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The alkaline process of spent nuclear fuel(SNF) reprocessing refers to reprocessing methods that use the alkaline solution of carbonates or hydroxides as the media to conduct the dissolution of SNF and subsequent separations of uranium, plutonium and other elements. Most of the fission products and minor actinides are either insoluble or changed to insoluble carbonates or hydroxides during the alkaline dissolution of SNF, indicating that the resulted dissolver solution contains less amount of fission and minor actinide elements. Thus, the solution is less radioactive and less corrosive in contrast to the acidic dissolver solution of commercial PUREX(plutonium uranium redox extraction) process. Due to advantages of the alkaline process and its important potential application in SNF reprocessing, researchers from Japan, Russia, the United States, South Korea, etc. have carried out some research work around this reprocessing method. This paper will review technical routes of the alkaline process proposed by these researchers and research progress related to the main processes such as oxidation dissolution of SNF, separation technologies and recovery of used reagents. The challenges and prospects in this field are also discussed.

Objective: Yiqi Fumai Lyophilized Injection (YQFM), a Chinese medicine injection, has been widely used for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, especially heart failure (HF). However, bioactive compounds and underlying mechanisms of YQFM in treating HF remain poorly understood. Materials and Methods: Network pharmacology was employed to investigate the bioactive compounds and mechanisms of YQFM. A compound-target network was constructed to screen bioactive compounds based on contribution index calculation. Then, an adriamycin-induced HF rat model was established to evaluate the cardio-protective effects of YQFM by hematoxylin and eosin staining and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays. Results: Network pharmacology indicated that YQFM may alleviate HF through 36 compounds and 109 targets. Particularly, ginsenosides Rb1, Rg1, Re, Rf, Rb2, Rh1, schisandrin, and ginsenoside Rc were indicated as the top contributors of YQFM in treating HF. YQFM was predicted to act on multiple targets such as vascular endothelial growth factor A, interleukin-2 (IL-2), IL-6, and IL-1β, as well as to regulate signaling pathways such as hypoxia-inducible factor 1, tumor necrosis factor, VEGF, and PI3K-Akt. The pharmacological study suggested that YQFM could attenuate cardiac injury and up-regulate plasma concentrations of VEGFR-1 and NO in HF rats. Ginsenoside Rb1, as the major contributor from network pharmacology analysis, also showed a cardioprotective effect and up-regulation of VEGFR-1 in plasma. Conclusions: Ginsenosides and schisandrin were predicted as the most important contributors to the cardioprotective effect of YQMF. Ginsenoside Rb1 was proved to alleviate HF and increase the plasma concentration of VEGFR-1.

Background: To identify the clustering characteristics of individual-, family-, and school-level factors, and examine their associations with health-related physical fitness. Methods: A total of 145,893 Chinese children and adolescents aged 9–18 years participated in this cross-sectional study. The 2-step cluster analysis was conducted to identify clusters among individual-, family-, and school-level factors. Physical fitness indicator was calculated through sex- and age-specific z scores of forced vital capacity, standing long jump, sit-and-reach flexibility, body muscle strength, endurance running, and body mass index. Results: Three, 3, and 5 clusters were automatically identified at individual, family, and school levels, respectively. Students with low physical fitness indicator were more likely to be in the "longest sedentary time and skipping breakfast" cluster (odds ratio [OR] = 1.18; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.12–1.24), and "physical inactivity and insufficient protein consumption" cluster (OR = 1.07; 95% CI, 1.02–1.12) at individual level, the "single children and high parental education level" cluster (OR = 1.15; 95% CI, 1.10–1.21), and "no physical activity support and preference" cluster (OR = 1.30; 95% CI, 1.25–1.36) at family level, and the "physical education occupied" cluster (OR = 1.06; 95% CI, 1.01–1.11), and "insufficient physical education frequency" cluster (OR = 1.16; 95% CI, 1.08–1.24) at school level. Girls were more vulnerable to individual- and school-level clusters, while boys were more susceptible to family clusters; the younger students were more sensitive to school clusters, and the older students were more susceptible to family clusters (P-interaction <.05). Conclusions: This study confirmed different clusters at multilevel factors and proved their associations with health-related physical fitness, thus providing new perspective for developing targeted interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The treatment of simulated radioactive wastewater by air-gap membrane distillation process was conducted. The membrane flux and rejection rates of Cs+, Sr2+, Co2+ and UO2+2 were used as indexes to evaluate the performance of PTFE, PVDF and PP hydrophobic membranes. The effects of feed temperature, feed flow rate and air gap thickness on membrane flux and the rejection rates were discussed. The results show that the feed temperature has the most significant effect on the membrane flux. Increasing the feed temperature can significantly increase the membrane flux. The membrane flux of PTFE membrane with a pore size of 0.22 μm increases from 4.79 kg/(m2·h) to 16.24 kg/(m2·h), when the feed temperature increases from 60 ℃ to 90 ℃. Increasing the feed flow rate can notably increase the membrane flux in the lower feed flow rate range. But with the increase of feed flow rate, the increase rate of membrane flux is slowing down. Increasing the air gap thickness decreases the membrane flux. Within the experimental conditions, the process conditions have no obvious effect on the rejection rate. Among the above three hydrophobic membranes, the PTFE membrane with a pore size of 0.22 μm has the best rejection performance with the rejection rate above 99.97%. The PTFE membrane with a pore size of 0.22 μm is more suitable to be applied to treat radioactive wastewater by the membrane distillation process.

BACKGROUND:Pneumoconiosis may play an important role in the development of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and the complication of COPD may impose a heavy burden of illness. METHODS:The study was conducted in Hunan Province in China from December 1, 2015, to December 1, 2016. Consecutive underground male pneumoconiosis patients employed for at least 1 year were recruited from the Hunan Occupational Disease Prevention Institute. Patient information, respiratory symptoms and clinical data were collected using a structured questionnaire. The diagnosis of COPD were assessed using the Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) criteria. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to examine the clinical and demographic risk factors of COPD among pneumoconiosis patients. RESULTS:The prevalence of COPD in our sample of pneumoconiosis patients was 18.65% (119/638). In pneumoconiosis patients with and without smoking history, the prevalence of COPD was 19.32 and 16.77%. Compared with non-COPD patients, those with COPD are older in age, have longer exposure time, have lower body mass index (BMI), have a higher smoking index and have worse pulmonary function (all p

In this paper, we study the existence of positive solution to boundary value problem of fractional differential equations with p$$ p $$‐Laplacian operator. By using Avery–Peterson theorem, some new existence results of three increasing positive solutions are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skeletal muscle dysfunction leads to reduction in activity in patients with COPD. As an essential part of the management of COPD, pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) alleviates dyspnea and fatigue, improves exercise tolerance and health-related quality of life, and reduces hospital admissions and mortality for COPD patients. Exercise is the key component of PR, which is composed of exercise assessment and training therapy. To evaluate PR's application in clinical practice, this article summarizes the common methods of exercise measurement and exercise training for patients with COPD. Exercise assessments should calculate patients' symptoms, endurance, strength, and health-related quality of life. After calculation, detailed exercise therapies should be developed, which may involve endurance, strength, and respiratory training. The detailed exercise training of each modality is mentioned in this review. Although various methods and therapies of PR have been used in COPD patients, developing an individualized exercise training prescription is the target. More studies are warranted to support the evidence and examine the effects of long-term benefits of exercise training for patients with COPD in each stage.

Objectives: Transcranial sonography has been used as a valid neuroimaging tool to diagnose Parkinson's disease (PD). This study aimed to develop a modified transcranial sonography (TCS) technique based on a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) model to predict Parkinson's disease. Methods: This retrospective diagnostic study was conducted using 1529 transcranial sonography images collected from 854 patients with PD and 775 normal controls admitted to the Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University (Suzhou, Jiangsu, China) between September 2019 and May 2022. The data set was divided into training cohorts (570 PD patients and 541 normal controls), and the validation set (184 PD patients and 234 normal controls). Using these datasets, we developed four different DCNN models (ResNet18, ResNet50, ResNet152, and DenseNet121). We then assessed their diagnostic performance, including the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) curve, specificity, sensitivity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), and F1 score and compared with traditional diagnostic criteria. Results: Among the 1529 TCS images, 570 PD patients and 541 normal controls from 4 of 6 sonographers of the TCS team were selected as the training cohort, and 184 PD patients and 234 normal controls from the other 2 sonographers were chosen as the validation cohort. There were no sex and age differences between PD patients and normal control subjects in the training and validation cohorts (P values > 0.05). All DCNN models achieved good performance in distinguishing PD patients from normal control subjects on the validation datasets, with diagnostic AUROCs and accuracy of 0.949 (95% CI 0.925, 0.965) and 86.60 for the RestNet18 model, 0.949 (95% CI 0.929, 0.971) and 87.56 for ResNet50, 0.945 (95% CI 0.931, 0.969) and 88.04 for ResNet152, 0.953 (95% CI 0.935, 0.971) and 87.80 for DenseNet121, respectively. On the other hand, the diagnostic accuracy of the traditional diagnostic method was 82.30. The accuracy of all DCNN models was higher than that of traditional diagnostic method. Moreover, the 5k-fold cross-validation results in train datasets showed that these DCNN models are robust. Conclusion: The developed transcranial sonography-based DCNN models performed better than traditional diagnostic criteria, thus improving the sonographer's accuracy in diagnosing PD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although facial expression recognition (FER) has a wide range of applications, it may be difficult to achieve under local occlusion conditions which may result in the loss of valuable expression features. This issue has motivated the present study, as a part of which an effective multi-feature cross-attention network (MFCA-Net) is proposed. The MFCA-Net consists of a two-branch network comprising a multi-feature convolution module and a local cross-attention module. Thus, it enables decomposition of facial features into multiple sub-features by the multi-feature convolution module to reduce the impact of local occlusion on facial expression feature extraction. In the next step, the local cross-attention module distinguishes between occluded and unoccluded sub-features and focuses on the latter to facilitate FER. When the MFCA-Net performance is evaluated by applying it to three public large-scale datasets (RAF-DB, FERPlus, and AffectNet), the experimental results confirm its good robustness. Further validation is performed on a real FER dataset with local occlusion of the face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detrimental health effects of atmospheric exposure to ambient particulate matter (PM) have been investigated in numerous studies. Exposure to pollutional haze, the carrier of air pollutants such as PM and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) has been linked to lung and cardiovascular disease, resulting increases in both hospital admissions and mortality. This review focuses on the constituents of pollutional haze and its effects on pulmonary function. The article presents the available information and seeks to correlate pollutional haze and pulmonary function.