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By employing time-varying proximal functions, adaptive subgradient methods (ADAGRAD) have improved the regret bound and been widely used in online learning and optimization. However, ADAGRAD with full matrix proximal functions (ADA-FULL) cannot handle large-scale problems due to the impractical $O(d^3)$ time and $O(d^2)$ space complexities, though it has better performance when gradients are correlated. In this paper, we propose two efficient variants of ADA-FULL via a matrix sketching technique called frequent directions (FD). The first variant named as ADA-FD directly utilizes FD to maintain and manipulate low-rank matrices, which reduces the space and time complexities to $O(\tau d)$ and $O(\tau^2d)$ respectively, where d is the dimensionality and $\tau\ll d$ is the sketching size. The second variant named as ADA-FFD further adopts a doubling trick to accelerate FD used in ADA-FD, which reduces the average time complexity to $O(\tau d)$ while only doubles the space complexity of ADA-FD. Theoretical analysis reveals that the regret of ADA-FD and ADA-FFD is close to that of ADA-FULL as long as the outer product matrix of gradients is approximately low-rank. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithms. more...

Background Rapid diagnosis of microbes in the burn wound is a big challenge in the medical field. Traditional biochemical detection techniques take hours or days to identify the species of contaminating and drug-resistant microbes. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is evaluated to address the need for a fast and sensitive method for the detection of bacterial contamination in liquids. Methods Herin, we developed a novel technique which by using NIRS together with supporting vector machine (SVM), to identify the microbial species and drug-resistant microbes in LB medium, and to diagnose the wound colonization and wound infection models of pigs. Results The device could recognize 100% of seven kinds of microbes and 99.47% of the multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus), with a concentration of 109 cfu ml−1 in LB medium. The accuracy of the microbial identification in colonized and infected wounds in-situ was 100%. The detection limit of NIRS with SVM for the detection of S. aureus and Escherichia coli (E. coli) was 101 cfu ml−1 in LB medium. Identification time was less than 5 s. Conclusion Our findings validate for the first time a novel technique aimed at the rapid, noncontacted, highly sensitive, and specific recognition of several microbial species including drug-resistant ones. This technique could represent a promising approach to identify diverse microbial species and a potential bedside device to rapidly diagnose infected wounds. more...

On March 10, 2021, the FDA granted regular approval to tivozanib for treatment of patients with relapsed or refractory (R/R) advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) following two or more prior systemic therapies. Approval was based on the TIVO-3 study, a randomized trial of tivozanib versus sorafenib in patients with R/R advanced RCC. In TIVO-3, patients were randomized to receive either tivozanib 1.34 mg orally once daily for 21 consecutive days of every 28-day cycle or sorafenib 400 mg orally twice daily continuously. The primary endpoint was progression-free survival (PFS) per RECIST v1.1. Tivozanib demonstrated efficacy compared with sorafenib with an improvement in PFS [HR, 0.73; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.56–0.95; P = 0.016]. The estimated median PFS was 5.6 months and 3.9 months in the tivozanib and sorafenib arms, respectively. There was no evidence of a detrimental effect on overall survival: HR, 0.97 (95% CI, 0.75–1.24). The most common grade 3 to 4 adverse reaction on the tivozanib arm was hypertension (24%). Compared with sorafenib, tivozanib was associated with lower rates of grade 3 to 4 diarrhea, rash, and palmar-plantar erythrodysesthesia. Patients receiving tivozanib in TIVO-3 had lower rates of dose reduction, interruption, or permanent discontinuation than those receiving sorafenib. more...

Smooth filtering, a common blurring and denoising operator, has often been utilized postoperatively to diminish the traces left by malicious manipulations. Most of the existing forensic methods only focus on one specific filtering artifact such as median filtering, which is insufficient to reveal the manipulation history of digital images. Unlike traditional convolutional neural network (CNN)-based networks, which normally introduce handcrafted features, including frequency domain features and median filtering residuals, into the preprocessing layer, this paper proposes an end-to-end deep learning model for robust smooth filtering identification. First, a distinctive network structure named the Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) block is introduced to select discriminative features adaptively and suppress the irrelevant features to the smooth filtering effect. Then, as the network depth increases, multiple inception-residual blocks are stacked to extract discriminative features and reduce the information loss. Finally, different smooth filtering operations can be classified through learning hierarchical features. The experimental results on a composite database show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, especially in small size and JPEG compression scenarios. more...

Predicting the future trajectories of surrounding agents has become an crucial problem to be solved for the safety of autonomous vehicles. Recent studies based on Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks have shown powerful abilities to model social interactions. However, many of these approaches focus on spatial interactions of the neighborhood agents but ignore temporal interactions that accompany spatial interactions. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Attention architecture (HSTA), which activates the utilization of spatial interactions with different weights, and jointly considers the temporal interactions across time steps of all agents. More specially, the graph attention mechanism (GAT) is presented to capture spatial interactions, the multi-head attention mechanism (MHA) is conducted to encode temporal correlations of interactions and a state gated fusion (SGF) layer is used to integrate spatial and temporal interactions. We evaluate our proposed method against baselines on both pedestrian and vehicle datasets. The results show that our model is effective and achieves state-of-the-art achievements. more...

Development and progression of many kidney diseases are substantially influenced by aberrant protein acetylation modifications of gene expression crucial for kidney functions. Histone deacetylase (HDAC) expression alterations are detected from renal samples of patients and animal models of various kidney diseases, and the administrations of HDAC inhibitors display impressive renal protective effects in vitro and in vivo. However, when the expression alterations of multiple HDACs occur, not all the HDACs causally affect the disease onset or progression. Identification of a single HDAC as a disease-causing factor will allow subtype-targeted intervention with less side effect. HDAC3 is a unique HDAC with distinct structural and subcellular distribution features and co-repressor dependency. HDAC3 is required for kidney development and its aberrations actively participate in many pathological processes, such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and neurodegenerative disorders, and contribute significantly to the pathogenesis of kidney diseases. This review will discuss the recent studies that investigate the critical roles of HDAC3 aberrations in kidney development, renal aging, renal cell carcinoma, renal fibrosis, chronic kidney disease, polycystic kidney disease, glomerular podocyte injury, and diabetic nephropathy. These studies reveal the distinct characters of HDAC3 aberrations that act on different molecules/signaling pathways under various renal pathological conditions, which might shed lights into the epigenetic mechanisms of renal diseases and the potentially therapeutic strategies. more...

In recent decades, metal halide semiconductors represented by lead-based halide perovskites have shown broad potential in optoelectronic applications. This family of semiconductors differs from traditional tetrahedral semiconductors in crystalline structure, chemical bonding, electronic-structure features, optoelectronic properties, as well as material fabrication method. At present, difficulties arising from both intrinsic material properties (including Pb toxicity and long-term stability) and technological aspects hinder their large-scale commercialization. In this Perspective, we focus on up-and-coming lead-free metal halide semiconductors toward high-performance optoelectronic applications. We start by outlining the advantages of metal halide semiconductors and their physical and chemical underpinnings. We then review composition and structure, electronic structure, optoelectronic properties, and device applications according to classification into three material categories, i.e., three-dimensional halide perovskites, low-dimensional perovskites and perovskite-like materials, and materials beyond perovskites. We conclude with an outlook on the challenges and opportunities of metal halide semiconductors and the future development of the field. more...

To quantify the intensity of automobile brake creep groan, both experimental and analytical studies are innovatively conducted on the friction-induced vibration and noise of the disc brake in this paper. Experimentally, three factors, brake disc initial temperature, terrain, and gear position, are comprehensively contemplated to design six different test conditions, based on which a creep groan vehicle road test is conducted. Depending on the subjective evaluation and statistical analysis of the annoyance degree caused by vibration and noise in the starting and braking process under different test conditions, the influence of each factor on creep groan intensity is obtained. By processing the brake caliper and lower suspension arm acceleration and the interior sound pressure signals acquired in the test, the occurrence conditions and transient dynamic characteristics of creep groan are explored. One of the creep groan vibration modes is triggered by the rapid removal of the force exerted on the brake pedal when the vehicle starts at an extremely low speed, which presents intermittent impact and chaotic characteristics. The other vibration mode shows periodic harmonic characteristics, whose energy is concentrated on specific frequencies in the form of frequency doubling. This vibration mode occurs when continuously maintaining a low brake oil pressure or slowly releasing the force exerted on the brake pedal during the vehicle low-speed starting process, the velocity-displacement phase-plane portrait of which shows a stable limit cycle of stick-slip motion. Analytically, four vibration indexes and four noise indexes are established to evaluate the intensity of creep groan, the validity of which is verified by linear regression analysis. Finally, by combining all effective indexes, multiple linear regression analysis is performed, based on which the mapping relationship between the subjective evaluation of creep groan and effective indexes is obtained. The results demonstrate that the combination of the logarithmic vibration dose value of maximum brake caliper acceleration pulse and the loudness of interior noise can accurately describe the annoying degree caused by creep groan. The regression model can quantify and predict creep groan intensity of the test vehicle under different test conditions, which has guiding significance for engineering applications. more...

Advanced deep learning technology has made great progress in generic object detection of autonomous driving, yet it is still challenging to detect small road hazards in a long distance owing to lack of large-scale small-object datasets and dedicated methods. This work addresses the challenge from two aspects. Firstly, a self-collected long-distance road object dataset (TJ-LDRO) is introduced, which consists of 109,337 images and is the largest dataset so far for the small road object detection research. Secondly, a vanishing-point-guided context-aware network (VCANet) is proposed, which utilizes the vanishing point prediction block and the context-aware center detection block to obtain semantic information. The multi-scale feature fusion pipeline and the upsampling block in VCANet are introduced to enhance the region of interest (ROI) feature. The experimental results with TJ-LDRO dataset show that the proposed method achieves better performance than the representative generic object detection methods. This work fills a critical capability gap in small road hazards detection for high-speed autonomous vehicles. more...

This paper aims to develop, in a case of multiple water sources, an optimal operational strategy that can be used in arid/semiarid regions by water decision-makers to schedule the use of each source over time, to control the artificial recharge to aquifers, to improve the energy efficiency related to the water supply system, to determine the optimal amount of water each source should supply over a period, and to minimise the water costs. In this regard, a novel, cost effective, and advanced optimal controller to operate a water supply system in arid/semiarid regions has been developed. This model is designed as a multi-constraint non-linear programming model that meets the demand for an ever-growing population, and considers in its formulation multiple surface water sources, aquifers, desalination plants, recycled water plants, the seasonal availability of surface water and groundwater, the monthly rainfall variability, and the seasonal energy price. To verify the effectiveness of the developed model, a real case study was conducted. The results obtained showed a 3% reduction in the water supply cost and sustainable improvement in groundwater management, demonstrating the model’s capacity to manage aquifer recharge efficiently, to optimally schedule the use of water sources. Adopting this strategy improves water security and the energy security in an urban region as it decreases the use of energy-intensive water sources during seasons with high electricity demand. more...

Objective To compare the re-intervention rates of myomectomy, uterine artery embolization (UAE) and magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound surgery (MRgFUS) for uterine fibroids (UFs) in different follow-up time. Methods Two investigators searched PubMed for clinical studies published in English from 1 Jan 2000 to 31 Dec 2020, and independently examined the paper to select qualified studies, extracted relevant information and assessed the risk of bias. Meanwhile, a meta-analysis of 31 studies containing totally 42103 patients was conducted to compare the re-intervention rate of myomectomy, UAE and MRgFUS. Results In the meta-analysis of 42103 patients, the 12-month re-intervention rates of myomectomy, UAE and MRgFUS for UFs were 0.06 (95%CI, 0.01-0.11), 0.07 (95%CI, 0.06-0.09), and 0.12 (95%CI, 0.04-0.20) respectively. The 24-month re-intervention rates were 0.10 (95%CI, 0.04-0.16), 0.08 (95%CI, 0.01-0.17), and 0.14 (95%CI, 0.07-0.21) respectively. The 36-month re-intervention rates were 0.09 (95%CI, 0.05-0.13), 0.14 (95%CI, 0.05-0.23), and 0.22 (95%CI, 0.11-0.32) respectively. Additionally, the 60-month re-intervention rates were 0.19 (95%CI, 0.15-0.24), 0.21 (95%CI, 0.17-0.25), and 0.49 (95%CI, 0.21-0.77) respectively. Conclusions The myomectomy has the lowest re-intervention rate of the three regimens in short time and long time while the MRgFUS has the highest. The rate of MRgFUS increased rapidly in the 60th month after the treatment. more...

Little is known about the benefit-risk profile of second-generation androgen receptor inhibitors in older men with non-metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. We aimed to examine the efficacy and safety of second-generation androgen receptor inhibitors in men aged 80 years or older with non-metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.We searched for all randomised controlled clinical trials evaluating second-generation androgen receptor inhibitors in patients with non-metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration before Aug 15, 2020, and pooled data from three trials that met the selection criteria. All three trials enrolled patients who were aged 18 years or older with an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 0-1, castration-resistant prostate cancer, prostate-specific antigen (PSA) 2·0 μg/L or greater, PSA doubling time of 10 months or less, and no evidence of distant metastatic disease on conventional imaging per the investigator's assessment at the time of screening. All patients had histologically or cytologically confirmed adenocarcinoma of the prostate without neuroendocrine differentiation or small-cell features. All patients who were randomly assigned to androgen receptor inhibitor or placebo groups in these trials were considered assessable and were included in this pooled analysis. We evaluated the effect of age on metastasis-free survival and overall survival across age groups (80 years vs ≥80 years) in the intention-to-treat population. Safety analyses were done in patients who received at least one dose of study treatment.Between Oct 14, 2013, and March 9, 2018, 4117 patients were assigned to androgen receptor inhibitor (apalutamide, enzalutamide, or daralutamide; n=2694) or placebo (n=1423) across three randomised trials. The median follow-up duration for metastasis-free survival was 18 months (IQR 11-26) and for overall survival was 44 months (32-55). In patients aged 80 years or older (n=1023), the estimated median metastasis-free survival was 40 months (95% CI 36-41) in the androgen receptor inhibitor groups and 22 months (18-29) in the placebo groups (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 0·37 [95% CI 0·28-0·47]), and the median overall survival was 54 months (50-61) versus 49 months (43-58), respectively (adjusted HR 0·79 [0·64-0·98]). In patients younger than 80 years of age (n=3094), the estimated median metastasis-free survival was 41 months (95% CI 36-not estimable [NE]) in the androgen receptor inhibitor groups and 16 months (15-18) in the placebo groups (adjusted HR 0·31 [95% CI 0·27-0·35]), and the median overall survival was 74 months (74-NE) versus 61 months (56-NE), respectively (adjusted HR 0·69 [0·60-0·80]). In patients aged 80 years or older, grade 3 or worse adverse events were reported in 371 (55%) of 672 patients in the androgen receptor inhibitor groups and 140 (41%) of 344 patients in the placebo groups, compared with 878 (44%) of 2015 patients in the androgen receptor inhibitor groups and 321 (30%) of 1073 patients in the placebo groups among patients younger than 80 years. The most common grade 3-4 adverse events were hypertension (168 [8%] of 2015 patients aged80 years and 51 [8%] of 672 patients aged ≥80 years in the androgen receptor inhibitor groups vs 53 [5%] of 1073 patients aged80 years and 22 [6%] of 344 patients aged ≥80 years in the placebo groups) and fracture (61 [3%] and 36 [5%] in the androgen receptor inhibitor groups vs 15 [1%] and 11 [3%] in the placebo groups).The findings of this pooled analysis support the use of androgen receptor inhibitors in older men with non-metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer. Incorporating geriatric assessment tools in the care of older adults with non-metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer might help clinicians to offer individualised treatment to each patient.None. more...

Fatigue failure caused by unsteady loads on the shaft is an important limiting factor in the development of large VAWT. This study proposes an active control method that relies on movable mass blocks to reduce the unsteady loads. Then on the basis of the aerodynamic load of the VAWT simulated by computational fluid dynamics, the motion laws of the mass blocks with different masses are investigated. When the mass of mass block is 0.075 kg, the radial load of the shaft can be reduced by 97.1% and the shaft deformation can be eliminated by 99% without affecting the power output of wind turbine. However, further research on the start-up performance of the VAWT indicates that the active control method also prolongs the start-up time. Thus a method of adjusting the moment of inertia of wind turbine with a rotation speed of 15.6 m/s is proposed to save 40.6% of the start-up time with respect to the method used for direct start-up with large moment of inertia of 0.036 kg m2. After the start-up, a transition displacement curve is plotted to aid in the switching design of the operation mode of mass blocks between the start-up phase and the normal operation phase. more...

The composition of the maternal vaginal microbiome influences the duration of pregnancy, onset of labor, and even neonatal outcomes. Maternal microbiome research in sub-Saharan Africa has focused on non-pregnant and postpartum composition of the vaginal microbiome. Here we aimed to illustrate the relationship between the vaginal microbiome of 99 laboring Ugandan women and intrapartum fever using routine microbiology and 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing from two hypervariable regions (V1–V2 and V3–V4). To describe the vaginal microbes associated with vaginal microbial communities, we pursued two approaches: hierarchical clustering methods and a novel Grades of Membership (GoM) modeling approach for vaginal microbiome characterization. Leveraging GoM models, we created a basis composed of a preassigned number of microbial topics whose linear combination optimally represents each patient yielding more comprehensive associations and characterization between maternal clinical features and the microbial communities. Using a random forest model, we showed that by including microbial topic models we improved upon clinical variables to predict maternal fever. Overall, we found a higher prevalence of Granulicatella, Streptococcus, Fusobacterium, Anaerococcus, Sneathia, Clostridium, Gemella, Mobiluncus, and Veillonella genera in febrile mothers, and higher prevalence of Lactobacillus genera (in particular L. crispatus and L. jensenii), Acinobacter, Aerococcus, and Prevotella species in afebrile mothers. By including clinical variables with microbial topics in this model, we observed young maternal age, fever reported earlier in the pregnancy, longer labor duration, and microbial communities with reduced Lactobacillus diversity were associated with intrapartum fever. These results better defined relationships between the presence or absence of intrapartum fever, demographics, peripartum course, and vaginal microbial topics, and expanded our understanding of the impact of the microbiome on maternal and potentially neonatal outcome risk. more...

Xia Han,1,&ast; Xiaotang Liang,2,&ast; Menghai Wu,1 Lijun Zhang,1 Honglei Jiang2 1Department of Cardiology, Jinan People’s Hospital Affiliated to Shandong First Medical University, Laiwu, 271199, People’s Republic of China; 2Shandong Second Provincial General Hospital, Jinan, Shandong Province, 250000, People’s Republic of China&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Honglei JiangShandong Second Provincial General Hospital, No. 4, Xingxi Street, Jinan, Shandong Province, 250000, People’s Republic of ChinaEmail jianghl_sd@21cn.comObjective: To evaluate the associations of genetic variants of the miR-217 gene with coronary artery disease (CAD) risk, as well as plasma level of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF).Methods: A case–control study with 498 CAD patients and 499 frequency-matched healthy controls was conducted to evaluate the associations of four tagSNPs of the miR-217 gene, including rs6724872, rs4999828, rs10206823, and rs41291177, with CAD risk and plasma level of VEGF.Results: SNP rs6724872 and rs4999828 were significantly associated with increased risk of CAD (P value was smaller than 0.05 even after Bonferroni multiple adjustment). Compared with the G allele, C allele of rs6724872 was significantly associated with 1.73-fold increased risk of CAD (95% CI: 1.25– 2.39; P = 0.001). While C allele of rs4999828 was significantly associated with 1.75-fold increased risk of CAD, compared with T allele (95% CI: 1.34– 2.29; P = 4 × 10− 5). Meanwhile, rs6724872 and rs4999828 were also significantly associated with higher level of VEGF (P < 0.001).Conclusion: These findings highlighted the important role of genetic variants of the miR-217 gene in the pathogenesis of CAD and potential targets for intervention.Keywords: coronary artery disease, miR-217, VEGF, genetic more...

Systemic vasculitis is a category of autoinflammatory diseases usually involving multiple organs. Involvement of the central nervous system (CNS) may mimic other disorders, hence resulting in overdiagnosis. This is a case report of a young man who presented with acrodynia, episodic pyrexia, and recurrent strokes. He was treated for systemic vasculitis with glucocorticoids and immunosuppressants, which failed to prevent the stroke. Finally, Fabry disease was diagnosed after [Formula: see text]-galactosidase A gene mutation analysis was done. Rheumatologists should be aware of Fabry disease, which may present with multi-system involvement that mimics vasculitis. To avoid inappropriate treatment, a comprehensive differential diagnosis should be considered before a diagnosis of primary systemic vasculitis is made. Recurrent strokes, especially in males younger than 40, should raise suspicions of Fabry disease. more...

Purpose Controversy exists regarding fibular status related to tibial alignment after congenital pseudarthrosis of the tibia (CPT) achieves union. We aimed to determine whether fibular status affected frontal plane tibial alignment post-CPT union. Methods Between January 2010 and December 2013, we followed 36 patients treated using a combined surgical technique (mean 6.6 years (2.2 to 9.4)). Outcome measures comprised medial proximal tibial angle, tibial diaphyseal angulation, lateral distal tibial angle (LDTA), relative intramedullary rod length and relative fibula length discrepancy. Results The frequency of proximal tibial valgus deformity and ankle valgus deformity were significantly lower in the fibular integrity group than in the fibular un-integrity group (proximal tibial valgus deformity: 2/17 versus 11/19; p = 0.006; ankle valgus deformity: 10/17 versus 18/19; p = 0.016). The mean LDTA was notably higher in the fibular integrity group than in the fibular un-integrity group (81.2° (sd 6.7°) versus 71.3° (sd 6.6°); p < 0.001). A statistically significant difference was observed in relative fibula length discrepancy between patients with fibular integrity (0.06 (0 to 0.11); Malhotra grade 0, n = 6; Malhotra grade I, n = 11) and those without (0.24 (0.01 to 0.36); Malhotra grade 2, n = 2; Malhotra grade 3, n = 17; p < 0.001). Ankle valgus deformity had a significant positive correlation with proximal tibial valgus deformity (r = 0.402; p = 0.015). Patients with an intact and normal length fibula had a lower frequency of ankle valgus deformity than those with an intact but shortening fibula (1/6 versus 9/11; p = 0.035). Conclusion Shortening or pseudarthrosis of the fibula was associated with ankle valgus and proximal tibial valgus deformities post-CPT union. Level of evidence III more...

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown lack of robustness, as they are vulnerable to small perturbations on the inputs. This has led to safety concerns on applying DNNs to safety-critical domains. Several verification approaches based on constraint solving have been developed to automatically prove or disprove safety properties for DNNs. However, these approaches suffer from the scalability problem, i.e., only small DNNs can be handled. To deal with this, abstraction based approaches have been proposed, but are unfortunately facing the precision problem, i.e., the obtained bounds are often loose. In this paper, we focus on a variety of local robustness properties and a(δ,ε)-global robustness property of DNNs, and investigate novel strategies to combine the constraint solving and abstraction-based approaches to work with these properties:We propose a method to verify local robustness, which improves a recent proposal of analyzing DNNs through the classic abstract interpretation technique, by a novel symbolic propagation technique. Specifically, the values of neurons are representedsymbolicallyand propagated from the input layer to the output layer, on top of the underlying abstract domains. It achieves significantly higher precision and thus can prove more properties.We propose a Lipschitz constant based verification framework. By utilising Lipschitz constants solved by semidefinite programming, we can prove global robustness of DNNs. We show how the Lipschitz constant can be tightened if it is restricted to small regions. A tightened Lipschitz constantcan be helpful in proving local robustness properties. Furthermore, a global Lipschitz constant can be used to accelerate batch local robustness verification, and thus support the verification of global robustness.We show how the proposed abstract interpretation and Lipschitz constant based approaches can benefit from each other to obtain more precise results. Moreover, they can be also exploited and combined to improve constraints based approach.We implement our methods in the tool PRODeep, and conduct detailed experimental results on several benchmarks more...

Learning with streaming data has attracted much attention during the past few years. Though most studies consider data stream with fixed features, in real practice the features may be evolvable. For example, features of data gathered by limited-lifespan sensors will change when these sensors are substituted by new ones. In this article, we propose a novel learning paradigm: Feature Evolvable Streaming Learning where old features would vanish and new features would occur. Rather than relying on only the current features, we attempt to recover the vanished features and exploit it to improve performance. Specifically, we learn a mapping from the overlapping period to recover old features and then we learn two models from the recovered features and the current features, respectively. To benefit from the recovered features, we develop two ensemble methods. In the first method, we combine the predictions from two models and theoretically show that with the assistance of old features, the performance on new features can be improved and we provide a tighter bound when the loss function is exponentially concave. In the second approach, we dynamically select the best single prediction and establish a better performance guarantee when the best model switches. Experiments on both synthetic and real data validate the effectiveness of our proposal. more...

Background and purpose — Acetabular anteversion (AA) is related to hip function. Most previous studies were based on radiographic investigations that determine osseous acetabular anteversion (OAA). But children’s acetabulum is mostly composed of cartilage; the cartilaginous acetabular anteversion (CAA) represents the real anteversion of the acetabulum. We measured OAA and CAA in children of various ages using MRI, and compared the developmental patterns between children with normal hips and those with developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH). Patients and methods — The OAA and CAA were measured on MRI cross-sections of the hips in 293 children with normal hips (average age 8 years), and in 196 children with DDH (average age 34 months). Developmental patterns of OAA and CAA in children with normal hips were determined through age-based cross-sectional analysis. Differences in OAA and CAA between children with normal hips and those with DDH were compared. Results — Normal OAA increased from mean 8.7° (SD 3.2) to 12° (3.0) during the first 2 years of life and remained unchanged until 9 years of age. From 9 to 16 years, the OAA showed a minimal increase of 2°–3°. The normal CAA increased rapidly from a mean of 12° (3.1) to 15° (2.7) within the first 2 years of life, and remained constant at 15° (SD 3.4) until 16 years of age. The age-matched average OAA in the normal and DDH cases was 11° (3.2) and 15° (3.0), respectively (p < 0.001). The age-matched average CAA in normal and DDH cases was 17° (4.2) and 23° (4.5), respectively (p < 0.001). Similarly, there was a significant difference in OAA and CAA between the uninvolved hips in unilateral DDH and normal cases (p < 0.001). Interpretation — The CAA was fully formed at birth in normal children, and remained unchanged until adulthood, whereas the OAA increased with age. The OAA and CAA were both over-anteverted in DDH children. MRI evaluation is of importance in children during skeletal development when planning hip surgery. more...

Cross-cultural English teaching is limited by the influence of traditional teaching models, resulting in poor teaching results. In order to improve the efficiency of cross-cultural English teaching, with the support of AI emotion recognition and neural network algorithm, this paper builds a cross-cultural O2O English teaching system with intelligent recognition and management. Moreover, this research uses background models to detect and track targets, to realize the full recognition of students’ emotions, and to facilitate teachers to effectively control online teaching. In addition, combined with online and offline teaching, this study uses neural network algorithm to stabilize the system and perform data processing, construct an overall O2O English teaching model according to actual needs, and formulate the corresponding teaching process. In order to verify the performance of the model, this study starts from two aspects: system performance test and system practice effect and uses statistical methods to collect and process data. The test results show that the model constructed in this paper has good performance and meets expectations. more...

Stress cardiomyopathy (SC) was first reported in the year 1983. It is narrated as critical but quite commutative left ventricular (LV) malfunction mostly caused by poignant or psychological disorder. Numerous variations of SC have been described as well as reverse stress cardiomyopathy (rSC) which is an adaptation identified by the decreased muscle movement related with hyperkinesis that reconciles impetuously. The signature of rSC is a medical demonstration alike to syndrome by an acute coronary, with no obvious difficult coronary artery disease. The occurrence of SC is approximated to be 4% of all victims conferring with gleaned syndrome by acute coronary. The portion of victims conferring with the rSC transfiguration out of all SC patients has been inconstant, varying from 1 to 24%. Reverse stress cardiomyopathy cases are found to be common with young people, less decrease in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) and more neurological disease compared to the SC. While the correct phenomenon of rSC is undetermined, postulated methods comprises of coronary microvasculature impairment, coronary artery spasm, and estrogen deficiency. Patients with rSC typically suffer with chest pain after an emotional or Psychological stressful event. The rSC can also be happened by general anesthesia, or neurological conditions. The diagnosis of rSC demands the presence of new electrocardiogram (EKG) abnormalities or elevated cardiac troponin, and absence of obstructive coronary disease, pheochromocytoma, or myocarditis. The consideration of rSC is quite analogous to that of SC, which is predominantly supportive with the treatment of complications. The recrudescence rate of rSC is around 12%. The most frequent complications of rSC include pericardial effusions, and development of LV thrombi. more...

Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) Cancer Susceptibility 2 (CASC2) has been proved to contribute to the development of cancers. However, the mechanism behind the action of CASC2 in thyroid cancer is not quite clear. We demonstrated that CASC2 was downregulated in thyroid cancer. We noted that CASC2 overexpression restrained the growth, migration, and invasion of thyroid cancer cells, whereas CASC2 depletion caused opposite trends. Bioinformatics analysis predicted that hypoxia inducible factor 1 subunit alpha inhibitor (FIH‐1) was potentially targeted by miR‐18a‐5p, which was confirmed by luciferase reporter assay. Upregulation of FIH‐1 abrogated the promotive effect of miR‐18a‐5p on the growth and invasion of thyroid cancer cells. In addition, CASC2 serves as a competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) and a ''sponge'' for miR‐18a‐5p, thereby regulating the expression of FIH‐1. These data elucidated the CASC2/miR‐18a‐5p ceRNA network in thyroid cancer pathogenesis. more...

Pitch angle greatly affects the performance of VAWT. Aiming at the maximum value of CT, this study first obtains the theoretical optimal angles of attack, i.e., 17.7° and −18.4° in upwind and downwind zones. A 2.5D model is simulated using Fluent to determine the magnitude and direction of induced velocity, and an initial pitch angle adjustment law is obtained combining the proposed local TSR. Compared with a prototype wind turbine, CP is increased by 2.69% after applying the initial adjustment law. The fitting curve angle δ at the abrupt part of pitch angle is analyzed. The smaller the angle δ is, the more evident the performance improvement of VAWT becomes. CP is increased by 11.68% when the angle is δ = 0°. On this basis, the adjustment law corresponding to δ = 0° of 100° more...

Nowadays, the urgency for the high-quality interdiffusion coefficients and atomic mobilities with quantified uncertainties in multicomponent/multi-principal element alloys, which are indispensable for comprehensive understanding of the diffusion-controlled processes during their preparation and service periods, is merging as a momentous trending in materials community. However, the traditional exploration approach for database development relies heavily on expertize and labor-intensive computation, and is thus intractable for complex systems. In this paper, we augmented the HitDIC (high-throughput determination of interdiffusion coefficients, https://hitdic.com) software into a computation framework for automatic and efficient extraction of interdiffusion coefficients and development of atomic mobility database directly from large number of experimental composition profiles. Such an efficient framework proceeds in a workflow of automation concerning techniques of data-cleaning, feature engineering, regularization, uncertainty quantification and parallelism, for sake of agilely establishing high-quality kinetic database for target alloy. Demonstration of the developed infrastructures was finally conducted in fcc CoCrFeMnNi high-entropy alloys with a dataset of 170 diffusion couples and 34,000 composition points for verifying their reliability and efficiency. Thorough investigation over the obtained kinetic descriptions indicated that the sluggish diffusion is merely unilateral interpretation over specific composition and temperature ranges affiliated to limited dataset. It is inferred that data-mining over large number of experimental data with the combinatorial infrastructures are superior to reveal extremely complex composition- and temperature-dependent thermal–physical properties. more...

Background: Moyamoya Disease (MMD) is a rare cerebrovascular disease with a high rate of disability and mortality. Immune reactions have been implicated in the pathogenesis of MMD, however, the underlying mechanism is still unclear. Objective: To identify proteins related to MMD specially involved in the immunogenesis, we performed a proteomic study. Methods: In this work, dural tissues or plasma from 98 patients with MMD, 17 disease controls without MMD, and 12 healthy donors were included. Proteomic profiles of dural tissues from 4 MMD and 4 disease controls were analyzed by an isobaric tag for relative and absolute quantitation (iTRAQ)- based proteomics. The immune-related proteins were explored by bioinformatics and the key MMDrelated proteins were verified by western blot, multiple reaction monitoring methods, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, and tissue microarray. Results: 1,120 proteins were identified, and 82 MMD-related proteins were found with more than 1.5 fold difference compared with those in the control samples. Gene Ontology analysis showed that 29 proteins were immune-related. In particular, Haptoglobin (HP) was up-regulated in dural tissue and plasma of MMD samples compared to the controls, and its up-regulation was found to be sex- and MMD Suzuki grade dependent. Through Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis, HP can well discriminate MMD and healthy donors with the Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.953. Conclusion: We identified the biggest protein database of the dura mater. 29 out of 82 differentially expressed proteins in MMD are involved in the immune process. Of which, HP was up-regulated in dural tissue and plasma of MMD, with sex- and MMD Suzuki grade-dependence. HP might be a potential biomarker of MMD. more...

At present, there is a certain lag in the construction of the service platform of the smart home pension system in my country, which does not reflect the use characteristics of the elderly. In order to improve the reliability of the smart service system for the elderly, this research builds a smart home care service platform based on machine learning and wireless sensor networks around the state of the elderly’s home life, disease stage, physical state, and intellectual state. Moreover, after comparing the advantages and disadvantages of several wireless sensor communication network technologies and in-depth understanding of communication principles and network topology, the overall design of the system is proposed. In addition, this study combines the design requirements of the system to optimize and improve the wearable physiological parameter collection system and focuses on the design and implementation of the hardware and software of the physiological parameter collection module in the construction of the new system platform. Finally, this study analyzes the performance of the model in this study through controlled trials. The results of the study show that the platform constructed in this paper is effective. more...

Introduction Previous studies of anti‐dsDNA, nucleosome (Nucl), histone (His), and C1q antibodies have revealed their clinical value in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). However, the correlation between four autoantibodies and SLE activity, lupus nephritis (LN) remains controversial, and data are insufficient on longitudinal monitoring. This study aimed at evaluating the value of these autoantibodies in active LN, and their performance on cross‐sectional evaluating and longitudinal monitoring of SLE disease activity. Methods Serum levels of four autoantibodies in 114 SLE patients, 219 other autoimmune disease patients (OAD), and 59 healthy controls were assayed by a quantitative immunoassay. Sera of 38 inpatients were obtained again after treatment. Results We found that serum levels of four autoantibodies were significantly higher in SLE than OAD patients (p .05). Conclusions Anti‐C1q, anti‐dsDNA, anti‐Nucl, and anti‐His perform well in diagnosing active LN and monitoring SLE disease activity. They could be indicators of active LN and SLE disease activity., Anti‐C1q, anti‐dsDNA, anti‐Nucl, and anti‐His perform well in diagnosing active LN and monitoring SLE disease activity. They could be indicators of LN and SLE disease activity. more...

Using photocatalysis to produce clean H2 energy has been considered as one of the ideal strategies to alleviate the energy crisis and environmental pollution. In this work, the density functional theory (DFT) calculation was used as a guide to determine the experimental scheme of surface modification of Cu2O with Cu3P. With Cu2O as the core and Cu3P as the shell, the precursor was constructed by electrostatic self-assembly at first. After secondary calcination, Cu97P3 was formed from the compact interface between Cu2O and Cu3P, thus the 3D hierarchical structure of Cu-O-P(Cu2O@Cu97P3@Cu3P) was successfully constructed. The generation of Cu97P3 significantly increases the photocatalytic H2 production of Cu2O@Cu97P3@Cu3P under visible light irradiation. The photocatalytic activity of the composite with optimal ratio increased about 17 times as much as that of pure Cu2O. The separation and transportation efficiency of its photogenerated charges has been significantly improved. The 3D hierarchical core-shell structure is not only beneficial to strengthen the interface contact between different semiconductors but also to improve the transferability of photogenerated electrons. Through a series of experimental results, the strategy has proved to be successful that Cu3P was introduced onto the surface of the Cu2O octahedron to change the adsorption free energy of H atoms, reduce the overpotential of hydrogen evolution, and increase the active sites of hydrogen production. At the same time, the isolated interfaces are integrated by calcination to obtain Cu97P3 bridged substances derived from the interfaces. The presence of Cu97P3 establishes a new fast channel for electron flow between semiconductors, significantly accelerates the transfer of electrons, and ultimately improves the performance of photocatalytic hydrogen evolution. This work provides new insights into the design and flexible synthesis of inexpensive copper-based nano-photocatalysts. more...

An effective method to reduce the recombination rate of photogenerated electron–hole pairs was developed by the construction of heterojunctions with rationally designed photocatalysts having a matched band structure. Herein, g-C3N4 hexagonal tubes possessing a lower conduction band were coupled with Co3S4 ultra-fine nanoparticles having relatively higher positions for their conduction band. A step-scheme heterojunction was constructed between these two materials, and through this heterojunction, the spatial charge separation was boosted. The boosted spatial charge separation led to more useful electrons with a higher reduction ability that participated in a photocatalytic H2 evolution reaction. The Co3S4 ultra-fine nanoparticles act as a mirror to repeatedly scatter and reflect incident light and thus enhance light utilization, and they also accelerate the spatial charge separation. The photocatalytic H2 evolution activity of the composite catalyst reached 2120 μmol g−1 h−1, which was 176 times higher than that of pristine g-C3N4 tubes. A series of characteristics were determined to investigate the interaction that occurred between the g-C3N4 hexagonal tubes and the Co3S4 ultra-fine nanoparticles, and to study the mechanism of the formed step-scheme. This work will guide the design of step-scheme heterojunction-based photocatalysts to produce H2 from photocatalytic water splitting. more...

Due to inherent uncertainty and volatility, large-scale wind power integration brings new challenges to the flexible operation of power systems. It calls for more flexibility not only from the generation side but also from the grid side, especially the hybrid HVAC/HVDC transmission grid. This paper proposes to exploit potential flexibility by controlling power flows through HVDC by the merits of its flexible regulation capability, as well as HVAC transmission switching (TS). To synergistically schedule them with generator units, a security-constrained economic dispatch (SCED) model for wind integrated hybrid AC/DC power system is presented to realize the co-optimization of generation and TS. Wherein, multiple uncertainties (wind power fluctuation and generator failure) are considered, and the linear power flow model of the DC grid is adopted. Then the model is transformed into a two-stage (normal state optimization and corrective dispatch verification) robust optimization (RO) model for iterative solution by the aid of the column-and-constraint generation (C&CG) algorithm. Case studies on the modified IEEE 14-bus and IEEE 118-bus systems show that TS can assist HVDC to optimize power flow distribution and provide more flexibility, meanwhile optimizing HVDC transmission power and TS can greatly reduce the operating cost of the whole system. more...

Axis-flux wind generators are widely used in vertical axis wind turbines given their high generator diameter-to-length and power-to-weight ratios, flexible field and winding design, improved cooling, and possibility of modular construction. In this paper, an asymmetric-primary axis-flux hybrid-excitation generator (APAFHG) is proposed to provide a controllable maglev force that compensates for the ripple of axial force fluctuation. First, the operation principle of the proposed generator is introduced. No-load performance influenced by direct current (DC) excitation is obtained by using the 3D finite element method (3D-FEM). Second, the load performances are analyzed under two typical operation statuses, namely, symmetrical pure resistance load and $i_{d}=0$ control strategy load. An alternating current (AC) excitation method is then comparatively analyzed to increase the output power under the maximum armature current. Third, based on the dq axes dynamic mathematical model, the quantitative calculations of levitation force and torque characteristics are deprived and then tested and verified by using the finite element analysis results. These results show that the proposed generator can be implemented for the decoupling control operation of power and levitation forces and is suitable for vertical axis wind turbines. more...

The construction of hydropower stations has been expanding in China as a result of economic development and the improvement of people’s lives. To save cost, the capacity of a single unit has been greatly increased, and many higher technical requirements have been presented for hydropower units, among which one of the key technologies is the thrust bearing. With the increase in single machine capacity, the pv value of the kinetic energy on the thrust bearing also increases, which will cause the bearing tile burning accident. Therefore, the thrust bearing needs to be designed to improve the bearing capacity. Instead of improving the traditional mechanical structure and using new materials, this paper proposes a levitation load reduction device for the thrust bearing to reduce the pv value of the kinetic energy on the thrust bearing. On the basis of kinetic energy analysis, the feasibility of the magnetic levitation load reduction device is analyzed. A repulsive maglev load reduction device suitable for hydropower units is designed; according to linear motor theory, a three-dimensional analytical model is established to analyze the levitation force, and an analytical calculation method is given. A finite element simulation model is built to study the effects of the primary electrical parameters, structural parameters, and material properties on electromagnetic forces, and the effect rules and the methods of optimal design are given. A small-scale prototype was developed, then tests were conducted to verify the feasibility and accuracy of the design and mechanism. more...

Objective: The objective is to explore whether hypertension influences unpredictable chronic mild stress (UCMS)-induced depressive-like behaviors and the potential therapeutic effect of Guan-Xin-Shu-Tong capsules (GXST) in controlling hypertension and depressive-like behaviors. Materials and Methods: Fifteen spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) and 15 wistar rats were divided into three groups respectively (n = 5, in each group), including control, UCMS, and UCMS + GXST groups. The systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), mean arterial pressure (MAP), and heart rate (HR) were recorded at baseline and at the end of the experiment. Rats were subjected to seven kinds of UCMS over 4 weeks. GXST treatments were administrated (2.8 g/kg) by intragastric gavage once a day over 4 consecutive weeks during UCMS treatment. Sucrose-preference and open-field tests were used to detect depressive-like behaviors. Results: SHR exposed to 4-week UCMS treatment had lower HR when compared with control and UCMS + GXST groups (P < 0.05); Wister rats receiving UCMS or UCMS + GXST had lower SBP (P < 0.05), lower DBP (P < 0.05) and lower MAP (P < 0.05) than controls. Compared with the controls, UCMS reduced the sucrose preference of Wistar rats, UCMS and UCMS + GXST decreased both grid-crossings and the number of upright postures measured in Wistar rats (P < 0.05). SHR showed lower sucrose consumption, less sucrose preference, and fewer grid-crossings after UCMS than control SHR. However, the lower incidence of upright postures in SHR was prevented by GXST treatment (P < 0.05). Linear correlation showed that grid-crossings or upright postures were negatively related to the values of SBP, DBP, or MAP, presenting the positive relationship between depressive-like behaviors and SBP, DBP, or MAP reduction in Wistar rats; there was a negative correlation between grid-crossings and DBP responses, and MAP responses in SHR, and a positive correlation between depressive-like behaviors and DBP and MAP response elevation in SHR. Conclusions: UCMS-induced depressive-like behaviors in Wistar and SHR, accompanied by a blood pressure decrease in Wistar rats but not in SHR. While GXST exhibited effective relief of depressive-like behaviors in SHR without influencing their blood pressure. more...

Preexcitation symptom presents morbidity of 0.1% to 0.3% in the general population, which could lead to deadly events while accompanying arrhythmia. The classical type is Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome characterized as a shorter PR period, longer QRS duration, and δ wave. Radiofrequency catheter ablation (RCA) takes a vital role in treating WPW and has a high success rate. While some patients complain of consecutive chest pain after RCA, which influence their daily life severely. A 45-year-old man went to a hospital for examination because of uncomfortable palpitation. The electrocardiogram (ECG) presenting WPW syndrome (left free wall accessory pathway), then he was admitted to the hospital and scheduled for RCA. The RCA was very successful and the ECG became normal. However, after ablation, he reported consecutive chest pain, accompanied by insomnia and hypertension. No abnormal elevations of cardiac-Troponin I, myoglobin, cytokeratin, creatine kinase MB were found, and the left ventricular ejection fraction was 60%. His mental status was measured by Patient-Health Questionnaire-9, 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale-7, Athens Insomnia Scale, indicating depressive status and anxiety status. The predominant managements involved flupentixol-melitracen and duloxetine. His chest pain, depressive, and anxiety symptoms were gradually relieved after 3-month treatment, and the drugs were slowly tapered in the 1½ years' follow-up period. Ultimately, he recovered and worked as before. This case highlights the importance of evaluating psychological status in patients with unexplained chest pain resulting from RCA and adopting antidepressants in those patients that coexist with definite depression or anxiety. more...

As IoT is getting a thriving development, IC technology has stepped into the nano-meter era. For advanced 28 nm process and beyond, the device pitch becomes smaller. As a result, the coupling effec... more...

The development and review of combination drug regimens in oncology may present unique challenges to investigators and regulators. For regulatory approval of combination regimens, it is necessary to demonstrate the contribution of effect of each monotherapy to the overall combination. Alternative approaches to traditional designs may be needed to accelerate oncology drug development, for example, when combinations are substantially superior to available therapy, to reduce exposure to less effective therapies, and for drugs that are inactive as single agents and that in combination potentiate activity of another drug. These approaches include demonstration of activity in smaller randomized trials and/or monotherapy trials conducted in a similar disease setting. This article will discuss alternative approaches used in the development of approved drugs in combination, based on examples of recent approvals of combination regimens in renal cell carcinoma. more...

Different energy systems are generally planned and operated independently, which result in the low energy utilisation, weak self-healing ability and low system reliability. Therefore, an adaptive clustering-based hierarchical layout optimisation method is proposed for a large-scale integrated energy system, considering energy balance, transmission losses and construction costs. First, an adaptive clustering partition method based on energy balance and load moments is proposed to determine the optimal location of energy hubs and to allocate each distributed generation and load to different energy hubs, forming multiple regional integrated energy systems adaptively. Then, the proposed hierarchical layout optimisation model is formulated as to find the modified minimum spanning tree of the regional integrated energy system and multi-regional integrated energy systems, respectively, to construct an economical and reliable interconnection network. Finally, the effectiveness of the optimisation model and strategy is verified by simulations. more...

Compared to the traditional cropping technology, low-cycle fatigue cropping can reduce load and improve cross-section quality. Geometric factors of V-shaped notch and processing parameters (such as load amplitude and load frequency) influence the cropping efficiency and section quality. By changing the factors, the sufficient efficiency of cropping and quality of cross-section get together. However, the influences of material defects, geometric parameters, loading frequency and other factors are different in each stage of the whole cropping process. If the effects of the parameters on the each stage of cropping process are clear, the higher productivity and the better cross-section quality will be obtained by applying suitable parameter on each stage of cropping process. To investigate the effects of eccentric ratio on each stage of low –cycle fatigue cropping process, a suitable monitoring method is needed. This study proposes acoustic emission (AE) technique to detect the low-cycle fatigue cropping process of 16 Mn eccentric bar (The bar prefabricated eccentric notches. The prefabricated notch improve the efficiency of cropping). The parameters of signals such as counts and kurtosis during the low–cycle fatigue process are obtained. According to the counts changes over time, the process of the 16 Mn metal bar cropping can be divided into three stages: the crack initiation stage, the crack propagation stage, and the fracture stage. Based on the cumulative counts, the eccentric ratio’s influence on the time of each cropping process stage is obtained. The time of the crack initiation stage and the final fracture stage doesn’t increase with the eccentric ratio. The time of the propagation stage influenced by the eccentric ratio greatly. Besides, the eccentric ratio’s influence on the cross-section quality is studied by using an advanced optical microscope system. The cross-section quality was influenced by the eccentric ratio significantly. The results of the paper indicate the acoustic emission (AE) monitoring technique is a useful method to detect the process of low-cycle fatigue cropping. Especially, it provide effective information to investigate the effects of the notch eccentric ratio during the low-cycle fatigue cropping process. The eccentric ratio’s effects on each stage of low-cycle fatigue cropping process offer guidance to improve low-stress fatigue cropping efficiency and cross-section quality. more...

Background: Breast cancer is a complex disease with high prevalence in women, the molecular mechanisms of which are still unclear at present. Most transcriptomic studies on breast cancer focus on differential expression of each gene between tumor and the adjacent normal tissues, while the other perturbations induced by breast cancer including the gene regulation variations, the changes of gene modules and the pathways, which might be critical to the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of breast cancer are more or less ignored. Objective: We presented a complete process to study breast cancer from multiple perspectives, including differential expression analysis, constructing gene co-expression networks, modular differential connectivity analysis, differential gene connectivity analysis, gene function enrichment analysis key driver analysis. In addition, we prioritized the related anti-cancer drugs based on enrichment analysis between differential expression genes and drug perturbation signatures. Methods: The RNA expression profiles of 1109 breast cancer tissue and 113 non-tumor tissues were downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Differential expression of RNAs was identified using the “DESeq2” bioconductor package in R, and gene co-expression networks were constructed using the weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA). To compare the module changes and gene co-expression variations between tumor and the adjacent normal tissues, modular differential connectivity (MDC) analysis and differential gene connectivity analysis (DGCA) were performed. Results: Top differential genes like MMP11 and COL10A1 were known to be associated with breast cancer. And we found 23 modules in the tumor network had significantly different co-expression patterns. The top differential modules were enriched in Goterms related to breast cancer like MHC protein complex, leukocyte activation, regulation of defense response and so on. In addition, key genes like UBE2T driving the top differential modules were significantly correlated with the patients’ survival. Finally, we predicted some potential breast cancer drugs, such as Eribulin, Taxane, Cisplatin and Oxaliplatin. Conclusion: As an indication, this framework might be useful in understanding the molecular pathogenesis of diseases like breast cancer and inferring useful drugs for personalized medication. more...

Background Human bladder cancer is the most common malignant tumor of the urinary system and one of the 10 most common tumors of the whole body. Although most patients with bladder cancer exhibit a good prognosis with standard treatment, effective therapies for patients with a recurrent or advanced bladder cancer are unavailable. Therefore, highly effective drugs to treat such patients need to be developed. Aloperine (ALO), a natural compound isolated from Sophora alopecuroides, has antitumor properties. However, the role of ALO in human bladder cancer remains unclear. Methods In the present study, MTT was used to detect the cytotoxic effect of ALO on human BC cell line EJ and human urothelium cell line SV-HUC-1cells. Meanwhile, in order to investigate the effects of ALO on the proliferation, apoptosis, migration, and invasion of BC EJ cells and its mechanism by Cell Counting Kit-8 (CCK-8) assay, immunofluorescence, Hoechst 33342 staining, wound scratch assay, transwell migration and invasion assay, Western blot analysis. Results ALO can inhibit the proliferation and invasion of human bladder cancer EJ cells, and is low-toxic to human urothelium cells. Moreover, it can promote cellular apoptosis in vitro. Further analysis demonstrated the involvement of Caspase-dependent apoptosis following ALO treatment. ALO also downregulated the protein expression levels of Ras, p-Raf1 and p-Erk1/2. Conclusion ALO is a potential drug for human bladder cancer therapy. more...

Biomass is a renewable and clean energy. Moreover, clean heating plays a vital role in solving issues related to the heating source structures in northern China. This paper reports on our novel technology: a system of biomass (mainly fruitwood waste, referred to in short as FWW) gasification for simultaneous clean heating and fruitwood activated carbon (FAC) production. In particular, we will discuss the features of our gasification system and product characteristics, as well as energy efficiency, environmental benefits, and economic benefits. The results showed that the energy conversion from FWW gasification was as follows: 48.10% hot gas, 49.08% fruitwood gasified carbon (FGC), and 2.82% energy loss. The NOx emissions of this system were about 126 mg/Nm3. The iodine adsorption values of the derived FGC and FAC were about 550 and 1000 mg/g, respectively. The system of gasification consumed 36 t of FWW per day, obtained 10 t of FGC, and produced 5 t of FAC. The emissions of CO2 were neutral during the operation, and the clean heating area was 4100 m2/d in Chengde, Hebei, China, with the payback period under one heating season. These results show that the system is practical, economical, energy-saving, and environmentally friendly. more...

In this study, we observed the fate of the inverted limbus after closed reduction for the treatment of developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) and its impact on acetabular development. Clinical data were reviewed for 26 DDH patients with an inverted or overriding limbus after closed reduction for hip dysplasia. Patients were divided into a residual inversion group (19 cases, 22 hips) and a spontaneous resolution group (7 cases, 7 hips) according to the limbus status at the last follow-up. Differences in the osseous acetabular index (AI) and cartilaginous AI (CAI), the magnitude of limbus inversion, center-edge angle (CEA), height-to-width index (HWI) of the femoral head epiphysis, and avascular necrosis (AVN) at last follow-up were compared. There were no statistically significant differences in the preoperative AI and CAI between groups. The magnitude of limbus inversion after reduction and the AI at the final follow-up in the residual inversion group were both larger than those in the spontaneous resolution group. The CAI, CEA, and HWI were not significantly different between groups. The magnitude of limbus inversion in the residual inversion group did not significantly decrease over time. AVN occurred in five hips in the residual inversion group. No cases of AVN occurred in the spontaneous resolution group. After closed reduction, the inverted limbus was not absorbed in the majority of cases; instead, it evolved into a thin layer of fibrous tissue embedded between the femoral head and acetabulum. This may delay the endochondral ossification of the acetabulum. more...

The rapid development of the semiconductor industry has motivated researchers passion for accelerating the discovery of advanced optoelectronic materials. Computational functionality‐driven design is an emerging branch of material science that has become effective at making material predictions. By combining advanced solid‐state knowledge and high‐throughput first‐principles computational approaches with intelligent algorithms plus database development, experts can now efficiently explore many novel materials by taking advantage of the power of supercomputer architectures. Here, we discuss a set of typical design strategies that can be used to accelerate inorganic optoelectronic materials discovery from computer simulations: In silico computational screening; knowledge‐based inverse design; and algorithm‐based searching. A few representative examples in optoelectronic materials design are discussed to illustrate these computational functionality‐driven modalities. Challenges and prospects for the computational functionality‐driven design of materials are further highlighted at the end of the review. more...

Objective To investigate the characteristics of hematological malignancies in patients with the SET-CAN fusion gene and provide a literature review. Methods We retrospectively analyzed the clinical data of three cases of acute leukemia and myeloid neoplasms harboring the SET-CAN fusion gene who were treated at our hospital. Their clinical manifestations, pathological results and treatment strategies were investigated. Results The three cases were diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL), acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and myeloid sarcoma (MS), respectively. Karyotype analyses identified a normal result in all three patients. Subsequently, we confirmed del(9q34) utilizing FISH analysis. Mutation of the BRAF gene was detected in case 1, while mutations in PHF6 and BCOR were detected in case 2, which have not been officially reported in patients with SET-CAN fusions. Finally, relevant literature focusing on adult patients with hematological malignancies harboring the SET-CAN fusion gene were summarized. Conclusion Adult patients with the SET-CAN fusion gene were rare among cases of hematological malignancies. There was a large degree of heterogeneity between different patients. Notably, some patients remained sensitive to chemotherapy. Overall prognosis may be related to the type of disease and other cytogenetic abnormalities. Systemic cytogenetic and molecular studies are needed to make accurate diagnoses. Additional cases need to be accumulated and summarized to better understand these diseases. more...

The Ni-Cu bimetallic nanoparticles were successfully anchorred on the surface of g-C3N4 nanosheets by a simple heat treatment process which was applied to the photocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction. In-situ introduction of Ni-Cu could significantly improve the photocatalytic hydrogen evolution performance compared with pure g-C3N4 in the system sensitized by eosin Y under a visible irradiation condition. The hydrogen production activity of the composite reached 104.4 μmol (2088.28 μmol g−1 h−1) after using the Ni Cu double promoter strategy, which was 24.3 times higher than g-C3N4. The excellent electrical conductivity of the bimetallic Ni-Cu and the close interfacial contact between Ni Cu and g-C3N4 played an important role for increasing the charge transfer rate. They were also the reasons of more efficient charge separation, which ultimately led to a significant promotion on the photocatalytic hydrogen production reaction. Ni-Cu/g-C3N4 coupling with a close Schottky interface between metal and semiconductor which enhanced H2-evolution performance and TEOA oxidation kinetics. This work provided a new way to load Ni Cu bimetallic nanoparticles in situ onto g-C3N4 and a reference on relative semiconductor materials. more...