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Aldosterone reductase family 1 member B10 (AKR1B10) is a nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADPH) (reduced coenzyme II)-dependent oxidoreductase, and its biological functions include carbonyl detoxification, hormone metabolism, osmotic adjustment, and lipid synthesis. Studies suggested that AKR1B10 is a new biomarker for cancer based on its overexpression in epithelial tumors, such as breast cancer, cervical cancer, and lung cancer. At present, studies on the expression of AKR1B10 in laryngeal cancer have not been reported. However, we found that AKR1B10 is upregulated in laryngeal carcinoma, and its expression was negatively correlated with the degree of differentiation. In addition, AKR1B10 expression was positively correlated with tumor size; lymph node metastasis; long-term drinking; and Ki-67, mutant p53, and matrix metalloproteinase 2 expression. AKR1B10 was overexpressed in Hep-2 laryngeal carcinoma cells. Oleanolic acid inhibited AKR1B10 activity and expression in Hep-2 cells and suppressed Hep-2 cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. Therefore, AKR1B10 may be related to the development of laryngeal carcinoma, suggesting its use as a prognostic indicator for laryngeal cancer.

With the ubiquitous deployment of smartphones worldwide recently, biomedical diagnostic devices based on smartphones are potential to be widely used for smart health management on the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) applications under point-of-care (PoC) settings. Therefore, this paper introduces one smartphone-based blood lipid data acquisition dongle to monitor blood lipid level, including total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), using only a fingertip blood drop for cardiovascular disease management. During detection, a thin photochemical test strip that consists of LEDs and detectors is plugged into the compact dongle, where changed color intensities will indicate the lipid determinant concentration from the measured reflection coefficient of the chromogenic product. Such smartphone-based photochemical blood lipid data acquisition dongle was validated by comparing with a clinical analyzer, and reached a correlation coefficient over 0.903 and averaged coefficient of variation (CV)% of 4.575% for blood lipid measurement of 115 patients. The photochemical dongle is, therefore, promising for the future chronic disease management in the IoMT.

Thyroid-like follicular renal cell carcinoma is a rare subtype of renal cell carcinoma that has only been recently recognized, as most cases involve a solid tumor in one kidney. In this study, we report a rare case of bilateral renal cell carcinoma wherein the tumor in the left kidney was diagnosed as clear cell carcinoma, while the tumor in right kidney as thyroid-like follicular renal cell carcinoma. The difference between this case and the ones described in previous reports is that thyroid-like follicular renal cell carcinoma showed cystic changes on imaging. This suggests that when renal cystic lesions are encountered, we should consider the possibility of such rare tumors.

We propose a novel physical layer security scheme applied to SCMA communication for satellite system, called SCMA secure communication based on distance spectrum. SCMA is an important alternative of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in the fifth generation mobile communication system, due to its superior overload transmission. This paper aims at designing SCMA codebooks based on distance spectrum, which involves parameter design, phase rotation, mapping, and sparse spreading. In addition, this paper shows that, in the multi- satellite communication links, the phase of the legitimate user channel is used as the key to be integrated into the satellite SCMA secure communication codebook structure to reduce the probability of being intercepted. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm effectively improves the safety of satellite communication links on the basis of ensuring that the overload transmission performance is not affected, and provides a valuable reference for the practical application of sparse code division multiple access.

In this paper, we propose a novel secure communication method for terrestrial-satellite system called hybrid-power communication. Hybrid-power communication, which belongs to physical layer security technology, not only eliminates the need for spread spectrum technology, but also is compatible with spread spectrum technology. Compared with artificial noise, hybrid-power communication method ensures the security of confidential user more efficiently, utilizing non-confidential users whose communication has no need to be encrypted. By allocating different power to the signals in accordance with hybrid-power factors, secure communication is achieved. Hybrid-power communication is able to improve the security of confidential user at a very low cost without affecting the communication performance of non-confidential user. In the last place, the simulation verifies our conclusion that compared with other available technologies, with the communication performance guaranteed, hybrid-power technology can effectively improve the security of the physical layer with the assistance of non-confidential user, while only costs tolerable resource loss and hardware requirements.

Background Anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC) is a rare malignant tumor. In addition to the main ATC type with classical histopathological features, the other morphological types of ATC include paucicellular variant, angiomatoid, lymphoepithelioma-like, and small-cell variant. However, an ATC variant with a chondrosarcomatous component has not been reported to date. Case presentation Computed tomography imaging of a 63-year-old male with a 2-month history of a cervical mass revealed a 4.5-cm lesion with heterogeneous enhancement in the left thyroid lobe and two smooth and homogeneous nodules in the right thyroid lobe. The patient underwent total thyroidectomy and cervical lymph node resection. Histologically, the tumor boundary in the left lobe was clear, with a few mitotically active, spindle sarcoma-like tumor cells observed in some areas. Immunohistochemically, these spindle cells were positive for vimentin and negative for cytokeratin, paired box-8, epithelial membrane antigen, calcitonin, thyroglobulin, and thyroid transcription factor-1. In other areas, abundant cartilage matrix production and irregularly shaped lobules of cartilage, often separated by fibrous bands, were observed. The chondrocytes appeared mildly/moderately atypical and contained enlarged, hyperchromatic nucleoli. One of the two nodules in the right thyroid lobe had a clear boundary and comprised some bland spindle cells in a prominently collagenous stroma with clear boundaries. The other nodule in the right thyroid lobe was completely enclosed within a thin, fibrous capsule and exhibited normofollicular and microfollicular architecture. The patient received adjuvant radiotherapy after the surgery and was free of any local or regional recurrence or distant metastases at the 8-month follow-up evaluation. Conclusions This unusual case of ATC with chondrosarcomatous differentiation is an important addition to the morphology spectrum of ATC types.

It is widely believed air pollution is an obstacle to cycling as it has negative effects on cyclists’ health outcomes and deteriorates their cycling experiences. However, the empirical studies investigating the impact of air pollution on cycling behaviour remains scarce. The aim of this paper is to fill the gap by looking at Beijing as a case study. The authors conducted a survey of 307 cyclists on the days with different levels of air quality in terms of concentration of PM2.5 in 2015. The results show that in the polluted weather, those who persist in cycling are more likely to be male, over 30 years old, lower income or those who travel short distances. Specifically, female cyclists have a higher tendency to shift from cycling to public transit than the males and medium and high-income earners are more likely to shift to using a car than low income earners. The residents’ subjective perceptions of safety and comfort have major effects on their cycling behaviour. A higher perception of comfort and safety is related to a higher possibility of continuing cycling when air quality became polluted. Cycling for commuting trips is less likely to be replaced by other modes than cycling for non-commuting trips, such as shopping. Results of this study reveal that improving air quality in a metropolitan area such as Beijing has co-benefits of cycling renaissance. The huge investments into cycling infrastructure should be integrated with policies designed to create an attractive environment for cycling.

The external micro-channel heat exchanger plays a significant role in performance of the heat pump system for EVs. It functions as both the evaporator and condenser. A test bench with the heat pump system is set up to research the influence of arrangement (vertical or horizontal) of flat tubes on the system performance. The investigation results show: on heating conditions, the horizontal HX has greater pressure drop, which brings about less heat absorption, higher compressor power consumption and worse system COP. However, the vertical HX is easier to frost than the horizontal. On cooling conditions, the heat pump system with horizontal external HX has larger cooling capacity and better COP.

Utilizing cabin return air to heat the cabin can reduce the heating load and save the battery power of Electric vehicle, but it is difficult to avoid fogging on the windshield caused by the high humidity of the return air. In this paper, the climate characteristics of the vehicle interior is analyzed by simulation with a thermal model based on the whole cabin. The simulation model is verified by an experimental test on a real car, and the errors are within 7%. The fogging conditions at different driving speeds and external air environments are drawn from the simulation results. An increase in external temperatures or a decrease in external humidity can benefit for increasing the return air ratio. The return air ratio decreases with the higher driving speed due to increases in the convective heat transfer coefficient, which leads to a lower temperature of the glass surface. This influence of the driving speed depends on the relative humidity of external air and becomes more obvious at the higher relative humidity conditions.

The differential count of white blood cells (WBCs) is one widely used approach to assess the status of a patient’s immune system. Currently, the main methods of differential WBC counting are manual counting and automatic instrument analysis with labeling preprocessing. But these two methods are complicated to operate and may interfere with the physiological states of cells. Therefore, we propose a deep learning-based method to perform label-free classification of three types of WBCs based on their morphologies to judge the activated or inactivated neutrophils. Over 90% accuracy was finally achieved by a pre-trained fine-tuning Resnet-50 network. This deep learning-based method for label-free WBC classification can tackle the problem of complex instrumental operation and interference of fluorescent labeling to the physiological states of the cells, which is promising for future point-of-care applications.

One lensfree microfluidic on-chip flowing cell imaging system with integrated SAW pumping is proposed in this article. The SAW device temperature responses are characterized to be below 40 °C so as not to harm cells. Different resolution enhancing techniques are implemented and compared. It is demonstrated that machine learning based methods exceed those interpolation based ones, and a training library of individual cell type helps improve the SSIM compared with a training library of combined cell types.

The traditional analytical biosensor instruments are relatively bulky, expensive, and not easy to handle, thus their applications are largely limited in resource-limited settings. The recent development of microfluidic lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technology has provided a possible solution to miniaturize the conventional biosensing system, yet other accessory devices to detect, readout, analyze, transfer, and display results are still required. With the rapid development, mass production, and pervasive distribution of smartphones in recent years, they have provided people with portable, cost-effective, and easy-to-operate platforms to build analytical biosensors for point-of-care (POC) applications and mobile health. Based on the common analytical methods, this paper reviews the recent development of four types of smartphone based analytical biosensory systems at the POC, i.e., smartphone-based microscopic imaging, colorimetric, electrochemical, and electrochemiluminescence biosensor. The different bio-sensing strategies and analytical performance together with future perspectives are discussed.

A single layer multi-polarization transmitarray is presented in this paper, whose structure can be much simpler than the traditional multi-layer frequency selective surface transmitarray. The proposed transmitarray consists of numerous split ring elements and has three working conditions. It is designed, simulated and measured in C-band. The measurement result shows that the transmitarray can switch polarization of the incident wave and set separation beam direction at the same time

Face recognition technology is widely used in law enforcement agencies. Face photo-sketch recognition is one of possible ways to identify suspects. We propose a method using joint dictionary learning for face photo-sketch recognition. Our method bypasses the image synthesis procedure used by previous joint dictionary learning based methods. Compared with other methods such as coupled dictionary learning which projects features from two different modalities into a common space for recognition, our method does not need extra projections, and avoids the expensive optimization of coupled dictionary learning. By using the cosine distance nearest neighbor classifier, our method performs equally well as coupled dictionary learning based method with much less computation. In the experiments on a popular face photo-sketch database, our method achieves recognition rates higher than or comparable to that of the state-of-art methods.

This research presents a novel feature that is capable of significantly facilitating distinction between metal pixels and non-metal pixels near metal in X-ray CT images. In order to create this feature, we exploit the Relevant Neighbor Area (RNA) idea originally developed for projection image inpainting. The feature distinctively distributes metal and near-metal pixels with opposite signs. Simple thresholding results on the histogram of the reconstructed image of the feature image shows the effectiveness of the feature proposed. The proposed feature, when combined with a segmentation algorithm, is expected to significantly contribute to the solution of metal area segmentation in X-ray CT images.

This research features multi-scale car detection and localization. Deformable active contour fragments are represented and learned at multiple scales, which directly represent the shape of cars. Accurate localization is also achieved by learning the variation of the car center position through the deformation of each active contour fragment. Employing Real-Boost for the proposed multi-scale deformable contour fragments provides a very good performance on widely used single scale multi-view and multi-scale multi-view car datasets.