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As a rising star of social apps, short video apps, e.g., TikTok, have attracted a large number of mobile users by providing fresh and short video contents that highly match their watching preferences. Meanwhile, the booming growth of short video apps imposes new technical challenges on the existing computation and communication infrastructure. Traditional solutions maintain all videos on the cloud and stream them to users via contend delivery networks or the Internet. However, they incur huge network traffic and long delay that seriously affect users' watching experiences. In this paper, we propose an edge-assisted short video sharing framework to address these challenges by caching some videos highly preferred by users at edge servers that can be accessed by users via high-speed network connections. Since edge servers have limited computation and storage resources, we design an online algorithm with provable approximation ratio to decide which videos should be cached at edge servers, without the knowledge of future network quality and watching preferences changes. Furthermore, we improve the performance by jointly considering video fetching and user-edge association. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithms under various system settings, and the results show that our proposals outperform existing schemes.

BACKGROUND Chronic urinary retention (CUR) is a frequent complication after orthotopic neobladder (ONB) reconstruction in women. To decrease CUR, several open surgical modifications to provide back support to the ONB have been established on the basis of pelvic anatomical differences between females and males. OBJECTIVE To illustrate our technique for robotic intracorporeal reconfiguration of ONB as integrated into our open surgical approach to provide back support to the ONB with round ligaments in women. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS From November 2017 to April 2021, 28 patients underwent robotic intracorporeal ONB with a minimum of 6 mo of follow-up at a single centre. SURGICAL PROCEDURE We performed robotic radical cystectomy, pelvic lymphadenectomy, and a complete intracorporeal ONB suspended with round ligaments (rONB). Our surgical procedure is demonstrated in the accompanying video. MEASUREMENTS Demographics and clinical and pathological data were collected. Perioperative and 90-d complications and 6-mo functional outcomes were compared for the rONB group (n = 12) and the patients receiving a traditional ONB (tONB; n = 16). RESULTS AND LIMITATIONS The median total operative time was 305 min (interquartile range [IQR] 270-370) for tONB and 303 min (IQR 287-330) for rONB. The median estimated blood loss was 325 ml (IQR 200-700) for tONB and 350 ml (IQR 262-600) for rONB. Some 50% of the tONB group and 41.7% of the rONB group experienced low-grade complications. A total of 12.5% tONB and 8.3% rONB patients experienced high-grade complications with neobladder-vaginal fistula. The cumulative risk of CUR was 37.5% in the tONB group and 16.7% in the rONB group. This study is limited by the small sample size and the short follow-up period. CONCLUSIONS We established a feasible surgical technique for a robotic intracorporeal ONB configuration suspended with round ligaments. This may prevent the occurrence of emptying dysfunction in women. PATIENT SUMMARY We describe our stepwise technique for creating a new bladder within the body that is suspended with round ligaments. Patients undergoing removal of the bladder for bladder cancer may benefit from this technique in terms of better urinary function and the advantages of a robotic surgical approach.

Harmonic current estimation is required in active power filters for compensation purposes. The most efficient way of calculating the total harmonic current up to the infinite order is to subtract the fundamental component from the distorted current. Direct determination of the fundamental component of a distorted current of mains frequency was realized recently with a third-order modulation integral observer. This article shows that using an exponential modulation function (Exp-MF) for the integral observer will: 1) significantly enhance the robustness of the observer against noise and 2) automatically remove the low-frequency envelope arising from the D/A and A/C sampling processes compared to previous polynomial modulation function. These new and advantageous features are supported with detailed analysis and experimental verification. The robust observer can be implemented in grid-connected power electronics circuits that require the instantaneous information of the fundamental and/or harmonic currents. Practical comparative tests with the adaptive notch filter and recursive discrete Fourier transform (DFT) methods in an active power filter have confirmed the good performance under both the steady and dynamic states of the proposed Exp-MF integral observer.

The atomic force microscope (AFM) is widely used in many fields such as biology, materials, and physics due to its advantages of simple sample preparation, high-resolution topography measurement and wide range of applications. However, the low scanning speed of traditional AFM limits its dynamics process monitoring and other further application. Therefore, the improvement of AFM scanning speed has become more and more important. In this review, the working principle of AFM is first proposed. Then, we introduce the improvements of cantilever, drive mechanism, and control method of the high-speed atomic force microscope (HS-AFM). Finally, we provide the next developments of HS-AFM.

Contactless fault diagnosis is one of the most important technique for fault identification of equipment. Based on the idea of contactless fault diagnosis, this paper presents a sound-based diagnosis method for railway point machines (RPMs). First, the sound signals are preprocessed using empirical mode decomposition (EMD). Entropy, time-domain and frequency-domain statistical parameters of the first 15 intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) are then extracted. Second, a two-stage feature selection strategy blending Filter method and Wrapper method is proposed, which can significantly reduce the dimension of features and select the optimal features. The superiority and effectiveness of the proposed feature selection strategy are verified by comparing with other feature selection methods. Third, a weighted majority voting (WMV)-based ensemble classifier optimized using particle swarm optimization (PSO) is developed and compared with single classifiers. And the ensemble patterns are discussed to select the most optimal ensemble pattern. The average diagnosis accuracies of 10 repeated trails of reverse-normal and normal-reverse switching processes reach 99% and 99.93%, respectively, which indicates the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has emerged as important transmission technology to improve the spectral/energy efficiency in the next-generation (beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G) wireless communication network and has numerous applications in the areas of Internet of Things (IoT) and vehicular communication systems. Thus, in this paper, we investigate the application of RIS in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled vehicular communication system with infinite and finite block length codes, where UAV communicates with the single antenna ground vehicle in the presence of several interfering vehicles on the road. We have obtained the approximate closed-form statistics of received SINR at ground vehicle in the presence of multiple nonidentical interference links. Furthermore, we analyze the performance of the considered system in terms of the coverage probability, bit-error-rate, block error rate (BLER) and goodput. It has been shown through the numerical results that the deployment of RIS significantly improves the performance of UAV-enabled vehicular communication network, even in the presence of the direct link between the UAV and the ground vehicle. Additionally, we also investigate the impact of various channel and system parameters like practical reflection coefficients of RIS, number of RIS reflecting elements, and number of interfering vehicles on the system performance. The analytical results are corroborated with Monte Carlo simulations.

A novel method for integrating multi-omics data, including gene expression, copy number variation, DNA methylation, and miRNA data, is proposed to identify biomarkers of cancer prognosis. First, survival analysis was performed for these four types of omics data to obtain survival-related genes. Next, survival-related genes detected in at least two types of omics data were selected as candidate genes. The four types of omics data only composed of candidate genes were subjected to dimension reduction using an autoencoder to obtain a one-dimensional data representation. The mRMR algorithm was used to screen for key genes. This method was applied to lung squamous cell carcinoma and 20 cancer-related genes were identified. Gene function analysis revealed that the genes were related to cancer. Using survival analysis, the genes were verified to distinguish between high- and low-risk groups. These results indicate that the genes can be used as biomarkers for cancer.

The further evolution and integration of internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies would transform traditional health care processes into smart health care services, which leverages various wireless sensors, cameras, and controllers to collect multi-dimensional medical information and analyze them intelligently. In case of this, the massive amount of data generated by smart health devices need to be transferred, processed and stored quickly, which poses great challenges to traditional cloud-based communications with single association mechanism. To address this problem, this paper proposes an innovative multi-access edge computing based access network with multi-association mechanism, where a single smart device could associate and communicate with multiple edge nodes. The deployment of edge nodes for proposed access network is formulated as an extended knapsack problem, which considers not only signal to interference plus noise rate (SINR) requirement of devices, but also power constraint and load balance of edge nodes and it is solved by the simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. Numerical results via SA algorithm show that the proposed multi-association mechanism can improve the SINR of devices significantly, while achieving better load balancing among edge nodes. All these together provides good reference to build an efficient access network for future smart healthcare system.

The reform of power spot market in China provides a new profit mode, determining energy trading strategy based on the power spot prices for distributed energy storages. However, individually accessing every distributed energy storage to the dispatch centre results in a high cost and low efficiency, which needs to be improved by connecting through the aggregator. To this end, this paper proposes a regulation mode and strategy for distributed energy storages participating in energy trading through aggregation. First, the optimal centres of distributed energy storages are searched as the aggregation centres according to the electrical distance distributed by the energy storage, and the model of each distributed energy storage aggregation group is established. On this basis, the conditional value at risk (CVaR) method is introduced to quantify the income risk brought by the fluctuation of power spot prices, following with the optimization model for day‐ahead stage and real‐time stage. Finally, case studies under multiple scenarios of power spot market verify that the regulation mode and strategy can effectively guarantee the economic profits of distributed energy storages by setting aggregation groups and reasonable risk preference coefficients.

Data collection in big data is an effective way to aggregate information that the collector is interested in. However, there is no assurance for the data that the users provide. Since collector does not have the ability to check the authenticity of every piece of information, the trustworthiness of users participated in the collection become important. In this paper, we design an efficient approach to calculate users' trustworthiness in data collection for big data context. We divide the trustworthiness into familiarity trustworthiness and similarity trustworthiness, and study the influences of user actions on trustworthiness. To prevent malicious users from raising their trustworthiness and providing false information that may mislead final results, we also design a security queue to record users' historical trust information, so that we can detect malicious users with high accuracy. Simulation results show that our model can sensitively resist the malicious actions of users.

BACKGROUND: Both portal vein embolization (PVE) and associating liver partition and portal vein ligation for staged hepatectomy (ALPPS) have merits and demerits when used in patients with unresectable liver cancers due to insufficient volumes in future liver remnant (FLR). METHODS: This study was a single-center, prospective randomized comparative study. Patients with the diagnosis of hepatitis B related hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) were randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to the 2 groups. The primary endpoints were tumor resection and three-year overall survival (OS) rates. RESULTS: Between November 2014 to June 2016, 76 patients with unresectable HBV-related HCC due to inadequate volume of FLR were randomly assigned to ALPPS groups (n=38) and TACE + PVE groups (n=38). Thirty-seven patients (97.4%) in the ALPPS group compared with 25 patients (65.8%) in the TACE + PVE group were able to undergo staged hepatectomy (risk ratio 1.48, 95% CI: 1.17–1.87, P

Key Points Somatic UBA1 mutations define VEXAS in men with late-onset systemic inflammatory disease and cytopenia.Features summarizing VEXAS include cytopenia, hypercellularity, lack of hematogones, and vacuoles in myeloid and erythroid precursors., VEXAS (vacuoles, E1 enzyme, X-linked, autoinflammatory, somatic) syndrome is caused by somatic mutations in UBA1 and is identified by a genotype-driven method. This condition affects unrelated men with adultonset inflammatory syndromes in association with hematologic manifestations of peripheral cytopenia and bone marrow myeloid dysplasia. Although bone marrow vacuolization restricted to myeloid and erythroid precursors has been identified in patients with VEXAS, the detailed clinical and histopathological features of peripheral blood and bone marrows remain unclear. The current case report describes the characteristic hematologic findings in patients with VEXAS, including macrocytic anemia, thrombocytopenia, marked hypercellular bone marrow with granulocytic hyperplasia, megaloblastic changes in erythroid precursors, and the absence of hematogones in addition to prominent vacuoles in myeloid and erythroid precursor cells. Characterizing the clinical and hematologic features helps to raise awareness and improve diagnosis of this novel, rare, but potentially underrecognized disease. Prompt diagnosis expands the general knowledgeable and understanding of this disease, and optimal management may prevent patients from developing complications related to this refractory inflammatory syndrome and improve the overall clinical outcome.

In this paper, we consider an energy-harvesting (EH) relay network composing of multiple sources, a destination and multiple EH decode-and-forward (DF) relays. The EH relays all equip with a power splitter to divide the received signal power into two parts, one for information decoding and the remaining for signal relaying. The power splitting ratio (PSR) depicts the trade-off between the relaying energy and decoding energy. We propose an optimal power splitting and joint source-relay selection (OPS-JSRS) scheme where the optimal power-splitting ratio is obtained and the best source-relay pair is selected to transmit the message. For the purpose of comparison, we examine the optimal power splitting and round-robin (OPS-RR) scheme and the traditional power splitting and joint source-relay selection (TPS-JSRS) scheme. The exact and asymptotic closed-form expressions of outage probability for OPS-RR, TPS-JSRS and OPS-JSRS schemes are derived. Numerical results show that OPS-JSRS scheme is better than OPS-RR and TPS-JSRS schemes in terms of outage probability, explaining the superiority of the proposed OPS-JSRS scheme. Additionally, outage probability performance of OPS-JSRS scheme can be improved by increasing the number of sources and relays.

Advanced remote-sensing instruments produce massively large scenes from the surface of the earth, with very high spatial resolution and dimensionality. Developing methods for efficiently localizing specific objects in a large-scale scene presents a significant challenge, mainly because of the high computational requirements involved. To tackle this issue, we propose a new hashing for localization (HfL) framework that efficiently searches for specific objects in the large-scale scene. It begins by dividing the scene into a large number of overlapping local patches. A lightweight deep hash model, referred to as a tiny hashing network (THNet), encodes the local patches into hash codes. The Hamming distances between the hash code of an object image, i.e., an image containing the specific class of objects to be localized in the scene, and those of all local patches are computed. Small values of the Hamming distance indicate local patches that are similar to the object image. The positions of these local patches in the large-scale scene reflect the regional locations of the specific objects. The hash codes are binary and do not take up much space, and the Hamming distance carries very low-computational overheads. Further, we exploit a class center loss as the THNet training objective, which can comprehensively manage multiple object classes. These features mean that the HfL framework can localize specific objects very quickly, regardless of the size of the scene. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework. For instance, HfL can find objects in a remote-sensing image of 19,584 x 19,584 pixels in only 4.388 s (on a single RTX2080ti), with remarkable localization results. The source codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/lrhan/HfL, together providing a baseline for fast localizing objects in a large-scale scene.

Ultra-thick steep coal seam mining will inevitably lead to the increase of greater and violent ground subsidence and deformation. A subsidence control method by inversely-inclined slicing and upward mining is proposed in this paper. By this method, the sequence of collapse of overlying strata and the direction of propagation of strata movement are changed, the extent of roof-side deformation thereby is lessened, and boundary angle of roof-side subsidence is reduced by 5°–10°. The mechanism of this mining method for control of strata movement has been evidenced by numerical simulation and experiments with similarity materials. A subsidence prediction model based on the variation of mining influence propagation angle can be used to evaluate the surface movement and deformation of the mining method. The application of the method in No.3 Mine in Yaojie mining area has yielded the expected result.

The main objective of this paper is to establish a mathematical framework to analyze the complex material and energy performance of the calcinations process based on the fundamental mass and energy conservations. The synergy degree of vital order parameters was defined and evaluated to assess the status and order of the calcination process. Furthermore, the synergy model for resource utilization and energy saving has also been developed. The results show that the energy efficiencies of the drying kiln, rotary kiln, incinerator and the cooler are 63.574%, 37.709%, 76.782% and 74.758%, respectively. Meanwhile, the synergy degree of the whole calcination system is determined as 0.507. Based on the result, several suggestions were proposed to improve the resource utilization, energy-saving and synergy performance. Assessing the performance of suggested improvements, the synergy degree was re-evaluated and recorded a substantial enhancement up to 0.809. The present work provides valuable insights and comprehensive analysis tool for assessing the performance and potential optimization of the calcination process.

Purpose: Although single-port robot-assisted radical prostatectomy (SP-RARP) is considered a safe and feasible approach for radical prostatectomy, the comparative performance of the SP robot with e...

Current cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, enable anonymity by using public keys to represent user accounts. On the other hand, inferring blockchain account types (i.e., miners, smart contracts or exchanges), which are also referred to as blockchain identities, is significant in many scenarios, such as risk assessment and trade regulation. Existing work on blockchain deanonymization mainly focuses on Bitcoin that supports simple transactions of cryptocurrencies. As the popularity of decentralized application (DApp) platform blockchains with Turing-complete smart contracts, represented by Ethereum, identity inference in blockchain faces new challenges because of user diversity and complexity of activities enabled by smart contracts. In this paper, we propose $I^2 GL$ , an identify inference approach based on big graph analytics and learning to address these challenges. Specifically, $I^2 GL$ constructs a transaction graph and aims to infer the identity of nodes using the graph learning technique based on Graph Convolutional Networks. Furthermore, a series of enhancement has been proposed by exploiting unique features of blockchain transaction graph. The experimental results on Ethereum transaction records show that $I^2 GL$ significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.

This article presents analysis, design details, and measurement result of a 224-Gb/s four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) transmitter (TX) consisting of a 7-bit voltage digital-to-analog converter (DAC) driver, digital 8-tap feed-forward equalizer (FFE), and a 28-GHz inductively peaked clock distribution network. The TX DAC uses quarter-rate clocking with a 4:1 pulse-based data serialization architecture. Design techniques for generating and distributing low-jitter CMOS clocks up to 29 GHz, timing closure in the serializer, 112-Gbaud 4:1 data MUX using 1-UI pulse generator, and bandwidth/return loss/group delay optimized output pad network using a 9th-order LC filter are described. Fabricated in the Intel 10-nm FinFET process technology, the TX demonstrates random jitter (RJ) of 65 fs $_{{rms}}$ with nominal output swing of 1.0 $V_{{ppd}}$ at 224 Gb/s achieving 1.88-pJ/b energy efficiency including an on-die LC phase-locked loop (PLL). To the best of authors' knowledge, this TX achieved the highest data rate with the lowest RJ for CMOS SerDes TXs reported to date.

A novel hyperspectral anomaly detection method is proposed in this paper. This method is motivated by two important observations. First, there are hundreds of bands in a hyperspectral image (HSI), among which redundant bands and some noisy bands could be eliminated to increase the discriminability from the spectral domain. Meanwhile, considering the small amount of the anomalies, they may be neglected in the spatial clustering process, and the anomalies can be highlighted by eliminating the clustered result from the original HSI. In this way, the spatial-spectral extraction is proposed to detect the anomalies in the HSI. Firstly, an iterative optimal neighborhood reconstruction method is utilized to select the bands while preserving their divergence. Secondly, the spatial clustering is achieved by minimizing the intra distance in any given category. Finally, the spatial clustered HSI is eliminated from the band selected HSI, and acts as the direct input for the detection process. Experimental results and data analysis have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

With the development of mobile terminals, tunable capacitors for signal processing and memristors for calculation have received a lot of attention. Combining a tunable capacitor and a memristor can improve the performance of mobile terminals and reduce space requirements. In this article, we report on Bi2NiMnO6 (BNMO) films with high dielectric tuning and nonvolatile resistive switching (RS) effects. The BNMO films are fabricated by the sol–gel method and annealed at different temperatures. It exhibits a dielectric tunability of up to 92%. This high dielectric tunability may be attributed to the modulation of the interface dipole by the electric field. When an electric field is applied, the interface dipole of the BNMO film is far away from the interface of the BNMO, and then forms a conductive channel where anions and cations are mixed. The BNMO films are found to have a double-set type effect due to its dielectric tunability properties. This work introduces an ultra-high dielectric tuning material and a new type of RS effect on BNMO thin film, which can achieve tuning and memory behavior on a device.

Autophagy regulator beclin 1 activity determines the severity of kidney damage induced by ischemia reperfusion injury, but its role in kidney recovery and fibrosis are unknown and its therapeutic potentials have not been tested. Here, we explored beclin 1 effects on kidney fibrosis in three models of acute kidney injury (AKI)—ischemia reperfusion injury, cisplatin kidney toxicity, and unilateral ureteric obstruction in mouse strains with three levels of beclin 1 function: normal (wild type), low (heterozygous global deletion of beclin 1, Becn1+/−), and high beclin 1 activity (knockin gain-of-function mutant Becn1, Becn1FA). Fourteen days after AKI induction, heterozygous mice had more, but knockin mice had less kidney fibrosis than wild-type mice did. One day after ischemia reperfusion injury, heterozygous pan-kidney tubular Becn1 null mice had more severe kidney damage than homozygous distal tubular Becn1 null mice did, which was similar to the wild-type mice, implying that proximal tubular beclin 1 protects the kidney against ischemia reperfusion injury. By 14 days, both pan-kidney heterozygous Becn1 null and distal tubular homozygous Becn1 null mice had poorer kidney recovery than wild-type mice did. Injection of beclin 1 peptides increased cell proliferation in kidney tubules in normal mice. Beclin 1 peptides injection either before or after (2–5 days) ischemia reperfusion injury protected the kidney from injury and suppressed kidney fibrosis. Thus, both endogenous beclin 1 protein expression in kidney tubules and exogenous beclin 1 peptides are kidney protective via attenuation of acute kidney damage, promotion of cell proliferation, and inhibition of kidney fibrosis, consequently improving kidney recovery post-AKI. Hence, exogenous beclin 1 peptide may be a potential new therapy for AKI.

The interfacial charge transfer (CT) that plays an important role in enhancing the photoelectric conversion efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) has not always been fully explored. Here, TiO2@N719@Ag DSSCs system was constructed, and the CT processes have been monitored by surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectra. Meanwhile, it is well known that as one of the most common external stimulis, high pressure can increase the free carrier density of TiO2 NPs and cause the band gap to narrow. In the high pressure SERS experiment, we observed a significant enhancement of N719 dye in the TiO2@N719@Ag system up to 2.48 GPa, which is consistent with the variation trend of charge transfer degree (ρCT). It is indicated that band gap changes will strongly affect the CT process, further influence the SERS signal intensity (or ρCT), and thus increase the CT probability of DSSCs. Futhermore, the decoration of Ag NPs in the TiO2@N719@Ag DSSCs system can introduce localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR), enhance the light trapping ability and offer additional CT pathways. Importantly, it is possible to improve the photoelectric conversion performance of DSSCs via high pressure method and the introducing of Ag NPs. Finally, in order to observe the CT process of DSSCs more clearly, the models describing the CT mechanism have been proposed. SERS spectroscopy is expected to be a promising technique for the exploration of the interfacial CT behavior in DSSCs devices, which may further broaden the thoughts of improvement of efficiency of cells.

With the wide deployment of digital image capturing equipment, the need of denoising to produce a crystal clear image from noisy capture environment has become indispensable. In this work, a novel type-2 fuzzy-based filter is proposed for denoising images corrupted by impulse noise, especially for the high-density salt-and-pepper noise. It operates two stages, namely, type-2 fuzzy identifier and matrix completion denoiser. In the proposed method, the type-2 fuzzy identifier is first employed to identify and trim the entries contaminated by impulse noise in the data matrix from fuzzy system. Then, the trimmed data matrix is utilized to retrieve the noiseless data matrix with the matrix completion technology. Herein, a novel matrix completion technique is developed without $a priori$ rank information compared with its counterparts. Simulation results are presented which vividly show the denoised images obtained by the proposed method can achieve crystal clear image with strong structural integrity, and are showing good performance in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).

Developing lead-free dielectric ceramics with outstanding energy storage properties has become urgent for dielectric capacitors. Herein, a synergistic effect design strategy has been proposed that combined the merits of relaxor ferroelectrics with high polarization/low remanent polarization and enhanced linear materials with relatively high polarization/ultrahigh dielectric breakdown strength. Hence, a novel lead-free 0.955Bi0.5Na0.5TiO3-0.045Ba(Al0.5Ta0.5)O3-based ceramics are engineered though introducing the enhanced linear dielectrics of 0.9CaTiO3-0.1BiScO3. A large recoverable energy density (Wrec∼3.13 J/cm3) and high efficiency (η∼88.4 %) as well as excellent power density (PD∼95.1 MW/cm3) and discharge speed (t0.9∼36 ns), along with superior stabilities, have been simultaneously realized. The piezoelectric force microscope measurements reveals that incorporating CT-BS generates more highly-dynamic polar nanoregions (PNRs), giving rise to rapid reversibility of PNRs with concurrently tailored energy storage performance. This study demonstrates synergistic effect design is a feasible and paradigmatic way to explore high-efficiency dielectrics for high-power energy storage applications.

Tropical forest and swidden agriculture are declining, while commercial plantation is continuously expanding. However, little is known about the mechanisms, processes and trends of the tropical forest-swidden-plantation (FSP) nexus. Global ongoing initiatives including the UN-REDD Programme, not only have repeatedly emphasized the significance of conserving forests, reforestation and afforestation, but re-pushed swidden agriculture to the forefront of a long-standing international debate of climate changes and biodiversity. Many facets limit our understanding of swidden agriculture. The lack of geographic and demographic data and their dynamics across the tropics undoubtedly further aggravate this situation since the first appeal of eradication of shifting cultivation by the FAO. Although recent studies have enriched significantly our knowledge of forest loss and plantation expansion, previous research has proceeded separately and has yet to be integrated under the umbrella of sustainable swidden agriculture. Efforts are needed to investigate the dynamics of the FSP nexus for sake of a synergetic goal of climate mitigation and poverty alleviation.

The integration of soft open point (SOP) effectively improves the flexibility of active distribution networks (ADNs). However, in practical operation, accurate network parameters are difficult to obtain and the operation state changes rapidly with distributed generators (DGs). With the development of information technologies, massive operation data can be acquired in ADNs. How to utilize multisource data has become the key to realize the intelligent operation of ADNs. This article proposes a data-driven operation strategy of SOP based on model-free adaptive control (MFAC). First, considering the inaccurate parameters and frequent change of operation states, a data-driven framework is formulated for the real-time operation of SOP. Then, the operation strategies of multiple SOPs are further improved with interarea coordination. The results of case studies show that driven by the measurement data, the potential benefits of SOPs are explored to adaptively respond to system state changes and improve the operational performance of ADNs.

Meng-Chang Yang,1,&ast; Peng Li,1,&ast; Wen-Jie Su,1 Rong Jiang,1 Jia Deng,1 Ru-Rong Wang,2 Chao-Li Huang3 1Department of Anesthesiology, Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Anesthesiology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Internal Medicine, Eastern Hospital, Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Ru-Rong WangDepartment of Anesthesiology, West China Hospital, Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 18140049936Fax +86 28-87393632Email wangrurong@scu.edu.cnChao-Li HuangDepartment of Internal Medicine, Eastern Hospital, Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, No. 585, Damian, Honghe North Road, Longquanyi District, Chengdu, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 13350855681Fax +86 28-87775681Email chaoli_huang@126.comPurpose: Several randomized clinical trials (RCTs) investigated the effects of the manual placental removal on hemorrhage or other hemorrhage-related complications compared with the spontaneous placental removal during cesarean section (CS), while the results remained controversial and were inconsistent. The purpose of this meta-analysis was to quantify the pooled effects of the methods of placental removal on hemorrhage during CS.Patients and Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted using PubMed, EMBASE, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. Heterogeneity was tested by I2 statistics and Q-statistic. The random-effects model or fixed-effects model were used to calculate the pooled effect for the included studies according to heterogeneity. And the term of standardized mean difference (SMD) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) was pooled and estimated the effects across all studies.Results: A total of nine RCTs were included in this meta-analysis. Compared with spontaneous group, manual placental removal increased the amount of hemorrhage (SMD = 0.53, 95% CI [0.12, 0.94]; Z = 2.54, P = 0.011) and increased the risk of endometritis (OR = 1.84, 95% CI [1.31, 2.58]; Z = 3.52, P < 0.0001). In contrast, there was no significant difference concerning the operating time (SMD = − 0.30, 95% CI [− 0.85, 0.24]; Z = 1.09, P = 0.276), the length of hospital stays (SMD = 0.11, 95% CI [− 0.08, 0.30]; Z = 1.11, P = 0.265), and blood transfusion requirement (OR = 1.36, 95% CI [0.91, 2.04]; Z = 1.52, P = 0.129), respectively.Conclusion: Comparing with spontaneous placental removal, manual placental removal appeared to be less positive effect during CS. Because of the limitations of this meta-analysis, more high-quality RCTs are needed to confirm our findings.Keywords: cesarean section, manual placental removal, spontaneous placenta removal, hemorrhage, meta-analysis

BACKGROUND To report the safety and effectiveness of laparoscopic intratumoral resection facilitated by coagulation (LIRC) compared with laparoscopic hepatectomy (LH) in treating giant hepatic hemangioma. METHODS From 2017 to 2020, 19 consecutive patients with giant hepatic hemangioma (≥ 10 cm) received LIRC in one center. We selected a subgroup of 103 patients treated by LH in other four centers who well matched the 19 consecutive patients treated with LIRC, in a 1:1 fashion based on the tumor location, tumor size, and body mass index. Furthermore, the differences in technical success, operative time, operative blood loss, change of laboratory indexes, hospital stays, complication and clinical responds are compared between the two groups. RESULTS Technical success was achieved in all 38 patients. Patients in the LIRC group had a relative shorter operative time (P

Macroscopic assembly of graphene sheets has renovated the preparation of neat carbonaceous fibers with integrating high performance and superior functionalities, beyond the pyrolysis of conventional polymeric precursors. To date, graphene microfibers by the liquid crystalline wet-spinning method have been established. However, how to reliably prepare continuous neat graphene nanofibers remains unknown. Here, we present the electrospinning of neat graphene nanofibers enabled by modulating colossally extensional flow state of graphene oxide liquid crystals. We use polymer with mega molecular weight as transient additives to realize the colossal extensional flow and electrospinning. The neat graphene nanofibers feature high electronic quality and crystallinity and exhibit high electrical conductivity of 2.02 × 106 S/m that is to be comparable with single crystal graphite whisker. The electrospinning of graphene nanofibers was extended to prepare large-area fabric with high flexibility and superior specific electrical/thermal conductivities. The electrospinning of graphene nanofibers opens the door to nanofibers of rich two-dimensional sheets and the neat graphene nanofibers may grow to be a new species after conventional carbonaceous nanofibers and whiskers in broad functional applications. Electrospinning of neat graphene nanofibers is realized by achieving the colossal extension flow of GO dispersion with the assistance of mega polymer. Neat graphene nanofibers and fabrics show good continuity, high crystallinity, excellent conductivity and thermal conductivity, having great potentials in extensive applications.

BACKGROUND Severe bony Bankart lesions are a difficult challenge in clinical treatment and research. The current treatment methods consist mostly of Latarjet-Bristow surgery and its modified procedures. While good results have been achieved, there are also complications such as coracoid fracture, bone graft displacement, and vascular and nerve injury. AIM To analyze the techniques and biomechanical properties of transversely fixing a bone block from the scapular spine using bone allograft pins with suture threads to repair bony Bankart lesions. METHODS Fresh human shoulder joint specimens and a cadaver specimen model for scapular bone grafting with allograft pin fixation for repair of bony Bankart lesions were used. When the humeral rotation angles were 0°, 30°, 60° and 90°, and the axial loads were 30 N, 40 N, and 50 N, the humerus displacement was studied by biomechanical experiments. RESULTS When the angle of external rotation of the humerus was 0°, 30°, 60°, and 90°, with axial loads of 30 N, 40 N, and 50 N, the data of the normal control group, allograft pin repair group, and titanium alloy hollow screw repair group were compared with each other by the q-test, which showed that there were no statistically differences among the three groups (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION The joints repaired with bone block from the scapular spine transversely fixed with allograft bony pins to repair bony Bankart lesions show good mechanical stability. The bone block has similar properties to normal glenohumeral joints in terms of biomechanical stability.

We report a facile but general method to prepare highly water-soluble and biocompatible photoinitiators for digital light processing (DLP)-based 3D printing of high-resolution hydrogel structures. Through a simple and straightforward one-pot procedure, we can synthesize a metal-phenyl(2,4,6-trimethylbenzoyl)phosphinates (M-TMPP)-based photoinitiator with excellent water solubility (up to ∼50 g/L), which is much higher than that of previously reported water-soluble photoinitiators. The M-TMPP aqueous solutions show excellent biocompatibility, which meets the prerequisite for biomedical applications. Moreover, we used M-TMPP to prepare visible light (405 nm)-curable hydrogel precursor solutions for 3D printing hydrogel structures with a high water content (80 wt %), high resolution (∼7 μm), high deformability (more than 80% compression), and complex geometry. The printed hydrogel structures demonstrate great potential in flexible electronic sensors due to the fast mechanical response and high stability under cyclic loadings.

Deep learning has seen its promising applications in manufacturing processes. In this study, a deep network named Cascade Tri-DFPN based on the two-stage target detection algorithm is proposed for detecting the defects on the texture surface of plastic relays. The network adopts a derivative Resnet-101d as the backbone to obtain a loss-reduced feature extraction. Meanwhile, an enhanced feature pyramid module is put forward to enhance the feature representation of the network by adding a dense connection of feature layers through the self-attentive block. Moreover, the defect region proposals are optimized by introducing a cascade module to obtain high-quality defective proposal boxes. Experimental results on the augmented data set of relays’ surface defect reveal an average accuracy of 88.57% and an average recall rate of 94.58%, much higher than those of traditional RCNN or FPN detectors, demonstrating the remarkable improvement of the proposed network. Robustness of the method is also verified by performing tests with deteriorative image processing, which indicates an eligible defect detection under relatively complex scenarios such as image blurring. The proposed deep network could be used in surface defect detection of plastic relays and other potentially related industrial defect detection fields.

Treatment for vestibular schwannoma (VS) in patients with neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2) is extremely challenging due to the high risk of hearing loss. The aim of this study was to develop nomograms for the prediction of useful hearing loss in patients with NF2. The nomogram was based on a retrospective study of 111 NF2 patients who underwent resection of large VS (> 2 cm) at Beijing Tiantan Hospital between 2011 and 2018. The utility of the proposed nomogram models was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, area under ROC curve (AUC), and calibration curve. The results were validated using a prospective cohort study on 33 patients consecutively enrolled at the same institution from 2019 to 2021. On multivariate analysis of the primary cohort, large tumour size (> 3 cm) and long duration of symptoms (> 24 months) were independent risk factors for preoperative useful hearing loss (AAO-HNS Class D) (P = 0.001 and P = 0.011, respectively), while large tumour size (> 3 cm), poor hearing (Class C), and lobular growth were significantly related to postoperative useful hearing loss (P

The object of this article is to present the innovative technology system for the deep mining of metal mines in China. Based on the current situation and major problems of deep mining of metal mineral resources in China, the key engineering technology development strategies to solve the problems, such as the green intelligent mining modes, are proposed, which is conducive to ensuring the safety of mineral resources supply and the sustainable development of the national economy in China.

Under the effects of internal factors and the external environment, some customer requirements can be extremely sensitive to change; these are known as sensitive requirements. These requirements drive the identification and design of the relevant engineering characteristics. This study defines such characteristics as agile engineering characteristics (AECs), which are crucial for redesigning products and prolonging their service life but attract limited research and practice attention. The research question of identifying the product AECs is answered in this study, and three key issues are solved in the proposed methodology. First, the contribution of product engineering characteristics to customer requirements is calculated using an orthogonal experimental design, and the optimal level combination of engineering characteristics to satisfy the customer requirements is determined through the analysis of variation. Subsequently, the relative importance of engineering characteristics is calculated based on data envelopment analysis. Next, an agility index is defined by integrating the customer satisfaction degree, the relative importance degree of engineering characteristics, and the variation of the level of engineering characteristics, to identify the AECs. Finally, based on the identification of the AECs of an electric vehicle air-conditioning heat pump scroll compressor, the results are analysed and compared to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

BACKGROUND & AIMS Early determination of the prognosis of patients with hepatitis B virus-related acute-on-chronic liver failure (HBV-ACLF) is important to guide clinical management and decrease mortality. The aim of this study was to develop a new simplified prognostic score to accurately predict outcomes in patients with HBV-ACLF. METHODS Prospective clinical data from 2,409 hospitalized patients with acute deterioration of HBV-related chronic liver disease were used to develop a new prognostic score that was validated in an external group. RESULTS A total of 954 enrolled patients with HBV-ACLF were diagnosed based on the Chinese Group on the Study of Severe Hepatitis B-ACLF (COSSH-ACLF) criteria. Six predictive factors were significantly related to 28-day mortality and constituted a new prognostic score (=1.649×ln(international normalized ratio)+0.457×hepatic encephalopathy score+0.425×ln(neutrophil)+0.396×ln(total bilirubin)+0.576×ln(serum urea)+0.033×age). The C-indices of the new score for 28-/90-day mortality (0.826/0.809) were significantly higher than those of 4 other scores (COSSH-ACLF, 0.793/0.784; CLIF-C ACLF, 0.792/0.770; MELD, 0.731/0.727; MELD-Na, 0.730/0.726; all p

In this paper, an uncertain economic dispatch problem (EDP) is considered for a group of coopertive agents. First, let each agent extract a set of samples (scenarios) from the uncertain set, and then a scenario EDP is obtained using these scenarios. Based on the scenario theory, a prior certification is provided to evaluate the probabilistic feasibility of the scenario solution for uncertain EDP. To facilitate the computational task, a distributed solution strategy is proposed by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and a finite-time consensus strategy. Moreover, the distributed strategy can solve the scenario problem over a weight-balanced directed graph. Finally, the proposed solution strategy is applied to an EDP for a power system involving wind power plants.

BACKGROUND: Breast cancer is a malignant tumor disease that poses a significant threat to women’s health. In recent years, the incidence of breast cancer in China has been increasing. This report aims to explore the effects of general anesthesia combined with a thoracic nerve block in modified breast cancer surgery. METHODS: A computer-based search of PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, and the Cochrane Library was performed to identify randomized controlled studies on breast cancer, general anesthesia combined with a thoracic nerve block, modified breast cancer surgery, and other breast cancer treatments. Further search criteria included postoperative pain score, postoperative morphine equivalents given 24 hours after surgery, and operation duration. After an initial selection process, the studies were evaluated using the Jadad scale and the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions to assess their suitability for inclusion in the subsequent meta-analysis of the experimental data, which was carried out using RevMan 5.3. RESULTS: A total of 8 studies comprising a total of 624 patients were selected for inclusion in this report. According to the meta-analysis, the analytical structure of the thoracic nerve group and the control group had a mean difference (MD) of −1.27 [95% confidence interval (CI): −1.68 to −0.86], the structure of the statistical test was Z=6.08 (P

As electric vehicle (EV) sales grew approximately 50% year-over-year, surpassing 3.2 million units in 2020, the "roaring era" of EV is around the corner. To meet the increasing demand for low cost and high energy density batteries, anode-free configuration, with no heavy and voluminous host material on the current collector, has been proposed and further investigated. Nevertheless, it always suffers from several nonnegligible "bottlenecks", such as fragile solid electrolyte interface, deteriorated cycling reversibility, and uncontrolled dendrite formation. Inspired by the "compensatory effect" of some disabled people with other specific functions strengthened to make up for their inconvenience, corresponding quasi-compensatory measures after anode removal, involving dimensional compensation, SEI robustness compensation, lithiophilicity compensation, and lithium source compensation, have been carried out and achieved significant battery performance enhancement. In this review, the chemistry, challenges, and rationally designed "quasi-compensatory effect" associated with anode-free lithium-ion battery are systematically discussed with several possible R&D directions that may aid, direct, or facilitate future research on lithium storage in anode-free configuration essentially emphasized.

In a deregulated environment, the renewable energy producers will face the challenge of how to increase their revenues under uncertainties of power generation and time-varying electricity price. In traditional power network scheduling, prediction and optimization are two independent processes, which easily leads to information loss and modeling error. To deal with the uncertainty and realize an end-to-end controller, this article proposes an energy storage system control model (ESSCM) in the scene of the combined wind-solar storage system. The proposed ESSCM using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm is trained by interacting with the massive environment of a power grid without requiring the assumption on the uncertainties. It learns from scratch to realize the coordination operation of with wind power and photovoltaic power in a combined system, further maximize the benefits of the combined system in the electricity market. One state-of-the-art DRL algorithm, namely double deep Q-network, is used to formulate the proposed ESSCM. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed approach can effectively accommodate the uncertainty and bring high revenues to the combined system.

Acute conditions are the leading cause of work restrictions and missed workdays, contributing to over $27 billion in lost productivity each year and negatively impacting workers' health and quality of life. Primary care services, specifically patient-centered medical homes (PCMHs), play an essential role in supporting timely acute illness or injury recovery for working adults. The purpose of this review is to synthesize the evidence on the relationship between PCMH implementation, care processes, and outcomes. In addition, we discuss the empirical connection between this evidence and return-to-work outcomes, as well as the need for further research.

The incidence and mortality of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) are increasing worldwide. High invasion and metastasis are one of the main causes of death in patients. The selection of reasonable and effective molecular markers to evaluate the prognosis of patients with ICC has important clinical guiding significance. In this study, the expression of Tspan protein in ICC and normal tissues was compared, the correlation between Tspan expression and pathological features of patients was analyzed by the logistic regression model using multivariate analysis, and the relationship between Tspan8 expression and prognosis of ICC patients was analyzed by the Kaplan–Meier survival curve. The results showed that Tspan8 is highly positive in ICC tissues, TNM stage, degree of tumor differentiation, lymph node metastasis, and Tspan8 protein expression were independently correlated, and the overexpression of Tspan was associated with the prognosis of ICC invasion and metastasis. This provides a new idea for clinical treatment.

To minimise the profile of Satcom‐on‐the‐Move ground terminals, in this study, a two‐dimensional beam‐scanning continuous transverse stub antenna that is based on a compact linear source generator (LSG) is presented. A periodic anti‐symmetric two‐step (ASTS) structure cascaded with a broadband network is used to construct a single‐layer compact LSG. The concept of a parallel‐plate waveguide polarisation twister is used to design the ASTS unit that acts as a TE10‐to‐transverse electromagnetic wave converter, to which chamfers and T‐type grooves are added to improve the output plane wave performance over the entire frequency band. A prototype array operating in the band 10.95–12.75 GHz is designed, fabricated, and measured, and the experimental results agree well with the simulated ones. A beam‐scanning range of ±61° in elevation is achieved at the central frequency. Although only 29 of 36 slots (ϕ = 0°) contribute to the radiation, the antenna aperture efficiency is still over 60% due to the superior performance of the single‐layer minimised LSG.

Germline DDX41 variants in myeloid neoplasms (MNs) are not uncommon, and we explored the prevalence and characterized the clinical and pathologic features in a cohort of 3132 unrelated adult MN patients. By targeted next-generation sequencing, we identified 28 patients (20 men and 8 women) with pathogenic germline DDX41 variants who developed acute myeloid leukemia (AML), in which only 3 (11%) had a family history (FH) of MNs. A subacute clinical course of cytopenia (mean duration of 11.2 months, range 0-72 months) prior to the initial AML diagnosis was accompanied by a low blast count (median at 30%, range 20-70%) in hypocellular marrows (93% of all patients), in vast contrast to the typical proliferative subtypes of AML in the elderly. Most patients had a normal karyotype (75%) and acquired a second DDX41 variant (69%). A favorable overall survival (OS) was observed in comparison to that of common subtypes of AML with wild-type DDX41 in age-matched patients. Our study demonstrated that the frequent germline pathogenic DDX41 variants characterized a clinically distinct AML entity. Features characteristic of DDX41-mutated AML include male predominance, often lack of FH, indolent course, low proliferative potential, frequent somatic DDX41 variants, and a favorable OS.

Lacustrine shale is an important target for the exploration of unconventional oil and gas in China beyond marine shale gas. However, the formation environment of lacustrine shale differs from that of marine shale, resulting in a different reservoir composition, organic matter, oil and gas content, and hydrocarbon mobility. In this study, the Chang 7 shale of the Yanchang Formation in the Ordos Basin was used to analyze the effect of volcanic activity on the paleoproductivity and preservation conditions during the formation of lacustrine shale. The results show that algae and bacteria were developed before the eruption. After the eruption, the number of bacteria declined, but the increased prosperity of algae reflects that the volcanic activity enhanced ancient productivity. The sulfate generated by volcanic activity promotes bacterial sulfate reduction, and the produced H2S leads to a strong reducing environment in the waterbody, which is conducive to the preservation of organic matter. Organic geochemical analysis shows that the black shale in the shale strata has a high total organic carbon (TOC) content and strong hydrocarbon generation potential, whereas the tuff has a low TOC content and can scarcely generate hydrocarbons, indicating that the tuff deposited by volcanic activity cannot be considered as effective source rock. In terms of storage space, shale is mainly laminar and dispersed, and it includes organic and inorganic pores. The development of organic pores is affected by thermal maturity, whereas inorganic pores mainly occur between detrital particles and crystals. Tuff is mainly supported by heterogeneous matrix and associated with alteration. Its pores include inter- and intragranular mineral pores. The development of tight sandstone pores is affected by compaction, cementation, and dissolution, which mainly consist of intra- and intergranular pores. The Chang 7 lacustrine shale generally contains oil, but different lithologies have different oil drainage efficiencies. Sandstone and shale exhibit the best and worst oil drainage efficiency, respectively. It is mainly affected by the pore size distribution, fluid properties, and rock wettability. Therefore, the development of shale oil should mainly focus on lacustrine shale formations with interbeds. The mutual dissolution of organic matter and hydrocarbons in the shale section leads to the poor mobility and difficult development of hydrocarbons.

Understanding the neural correlates of cognitive problems in patients with breast cancer (BC) after systemic treatment have been a topic of increasing investigation. The heterogeneity of the systemic treatment regimens may undermine our ability to identify brain microstructural alterations resulting from any given regimen. We investigated the detrimental effects of the anthracycline-based systemic treatment (AST) regimen (epirubicin and cyclophosphamide + docetaxel + tamoxifen) on brain gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) microstructural alteration in long-term BC survivors. We performed a battery of neuropsychological tests and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to 31 long-term BC survivors who had received the AST regimen (AST group) and 43 healthy controls (HC group). Voxel-based morphometry evaluated the whole-brain voxel-wise GM volume, while diffusion tensor imaging technique with tract-based spatial statistics analysis evaluated whole-brain WM microstructural alteration. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) was used to evaluate the relationship between cognitive impairment and brain microstructural alteration in BC survivors. Compared with the HC group, the AST group exhibited a significantly poorer performance in attention, as well as a marginal significantly poorer performance in verbal working memory and executive function. Significantly lower fractional anisotropy (FA), higher radial diffusivity (RD), and lower axial diffusivity (AD) in multiple brain WM regions were showed in AST group compared with the HC group. Overlap of lower FA and higher RD was found in the body of corpus callosum (CC) and bilateral superior corona radiata (SCR), whereas overlap of lower FA and AD was found in the body of CC and right SCR. The PLSR results showed that the WM regions with overlap of lower FA and AD were significantly associated with executive and verbal working memory decline. No significant difference was observed in the GM volume between groups. Our results suggest that microstructural abnormalities of certain vulnerable WM regions in the AST regimen-exposed brain may provide neuroimaging evidence for the identification of brain injury and cognitive impairment induced by specific chemotherapy regimens.

Population and income growth are increasing global food demand at a time when a third of the world’s agricultural soils are degraded and climate variability threatens the sustainability of food production. Intercropping, the practice of growing two or more spatially intermingled crops, often increases yields, but whether such yield increases, their stability and soil fertility can be sustained over time remains unclear. Using four long-term (10–16 years) experiments on soils of differing fertility, we found that grain yields in intercropped systems were on average 22% greater than in matched monocultures and had greater year-to-year stability. Moreover, relative to monocultures, yield benefits of intercropping increased through time, suggesting that intercropping may increase soil fertility via observed increases in soil organic matter, total nitrogen and macro-aggregates when comparing intercropped with monoculture soils. Our results suggest that wider adoption of intercropping could increase both crop production and its long-term sustainability. Growing demand for food is confronting constraints to its sustainable production. This study finds that intercropping increases grain yields and their stability and that yield benefits increase over time.