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Background: Leukocyte telomere length shortening is a characteristic of premature senescence, a process that can be accelerated by oxidative stress. In general, patients with end-stage renal disease undergoing regular hemodialysis (HD) are repeatedly exposed to oxidative stress. Patients undergoing HD tend to have cardiovascular diseases associated with oxidative stress and inflammation. Therefore, we assumed that telomere length is associated with HD vintage and the degree of vascular calcification. Methods: A total of 144 patients undergoing regular HD before kidney transplantation and 62 patients on hemodialysis, but not undergoing kidney transplantation, were enrolled. We measured common laboratory values, such as calcium, phosphate, and hemoglobin levels, and assessed the degree of vascular calcification in the patients. The leukocyte telomere length was measured using reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, and Spearman correlation was used for correlation analysis. Results: The leukocyte telomere length was negatively associated with age (rho = −0.306, P＜0.01); it was shorter in middle-aged patients than in young patients (13.48 ± 4.80 vs. 15.86 ± 4.51, P

Context Tangwang Mingmu granule (TWMM), a traditional Chinese medicine, has been widely used in the treatment of diabetic retinopathy (DR), the most common microvascular complication in diabetes mellitus. Objective To establish a method to select target compounds from herbs for a pharmacokinetic study using network pharmacology, which could be applied in clinical settings. Materials and methods First, UPLC/Q Exactive Q-Orbitrap and GCMS 2010 were used to determine the non-volatile and volatile ingredients of TWMM. Based on the identified compounds, network pharmacology was used to screen the key compounds and targets of TWMM in the treatment of DR. Based on the compound-target-pathway network and identification of components emigrant into blood, the potential compound markers in vivo were chosen. Then, Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats were administrated of TWMM at a 9.6 g/kg dose to investigating pharmacokinetic parameters using the UPLC-QQQ-MS. Results Ninety and forty-five compounds were identified by UPLC-MS and GC-MS, respectively. Based on the network pharmacology, nine compounds with a degree value above 15 were screened and implied that these compounds are the most active in DR treatment. Moreover, criteria of degree value greater than 7 were applied, and PTGS2, NOS2, AKT1, ESR1, TNF, and MAPK14 were inferred as the core targets in treating DR. After identification of components absorbed into blood, luteolin and formononetin were selected and used to investigate the pharmacokinetic parameters of TWMM after its oral administration. Conclusions The reported strategy provides a method that combines ingredient profiling, network pharmacology, and pharmacokinetics to determine luteolin and formononetin as the pharmacokinetic markers of TWMM. This strategy provides a clinically relevant methodology that allows for the screening of pharmacokinetic markers in Chinese medicines.

Virus myocarditis (VMC) is a common cardiovascular disease and a major cause of sudden death in young adults. However, there is still a lack of effective treatments. Our previous studies found that calpain activation was involved in VMC pathogenesis. This study aims to explore the underlying mechanisms further. Neonatal rat cardiomyocytes (NRCMs) and transgenic mice overexpressing calpastatin (Tg-CAST), the endogenous calpain inhibitor, were used to establish VMC model. Hematoxylin and eosin and Masson staining revealed inflammatory cell infiltration and fibrosis. An ELISA array detected myocardial injury. Cardiac function was measured using echocardiography. CVB3 replication was assessed by capsid protein VP1. Apoptosis was measured by TUNEL staining, flow cytometry, and western blot. The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress-related proteins were detected by western blot. Our data showed that CVB3 infection resulted in cardiac injury, as evidenced by increased inflammatory responses and fibrosis, which induced myocardial apoptosis. Inhibiting calpain, both by PD150606 and calpastatin overexpression, could attenuate these effects. Furthermore, ER stress was activated during CVB3 infection. However, calpain inhibition could downregulate some ER stress-associated protein levels such as GRP78, pancreatic ER kinase-like ER kinase (PERK), and inositol-requiring enzyme-1α (IRE-1α), and ER stress-related apoptotic factors, during CVB3 infection. In conclusion, calpain inhibition attenuated CVB3-induced myocarditis by suppressing ER stress, thereby inhibiting cardiomyocyte apoptosis.

Hiatal hernia repair (HHR) during sleeve gastrectomy (SG) is recommended when hiatal hernia (HH) is found intraoperatively. However, its effect on gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) remains controversial. To evaluate the effect of concomitant SG and HHR on GERD in patients with obesity. Web of Science, PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and ClinicalTrials.gov databases were searched for all studies reporting the efficacy of SG+HHR for patients with obesity and GERD up to March 2021. A total of 18 studies totaling 937 patients met the inclusion criteria. The results of meta-analysis showed that after SG+HHR, there was a significant reduction in GERD symptoms (OR: 0.20; 95% CI: 0.10 to 0.41; P < 0.00001), improvement in esophagitis (OR: 0.12, 95% CI: 0.05 to 0.26, P < 0.001), and decrease in GERD-HRQL (MD: 19.13, 95% CI: −3.74 to 34.51; P=0.01). The incidence of GERD remission after SG+HHR was 68.0% (95% CI: 55.0–80.9%), de novo GERD was 12% (95% CI: 8–16%), and HH recurrence was 11% (95% CI: 4 to 19%). SG+HHR was superior to SG alone in GERD remission (OR: 2.97, 95% CI: 1.78 to 4.95, P < 0.0001). However, there was no significant difference in de novo GERD after SG+HHR compared with SG alone. SG+HHR can positively affect weight loss, GERD resolution, esophagitis reduction, and GERD-HRQL improvement. SG+HHR seems to have a promising future in patients with obesity and GERD. However, further studies based on objective assessment are warranted to evaluate these results better.

Wenhui Chen,* Yucheng Wang,* Jie Zhu, Cunchuan Wang, Zhiyong Dong Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, Guangzhou, 510630, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Zhiyong DongDepartment of Bariatric Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, No. 613 Huangpu Avenue West, Guangzhou, 510630, People’s Republic of ChinaTel/Fax +86 20 38688608Email dongzy2008@jnu.edu.cnIntroduction: Sleeve gastrectomy (SG) is the most commonly performed bariatric procedure. It has been shown that bariatric surgery reduces cancer risk. However, the risk of esophagogastric cancer after SG has not been defined yet and the development of cancer in the esophagus and stomach remains a matter of concern.Methods: Web of Science, PubMed and Embase databases were searched. Articles that described the diagnosis and management of esophageal or gastric cancer after SG were considered.Results: Seventeen esophagogastric cancer patients after SG were included. The age of the patients ranged from 21 to 64 years. Tumors were diagnosed after an interval of 33.9 ± 22.8 months from SG (range 4 months– 96 months). There were 4 esophageal cancers,4 gastroesophageal cancers and 9 gastric cancers; adenocarcinoma was the most frequent tumor histology (88.2%). The most commonly reported symptoms were food intolerance/dyspepsia (50.0%), vomiting/nausea/regurgitation (35.7%). Upper gastrointestinal endoscopy (UGIE) with biopsy was used for diagnosis in most of the patients. Surgery was performed in 10 patients (58.8%), while 4 patients were treated by endoscopic procedures (23.5%). The mean follow-up length was 12.2 months (range 3 months– 36 months) and the overall disease-free survival rate was 88.9%.Conclusion: The development of esophagogastric cancer after SG is still not well defined but it may occur at any time. Preoperative and follow-up UGIE are essential in order to allow for prevention, early diagnosis. Further epidemiologic studies are needed to investigate the post-SG-related risk of esophagogastric cancer development.Keywords: sleeve gastrectomy, esophageal cancer, gastric cancer, obesity

AlGaN/GaN-Si based MIS-HEMTs are considered as the popular candidates for application in the 5G communication system due to their competitive characteristics and low cost. Ohmic contact, as an important fabrication process, significantly affects the performance of the device. In this study, the ohmic contact process, including the SiN passivation layer etching, surface treatment, and barrier layer etching, was studied in detail in order to effectively optimize the device performance. It is observed that the sample with the SiN passivation layer etched by the magnetic neutral loop discharge (NLD) resulted in a lower contact resistance as compared to the reaction ion etching (RIE). The sample surface treated with the O plasma and pickled in the HCl:H2O = 1:10 liquid could effectively remove the pollutants and oxides from the surface, thus, correspondingly presenting a lower ohmic contact resistance as compared to the N2 plasma. Meanwhile, an optimum etching depth was developed with the ICP process for 6 min with an etching speed of 1.6 nm/min. A contact resistance of $0.76~\Omega \cdot \text {mm}$ and square resistance of 274.63 ohm/sq were observed under the above-mentioned optimized ohmic contact process. The AlGaN/GaN-Si MIS-HEMT with gate length of $0.5~\mu \text{m}$ , gate-source space of $1~\mu \text{m}$ , gate-drain space of $2.5~\mu \text{m}$ , and gate width of $100~\mu \text{m}$ was fabricated using the optimized process. A saturation current density of 794.30 mA/mm and the maximum transconductance of 16.86 mS were observed. The findings in this study provide the experimental basis for the manufacturing of AlGaN/GaN-Si based MIS-HEMTs for RF applications.

Surface defect recognition is an important technology to guarantee the quality of products in modern manufacturing systems, but the class imbalance in real-world production greatly influences its performance. Recently, some deep learning-based methods have been developed to address the class imbalance. Because of the interclass similarities and the intraclass variations (ISIV) of surface defect, it is hard to apply them to solve the coupling between class imbalance and ISIV. Graph-based methods, including graph convolutional network (GCN), have the potential for ISIV. Therefore, this article proposes a new graph-based method, named anchor-based class-balanced GCN (ACB-GCN), to solve the class imbalance in surface defect recognition. First, the proposed method constructs a class-balanced graph to address the problem that excessive information from majority classes influence the performance of graph convolution. Second, the proposed method defines anchor vectors in each defect to reduce the influence of ISIV on graph construction. The experimental results on four famous data sets with class imbalance demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively address the coupling between class imbalance and ISIV, and thus extract the discriminative features. Meanwhile, the proposed method achieves better performance than traditional methods and the original GCN, especially on minority classes.

Podocyte injury plays a vital role in proteinuria and nephrotic syndrome. Calcineurin (CaN) inhibitors are effective in reducing proteinuria. However, their molecular mechanism is still not fully understood. Angiopoietin-like-4 (ANGPTL4) is a secreted protein that mediates proteinuria in podocyte-related nephropathy. In this study, we established a puromycin aminonucleoside (PAN)-induced minimal-change disease (MCD) rat model and a cultured podocyte injury model. We found that CaN inhibitors protected against PAN-induced podocyte injury, accompanied by an inhibition of Nfatc1 and Angptl4 both in vivo and in vitro. Nfatc1 overexpression and knockdown experiments indicated that Angptl4 was regulated by Nfatc1 in podocytes. ChIP assays further demonstrated that Nfatc1 increased Angptl4 expression by binding to the Angptl4 promoter. In addition, overexpression and knockdown of Angptl4 revealed that Angptl4 directly induced rearrangement of the cytoskeleton of podocytes, reduced the expression of synaptopodin, and enhanced PAN-induced podocyte apoptosis. Furthermore, in a cohort of 83 MCD and 94 membranous nephropathy (MN) patients, we found increased expression of serum ANGPTL4 compared to 120 healthy controls, and there were close correlations between serum ANGPTL4 and Alb, urinary protein, urinary Alb, eGFR, Scr, and BUN in MCD patients. No obvious correlation was found in MN patients. Immunofluorescence studies indicated that increased ANGPTL4 in MCD and MN patients was located mostly in podocytes. In conclusion, our results demonstrate that CaN inhibitors ameliorate PAN-induced podocyte injury by targeting Angptl4 through the NFAT pathway, and Angptl4 plays a vital role in podocyte injury and is involved in human podocyte-related nephropathy. © 2020 The Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Objective To describe the clinical outcomes of occipitocervical fusion (OCF) using cervical pedicle fixation with assistance of O-arm navigation and present its clinical feasibility. Methods From January 2015 to December 2016, eight patients with a variety of diagnoses were surgically treated with occipitocervical fusion using cervical pedicle screws under O-arm navigation. All patients received full workup consisting of clinical and radiological assessments. Perioperative parameters including operating time, intraoperative blood loss, postoperative complications, surgical outcomes were recorded. Postoperative data were acquired resorting to the scheduled follow-up 3, 6 and 12 months after their discharge and annually afterwards. The Japanese Orthopaedic Association (JOA) Scores and American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) Scale were used to evaluate neurological function. The accuracy of screw placement was classified according to a modified classification of Gertzbein and Robbins. The fusion status was evaluated in reference to the Bridwell's posterior fusion grades. Results The patient cohort comprised of five males and three females, with the average age of 51.9 years (range from 18 to 74 years). The patients all showed indications for OCF and were performed with polyaxial screws through cervical pedicles. The average operation time was 274 min (range from 226 to 380 min), with the intraoperative blood loss of 437.5 mL and the blood transfusion volume of 481.3 mL. The average follow-up time was 23.5 months (range from 17 to 32 months). All patients exhibited radiographic evidence of osseous fusion by X-ray and computed tomography (CT) at the final follow-up. No neurovascular complications were found during the follow-up time, and the clinical symptoms were observed to be significantly improved in all the patients. Thirty-four cervical pedicle screws were implanted within the eight patients, with the accuracy of cervical pedicle screw placements as 94.1% (32/34), among which, two pedicle screws were found to broken through the cervical pedicles that were evaluated as Grade II. Conclusions Occipitocervical fusion via cervical pedicle fixation assisted with O-arm navigation is a feasible and safe procedure with a vast range of indications.

Pathogenesis and treatment for diabetic neuropathy are still complex. A deficit of neurotrophic factors affecting Schwann cells is a very important cause of diabetic neuropathy. Neuritin is a newly discovered potential neurotrophic factor. In this study, we explored the effect of exogenous neuritin on survivability and functions of diabetic Schwann cells of rats with experimental diabetic neuropathy. Diabetic neuropathy was induced in rats. 12‐week diabetic rats contrasted with non‐diabetic normal rats had decreased levels of serum neuritin and slowed nerve conduction velocities (NCVs). Schwann cells isolated from these diabetic rats and cultured in high glucose showed reduced cell neuritin mRNA and protein and supernatant neuritin protein, increased apoptosis rates, increased caspase‐3 activities and progressively reduced viability. In contrast, exogenous neuritin treatment reduced apoptosis and improved viability, with elevated Bcl‐2 levels (not Bax) and decreased caspase‐3 activities. Co‐cultured with diabetic Schwann cells pre‐treated with exogenous neuritin in high glucose media, and diabetic DRG neurons showed lessened decreased neurite outgrowth and supernatant NGF concentration occurring in co‐culture of diabetic cells. Exogenous neuritin treatment ameliorated survivability and functions of diabetic Schwann cells of rats with diabetic neuropathy. Our study may provide a new mechanism and potential treatment for diabetic neuropathy.

Tacrolimus (FK506) and cyclosporine A (CsA) are widely used to protect graft function after renal transplantation. The aim of the present study is to determine whether the single nucleotide polymorphism of CYP3A5 is a predictive index of FK506 dose requirement, and also the selection yardstick of FK506 or CsA treatment.We tested archival peripheral blood of 218 kidney recipients for CYP3A5 genotyping with PCR-SSP. Meanwhile, the dose of FK506 and CsA was recorded, blood concentration of the drugs was measured, and graft outcome was monitored.These results indicate that CYP3A5*AA/AG carriers need higher FK506 dose than CYP3A5*GG homozygote to achieve the target blood concentration. For CYP3A5*GG carriers, taking FK506 or CsA are both advisable. CYP3A5*AA/AG carriers preferred to CsA treatment depending on the graft outcomes and drug costs. CYP3A5 genotyping is a new approach to detecting FK506 dose requirement and a predictive index for the FK506 or CsA treatment selection in kidney recipients.

Inflammation is an important process involved in several cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), and nod‐like receptor family pyrin domain containing 3 (NLRP3) inflammasome is a vital player in innate immunity and inflammation. In this review, we aim to provide a comprehensive summary of the current knowledge on the role and involvement of NLRP3 inflammasome in the pathogenesis and treatment of CVDs. NLRP3 inflammasome functions as a molecular platform, and triggers the activation of caspase‐1 and cleavage of pro‐IL‐1β, pro‐IL‐18, and gasdermin D (GSDMD). Cleaved NT‐GSDMD forms pores in the cell membrane and initiates pyroptosis, inducing cell death and release of many intracellular pro‐inflammatory molecules. NLRP3 inflammasome activation is triggered via inter‐related pathways downstream of K+ efflux, lysosomal disruption, and mitochondrial dysfunction. In addition, the Golgi apparatus and noncoding RNAs are gradually being recognized to play important roles in NLRP3 inflammasome activation. Many investigations have revealed the association between NLRP3 inflammasome and CVDs, including atherosclerosis, ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury and heart failure induced by pressure overload or cardiomyopathy. Some existing medications, including orthodox and natural medicines, used for CVD treatment have been newly discovered to act via NLRP3 inflammasome. In addition, NLRP3 inflammasome pathway components such as NLRP3, caspase‐1, and IL‐1β may be considered as novel therapeutic targets for CVDs. Thus, NLRP3 inflammasome is a key molecule involved in the pathogenesis of CVDs, and further research focused on development of NLRP3 inflammasome‐based targeted therapies for CVDs and the clinical evaluation of these therapies is essential.

Roux-en-Y gastric bypass (RYGB) is one of the most frequently performed bariatric procedures worldwide. Remnant gastric cancer after RYGB is a rare complication. There were about seventeen cases reported in the world. The location of the tumor in these cases occurs mainly in the gastric antrum, followed by the body, then the pylorus and linitis plastica, and the last was fundus of the stomach. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case that gastric cancer located in the cardia of stomach after RYGB. A 68-year-old male patient had chronic esophagitis, bile reflux gastritis, and erosive antral gastritis 5 years after RYGB and now developed to aggressive carcinoma in the gastric pouch. In spite of having chemotherapy and traditional Chinese medicine therapy, the patient died of multiple organ failure after 15 months. This case report highlights the importance to have gastroscopy to observe the proximal small remnant stomach after RYGB in long-term follow-up. Attention must be paid when patients develop symptoms like abdominal pain or excessive weight loss after RYGB. For patients at high risk such as those who have a family history of gastric cancer or presenting abnormal levels of tumor markers should rather undergo Sleeve Gastrectomy plus Jejunojejunal Bypass (SGJB) instead of RYGB.

Organic–inorganic hybrid perovskites have recently emerged as promising potential candidate materials in the area of photoelectrics due to their unparalleled optoelectronic features. However, the performance of an optoelectronic device is always affected by the mixed ionic and electronic conducting behavior within perovskites. Herein, the hysteresis effect on carrier mobility and photoresponse characteristics of perovskites were investigated through adding rational additives to the precursor solution. The results show that the perovskite with foreign fullerene derivative (PCBM) additive can suppress hysteresis behavior and increase the mobility by two-fold, while the perovskite with native iodine (I) additive will amplify hysteresis and reduce the mobility by two orders of magnitude at the room temperature compared with that of the pure perovskite. Furthermore, we found that the response characteristics of the photodetectors are strongly affected by the carrier mobility. Capacitance–voltage results confirm the significant change in hysteresis after the introduction of different additives, which explains the changes in mobility and photoresponse time. Our results enlighten the hysteresis effect related to carrier transport and photoresponse characteristics, and provide guidance for the development of reliable, high performance perovskite devices.

Despite untiring efforts to develop therapies for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), survival statistics remain dismal, necessitating distinct approaches. Photodynamic priming (PDP), which improves drug delivery and combination regimens, as well as tumor photodestruction are key attributes of photodynamic therapy (PDT), making it a distinctive clinical option for PDAC. Localized, high-payload nanomedicine-assisted delivery of photosensitizers (PSs), with molecular specificity and controlled photoactivation, thus becomes critical in order to reduce collateral toxicity during more expansive photodynamic activation procedures with curative intent. As such, targeted photoactivable lipid-based nanomedicines are an ideal candidate but have failed to provide greater than two-fold cancer cell selectivity, if at all, due to their extensive multivariant physical, optical, and chemical complexity. Here, we report (1) a systematic multivariant tuning approach to engineer (Cet, anti-EGFR mAb) photoimmunonanoconjugates (PINs), and (2) stroma-rich heterotypic PDAC in vitro and in vivo models incorporating patient-derived pancreatic cancer-associated fibroblasts (PCAFs) that recapitulate the desmoplasia observed in the clinic. These offer a comprehensive, disease-specific framework for the development of Cet-PINs. Specificity-tuning of the PINs, in terms of PS lipid anchoring, electrostatic modulation, Cet orientation, and Cet surface densities, achieved ∼16-fold binding specificities and rapid penetration of the heterotypic organoids within 1 h, thereby providing a ∼16-fold enhancement in molecular targeted NIR photodestruction. As a demonstration of their inherent amenability for multifunctionality, encapsulation of high payloads of gemcitabine hydrochloride, 5-fluorouracil, and oxaliplatin within the Cet-PINs further improved their antitumor efficacy in the heterotypic organoids. In heterotypic desmoplastic tumors, the Cet-PINs efficiently penetrated up to 470 μm away from blood vessels, and photodynamic activation resulted in substantial tumor necrosis, which was not elicited in T47D tumors (low EGFR) or when using untargeted constructs in both tumor types. Photodynamic activation of the Cet-PINs in the heterotypic desmoplastic tumors resulted in collagen photomodulation, with a 1.5-fold reduction in collagen density, suggesting that PDP may also hold potential for conquering desmoplasia. The in vivo safety profile of photodynamic activation of the Cet-PINs was also substantially improved, as compared to the untargeted constructs. While treatment using the Cet-PINs did not cause any detriment to the mice's health or to healthy proximal tissue, photodynamic activation of untargeted constructs induced severe acute cachexia and weight loss in all treated mice, with substantial peripheral skin necrosis, muscle necrosis, and bowel perforation. This study is the first report demonstrating the true value of molecular targeting for NIR-activable PINs. These constructs integrate high payload delivery, efficient photodestruction, molecular precision, and collagen photomodulation in desmoplastic PDAC tumors in a single treatment using a single construct. Such combined PIN platforms and heterocellular models open up an array of further multiplexed combination therapies to synergistically control desmoplastic tumor progression and extend PDAC patient survival.

Sepsis is a heterogeneous syndrome induced by infection and results in high mortality. Even though more than 100 biomarkers for sepsis prognosis were evaluated, prediction of patient outcomes in sepsis continues to be driven by clinical signs because of unsatisfactory specificity and sensitivity of these biomarkers. This study aimed to elucidate the key candidate genes involved in sepsis response and explore their downstream effects based on weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA). The dataset GSE63042 with sepsis outcome information was obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database and then consensus WGCNA was conducted. We identified the hub gene SDF4 (stromal cell derived factor 4) from the M6 module, which was significantly associated with mortality. Subsequently, two datasets (GSE54514 and E-MTAB-4421) and cohort validation (n=89) were performed. Logistic regression analysis was used to build a prediction model and the combined score resulting in a satisfactory prognosis value (area under the ROC curve=0.908). The model was subsequently tested by another sepsis cohort (n=70, ROC= 0.925). We next demonstrated that endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress tended to be more severe in patients PBMCs with negative outcomes compared to those with positive outcomes and SDF4 was related to this phenomenon. In addition, our results indicated that adenovirus-mediated Sdf4 overexpression attenuated ER stress in cecal ligation and puncture (CLP) mice lung. In summary, our study indicates that incorporation of SDF4 can improve clinical parameters predictive value for the prognosis of sepsis, and decreased expression levels of SDF4 contributes to excessive ER stress, which is associated with worsened outcomes, whereas overexpression of SDF4 attenuated such activation.

MYH9-related disease or disorder (MYH9-RD) is an autosomal dominant disease caused by mutations in the MYH9 gene. Mutations in this gene initially affect the hemic system, and other manifestations may evolve with age. Here, we report the case of a 46-year-old Chinese woman with MYH9-RD who was primarily misdiagnosed with idiopathic thrombocytopenia purpura. Exome sequencing of the patient, and the mother and son of the patient revealed a deletion mutation c.5797delC (p. R1933Efs*15) in exon 41 (encoding non-helical tailpiece, NHT) of the MYH9 gene, which consequently led to a frameshift mutation. To the best of our knowledge, this mutation has been reported in Italy once, while the substitution mutation c.5797 C>T is the most frequent mutation. Mutations that affect the NHT region cause thrombocytopenia throughout life; however, our patient presented with a more severe phenotype than previously reported, including thrombocytopenia, inclusion bodies in neutrophils, sensorineural hearing loss, nephropathy, and abnormal liver enzymes. Our goal in the current case is to prevent further progression of renal involvement and to identify other affected members in this family to provide early intervention. This case may raise awareness of MYH9-RD when diagnosing thrombocytopenia and improve our understanding of this condition.

With the purpose of determining the best feature set of BCI system based on EEG, this paper proposes a feature dimension reduction method on the basis of Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Feature extraction time and classification accuracy are used as evaluation criteria by using SVM classifier. Feature dimension is reduced from two aspects of feature type and number of channels. Time domain, frequency domain, time-frequency domain and spatial domain features are extracted for comparison in the designed hand gesture recognition experiment. Compared with the running time and classification accuracy of PCA and LDA algorithms, it is confirmed that the feature dimension reduction algorithm based on Pearson correlation coefficient can effectively reduce the feature extraction time and improve the classification accuracy, and obtain the most suitable system feature subset.

With the development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the increasing popularity of smart devices, smart homes’ IoT devices are becoming more and more intelligent. However, with the access of sensor technology and the gradual increase in the number of devices, some security issues will inevitably occur in smart homes, such as ensuring that the instructions currently executed by the device are legal instructions issued by legitimate users. To solve such challenges, we propose a framework for detecting sensitive instructions. At the same time, we collected a large amount of automation strategy data in smart homes. We used machine learning to extract the sensor cooperative work context characteristics during the execution of sensitive instructions. Finally, We used the test set data to verify and evaluate the performance of our framework. Our evaluation results show that for some sensitive instructions, the goal of being able to intercept high-threat instructions actively has been achieved. The accuracy of the attack detection framework model has also reached more than 89.23%, and some devices even exceed 95%.

Wenhui Chen,1,&ast; Jia Feng,2,&ast; Yucheng Wang,1 Cunchuan Wang,1 Zhiyong Dong1 On behalf of Chinese Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Collaborative1Department of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Cellular Biology, Institute of Biomedicine, Jinan University, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Zhiyong Dong; Cunchuan WangDepartment of Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Jinan University, No. 613 Huangpu Avenue West, Guangzhou, Guangdong, 510632, People’s Republic of ChinaTel +86 135 445 277 26Fax +86 20 38688608Email dongzy2008@jnu.edu.cn; twcc2015@163.comBackground: Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is highly prevalent in bariatric surgery patients and can lead to potential perioperative risks, but some screening tools lack adequate performance in this population. Thus, we aimed to develop and validate a clinical nomogram for predicting OSA in bariatric surgery candidates.Methods: We retrospectively collected the data of 482 bariatric surgery patients between September 2015 and January 2020. Patients were randomly classified into training cohort (n=338) and validation cohort (n=144). The Lasso regression was used to select potentially relevant features; then, multivariable logistic regression analysis was used to establish the nomogram. Discrimination, calibration and clinical usefulness of the nomogram were assessed using the C-index, calibration curve and decision curve analysis (DCA).Results: The overall prevalence of OSA was 71.0% and higher in males (88.2%) compared to females (60.1%). Of these, 26.1% had mild OSA, 14.9% had moderate OSA, and 44.8% had severe OSA. The nomogram consisted of gender, habitual snoring, type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), neck circumference, body mass index (BMI) and age. The nomogram provided favorable discrimination, with a C-indexes for the training and validation cohort of 0.856 (95% CI: 0.816– 0.897) and 0.829 (95% CI: 0.76– 0.895), respectively, and good calibration. The DCA displayed that the nomogram was clinically useful.Conclusion: We established a concise and practical nomogram that could facilitate the preoperative individualized prediction of OSA before bariatric surgery, which may help clinicians select bariatric surgery patients with high-risk OSA for polysomnography (PSG).Keywords: obstructive sleep apnea, bariatric surgery, obesity, predictors, nomogram

Open Information Extraction (OIE), the task aimed at discovering all textual facts organized in the form of (subject, predicate, object) found within a sentence, has gained much attention recently. However, in some knowledge-driven applications such as question answering, we often have a target entity and hope to obtain its structured factual knowledge for better understanding, instead of extracting all possible facts aimlessly from the corpus. In this paper, we define a new task, namely Semi-Open Information Extraction (SOIE), to address this need. The goal of SOIE is to discover domain-independent facts towards a particular entity from general and diverse web text. To facilitate research on this new task, we propose a large-scale human-annotated benchmark called SOIED, consisting of 61,984 facts for 8,013 subject entities annotated on 24,000 Chinese sentences collected from the web search engine. In addition, we propose a novel unified model called USE for this task. First, we introduce subject-guided sequence as input to a pre-trained language model and normalize the hidden representations conditioned on the subject embedding to encode the sentence in a subject-aware manner. Second, we decompose SOIE into three uncoupled subtasks: predicate extraction, object extraction, and boundary alignment. They can all be formulated as the problem of table filling by forming a two-dimensional tag table based on a task-specific tagging scheme. Third, we introduce a collaborative learning strategy that enables the interactive relations among subtasks to be better exploited by explicitly exchanging informative clues. Finally, we evaluate USE and several strong baselines on our new dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method and reveal insight for future improvement.

With the development of semiconductor technology, the size of traditional metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor devices continues to decrease, but it cannot meet the requirements of high performance and low power consumption. Low power tunneling field effect transistor (TFET) has gradually become the focus of researchers. This paper proposes a novel T-shaped gate TFET based on the silicon with the negative capacitance (NC-TGTFET). On the basis of TGTFET, ferroelectric material (HZO) is used as gate dielectric. The simulation results show that, compared with the traditional TGTFET, the opening order and sensitivity of the two tunneling junctions are different. The influences of thickness and the doping concentration of pocket and ferroelectric material properties on the characteristics of NC-TGTFET is also discussed by Sentaurus simulation tool. Furthermore, the negative capacitance of ferroelectric material makes NC-TGTFET have a very steep subthreshold swing (18.32 mV/dec) at the range of drain current from 1 × 10-15to 1 × 10-7Aμm-1. And the on-state current (Vg= 0.5 V,Vd= 0.5 V) is 1.52 × 10-6Aμm-1.

BACKGROUND Hyperphosphatemia, hypocalcemia, and elevation of parathyroid hormone (PTH) are typical abnormalities of uremic patients with Secondary hyperparathyroidism (SHPT). However, metabolic imbalance associated with SHPT is not well understood. METHODS A total of 15 SHPT patients with an intact parathyroid hormone (iPTH) level > 600 pg/mL were set as preoperative (PR) group, 15 age- and gender-matched controls who had undergone parathyroidectomy plus forearm transplantation because of hyperparathyroidism and achieved an iPTH level

Organolead halide perovskite with excellent optoelectronic properties, which endows its potential applications in versatile optoelectronic device including solar cells and photodetectors. In spite of great efforts made on the perovskite photodetectors, novel device configurations based on perovskite films have to be explored to further improve the performance. Here, we present perovskite photodetectors enabled by a novel metal (Al)–oxide–semiconductor (perovskite) (MOS) structure. The unique photodetector can work on a wide voltage range and exhibits extreme characteristics with a pA-scale dark current, and a high detectivity (>1014 Jones). Both ultralow dark and light currents enable the small power consumption output ∼nW under 2 mW cm−2 at 2 V. The C–V data analysis proves that the charge carriers are accumulated at the oxide/perovskite interface, which leads to the reduction of the conduct band offset. At a low voltage the current transport behaviors for the MOS structure photodetectors are dominated by the Ohm’s Law, while at a high voltage, the main mechanism is Schottky emission which is demonstrated by temperature-dependence I–V measurements. Our results strongly propose the use of perovskite based photodetectors with a unique MOS structure in the application of optoelectronic devices.

In this work, low-power and high-performance gas sensors toward trimethylamine (TMA) are presented for the food quality control in the Internet of Things. An amphiphilic perylene diimide derivative (1,6,7,12-tetra-chlorinated perylene- N-(2-hydroxyethyl)- N'-hexylamine-3,4,9,10-tetracarboxylic bisimide, TC-PDI) is synthesized and further employed to construct the organic microrods of TC-PDI and organic/inorganic microbelts of TC-PDI/CdS by a phase transfer method. Due to the formation of n-n heterojunctions, the TC-PDI/CdS microbelts exhibit higher conductivity than the TC-PDI microrods alone, which present an efficient gas sensing platform for TMA determination at room operating temperature with high reproducibility and selectivity. Remarkably, the limit of detection, stability, and selectivity of the TC-PDI/CdS gas sensor are significantly improved, which ascribes to the efficient charge separation of n-n heterojunctions. More importantly, the fabricated gas sensor provides potential application of "on-site" and "on-line" TMA identification in real systems and suggests an efficient way to develop new hybrid n-n heterojunctions for a low-power and high-performance gas sensor.

High-performance photodetectors based on organic–inorganic hybrid perovskite single crystals and films have attracted extensive attention recently. In this study, a self-powered behavior was observed in a perovskite photodetector with a special asymmetrical metal/silicon dioxide/perovskite (MOS) structure that lacks the hole and electron transport layers. This self-powered behavior originates from the as-formed built-in electric field within the perovskite film due to the light-induced self-poling effect. The photogenerated carriers are well separated and drift in response to the built-in electric field, resulting in a large photocurrent reaching the nA level without an applied bias. Silicon dioxide acted as a barrier for the carriers, resulting in an ultralow dark current equal to the noise current. This self-powered MOS photodetector exhibited an ION/IOFF ratio of 105 and fast rise and fall characteristics (

BackgroundIncreasing evidence shows that Angptl4 affects proteinuria in podocytes injured kidney disease, however, whether there is a relationship between Angptl4 and IgA nephropathy (IgAN) has not been studied yet.MethodsPlasma and urine samples were obtained from 71 patients with IgAN and 61 healthy controls. Glomeruli from six renal biopsy specimens (three IgAN patients and three healthy controls) were separated by RNA-Seq. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) related to podocytes and Angptl4 between IgAN patients and healthy controls were performed using the Limma package. Gene set enrichment analysis was used to determine whether there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups. STRING was used to create a protein-protein interaction network of DEGs. Association analysis between Angptl4 levels and clinical features of IgAN was performed.ResultsThirty-three podocyte-related and twenty-three Angpt4-related DEGs were found between IgAN patients and healthy controls. By overlapping the genes, FOS and G6PC were found to be upregulated in IgAN patients, while MMP9 was downregulated in IgAN patients. Plasma and urine Angptl4 levels were closely related to the degree of podocyte injury and urine protein, but not to the protein-creatine ratio.ConclusionOur findings show that Angptl4 levels in plasma and urine are related to podocyte damage and, therefore, may be a promising tool for assessing the severity of IgAN patients to identify and reverse the progression to ESRD.

Background. The objective of this study was to develop a nomogram model and risk classification system to predict overall survival in elderly patients with fibrosarcoma. Methods. The study retrospectively collected data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database relating to elderly patients diagnosed with fibrosarcoma between 1975 and 2015. Independent prognostic factors were identified using univariate and multivariate Cox regression analyses on the training set to construct a nomogram model for predicting the overall survival of patients at 3, 5, and 10 years. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and calibration curves were used to evaluate the discrimination and predictive accuracy of the model. Decision curve analysis was used for assessing the clinical utility of the model. Result. A total of 357 elderly fibrosarcoma patients from the SEER database were included in our analysis, randomly classified into a training set (252) and a validation set (105). The multivariate Cox regression analysis of the training set demonstrated that age, surgery, grade, chemotherapy, and tumor stage were independent prognostic factors. The ROC showed good model discrimination, with AUC values of 0.837, 0.808, and 0.806 for 3, 5, and 10 years in the training set and 0.769, 0.779, and 0.770 for 3, 5, and 10 years in the validation set, respectively. The calibration curves and decision curve analysis showed that the model has high predictive accuracy and a high clinical application. In addition, a risk classification system was constructed to differentiate patients into three different mortality risk groups accurately. Conclusion. The nomogram model and risk classification system constructed by us help optimize patients’ treatment decisions to improve prognosis.

Fuel standards and gasoline content regulations are widely adopted by policymakers to reduce urban pollution and emission. An important but understudied question for policy design is measuring consumers’ private willingness to pay for higher gasoline standards. The empirical challenge is distinguishing consumers’ preferences over environmental standards from those over other product attributes e.g., price and brand. This paper provides a framework to uncover consumers’ preferences for higher fuel standards and estimates demand responses using high-frequency gas station-level panel data. We exploit unique characteristics of China’s retail gasoline market: government-controlled supply, homogeneous retailers, and highly regulated prices. Policy-induced differences in fuel standards generate spatial discontinuities at regional borders where consumers can freely choose from high or low standard gasoline. Combining difference-in-difference and geographic regression discontinuity, our identification strategy compares sales volume at gas stations on different sides of the border before and after one region experiences an exogenous fuel standard reform. Meanwhile, the reform induces a cost-driven price change that differs from daily price fluctuations. Controlling for this concurrent price change and other confounding factors, our data suggest that the enforcement of higher fuel standards increases sales at gas stations on the treated side of the border by 9.6-14%, which provides evidence that consumers respond strongly to fuel standard improvement. In the preferred specification, we estimate the consumer's WTP for higher fuel standard (III to IV) as 0.288 Yuan/liter, which accounts for about 3.9% of the gasoline price. We also find that consumers of premium gasoline have higher WTP for emission standard improvement than those of regular gasoline. Our findings highlight the importance of considering consumers’ private value from emission standards when designing environmental regulation.

Disturbed intrauterine development increases the risk of renal disease. Various studies have reported that Notch signalling plays a significant role in kidney development and kidney diseases. A disintegrin and metalloproteinase domain 10 (ADAM10), an upstream protease of the Notch pathway, is also reportedly involved in renal fibrosis. However, how ADAM10 interacts with the Notch pathway and causes renal fibrosis is not fully understood. In this study, using a prenatal chlorpyrifos (CPF) exposure mouse model, we investigated the role of the ADAM10/Notch axis in kidney development and fibrosis. We found that prenatal CPF‐exposure mice presented overexpression of Adam10, Notch1 and Notch2, and led to premature depletion of Six2+ nephron progenitors and ectopic formation of proximal tubules (PTs) in the embryonic kidney. These abnormal phenotypic changes persisted in mature kidneys due to the continuous activation of ADAM10/Notch and showed aggravated renal fibrosis in adults. Finally, both ADAM10 and NOTCH2 expression were positively correlated with the degree of renal interstitial fibrosis in IgA nephropathy patients, and increased ADAM10 expression was negatively correlated with decreased kidney function evaluated by serum creatinine, cystatin C, and estimated glomerular filtration rate. Regression analysis also indicated that ADAM10 expression was an independent risk factor for fibrosis in IgAN. © 2020 The Authors. The Journal of Pathology published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. on behalf of The Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

Due to its unique I-V property, memristor is considered to be the key device for artificial intelligence application. Among the alternative memristor materials, organometal trihalide perovskite (OTP) follow with interest in photoelectric coupling area with excellent light absorption ability. However, the power consumption of OTP memristor still remains to be reduced. Here, Cs0.05(FAxMA1−x)0.95PbIyBr3−y (CsFAMAPbIBr) with prominent photoresponse property is used as the functional layer of the memristor. Maximum high resistance state (HRS)/low resistance state (LRS) (~100) and maximum power of 9.8 × 10−9 W is reached under small voltage (−1 V~1 V) with W/OTP/Al structure. Since the oxide modification layer acts as a series resistance for the device, when 90 nm thickness of zinc oxide layer is added to the W/OTP interface, the power consumption of the device is reduced by an order of magnitude. Then, the maximum power of the device decreases by two orders of magnitude (to 2.5 × 10−11 W) under 2 mW/cm2 light condition, and the phenomenon called negative photoconductance (NPC) effect that defined as an increase in resistance upon exposure to illumination. Through the optical and oxide modification, OTP memristor with low power consumption is achieved.

Background Angiosarcomas (AS) have poor prognosis and often metastasize to distant sites. The potential predictors of metastatic angiosarcomas (MAS) have not been extensively investigated. The main objective of this study was to identify survival predictors of MAS. Methods Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) datasets were used to identify patients with MAS from 2010 to 2016. Risk predictors were determined with the aid of Kaplan-Meier and Cox regression model analyses. Results A total of 284 MAS patients met the study entry criteria. Among these, 121 patients (42.6%) were diagnosed with metastasis in bone, 26 in brain (9.2%), 86 in liver (30.3%) and 171 in lung (60.2%). Overall, 96 patients (33.8%) had two or more metastatic sites. The 1- and 3-year overall survival (OS) rates were 20.8 and 3.8% while 1- and 3-year cancer-specific survival (CSS) rates were 22.0 and 5.2%, respectively. Cox regression analysis revealed chemotherapy, radiation treatment (RT) and tumor size ≤10 cm as independent favorable predictors of OS. In terms of CSS, tumor grade IV, tumor size > 10 cm and absence of chemotherapy were independent adverse predictors. Surgery did not prolong survival outcomes (both OS and CSS) in the current cohort. Conclusion MAS is associated with extremely poor survival. Chemotherapy, RT, and tumor size are independent predictors of OS. Chemotherapy and tumor size are independent prognostic factors of CSS. Chemotherapy is therefore recommended as the preferred treatment option for MAS patients.

Automatic surface defect recognition is very important to ensure product quality in modern manufacturing. In recent studies, deep learning-based methods develop rapidly because of its end-to-end training, but the difficult in collecting massive samples limits the application of these methods. Due to the intra-class variations and inter-class similarities in surface defect, it is difficult for the methods to extract features precisely. The knowledge graph can represent the relations of defect samples to improve the ability of extracting features. Therefore, this paper proposes a knowledge graph-guided convolutional neural network (KCNN) for surface defect recognition. Firstly, KCNN defines a knowledge graph by computing cosine distance of defect samples, which can represent the relations of defect samples. Secondly, KCNN uses the knowledge graph to define an extra cost function to guide the training of CNN, which can improve the abilities of extracting features of defect samples. The proposed method is tested on a benchmark dataset and the results show that KCNN achieves as high as 99.79% of the prediction accuracy on small sample training dataset (300 samples) without increasing the recognition time. Compared with other deep learning methods, KCNN achieves the best performances.

Due to non-response to chemotherapy, incomplete surgical resection, and resistance to checkpoint inhibitors, breast cancer with bone metastasis is notoriously difficult to cure. Therefore, the development of novel, efficient strategies to tackle bone metastasis of breast cancer is urgently needed. Chemokines, which induce directed migration of immune cells and act as guide molecules between diverse cells and tissues, are small proteins indispensable in immunity. These complex chemokine networks play pro-tumor roles or anti-tumor roles when produced by breast cancer cells in the tumor microenvironment. Additionally, chemokines have diverse roles when secreted by various immune cells in the tumor microenvironment of breast cancer, which can be roughly divided into immunosuppressive effects and immunostimulatory effects. Recently, targeting chemokine networks has been shown to have potential for use in treatment of metastatic malignancies, including bone-metastatic breast cancer. In this review, we focus on the role of chemokines networks in the biology of breast cancer and metastasis to the bone. We also discuss the therapeutic opportunities and future prospects of targeting chemokine networks, in combination with other current standard therapies, for the treatment of bone-metastatic breast cancer.

Background There is a paucity of literature about prognostic evaluation for patients with breast cancer (BC) and bone metastasis at presentation. To date, little is known about how to accurately predict the prognosis of BC patients with bone metastasis at presentation. Thus, an accurate prediction tool of prognosis in this population is urgently needed. Our goal is to construct novel and prognostic nomograms for BC patients with bone metastasis at presentation. Methods We searched Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database for BC patients with bone metastasis at presentation between 2010 and 2016. Multivariate analysis was performed to obtain significantly independent variables. Then, novel prognostic nomograms were constructed based on those independent predictors. Results Tumor grade, histological type, primary tumor size, tumor subtype, surgery, chemotherapy and number of metastatic organs except bone were recognized as significantly independent variables of both overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS). Then those significant variables were integrated to construct nomograms for 3- and 5-year survival. Calibration plots for the 3- and 5-year survival in training and validation sets showed that the prediction curve was close to a 45 degree slash. The C-indices of OS in training and validation cohorts were 0.705 and 0.678, respectively. Similar results were observed for CSS in training and validation cohorts. Conclusions Our proposed nomograms can effectively and accurately predict the prognosis of BC patients with bone metastasis at presentation, which provide a basis for individual treatments for metastatic lesions.

With the improved understanding of the molecular pathogenesis and characteristics of cancers, the critical role of the immune system in preventing tumor development has been widely accepted. The understanding of the relationship between the immune system and cancer progression is constantly evolving, from the cancer immunosurveillance hypothesis to immunoediting theory and the delicate balance in the tumor microenvironment. Currently, immunotherapy is regarded as a promising strategy against cancers. Although adoptive cell therapy (ACT) has shown some exciting results regarding the rejection of tumors, the effect is not always satisfactory. Cellular therapy with CD4+ T cells remains to be further explored since the current ACT is mainly focused on CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs). Recently, Th9 cells, a subgroup of CD4+ T helper cells characterized by the secretion of IL-9 and IL-10, have been reported to be effective in the elimination of solid tumors and to exhibit superior antitumor properties to Th1 and Th17 cells. In this review, we summarize the most recent advances in the understanding of Th9 cell differentiation and the dual role, both anti-tumor and pro-tumor effects, of Th9 cells in tumor progression.

Organ dysfunction caused by sepsis is life-threatening and results in high mortality. Therapeutic options for sepsis are limited. Pathogenic factors are considered as components of environmental pressure that modify DNA methylation patterns thereby enhancing disease progression. Here, we found that sepsis patients exhibited higher levels of genomic DNA methylation patterns and hypermethylated genes associated with the NF-kB signaling pathway. Therefore, we hypothesized that a DNA methyl transferase inhibitor, Decitabine, may mitigate inflammation and improve survival by inhibiting the NF-κB signaling pathway. To test the hypothesis, mice challenged with caecal ligation and puncture (CLP) were subcutaneously injected with Decitabine solution (0.5, 1, and 1.5 mg/kg) 2 h following operation. Our results indicated that Decitabine reduces DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs), attenuates NF-κB activation, downregulates inflammatory cytokine levels, and inhibits the progression of sepsis. Thus, DNA methylation may be indispensable for sepsis and serve as a predicting factor. The use of Decitabine could represent a novel strategy in the treatment of sepsis.

Acute rejection (AR) can lead to allograft dysfunction following renal transplantation, despite immunosuppressive treatments. Accumulating evidence points out a role for epigenetic modification in immune responses. However, the mechanism and contribution of DNA methylation in allograft survival remain unclear. In this study, we followed up patients who successively experienced end‐stage renal disease, renal transplantation with allograft function or dysfunction, and hemodialysis. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells were collected at different time points for analysis of the DNA methylation. Epigenetic modifier analysis was also performed to explore its effect of methylation in a mouse model of AR. Compared with the allograft‐stable cohort, patients who experienced AR‐induced allograft dysfunction demonstrated more changes in methylation patterns. Pathway analysis revealed that the hypermethylated areas in the allograft dysfunction group were associated with genes related to the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway. Moreover, in the mouse AR model, treatment with the DNA methyltransferase inhibitor—decitabine regulated the Th1/2/17/regulatory T cell (Treg cell) immune response via its demethylating role in the suppressing the activity of the mTOR pathway, which ultimately ameliorated renal allograft‐related inflammatory injuries. These results revealed that changes in methylation accompany AR‐induced allograft dysfunction after renal transplantation. Epigenetics may provide new insights into predicting and improving allograft survival., Whole‐genome bisulfite sequencing explores epigenetic changes in renal transplant recipients, revealing enhanced hypermethylation of genes enriched in immune‐related pathways.

Background: Renal diabetic changes are frequent in kidney transplantation (KTx) donors. Whether these diabetic changes are reversible remains a topic of debate. This study aimed to test the hypothesized reversibility of diabetic changes after KTx. Methods: C57BL/6J mice were randomly divided into three groups: the control group, early-stage group (ESG), and advanced-stage group (ASG). Diabetes mellitus (DM) was induced in mice by intraperitoneal injection of streptozotocin (STZ) at 50 mg/kg body weight for five consecutive days. Blood glucose levels ≥16.7 mmol/L were indicative of diabetic mice. The kidneys from ESG and ASG were transplanted to control mice 12 or 32 weeks after STZ injection. Kidney tissue, blood, and 24-hour urine specimens of donor and recipient mice were collected before KTx and 28 days after KTx, respectively. We measured the body weight, blood glucose, histological changes, reactive oxygen species (ROS), apoptosis. Electron microscopy was also performed to evaluate the mitochondrial morphology. The expression of NADPH oxidases (NOXs) was assessed by qRT-PCR. Results: Kidneys from early-stage diabetic mice showed evidence of lesion reversal four weeks after KTx, including decreased urinary albumin and reversal of histological changes. Besides, mitochondrial swelling, oxidative stress, apoptosis, and overexpression of NOXs in the kidneys were also suppressed. Conversely, no changes were observed in kidneys from advanced-stage diabetic mice after KTx. Conclusions: We confirmed that early-stage but not advanced-stage diabetic nephropathy (DN) is reversible, which is related to reduced NOX expression and improvement in mitochondrial function. These results indicated that kidneys with early-stage DN could be used for KTx in clinical practice, as the disease may be reversed following KTx.

© 1992-2012 IEEE. To enhance the resolution and accuracy of depth data, some video-based depth super-resolution methods have been proposed, which utilizes its neighboring depth images in the temporal domain. They often consist of two main stages: motion compensation of temporally neighboring depth images and fusion of compensated depth images. However, large displacement 3D motion often leads to compensation error, and the compensation error is further introduced into the fusion. A video-based depth super-resolution method with novel motion compensation and fusion approaches is proposed in this paper. We claim that 3D nearest neighboring field (NNF) is a better choice than using positions with true motion displacement for depth enhancements. To handle large displacement 3D motion, the compensation stage utilized 3D NNF instead of true motion used in the previous methods. Next, the fusion approach is modeled as a regression problem to predict the super-resolution result efficiently for each depth image by using its compensated depth images. A new deep convolutional neural network architecture is designed for fusion, which is able to employ a large amount of video data for learning the complicated regression function. We comprehensively evaluate our method on various RGB-D video sequences to show its superior performance.

This retrospective cohort study aims to evaluate the effects of introducing the O-arm-based navigation technique into the traditional posterior lumbar interbody fusion (PLIF) procedure treating elderly patients with three-level lumbar degenerative diseases. Forty-one consecutive elderly patients were enrolled according to the criteria. There were 21 patients in the free-hand group and 20 patients in the O-arm group. Both two groups underwent the PLIF with or without the O-arm-based navigation technique. The demographic features, clinical data and outcomes, and radiological information were collected for further analysis. The average follow-up time was 18.3 (range, 12–28) months in the free-hand group and 16.7 (range, 12–24) months in the O-arm group. Comparison between two groups revealed no significant difference regarding demographic features. The operation time took in the navigation group was significantly less than that in the free-hand group (222.55 ± 38.00 mins versus 255.19 ± 40.26 mins, P

Research and regulation of tree growth at molecular level is a new trend in the development of forest biotechnology. However, as the limitations of wood as a research material, it is difficult to operate and compare the growth cycle in the laboratory, which greatly hinders study of the molecular biology of forest trees. Arabidopsis thaliana is the most important model plant in botanical research and is an excellent material for plant molecular biology research. Recent studies have shown that herbaceous Arabidopsis can not only provide genetic resources for tree molecular breeding but also can be used as an auxiliary means of wood molecular biology research and even can be directly used as an experimental model for the study of the molecular mechanism of tree development. This paper mainly discusses the establishment process of the tree molecular gene system platform under the background of the Internet of Things and studies the molecular genome of Arabidopsis, combining the characteristics of the tree itself and using the diversity of the frequency of different bases in the gene fragment to cluster the tree molecular genome, which is a molecular biology research and provides an important way of thinking.

Surface defect recognition is important to improve the surface quality of end products. In this area, there were many convolutional neural network (CNN)-based methods because CNN can extract features automatically. The extracted features determine the performance of recognition, so it is important for CNN-based methods to extract effective and sufficient features. However, feature extraction needs a large-scale dataset, which is hard to obtain. To save the cost of collecting samples and extract effective features, ensemble methods were proposed to make full use of the features extracted by CNN in order to guarantee good performance with limited samples. However, the methods are confined to utilize one sample – they extracted multi-level features from one individual sample – but ignore the vast information in a dataset. Due to the limit information in one sample, this paper turns the attention to the training dataset and attempts to mine the multi-level information in the dataset for predicting. The proposed method is named as Prototype vectors fusion-based CNN (ProtoCNN), which utilizes the prototype information in the training dataset. In training process, it trains a VGG11 as the base model, and meanwhile prototype vectors corresponding to each defect class are generated in multiple feature layers of VGG11. Then, in predicting process, the prototype vectors are fused to predict unknown samples. The experiments on three famous datasets, including NEU-CLS, wood dataset, and textile dataset indicate that the proposed ProtoCNN outperforms conventional ensemble models and other models for surface defect recognition. In these datasets, ProtoCNN has achieved the accuracy of 99.86%, 90.01%, and 81.28% respectively, which increase 1.05%, 4.07%, 19.53% compared to its base model respectively. Finally, this paper analyzes the effectiveness and practicality of prototype vectors, showing that the proposed ProtoCNN is practical for real world application.

Memristors are new type of circuit element with the characteristics of both integrated computing and storage, which can promote the development of artificial intelligence and memory- computing fusion technology. In this manuscript, a novel triple cation Organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite (OHP) based optoelectronic coupling memristors with structure of FTO/TiO2/Cs0.05(FAxMA1−x)0.95PbBryI3−y/Al were fabricated, hysteresis loops with low power consumption, high HRS/LRS ratio and obvious light response are presented. Besides, capacitive coupling behaviors are observed in current curves. By changing voltage or light condition, memristors can evolve from capacitive behavior to pure memristive behavior. Physical mechanisms are discussed to explain this phenomenon. This work opens up a way in improving the resistive switching performances of OHP memristors, and can be of great benefit to the potential application in neuromorphological analysis.

With the rapid development of semiconductor process, both tunneling field effect transistor (TFET) and negative capacitance field effect transistor (NCFET) are regarded as the effective low power devices. In this paper, a novel silicon-based dual source U-shaped channel TFET with negative capacitance (NCDU-TFET) is proposed and investigated by Synopsys Sentaurus TCAD. We pick ferroelectric material (Hf0.5Zr0.5O2) as the gate dielectric. The higher electric field caused by negative capacitance effectively increases the tunneling rate, so the super-steep subthreshold swing (SS) and higher on-state current are obtained for NCDU-TFET. Besides, the impacts of device parameters including gate dielectric layer thickness, coercive electric field and remnant polarization are also analyzed systematically in this paper. The simulation results indicate the average SS of NCDU-TFET is 17.04mV/dec, which is much lower than that of DU-TFET. And the on-state current of NCDU-TFET is nearly three orders of magnitude higher than that of DU-TFET. So NCDU-TFET has the potential to be used as a low-power component for large-scale integrated circuits.

Organic-inorganic halide perovskites (OHPs) have been proven to possess unique optical and electrical properties, and achieved more extensive application as excellent materials for memristors in recent years. Based on the traditional OHP-based memristors, the intermediate layer of the memristor was prepared using yttrium oxide (Y2O3)/OHP stacking structure in this manuscript. The potential barrier between Y2O3and perovskite is relatively high (ΔEC = 2.13 eV) which leads to comparatively low current of the memristor, thus the power consumption can be reduced. Besides, by changing the external light conditions, one can realize sharp or slow switch between high resistance state (HRS) and low resistance state (LRS), so as to meet the requirement of multilevel data storage, which indicates its promising application prospect in information storage and biological simulation. In addition, based on characteristics of photoelectric coupling, the Y2O3/OHP memristor can also achieve the advantage of adjustable threshold voltage. The transition of HRS and LRS can be realized by changing the illumination condition at any voltage, which means the set and reset voltage are not fixed, so that the memristor with adjustable threshold voltage can adapt to various working conditions.

In this Letter, a novel, to the best of our knowledge, approach to improve the imaging resolution of dark-field microscopy is proposed and demonstrated. Inspired by an existing super-resolution imaging method based on near-filed illumination using a prism or microfiber, a microparticle-generated full-direction evanescent field for sample illumination was demonstrated to achieve a multi-orientation near-field illumination in one snapshot and to obtain a super-resolution image by spatial frequency shifting. The ultimate resolution and the additional magnification factor of this method were analyzed theoretically. Imaging experiments were carried on a standard microscope calibration target MetroChip and a Blu-ray disc characterized by subwavelength microstructures. High-imaging resolution was demonstrated experimentally, and two novel illumination modes were proposed to overcome imaging direction selectivity. Our work opened up a new perspective of super-resolution imaging with near-field illumination.

Our study found that birch employs different physiological pathways to tolerance salt stress in roots and leaves, and the genes closely correlated with these physiological changes were identified. Birches are fast-growing woody plants that are adapted to adverse environments, and are widely distributed from north Europe to northeast Asia. However, the salt stress tolerance mechanism of birch has little been studied. Here, we investigated the physiological and molecular response of white birch (Betula Platyphylla) to salt stress. Long-term salt stress inhibited photosynthetic activity, and decreased stomatal conductance of birch. Abscisic acid was induced in birch during the early salt stress period, and Ca2+ level was increased slowly but maintained at a higher level for a long time. Under salt conditions, the salt-overly-sensitive pathway was activated in birch roots; reactive oxygen species (ROS) was highly accumulated, and superoxide dismutase is the main ROS scavenger in roots, while peroxidase is the main ROS scavenger in leaves. Proline plays a role in salt tolerance in both roots and leaves; however, soluble sugars and trehalose also have roles in salt stress tolerance, but mainly in leaves. Additionally, the genes that might have essential roles in controlling some of these physiological changes were identified, which represent good candidate genes to characterize the salt tolerance mechanism of birch. This study increased our understanding of the salt tolerance mechanism of birch plants.