a specialist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bone formation is dependent on the osteoblasts which are differentiated from bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs). In addition to potent proliferation, self‐renewal, and pluripotent differentiation, BMSCs have been extensively studied due to their low immunogenicity and immunomodulatory effects. Recently, galectin‐1 (Gal‐1) has been proposed as a potent mediator of immunomodulatory properties of BMSCs. Previous study demonstrated that Gal‐1 showed age‐related decline in mice serum and serum Gal‐1 was positively associated with bone mass in mice. The current study makes attempts to elucidate the functional role of Gal‐1 in skeletal system by investigating the regulation of Gal‐1 expression during BMSCs osteogenic differentiation and the molecular mechanisms underlying the effects of Gal‐1 on BMSCs osteogenic differentiation. In Gal‐1 null (−/−) mice, bone loss was observed due to bone formation attenuation. In in vitro experiments, Gal‐1 supported the osteogenic differentiation of BMSCs by binding to CD146 to activate Lrp5 expression and Wnt/β‐catenin signaling pathway. Meanwhile, there was positive feedback regulation via Wnt/β‐catenin signaling to maintain Gal‐1 high‐level expression during osteogenic differentiation of BMSCs. More importantly, Gal‐1 down‐regulation in BMSCs and attenuation of osteogenic differentiation potential of BMSCs were observed in aged mice compared with young mice. Gal‐1 over‐expression could enhance osteogenic differentiation potential of aged BMSCs. Our study will benefit not only for deeper insights into the functional role of Gal‐1 but also for finding new targets to modulate BMSCs osteogenic differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pioneering work from Lieping Chen's laboratory identified Siglec‐15 as a novel tumor immune suppressor, while the regulatory mechanisms underlying the broad upregulation of Siglec‐15 in human cancers remain obscure. Here we found that long non–coding RNA (lncRNA) LINC00973 was higher in Siglec‐15‐positive clear‐cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC), and LINC00973 positively regulated Siglec‐15 expression at transcriptional level. This effect was evidently dependent on miR‐7109‐3p (designated as miR‐7109 hereafter), and we provided evidence that Siglec‐15 is a direct target of miR‐7109. Through sponging miR‐7109, LINC00973 functioned as competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) to control cell surface abundance of Siglec‐15, and, consequently, was involved in cancer immune suppression. We further demonstrated that LINC00973 and miR‐7109 expression in ccRCC antagonistically influenced immune activation of co–cultured Jurkat cells. Our study highlighted the importance of LINC00973‐miR‐7109‐Siglec‐15 in immune evasion in ccRCC, which offers significant opportunity for both therapeutic intervention and diagnostic/prognostic exploitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Even though Java is the de facto programming language for enterprise applications, there exist only a limited number of Java-based benchmarks to understand the performance on emerging multicore systems. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a report generation benchmark that is developed on top of Open Source Apache Geronimo's DayTrader benchmark. Report generation and rendering is at the heart of many enterprise business analytics and business intelligence software products, and it is used by many enterprise applications. We evaluate the performance scalability of this benchmark on a state-of-the-art Power7 multicore system with 8 Power7 cores and 32 hardware threads. The benchmark throughput scales linearly up to eight hardware threads, but beyond that point, the throughput falls sharply. Significant locking in the Java class libraries for non-shared objects results in this performance drop. Splitting the locks on these shared classes results in near linear scaling from eight to 32 threads and improved the throughput by 80%. We also show that the Linux operating system load balancing could result in a degraded application performance in hardware multithreaded systems and simultaneous-multithreads-aware task scheduling results in uniform core-resource utilization as well as improved application performance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nanofiber membranes have huge potential applications in many areas due to their unique properties. However, the thermoplastic micro/nanofiber membranes were rarely reported. In this paper, polypropylene (PP) nanofibers were prepared by melt extrusion of immiscible blends of PP, cellulose acetate butyrate (CAB), and subsequent removal of the CAB matrix. The wet-laid application was used to make PP nanofiber membranes and PP-g-MAH/nonwoven micro/nanofiber membrane. The properties of membranes including morphology, apparent density, porosity, contact-angle, pore size distribution, and water flux were characterized. The results showed that the consequent membranes were provided with optimistic porosity and pore size distribution. Moreover, they were all with high pure water fluxes, which were superior to that of PP microporous membrane. They performed an excellent separation performance of TiO2 suspension and dyeing wastewater. The work revealed this method could be an efficient one to make thermoplastic polymer micro/nanofiber membranes, and they would have a brilliant potential application for water treatment. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Low-grade chronic inflammation and endothelial dysfunction have been hypothesized to underlie the constellation of cardiometabolic risk factors, possibly by inducing insulin resistance. In the present study, we investigated associations between inflammation, endothelial dysfunction biomarkers and insulin resistance [measured by homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR)] in a large community population. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional study among 2589 participants aged 20 years and older in Inner Mongolia, China. Overnight fasting blood samples were obtained to measure the plasma glucose, serum insulin and biomarkers including C-reactive protein (CRP), soluble inter-cellular adhesion molecule-1 (sICAM-1), soluble E-selectin (sE-selectin) and angiotensin II. Results Among the residents of Inner Mongolia, levels of C-reactive protein (7.58 versus 5.63), soluble E-selectin (20.69 versus 17.93) and angiotensin II (51.80 versus 48.00) were all significantly higher in individuals with a higher HOMA-IR than in those with lower HOMA-IR. Higher HOMA-IR was also positively and significantly ( p < 0.05) associated with higher C-reactive protein (odds ratio 1.47, 95% confidence interval 1.19, 1.82), and higher soluble E-selectin (odds ratio 1.53, 95% confidence interval 1.24, 1.88), adjusted for multivariables. Conclusions Elevated C-reactive protein and soluble E-selectin were associated with higher HOMA-IR among residents of Inner Mongolia. This study suggests that inflammation and endothelial dysfunction may relate to insulin resistance. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection causes pneumonia and sepsis. Previous research found that X‐ray radiation can induce P. aeruginosa to release outer membrane vesicles (OMVs) of relatively consistent sizes. This study found that OMVs derived from X‐ray‐irradiated P. aeruginosa can significantly inhibit lung leakage, inflammatory cell infiltrating into lung, and the production of pro‐inflammatory cytokines, IL‐1β and TNFα caused by P. aeruginosa infection under preventive and therapeutic administration conditions. Under the same conditions, OMVs also significantly alleviated pathological characteristics of lung injury, including pulmonary edema, pulmonary hemorrhage, and alveolar wall thickening. OMVs also significantly reduced bacterial burdens in peritoneal cavity, accompanied by a reduction in the number of viable bacteria capable of forming bacterial colonies. Pretreating macrophages and neutrophils with OMVs enhances their bactericidal ability. When bacteria were cocultured with treated cells, the number of viable bacteria capable of forming bacterial colonies was significantly reduced. OMVs themselves have not been shown to cause any lung injury or affect bacterial viability. Therefore, OMVs derived from X‐ray‐irradiated P. aeruginosa may not only be applied in prevention and treatment of diseases associated with P. aeruginosa infection, but also served as an excellent vaccine development platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]