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A two-level hierarchical scheme for videobased person re-identification (re-id) is presented, with the aim of learning a pedestrian appearance model through more complete walking cycle extraction. Specifically, given a video with consecutive frames, the objective of the first level is to detect the key frame with lightweight Convolutional neural network (CNN) of PCANet to reflect the summary of the video content. At the second level, on the basis of the detected key frame, the pedestrian walking cycle is extracted from the long video sequence. Moreover, local features of Local maximal occurrence (LOMO) of the walking cycle are extracted to represent the pedestrian' s appearance information. In contrast to the existing walking-cycle-based person re-id approaches, the proposed scheme relaxes the limit on step number for a walking cycle, thus making it flexible and less affected by noisy frames. Experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets: PRID 2011 and iLIDS-VID. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme outperforms the six state-of-art video-based re-id methods, and is more robust to the severe video noises and variations in pose, lighting, and camera viewpoint.

Zhongjing Lv,1,2,* Rong Cong,1,* Jiafeng Li,1,2 Kun Cao,1,2 Qiang Bao,1,2 Linlin Li,1,3 Feng Yang,1,2 Jian Yuan1,2 1School of Stomatology, Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province, Mainland China; 2Department of Stomatology, Affiliated Hospital of Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province, Mainland China; 3Department of Pathology, Affiliated Hospital of Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province, Mainland China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Jian Yuan; Feng YangDepartment of Stomatology, Affiliated Hospital of Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province 221000, Mainland ChinaEmail yuanjian2009_2010@163.com ; yangfeng0909@126.comBackground: Oral leukoplakia is the most common oral mucosal disease. A proportion of such cases can progress to oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC). The mechanism of oral leukoplakia malignant transformation is still unclear. In this study, we analyzed the expression of parathyroid hormone-like hormone (PTHLH) in oral leukoplakia and the effect on prognosis, so as to find reliable molecular markers that can predict oral leukoplakia malignant transformation.Methods: We measured PTHrP which is coded by PTHLH in oral leukoplakia tissues of 79 cases (30 cases progressed to OSCC and 49 did not) and analyzed the clinical outcomes. Then, PTHLH expression was reduced using lentivirus-mediated small hairpin RNA (shRNA) interference to determine the biological role of PTHLH in DOK cells.Results: PTHrP was found to be highly expressed in 38% of tissues of oral leukoplakia. There was weak or no PTHrP expression in 25 patients, moderate expression in 24 patients, and strong in 30 patients with oral leukoplakia. The expression level was associated with the degree of atypical hyperplasia and poor prognosis. The cell proliferation, invasion, migration, cell cloning, and cell cycle were affected after reducing PTHLH expression.Conclusion: Our data suggest that either PTHLH or PTHrP plays a key role in the malignant transformation of oral leukoplakia and might be a reliable biomarker for predicting the carcinogenesis of oral leukoplakia.Keywords: PTHLH, oral leukoplakia, malignant transformation

Data from in vitro and animal studies support the preventive effect of tea (Camellia sinensis) against colorectal cancer. Further, many epidemiologic studies evaluated the association between tea consumption and colorectal cancer risk, but the results were inconsistent. We conducted a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies to systematically assess the association between tea consumption and colorectal cancer risk. A comprehensive literature review was conducted to identify the related articles by searching PubMed and Embase up to June, 2019. Summary relative risks (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated using a fixed effect model. Twenty cohort articles were included in the present meta-analysis involving 2,068,137 participants and 21,437 cases. The combined RR of colorectal cancer for the highest vs. lowest tea consumption was determined to 0.97 (95% CI 0.94–1.01) with marginal heterogeneity (I2 = 24.0%, P = 0.093) among all studies. This indicated that tea consumption had no significant association with colorectal cancer risk. Stratified analysis showed that no significant differences were found in all subgroups. We further conducted the gender-specific meta-analysis for deriving a more precise estimation. No significant association was observed between tea consumption and colorectal cancer risk in male (combined RR = 0.97; 95% CI 0.90–1.04). However, tea consumption had a marginal significant inverse impact on colorectal cancer risk in female (combined RR = 0.93; 95% CI 0.86–1.00). Further, we found a stronger inverse association between tea consumption and risk of colorectal cancer among the female studies with no adjustment of coffee intake (RR: 0.90; 95% CI 0.82–1.00, P 0.05). Our finding indicates that tea consumption has no significant impact on the colorectal cancer risk in both genders combined, but gender-specific meta-analysis shows that tea consumption has a marginal significant inverse impact on colorectal cancer risk in female.

A series of adjustable long chain branching poly(L-lactide)s (b-PLAs) was prepared by reactive processing of linear PLA using pyromellitic dianhydride (PMDA) and polyfunctional epoxy ether (PFE) as the branching agent and their vascular stents were fabricated via 3D-printing. Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and gel permeation chromatography (GPC) results indicated that the chain branching reaction occurs and the average molecular weight increases obviously after the chain branching reaction. Rheological tests on the b-PLAs demonstrated that they are composed of a symmetric- or asymmetric-star, or tree-like chain configuration. The volume fraction of the branching structure of the chains increased from 0.03 to 0.3 with increasing branching agent content. The effects of the branching structure on the melt crystallization behavior of b-PLAs were investigated by means of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The isothermal crystallization results showed that the half-time of crystallization (t1/2) of the samples decreased from 16.8 min for linear PLA to 2.3 min when the branching agent content was 2 wt% at 106 °C. Also, as observed from polarized optical microscopy experiments, the nucleation density of the b-PLAs significantly increased with increasing volume fraction of the branching structure because the enrichment of segments around the branching structure facilitated nucleation, thus the b-PLA samples have a higher probability to form a primary nucleus than linear PLA. Moreover, mechanical testing demonstrated that forming the branching structure enabled the effective modification of the mechanical properties of PLA. The microstructures with a smaller spherulite size and higher crystallinity of the b-PLAs improved their tensile strength and modulus from 45.7 MPa and 1.63 GPa to 77.2 MPa and 3.41 GPa, respectively. Furthermore, the radial force performance of the 3D printed b-PLA vascular stents was enhanced from 4.8 to 13.7 N by the branching structure of the chains. The CCK-8 assay results indicated that the osteoblast activity of b-PLA is higher than that of linear PLA, and the scanning electron microscopy (SEM) results also indicated that b-PLA was covered and flattened with a better attachment morphology for the osteoblasts than PLA. Therefore, the b-PLAs with a long chain branching structure could effectively facilitate cell growth, proliferation, and differentiation.

High volume resistivity and surface resistance of Poly-ether-ether-ketone (PEEK), which is a kind of semi-crystalline aromatic thermoplastics with outstanding features, restrict their use in the fields of electronics and electromagnetic. In order to broaden the application range in the aerospace and electronics, PEEK with high chemical inert was modified by 1064nm-wavelength infrared pulse fiber laser. The properties of PEEK, such as surface micromorphology and roughness, were characterized by SEM and metallographic microscope, respectively. The results show that, in the fixed overlap rate of spot, the interaction between laser and PEEK is changed from photothermal reaction at low laser energy density to photochemical-photothermal synergy with high laser energy density. In this case, the surface of PEEK is gradually changed from periodic undulating groove structure to obvious melting material accumulation, meanwhile, the periodic fluctuation boundary is gradually blurred. In addition, when the laser energy density is fixed, the thermal accumulation effect is enhanced with the increase of the overlap rate of spot, which leads to the transition of PEEK surface from lattice hole structure to periodic groove structure, and then gradually covered by molten accumulation.