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Background: Oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) are myelinated glial cells of the central nervous system (CNS), able to regenerate oligodendrocytes and myelin. This study aimed to elucidate the effect of A2B5-positive (A2B5+) OPC transplantation in rats with spinal cord contusion (SCC) and to investigate changes in expression of various factors involved in the Notch signaling pathway after OPC transplantation. Methods: OPCs were obtained from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) originating from mouse embryo fibroblasts (MEFs). After identification of iPSCs and iPSC-derived OPCs, A2B5+OPCs were transplanted into the injured site of rats with SCC one week after SCC insult. Behavioral tests evaluated motor and sensory function 7 days after OPC transplantation. Real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) determined the expression of various cytokines related to the Notch signaling pathway after OPC transplantation. Results: IPSC-derived OPCs were successfully generated from MEFs, as indicated by positive immunostaining of A2B5, PDGFα and NG2. Further differentiation of OPCs was identified by immunostaining of Olig2, Sox10, Nkx2.2, O4, MBP and GFAP. Importantly, myelin formation was significantly enhanced in the SCC+OPC group and SCI-induced motor and sensory dysfunction was largely alleviated by A2B5+OPC transplantation. Expression of factors involved in the Notch signaling pathway (Notch-1, Numb, SHARP1 and NEDD4) was significantly increased after OPC transplantation. Conclusions: A2B5+OPC transplantation attenuates motor and sensory dysfunction in SCC rats by promoting myelin formation, which may be associated with change in expression of factors involved in the Notch signaling pathway.

Background Although several measures have been taken to control hand foot and mouth disease (HFMD) and herpangina (HA), these two diseases have been prevalent in China for 10 years with high incidence. We suspected that adults’ inapparent infection might be the cause of the continued prevalence of HFMD/HA infection in mainland China. Methods To explore the role of adults (especially caregivers) in the transmission process of HFMD/HA among children, 330 HFMD/HA cases and 330 healthy children (controls) were selected for a case–control study. Then, data were analyzed by logistic regression. Results Single-variable analyses revealed that caregivers who tested positive for enterovirus was a significant risk factor of HFMD/HA transmission to children (adjusted odds ratio (OR) = 9.22; 95% CI, 1.16 to 73.23). In the final multivariable model, caregiver behavior, such as cooling children’s food with mouth (OR = 1.85; 95% CI, 1.11 to 3.08) and feeding children with their own tableware (OR = 2.19; 95% CI, 1.07 to 4.45), significantly increased the risk of transmitting HFMD/HA to children. On the contrary, washing hands before feeding children reduced such risk. Conclusions These results implied that the caregivers might be the infectious source or carriers of enterovirus. Therefore, preventing or treating the caregivers’ enterovirus infection and improving their hygiene habits, especially when they are in contact with children, could provide a breakthrough for the effective control of HFMD/HA.

Background/Purpose Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE), a multidrug-resistant, difficult-to-treat pathogen of healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), is now endemic at many intensive care units (ICUs). Chlorhexidine (CHG) bathing is a simple and highly effective intervention to decrease VRE acquisition, but its effect on VRE-HAIs has not been assessed in prospective studies at ICUs. Methods This is a cluster quasi-experimental controlled study. Under active VRE surveillance and contact isolation of all identified VRE carriers, four ICUs were assigned to provide 2% CHG bathing for all patients on a daily basis (CHG group) during the intervention period, while another four ICUs were assigned to provide standard care without CHG bathing for all patients (standard care group) during the same period. Results The CHG group (n = 1501) had a 62% lower crude incidence of VRE-HAIs during the intervention period, compared with the baseline period (1.0 vs. 2.6 per thousand patient-days, P = 0.009), while VRE-HAIs incidence did not change in standard care group (n = 3299) (1.1 vs. 0.5 per thousand patient-days, P = 0.139). In multivariable analyses, CHG bathing was independently associated with a 70% lower risk of VRE-HAIs (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 0.3, 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.2 to 0.7, P = 0.006). In contrast, standard care during the same period had no effect on the risk of VRE-HAIs (adjusted OR 1.8, 95% CI: 0.7 to 4.7, P = 0.259). Conclusion CHG bathing is a highly effective approach to prevent VRE-HAIs at ICUs, in the context of active VRE surveillance with contact isolation.

Background:. Colorectal cancer is harmful to the patient's life. The treatment of patients is determined by accurate preoperative staging. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) played an important role in the preoperative examination of patients with rectal cancer, and artificial intelligence (AI) in the learning of images made significant achievements in recent years. Introducing AI into MRI recognition, a stable platform for image recognition and judgment can be established in a short period. This study aimed to establish an automatic diagnostic platform for predicting preoperative T staging of rectal cancer through a deep neural network. Methods:. A total of 183 rectal cancer patients’ data were collected retrospectively as research objects. Faster region-based convolutional neural networks (Faster R-CNN) were used to build the platform. And the platform was evaluated according to the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. Results:. An automatic diagnosis platform for T staging of rectal cancer was established through the study of MRI. The areas under the ROC curve (AUC) were 0.99 in the horizontal plane, 0.97 in the sagittal plane, and 0.98 in the coronal plane. In the horizontal plane, the AUC of T1 stage was 1, AUC of T2 stage was 1, AUC of T3 stage was 1, AUC of T4 stage was 1. In the coronal plane, AUC of T1 stage was 0.96, AUC of T2 stage was 0.97, AUC of T3 stage was 0.97, AUC of T4 stage was 0.97. In the sagittal plane, AUC of T1 stage was 0.95, AUC of T2 stage was 0.99, AUC of T3 stage was 0.96, and AUC of T4 stage was 1.00. Conclusion:. Faster R-CNN AI might be an effective and objective method to build the platform for predicting rectal cancer T-staging. Trial registration:. chictr.org.cn: ChiCTR1900023575; http://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.aspx?proj=39665.

Aims. This study sought to report the 10-year clinical outcomes of patients who underwent unprotected left main (LM) percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in a large centre. Methods and Results. A total of 913 consecutive patients who underwent unprotected LM PCI from January 2004 to December 2008 at Fu Wai Hospital were retrospectively analysed; the mean age was 60.0 ± 10.9 years, females accounted for 22% of patients, diabetes was present in 27.7% of patients, and an LM bifurcation lesion occurred in 82.9% of patients. During the median follow-up of 9.7 years, major adverse cardiac or cerebrovascular events (MACCEs) occurred in 25.6% (234) of patients, and the rates of all-cause death, myocardial infarction, and stroke were 14.9%, 11.0%, and 7.1%, respectively. Cardiac death occurred in only 7.9% of patients. The estimated event rate was 41.9% for death/myocardial infarction/any revascularization and 45.9% for death/MI/stroke/any revascularization. Definite/probable stent thrombosis occurred in 4.3% (39) of patients. According to the subgroup analysis, IVUS-guided PCI was associated with less long-term MACCEs. Further multivariate analysis identified that age and LVEF

AIM: To evaluate the clinical outcomes in terms of vision across distances (near, intermediate, and far), contrast sensitivity and subjective patient satisfaction after femtosecond laser-assisted cataract surgery (FLACS) with implantation of an extended range of vision (ERV) intraocular lens (IOL). METHODS: Forty patients (55 eyes) undergoing bilateral or monocular FLACS with implantation of the ERV IOL TECNIS Symfony (Johnson & Johnson Vision) were enrolled. Uncorrected distance (UDVA), intermediate (UIVA) and near visual acuities (UNVA) were evaluated at 3mo after surgery, as well the defocus curve, contrast sensitivity, patient satisfaction and spectacle independence. RESULTS: No severe complications occurred. All eyes showed a central position of the IOL in the capsular bag without tilting at 3mo after surgery. 3mo postoperative mean logMAR visual acuity at 5 m, 67 cm and 40 cm were -0.04 ±0.08, -0.17±0.22, 0.37±0.17, respectively. All patients obtained satisfactory UDVA and UIVA, as well as functional UNVA, meeting the needs of daily life. Spectacle independence rate was 94.55%. Contrast sensitivity results did not differ from those obtained with monofocal aspheric lenses. Likewise, no moderate and severe photic phenomena were reported. Mean patient satisfaction scores with distance, intermediate and near vision were 9.0, 9.0, and 7.0, respectively. CONCLUSION: FLACS with implantation of the ERV IOL TECNIS Symfony provides a successful visual restoration at far, intermediate distance and a functional-range near vision acuity, with minimal level of disturbing photic phenomena, and high rates of spectacle independence and patient satisfaction.

Background. Coronary atherosclerotic plaque could go through rapid progression and induce adverse cardiac events. This study aimed to evaluate the impacts of smoking status on clinical outcomes of coronary non-target lesions. Methods. Consecutive patients with coronary heart disease who underwent two serial coronary angiographies were included. All coronary non-target lesions were recorded at first coronary angiography and analyzed using quantitative coronary angiography at both procedures. Patients were grouped into non-smokers, quitters, and smokers according to their smoking status. Clinical outcomes including rapid lesion progression, lesion re-vascularization, and myocardial infarction were recorded at second coronary angiography. Multivariable Cox regression analysis was used to investigate the association between smoking status and clinical outcomes. Results. A total of 1255 patients and 1670 lesions were included. Smokers were younger and more likely to be male compared with non-smokers. Increase in percent diameter stenosis was significantly lower (2.7 [0.6, 7.1] % vs. 3.5 [0.9, 8.9]%) and 3.4 [1.1, 7.7]%, P = 0.020) in quitters than those in smokers and non-smokers. Quitters tended to have a decreased incidence of rapid lesions progression (15.8% [76/482] vs. 21.6% [74/342] and 20.6% [89/431], P = 0.062), lesion re-vascularization (13.1% [63/482] vs. 15.5% [53/432] and 15.5% [67/431], P = 0.448), lesion-related myocardial infarction (0.8% [4/482] vs. 2.6% [9/342] and 1.4% [6/431], P = 0.110) and all-cause myocardial infarction (1.9% [9/482] vs. 4.1% [14/342] and 2.3% [10/431], P = 0.128) compared with smokers and non-smokers. In multivariable analysis, smoking status was not an independent predictor for rapid lesion progression, lesion re-vascularization, and lesion-related myocardial infarction except that a higher risk of all-cause myocardial infarction was observed in smokers than non-smokers (hazards ratio: 3.00, 95% confidence interval: 1.04–8.62, P = 0.042). Conclusion. Smoking cessation mitigates the increase in percent diameter stenosis of coronary non-target lesions, meanwhile, smokers are associated with increased risk for all-cause myocardial infarction compared with non-smokers.

BACKGROUND Human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2) amplification is a molecular driver for a subset of colorectal cancers (CRCs) and one of the major causes of anti-epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) treatment failure. Compared to dual anti-HER2 treatments, which have been shown to be effective in HER2-positive metastatic CRC patients, single-agent anti-HER2 therapy is rarely used to treat CRC. CASE SUMMARY Herein, we report a case of RAS/BRAF-wild-type metastatic CRC that was identified as HER2-positive through circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) testing by next-generation sequencing following the failure of two lines of therapy. Subsequently, the patient was given lapatinib monotherapy that led to a partial response with a progression-free survival of 7.9 mo. Moreover, serial ctDNA detection was used to monitor the efficacy of lapatinib. The aberration of HER2 copy number disappeared when radiographic assessment revealed a partial response. However, a high level of HER2 amplification was detected again at the time of disease progression. Finally, a phosphatidylinositol-4,5-bisphosphate 3-kinase catalytic subunit alpha mutation was identified at the time of tumor progression, which may explain the acquired resistance to lapatinib. CONCLUSION This is the first case report of HER2-positive RAS/BRAF wild-type metastatic CRC patient responding to lapatinib monotherapy. It highlights that ctDNA testing is an effective and feasible approach to evaluate the efficacy of anti-HER2 therapy.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), a primary liver tumor, is the third leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. The proteasome system is overactivated in the majority of tumors, including HCC. However, targeting the proteasome system in HCC is not as effective as in other types of cancer. Therefore, a new target of HCC therapy needs to be identified, and the potential mechanism must be studied. Using the The Cancer Gene Genome Atlas and GEO datasets, the present investigation demonstrated for the first time that ADRM1 is overexpressed in HCC, and the high level of its expression predicts poor overall survival in HCC patients. The high expression of ADRM1 in HCC was verified using tumor tissue arrays. By comparing paired tumor and nontumor tissues, it was shown that the majority of HCC patients (76.25%) exhibited higher ADRM1 expression in the tumor than in normal tissues. in vitro experiments demonstrated that targeting ADRM1 with shRNAs significantly suppressed the proliferation of HCC cells. RA190, a specific inhibitor of ADRM1, suppressed cell proliferation and colony formation by HCC cells in a concentration-dependent manner. The study of the mechanism of the effects of RA190 revealed that targeting ADRM1 blocked the G2/M transition in the cell cycle and induced apoptosis of HCC cells. Together, the obtained results indicate that ADRM1 is a promising target for HCC therapy and suggest that ADRM1 inhibitors, such as RA190, have the potential for clinical application in the treatment of HCC.

Background Acute respiratory infections (ARIs) remain a significant public threat with high morbidity and mortality worldwide; viruses are significant pathogens that cause ARIs. This study was conducted to better understand the epidemiological characteristics of respiratory viruses circulating in southern China. Methods We collected 22,680 respiratory samples from ARI patients in 18 hospitals in southern China during 2009–2018; seven common respiratory viruses including Flu, RSV, PIV, hMPV, ADV, HCoV, and HBoV were screened using in-house real-time PCR. Results Of all samples, 9760 ARI cases (9760/22680, 43.03%) tested positive for the seven common respiratory viruses. The most detected virus was Flu (14.15%), followed by RSV (10.33%) and PIV (5.43%); Flu-A, PIV3, and HCoV-OC43 were the predominant subtypes. Although most of the viruses were detected in male inpatients, Flu was more likely detected in female outpatients. Flu infection was more likely to cause URTI (upper respiratory tract infection), whereas RSV infection was more likely to cause pneumonia and bronchitis. The prevalence of Flu was particularly high in 2009. The epidemic level was found notably high in 2014–2018 for RSV, in 2016–2018 for PIV, in the summer of 2018 for ADV, in the summer of 2016 and winter of 2018 for HCoV, and in the summer of 2011 and autumn of 2018 for HBoV. The co-detection rate of the seven viruses was 4.70%; RSV, PIV, and Flu were the most commonly co-detected viruses. Conclusions This work demonstrates the epidemiological characteristics of seven common respiratory viruses in ARI patients in southern China.

Background. The efficacy of entecavir (ETV) add-on peg-interferon therapy compared with ETV monotherapy in treatment-naïve hepatitis B virus (HBV) patients remains controversial. We investigated whether adding peg-interferon to ongoing ETV treatment leads to a better curative effect or not. Methods. All patients have been recruited between August 2013 and January 2015 from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center and Zhongshan Hospital (China). Eligible HBV patients (n = 144) were randomly divided (1:1) to receive either ETV monotherapy (n = 70) or peg-interferon add-on therapy from week 26 to 52 (n = 74). Patients were followed-up for at least 2 years. Indexes including hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) and hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) seroconversion rate, sustained virologic response, transient elastography value, and histological scores were evaluated every 3 months until the end of the study. The rate of patients with HBsAg loss was defined as the primary endpoint criteria. Results. At week 26, no patient achieved HBsAg seroconversion in either group. At week 52, one patient in the monotherapy group was HBsAg-negative but there was none in the combination therapy group. The monotherapy group showed significantly better liver function recovery results than the combination therapy group. At week 78, one patient in the combination group had HBsAg seroconverted. At week 104, only three patients in the combination therapy group were HBsAg-negative compared with one patient in monotherapy. The mean alanine aminotransferase and aspartate aminotransferase levels and transient elastography values decreased significantly compared with baseline. Both groups showed a favorable decrease in alpha-fetoprotein (monotherapy: 4.5 [2.8, 7.1] vs. 2.2 [1.8, 3.1] ng/mL, P

To assess the effect and safety of Hydroxysafflor Yellow A for Injection (HSYAI) in treating patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and blood stasis syndrome (BSS).A multicenter, randomized, double-blind, multiple-dose, active-controlled phase II trial was conducted at 9 centers in China from July 2013 to September 2015. Patients with moderate or severe AIS and BSS were randomly assigned to low-, medium-, high-dose HSYAI groups (25, 50 and 70 mg/d HSYAI by intravenous infusion, respectively), and a control group (Dengzhan Xixin Injection (, DZXXI) 30 mL/d by intravenous infusion), for 14 consecutive days. The primary outcome was the Modified Rankin Scale (mRS) score ⩽1 at days 90 after treatment. The secondary outcomes included the National Institute of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score ⩽1, Barthel Index (BI) score ⩾95, and BSS score reduced ⩾30% from baseline at days 14, 30, 60, and 90 after treatment. The safety outcomes included any adverse events during 90 days after treatment.Of the 266 patients included in the effectiveness analysis, 66, 67, 65 and 68 cases were in the low-, medium-, and high-dose HSYAI and control groups, respectively. The proportions of patients in the medium- and high-dose HSYAI groups with mRS score ⩽1 at days 90 after treatment were significantly larger than the control group (P0.05). The incidences of favorable outcomes of NIHSS and BI at days 90 after treatment as well as satisfactory improvement of BSS at days 30 and 60 after treatment in the medium- and high-dose HSYAI groups were all significantly higher than the control group (P0.05). No significant difference was reported among the 4 groups in any specific adverse events (P0.05).HSYAI was safe and well-tolerated at all doses for treating AIS patients with BSS. The medium (50 mg/d) or high dose (75 mg/d) might be the optimal dose for a phase III trial. (Registration No. ChiCTR-2000029608).

Objective: There are no comprehensive studies on survival outcomes and optimal treatment protocols for cervical esophageal cancer (CEC), due to its rare clinical prevalence. Our objective was to determine the relationship between pathological characteristics, treatment protocols, and survival outcomes in Chinese CEC patients. Methods: A total of 500 Chinese CEC patients were selected from our 500,000 esophageal and gastric cardia carcinoma database (1973–2018). There were two main groups: patients treated with surgery, and patients receiving non-surgical treatments (radiotherapy, radiochemotherapy, and chemotherapy). The Chi-square test and Kaplan–Meier method were used to compare the continuous variables and survival. Results: Among the 500 CEC patients, 278 (55.6%) were male, and the median age was 60.9 ± 9.4 years. A total of 496 patients (99.2%) were diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma. In 171 (34.2%) patients who received surgery, 22 (12.9%) had undergone laryngectomy. In 322 (64.4%) patients who received non-surgical treatments, 245 (76.1%) received radiotherapy. Stratified survival analysis showed that only T stage was related with survival outcomes for CEC patients in the surgical group, and the outcomes between laryngectomy and non-laryngectomy patients were similar. It was noteworthy that the 5-year survival rate was similar in CEC patients among the different groups treated with surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, or radiochemotherapy (P = 0.244). Conclusions: The CEC patients had similar survival outcomes after curative esophagectomy and radiotherapy, including those with or without total laryngectomy. These findings suggest that radiotherapy could be the initial choice for treatment of Chinese CEC patients.

Efficient deep learning inference requires algorithm and hardware codesign to enable specialization: we usually need to change the algorithm to reduce memory footprint and improve energy efficiency. However, the extra degree of freedom from the neural architecture design makes the design space much larger: it is not only about designing the hardware architecture but also codesigning the neural architecture to fit the hardware architecture. It is difficult for human engineers to exhaust the design space by heuristics. We propose design automation techniques for architecting efficient neural networks given a target hardware platform. We investigate automatically designing specialized and fast models, auto channel pruning, and auto mixed-precision quantization. We demonstrate that such learning-based, automated design achieves superior performance and efficiency than the rule-based human design. Moreover, we shorten the design cycle by 200× than previous work, so that we can afford to design specialized neural network models for different hardware platforms.

Luminescent and transparent composites formed by embedding luminophores in a solid matrix are essential components for several photonic applications, such as luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) and luminescent down-shifting/conversion layers. For these applications, the optical losses, including reabsorption and scattering need to be minimized, while the photoluminescence (PL) emission must be stable against outdoor environments. Here, highly transparent and luminescent aluminosilicate glass doped with surface-engineered gold nanoclusters (AuNCs) was prepared without involving toxic elements and hazardous solvents. Such an AuNC@glass composite with a high loading (∼14 wt%) exhibits a unique absorption profile; near-unity absorptance in the absorption range but near-zero reabsorption in the emission region, and thus generates bright PL emission with negligible reabsorption losses. Meanwhile, the PL quantum yield was enhanced (from ∼1% to ∼14%) without sacrificing the Stokes shift, while still maintaining high optical transparency. In addition, they have high stability due to the effective protection of rigid inorganic matrices, and thus would be eco-friendly candidates for further preparation of efficient and reabsorption-free LSCs.

Highlights • For respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), an annual distribution pattern of 2-year RSV-A dominance followed by a 1-year RSV-B dominance was found in Guangzhou. • In 2011–2016 in south China, prevalent RSV-A genotypes were NA1 and ON1 and the prevalent RSV-B genotype was BA9. • The prevalent RSV-A genotype changed from Chongqing NA1 in 2011 to Hong Kong ON1 in 2014. • The highest RSV epidemic peak occurred in 2015, indicating a possible biennial peak. • The ongoing evolution of RSV-A ON1 and NA1 genotypes indicated high selection pressure., Background Human respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is one of the most important pathogens that cause acute respiratory infections in children and immunocompromised adults. This work was conducted to understand the epidemiological and phylogenetic features of RSV in southern China during 2011–2016. Methods A total of 16 024 nasopharyngeal swabs were collected from patients with respiratory infections in 14 hospitals, and screened for RSV and seven other respiratory viruses using real-time PCR. Six hundred and twenty-three RSV-positive samples from 13 hospitals were further analyzed for subtypes. G gene sequencing and phylogenetic analysis were performed based on 46 RSV-A and 15 RSV-B strains. Results RSV was detected in 9.5% of the 16 024 specimens, the highest among the eight respiratory viruses screened. Most of these specimens came from inpatients and children under 3 years of age. The incidence of RSV-A (9.4%) was higher than that of RSV-B (4.4%) in children (

Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) have enabled controllable image synthesis for many computer vision and graphics applications. However, recent cGANs are 1-2 orders of magnitude more computationally-intensive than modern recognition CNNs. For example, GauGAN consumes 281G MACs per image, compared to 0.44G MACs for MobileNet-v3, making it difficult for interactive deployment. In this work, we propose a general-purpose compression framework for reducing the inference time and model size of the generator in cGANs. Directly applying existing CNNs compression methods yields poor performance due to the difficulty of GAN training and the differences in generator architectures. We address these challenges in two ways. First, to stabilize the GAN training, we transfer knowledge of multiple intermediate representations of the original model to its compressed model, and unify unpaired and paired learning. Second, instead of reusing existing CNN designs, our method automatically finds efficient architectures via neural architecture search (NAS). To accelerate the search process, we decouple the model training and architecture search via weight sharing. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across different supervision settings (paired and unpaired), model architectures, and learning methods (e.g., pix2pix, GauGAN, CycleGAN). Without losing image quality, we reduce the computation of CycleGAN by more than 20x and GauGAN by 9x, paving the way for interactive image synthesis. The code and demo are publicly available., National Science Foundation (U.S.). Career (Award 1943349)

The entire world is currently facing problems related to higher rates of human trafficking today, and the research shows that the higher percentage of victims are among children. Although countless children are reported missing every year, many of them remain untraced. This paper presents a novel use of deep learning methodology for fighting against human trafficking and identifying the reported missing child from their photos, with the help of face recognition. The first step is to register the children in the common portal to be verified before crossing the border of their country of origin. Secondly, the public can upload photographs of suspected missing children into a common portal with landmarks and remarks. Uploaded photos are automatically compared with the registered photos of the missing children from the repository, and the classification of the input children’s images is performed. The photo with the best match will be selected from the database. To do that, a deep learning model is trained to correctly identify the missing child from the missing children image database provided, using the facial images uploaded by the public. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), a highly effective deep learning technique for image-based methodology, is adopted here for face recognition purposes. Face descriptors are extracted at 99.98% from the images using a pre-trained CNN model VGG16-Face deep architecture.

Background: Recent studies have found that circular RNA is an abundant RNA species, belongs to part of the competing endogenous RNA network(ceRNA), which was proved to play an important role in the development, diagnosis and progress of diseases.Methods: We determined the expression of circular RNAs in paired normal gastric tissues(N), primary GIST (gastrointestinal stromal tumor) tissues (Y or YC) and imatinib mesylate secondary resistance GIST tissues(C) with microarray and predicted 8677 dysregulated circular RNAs.Results: We identified 15 circRNAs was up-regulated and 8 circRNAs were down-regulated in C group. Gene ontology (GO)and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis indicated that these host linear transcripts that differentially express circular RNAs are involved in many key biological pathways., predicting the potential tumor-genesis and drug resistance mechanism was related with HIF-1 pathway, later we draw the cirRNA-miRNA-mRNA network involved in the HIF-1 pathway, found that several dysregulated circRNAs and the relationship between circRNA-miRNAs-mRNA, such as circRNA_06551, circRNA_14668, circRNA_04497, circRNA_08683, circRNA_09923(Green, down-regulation) and circRNA_23636, circRNA_15734(Red, up-regulation). Conclusions: Taken together, we identified a panel of dysregulated circRNAs that may be potential biomarkers even therapy relevant to the GIST, especially imatinib secondary resistance GIST.

Background This study aims to investigate the risk factors of vertebral re-fracture after percutaneous kyphoplasty (PKP) for osteoporosis vertebral compression fracture (OVCF), and to provide reference for clinical prevention. Material and methods A retrospective analysis was performed on 228 OVCF patients admitted on November 6, 2013, solstice, December 14, 2018, which met the inclusion criteria. There were 35 males and 193 females, with a male-to-female ratio of 3:20, and an age of 61–89 years. All patients were treated with PKP surgery with complete clinical data, and the rate of re-fracture was calculated according to whether re-fracture occurred after surgery, divided into the re-fracture group (24 cases) and the non-refracture group (204 cases). May be associated with subsequent fracture factors (gender, age, number of surgical segment vertebral body, whether with degenerative scoliosis, whether to fight osteoporosis) into a single-factor research, then the single-factor analysis was statistically significant risk factors for multiple logistic regression analysis, further defined after PKP holds the vertebral body fracture independent risk factors. Survival analysis was performed using the time of vertebral re-fracture after PKP as the end time of follow-up, the occurrence of re-fracture after PKP as the endpoint event, and the presence or absence of degenerative lateral curvature as a variable factor. Results All 228 vertebroplasty patients were followed up for a period of 1.8 to 63.6 months. The mean follow-up time was (28.8 ± 15.6) months, and the re-fracture rate was 10.5%. There were statistically significant differences between the re-fracture group and the non-refracture group in age, number of operative vertebral bodies, whether there was a combination of degenerative scoliosis and whether there was anti-osteoporosis treatment (P P value was 0.00, and the mean 95% confidence interval was (34.4–49.7 months), indicating that the combination of degenerative lateral bending might be related to the occurrence of re-fracture. Conclusions Combined scoliosis is an independent risk factor for re-fracture after OVCF laminoplasty and a possible risk factor for re-fracture after surgery.

Heterogeneity in breast cancer leads to diverse morphological features and different clinical outcomes. There are inherent differences in breast cancer between the populations in Asia and in western countries. The use of immune-based treatment in breast cancer is currently in the developmental stage. The VGH-TAYLOR study is designed to understand the genetic profiling of different subtypes of breast cancer in Taiwan and define the molecular risk factors for breast cancer recurrence. The T-cell receptor repertoire and the potential effects of immunotherapy in breast cancer subjects is evaluated. The favorable biomarkers for early detection of tumor recurrence, diagnosis and prognosis may provide clues for the selection of individualized treatment regimens and improvement in breast cancer therapy.Lay abstract We describe the rationale and design for the VGH-TAYLOR study, which includes Taiwanese patients with breast cancer and with a wide spectrum of clinical scenarios covering different breast cancer subtypes and clinical settings, such as the neoadjuvant, adjuvant and metastatic settings. The gene expression profile and genetic mutations of breast cancer subjects with the primary and recurrent tumors are compared. We also explore whether immune-related gene expression and diversity have any impact on response to treatment and survival. This study aims to discover biomarkers of detection of cancer relapse, diagnosis and prognosis that may enable personalized medicine and improvement in breast cancer treatment.

BACKGROUND Alzheimer's disease (AD) is clinically characterized as a progressive cognitive impairment and behavioral disorder. Pathological hallmarks of AD include extracellular senile plaques (SPs), intracellular neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs) and massive neuronal loss. Although the exact cause of AD is not well understood, a mounting body of evidence has demonstrated that the pathogenesis of AD is associated with oxidative stress, neu-roinflammation, and amyloid beta (Aβ) induced neural apoptosis. Moreover, overexpression of β-secretase 1 (BACE1), Aβ, mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR), and Tau proteins are closely related to cognitive symptoms in AD. Studies have demonstrated that artemether, an antimalarial drug with acceptable side effects, possesses protective effects against neuroinflammation and oxidative stress. Importantly, artemether can easily penetrate the blood brain barrier, thereby representing an ideal drug candidate for AD treatment. METHODS The effect of artemether on memory protection and the associated molecular mechanisms were investigated in an Aβ25-35 induced cognitive impairments rat model. RESULTS Results of the in vivo study showed that oral administration of artemether significantly attenuated Aβ25-35-induced cognitive impairment in rats. Results of the in vitro study revealed that artemether significantly downregulated the endogenous expression of Aβ, BACE1, mTOR, and Tau proteins in N2a cells. CONCLUSIONS The beneficial effect of artemether against Aβ 25-35-induced cognitive impairments was attributable to the downregulation of the expression of Aβ, BACE1, mTOR, and Tau proteins, suggesting the potential of artemether as an effective, neuronal protective, and multi-targeted drug candidate for AD treatment.

Background: Wutou Decoction (WTD), as a classic prescription, has been generally used to treat rheumatoid arthritis (RA) for two thousand years in China. However, the potential protective effects of WTD on rheumatoid arthritis and its possible mechanism have rarely been reported.Purpose: The aim of this study was to explore the possible mechanism of WTD against RA and a promising alternative candidate for RA therapy.Methods: A model of collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) was constructed in rats to assess the therapeutic effects of WTD. Histopathological staining, immunofluorescence, and western blotting of synovial sections were conducted to detect the antiangiogenic effects of WTD. Then, cell viability assays, flow cytometry, scratch healing assays, and invasion assays were conducted to explore the effects of WTD on MH7A human fibroblast-like synoviocyte (FLS) cell proliferation, apoptosis, migration, and invasion in vitro. The ability of WTD to induce blood vessel formation after MH7A cell and human umbilical vein endothelial cell line (HUVEC) coculture with WTD intervention was detected by a tube formation assay. The mechanisms of WTD were screened by network pharmacology and confirmed by in vivo and in vitro experiments.Results: WTD ameliorated the symptoms and synovial pannus hyperplasia of CIA rats. Treatment with WTD inhibited MH7A cell proliferation, migration, and invasion and promoted MH7A apoptosis. WTD could inhibit MH7A cell expression of proangiogenic factors, including VEGF and ANGI, to induce HUVEC tube formation. Furthermore, the PI3K-AKT-mTOR-HIF-1α pathway was enriched as a potential target of WTD for the treatment of RA through network pharmacology enrichment analysis. Finally, it was confirmed in vitro and in vivo that WTD inhibits angiogenesis in RA by interrupting the PI3K-AKT-mTOR-HIF-1α pathway.Conclusion: WTD can inhibit synovial hyperplasia and angiogenesis, presumably by inhibiting the migration and invasion of MH7A cells and blocking the production of proangiogenic effectors in MH7A cells. The possible underlying mechanism by which WTD ameliorates angiogenesis in RA is the PI3K-AKT-mTOR-HIF-1α pathway.

Negative differential resistance (NDR) devices have attracted considerable interest due to their potential applications in switches, memory devices, and analog-to-digital converters. Modulation of the NDR is an essential issue for the development of NDR-based devices. In this study, we successfully synthesized graphene oxide quantum dots (GOQDs) using graphene oxide, cysteine, and H2O2. The current–voltage characteristics of the GOQDs exhibit a clear NDR in the ambient environment at room temperature. A peak-to-valley ratio as high as 4.7 has been achieved under an applied voltage sweep from −6 to 6 V. The behavior of the NDR and its corresponding peak-to-valley ratio can be controlled by adjusting the range of applied voltages, air pressure, and relative humidity. Also, the NDR is sensitive to the the concentration of H2O2 added in the synthesis. The charge carrier injection through the trapping states, induced by the GOQD aggregation, could be responsible for the NDR behavior in GOQDs.

BackgroundLiver dysfunction and chronic inflammation influence the prognosis of many tumors and surgical outcomes. This study was performed to determine whether the Fibrosis-4 (FIB-4) index, originally defined as a noninvasive fibrosis marker, can predict the prognosis of patients with gastric cancer undergoing radical gastric cancer surgery.MethodsWe have retrospectively analyzed 594 consecutive patients with gastric cancer who underwent gastrectomy in our database. The FIB-4 index was calculated using laboratory data and age before gastrectomy. The clinical utility of FIB-4 was evaluated by X-tile. Patients were divided into two groups (high and low FIB-4 index groups), and their overall survival (OS) was investigated. Cox regression analysis was used to identify the independent parameters associated with prognosis. Finally, we developed a prognostic prediction model by using R statistical software.ResultsA total of 556 patients, including 422 men and 134 women, were enrolled. Of these, 61 (11.0%) and 495 (89.0%) patients had low and FIB-4 indexes, respectively. In addition to the indicators of FIB-4, preoperative age, tumor site, surgical procedure, TNM stage, and postoperative complications were found to be independent predictors of prognosis (P < 0.05). Among patients, the FIB-4 index group had significantly shorter OS (log-rank P = 0.01) than the low FIB-4 index group. This association was also confirmed in the multivariate analysis (hazard ratio, 4.65; 95% confidence interval, 1.07-4.29; P = 0.031).ConclusionsPreoperative FIB-4 index can predict long-term outcomes of gastric cancer patients who had undergone gastrectomy.

Glycoprotein non-metastatic B (GPNMB) is a transmembrane protein overexpressed in numerous cancers including triple-negative breast cancers (TNBC). It has been linked to promote cancer aggressiveness and implicated as a novel target for GPNMB-expressing cancers. In current study, we aimed to explore the clinical significance of GPNMB in TNBC. Among 759 specimens, immunohistochemistry (IHC) exhibited GPNMB expressions were variable in different subtypes and significantly higher in TNBC. Kaplan–Meier analysis revealed GPNMB overexpression in TNBC was associated with worse prognosis especially distant metastasis (P = 0.020, HR = 2.515, CI 1.154–5.480). Multivariate analysis showed GPNMB expression was an independent prognostic factor in terms of recurrence and distant metastasis (P = 0.008, HR = 3.22, CI 1.36–7.61; P = 0.017, HR = 3.08, CI 1.22–7.74). In silico analysis showed high mRNA expression of GPNMB was associated with distant metastasis and GPNMB was overexpressed in TNBC. Furthermore, GPNMB positively correlated with epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT) regulators, mesenchymal marker vimentin, MMP and integrins. The protein levels of Twist and MMP2 were upregulated by GPNMB overexpression in TNBC cells. GPNMB-enhanced cell invasion was attenuated by broad spectrum MMP inhibitor (GM 6001) and the selective inhibitor of MMP-2 (ARP100). In summary, GPNMB expression is prevalent in TNBC and may be implicated as a prognostic biomarker in patients with TNBC.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have enabled photorealistic image synthesis and editing. However, due to the high computational cost of large-scale generators (e.g., StyleGAN2), it usually takes seconds to see the results of a single edit on edge devices, prohibiting interactive user experience. In this paper, we take inspirations from modern rendering software and propose Anycost GAN for interactive natural image editing. We train the Anycost GAN to support elastic resolutions and channels for faster image generation at versatile speeds. Running subsets of the full generator produce outputs that are perceptually similar to the full generator, making them a good proxy for preview. By using sampling-based multi-resolution training, adaptive-channel training, and a generator-conditioned discriminator, the anycost generator can be evaluated at various configurations while achieving better image quality compared to separately trained models. Furthermore, we develop new encoder training and latent code optimization techniques to encourage consistency between the different sub-generators during image projection. Anycost GAN can be executed at various cost budgets (up to 10x computation reduction) and adapt to a wide range of hardware and latency requirements. When deployed on desktop CPUs and edge devices, our model can provide perceptually similar previews at 6-12x speedup, enabling interactive image editing. The code and demo are publicly available: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/anycost-gan., Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2021. The code and demo are available: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/anycost-gan

In this paper, we propose a generic Runtime Network Routing (RNR) framework for efficient image classification, which selects an optimal path inside the network. Unlike existing static neural network acceleration methods, our method preserves the full ability of the original large network and conducts dynamic routing at runtime according to the input image and current feature maps. The routing is performed in a bottom-up, layer-by-layer manner, where we model it as a Markov decision process and use reinforcement learning for training. The agent determines the estimated reward of each sub-path and conducts routing conditioned on different samples, where a faster path is taken when the image is easier for the task. Since the ability of network is fully preserved, the balance point is easily adjustable according to the available resources. We test our method on both multi-path residual networks and incremental convolutional channel pruning, and show that RNR consistently outperforms static methods at the same computation complexity on both the CIFAR and ImageNet datasets. Our method can also be applied to off-the-shelf neural network structures and easily extended to other application scenarios.

Nonzero-bandgap graphene quantum dots (GQDs) are novel optical gain materials promising for solution-processed light sources with high cost efficiency and device performance. Currently, there have ...

BACKGROUND Accurate evaluation of muscle strength and function is difficult. Commonly known as sarcopenia, skeletal muscle loss is closely correlated with the prognosis of patients diagnosed with gastric cancer (GC). We wondered the correlation between skeletal muscle measures combined with computed tomography and grip strength (GS) and short-term outcomes after radical gastrectomy (RG) in patients with GC. MATERIALS AND METHODS We analyzed 594 patients with GC who underwent RG. The skeletal muscle index (SMI), skeletal muscle density (Hounsfield unit average calculation [HUAC]), and GS were measured. The skeletal muscle gauge (SMG) was created by multiplying SMI and HUAC. Logistic regression modeling and multivariate analysis were used. RESULTS Univariate analysis showed that low SMI, low HUAC, low GS, and low SMG were predictors of short-term complications after surgery. Compared with other muscle-related factors (AUCHUAC = 0.559, AUCSMI = 0.575, AUCGS = 0.580, AUCSMG = 0.598, AUCSMI+GS = 0.559), low GS plus SMG (AUCGS plus SMG = 0.614, P

Modulation of the photoluminescence (PL) properties in graphene oxide quantum dots (GOQDs) is important for fundamental research and applications in bioimaging and optoelectronic devices. Herein, the synthesis of GOQDs doped with diethylenetriamine (DETA) was implemented by one-pot synthesis via oil bath heating. The PL intensity in the GOQDs was increased by an enhancement factor of ∼13.2 following the DETA doping. The band gap of the GOQDs increased with the increase in DETA doping, producing tunable PL from red to blue emission with a wavelength change of ∼265 nm. The significant tuning of the PL wavelength in the GOQDs was attributed to the variation of pyrrolic and/or graphitic N in the C–N bonding configuration. The synthesized GOQDs were found to inject carriers into the gallium nitride (GaN) epilayer in the GOQD/GaN composite, which in turn enhance the PL in the GaN epilayer. Our observations provide effective approaches for tuning the PL wavelength in GOQDs and enhancing the PL intensity in GaN;...

Based on the peripheral refractive theory, this study designed a contact lens which can change the peripheral refraction of the retina, and established a retinal image system that can analysis the refractive state of the eyeball. The Monte-Carlo ray trace modeling was used to analyze the retinal images under different refractive conditions. The calculation of the power vector of refractive state was optimized for judging the corrective effect. The purpose of this study is to control the development of myopia for suppress the change of axis oculi when the eyeball supported in relative peripheral myopia or emmetropia by using contact lens. The results show that the model of peripheral refractive lenses with fourth-order spherical aberration constructed in this study can be used to control myopia and can achieve excellent corrective effect.

Medical care for the Chinese population has been focused on first-line activities, that is, therapy, but with little follow-up on treated patients. However, efficacy of therapy is highly dependent upon post-therapy recovery. For coronary heart disease (CHD), home-based cardiac telerehabilitation (HBCTR) is an alternative to hospital-based or center-based cardiac rehabilitation, and is an innovative approach to enhance recovery, but the approach is seldom used in China. Our preliminary survey in Shantou, China, indicated that most CHD patients showed a positive attitude toward the HBCTR technology. Our follow-up study was focused on assessing the effect of the HBCTR program in low-risk patients after percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI).A two-arm randomized controlled trial was conducted at the First Affiliated Hospital of the Shantou University Medical College, China. The effectiveness of this program was measured by using blood pressure, Six-Minute Walking Test (6MWT), Fagerstrom Test for Nicotine Dependence (FTND), Cardiac Depression Scale (CDS), and SF-36 Health Survey (SF36).A total of 80 post-PCI patients were recruited and randomly divided into two equal groups. Based upon our effort, the usual care (UC) group received paper-based CHD educational booklets and biweekly outpatient review. The HBCTR group carried out outdoor walking/jogging exercise with real-time physiological monitoring along with CHD education materials. After the 6-week intervention, the 6MWT, SF36 (PCS, MCS), FTND and CDS in both groups were found to have significantly improved compared with baseline. In addition, the improvements in SF36, FTND scores, and 6MWT distance in the HBCTR group were significantly better than those in the UC group (p0.05).Our observations indicated that the HBCTR program may be applied successfully in Chinese patients who had very little technical skills and its application may be highly cost-effective.

Summary Background VEGF and VEGF receptor 2 (VEGFR-2)-mediated signalling and angiogenesis can contribute to the pathogenesis and progression of gastric cancer. We aimed to assess whether the addition of ramucirumab, a VEGFR-2 antagonist monoclonal antibody, to first-line chemotherapy improves outcomes in patients with metastatic gastric or gastro-oesophageal junction adenocarcinoma. Methods For this double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled, phase 3 trial done at 126 centres in 20 countries, we recruited patients aged 18 years or older with metastatic, HER2-negative gastric or gastro-oesophageal junction adenocarcinoma, an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance status of 0 or 1, and adequate organ function. Eligible patients were randomly assigned (1:1) with an interactive web response system to receive cisplatin (80 mg/m2, on the first day) plus capecitabine (1000 mg/m2, twice daily for 14 days), every 21 days, and either ramucirumab (8 mg/kg) or placebo on days 1 and 8, every 21 days. 5-Fluorouracil (800 mg/m2 intravenous infusion on days 1–5) was permitted in patients unable to take capecitabine. The primary endpoint was investigator-assessed progression-free survival, analysed by intention to treat in the first 508 patients. We did a sensitivity analysis of the primary endpoint, including a central review of CT scans. Overall survival was a key secondary endpoint. This study is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT02314117. Findings Between Jan 28, 2015, and Sept 16, 2016, 645 patients were randomly assigned to receive ramucirumab plus fluoropyrimidine and cisplatin (n=326) or placebo plus fluoropyrimidine and cisplatin (n=319). Investigator-assessed progression-free survival was significantly longer in the ramucirumab group than the placebo group (hazard ratio [HR] 0·753, 95% CI 0·607–0·935, p=0·0106; median progression-free survival 5·7 months [5·5–6·5] vs 5·4 months [4·5–5·7]). A sensitivity analysis based on central independent review of the radiological images did not corroborate the investigator-assessed difference in progression-free survival (HR 0·961, 95% CI 0·768–1·203, p=0·74). There was no difference in overall survival between groups (0·962, 0·801–1·156, p=0·6757; median overall survival 11·2 months [9·9–11·9] in the ramucirumab group vs 10·7 months [9·5–11·9] in the placebo group). The most common grade 3–4 adverse events were neutropenia (85 [26%] of 323 patients in the ramucirumab group vs 85 [27%] of 315 in the placebo group), anaemia (39 [12%] vs 44 [14%]), and hypertension (32 [10%] vs 5 [2%]). The incidence of any-grade serious adverse events was 160 (50%) of 323 patients in the ramucirumab group and 149 (47%) of 315 patients in the placebo group. The most common serious adverse events were vomiting (14 [4%] in the ramucirumab group vs 21 [7%] in the placebo group) and diarrhoea (11 [3%] vs 19 [6%]). There were seven deaths in each group, either during study treatment or within 30 days of discontinuing study treatment, which were the result of treatment-related adverse events. In the ramucirumab group, these adverse events were acute kidney injury, cardiac arrest, gastric haemorrhage, peritonitis, pneumothorax, septic shock, and sudden death (n=1 of each). In the placebo group, these adverse events were cerebrovascular accident (n=1), multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (n=2), pulmonary embolism (n=2), sepsis (n=1), and small intestine perforation (n=1). Interpretation Although the primary analysis for progression-free survival was statistically significant, this outcome was not confirmed in a sensitivity analysis of progression-free survival by central independent review, and did not improve overall survival. Therefore, the addition of ramucirumab to cisplatin plus fluoropyrimidine chemotherapy is not recommended as first-line treatment for this patient population. Funding Eli Lilly and Company.

Donor lymphocyte infusion (DLI) might be used prophylactically to reduce relapse after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for very high-risk leukemia/lymphoma without effective targeted therapy. To compare the safety and efficacy of prophylactic DLI for prevention of relapse after allogeneic peripheral blood stem cell transplantation from haploidentical donors (HID-SCT) and matched-sibling donors (MSD-SCT) in patients with very high-risk acute myeloid leukemia (AML), we performed a retrospective analysis in a cohort of 21 HID-SCT and 13 MSD-SCT recipients, displaying similar baseline characteristics except for donor's gender distribution. Grade 2-4 acute graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) at 100-day post-DLI was higher in HID-SCT group than that in MSD-SCT group (59.5% vs. 30.8%, p = 0.05). The grade 3-4 acute GVHD (17.5% vs. 7.7%), 1-year chronic GVHD (36.6% vs. 33.2%), and severe chronic GVHD (15.3% vs. 27.3%) were not statistically significant different between groups. One-year non-relapse mortality was higher in HID-SCT group than that in MSD-SCT group with marginal significance (27.9% vs. 0.0%, p = 0.061). One-year relapse rate was not statistically significant different between HID-SCT group and MSD-SCT group (21.6% vs. 36.5%, p = 0.543). For HID-SCT recipients, 1-year relapse rate was lower in patients receiving prophylactic DLI than that in a control cohort of eight patients with same very high-risk features but not receiving prophylactic DLI (62.5% vs. 28.3%, p = 0.037). No statistically significant difference was observed in 1-year overall survival (OS, 55.1% vs. 83.9%, p = 0.325) and relapse-free survival (RFS, 50.1% vs. 74.0%, p = 0.419) rates between HID-SCT group and MSD-SCT group. In multivariate analyses, non-remission status prior to transplant, poor-risk gene mutations, and donor's age ≥ 48 years predicted a higher risk of relapse after DLI. Non-remission status prior to transplant predicted inferior OS and RFS. Patient's age ≥ 40 years also predicted an inferior OS. In conclusion, prophylactic DLI was very safe and efficient for reducing relapse in patients with very high-risk AML receiving MSD-SCT. In the recipients of HID-SCT, the application of prophylactic DLI could reduce the risk of relapse, although with a higher incidence of DLI-associated acute GVHD than those of MSD-SCT.

Background EGFR and HER2 overexpression has been reported to play important roles in colorectal cancer (CRC) development and metastasis. Ovarian metastasis is rare yet is one of the most malignant metastases of CRC, but very few studies have focused on its biological features. This study aimed to investigate the expression of EGFR and HER2 in ovarian metastases of CRC and to reveal their clinical significance. Methods The expression of HER2 and EGFR in both primary tumours and ovarian metastases was analysed by immunohistochemistry (IHC) in 31 CRC patients with ovarian metastases as well as in the primary tumours of 26 CRC patients with non-ovarian metastases. The overall survival time was calculated with a Kaplan-Meier survival curve and compared with a log-rank test. Results HER2 positivity in primary tumours was significantly higher in patients with ovarian metastases than in those with non-ovarian metastases (54.5% vs. 36.4%, P 0.05). HER2 expression was not correlated with age, primary tumour site, tumour differentiation, tumour diameter or vascular cancer embolus (P > 0.05). The positive rates of HER2 and EGFR in ovarian metastases were 44.8 and 69.0%, respectively. HER2 expression in ovarian metastases was correlated with peritoneal metastasis and bilateral ovarian metastasis (P 0.05). There was no significant correlation between EGFR expression and the clinicopathological features in ovarian metastases (P > 0.05). CRC patients with HER2-positive ovarian metastases showed a shortened overall survival time compared to that of CRC patients with HER2-negative metastases (17.0 ± 5.2 vs. 32.0 ± 8.3 months). Conclusion Our studies revealed that EGFR and HER2 are highly expressed in the primary tumours and metastases of CRC patients with ovarian metastases. HER2 positivity may be a negative prognostic predictor in patients with ovarian metastases.

The original version of this Article contained an error in the spelling of the author Manuela Gago-Dominguez, which was incorrectly given as Manuela G. Dominguez. This has now been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Because of the lack of reliable prognostic and predictive biomarkers for CRC, most patients are often diagnosed at a late stage. The tryptophan–kynurenine pathway plays a crucial role in promoting cancer progression. Kynurenine is considered an oncometabolite in colon cancer, and its downstream metabolites are also associated with CRC. Kynurenine 3-monooxygenase (KMO), a pivotal enzyme that catalyzes kynurenine metabolism, is essential for several cellular processes. In the current study, we explored the role of KMO in CRC. Immunohistochemical results showed that KMO was upregulated in CRC tissues relative to paired healthy tissue and polyps. Moreover, CRC patients with higher KMO expression were associated with higher metastasis and poorer survival rates. Knockdown of KMO decreased the expression of cancer stem cell markers, as well as the sphere-forming, migration, and invasion abilities of CRC cells. Additionally, blockade of the enzymatic activity of KMO using an inhibitor suppressed sphere formation and cell motility in CRC cells. These findings suggest the clinical relevance of KMO in CRC tumorigenesis and aggressiveness.

A high-efficiency inverted-type CH3NH3PbI3 (MAPbI3) solar cell was fabricated by using a ultrathin poly[3-(4-carboxybutyl)thiophene-2,5-diyl]-Na (P3CT-Na) film as the hole transport layer. The averaged power conversion efficiency (PCE) can be largely increased from 11.72 to 18.92% with a double-filtering process of the P3CT-Na solution mainly due to the increase in short-circuit current density (JSC) from 19.43 to 23.88 mA/cm2, which means that the molecular packing structure of P3CT-Na thin film can influence the formation of the MAPbI3 thin film and the contact quality at the MAPbI3/P3CT-Na interface. Zeta potentials, atomic-force microscopic images, absorbance spectra, photoluminescence spectra, X-ray diffraction patterns, and Raman scattering spectra are used to understand the improvement in the JSC. Besides, the light intensity-dependent and wavelength-dependent photovoltaic performance of the MAPbI3 solar cells shows that the P3CT-Na thin film is not only used as the hole transport layer but also plays an important role during the formation of a high-quality MAPbI3 thin film. It is noted that the PCE values of the best P3CT-Na based MAPbI3 solar cell are higher than 30% in the yellow-to-near infrared wavelength range under low light intensities. On the other hand, it is predicted that the double-filtering method can be readily used to increase the PCE of polymer based solar cells.

Objective The present study compared 10-year clinical outcomes between transradial access (TRA) and transfemoral access (TFA) for left main (LM) percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Background There are limited data regarding the long-term safety and efficacy of TRA for LM PCI. Methods This retrospective study evaluated consecutive patients who underwent unprotected LM PCI between January 2004 and December 2008 at Fu Wai Hospital. The exclusion criteria were age of less than 18 years and presentation with acute myocardial infarction. The primary endpoint was major adverse cardiac or cerebrovascular events (MACCE), which was defined as a composite of all-cause death, myocardial infarction, stroke, and any revascularization at the 10-year follow-up. Results Among 913 eligible patients, TRA was used for 417 patients (45.7%) and TFA was used for 496 patients (54.3%). The 30-day clinical outcomes were similar between the two groups. Results from the 10-year follow-up revealed that MACCE occurred in 180 patients (46.7%) from the TRA group and in 239 patients (51.2%) from the TFA group (log-rank p = .3). The TRA and TFA groups also had low and comparable cumulative rates of all-cause death (14.6% vs. 17.3%, log-rank p = .56) and cardiac death (7.9% vs. 9.1%, log-rank p = .7). Conclusion The present study revealed no significant differences in long-term clinical outcomes when TRA or TFA were used for LM PCI.

This paper describes the requirements and the difficulty encountered in preparing the data for the consumption calculations of a waste heat recovery boiler (WHRB). The study is performed based on continuous monitoring of the operating data by considering the extensive thermal surfaces and a large number of small-serrated fins. The recovery boiler efficiency improved using optimization of temperature profile by better surface arrangement. Then, the suggested designed waste heat recovery boiler is accessible and conducted in a real combined cycle power plant (CCPP). The CCPP optimization is performed based on the new WHRB with and without optimal saturation temperature, and the recovery boiler optimal temperature is obtained based on the objective function. The founded values of the CCPP at different temperatures are verified and compared to the regular operation. The important findings include four categories. First, the gas temperature of the recovery boiler will decrease slightly while the efficiency will increase by increasing the load changes. Second, the dependency of the decision parameters of the CCPP to the ambient temperature is effectively high, and any changes in the efficiency depending on the ambient temperature. Third, the exergy efficiency increment without affecting the total exergy can be performed by using the low-pressure saturation temperature as a decision-making parameter. Forth, 17.9% improvement in the entire cycle efficiency and a 2.14% increase in WHRB exergy are observed after incrementing the cost by 14.48%.

BACKGROUND Natural killer (NK) cells are important for the prognosis of multiple cancers, but their prognostic value remains to be evaluated in patients with gastric cancer. Thus, this retrospective study was conducted at a single center to investigate the association between percentage of NK cells in the peripheral blood and prognosis in patients with gastric cancer. MATERIAL AND METHODS The data of 180 gastric cancer patients were collected. Univariate and multivariate Cox regression models were applied to screen candidate prognostic factors. A time-dependent receiver operating characteristic curve was employed to evaluate the ability of NK cells as a prognostic marker. Furthermore, we determined the correlation between the NK cells percentage and other parameters and their clinical significance. RESULTS Patients with a higher percentage of NK cells survived longer than those with a lower percentage of NK cells. Cox analysis revealed that NK cells could be used as an independent indicator for patients with gastric cancer. The percentage of NK cells was positively correlated with lymphocyte count and albumin, but was negatively correlated with CA125 and neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio. The area under the curve for NK cells in predicting the 5-year survival rate for gastric cancer was 0.792. This increased to 0.830 upon combining NK cells with neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio. Patients at early T, N, and clinical stages possessed a significantly higher percentage of NK cells compared to those at advanced T, N, and clinical stages of gastric cancer. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that a higher percentage of NK cells predicts is associated with longer survival of gastric cancer patients and could serve as an independent prognostic biomarker.

Background The effect of metformin on gut microbiota has been reported, but whether metformin can suppress colorectal cancer (CRC) by affecting gut microbiota composition and rescue F. nucleatum-induced tumourigenicity remains unclear. Methods To identify microbiota associated with both CRC occurrence and metformin treatment, first, we reanalyzed the gut microbiome of our previous data on two human cohorts of normal and CRC individuals. Subsequently, we summarized microbiota altered by metformin from published literatures. Several taxa, including Fusobacterium, were associated with both CRC occurrence and metformin treatment. We investigated the effect of metformin on APCMin/+ mice given with or without F. nucleatum. 16S rRNA gene sequencing was performed. Findings We summarized 131 genera altered by metformin from 18 published literatures. Five genera reported to be changed by metformin, including Bacteroides, Streptococcus, Achromobacter, Alistipes and Fusobacterium, were associated with CRC in both of our human cohorts. Metformin relieved the symptoms caused by F. nucleatum administration in APCMin/+ mice, and showed promise in suppressing intestinal tumour formation and rescuing F. nucleatum-induced tumourigenicity. Administration of F. nucleatum and/or metformin had effect on gut microbiome structure, composition and functions of APCMin/+ mice. Interpretation This study pioneers in predicting critical CRC-associated taxa contributing to the antitumour effect of metformin, and correlating gut microbiome with the antitumour effect of metformin in experimental animals. We presented a basis for future investigations into metformin's potential effect on suppressing F. nucleatum-induced tumor formation in vivo. Funding This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31701250).

Ferromagnetic semiconductors with luminescent effects provide a unique platform for studying magneto-electric-optical multifunctional devices. However, little is known about such materials with spin ordering well above room temperature. By using a unique high-pressure annealing method, a Cr and Fe disordered perovskite oxide SrCr0.5Fe0.5O2.875 (SCFO) with a simple cubic structure was prepared. Magnetic measurements demonstrated the ferromagnetic behavior with a spin ordering temperature as high as 600 K. In contrast to metallic SrCrO3 and SrFeO3, SCFO, with a moderate oxygen deficiency, is a direct bandgap semiconductor with an energy gap of 2.28 eV, which is within the visible light region. As a consequence, SCFO displays a green fluorescent effect arising from the d–p bonding and anti-bonding states. Moreover, the photoluminescence intensity can be tuned by a magnetic field. This work opens up a new avenue for research on room-temperature multifunctional materials with coupled magnetic, electrical, and optical performance. A magnetic semiconductor that retains its magnetic properties at high temperatures has been developed by researchers in China and Germany. Semiconductor materials do much of the processing in computers and cell phones whereas magnetic materials store and retrieve information. A magnetic semiconductor merges these two functions in a single material and offers unique functionality not seen in the other materials. However, the magnetic properties of most of the known magnetic semiconductors disappear at high temperatures, limiting their application. Youwen Long from the Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics and colleagues used high pressures and high temperatures to create a SrCrFeO compound. This perovskite (a compound with a similar crystal structure to CaTiO3) demonstrated ferromagnetic behavior up to 600 K. Ferromagnetic semiconductors are promising candidates for high-performance multifunctional spintronic devices due to the peculiar magneto-electric and magneto-optical properties. However, the low spin ordering temperature limits their applications. By using high pressure to stabilize the crystal structure and oxygen content, an oxygen-deficient perovskite SrCr0.5Fe0.5O2.875 was synthesized. This compound displays ferromagnetic behavior with a spin ordering temperature as high as 600 K. Benefiting from the semiconducting direct bandgap (~2.28 eV), a field-tunable green fluorescent effect is observed. This work opens up a new avenue for research on room-temperature multifunctional materials with coupled magnetic, electrical, and optical performance.

Two-dimensional (2D) layered GaSe films were grown on GaAs (001), GaN/Sapphire, and Mica substrates by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). The in situ reflective high-energy electron diffraction monitoring reveals randomly in-plane orientations of nucleated GaSe layers grown on hexagonal GaN/Sapphire and Mica substrates, whereas single-orientation GaSe domain is predominant in the GaSe/GaAs (001) sample. Strong red-shifts in the frequency of in-plane $${E}_{2g}^{2}$$E2g2 vibration modes and bound exciton emissions observed from Raman scattering and photoluminescence spectra in all samples are attributed to the unintentionally biaxial in-plane tensile strains, induced by the dissimilarity of symmetrical surface structure between the 2D-GaSe layers and the substrates during the epitaxial growth. The results in this study provide an important understanding of the MBE-growth process of 2D-GaSe on 2D/3D hybrid-heterostructures and pave the way in strain engineering and optical manipulation of 2D layered GaSe materials for novel optoelectronic integrated technologies.

Objectives. To assess the impact of different guidewires on stent coating integrity in jailed wire technique (JWT) for bifurcation treatment. Background. JWT is commonly adopted to protect side branch in provisional one-stent strategy for coronary bifurcation lesions. However, this technique may cause defects in stent coatings. The degree of coating damage caused by different types of jailed wires remains unknown. Methods. A fluid model with a bifurcation was established to mimic the condition in vivo. One-stent strategy was performed with three types of guidewire (nonpolymer-jacketed wire, intermediate polymer-jacketed wire, and full polymer-jacketed wire) tested for JWT. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) was used to evaluate stent coating integrity and wire structure. The degrees of coating defects were recorded as no, slight, moderate, and severe defects. Results. A total of 27 samples were tested. Analyses of SEM images showed a significant difference in the degree of coating damage among the three types of wire after the procedure of JWT ( P < 0.001 ). Nonpolymer-jacketed wire could inevitably cause a severe defect in stent coatings, while full polymer-jacketed wire caused the least coating damages. Besides, there were varying degrees of coil deformation in nonpolymer-jacketed wires, while no surface damage or jacket shearing was observed in full polymer-jacketed wires. Conclusions. Although nonpolymer-jacketed wire has long been recommended for JWT, our bench-side study suggests that full polymer-jacketed wire may be a better choice. Further clinical studies are needed to confirm our findings.

Although it has been well recognized that the virus SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, can be acquired by exposure to fomites, surprisingly, the contamination of patients’ surroundings by SARS-CoV-2 is largely unknown, as there have been few studies. We performed an environmental sampling study for 13 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients and found extensive contamination of patients’ surroundings. In particular, we found that asymptomatic COVID-19 patients contaminated their surroundings and therefore imposed risks for other people. Environment cleaning should be emphasized in negative-pressure rooms. The findings may be useful to guide infection control practice to protect health care workers., The contamination of patients’ surroundings by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) remains understudied. We sampled the surroundings and the air of six negative-pressure non-intensive care unit (non-ICU) rooms in a designated isolation ward in Chengdu, China, that were occupied by 13 laboratory-confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients who had returned from overseas travel, including 2 asymptomatic patients. A total of 44 of 112 (39.3%) surface samples were positive for SARS-CoV-2 as detected by real-time PCR, suggesting extensive contamination, although all of the air samples were negative. In particular, in a single room occupied by an asymptomatic patient, four sites were SARS-CoV-2 positive, highlighting that asymptomatic COVID-19 patients do contaminate their surroundings and impose risks for others with close contact. Placement of COVID-19 patients in rooms with negative pressure may bring a false feeling of safety, and the importance of rigorous environment cleaning should be emphasized. IMPORTANCE Although it has been well recognized that the virus SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, can be acquired by exposure to fomites, surprisingly, the contamination of patients’ surroundings by SARS-CoV-2 is largely unknown, as there have been few studies. We performed an environmental sampling study for 13 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients and found extensive contamination of patients’ surroundings. In particular, we found that asymptomatic COVID-19 patients contaminated their surroundings and therefore imposed risks for other people. Environment cleaning should be emphasized in negative-pressure rooms. The findings may be useful to guide infection control practice to protect health care workers.

Model quantization is a widely used technique to compress and accelerate deep neural network (DNN) inference. Emergent DNN hardware accelerators begin to support mixed precision (1-8 bits) to further improve the computation efficiency, which raises a great challenge to find the optimal bitwidth for each layer: it requires domain experts to explore the vast design space trading off among accuracy, latency, energy, and model size, which is both time-consuming and sub-optimal. Conventional quantization algorithm ignores the different hardware architectures and quantizes all the layers in a uniform way. In this paper, we introduce the Hardware-Aware Automated Quantization (HAQ) framework which leverages the reinforcement learning to automatically determine the quantization policy, and we take the hardware accelerator's feedback in the design loop. Rather than relying on proxy signals such as FLOPs and model size, we employ a hardware simulator to generate direct feedback signals (latency and energy) to the RL agent. Compared with conventional methods, our framework is fully automated and can specialize the quantization policy for different neural network architectures and hardware architectures. Our framework effectively reduced the latency by 1.4-1.95x and the energy consumption by 1.9x with negligible loss of accuracy compared with the fixed bitwidth (8 bits) quantization. Our framework reveals that the optimal policies on different hardware architectures (i.e., edge and cloud architectures) under different resource constraints (i.e., latency, energy, and model size) are drastically different. We interpreted the implication of different quantization policies, which offer insights for both neural network architecture design and hardware architecture design., Journal preprint of arXiv:1811.08886 (IJCV, 2020). The first three authors contributed equally to this work. Project page: https://hanlab.mit.edu/projects/haq/

We present APQ for efficient deep learning inference on resource-constrained hardware. Unlike previous methods that separately search the neural architecture, pruning policy, and quantization policy, we optimize them in a joint manner. To deal with the larger design space it brings, a promising approach is to train a quantization-aware accuracy predictor to quickly get the accuracy of the quantized model and feed it to the search engine to select the best fit. However, training this quantization-aware accuracy predictor requires collecting a large number of quantized pairs, which involves quantization-aware finetuning and thus is highly time-consuming. To tackle this challenge, we propose to transfer the knowledge from a full-precision (i.e., fp32) accuracy predictor to the quantization-aware (i.e., int8) accuracy predictor, which greatly improves the sample efficiency. Besides, collecting the dataset for the fp32 accuracy predictor only requires to evaluate neural networks without any training cost by sampling from a pretrained once-for-all network, which is highly efficient. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate the benefits of our joint optimization approach. With the same accuracy, APQ reduces the latency/energy by 2x/1.3x over MobileNetV2+HAQ. Compared to the separate optimization approach (ProxylessNAS+AMC+HAQ), APQ achieves 2.3% higher ImageNet accuracy while reducing orders of magnitude GPU hours and CO2 emission, pushing the frontier for green AI that is environmental-friendly. The code and video are publicly available., Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2020

Cold-hardy perennial wheatgrass plays an important role in the use of barren land for farming, soil and water conservation, variety improvement, and also for increasing grass yield. By crossing octoploid tritelytrigia (2n = 8x = 56, AABBDDEE) with Thinopyrum intermedium (2n = 6x = 42, StStJJJ S J S ), we developed 34 lines of perennial wheatgrass from F1 to F6 generations, which had vigorous regrowth and cold hardiness. The cold-hardy, perennial wheatgrass lines were well-adapted to the cold environment and developed root and rhizomes, with a longevity between 5 and 11 years and a better seed set. Some of them maintained wheat chromosomes beneficial for breeding perennial wheat. Molecular cytogenetic analysis demonstrated that the Th. intermedium chromosomes contributed the most to the synthetic genome of the wheatgrass hybrids and were associated with the perennial growth habit and winter hardiness. They were also preferentially maintained and transmitted to the progenies. Some wheat chromosomes were also transmitted from the F1 to F6 generations, although they were eliminated in each life cycle of the wheatgrass hybrids. The numbers of wheat and Th. intermedium chromosomes affected seed set and perennial growth habit. Seed set increased with the establishment of a more balanced genomic constitution in later generations. The cold-hardy and perennial wheatgrass lines were produced, which can be the starting point of domestication effort aimed at producing well-adapted ground cover plants under extreme environments.