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This meta-analysis was performed to evaluate the effect of Seprafilm® on postoperative small bowel obstruction.A literature search was conducted in the PubMed and EMBASE databases through August 2020. The pooled risk ratios as well as the corresponding 95% confidence intervals were calculated using RevMan 5.3 software.A total of 9 clinical control trials involving 4,351 patients (2,123 in the Seprafilm® group and 2,228 in the control group) were included. The overall analysis showed that the pooled risk ratio was 0.45 (95% confidence interval = 0.34-0.60; P.00001), indicating that the risk of postoperative small bowel obstruction can be significantly decreased by the application of Seprafilm®. Similarly, an obvious effect of Seprafilm® on reducing the rate of postoperative small bowel obstruction was also shown in the subgroup analyses by population (adult participants), study design (randomized control study or nonrandomized control study), region (Japan or Korea), follow-up duration (2 years or 5 years), and sheet number of Seprafilm® (1 sheet or1 sheet).In conclusion, the use of Seprafilm® is beneficial for decreasing the rate of postoperative small bowel obstruction.

Objective: This retrospective study analyzed the factors affecting recurrence in patients after surgery with borderline ovarian tumors and postoperative recurrence and pregnancy after fertility-sparing surgery (FSS), to provide guidance for clinical treatment of borderline ovarian tumors and propose a therapeutic strategy for fertility protection. Methods: A total of 415 patients with borderline ovarian tumors were initially operated on in the gynecology ward of Shengjing Hospital Affiliated with China Medical University from September 1, 2013, to September 1, 2019. Central pathology review and prospective follow-up were carried out. The clinical and pathological data were consulted through the medical record query system of our hospital. The recurrence and pregnancy of the patients were investigated through telephone follow-up and outpatient and inpatient medical records. The influence of clinical and pathological variables on recurrence and pregnancy were evaluated using univariate/multivariate analyses. Results: In this study, 415 patients were collected, of which 21 lost follow-up, and a total of 394 eligible patients were included in the analysis. Among these patients, 25 patients relapsed with a recurrence rate of 6.3% and there were 196 patients with fertility-sparing surgery, of the 63 patients attempting to conceive, 35 were able to attain pregnancy with a pregnancy rate of 55.6%. All patients survived until the follow-up deadline. In univariate and multivariate analyses, FSS, FIGO stage, and micropapillary pattern were independent risk factors for recurrence of BOTs. FIGO stage, micropapillary pattern were independent risk factors for recurrence of BOTs with FSS. The risk of recurrence was not related to omentectomy nor postoperative chemotherapy. While omentectomy and chemotherapy had an impact on the pregnancy rate (P

Effectively learning and extracting the feature representations of 3D point clouds is an important yet challenging task. Most of existing works achieve reasonable performance in 3D vision tasks by modeling the relationships among points appropriately. However, the feature representations are only learned with a specific transform through these methods, which are easy to overlap and thus limit the representation ability of the model. To address these issues, we propose a novel Multi-Transform Learning framework for point clouds (PointMTL), which can extract diverse features from multiple mapping transform to obtain richer representations. Specifically, we build a module named Multi-Transform Encoder (MTE), which encodes and aggregates local features from multiple non-linear transforms. To further explore global context representations, a module named Global Spatial Fusion (GSF) is proposed to capture global information and selectively fuse with local representations. Moreover, to guarantee the richness and diversity of learned representations, we further propose a Spatial Independence Criterion (SIC) strategy to enlarge the differences between the transforms and reduce information redundancies. In contrast to previous works, our approach fully exploits representations from multiple transforms, thus having strong expressiveness and good robustness for point clouds related tasks. The experiments on three typical tasks (i.e., semantic segmentation on S3DIS and ScanNet, part segmentation on ShapeNet and shape classification on ModelNet40) demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.

Background and Aims. Radix Rehmanniae and Corni Fructus (RC) have been widely applied to treat diabetic nephropathy (DN) for centuries. But the mechanism of how RC plays the therapeutic role against DN is unclear as yet. Methods. The information about RC was obtained from a public database. The active compounds of RC were screened by oral bioavailability (OB) and drug-likeness (DL). Gene ontology (GO) analysis was performed to realize the key targets of RC, and an active compound-potential target network was created. The therapeutic effects of RC active compounds and their key signal pathways were preliminarily probed via network pharmacology analysis and animal experiments. Results. In this study, 29 active compounds from RC and 64 key targets related to DN were collected using the network pharmacology method. The pathway enrichment analysis showed that RC regulated advanced glycosylation end product (AGE-) RAGE and IL-17 signaling pathways to treat DN. The animal experiments revealed that RC significantly improved metabolic parameters, inflammation renal structure, and function to protect the kidney against DN. Conclusions. The results revealed the relationship between multicomponents and multitargets of RC. The administratiom of RC might remit the DM-induced renal damage through the AGE-RAGE signaling pathway to improve metabolic parameters and protect renal structure and function.

The intermittence and uncertainty of wind power pose challenges to large-scale wind power grid integration. The study of wind power uncertainty is becoming increasingly important for power system planning and operation. This paper proposes a wind power probabilistic interval prediction model, and a novel reliability assessment approach is presented for electrical power systems. First, the unknown parameters estimation of the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) prediction model is based on the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)-based Bayesian estimation method to improve the quality of statistical inference. Then, a quantum genetic algorithm is used to segment the power to determine the best output for each power segment weight and calculate the probabilistic prediction interval of wind power. Finally, reliability assessment by the sequential Monte Carlo simulation is presented combining with the probabilistic prediction interval of wind power on IEEE-RTS79 reliability test system. The simulation results that proposed variation range of reliability assessment indices consider the uncertain scenario of wind power and has guiding significance for power generation scheduling. Compared with genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm, it is proved that the proposed prediction interval model has better prediction interval coverage probability index and interval average bandwidth index.

Objective Both cystatin C (CysC) and neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL) are markers of kidney injury and may also be marker candidates for neuroinflammation. The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between kidney injury and ischemic stroke (IS).Methods 498 IS patients were enrolled, and 173 IS-related disease control (DC) patients and 293 healthy control (HC) subjects were randomly selected. We analyzed the relationship between the levels of serum kidney function markers (including NGAL, Cre, Ure, CysC and eGFR) and the occurrence of IS.Results When they were admitted to the hospital, the NGAL level of patients with first-onset IS was higher than that of both HC group (z=5.964, Pp=0.341, Pp=0.460) , PConclusion IS is related to kidney injury and neuroinflammation. NGAL and CysC are suitable for IS prediction in patients with normal kidney function and CKD, respectively. Researchers should pay attention to the changes of NGAL and CysC for the prevention and treatment of stroke in these two types of patients, respectively.

Tendon injury commonly occurs during sports activity, which may cause interruption or rapid decline in athletic career. Tensile strength, as one aspect of tendon biomechanical properties, is the main parameter of tendon function. Tendon injury will induce an immune response and cause the loss of tensile strength. Regulation of mechanical forces during tendon healing also changes immune response to improve regeneration. Here, the effects of internal/external forces and immune response on tendon regeneration are reviewed. The interaction between immune response and internal/external forces during tendon regeneration is critically examined and compared, in relation to other tissues. In conclusion, it is essential to maintain a fine balance between internal/external forces and immune response, to optimize tendon functional regeneration.

Web content accessibility is essential for a product to serve a wider range of users and make content accessible for all users under different conditions. However, it is rarely mentioned in ICT industry and also not being widely addressed among most of the companies in China. Advocating for accessibility in an existing complex product poses more challenges and demands more effort. As we think everyone's experience matters and it is imperative to make Alibaba Cloud console more inclusive, we propose a method that making the accessibility adoption process easier for all enterprise scaled products by taking incremental steps. Starting from getting stakeholders onboard with explicit data, our practice includes a way to design an adapted, simplified yet comprehensible version of accessibility design guidelines, which can make the implementation of accessibility more executable in Chinese enterprises, as well as how to design a set of level definition that could help to prioritize tasks based on the user composition of a product. The approach could be a helpful reference for other companies and teams in China.

This study is to investigate the role of neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL), cystatin C (CysC) and creatinine in the diagnosis of acute kidney injury (AKI) secondary to liver cirrhosis. A total of 825 patients (including 540 liver cirrhosis patients and 285 healthy controls) were enrolled. Liver cirrhosis patients were further subdivided into AKI secondary to liver cirrhosis group (AKI group, 210 patients) and simple liver cirrhosis group (LC group, 330 patients). Serum NGAL/urine NGAL (sNGAL/uNGAL), and serum creatinine (sCr) levels as well as estimated glomerular filtration rates were measured. The diagnostic performances of these indicators in AKI secondary to liver cirrhosis were evaluated. The levels of sNGAL, uNGAL, CysC and sCr in the AKI group were significantly higher than those of LC and healthy control groups. However, the eGFR and c-aGFR of AKI group were significantly lower. With the progression of AKI (AKI-S1→AKI-S2→AKI-S3), the levels of sNGAL, uNGAL, CysC and sCr increased gradually, while the levels of c-aGFR and eGFR decreased gradually. The sNGAL, uNGAL and CysC were positively correlated with sCr (r = 0.638, 0.635, and 0.650), but negatively correlated with c-aGFR (r = -0.617, -0.606 and -0.655). However, eGFR had a negative correlation with sCr (r = -0.711), but a positive correlation with c-aGFR (r = 0.736). ROC curve analysis showed that the area under the curve for uNGAL was the largest (0.976), followed by sNGAL (0.967). The diagnostic efficacy of uNGAL and sNGAL in AKI group were 0.907 and 0.870, and the risk degrees were OR = 54.524 and 5.115, respectively. NGAL might perform better than sCr and CysC in the diagnosis of AKI secondary to liver cirrhosis, while uNGAL might be a better indicator than sNGAL in AKI diagnosis.

IntroductionTo investigate the diagnostic value of serum complement components 1 q (C1q), neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL), cystatin C (CysC), creatinine (SCr) and urea (SUr) for early diabetic kidney disease (EDKD)Material and methodsIndividuals with type 2 diabetes mellitus (DM) and healthy subjects at Mianyang Central Hospital from March, 2017 to November, 2017 were enrolled according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Serum SUr, SCr, CysC, C1q and NGAL were detected. Diagnostic values were evaluated by ROC.ResultsTotally, 546 individuals were enrolled, including 136 patients in simple DM group (SDM group), and 109 patients in EDKD group and 301 healthy controls (HC group). Compared with SDM group and HC group, serum SUr, SCr, C1q, CysC and NGAL in EDKD group were significantly increased (P0.05).ConclusionsC1q, CysC and NGAL have similar diagnostic performances, which is superior to SCr, in diagnosis of EDKD. Moreover, C1q +CysC combination has the optimal diagnostic performance for EDKD.

Aim: Atherosclerosis involves vascular endothelial damage and lipid metabolism disorder, which is closely related to the occurrence and development of diabetic kidney disease (DKD). However, studies on non-high albuminuria DKD (NHADKD) with an albumin to creatinine ratio (ACR) Methods: Serum lipid indicators, lipoprotein-associated phospholipase A2 (Lip-PLA2) and homocysteine levels were measured in 1116 subjects to analyze their relationship with NHADKD. Results: Among all subjects, Lip-PLA2 had the closest but relatively weak correlation with ACR ( r = 0.297, p 0.05). When ACR was ⩾10mg/g, homocysteine [OR = 17.26(9.67–30.82)] and total-Chol [OR = 5.63(2.95–10.76)] were risk factors for NHADKD, and ORhomocysteine was significantly higher than ORtotal-Chol ( Z = 3.023, p Conclusions: The occurrence of NHADKD may be related to the levels of homocysteine, total-Chol, HDL-Chol, and Lip-PLA2 in blood. Among them, homocysteine may be most closely related to NHADKD.

Objective. Many studies have identified causal and promotive roles of oxidative stress (OxS) and oxidative damage caused by OxS in the occurrence and progression of cancer. Many biomarkers in the blood circulation of patients may change correspondingly with the development of tumors. This study is aimed at investigating the correlation between OxS and serum trace element (TE) levels of patients with different types of cancer. Methods. 1143 different types of cancer patients and 178 healthy controls from Mar. 2018 to Aug. 2020 in Mianyang Central Hospital were involved in this study. Their levels of OxS parameters (including total oxidant status (TOS), total antioxidant status (TAS), and oxidant stress index (OSI)) and the concentrations of serum TEs (including Cu, Zn, Fe, and Se) were determined. Results. Compared with healthy controls, all types of cancer patients had higher TOS level (all P adj < 0.001 ) and OSI level ( z = 6.228 ~ 9.909 , all P adj < 0.001 ) and lower TAS level (all P adj < 0.001 ). Compared with healthy controls, the changes of four TE levels in serum were different in different types of cancer patients, among which Cu increased in all groups, but there was no statistical difference in gastric and brain cancer; Se decreased in all groups, but there was no statistical difference in gastric, colorectal, esophageal, and other cancer; Zn was significantly decreased in breast cancer patients ( P adj < 0.001 ); there was no statistical difference in the change of Fe in liver, kidney, and other cancer. Spearman correlation showed that the change of Cu concentration was most closely related to the three OxS parameters and was strongly correlated in the observed several types of tumors ( r s > 0.6 ). Multinomial logistic regression showed that the risks of different tumors are related to the level change of multiple TEs and OxS parameters ( OR TOS = 1.19 ~ 2.82 , OR OSI = 2.56 ~ 4.70 , OR TAS = 0.20 ~ 0.46 , OR Cu = 0.73 ~ 1.44 , OR Zn = 0.81 ~ 0.91 , OR Fe = 0.68 ~ 1.18 , and OR Se = 0.22 ~ 0.45 , all P < 0.006 ). Conclusions. The OxS exists in the occurrence and development of cancer, which may be related to the changes of certain trace elements. In order to evaluate OxS correctly, it is necessary to detect TAS and TOS and at the same time, their ratio OSI should be detected. Assessment of markers representing the overall level of OxS and TEs may guarantee improved the monitoring of disease occurrence and development risk in cancer patients.

Background Candida tropicalis (C. tropicalis) is an important opportunistic pathogenic Candida species that can cause nosocomial infection. In this study, we analyzed the distribution and drug susceptibility of C. tropicalis and the relationship between ERG11 and UPC2 expression and resistance to azole antifungal agents. Methods C. tropicalis was cultured and identified by Sabouraud Agar Medium, CHROM Agar Candida and ATB tests (Bio-Mérieux, France). Total RNA was extracted from the collected strains, and the ERG11 and UPC2 mRNA expression levels were analyzed by quantitative real-time PCR. Results In total, 2872 clinical isolates of Candida, including 319 strains of C. tropicalis, were analyzed herein; they were mainly obtained from the Departments of Respiratory Medicine and ICU. The strains were predominantly isolated from airway secretion samples, and the detection trend in four years was mainly related to the type of department and specimens. The resistance rates of C. tropicalis to fluconazole, itraconazole and voriconazole had been increasing year by year. The mRNA expression levels of ERG11 and UPC2 in the fluconazole-resistant group were significantly higher than they were in the susceptible group. In addition, there was a significant positive linear correlation between these two genes in the fluconazole-resistant group. Conclusions Overexpression of the ERG11 and UPC2 genes in C. tropicalis could increase resistance to azole antifungal drugs. The routine testing for ERG11 and UPC2 in high-risk patients in key departments would provide a theoretical basis for the rational application of azole antifungal drugs.

Background Hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) is a major public health issue in China with a high burden of reinfection. Previous studies presented evidence of the relationship between meteorological factors and HFMD incidence, but no study examined the effects of extreme meteorological factors on HFMD reinfection. Methods Daily HFMD reinfection counts and meteorological data of Hefei city were collected from 2011 to 2016. A distributed lag non-linear model was used to quantify the effects of extreme weather (wind speed, sunshine duration, and precipitation) on HFMD reinfection. All effects were presented as relative risk (RR), with 90th or 10th percentiles of meteorological variables compare with their median values. Confounding factors, such as mean temperature, relative humidity, day of week, and long-term trend were controlled. Results A total of 4873 HFMD reinfection cases aged 0–11 years were reported. Extremely high precipitation, low wind speed, and low sunshine duration increased HFMD reinfection risk. The effect of extremely high precipitation was greatest at 8 days lag (RR = 1.01, 95%CI: 1.00–1.02). Extremely low wind speed and low sunshine increased 19% (RR = 1.19, 95%CI: 1.09–1.32) and 12% (RR = 1.12, 95%CI: 1.00–1.26) risk at lag 0–12 days, respectively. By contrast, extremely high wind speed and high sunshine duration exerted certain protective effects on HFMD reinfection at lag 0–12 days (RR = 0.76, 95%CI: 0.66–0.88; RR = 0.88, 95%CI: 0.79–0.99, respectively). Subgroup analyses showed that nursery children were the most sensitive people to the extreme wind speed and sunshine duration. Children aged 4–11 years appeared to be more susceptible to extreme sunshine duration than children aged Conclusion The present study provides evidence that extreme meteorological factors exert delayed effects on HFMD reinfection. Developing an early warning system is necessary for the protection of children from harm due to extreme meteorological factors.

In recent years, hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) has become a major public health issue in China, and its reinfection rate has been high. Numerous studies have examined the effects of meteorological factors involved in HFMD infection. However, no study has investigated the effects on HFMD reinfection. The present study analyzed the relationship between relative humidity and HFMD reinfection.We employed a distributed lag nonlinear model to evaluate the relationship between relative humidity and childhood HFMD reinfection in Hefei, China during 2011-2016. This model controlled confounding factors, including seasonality, long-term trend, day of the week, precipitation, and mean temperature.Childhood HFMD reinfection cases occurred mainly from April to July, and the second peak occurred from October to December. A statistically significant association was observed between relative humidity and HFMD reinfection with delayed effects. The adverse effect of high relative humidity (75%) appeared later than those of low relative humidity (75%). Moreover, the highest relative risk (RR 1.08, 95% CI 1.04-1.13) occurred when the relative humidity was 100% and had an 8-day lag. Given the differences between gender and age groups, the effects of extremely high relative humidity on females and those aged ≥4years were higher than those of other groups and caused the highest cumulative relative risks at lag 0-9 or 0-10days (Female: RR 2.00, 95% CI 1.23-3.26; Male: RR 1.55, 95% CI 1.04-2.30; Aged ≥4years: RR 2.31, 95% CI 1.27-4.18; Aged4years: RR 1.51, 95% CI 1.04-2.20).High and low relative humidity were found to cause the elevated risks of HFMD reinfection, and the highest risk was observed at extremely high relative humidity. Early warning systems should be built for the protection of susceptible populations, particularly females and children aged ≥4years.

Background Previous articles explored the role of UGT1A1 polymorphism on predicting irinotecan-induced toxicity, but the conclusions were still inconsistent and not comprehensive. We performed this meta-analysis to investigate the association between UGT1A1 polymorphism and irinotecan-induced toxicity. Methods PubMed and Web of Science were searched for articles before July 2017. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were set to select eligible articles, and corresponding data were extracted from those articles. Subgroup analyses based on different cancer categories, doses and races were carried out to achieve comprehensive results. Statistical analyses were conducted using STATA 11.0. Results A total of 38 studies with 6742 cases were included after reading full text. Both UGT1A1*6 and UGT1A1*28 polymorphism are significantly associated with severe irinotecan-induced toxicity. Both Asian and Caucasian cancer patients with UGT1A1*28 variant had an increased risk. Compared with heterozygous variant, patients with homozygous variant suffered from a higher risk of toxicity. The effect of UGT1A1*28 polymorphism on diarrhea was less than on neutropenia. Subgroup analysis exhibited that for UGT1A1*6 polymorphism, patients treated with low-dose irinotecan were at a notable risk of toxicity. Moreover, the association between UGT1A1*6 polymorphism and irinotecan-induced toxicity was found in patients suffering from respiratory system cancers. Conclusions Both UGT1A1*6 and UGT1A1*28 polymorphisms can be considered as predictors of irinotecan-induced toxicity, with effect varying by race, cancer type and irinotecan dose.

OBJECTIVE This study aims to explore the correlation of oxidative stress (OxS) in patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) and the disease severity with HBV genotypes and drug resistance mutations. METHODS A total of 296 patients with CHB were enrolled into the study. PCR-reverse dot-blot hybridization was used to detect the HBV genotypes (B, C, and D) and the drug resistance-causing HBV mutant genes. In addition, the total oxidative stress (TOS) and total antioxidant status (TAS) were determined, and oxidative stress index (OSI) was calculated and compared. RESULTS Serum levels of TOS and OSI, the B/C ratio, and drug resistance mutation rate were increased along with the elevated disease severity degree (CHB

Objective: To explore the correlation of oxidative stress in patients with chronic hepatitis B and degree of severity of the disease with HBV genotype and drug-resistant mutation. Methods: A total of 296 patients with diagnosed chronic hepatitis B were selected from Febuary 2014 to April 2016 in Mianyang Central Hospital, including 145 cases of chronic hepatitis B (CHB), 101 cases of hepatitis B cirrhosis (HBC), and 50 cases of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Three HBV genotypes (B, C and D) and eight drug-resistant mutation genes (rt180L, rt204M, rt207V, rt236N, rt250M, rt181A, rt184T and rt202S) were detected by PCR-reverse dot blot method. In addition, total oxidative stress (TOS), and total antioxidant status (TAS) were measured, on the basis of which oxidative stress index (OSI) was calculated. Furthermore, the differences of TOS, TAS and OSI levels were compared between different liver diseases, different genotypes or drug-resistant mutation, and also the correlations were analyzed between HBV genotype, drug-resistant mutation, patient’s oxidative stress status and disease severity. Results: Serum TOS and OSI levels, HBV-B/C ratios and drug-resistant mutation rates increased gradually with the severity of liver disease (CHB

BACKGROUND Oxidative stress parameters such as total oxidant status (TOS), total antioxidant status (TAS), and oxidative stress index (OSI) have been studied in breast, thyroid, and simple esophageal cancers (EC). We evaluated these parameters in patients with EC and analyzed their correlations with treatment outcomes. MATERIAL AND METHODS Serum TOS, TAS, and OSI in 92 patients with EC at different clinical stages and in 64 healthy people (controls) were measured. RESULTS Serum TOS, TAS, and OSI were significantly different between patients with EC and healthy controls (all p0.001); however, there were no significant differences across different clinical stages (all p0.05). These factors are not correlated with smoking or drinking history (all p0.05). Patients with EC with higher TOS and OSI and lower TAS had better responses to chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy, but there was no significant correlation with different responses (all p0.05). In a receiver operating characteristic curve analysis comparing patients with EC with healthy controls, the Youden indices were 0.391, 0.886, and 1, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Serum TOS, TAS, and OSI were significantly different between patients with EC and healthy controls. In patients with EC, these factors were not correlated with smoking or drinking history or with clinical stage. Patients with EC with higher TOS and OSI and lower TAS had a trend towards better outcomes but it did not reach significance. Serum TOS and OSI are potential diagnostic biomarkers that can be used to identify cases of EC.

Few-shot segmentation segments object regions of new classes with a few of manual annotations. Its key step is to establish the transformation module between support images (annotated images) and query images (unlabeled images), so that the segmentation cues of support images can guide the segmentation of query images. The existing methods form transformation model based on global cues, which however ignores the local cues that are verified in this paper to be very important for the transformation. This paper proposes a new transformation module based on local cues, where the relationship of the local features is used for transformation. To enhance the generalization performance of the network, the relationship matrix is calculated in a high-dimensional metric embedding space based on cosine distance. In addition, to handle the challenging mapping problem from the low-level local relationships to high-level semantic cues, we propose to apply generalized inverse matrix of the annotation matrix of support images to transform the relationship matrix linearly, which is non-parametric and class-agnostic. The result by the matrix transformation can be regarded as an attention map with high-level semantic cues, based on which a transformation module can be built simply. The proposed transformation module is a general module that can be used to replace the transformation module in the existing few-shot segmentation frameworks. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on Pascal VOC 2012 dataset. The value of mIoU achieves at 57.0% in 1-shot and 60.6% in 5-shot, which outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 1.6% and 3.5%, respectively.

This paper proposes a new method to generate pseudo-annotations from manual bounding boxes for semantic segmentation. Different from traditional local data driven based methods such as Conditional Random Field (CRF) and GrabCut, we aim at using class-agnostic bounding box based segmentation models. To this end, we propose a new segmentation network, which formulates segmentation task as a sparse boundary point detection task rather than dense pixel label prediction task, and therefore can provide new type of pseudo-annotations. Furthermore, we detect object boundary based on direction, and use multiple directions to handle various shapes of objects. Moreover, we further enhance the pseudo generation by combining different types of segmentation masks. Classical Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN) network based on dense prediction is also modified to generate diverse foreground masks. A simple fusion method based on intersection operation is proposed to combine the two types of pseudo-annotations. We verify the effectiveness of our method on PASCAL VOC 2012 validation dataset. The mIoU value is 67.9%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 1.1%.

Cathepsin S (CatS), a member of cysteine cathepsin proteases, has been well studied due to its significant role in many pathological processes, including arthritis, cancer and cardiovascular diseases. CatS inhibitors have been included in D3R-GC3 for both docking pose prediction and affinity ranking, and in D3R-GC4 for binding affinity ranking. The difficulties posed by CatS inhibitors in D3R mainly come from three aspects: large size, high flexibility and similar chemical structures. We have participated in GC4; our best submitted model, which employs a similarity-based alignment docking and Vina scoring protocol, yielded Kendall’s τ of 0.23 for 459 binders in GC4. In our further explorations with machine learning, by curating a CatS specific training set, adopting a similarity-based constrained docking method as well as an arm-based fragmentation strategy which can describe large inhibitors in a locality-sensitive fashion, our best structure-based ranking protocol can achieve Kendall’s τ of 0.52 for all binders in GC4. In this exploration process, we have demonstrated the importance of training data, docking approaches and fragmentation strategies in inhibitor-ranking protocol development with machine learning.

Maintaining design consistency is very important for IT organizations with complex products. In order to improve design consistency, we need a way to measure it first. Here we describe a method to evaluate GUI consistency, and we then develop a consistency score to quantify the consistency performance. This approach is initially designed towards our online cloud platform and we believe it can be applied to a variety of user interface types.

Background The information concerning non-invasive, easily obtainable, and accurate biomarkers for diagnosis of lupus nephritis (LN) is extremely limited. The aim of this study was to evaluate the diagnostic performance of cystatin C (CysC) and complement component 1q (C1q) for LN. Methods A case-control study that included 905 patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) without LN (group SLE), 334 patients with active lupus nephritis (group LNA), 255 patients with inactive lupus nephritis (group LNI), and 497 healthy individuals (group HC) was performed in Mianyang Central Hospital from March 2017 to December 2018. The serum levels of CysC, C1q, urea (Urea), and creatinine (Creat) were measured, and 2 estimated glomerular filtration rates (eGFRCysC and eGFRCreat) were calculated by equations which were based on serum CysC established by our group and the modification of diet in renal disease (MDRD), respectively. ANOVA analysis or Kruskal-Wallis test was used for comparing the differences among the groups, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was applied to identify the diagnostic efficiencies of individual or combined multiple indicators. Results Significantly elevated CysC and decreased C1q were observed in the LNA and LNI groups, which was in contrast to their levels in the SLE and HC groups. CysC (AUC = 0.906) or eGFRCysC (AUC = 0.907) assessed the highest diagnostic performance on LNA when detected individually, followed by C1q (AUC = 0.753). Joint utilization of C1q and CysC achieved very good performance (AUC = 0.933) which approximated to the best one observed in the combinations of C1q, Urea, CysC, eGFRCreat, and Creat (AUC = 0.975). Conclusion The separately detected CysC (eGFRCysC) and C1q were superior to the conventional biomarkers Urea, Creat, and eGFRCreat in the diagnosis of LNA. Moreover, although the combined detection of Urea, Creat, C1q, CysC, and eGFRCreat had the greatest diagnostic performance, the joint utilization of CysC and C1q could be prioritized for rapid discrimination of LNA if the economic burden is taken into consideration.

The depth accurately estimated from the RGB image can be used in applications such as 3D reconstruction and scene display. In depth estimation, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) plays an important role. However, most of the existing CNN-based depth estimation methods often do not take full advantage of the space and channel information in the local receptive field, resulting in lower-resolution depth maps. Based on the extant Encoder-Decoder network architecture, a simple and effective attention module is introduced to learn the discerning feature and the semantic feature in this paper. First, the intermediate feature map is generated by the encoder, and then the attention module is used to generate the attention maps along the two dimensions of the space and channel of the feature map. Finally, the refined output generated by multiplying the attention maps to intermediate feature maps is input to the subsequent neural network for further work. Our works show that the suggest approach has obtained good achievements on NYU Depth v2.

In order to improve the accuracy of the super-resolution network and reduce the number of model parameters, this paper improves its RCAB module on the basis of RCAN, and builds a reconstruction network RSAN that can improve the quality and efficiency of image super-resolution reconstruction. By replacing the original channel attention module with a more efficient and lightweight shuffle attention, it is mainly used to reduce the number of parameters, supplemented by improving the accuracy; and replacing part of the ordinary convolution in RCAN with split convolution is mainly used to improve accuracy, supplemented by reducing feature redundancy and parameters. The experimental results show that RSAN in this paper can not only obtain better subjective visual evaluation and objective quantitative evaluation, but also reduce the number of network model parameters and improve the efficiency of the network to a certain extent.

Background Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are balanced through enzymatic mechanisms and exogenous antioxidants; imbalance results in oxidative stress (OxS). It is known that OxS plays an important role in the occurrence, development, and metastasis of breast cancer. The present study aimed to assess serum total oxidant status (TOS), total antioxidant status (TAS), and oxidant stress index (OSI) in patients at different clinical stages of breast cancer and to evaluate their diagnostic accuracy. Methods Serum TOS, TAS, and OSI were determined in 91 patients with breast cancer at different stages, 51 patients with benign breast tumors, and 35 healthy adults. Results Significant differences in serum TOS (F = 104.384, p = 0.000), TAS (F = 18.247, p = 0.000), and OSI (F = 62.598, p = 0.000) were observed among the 3 groups (benign breast tumor patients, breast cancer patients, and healthy women). Of the enrolled breast cancer patients, significant differences were also observed among different tumor stages, with TOS and OSI gradually increasing as the disease progressed, while TAS diminished. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis revealed that the area under the ROC curve for OSI (AUC OSI ) was significantly higher than AUC TAS (z = 2.344, p = 0.019) in distinguishing breast cancer from control groups (including disease control and the healthy control). The AUC OSI (z = 4.700, p = 0.001) or AUC TOS (z = 4.700, p = 0.001) was significantly higher than AUC TAS in distinguishing breast cancer from the healthy control. The AUC OSI (z = 5.907, p = 0.000) or AUC TOS (z = 5.667, p = 0.000) was significantly higher than AUC TAS in distinguishing benign breast tumors from the healthy control. Conclusion Oxidative stress parameters might serve as important indexes for monitoring breast cancer occurrence and progression. The combined evaluation of TOS, TAS, and OSI could be more beneficial for clinical assessment.

Background The shortage of primary care physicians in rural China is an enduring problem with serious implications for access to care. In response to the shortage in health workforce in rural areas, China government has launched the rural-oriented tuition-waived medical education (RTME) programme since 2010, aiming to train more general practitioners to address the rural health workforce requirements in middle and west areas. This study aims to investigate the prevalence of mental illness and the level of professional identity in the rural-oriented tuition-waived medical students (RTMSs), and to explore the impact of the RTMSs’ professional identity and related cognition and satisfaction with the RTME programme on mental health. Methods We conducted a descriptive, cross-sectional study. A total of 1103 RTMSs and 1095 non-oriented medical students from seven medical universities (colleges) in Anhui province completed a demographic questionnaire, the Depression, Anxiety, Stress Scales and the Professional Identity Questionnaire for Undergraduate Students. Cognition and satisfaction with the RTME programme of the RTMSs were collected. Multiple linear regression analysis was used to analyze the data. Results The prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress in RTMSs were 11.8, 22.9 and 3.4%, respectively. The mean total scores of the Professional Identity Questionnaire for Undergraduate Students were 3.58 (SD = 0.61). Results of multiple linear regression model indicated that students who are dissatisfied with targeted primary healthcare institution are likely to suffer from depression and anxiety; moreover, students who enrolled in the rural-oriented tuition-waived medical education programme due to economic reason are more likely to suffer from anxiety. Furthermore, a significant positive correlation was found between professional identity and mental health. Conclusions Providing better information about the RTME programme prior to enrollment and improving the students’ cognition of the policy’s effectiveness and the social value of rural healthcare work may contribute to improving the professional identity of the RTMSs. Meanwhile, a significant positive association was found between professional identity and mental health. This is a new perspective that shows that developing and improving professional identity may help medical students reduce the risk of psychological illness.

In-situ exploitation of oil shale by electric heating consumes large amounts of electricity. Under the existing dispatch system, using wind power output and photovoltaic power output to support the exploitation of oil shale can promote renewable energy use, reduce the consumption of coal and other fossil fuels, and protect the environment from pollution. In this study, the characteristics of the wind power and photovoltaic power output are analyzed, and the correlation between the power outputs is evaluated using the copula function. The load of exploiting oil shale is presented. In order to match the heating load characteristics of oil shale exploitation, a particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to optimize the heating temperature of the heated well to minimize the cost. An economic analysis is conducted of five different power supply combinations, including wind power, photovoltaic power, and the existing power grid. The income ratio of the five modes is calculated using actual data of a project in Jilin province in China, and the feasibility of in-situ electric heating by wind power, photovoltaic power, and the power grid is determined. The results of this study provide useful references for decision makers to plan the power supply scheme for in-situ oil shale exploitation.

As a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Shuangxia Decoction (SXD) has been used to treat insomnia in oriental countries for more than thousands of years and it presents remarkable clinical effects. However, its active pharmacological fraction and the mechanism of sedative-hypnotic effects have not been explored. In this paper, we investigated active pharmacological fraction and revealed the detailed mechanisms underlying the sedative-hypnotic effects of SXD. It showed that SXD water extract compared to ethanol extract possessed better sedative effects on locomotion activity in normal mice and increased sleep duration in subhypnotic dose of sodium pentobarbital-treated mice. SXD alleviated p-chlorophenylalanine (PCPA) -induced insomnia by increasing the content of 5-HT in cortex [F (4, 55) = 12.67], decreasing the content of dopamine (DA) and norepinephrine (NE). Furthermore, SXD enhanced the expression of 5-HT

The effect of different individual TFA isomers on cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been a limited study, especially for stroke. We aimed to investigate the relationships between four major plasma TFA isomer (elaidic, vaccenic, palmitelaidic and linolelaidic acid) concentrations and the risk of CVD, stroke and non-stroke CVD. A cross-sectional study was conducted, utilising a nationally representative sample of US adults in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Among the 3504 participants, 304 participants self-reported CVD history. The highest quintile of elaidic acid intake was associated with a 233% higher CVD risk (p = .010). Adjusted for age, gender and race, palmitelaidic acid was associated with a decreased CVD risk, but the effect size was diminished in a subsequent analysis model. For stroke risk, we failed to identify any associations. In addition to elaidic acid, the health effect of palmitelaidic acid should be paid more attention in the future studies.

Although vitamin D is reportedly associated with various cancers, the association between vitamin D and thyroid cancer is indefinite. We aimed to investigate whether this association applies to thyroid cancer (TC). A total of 276 Chinese Han people were recruited in a current matched case–control study. Multivariable conditional logistic regression was computed to estimate the association between plasma 25(OH)D and papillary thyroid cancer (PTC). In addition, we searched relevant studies in PubMed and Web of Science databases before December 2017 to conduct a meta-analysis. In our case–control study, plasma 25(OH)D concentration was inversely associated with PTC risk (highest tertile vs lowest tertile: adjusted OR = 0.25; 95% CI 0.10, 0.61; Ptrend = 0.003). This association was independent of body mass index and physical activity (all adjusted Pinteraction > 0.05). A total of 11 studies were included in the meta-analysis, among which ten studies have been published and one was our case–control study. Compared with 25(OH)D non-deficient group, the pooled OR of TC was 1.42 (95% CI 1.17, 1.73) in the deficient group. Similarly, blood 25(OH)D levels in patients with TC were tend to be lower than those in the controls (SMD = − 0.20, 95% CI − 0.36, − 0.03). A high level of circulating 25(OH)D was associated with a decreased TC risk. This association has important significance in public health and should, therefore, be further studied.

Arterial stiffness (AS) is a predictor of coronary artery outcomes in patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD). Carotid–femoral pulse wave velocity (cf-PWV) is a commonly used method for assessing AS. This study aimed to assess the relationship between cf-PWV and clinical CVD events. Of the 786 studies identified, 19 studies were included in the final meta-analysis. Meta-analysis revealed that participants with high cf-PWV by 1 standard deviation (SD), 1 m/s, and cutoff points have a high pooled relative risk for CVD events (1 SD: 1.25, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.19-1.31; 1 m/s: 1.12, 95% CI: 1.07-1.18; and cutoff points: 1.80, 95% CI: 1.45-2.14) and CVD mortality (1 SD: 1.23, 95% CI: 1.15-1.31; 1 m/s: 1.09, 95% CI: 1.04-1.14; and cutoff points: 1.85, 95% CI: 1.46-2.24). In addition, we found that the predictive value of increased AS was higher in patients with higher disease risk for total CVD events and CVD mortality than in other patients. Carotid–femoral pulse wave velocity is a useful biomarker to improve the prediction of CV risk for patients and identify high-risk populations who may benefit from aggressive CV risk factor management.

A 3D point cloud model reconstructed based on image usually contains many outliers. These outliers may exist in the form of isolation or aggregated clusters, or connected to surface of model. Based on the distribution characteristics of outliers, an integrated outlier detection method is proposed. Firstly, the spatial topological relation of point cloud data is established by dividing cell method. When the surface of model sampling is insufficient, the points of surface will be split into a number of clusters with different sizes instead of a complete cluster, the boundary matching method can be used to preserve the good points and remove outlier clusters. Finally, the improved K-means algorithm is adopted to cluster all points based on colors, and remove the outliers which are connected to surface. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively detect outliers with the different distribution state in the reconstructed point clouds.

In this work, multi-mode resonator technology is applied to finline bandstop filter (BSF) to improve its performance. A finline BSF with two transmission zeros in the stopband is realized by using a new kind of dual-mode finline resonator proposed in this paper. The bandwidth of the designed filter is clearly broadened to three times that of the traditional finline BSF without enlarging its size. Its measured bandwidth under 20 dB rejection is about 600 MHz and the insertion loss in the passband is below 0.4 dB including the insertion loss of two finline-to-waveguide transitions. There is a good agreement between the simulated and measured results.

We investigated oxidative stress parameters in the sera of patients with lung cancer and healthy individuals to evaluate their correlations with lung cancer. Ninety-four lung cancer patients and 64 healthy controls were enrolled after obtaining informed consent. Their sera oxidative stress parameters were measured. Total antioxidant status (TAS), total oxidant status (TOS), and oxidative stress index (OSI) were significantly different between patients and healthy groups (all P .05). TAS and OSI were significantly different between the nonsmoking and smoking groups, radiotherapy and without radiotherapy groups, chemotherapy and without chemotherapy groups (P .05). In a receiver operating characteristic curve analysis comparing patients with lung cancer with healthy controls, the Youden indices of TOS, TAS, and OSI were 0.541, 0.532, and 1, respectively. The oxidative stress may be correlation with lung cancer staging. Smoking, surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy showed correlation with parts oxidative stress parameters.

Many applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) depend on the occurrences of events with temporal and spatial constraints to determine the further actions. A major challenge encountered is how to specify and detect the spatio-temporal events. The paper adopts Pub/Sub middleware to help IoT applications to capture spatio-temporal events. Specifically, the paper presents a composite subscription language CPSL and builds the corresponding Pub/Sub middleware Grus. The subscriptions in CPSL can specify diverse temporal, spatial and logical relationships of events, in particular, can describe the moving events related to mobile objects, and Grus is responsible for detecting whether events are matched with subscriptions in a distributed way. In addition, Grus provides the optimization strategies for subscriptions involving unary spatial operators. The paper also evaluates Grus's matching performance and costs through simulation experiments. The experimental results show that Grus can achieve satisfying performance and acceptable overheads, and the optimization strategies can efficiently speed up the detection of spatial events.

Accidents caused by defective software systems have long been a nightmare. Though engineers utilize advanced techniques and rigorous quality control procedures, we still have to admit that the increasing complexity and expanding scale of software systems make it extremely difficult to guarantee high quality deliverables. Since large-scale software systems exhibit the characteristics of complex networks, applying the principles of complex networks to evaluate the quality of software systems has attracted attention from both academia and industry. Unfortunately, most current research studies focus only on one or a limited number of attributes of software structures which makes them ineffective in providing comprehensive and insightful quality evaluation for software structures. To overcome this problem, we propose an approach based on various software structural characteristics to evaluate software structures from modularity, hierarchy, complexity, and fault propagation points of view. A model based on these four aspects is proposed to better understand software structural quality. A prediction model is also proposed to provide insights on the nature of software evolution and its current status. Experiments using two software projects were performed against the thresholds obtained by evaluating more than 5,000 versions of open source projects. Our results suggest that the approach described in this paper can help us analyze real-world software projects for better quality evaluation.

Oxidative stress (OS) is a state of excessive free radicals and reactive metabolites among which the most important class is reactive oxygen species (ROS) - radicals derived from oxygen - as represented by the superoxide anion radical (O2(·-)) and its reactive metabolites, hydroxyl radical (·OH) and hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2)). In essence, OS represents an imbalance between the production of oxidants - ROS - and their elimination by antioxidative systems in the body. Many studies have linked OS to thyroid cancer by showing its association with abnormally regulated oxidative or antioxidative molecules. The study by Wang et al. in the December 2011 issue of Endocrine-Related Cancer (18, 773-782) further supports this relationship by demonstrating a high total oxidant status and OS index in thyroid cancer patients. The origin of ROS in thyroid cancer patients has not been defined, but thyroid cancer itself can be one since inflammation, a major event in it, is a classical source of ROS. ROS may in turn enhance the mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase and phosphatidylinositol-3-kinase (PI3K) pathways, forming a vicious cycle propelling thyroid tumorigenesis. Regardless of the mechanism, the clinical implication of the association of OS with thyroid cancer is severalfold: one, OS is a new risk factor for thyroid cancer; two, OS confers thyroid cancer patients an increased risk for cardiovascular diseases, degenerative neurological disorders, and other cancers that are classically associated with OS; and three, interference with OS may reduce this risk and be therapeutically beneficial to thyroid cancer itself in thyroid cancer patients. These interesting possibilities deserve further studies.

Publish/Subscribe (Pub/Sub) systems are the middleware which provides the distributed event detection. The increasing requirements from applications have driven Pub/Sub systems to provide diversified quality of service (QoS). Therefore, this paper builds a Pub/Sub system Phoenix on the cloud which can meet the different needs of system reliability and user timeliness. In brief, Phoenix can deal with link failure, broker failure and cluster churning to guarantee that the system can run normally. Meanwhile, it provides the timeliness guarantee mechanism to manage to satisfy the timeliness specified by the users with its best effort. The experimental results show that Phoenix is fairly reliable and accommodates the users' personalized timeliness requirements well.

Hepatic cirrhosis is often accompanied by functional kidney impairment, which may be reversed if early treatment is promptly administered. This study aimed to investigate the role of Cystatin C and Cystatin C estimated glomerular filtration rate in the diagnosis of kidney impairment in patients with hepatic cirrhosis. Four hundred sixty five patients with hepatic cirrhosis were recruited. Serum creatinine and Cystatin C were determined, and their estimated glomerular filtration rates were calculated. The area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve (area under curve [AUC]) of Cystatin C and Cystatin C estimated glomerular filtration rate was significantly larger than that of serum creatinine and serum creatinine estimated glomerular filtration rate, respectively (P = .000). When the optimal cut-off value and upper reference limit were used, similar sensitivity, misdiagnosis rate, and diagnostic consistency were only observed in Cystatin C estimated glomerular filtration rate (P > .05). Cystatin C and Cystatin C estimated glomerular filtration rate are superior to serum creatinine and serum creatinine estimated glomerular filtration rate in diagnosis of secondary kidney impairment, and Cystatin C estimated glomerular filtration rate has a better performance as compared with Cystatin C. However, it is not a measured parameter, and thus the lab should determine its own optimal cut-off value.

A spatial 2-RPU&SPR parallel manipulator (PM) with three degrees of freedom (DOF) is proposed in this paper. The architecture of the manipulator is comprised of a moving platform attached to a base through two revolute-prismatic-universal jointed serial linkages and one spherical-prismatic-revolute jointed serial linkage. The prismatic motions of the prismatic joints are considered to be actively actuated. The moving platform of the manipulator has one-translational and two rotational (1T2R) DOFs with respect to the fixed base. The kinematics including forward and inverse position analysis is analyzed. At last, the simulations of position and velocity of the manipulator are made to validate the algorithm.

With the expanding wind power scale by each year, the traditional method for optimizing spinning reserve (SR) capacity is no longer applicable. Due attention has to be paid on this added wind uncertainty when setting the SR requirement. For obtaining the more optimal and reasonable results, a technique that SR determination can be dealt should be researched in wind power integration system. Therefore, with involving wind farm output variables, the fresh and upgrade Robust Linear Optimization (RLO) which proposed by Seong-Cheol Kang is firstly introduced into constructing the model of minimum generating the cost of conventional generators (CGs) and SR cost and its optimal capacity in this paper. The wind farm output was described as its minimum, maximum and mean values in the model through the SCK robust linear optimization theory. The reliability for optimal SR capacity and total cost can be preliminarily calculated under a variety of wind power fluctuation in this model. The validity of the proposed method will be verified by the test results of the IEEE-30 bus system. The relationships of wind uncertainties and required SRs can also be confirmed.

Content-based Pub/Sub systems enable various applications especially in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) to capture the events interested by the users. However, the event/subscription routing approaches in the Pub/Sub systems must adapt to the diversity and skew ness of the events/subscriptions. Only on this basis, performance improvement and quality of service required by the users can be considered. In the face of changing event/subscription loads, this paper presents an adaptive approach to channel management in the channel-based routing. Our approach exploits the historical information of the subscriptions and events as well as the covering relationship between subscriptions to accomplish channel splitting and joining. Due to properly utilizing the differencing method of set partitioning, our approach can guarantee that the difference between loads of two resultant brokers is as small as possible at the granularity of a subscription tree after a channel splitting operation on an overloaded broker. Moreover, it can work with any content-based subscription language without any limitation imposed on the specifications of subscriptions. The experimental results show that our approach is adaptable and elastic in terms of standard deviation of loads of brokers and also has acceptable offloading time.

Oxidative stress is involved in a variety of diseases. Prospective studies investigating the relationship between oxidative stress biomarkers and the status and development of colorectal cancer (CRC) are scarce; previous studies have failed to establish a relationship between the serum total oxidant/antioxidant status and CRC. Therefore, we compared the total serum oxidant/antioxidant levels of CRC patients and healthy subjects, and analyzed their clinical significance in the CRC. Fasting blood samples from 132 CRC patients and 64 healthy subjects were collected. Oxidative stress parameters, including total oxidant status (TOS) and total antioxidant status (TAS), were measured, and the oxidative stress index (OSI) was calculated. The TOS and OSI levels increased significantly (P0.05).However, the levels of TOS, TAS, and OSI were significantly different between patients with no metastasis and those with metastases to two organs (P

OBJECTIVE To utilize serum cystatin C (CysC) concentration to identify the daily dosage regimen of vancomycin (Van) for the treatment of patients with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections. METHODS Serum Van, CysC, and serum and urine creatinine (Cr) concentrations were detected in 65 MRSA-infected patients. The estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), Cr clearance (CLcr) and Van clearance (CLvan) were calculated and the correlation equation between CysC and CLvan was obtained using mathematical methods. Finally, the daily dosage equation of Van was derived according to pharmacokinetic theory. RESULTS In the test sample, serum Cr was 183.27 ± 68.34 μmol/l, CLcr was 75.56 ± 30.02 ml/min, eGFR was 70.79 ± 40.79 ml/min, and serum CysC was 1.35 ± 0.61 mg/l. There was significant correlation between eGFR and CLcr (R2 = 0.8051, p = 0.000). Bland-Altman analysis showed an agreement of 96.9% (63/65) between eGFR and CLcr. eGFR was significantly correlated with CLvan (R2 = 0.8465, p = 0.000) and the correlation was significantly higher than that between CLvan and CLcr (R2 = 0.6367, p = 0.000). CysC fits a high correlated CLvan estimating equation (R2 = 0.9211, p = 0.000): CLvan(ml/min) = 64.4026 × (CysC)-1.1488. Accordingly, the predicted equation was created for calculation of the Van dosage to achieve the appropriate target steady-state serum concentration (Css): IR (the rate of continuous infusion, g/D) = 64.4026 × (CysC)-1.1488 × Css (mg/l) × (60/1,000) × 24. CONCLUSIONS Serum CysC is a good marker of renal function in comparison with serum Cr for the dose determination of Van. CysC can estimate the daily dose of Van, and may improve therapeutic success rates of MRSA-infected patients.

Emergency management needs to detect diverse events, covering non-spontaneous events and spatio-temporal events, and notify the related personnelas soon as possible so that they can make further decisions. This paper introduces how to carry out event detection and notification by exploiting content-based Pub/Sub systems, and it also summarizes our work progress in this field. Through describing our event detection language and its application examples, the paper demonstrates the event detection capability of our Pub/Sub systems. Furthermore, this paper explains subscription/event routing strategies employed in our Pub/Sub systems constructed in different network environments (including cloud and VANETs), and these strategies serve for dynamic load balance and efficient event notification, respectively.

Data replication can improve the performance and availability for applications, and when it is employed by big data applications, it has to solve the challenges posed by big data applications, i.e., offering scalability and varying consistency levels. In this paper, we design and implement a data replication framework Pyxis+, whereby replication-aware applications can be developed in a rapid and convenient way. Pyxis+ allows the applications to register different consistency levels and automatically switches the consistency levels according to the change of requirements and performance. Meanwhile, on the basis of the consistency guarantees, Pyxis+ takes advantage of the consistent hashing technology to improve the scalability of data access. Simulation experimental results show that Pyxis+ can obtain relatively stable throughputs and response time by adding or removing replica managers while facing the increase of user requests.

The character of reactive power in wind power integrated system affects active power losses and voltage level of the entire system. For the influence from the randomness of wind speed to entire system power flow, a reactive power optimization model based on Robust Optimization (RO) is presented firstly. With minimizing power losses as an objective, the uncertainty of the wind speed is taken as a random variable and demonstrated in a "box" uncertainty set for transforming the uncertain constraints into the certain form. The duality theorem is utilized to simplify the model to be general linear programming ones. IEEE30-node system is used as an example to test the model and method. The results show that the random wind speed is quantitated effectively, power losses are reduced, and even the voltage of entire system can be restricted within regular range. The reactive power optimization method with RO is simple, feasible and significant.