Search

Purpose: This meta-analysis investigated the relationships between the CD44+/CD24- phenotype and tumor size, lymph node metastasis, distant metastasis, disease-free survival (DFS), and overall survival (OS) in 8036 postoperative breast cancer patients enrolled in 23 studies.Methods: A literature search of PubMed, Medline, Cochrane, Embase, and PMC was conducted to identify eligible studies. The combined odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (95%CIs) were analyzed to evaluate the relationships between the CD44+/CD24- phenotype and the pathological and biological characteristics of breast cancer patients, and the combined hazard ratios (HRs) and 95% CIs were calculated to evaluate the relationships between CD44+/CD24- and DFS and OS of breast cancer petients using Stata12.0 software.Results: The CD44+/CD24- phenotype were not related to the tumor size (tumor size > 2.0 cm vs ≤ 2.0 cm, combined OR = 0.98, 95%CI: 0.68–1.34, p = 0.792) and didn’t promote lymph node metastasis (lymph node metastasis vs. no lymph node metastasis, combined OR = 0.94, 95% CI: 0.71–1.26, p = 0.692) and distant metastasis (distant metastasis vs no distant metastasis, combined OR = 3.88, 95% CI: 0.93–16.24, p = 0.064). The CD44+/CD24- phenotype was negatively correlated with postoperative DFS (HR = 1.67, 95% CI: 1.35–2.07, p

We present a novel anisotropic surface remeshing method that can efficiently eliminate obtuse angles. Unlike previous work that can only suppress obtuse angles with expensive resampling and Lloyd-type iterations, our method relies on a simple yet efficient connectivity and geometry refinement, which can not only remove all the obtuse angles, but also preserves the original mesh connectivity as much as possible. Our method can be directly used as a post-processing step for anisotropic meshes generated from existing algorithms to improve mesh quality. We evaluate our method by testing on a variety of meshes with different geometry and topology, and comparing with representative prior work. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Surface waters from five districts in the inner city of Beijing were collected for analysis of 43 target compounds of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) to understand the spatial distribution patterns of different groups of PPCPs in the central urban area of a metropolitan city characterized by many hospitals and public parks. The total concentrations of PPCPs showed large spatial variability, ranging from 71.1 to 2400 ng/L. The x-ray contrast medium iopromide was the compound with the highest concentrations. Pharmaceuticals showed similar spatial distributional patterns with large hospitals. Positive correlations between iopromide and pharmaceuticals were observed. In contrast, in general there is no correlation between iopromide and personal care products. The concentrations of PPCPs in the landscape waters were not high but were characterized by high proportions of acidic, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs with low or even negative removal efficiencies in the WWTP in Beijing, suggesting that the reclaimed water irrigation can be another source of PPCPs in surface waters in the inner city of Beijing.

To describe the application of reversed contralateral distal femoral locking compression plate (DF-LCP) inserted through a progressive and intermittent drilling procedure in the treatment of osteopetrotic subtrochanteric fracture (OSF).Three patients (one male and two females with an average age of 45.33 ± 11.09 years) with OSF hospitalized between September 2015 and September 2020, were included in this present study. Lateral approach was applied in all patients who accepted open reduction and internal fixation (ORIF) with a reversed contralateral DF-LCP inserted through a progressive and intermittent drilling procedure. The operation time and intraoperative blood loss were recorded to evaluate the efficiency of this surgical method. Physical examination and imaging examination of the fracture site were used to evaluate the fracture union status, the position and stability of the implant, and the alignment of the injured limb at 1, 3, 6, and 12 months after operation, then a subsequent visit was conducted at least once a year. Harris Hip Score (HHS) was used to evaluate the hip joint function at 6 and 12 months after operation.The average operation time was 140 ± 21.60 min (110, 160, and 150 min); The average intraoperative blood loss was about 333.33 ± 23.57 ml (300, 350, and 350 ml). The average follow-up time was 22.33 ± 7.41 months (29, 26, and 12 months). All patients achieved bone union with an average time of 6.67 ± 0.94 months (6, 8, and 6 months). At the time of 6 months after operation, case 1 and 3 were almost pain-free and could walk with full weight bearing while case 2 could walk only with partial weight bearing using a crutch. The HHS scores of cases 1, 2, and 3 were 84/100, 74/100, and 92/100, respectively. At the follow-up at 12 months after operation, the HHS score improved to 91/100, 81/100, and 96/100, respectively. The contralateral incomplete old subtrochanteric fracture was deteriorated in case 1 at 26 months after operation. After 3 months of limited weight bearing using a crutch, bone union was verified in radiograph imaging. Fresh contralateral subtrochanteric fracture occurred in case 2 at 26 months after operation, which was treated using a similar surgical approach, and its clinical outcome is under follow-up. Moreover, no perioperative complications including operation-related death, vascular/nerve injury, deep venous thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, and incision infection, and long-term complications involving malunion, nonunion, implant failure, ankylosis, heterotopic ossification, osteonecrosis, and osteomyelitis were identified.The application of reversed contralateral DF-LCP in OSF is practicable and reliable. Progressive and intermittent drilling is a safe and efficient method for implant insertion in this complicated situation.

With programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) inhibitors approved for second-line treatment of advanced esophageal cancer, immunotherapy and chemotherapy have gradually become the main treatments for second-line treatment of patients with advanced esophageal cancer (AEC). This meta-analysis and systematic review were conducted to evaluate the efficacy and safety of PD-1 inhibitors monotherapy versus chemotherapy in second-line treatment of AEC.Eligible randomized controlled trials were searched in PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library and abstracts presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology or European Society of Medical Oncology were reviewed to assess the efficacy and tolerability of PD-1/programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) inhibitors relative to chemotherapy for AEC from January 2016 to October 2020. Patients diagnosed with AEC and progressing after first-line therapy were included in this study. Hazard ratios (HRs) of progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS), risk ratios (RRs) of objective response rate (ORR), and the odds ratios (ORs) of adverse effects (AEs) were calculated.The study included 4 randomized controlled trials with 1683 patients. The results indicated that PD-1 inhibitors prolonged the OS (HR = 0.79; 95% CI, 0.71-0.88; P0.01) and improved the ORR (RR = 3.00; 95% CI, 2.36-3.82; P = 0.01) but did not improve the PFS (HR = 0.96; 95% CI, 0.76-1.20; P = 0.692) compared with chemotherapy in the second-line treatment of AEC. PD-1 inhibitors alone were associated with a lower incidence of all treatment-related AEs (OR = 0.29; 95% CI, 0.09-0.89; P = 0.03) and grade 3 to 5 treatment-related AEs (OR = 0.26; 95% CI, 0.16-0.44; P0.01) versus chemotherapy. PD-1 inhibitors prolonged OS mainly in the following patient groups: male, age65 years, Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 1, or PD-L1 tumor proportion score ≥10%. Asian patients had a longer OS than non-Asian patients (P = 0.01).The available evidence indicates that the efficacy and tolerability of PD-1 inhibitors were better than chemotherapy in the second-line treatment of AEC, and the benefiting population of these patients was limited to males, those65 years of age, those with a Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 1, or those with a PD-L1 tumor proportion score ≥10%. Notably, Asian patients receiving immune monotherapy had longer OS than non-Asian patients.

We present a framework for fast synthesizing indoor scenes, given a room geometry and a list of objects with learnt priors.Unlike existing data-driven solutions, which often learn priors by co-occurrence analysis and statistical model fitting, our methodmeasures the strengths of spatial relations by tests for complete spatial randomness (CSR), and learns discrete priors based onsamples with the ability to accurately represent exact layout patterns. With the learnt priors, our method achieves both acceleration andplausibility by partitioning the input objects into disjoint groups, followed by layout optimization using position-based dynamics (PBD)based on the Hausdorff metric. Experiments show that our framework is capable of measuring more reasonable relations amongobjects and simultaneously generating varied arrangements in seconds compared with the state-of-the-art works.

Skeletal motion plays a vital role in human activity recognition as either an independent data source or a complement. The robustness of skeleton-based activity recognizers has been questioned recently, which shows that they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks when the full-knowledge of the recognizer is accessible to the attacker. However, this white-box requirement is overly restrictive in most scenarios and the attack is not truly threatening. In this paper, we show that such threats do exist under black-box settings too. To this end, we propose the first black-box adversarial attack method BASAR. Through BASAR, we show that adversarial attack is not only truly a threat but also can be extremely deceitful, because on-manifold adversarial samples are rather common in skeletal motions, in contrast to the common belief that adversarial samples only exist off-manifold. Through exhaustive evaluation and comparison, we show that BASAR can deliver successful attacks across models, data, and attack modes. Through harsh perceptual studies, we show that it achieves effective yet imperceptible attacks. By analyzing the attack on different activity recognizers, BASAR helps identify the potential causes of their vulnerability and provides insights on what classifiers are likely to be more robust against attack. Code is available at https://github.com/realcrane/BASAR-Black-box-Attack-on-Skeletal-Action-Recognition., Comment: Accepted in CVPR 2021

We present deep shapely portraits, a novel method based on deep learning, to automatically reshape an input portrait to be better proportioned and more shapely while keeping personal facial characteristics. Different from existing methods that may suffer from irrational face artifacts when dealing with portraits with large pose variations or reshaping adjustments, we utilize dense 3D face information and constraints instead of sparse facial landmarks based on 3D morphable models, resulting in better reshaped faces lying in rational face space. To this end, we first estimate the best shapely degree for the input portrait using a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on our newly developed ShapeFaceNet dataset. Then the best shapely degree is used as the control parameter to reshape the 3D face reconstructed from the input portrait image. After that, we render the reshaped 3D face back to 2D and generate a seamless portrait image using a fast image warping optimization. Our work can deal with pose and expression free (PE-Free) portrait images and generate plausible shapely faces without noticeable artifacts, which cannot be achieved by prior work. We validate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed method by extensive experiments and user studies.

The main aim of this study was to systematically evaluate the efficacy and safety of inhibitors of programmed cell death receptor 1 (PD-1) and its ligand, programmed cell death ligand-1 (PD-L1), in the treatment of advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).Randomized controlled trials assessing the efficacy of PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors relative to platinum-based chemotherapy for advanced NSCLC in PubMed, EMBASE, and Cochrane libraries from 2015 to 2020 were searched, along with review of studies at American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) and European society for Medical Oncology (ESMO). Pooled hazard ratios (HR) for progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) and odds ratios (OR) for adverse events (AE) were calculated using STATA and Revman software.PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors alone or combined with chemotherapy significantly improved OS (HR = 0.82, 95% CI:0.74-0.91, P = 0.01 or HR = 0.74, 95% CI:0.67-0.82, P = 0.001). PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors alone did not benefit PFS (HR = 0.99, 95% CI: 0.89-1.10, P = 0.892), while combination therapy led to prolonged PFS (HR = 0.61, 95% CI: 0.56-0.67, P0.001). Subgroup analysis showed that in NSCLC with PD-L1 ≥ 50%, treatment with PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors alone significantly improved both PFS and OS. In patients subjected to the combined treatment regimen, we observed significant differences in PFS among groups stratified by PD-L1 expression (p0.001), immune drug type (p = 0.029), gender (p = 0.014) and liver metastasis (p = 0.035) and OS among groups stratified by immune drug type (p0.001), gender (P = 0.001) and smoking status (P = 0.041). Safety analysis showed that combination therapy increased chemotherapy-induced adverse events (AE), while PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors alone were associated with a lower incidence of any grade of treatment-related AEs (TRAE). A higher incidence of Grade 3-5 TRAEs and hypothyroidism was observed with PD-1 inhibitors than PD-L1 inhibitors.First-line treatment of advanced NSCLC with immune monotherapy or immunochemotherapy confers a greater survival benefit than chemotherapy alone. Combination of chemotherapy with PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors leads to an increase in adverse events, and PD-1 inhibitors offer enhanced survival benefits and fewer adverse events than PD-L1 inhibitors. Remarkably, female patients undergoing combination therapy had longer overall survival than male patients.

3D spatial information is known to be beneficial to the semantic segmentation task. Most existing methods take 3D spatial data as an additional input, leading to a two-stream segmentation network that processes RGB and 3D spatial information separately. This solution greatly increases the inference time and severely limits its scope for real-time applications. To solve this problem, we propose Spatial information guided Convolution (S-Conv), which allows efficient RGB feature and 3D spatial information integration. S-Conv is competent to infer the sampling offset of the convolution kernel guided by the 3D spatial information, helping the convolutional layer adjust the receptive field and adapt to geometric transformations. S-Conv also incorporates geometric information into the feature learning process by generating spatially adaptive convolutional weights. The capability of perceiving geometry is largely enhanced without much affecting the amount of parameters and computational cost. Based on S-Conv, we further design a semantic segmentation network, called Spatial information Guided convolutional Network (SGNet), resulting in real-time inference and state-of-the-art performance on NYUDv2 and SUNRGBD datasets.

We propose a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) for the task of unsupervised learning of 3D representations from natural images. Most generative models rely on 2D kernels to generate images and make few assumptions about the 3D world. These models therefore tend to create blurry images or artefacts in tasks that require a strong 3D understanding, such as novel-view synthesis. HoloGAN instead learns a 3D representation of the world, and to render this representation in a realistic manner. Unlike other GANs, HoloGAN provides explicit control over the pose of generated objects through rigid-body transformations of the learnt 3D features. Our experiments show that using explicit 3D features enables HoloGAN to disentangle 3D pose and identity, which is further decomposed into shape and appearance, while still being able to generate images with similar or higher visual quality than other generative models. HoloGAN can be trained end-to-end from unlabelled 2D images only. Particularly, we do not require pose labels, 3D shapes, or multiple views of the same objects. This shows that HoloGAN is the first generative model that learns 3D representations from natural images in an entirely unsupervised manner., Comment: International Conference on Computer Vision ICCV 2019. For project page, see https://www.monkeyoverflow.com/#/hologan-unsupervised-learning-of-3d-representations-from-natural-images/

Flat design is a modern style of graphics design that minimizes the number of design attributes required to convey 3D shapes. This approach suits design contexts requiring simplicity and efficiency, such as mobile computing devices. This `less-is-more' design inspiration has posed significant challenges in practice since it selects from a restricted range of design elements (e.g., color and resolution) to represent complex shapes. In this work, we investigate a means of computationally generating a specialized 2D flat representation - image formed by black-and-white patches - from 3D shapes. We present a novel framework that automatically abstracts 3D man-made shapes into 2D binary images at multiple scales. Based on a set of identified design principles related to the inference of geometry and structure, our framework jointly analyzes the input 3D shape and its counterpart 2D representation, followed by executing a carefully devised layout optimization algorithm. The robustness and effectiveness of our method are demonstrated by testing it on a wide variety of man-made shapes and comparing the results with baseline methods via a pilot user study. We further present two practical applications that are likely to benefit from our work.

High levels of perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) were observed in rural areas near a fluorochemical industrial park (FCIP) in the Yangtze River Delta region. The concentrations of total PFAS (∑PFASs) in soil, surface water, groundwater, and rainwater were in the range of 0.6-64.6 ng/g dry weight, 15.6-480.9, 4.8-614.6, and 13.4-542.2 ng/L, respectively. PFASs in rainwater and groundwater were higher than in surface water. The influence of the FCIP on rural soils extended to a distance of approximately 4 km based on the changes in PFAS compositions. The impact on surface water is mainly through direct river flow connected with contaminated sources, which may extend farther than 7 km in the case of unrestricted flow but much shorter distance for unconnected rivers. The penetration of PFASs in groundwater aquifers can extend as far as ca. 6 km, while direct water flow is the main transport route for PFASs. The influence radius of the FCIP can be as far as 60 km due to atmospheric precipitation.

Real-time portrait segmentation plays a significant role in many applications on mobile device, such as background replacement in video chat or teleconference. In this paper, we propose a real-time portrait segmentation model, called PortraitNet, that can run effectively and efficiently on mobile device. PortraitNet is based on a lightweight U-shape architecture with two auxiliary losses at the training stage, while no additional cost is required at the testing stage for portrait inference. The two auxiliary losses are boundary loss and consistency constraint loss. The former improves the accuracy of boundary pixels, and the latter enhances the robustness in complex lighting environment. We evaluate PortraitNet on portrait segmentation dataset EG1800 and Supervise-Portrait. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves remarkable performance in terms of both accuracy and efficiency, especially for generating results with sharper boundaries and under severe illumination conditions. Meanwhile, PortraitNet is capable of processing 224 × 224 RGB images at 30 FPS on iPhone 7.

Stop Motion Animation is the traditional craft of giving life to handmade models. The unique look and feel of this art form is hard to reproduce with 3D computer generated techniques. This is due to the unexpected details that appear from frame to frame and to the sometimes choppy appearance of the character movement. The artist's task can be overwhelming as he has to reshape a character into hundreds of poses to obtain just a few seconds of animation. The results of the animation are usually applied in 2D mediums like films or platform games. Character features that took a lot of effort to create thus remain unseen. We propose a novel system that allows the creation of 3D stop motion-like animations from 3D character shapes reconstructed from multi-view images. Given two or more reconstructed shapes from key frames, our method uses a combination of non-rigid registration and as-rigid-as-possible interpolation to generate plausible in-between shapes. This significantly reduces the artist's workload since much fewer poses are required. The reconstructed and interpolated shapes with complete 3D geometry can be manipulated even further through deformation techniques. The resulting shapes can then be used as animated characters in games or fused with 2D animation frames for enhanced stop motion films.

Quadrics are a compact mathematical formulation for a range of primitive surfaces. A problem arises when there are not enough data points to compute the model but knowledge of the shape is available. This paper presents a method for fitting a quadric with a Bayesian prior. We use a matrix normal prior in order to favour ellipsoids when fitting to ambiguous data. The results show the algorithm copes well when there are few points in the point cloud, competing with contemporary techniques in the area.

Little research on perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) has been conducted in rural areas, although rural PFC sources are less complicated than in urban and industrial areas. To determine the levels and geographical distribution of 17 PFC compounds, samples of soil, surface water, and groundwater were collected from eight rural areas in eastern China. The total PFC concentrations (∑PFCs) in soils ranged from 0.34 to 65.8 ng/g ∑PFCs in surface waters ranged from 7.0 to 489 ng/L and ∑PFCs in groundwater ranged from 5.3 to 615 ng/L. Ratios of perfluorononanoic acid/perfluorooctanoic acid (PFNA/PFOA), perfluoro-n-butyric acid/perfluorooctanoic acid (PFBA/PFOA), and perfluoroheptanoic acid/perfluorooctanoic acid (PFHpA/PFOA) in rainwater increased due to the fluorine chemical plants in the surrounding rural and urban areas, suggesting that atmospheric precipitation may carry PFCs and their precursors from the fluorochemical industrial area to the adjacent rural areas.

Designers always get good inspirations from fascinating geometric structures gifted by the nature. In the recent years, various computational design tools have been proposed to help generate cell packing structures on freeform surfaces, which consist of a packing of simple primitives, such as polygons, spheres, etc. In this work, we aim at computationally generating novel ellipsoid packing structures on freeform surfaces. We formulate the problem as a generalization of sphere packing structures in the sense that anisotropic ellipsoids are used instead of isotropic spheres to pack a given surface. This is done by defining an anisotropic metric based on local surface anisotropy encoded by principal curvatures and the corresponding directions. We propose an optimization framework that can optimize the shapes of individual ellipsoids and the spatial relation between neighboring ellipsoids to form a quality packing structure. A tailored anisotropic remeshing method is also employed to better initialize the optimization and ensure the quality of the result. Our framework is extensively evaluated by optimizing ellipsoid packing and generating appealing geometric structures on a variety of freeform surfaces.

The Yangtze River drainage basins are China’s most important economic development zones and also the locations of several large-scale fluorine chemical industries. In order to reveal the contribution from the tributaries at the dividing point between the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River with respect to perfluorinated substances (PFASs), 17 PFAS compounds in surface water, groundwater, and tap water samples were analyzed in the tributary system of the Jiujiang section of the Yangtze River. The total concentrations of PFASs in the surface waters ranged from 7.8 to 586.2 ng/L. High proportion of short-chain compound PFBS in surface waters in Nanchang City, Poyang Lake, and the Yangtze River was observed which is likely of WWTPs’ origin.

This work presents a novel hand pose estimation framework via intermediate dense guidance map supervision. By leveraging the advantage of predicting heat maps of hand joints in detection-based methods, we propose to use dense feature maps through intermediate supervision in a regression-based framework that is not limited to the resolution of the heat map. Our dense feature maps are delicately designed to encode the hand geometry and the spatial relation between local joint and global hand. The proposed framework significantly improves the state-of-the-art in both 2D and 3D on the recent benchmark datasets.

Due to the development of 3D sensing and modeling techniques, the state-of-the-art mixed reality devices such as Microsoft Hololens have the ability of digitalizing the physical world. This unique feature bridges the gap between virtuality and reality and largely elevates the user experience. Unfortunately, the current solution only performs well if the virtual contents complement the real scene. It can easily cause visual artifacts when the reality needs to be modified due to the virtuality (e.g., remove real objects to offer more space for virtual objects), a common scenario in mixed reality applications such as room redecoration and environment design. We present a novel system, called emph{SceneCtrl}, that allows the user to interactively edit the real scene sensed by Hololens, such that the reality can be adapted to suit virtuality. Our proof-of-concept prototype employs scene reconstruction and understanding to enable efficient editing such as deleting, moving, and copying real objects in the scene. We also demonstrate emph{SceneCtrl} on a number of example scenarios in mixed reality, verifying the enhanced experience by resolving conflicts between virtuality and reality.

Perfluoroalkyl acids (PFAAs) are widely used as multi-purpose surfactants or water/oil repellents. In order to understand the contamination level and compositional profiles of PFAAs in aqueous environment in textile, leather, and paper making industrial areas, surface waters and tap waters were collected along the watershed of the Qiantang River where China's largest textile, leather, and paper making industrial bases are located. For comparison, surface water and tapwater samples were also collected in Hangzhou and its adjacent areas. 17 PFAAs were analyzed by solid phase extraction-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. The results show that the total concentrations of PFAAs (ΣPFAAs) in the Qiantang River waters ranged from 106.1 to 322.9 ng/L, averaging 164.2 ng/L. The contamination levels have been found to be extremely high, comparable to the levels of the most serious PFAA contamination in surface waters of China. The PFAA composition profiles were characterized by the dominant PFOA (average 58.1% of the total PFAAs), and PFHxA (average 18.8%). The ΣPFAAs in tap water ranged from 9.5 to 174.8 ng/L, showing PFAA compositional pattern similar to the surface waters. Good correlations between PFAA composition profiles in tap waters and the surface waters were observed.

The availability of commodity 3D extruder pen allows direct drawing of 3D wire sculptures for novice users, enabling many novel applications such as intuitive spatial intelligence development for school students. However, the lack of spatial and structural cues among individual pen strokes makes the 3D drawing process challenging, which often leads to highly distorted and even incomplete wire sculptures. We present a mixed reality system, called `WireDraw', to immersively guide the 3D drawing for easy wire sculpturing. The system design is based on novel 3D drawing principles and the subsequent optimization, making the stroke sequence of the wire model drawable and easy to draw. On-the-fly edits on unsatisfactory strokes are also allowed for creative design. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system by testing on a variety of wire models and a user study. The results show that the visual guidance provided by our system is extremely helpful for drawing high-quality wire sculptures.

Compared to the low-altitude areas, high-altitude regions have low air temperature and relatively high snow precipitation. These climatological characteristics will affect the environmental behavior of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in such a special geographical environment, leading to cold-trapping of certain POPs in these areas. Ruoergai highland prairie in the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau was selected to study the distribution characteristics of organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in aerosols and gas phase samples collected in two seasons of 2011 and measured by isotope dilution-HRGC/HRMS method. OCPs and PCBs in the Ruoergai air were at low levels compared with the adjacent populated areas such as Lanzhou and Chengdu. Higher concentrations of POPs in aerosol and gas phase were observed in winter than in summer, showing the impact of monsoon on the transport of POPs to this region. Northwesterly winds in winter may transport OCPs and PCBs from industrial and agricultural areas in the northwestern China. HCB, α-HCH, and PCB 28 were the predominant compounds found in the air. Soil to air fugacity ratios show that Ruoergai soils behave as a secondary source of the relatively volatile compounds (HCHs, α-endosulfan, PCB 28 and 52) to the atmosphere during summer and behave as a sink of atmospheric DDTs due to the OC-rich soils as well as lower temperatures. Similar 206Pb/207Pb and 208Pb/207Pb ratios in Ruoergai aerosols to those of aerosols of Lanzhou and ores in Qinghai, Xinjiang, Kazakhstan, and Russia may indicate that the aerosol sources were mainly related to air mass passing over the neighboring regions and countries.

Excess fluoride intake could induce apoptosis in the cells. As an essential micronutrient and cytoprotectant, zinc is involved in many types of apoptosis. Here, we studied the effects of zinc and ZIP1 on fluoride-induced apoptosis in mouse MC3T3-E1 cells and examined the underlying molecular mechanisms. Our study found that fluoride not only inhibited cell proliferation and increased the intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) but also induced cell apoptosis. Whereas pretreatment with zinc significantly attenuated fluoride-induced ROS production and partly protected cells against fluoride-induced apoptosis through MAPK/ERK signaling pathway. Our study also found that fluoride upregulated the expression of ZIP1 in a time-dependent manner. Moreover, overexpression of ZIP1 also inhibited fluoride-induced apoptosis by activation of PI3K/Akt pathway. This cytoprotective effect of zinc and ZIP1 may be new factors that affect the physiological activity of fluoride and need study further.

We perform first-principles calculations founded on the hybrid density functional theory to investigate the electronic structure properties of c-ZrO2 and c-HfO2. The results indicate that PBE0 is better than HSE03/06 to improve the theoretical values of the band gaps. The similarities and differences between c-ZrO2 and c-HfO2 are described at PBE0 level, and the small differences between these two oxides may be caused by the difference in electronegativity. Then, a systematic study on the electronic structure properties of c-ZrO2 surfaces is performed at PBE level. The results illustrate that (1 1 0) and (1 1 1)-O are the most stable surfaces, and both of them are insulating without any surface state in the energy gap. These are similar with the electronic properties of c-HfO2 surfaces. The optical band gaps for the surfaces of c-ZrO2, apart from (1 1 1)-O and (1 1 1)-OO surfaces, are considerably reduced in comparison to the c-ZrO2 bulk. In addition, we also find that the optical band gaps for the surfaces of c-ZrO2 are all indirect expect (1 1 0) surface.

Through core observation and description, whole rock chemical analysis, thin section identification and logging identification method, The volcanic rock of this area is mainly basalt, trachyte and tuff, three major categories, further divided into 10 subclasses. Basalt intergranular-intersertal structure, the main minerals are plagioclase , sodium feldspar and mafic pyroxene , belong to alkaline series,infrasonic wave, low natural gamma, high resistance, high density; Trachyte ,typical rough structure, high content of feldspar, the negative anomaly of naturalelectric potential, high resistance, high natural gamma measurement, infrasonic wave;Tuff, tuffaceous texture, massive structure, rock is composed of lithic, vitric, crystal and volcanic ash, ingredients to alkali feldspar, biotite, plagioclase etc, low natural gamma, low resistivity , low density.

This paper presents the results of studies on the geochemistry of iodine-rich groundwater in the southwest of the Taiyuan Basin, Shanxi Province, North China. A total of 950 water samples were collected from shallow (≤ 50 m), medium-depth (50–200 m) and deep (≥ 200 m) wells in the southwestern Taiyuan Basin. Total and inorganic iodine concentrations, including species of iodide and iodate, were determined using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and high performance liquid chromatography- ICP-MS (HPLC-ICP-MS). The results indicate that there are 76.8%, 70.3% and 85.2% of groundwater samples from the above-mentioned three levels, respectively, that exceed the national drinking water standard for iodine (150 μg/L), with the highest iodine concentration of up to 4117 μg/L, 27 times higher than the standard, tested in shallow groundwater. The main species of iodine in the groundwater is iodide ion with a small proportion of iodate. Organic iodine was detected in about 60% of the water samples with relatively low content. The main factors causing the high iodine concentrations in groundwater include the unique topography, geomorphologic features and aquifer structures in the study area, resulting in hindered movement of groundwater. Furthermore, salinization of surface soil in the low-lying lands intensifies the elevation of iodine concentrations in shallow groundwater. The enrichment of iodine in groundwater is inextricably linked to the geological environment of marine, lacustrine and fluvial sedimentations. The results of this research could provide scientific bases for optimization of water supply scheme in China's iodine excess areas.

Near-surface atmospheric aerosols were collected at sampling frequency of 3 d per week for one year from August 2009 to July 2010 in Laoshan District, Qingdao, located in the mid-latitude coastal region of East Asia monsoon region. The samples were analyzed for cosmogenic nuclide beryllium-7 ( 7 Be), organochlorine pesticides (OCPs), and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). The annual average 7 Be concentration was 6.83 ± 0.40 mBq m −3 , with the variation range from 1.52 to 14.58 mBq m −3 . The maximum and minimum levels were observed in September and May, respectively. Autumn and spring were the seasons with high 7 Be concentrations and summer was the lowest 7 Be season. Enhanced wet precipitation may have caused lower 7 Be observed in summer when southeasterlies were prevailing. Higher 7 Be concentrations in autumn 2009 were caused by the abnormal atmospheric circulation. Concentrations of HCHs, DDTs, and PCBs followed a trend of being lower in summer and higher in winter. Higher chlorinated PCB isomers were predominant in winter and lower chlorinated PCB isomers were predominant in summer. ∑OCPs generally showed positive correlations with 7 Be but were interrupted by the “spring leak maximum” episode for 7 Be in the atmosphere in April when the stratosphere–troposphere exchange was enhanced, and in December when abnormally high HCHs were observed. No significant correlation was found between 7 Be and PCBs except for PCB28. Seasonal oscillations in 7 Be and the ratios of POP/ 7 Be were observed.

We present a framework for generating street networks and parcel layouts. Our goal is the generation of high-quality layouts that can be used for urban planning and virtual environments. We propose a solution based on hierarchical domain splitting using two splitting types: streamline-based splitting, which splits a region along one or multiple streamlines of a cross field, and template-based splitting, which warps pre-designed templates to a region and uses the interior geometry of the template as the splitting lines. We combine these two splitting approaches into a hierarchical framework, providing automatic and interactive tools to explore the design space.

The research on volcanic diagenesis have important value in volcanic secondary pore formation, evolution and reservoir prediction. Using core, slice, imaging logging and geochemical analysis, from lithology-lithofacies characteristics of Yingcheng Formation in Xujiaweizi depression, Songliao Basin, study on volcanic diagenesis, types, characteristics and relationship of reservoir space. The results are shown that: The volcanic mainly developed dissolution 13 diagenesis types, and base on the formation mechanism and effect to the reservoir space, it is divided further into constructive and destructive categories In the study area; Reservoir performance of reservoir space depend on the type, combination form and development degree, and the diagenesis is main control factor of rservoir space (pore, crack) formation, preservation, damage evolution characteristics; volcanic diagenetic complexity is the main reason of reservoir space complexity and diversity.

A high-volume air sampler and a high-resolution gamma-ray spectrometer have been used to measure the activity of 7Be in near-surface atmospheric aerosols at sampling frequency of 3 days week for 1 year from August 2009 to July 2010 at Beijing in the mid-latitude region of East Asia monsoon. The measurements indicate that the average concentration of 7Be was 8.39 ± 0.49 mBq m−3, which was significantly higher than values reported for other cities in the East Asia monsoon region and in the world during the same period. The maximum and minimum of the weekly means of 7Be concentration were observed in September and May, respectively. The 7Be concentrations varied in accordance with the monsoon phases. Low but frequent wet precipitation may have caused lower 7Be observed in July when southeasterly was prevailing. Higher seasonal mean of 7Be concentrations in autumn could be attributed to the abnormal atmospheric circulation in autumn 2009.

Creating desirable layouts of building interiors is a complex task as designers have to manually adhere to various local and global considerations arising from competing practical and design considerations. In this work, we present an interactive design tool to create desirable floorplans by computationally conforming to such design constraints. Specifically, we support three types of constraints: (i) functional constraints such as number of rooms, connectivity among the rooms, target room areas, etc., (ii) design considerations such as user modifications and preferences, and (iii) fabrication constraints such as cost and convenience of manufacturing. Based on user specifications, our system automatically generates multiple floor layouts with associated 3D geometry that all satisfy the design specifications and constraints, thus exposing only the desirable family of interior layouts to the user. In this work, we focus on pre-cast concrete-based constructions, which lead to interesting discrete and continuous optimization possibilities. We test our framework on a range of complex real-world specifications and demonstrate the control and expressiveness of the exposed design space relieving the users of the task of manually adhering to non-local functional and fabrication constraints.

This paper describes a modeling method for film thickness variation within plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) processes. The model enables the identification and optimization of deposition process sensitivities to electrode configuration, deposition system design and gas flow distribution. An comparison between theory and experiment is provided for PECVD of diamond-like-carbon (DLC) deposition onto flat and curved substrate geometries. This process utilizes butane reactive feedstock with an argon carrier gas. Radio-frequency plasma is used. The PECVD deposition system is based on co-planar 300mm diameter electrodes with separate RF power matching to each electrode. The system has capability to adjust the electrode separation as a parameter to optimize uniformity. Vacuum is achieved using dry pumps with real time control of butterfly valve position for active pressure control. Deposited film thickness sensitivities to electrode geometry, plasma power density, and pressure and gas flow distribution are demonstrated. In addition to film thickness uniformity, optical, durability and environmental performance of resulting DLC on germanium substrate materialreported.

Urban facades regularly contain interesting variations due to allowed deformations of repeated elements (e.g., windows in different open or close positions) posing challenges to state-of-the-art facade analysis algorithms. We propose a semi-automatic framework to recover both repetition patterns of the elements and their individual deformation parameters to produce a factored facade representation. Such a representation enables a range of applications including interactive facade images, improved multi-view stereo reconstruction, facade-level change detection, and novel image editing possibilities.

Based on the core, thin section, scanning electron microscopy, well logging and the physical properties of reservoir, according to the research on the volcanic reservoirs characteristics of the E2-3S3 Formation in Oulituozi area, obtaining the following points: Basalt, trachyte and tuff are mainly lithology, overflow facies are main lithofacies, secondly explosive facies and volcanic sedimentary facies; Secondary reservoir spaces are often superimposed on the original reservoir spaces, and pore, hole and slit together form the effective reservoir spaces; The reservoir property show that the trachyte are the best, secondly the basalt and tuff; Reservoir lithology, lithofacies, thickness, fracture development, physical and electrical properties and other reservoir parameters are the main evaluation criteria to conduct the reservoir comprehensive evaluation.

Pixel art is a modern digital art in which high resolution images are abstracted into low resolution pixelated outputs using concise outlines and reduced color palettes. Creating pixel art is a labor intensive and skill-demanding process due to the challenge of using limited pixels to represent complicated shapes. Not surprisingly, generating pixel art animation is even harder given the additional constraints imposed in the temporal domain. Although many powerful editors have been designed to facilitate the creation of still pixel art images, the extension to pixel art animation remains an unexplored direction. Existing systems typically request users to craft individual pixels frame by frame, which is a tedious and error-prone process. In this work, we present a novel animation framework tailored to pixel art images. Our system bases on conventional key-frame animation framework and state-of-the-art image warping techniques to generate an initial animation sequence. The system then jointly optimizes the prominent feature lines of individual frames respecting three metrics that capture the quality of the animation sequence in both spatial and temporal domains. We demonstrate our system by generating visually pleasing animations on a variety of pixel art images, which would otherwise be difficult by applying state-of-the-art techniques due to severe artifacts.

Connectivity and layout of underlying networks largely determine agent behavior and usage in many environments. For example, transportation networks determine the flow of traffic in a neighborhood, whereas building floorplans determine the flow of people in a workspace. Designing such networks from scratch is challenging as even local network changes can have large global effects. We investigate how to computationally create networks starting from only high-level functional specifications. Such specifications can be in the form of network density, travel time versus network length, traffic type, destination location, etc. We propose an integer programming-based approach that guarantees that the resultant networks are valid by fulfilling all the specified hard constraints and that they score favorably in terms of the objective function. We evaluate our algorithm in two different design settings, street layout and floorplans to demonstrate that diverse networks can emerge purely from high-level functional specifications.

The levels of DDTs, HCHs and PCBs in topsoil, cereal and irrigation water from typical industrial and agricultural areas of Jilin Province in Northeastern China were evaluated by using gas chromatography coupled with an electron capture detector. The amount of ∑OCPs and ∑(7)PCBs found in topsoils ranged from 24.7 to 98.0 and 17.2 to 98.7 ng g(-1), respectively. The geometric means of ∑HCHs, ∑DDTs and ∑(7)PCBs in rice stem samples were 28.9, 32.4 and 49.0 ng g(-1), respectively. The average level of total OCPs concentration in rice field water in Meihekou area (0.849 ng g(-1)) is higher than that in Jilin area (0.178 ng g(-1)) and all OCPs concentrations in rice field water met the water quality standards for Grade I regulated by China's national environmental quality standard of surface water.

We present a general computational framework to locally characterize any shape space of meshes implicitly prescribed by a collection of non-linear constraints. We computationally access such manifolds, typically of high dimension and co-dimension, through first and second order approximants, namely tangent spaces and quadratically parameterized osculant surfaces. Exploration and navigation of desirable subspaces of the shape space with regard to application specific quality measures are enabled using approximants that are intrinsic to the underlying manifold and directly computable in the parameter space of the osculant surface. We demonstrate our framework on shape spaces of planar quad (PQ) meshes, where each mesh face is constrained to be (nearly) planar, and circular meshes, where each face has a circumcircle. We evaluate our framework for navigation and design exploration on a variety of inputs, while keeping context specific properties such as fairness, proximity to a reference surface, etc.

Near-surface atmospheric aerosol samples were collected at the sampling frequency of 2–3 d per week for one year from August 2006 to August 2007 at a low latitude station in Tianhe District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province of southern China. The samples were analyzed for cosmogenic nuclide 7Be and persistent organic pollutants, i.e. organochlorine pesticides (OCPs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). The annual average 7Be concentration was 2.59 mBq m−3, with the maximum occurred in May (8.45 mBq m−3) and minimum in late August and early September (0.07 mBq m−3). Winter and spring were the seasons in which the 7Be concentrations were high while summer and autumn were the lower 7Be seasons. Spring peaks in 7Be in the near-surface atmospheric aerosols may have associated with the “spring leak maximum” episode. The annual average ∑OCPs concentration was 345.6 pg m−3, ∑33PCBs 317.6 pg m−3, and ∑31PBDEs 609.0 pg m−3. The variation trends in the time-series of 7Be, OCPs, PCBs, and PBDEs in near-surface atmospheric aerosol showed both common features and differences. Significant correlations (R2 = 0.957 and 0.811. respectively, p = 0.01) were observed between the monthly average 7Be concentrations and those of ∑PCBs and ∑PBDEs in summer, autumn, and early winter. The difference between the seasonal variation features of OCPs and PCBs (and PBDEs) could be attributed to the different source functions and physical–chemical properties which could control the behaviors of these compounds in air–aerosol partitions as well as atmospheric transport.

Surface Ricci flow is a powerful tool to design Riemannian metrics by user defined curvatures. Discrete surface Ricci flow has been broadly applied for surface parameterization, shape analysis, and computational topology. Conventional discrete Ricci flow has limitations. For meshes with low quality triangulations, if high conformality is required, the flow may get stuck at the local optimum of the Ricci energy. If convergence to the global optimum is enforced, the conformality may be sacrificed. This work introduces a novel method to generalize the traditional discrete Ricci flow. The generalized Ricci flow is more flexible, more robust and conformal for meshes with low quality triangulations. Conventional method is based on circle packing, which requires two circles on an edge intersect each other at an acute angle. Generalized method allows the two circles either intersect or separate from each other. This greatly improves the flexibility and robustness of the method. Furthermore, the generalized Ricci flow preserves the convexity of the Ricci energy, this ensures the uniqueness of the global optimum. Therefore the algorithm won't get stuck at the local optimum. Generalized discrete Ricci flow algorithms are explained in details for triangle meshes with both Euclidean and hyperbolic background geometries. Its advantages are demonstrated by theoretic proofs and practical applications in graphics, especially surface parameterization.