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Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is one of the commonest neurodegenerative diseases of adult-onset, which is characterized by the progressive death of motor neurons in the cerebral cortex, brain stem and spinal cord. The dysfunction and death of motor neurons lead to the progressive muscle weakness, atrophy, fasciculations, spasticity and ultimately the whole paralysis of body. Despite the identification of several genetic mutations associated with the pathogenesis of ALS, including mutations in chromosome 9 open reading frame 72 leading to the abnormal expansion of GGGGCC repeat sequence, TAR DNA-binding protein 43, fused in sarcoma/translocated in liposarcoma, copper/zinc superoxide dismutase 1 (SOD1) and TANK-binding kinase 1, the exact mechanisms underlying the specific degeneration of motor neurons that causes ALS remain incompletely understood. At present, since the transgenic model expressed SOD1 mutants was established, multiple in vitro models of ALS have been developed for studying the pathology, pathophysiology and pathogenesis of ALS as well as searching the effective neurotherapeutics. This review reviewed the details of present established in vitro models used in studying the pathology, pathophysiology and pathogenesis of ALS. Meanwhile, we also discussed the advantages, disadvantages, cost and availability of each models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To demonstrate the applicability and adaptability of uterine fibroid symptoms and quality of life (UFS-QoL) in assessing the efficacy of treatment in Chinese populations.Methods: This is a secondary analysis of a prospective cohort study involving 20 Chinese hospitals and 2,411 Chinese women with fibroids. Patients completed UFS-QoL and short form-36 (SF-36) at pre-surgery, 6-month and 12-month post-treatments. Internal consistency of the quality of life assessed by the UFS-QoL questionnaire using Cronbach's α coefficient (α). Principal axis factor analysis with orthogonal rotation was established to investigate relationships between items and subscales. Concurrent validity refers to the Spearman's correlation estimate of the correlation between UFS-QoL and SF-36. Using effect size and standardized response mean, the ability to detect change was evaluated by comparing pre- and post-6-month and post-12-month treatment scores.Results: Exploratory factor analysis yielded six subscales (concern, activities, energy/mood, control, self-consciousness, and sexual function) with eigenvalues > 1 in UFS-QoL. A 63.61% total variance was explained by the test items. Ceiling effects of self-consciousness and sexual functioning subscales from UFS-QoL were > 15%. UFS-QoL showed a positive and moderate correlation with SF-36 to establish good concurrent validity. And showed good consistency reliability (Cronbach α > 0.7 in all subscales), ability to detect change after treatment. This excluded self-consciousness (α = 0.56), which demonstrated the lowest effect size (0.38) and standardized response means (0.38) 6- and 12-months post-treatment.Conclusions: Symptom severity, activity, and mood subscales of the Chinese UFS-QoL were valid and reliable. However, the self-consciousness domain needs further investigation on cultural adaptation, such as cognitive debriefing for how Chinese interpret these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, spectral clustering has found widespread applications in various real-world scenarios, showcasing its effectiveness. Traditional spectral clustering typically follows a two-step procedure to address the optimization problem. However, this approach may result in substantial information loss and performance decline. Furthermore, the eigenvalue decomposition, a key step in spectral clustering, entails cubic computational complexity. This paper incorporates linear embedding into the objective function of spectral clustering and proposes a direct method to solve the indicator matrix. Moreover, our method achieves a linear time complexity with respect to the input data size. Our method, referred to as Spectral Clustering with Linear Embedding (SCLE), achieves a direct and efficient solution and naturally handles out-of-sample data. SCLE initiates the process with balanced and hierarchical K-means, effectively partitioning the input data into balanced clusters. After generating anchors, we compute a similarity matrix based on the distances between the input data points and the generated anchors. In contrast to the conventional two-step spectral clustering approach, we directly solve the cluster indicator matrix at a linear time complexity. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets underscore the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed SCLE method. • Addressing spectral clustering time issues with a faster graph construction method. • Eliminating eigendecomposition, our approach saves computational time. • Avoiding intermediate variables, our method prevents information loss in updates. • Our algorithm achieves direct clustering matrix solution in linear time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, with the booming growth of cloud computing, workloads from broad ranges of functions and demands are crammed into a single physical machine. They lay considerable stress on the need of evolution of the operating system underneath, especially the memory subsystem. Even enhancing large pages with main memory compression is not intuitively straightforward due to rigid rules imposed by the state-of-the-art manager Buddy System from the beginning of the design. To relieve the aforementioned problems and provide broader design space for system designers, we propose Zweilous, a clean slate physical memory management framework. It is self-contained, highly decoupled, and thus can co-exist with the vanilla memory manager. Separate self-contained metadata/functions guarantee a flexible extension with little modification to current frameworks. To show it is easy to add enhanced functions that accelerate the evolution of the memory management subsystem, we implement Hzmem, a new large page memory manager redesign enhanced with the function of main memory compression. Our method achieves competitive performance compared with native and virtualized large page support, effective memory size increased and fewer impacts on other parts of the operating system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Transplantation and immunosuppressive therapies are the available treatments for aplastic anemia; however, each strategy has its advantages and disadvantages. Objective The aim of this study was to find a new strategy for aplastic anemia treatment. Design This was an experimental and comparative study. Methods The aplastic anemia model was established by injecting rabbits with benzene and cyclophosphamide. The rabbits with aplastic anemia were divided into low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) and control groups. The distal femoral metaphysis of rabbits in the LIPUS group was treated with ultrasound for 30 days (20 min/d), whereas the control group received a sham treatment. Diarrhea, mortality, and blood cell count were evaluated. The levels of forkhead box P3, interleukin 17, interleukin 4, and interferon gamma were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Bone marrow hyperplasia was observed by hematoxylin-eosin staining and scanning electron microscopy. Results The numbers of red blood cells (RBCs), white blood cells (WBCs), and platelets (PLTs) were lower, the amount of hematopoietic tissue was lower, and the amount of adipose tissue was higher in the rabbit aplastic anemia model than in the normal rabbits. The numbers of RBCs, WBCs, and PLTs increased after LIPUS treatment. The interleukin 17 level decreased, whereas the forkhead box P3 level increased. The amount of hematopoietic tissue increased, whereas the amount of adipose tissue decreased. Limitations The number of hematopoietic stem cells could not be evaluated. Conclusions LIPUS improved the hematopoietic microenvironment, accelerated the reconstruction of bone marrow cells, and increased the quantity and quality of RBCs, WBCs, and PLTs in the peripheral blood. Hence, it can serve as a novel treatment strategy for aplastic anemia in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As we enter the era of many-core, providing the shared memory abstraction through cache coherence has become progressively difficult. The standard directory-based coherence does not scale well with increasing core count. Timestamp-based hardware coherence protocols introduced recently offer an attractive alternative solution. This paper proposes a timestamp-based coherence protocol, called TC-Release++ , that efficiently supports cache coherence in large-scale systems. Our approach is inspired by TC-Weak, a recently proposed timestamp-based coherence protocol targeting GPU architectures. We first design TC-Release in an attempt to straightforwardly port TC-Weak to general-purpose many-cores. But re-purposing TC-Weak for general-purpose many-core architectures is challenging due to significant differences both in architecture and the programming model. Indeed the performance of TC-Release turns out to be worse than conventional directory protocols. We overcome the limitations and overheads of TC-Release by exploiting simple hardware support to eliminate frequent memory stalls, and an optimized lifetime prediction mechanism to improve cache performance. The resulting optimized coherence protocol TC-Release++ is highly scalable (storage scales logarithmically with core count) and shows better performance (3.0 percent) and comparable network traffic (within 1.3 percent) relative to the baseline MESI directory protocol. We use Murphi to formally verify that TC-Release ++ is error-free and imposes small verification cost. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Three structures: free-standing Ta 2 O 5 nanotube membranes, adhered Ta 2 O 5 nanotube arrays and spark discharge Ta 2 O 5 films, have been fabricated respectively by anodizing pure Ta for one hour in three different using stages of the same original concentration electrolyte consisting of 96 vol% H 2 SO 4 (95–98%) and 4 vol% HF (48%) in this work. Stage I: In the 0–10 hours used electrolyte, patchy free-standing Ta 2 O 5 nanotube membranes formed within the potential range of 10 V–70 V; Stage II: In the 30–50 hours used solution, highly ordered amorphous adhered Ta 2 O 5 nanotube arrays with top diameter of 40 nm–270 nm and length of 5 μm–122 μm were fabricated during 10 V–170 V; Stage III: When the using time of electrolyte exceeded 50 hours, spark discharge films with Ta 2 O 5 crystal phase formed at 180 V–200 V, and nanotube structure still remained partially in the spark discharge films. The diameter of Ta 2 O 5 nanotubes increases with the increasing of voltage. In addition to Ta and O elements, adhered Ta 2 O 5 nanotube array films contain a small amount of S and F elements, but the spark discharge Ta 2 O 5 films do not consist of S element. Adhered Ta 2 O 5 nanotube arrays and spark discharge Ta 2 O 5 films show excellent hydrophilicity. The current density-time curves of adhered Ta 2 O 5 nanotube arrays obtained at high voltage (70 V–170 V) exhibit unique fluctuation phenomena and the current oscillation behaviors have a significant influence on the morphologies of nanotube array. Moreover, irritating gases emission on anode and light yellow sediment on cathode occur in the anodization process of Ta 2 O 5 nanotube arrays. This work obtains Ta 2 O 5 nanotube arrays with various structure parameters and expands anodic Ta 2 O 5 film fabrication windows using HF/H 2 SO 4 electrolyte at different stages, meanwhile provides the detailed analyses for growth mechanism of Ta 2 O 5 nanotube arrays. Our results are expected to provide references for the nanostructure preparation on the surface of other metals and alloys by anodization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a robust and effective mesh denoising approach consisting of three steps: vertex pre-filtering, L 1 -median normal filtering, and vertex updating. Given an input noisy mesh model, our method generates a high quality model that preserves geometric features. Our approach is more robust than state of the art approaches when denoising models with different levels of noise and can handle models with irregular surface sampling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study primarily investigated the effect of gua sha plate thickness on hand fatigue incurred through the sustained gripping of a gua sha plate. A total of 25 participants were recruited and five gua sha plates of various thicknesses were tested. The participants’ subjective and objective fatigue scores after they completed the assigned tasks using the plates were collected and analyzed. The results revealed that the fatigue associated with the usage of thick gua sha plates was considerably less than the fatigue associated with the usage of a thin gua sha plate. The gua sha plate thickness was also significantly and inversely correlated with the participants’ thumb–index web size. Because of the limited range of plate thickness in this study, the results must be further verified. However, these preliminary results and methods serve as a reference for selecting and designing gua sha plates, as well as for conducting subsequent relevant studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multicore systems are widely deployed in both the embedded and the high end computing infrastructures. However, traditional virtualization systems can not effectively isolate shared micro architectural resources among virtual machines (VMs) running on multicore systems. CPU and memory intensive VMs contending for these resources will lead to serious performance interference, which makes virtualization systems less efficient and VM performance less stable. In this paper, we propose a contention-aware performance prediction model on the virtualized multicore systems to quantify the performance degradation of VMs. First, we identify the performance interference factors and design synthetic micro-benchmarks to obtain VM’s contention sensitivity and intensity features that are correlated with VM performance degradation. Second, based on the contention features, we build VM performance prediction model using machine learning techniques to quantify the precise levels of performance degradation. The proposed model can be used to optimize VM performance on multicore systems. Our experimental results show that the performance prediction model achieves high accuracy and the mean absolute error is 2.83%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design is a powerful weapon for modern companies so it is important to have excellent designers in the industry. The purpose of this study is to explore the learning problems and the resources that students use to overcome problems in undergraduate industrial design studio courses. A survey with open-type questions was conducted to collect data. Participants in this study were 189 undergraduate industrial design students from three universities, and two coding schema were formulated for analysing the data. The results demonstrated that the most difficult design tasks included concept generation, design presentation, and design research. The learning resources used to solve the learning problems included four categories: people, object, method, and environment. This information will increase the understanding of the learning process of students and provide a reference for teaching and the setting of learning resources in industrial design education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applications in many domains such as text mining and natural language processing need to deal with high-dimensional data. High-dimensional data may present better clustering characteristics on a selected low-dimensional subspace. Subspace clustering is to project the data onto a low-dimensional subspace before clustering. Traditional subspace clustering methods employ eigenvalue decomposition to find the projection of the input data and perform K-means or kernel K-means to obtain the clustering matrix. This kind of methods is not only inefficient, but also adopts a two-step method to generate an approximate solution. Although Discriminative K-means (DisKmeans) integrates dimensionality reduction and clustering into a joint framework and solves the optimization problem by kernel K-means, such method needs to find the centroids in the kernel space and class labels iteratively and has a square time complexity. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose an algorithm, namely Fast DisKmeans (FDKM), to obtain the cluster indicator matrix in a direct way. Moreover, our proposed method has a linear time complexity, which is a significant reduction compared with the squared time complexity of DisKmeans. We also demonstrate that solving the object function of DisKmeans is equivalent to representing the cluster assignment matrix by a low-dimensional linear mapping of the data. Based on this observation, we propose the second algorithm, namely Iterative Fast DisKmeans (IFDKM), which also has a linear time complexity. A series of experiments were conducted on several datasets, and the experimental results showed the superior performance of FDKM and IFDKM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solar cells based on Cu(In,Ga)Se 2 (CIGS) absorber layers have owned the highest energy conversion efficiency among thin film solar cells and it is reported that the efficiency of CIGS solar cells is above 21% at present. In this paper, the performances of monolayer CIGS thin film solar cells with conventional ZnO/CdS/CIGS structure are calculated by using wxAMPS simulative software. The optimum values of the thicknesses of CdS/CIGS layers and carrier density of CIGS layer have been calculated and it is shown that the performances of solar cells have been improved by optimizing the parameters of solar cells. The temperature dependence of performances for CIGS solar cells has been simulated to guide the fabricated devices to obtain higher efficiency in the different temperature conditions. As a result of calculation, it is shown that excellent performance can be obtained by adjusting the parameters, and that the highest efficiency of solar cell can be achieved under certain conditions, where the thicknesses of ZnO, CdS and CIGS are 100 nm, 30 nm and 3 μm, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective To evaluate the incidence and severity of adverse reactions to ultrasound-guided ultrasound ablation of uterine fibroids through a multicenter, large-scale retrospective study. Methods Between July 2006 and June 2007, 9988 patients with uterine fibroids or adenomyosis were enrolled and received ultrasound ablation treatment under conscious sedation. Forty-two doctors administrated the treatment following a standardized clinical protocol. In-treatment and post-treatment side effects and complications were monitored and each patient was followed up for at least 6 months after the treatment. Complications were classified and graded according to the SIR classification system. The technical success and safety of the treatment were evaluated. Results The mean age of the 9988 patients was 40.4 ± 5.8 years (range, 20–56 years). Among them, 7438 had uterine fibroids and 2549 had adenomyosis. Specifically, 6545 patients had solitary uterine fibroid, 818 had multiple uterine fibroids, and 76 had fibroids complicated with adenomyosis. There were mainly three types of fibroids: submucous myoma in 89 patients (12.0%), intramural myoma in 5059 patients (68.0%) and subserosal myoma in 1478 patients (20.0%). In terms of fibroid location, 3496 fibroids were found in the anterior wall (47.0%), 2306 in the posterior wall (31.0%), 447 in the lateral wall (6.0%), and 1190 in fundus (16.0%). The length of treatment for uterine fibroids and adenomyosis averaged 84.2 ± 38.8 min (range, 30.0–240.0 min) and 93.3 ± 55.4 min (range, 15.0–240.0 min), respectively; and the lengths of sonication were 1243.8 ± 725.2 s (range, 506.0–2658.0 s) and 1169.7 ± 707.7 s (range, 185.0–3600.0 s), respectively. Of the uterine fibroids patients, 98.38% (7319/7439) underwent successful ablation with a mean volume ablation rate of 83.1% ± 15.6% (range, 25–100%). Of the adenomyosis patients, 94.59% (2411/2549) underwent successful ablation with a mean volume ablation rate of 73.2% ± 23.6% (range, 21–100%). A total of 1062 patients (10.6%) presented with 1305 events of adverse reactions. According to the SIR classification system, 1228 (94.1%) of these reactions fell under Class A; 45 (3.4%) fell under Class B; 24 (1.8%) fell under Class C; and the rest 8 (0.6%) fell under Class D. Adverse reactions included 874 cases (8.67%) of vaginal secretion, 225 cases (2.23%) of lower abdominal pain 24 h after the treatment but requiring no painkillers, 76 cases (0.76%) of melosalgia or buttock pain, 52 cases (0.52%) of odynuria, 20 cases (0.20%) of menstruation-like vaginal bleeding, 2 cases (0.2%) of temporary blurred vision, 26 cases (0.26%) of blisters or tangerine pericarp-like burns in the abdominal skin, 16 cases (0.16%) of urinary retention, 4 cases (0.4%) of fever of 38.5 °C, 3 cases (0.3%) of acute renal insufficiency, 2 cases (0.2%) of intestinal perforation, and 1 case (0.01%) of long-term lateral ventral syndrome. No permanent injury or fatal complication occurred. Conclusions Based on our observations from 9988 cases, ultrasound ablation treatment for uterine fibroid and adenomyosis is highly effective and safe. Adverse reactions to ultrasound ablation under conscious sedation are slight and temporary for both conditions. Hence, this clinically effective and safe treatment is an alternative treatment for women with uterine fibroids and adenomyosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile virtualization has emerged fairly recently and is considered a valuable way to mitigate security risks on Android devices. However, major challenges in mobile virtualization include runtime, hardware, resource overhead, and compatibility. In this paper, we propose a lightweight Android virtualization solution named Condroid , which is based on container technology. Condroid utilizes resource isolation based on namespaces feature and resource control based on cgroups feature. By leveraging them, Condroid can host multiple independent Android virtual machines on a single kernel to support mutilple Android containers. Furthermore, our implementation presents both a system service sharing mechanism to reduce memory utilization and a filesystem sharing mechanism to reduce storage usage. The evaluation results on Google Nexus 5 demonstrate that Condroid is feasible in terms of runtime, hardware resource overhead, and compatibility. Therefore, we find that Condroid has a higher performance than other virtualization solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Various direct and indirect mitochondrial dysfunction is associated with ALS. • Protein misfolding and abnormal aggregation induce and exacerbate ALS. • An epigenetic perspective on the pathogenesis of ALS is presented. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disease with multiple complex mechanisms involved. Among them, mitochondrial dysfunction plays an important role in ALS. Multiple studies have shown that mitochondria are closely associated with reactive oxygen species production and oxidative stress and exhibit different functional states in different genetic backgrounds. In this review we explored the roles of Ca2+, autophagy, mitochondrial quality control in the regulation of mitochondrial homeostasis and their relationship with ALS. In addition, we also summarized and analyzed the roles of protein misfolding and abnormal aggregation in the pathogenesis of ALS. Moreover, we also discussed how epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation and protein post-translational modification affect initiation and progression of ALS. Nevertheless, existing events still cannot fully explain the pathogenesis of ALS at present, more studies are required to explore pathological mechanisms of ALS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: To explore the potential of AVPR2 in the immunotherapy of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC), thus providing insights into a novel antitumour strategy. Methods: In this study, we performed a comprehensive analysis of the AVPR2 gene in HNSCC using public datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas and Gene Expression Omnibus. We explored the potential molecular mechanism of HNSCC in clinical prognosis and tumour immunity from the aspects of gene expression, prognosis, immune subtypes, and immune infiltration. Results: AVPR2 expression was significantly downregulated in primary HNSCC tissue compared with normal tissue. HNSCC patients with high AVPR2 expression had a better prognosis. Moreover, the results of GSEA showed that immune subtype surface AVPR2 is involved in immune modulation. Furthermore, significant strong correlations between AVPR2 expression and infiltrating immune cells existed in HNSCC, and marker genes of infiltrating immune cells were also significantly related to AVPR2 expression in HNSCC. These results suggest that AVPR2 expression can influence the infiltration of tumour immune cells. Finally, we found that only high levels of B-cell infiltration, rather than those of other immune cells, can predict a longer overall survival in patients with HNSCC. Future studies are needed to explore the role of AVPR2 and tumour-infiltrating B cells in HNSCC. Conclusions: The AVPR2 gene may be a prognostic biomarker of HNSCC. Moreover, AVPR2 may play a role in HNSCC immune modulation, and the regulation of tumour-infiltrating B cells by AVPR2 may be a key link. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate changes in vaginal microecology in women with high-risk human papillomavirus (HR-HPV) infection after focused ultrasound (FU) treatment. We collected vaginal secretions at the time of admission and 3 months after FU treatment from 169 women who received FU treatment for cervical HR-HPV infection between July 2020 and September 2022. Among them, there were 101 patients with cute vaginitis, we also collected their vaginal secretions after one week of drug treatment. These samples were evaluated for vaginal microecology and HPV-DNA examination. Of the 169 patients, 101 (59.7%) suffered from acute vaginitis at the time of admission. After one week of targeted antibiotics drug treatment, there were no pathogens or pus cells on the field of microscopic vision, but there was no significant difference(p > 0.05) in the diversity and density of vaginal flora, the proportion and function of Lactobacillus (H2O2 negative rate) between one week after treatment and at the time of admission. At the time of admission of the 169 patients, the normal flora rate was 40.3%, which increased to 93.5% three months after FU treatment. The differences in vaginal secretion parameters at the time of admission and 3 months after FU treatment were as follows: H2O2 negative rate (37.3% vs. 3.6%), leukocyte esterase positive rate (54.4% vs. 5.9%), sialidase positive rate (38.5% vs. 4.1%), bacterial vaginitis positive rate (55% vs. 4.7%), fungal vaginitis positive rate (44.4% vs. 5.9%), and trichomonal vaginitis positive rate (7.1% vs. 0). The difference was statistically significant (p < 0.01). The pH value and Nagent score at the time of admission were significantly higher than those three months after FU. Three months after FU, the positive rate of HPV was 5.8% in the group of patients with normal vaginal microecology at the time of admission and post-FU; it was 6.7% in the group of patients with abnormal vaginal microecology at the time of admission and normal vaginal microecology post-FU; and it was 100% in the group patients with abnormal vaginal microecology at the time of admission and post-FU. A significant difference was observed among the three groups (p < 0.01). FU is an effective treatment for patients with cervical HR-HPV infection. FU does not interfere with the vaginal microecology of HR-HPV positive patients with normal vaginal microecology.FU followed by antibiotic drug therapy for pathogens is beneficial to restore the function of Lactobacillus vaginalis in HR-HPV positive patients with acute vaginitis,so as to improve the vaginal microecology of HR-HPV positive patients with abnormal vaginal microecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the use of digital heritage in preserving and presenting natural and cultural heritage by preservation specialists and computer scientists. The author describes how animations, computer games, and virtual reality (VR) were applied to China's Jing-Hang Grand Canal (Da Yunhe in Chinese). The techniques in building the virtual canal are presented as well as some screenshots of the virtual grand canal itself.

Most existing 3D geometry copy detection research focused on 3D watermarking, which first embeds "watermarks" and then detects the added watermarks. However, this kind of methods is non-straightforward and may be less robust to attacks such as cropping and noise. In this paper, we focus on a fundamental and practical research problem: judging whether a point cloud is plagiarized or copied to another point cloud in the presence of several manipulations (e.g., similarity transformation, smoothing). We propose a novel method to address this critical problem. Our key idea is first to align the two point clouds and then calculate their similarity distance. We design three different measures to compute the similarity. We also introduce two strategies to speed up our method. Comprehensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method in estimating the similarity of two given 3D point clouds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tumor immunotherapy is booming around the world. However, strategies to activate the immune system and alleviate the immunosuppression still need to be refined. Here, we demonstrate for the first time that low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS, spatial average time average intensity (Isata) is 200 mW/cm2, frequency is 0.3 MHz, repetition frequency is 1 kHz, and duty cycle is 20%) triggers the immune system and further reverses the immunosuppressive state in the mouse models of breast cancer by irradiating the spleen of mice. LIPUS inhibited tumor growth and extended survival in mice with 4 T-1 tumors. Further studies had previously shown that LIPUS enhanced the activation of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells in the spleen and led to significant changes in cytokines, as well as induced upregulation of mRNA levels involved in multiple immune regulatory pathways in the spleen. In addition, LIPUS promoted tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte accumulation and CD8+ T cell activation and improved the dynamics of cytokines/chemokines in the tumor microenvironment, resulting in a reversal of the immunosuppressive state of the tumor microenvironment. These results suggest a novel approach to activate the immune response by irradiating the spleen with LIPUS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an abstract of the article 'The Influence of Hydrogen on a Hyperfine Field of the Amorphous Alloy Fe[sub83.3]B[sub11.2]Si[sub3.5]C[sub2],' by Rongli Gui, WenZhi Chen and KaiYuan Llo.

A high-quality domain-oriented dataset is crucial for the domain-specific named entity recognition (NER) task. In this study, we introduce a novel education-oriented Chinese NER dataset (EduNER). To provide representative and diverse training data, we collect data from multiple sources, including textbooks, academic papers, and education-related web pages. The collected documents span ten years (2012–2021). A team of domain experts is invited to accomplish the education NER schema definition, and a group of trained annotators is hired to complete the annotation. A collaborative labeling platform is built for accelerating human annotation. The constructed EduNER dataset includes 16 entity types, 11k+ sentences, and 35,731 entities. We conduct a thorough statistical analysis of EduNER and summarize its distinctive characteristics by comparing it with eight open-domain or domain-specific NER datasets. Sixteen state-of-the-art models are further utilized for NER tasks validation. The experimental results can enlighten further exploration. To the best of our knowledge, EduNER is the first publicly available dataset for NER task in the education domain, which may promote the development of education-oriented NER models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Transmissible cyber threats have become one of the most serious security issues in cyberspace. Many techniques have been proposed to model, simulate and identify threats' sources and their propagation in large-scale distributed networks. Most techniques are based on the analysis of real networks dataset that contains sensitive information. Traditional in-memory analysis of these dataset often causes data leakage due to system vulnerabilities. If the dataset itself is compromised by adversaries, this threat cost would be even higher than the threat being analysed. In this paper, we propose a new distributed shielded execution framework (Disef) for cyber threats analysis. The Disef framework enables efficient distributed analysis of network dataset while achieves security guarantees of data confidentiality and integrity. In-memory dataset is protected by using a new encrypted key–value format and could be efficiently transferred into Intel SGX enabled enclaves for shielded execution. Our experimental results showed that the proposed framework supports secure in-memory analysis of large network dataset and has comparable performance with systems that have no confidentiality and integrity guarantees. Highlights • A distributed shielded execution framework for network cyber threats analysis is presented. • A brief secure partition mechanism is proposed to decouple secure and normal spaces. • A context-switch secure interface is proposed to reduce Iago attacks. • New key–value encryption operations are integrated to prevent rollback and replay attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fault-tolerance property in most cloud storage systems are designed within the scale of a single datacenter. The single datacenter as a whole may be unreachable or crashed due to severe problems, such as broken network links, power supply interruptions, and natural disasters, etc. Therefore, the design of an effective cross-datacenter fault-tolerant storage system is important to protect data security in the cloud. However, building a cross-datacenter fault-tolerant system faces great challenges, such as high latency, low throughput, high costs of bandwidth resources between datacenters. In this paper, we propose a practical cross-datacenter fault-tolerant (CDFT) algorithm in the cloud storage system. Our fault-tolerant algorithm design considers the difficult tradeoffs among fault tolerance, latency, throughput, network and storage costs. We propose the Domain Fault Codes (DFC) and the topology-aware scheduling techniques, which can tolerate the whole datacenter breakdown. We implemented the DFC-CDFT algorithm in a prototype cloud storage system. The experimental results showed that the proposed DFC-CDFT algorithm can effectively recover data blocks from the single datacenter failure while achieves low storage and bandwidth costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of Internet of Things technology and the promotion of embedded devices' computation performance, smart devices are probably open to security threats and attacks while connecting with rich and novel Internet. Attracting lots of attention in embedded system security community recently, Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), allows for the execution of arbitrary code within environments completely isolated from the rest of a system. However, existing memory protection methods in a TEE are inadequate. In general, the software-based formal methods are not practical and the hardware-based implementation approaches lack of theoretical proof. To address the memory isolation and protection problems in TEE, in this paper, we propose a practical memory integrity protection method on an ARM-based platform, called MIPE, to defend against security threats including kernel data attacks and direct memory access attacks. MIPE utilizes TrustZone technique to create a isolated execution environment, which can protect the sensitive code and data against attacks. To present the integrity protection strategies, we provide the design of MIPE using B method, which is a practical formal method. We also implement MIPE on the Xilinx Zynq ZC702 evaluation board. The evaluation results show that the automatic proof rate of machines using B method is about 78.32%, and the proposed method is effective and feasible in terms of both load time and overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives To evaluate the safety of ultrasound-guided high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) ablation for patients with diffuse adenomyosis. Methods This was a retrospective cohort study. The data was collected from 417 symptomatic adenomyosis patients who underwent ultrasound-guided HIFU between January 2012 and December 2015 at 1st Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China. Among them were 260 patients with diffuse adenomyosis (Group D) and 157 patients with focal adenomyosis (Group F). All patients underwent contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) one week before and the day after HIFU treatment. Successful treatment with HIFU was measured by the non-perfused volume ratio (NPVR). Intraprocedural and postprocedural adverse effects and complications were recorded to assess the safety of the procedure. Patients were followed-up for three months post-treatment. Complications were given a grade A through F according to the SIR Standards. Results All patients successfully completed the procedure, non-perfused regions appeared in 415 (99.5%) patients. The non-perfused volume ratio (NPVR) of Group D was significantly lower than that of Group F ( P < 0.05). During the procedure, the odds ratio of skin-burning pain was 1.7 (OR = 1.617, 95% CI: 1.103–2.532), when comparing Group D with Group F, while the odds ratio of inguinal pain was equal to 2.0 (OR = 2.038, 95% CI: 1.161–3.580), when Group F was compared to Group D. 97 patients (23.3%) received nominal therapy due to complications ([Society of interventional radiology, SIR]-B grade), among them, there were 62 cases (23.8%) in Group D and 35 cases (22.3%) in Group F. No significant difference was found between the two groups (P > 0.05) and neither of the reported complications of SIR-C-SIR-F occurred within the two groups. Conclusions Based on our results, ultrasound-guided HIFU is safe for the treatment of diffuse adenomyosis, and controlling the ablation zone is crucial to ensure patients’ safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an increasing important paradigm, which not only provides safety enhancement but also improves roadway system efficiency. However, the security issues of data confidentiality, and access control over transmitted messages in VANET have remained to be solved. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient message dissemination scheme (SEMD) with policy enforcement in VANET, and construct an outsourcing decryption of ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) to provide differentiated access control services, which makes the vehicles delegate most of the decryption computation to nearest roadside unit (RSU). Performance evaluation demonstrates its efficiency in terms of computational complexity, space complexity, and decryption time. Security proof shows that it is secure against replayable choosen-ciphertext attacks (RCCA) in the standard model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving anti-tumor immunity has promising outcomes in eradicating malignant tumors. Tumor cells can escape from immune surveillance and killing; therefore, various strategies are continuously developing to inhibit immune escape. Focused ultrasound (FUS) has recently emerged to play an important role in immune modulation. After FUS therapy, various tumor antigens and related signals are released. The non-thermal effect of FUS strengthens the blood and lymph circulation, increases cell permeability, and helps in crossing the physical barrier like the blood–brain barrier and blood–tumor barrier. However, the different ablation of FUS is proposed to have a different anti-tumor immune effect. Therefore, we categorized the FUS ablation into thermal and non-thermal ablation and summarized possible anti-tumor immunity mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) is one of the popular treatment modalities allowing to boost the proliferation, differentiation, and migratory activity of cells, which might be a powerful strategy for anti-aging. Seeking a novel setup for LIPUS would benefit the development of ultrasound therapeutics. Methods: Here, we proposed a novel underwater exposure setup of LIPUS. C57BL/6 mice were reared in the designated age-groups, which consisted of a middle-aged group (12–14 months) and an old-age group (20–23 months). The age-related changes of body composition, imbalance of energy supply and demand, imbalance of signal network maintaining internal stability, and representative phenotypes of neurodegeneration and neuroplasticity with the presence and absence of underwater LIPUS in middle-aged and aged groups were evaluated. Results: The results showed that there were obvious aging changes, imbalance of energy supply and demand, imbalance of signal network maintaining homeostasis, neurodegeneration, and damage of neural plasticity in the middle-aged and aged group with or without the LIPUS. Although middle-aged group and aged group responded differently to LIPUS, they mostly generated positive results in relieving bone loss, improving ovarian structure, regulated immune system, and enhanced endurance ability, which should have declined over age. Discussion: These findings indicate that underwater extracorporeal LIPUS exposure could be employed as single or combined anti-aging strategies that generated positive outcomes against the process of aging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highly crystallized single-phase Cu 2 ZnSnS 4 thin films were fabricated using a simple single-target sputtering technique followed by low-cost sulfurization treatment with sulfur powder. The effects of sulfurization temperature (ranging from 400 to 550 °C) on the structure, morphology, composition, optical and electrical properties of the synthesized CZTS thin film were investigated systematically. The increased sulfurization temperature was found to affect the elemental composition slightly but significantly improve crystallinity, carrier mobility and optical band gap of CZTS films. In particular, the CZTS film sulfurized at 500 °C had excellent optical and electrical properties (an optical band gap of 1.53 eV, a hole concentration of 3.2 × 10 15 cm −3 , and a carrier mobility of 57.6 cm 2 (V.s) −1 ). Furthermore, CZTS-based solar cells were successfully fabricated. Current-voltage (J-V) characteristics indicated that the current density had a tendency of increase with the increase of sulfurization temperature, which was attributed to the relatively large grains and high mobility achieved at a high sulfurization temperature. Importantly, the solar cell based on the CZTS thin film sulfurized at 500 °C had the best performance with a photovoltaic conversion efficiency of 4.4%, open-circuit voltage of 650 mV, short-circuit current density of 19.2 mA/cm 2 , and fill factor of 37%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy and safety of focused low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (FLIPUS) with pulsed shortwave diathermy (PSWD) in subjects with painful knee osteoarthritis (OA). In a prospective randomized trial, 114 knee OA patients were randomly allocated to receive FLIPUS or PSWD therapy. The primary outcome was the change from baseline in the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC) total scores. Secondary outcomes included the numerical rating scale (NRS) for pain assessment, time up and go (TUG) test, active joint range of motion (ROM) test, and Global Rating of Change (GRC) scale. Data were collected at baseline, 12 days, 12 weeks and 24 weeks. Patients receiving FLIPUS therapy experienced significantly greater improvements in the WOMAC total scores than patients receiving PSWD therapy at 12 days (mean difference, − 10.50; 95% CI − 13.54 to − 7.45; P = 0.000). The results of the NRS, TUG test, ROM test and GRC scale showed that participants treated with FLIPUS reported less pain and better physical function and health status than those treated with PSWD at 12 days (P = 0.011, P = 0.005, P = 0.025, P = 0.011, respectively). Furthermore, patients in the FLIPUS group showed significant improvements in the WOMAC total scores and NRS scores at 12 weeks (mean difference, − 7.57; 95% CI − 10.87 to − 4.26; P = 0.000 and − 1.79; 95% CI − 2.11 to − 1.47, respectively) and 24 weeks (mean difference, − 6.96; 95% CI − 10.22 to − 3.71; P = 0.000 and − 1.37; 95% CI − 1.64 to − 0.96; P = 0.000, respectively) of follow-up. There were no adverse events during or after the interventions in either group. This study concluded that both FLIPUS and pulsed SWD are safe modalities, and FLIPUS was more effective than PSWD in alleviating pain and in improving dysfunction and health status among subjects with knee OA in the short term. Trial registration: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry, ChiCTR2000032735. Registered 08/05/2020, http://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.aspx?proj=53413. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In common sense, virtualization technology is adopted to offer several isolated execution environments and make better use of computational resources in server environment. However, in embedded systems, the significance of virtualization does not come into the picture. The extensive utilization of mobile smart devices has led to a series of issues such as security, wasting of resources, and power consumption. In this paper, we discuss how mobile virtualization addresses these challenges and then present a detail analysis of four mainstream mobile virtualization solutions: containers, paravirtualization, hardware-assisted full virtualization, and microkernel. At last, we carry out a series of performance comparisons among these solutions and make some suggestions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose To investigate the value of microbubble contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) in evaluating the treatment response of uterine fibroids to HIFU ablation. Materials and methods Sixty-eight patients with a solitary uterine fibroid from the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University were included and analyzed. All patients underwent pre- and post-treatment magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with a standardized protocol, as well as pre-evaluation, intraprocedure, and immediate post-treatment CEUS. CEUS and MRI were compared by different radiologists. Results In comparison with MRI, CEUS showed that the size of fibroids, volume of fibroids, size of non-perfused regions, non-perfused volume (NPV) or fractional ablation (NPV ratio) was similar to that of MRI. In terms of CEUS examination results, the median volume of fibroids was 75.2 (interquartile range, 34.2–127.3) cm 3 , the median non-perfused volume was 54.9 (interquartile range, 28.0–98.1) cm 3 , the mean fractional ablation was 83.7 ± 13.6 (range, 30.0–100.0)%. In terms of MRI examination results, the median volume of fibroids was 74.1 (interquartile range, 33.4–116.2) cm 3 . On the basis of contrast-enhanced T1-weighted images immediately after HIFU treatment, the median non-perfused volume was 58.5 (interquartile range, 27.7–100.0) cm 3 , the average fractional ablation was 84.2 ± 14.2 (range, 40.0–100.0)%. Conclusions CEUS clearly showed the size of fibroids and the non-perfused areas of the fibroid. Results from CEUS correlated well with results obtained from MRI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study was aimed at evaluating the feasibility, safety and therapeutic effects of high-intensity focused ultrasound ablation (HIFUA) in the treatment of post-operative recurrent desmoid tumors. From September 2017 to May 2020, 42 consecutive patients with pathologically proven desmoid tumors treated with HIFUA for the first time were enrolled. These were divided into two groups: post-operative recurrent group (30 cases) and non-surgery group (12 cases). The basic characteristics, treatment parameters, ablation efficacy, tolerance and adverse events were recorded and compared between groups. The minimum distance between the tumor and skin surface in the post-operative recurrent group was significantly smaller than that in the non-surgery group (6.9 mm vs. 10.8 mm, p = 0.011), but there was no significant difference in the other basic characteristics (p > 0.05). The average acoustic power and intensity of treatment in the post-operative recurrent group were significantly lower than those in the non-surgery group (p = 0.006 and 0.036, respectively), but there was no significant difference in the remaining parameters or in ablation efficacy between groups (p > 0.05). HIFUA was successfully performed, and a large volume of coagulation necrosis was obtained from all patients without serious or life-threatening adverse events. Furthermore, there was no significant difference in the incidence of moderate adverse events and average length of stay between groups (p > 0.05). The average power and intensity of HIFUA treatment were adversely affected by surgical scar and tumor infiltration along the surgical path. However, HIFUA can still be used as an effective minimally invasive therapy for the local control of post-operative recurrent desmoid tumors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Growth hormone (GH) and its receptors are critical regulators of somatic growth and metabolism. It has been shown in mammals that the methylation of cytosines within the GH promoter plays a key role in regulating transcripts expression. In the present study, the GH, GHR1 and GHR2 proximal promoters were identified and the methylation levels of these genes in corresponding tissues were assayed. The results suggested that significant arising of GH putative promoter methylation levels in pituitary was observed in females compared with males. However, no such sex-specific changes were found in GHR1 and GHR2 promoters. The GH mRNA expression also was influenced by GH promoter methylation levels in pituitary, which resulted in the higher growth rate of Nile tilapia males. Meanwhile, the methylation levels of GH putative promoter were negatively correlated with growth rate as well as mRNA expression of GH. Furthermore, the methylation of specific E-Box CpG site is also negatively related to the mRNA expression of GH in pituitary. Taken together, our data provide an epigenetic mechanism of explicating the sex duality in phenotypic plasticity of growth rate in male and female of Nile tilapia. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Purpose: To test the feasibility of MRI-guided high intensity focused ultrasound ablation for adenomyosis. Materials and methods: Patients with symptomatic adenomyosis were treated with MRI-guided high intensity focused ultrasound (MRIgHIFU). Under conscious sedation, MRIgHIFU was performed by a clinical MRI-compatible focused ultrasound tumour therapeutic system (JM15100, Haifu® Technology Co. Ltd., Chongqing, China) which is combined with a 1.5T MRI system (Magnetom Symphony, Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany). MRI was used to calculate the volume of the uterus and lesion. Non-perfused volume of the targeted lesions was evaluated immediately after MRIgHIFU. Patient symptoms were assessed using symptom severity score (SSS) and uterine fibroids symptoms and quality of life questionnaire (UFS-QOL). Results: Ten patients with mean age of 40.3±4 years with an average lesion size of 56.9±12.7mm in diameter were treated. Non-perfused volume and the percentage of non-perfused volume obtained from contrast-enhanced T1 Magnetic resonance images immediately post-treatment were 66.6±49.4cm3 and 62.5±21.6%, respectively. The mean SSS and UFS-QOL showed significant improvements of 25%, 16% and 25% at 3, 6 and 12 months follow up, respectively, to pre-treatment scores. No serious complications were observed. Conclusion: Based on the results from this study, MRIgHIFU treatment appears to be a safe and feasible modality to ablate adenomyosis lesion and alleviate its symptoms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Reflective actions in collaborative design can potentially improve design performance and results. This paper quantitatively reexamines the relationships between reflective activities and design performance during the collaborative design process in terms of reflection in action. Twenty sets of protocol data were encoded by a modified version of Valkenburg and Dorst's coding scheme. Using statistical testing, the relationship between the design performance and the number of activities plus the transitions was examined. A significant statistical correlation was found between the percentage of mature framing (setting up of a desired goal with sufficient follow-ups) and the overall performance. These quantitative results verify the qualitative findings of the previous study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The design of social learning analytics (SLA) tools has become a practical means to make available learning information with a goal to improve students' regulation, reflection, and engagement in online learning. This design-based research uses the multi-method analytics to iteratively design, implement, and modify the SLA tool that makes available social, topic, and cognitive information to students in online discussions. This tool demonstrates students' online discussions from social, sematic, and cognitive aspects. This research further uses online questionnaire and interview methods to investigate students' perceptions about the tool's usefulness and usability. After experiencing this tool, students proposed critical feedback for tool improvement from the network visualization, peer reference, and explanation support perspectives. Overall, the SLA tool is a beneficial tool to foster students' awareness of their own learning and peer learning process to improve students' regulation and reflection of learning and eventually improve student engagement in online discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of dynamic polar nanoregions (PNRs) of (1-x)Pb(Zn1/3Nb2/3)O3-xPbTiO3 (PZN-100xPT) single crystals with the PT content x = 0.15 (i.e., higher than above the morphotropic phase boundary composition x ∼ 0.09) has been investigated using inelastic light scattering. The remarkable anomaly of the longitudinal acoustic mode is clearly observed in the vicinity of the cubic-tetragonal phase transition temperature at the TC-T = 481 K. A broad central peak (CP) appears below the Burns temperature TB ∼ 700 K. Upon cooling, the relaxation time determined from the CP width clearly shows a critical slowing down when approaching TC-T in contrast with the suppressed slowing down previously observed in PZN-7PT [S. Tsukada and S. Kojima, Phys. Rev. B 78, 144106 (2008)]. These facts are due to the existence of dynamic PNRs and the disappearance of chemically ordered regions resulting from a higher PT content in the solid solution. In the cubic phase, the local symmetry breaking caused by the PNRs was observed by Raman scattering. The initial size of dynamic PNRs is about 3 nm just below TB, and it increases significantly upon cooling below the intermediate temperature T* ∼ 600 K, reaching 10 nm down to TC-T. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Using 5 kinds of environment audio data collected by mobile phone. • The sound environment classification system stacking 7 audio frames into a block. • The sound environment classification system integrating 30 rows into an audio unit. • Transplantation of sound environment classification system on mobile phone. In general, a hearing aid app is very useful for the persons having either partial or complete inability to hear. At present, there is no special provision available in the hearing aid app for the classification of different environmental sounds. This paper proposes an algorithm for environmental sound classification based on Superimposed Audio Blocks using Deep Neural Networks (SAB - DNN) and also to implement it on the hearing aid app. The system can recognize five kinds of different sound fields automatically: bus, subway, street, indoor, car. In this system, 512 sampling points are taken as an audio frame and several audio frames are stacked up into an Audio Block (AB). when 7 audio frames are stacked up into an Audio Block (AB), the accuracy rate of sound environment classification using (AB - DNN) tends to be the best (96.18%). Based on this, the experiment integrates multiple Audio Block (AB) into an audio unit called Superimposed Audio Blocks(SAB) and classify it using DNN. Optimally, 30 sound blocks are integrated into a SAB which results in the classification accuracy up to 98.8%. As far as we know, it is the first time on the hearing aid app to implement an improved Deep Neural Network (DNN) based classification system and superposition of multi-audio frames and blocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relaxor characteristics of Pb[(Zn1/3Nb2/3)1–xTix]O3 (PZN‐xPT) single crystals (with x = 0 and x = 0.08) are investigated using temperature‐dependent Brillouin scattering spectroscopy. The longitudinal acoustic (LA) mode shows typical relaxor behaviors for PZN, whereas its mode frequency exhibits a discontinuous change at the phase transition temperature (TC) for PZN‐8%PT. The transverse acoustic (TA) mode, which is forbidden in an ideal cubic phase at the backscattering geometry, appears in both samples at a certain temperature above either the dielectric maximum temperature (Tm) or TC. This breakdown of the Brillouin selection rule in the cubic phase indicates that the noncubic polar regions become appreciable at this temperature where the interaction between the acoustic waves and the polar nanoregions (PNRs) is strong enough to enable the appearance of the TA mode. The intermediate characteristic temperature T* is determined in terms of the minimum of the temperature derivative of the half width of the LA mode, and the values are nearly the same as those determined via the acoustic emission signal measurements. These comparisons reveal the universal feature of the local phase transformation from dynamic to quasistatic PNRs at T*, giving rise to the appearance of the TA mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: The medial column fracture of the proximal humeral fracture is a type of fracture with high postoperative complications after internal fixation. Proximal humeral internal locking system is widely used in the proximal humeral fracture. The biomechanical stability of two different internal fixation models for the treatment of the poor medial column support proximal humeral fractures with proximal humeral internal locking system and proximal humeral internal locking system with fibular allograft augmentation is still unclear. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the biomechanical stability of the proximal humeral intemallocking system and proximal humeral internal locking system with fibular allograft augmentation in the poor medial column support proximal humeral fracture with finite element analysis, and to compare the difference in fixation modes in humeral calcar supporting screws under different fixing methods. METHODS: The proximal CT data of osteoporosis were obtained. According to the 5-mm osteotomy of the humerus, the posterior medial column of the humerus was established and divided into two groups. Group A was the proximal humeral internal locking system plate group, in which the A 1 group was placed in the proximal end of the plate, the A2 group was the E screw missing, the A3 group was the D screw missing; the 8 group received the proximal humeral intemallocking system plate combined with fibular allograft augmentation, and all screws was placed in the proximal end of the plate in the 81 group. In the 82 group, E screw was missing; in the 83 group, D screw was missing. The three-dimensional finite element method was used to analyze the biomechanical stability of different groups of models under indirect violence. RESULTS AND CONCLUSION: (1) In terms of structural stability, 8 group was significantly better than A group. The structural stability of A 1 group and A3 group of A group was comparable and better than that in A2 group. In 8 group, the structural stability of 81 group and 82 group was comparable and superior to 83 group. (2) For the poor medial column support proximal humeral fracture, the mechanical stability of the proximal humeral internal locking system plate combined with fibular allograft augmentation was better than that of the proximal humeral intemallocking system plate alone. When the fibular support was combined, the screw placement in the proximal end of the plate is optimal, and D screw has an important stabilizing effect on the support of the poor medial column support proximal humeral fracture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To investigate the promoting effects and mechanisms of low intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) on the migration of bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs). The BMSCs migration was researched from cell and animal experiments. In the cell experiment, the BMSCs was treated using LIPUS (30 mW/cm2, 20 min/day, 2 days), and the wound healing and transwell migration were observed. In the animal experiment, the BMSCs labelled with green fluorescent protein (GFP) were injected into rats with femoral defects via the tail vein (1 × 106/mL). The healing of bone was detected using x-ray and sampled for hematoxylin & eosin (H&E) staining and fluorescence microscopy. About the mechanisms, the cellular F-actin of cytoskeleton was stained with FITC-phalloidin. The changes of BMSCs genes after LIPUS treatment were screened using microarray assay and verified using quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). The biological processes of those genes were predicted by KEGG analysis. The protein expression levels of FAK, ERK1/2 and myosin II related migration were detected using western blotting. The results showed LIPUS promoted the BMSCs migration (p <.05) without significant temperature changes (p >.05) in vitro and in vivo than control group (p <.05). The cytoskeletal rearrangement was carried out, and the ITGA8 gene related with cell migration was found with high expression after LIPUS treatment (p <.05). FAK inhibitor (PF-573228) and ERK1/2 inhibitor (U0126) were proved, in turn, decreased the BMSCs migration induced using LIPUS (p <.05). LIPUS can promote the BMSCs migration in vitro and in vivo, one mechanism may be related to the activation of FAK-ERK1/2 signalling pathways using LIPUS.Experiments in vivo and in vitro were designed to explore the migration and mechanisms of BMSCs treated using LIPUS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms to investigate the effect of low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) for differentiation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) and the feasibility of simultaneously inducing into osteoblasts and vascular endothelial cells within the cell culture medium in which two inductive agents are added at the same time with or without LIPUS. Cells were divided into a non-induced group, an osteoblast-induced group, a vascular endothelial-induced group, and a bidirectional differentiation-induced group. Each group was further subdivided into LIPUS and non-LIPUS groups. The cell proliferation in each group was measured by MTT assay. Cell morphological and ultrastructural changes were observed by inverted phase contrast microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. The differentiation of BMSCs was detected by confocal microscopy, flow cytometry and quantitative RT-PCR. Results demonstrated that both osteoblast and vascular endothelial cell differentiation markers were expressed in the bidirectional differentiation induction group and early osteogenesis and angiogenesis appeared. The cell proliferation, differentiation rate and expression of osteocalcin and vWF in the LIPUS groups were all significantly higher than those in the corresponding non-LIPUS group (p <.05), suggesting LIPUS treatment can promote the differentiation efficiency and rate of BMSCs, especially in the bidirectional differentiation induction group. This study suggests the combination of LIPUS and dual-inducing agents could induce and accelerate simultaneous differentiation of BMSCs to osteoblasts and vascular endothelial cells. These findings indicate the method could be applied to research on generating vascularized bone tissue with a shape and function that mimics natural bone to accelerate early osteogenesis and angiogenesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acoustic and dielectric properties of Pb[(Zn1/3Nb2/3)1-xTix]O3 (PZN-xPT) single crystals with x=0.045 have been studied by the high-resolution micro-Brillouin scattering and dielectric spectroscopy in a wide temperature range. The softening of the Brillouin shift and the increase of dielectric relaxation time upon cooling indicated the formation of polar nanoregions (PNRs) and the slowing down of their dynamics. In contrast to the acoustic properties of typical model relaxors such as lead magnesioniobate, the change in the Brillouin shift near its minimum became sharper on heating compared to the change on cooling, pointing to the clear existence of hysteresis in the dynamics of the diffuse phase transition in PZN-4.5%PT. Since the number of PNRs will increase upon cooling, it may be expected that the kinetics of the phase transition would become slower, the lower the transition temperature resulting in the more sluggish, broad feature of the Brillouin shift observed during cooling. This result may indicate that the number and size of polar nanoregions, which are dependent on temperature, play an important role in the development of the mesoscopic ferroelectric order in PZN-4.5%PT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The N on- A ffinity A ware G rouping based resource A llocation (NAGA) method toward the G eneral VM P lacement (GP) problem enables (1) some VMs to be co-located onto the same PM while the VMs are required to be placed onto distinct PMs; and (2) some VMs to be dispersedly placed onto distinct PMs while the VMs are required to be co-located onto the same PM, leading to a serious performance degradation of application running over multiple VMs in cloud computing. In this work we study an A ffinity A ware VM P lacement (AAP) problem and propose a J oint A ffinity A ware G rouping and B in P acking (JAGBP) method to remedy the deficiency of the NAGA method. We firstly introduce affinity of VMs to identify affinity relationships to VMs which are required to be placed with a special VM placement pattern, such as colocation or disperse placement, and formulate the AAP problem. Then, we propose an affinity aware resource scheduling framework, and provide methods to obtain and identify the affinity relationships between VMs, and the JAGBP method. Lastly, we present holistic evaluation experiments to validate the feasibility and evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. The results demonstrate the significance of introduced affinity and the effectiveness of JAGBP method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growing availability of various optical and laser scanners, it is easy to capture different kinds of mesh models which are inevitably corrupted with noise. Although many mesh denoising methods proposed in recent years can produce encouraging results, most of them still suffer from their computational efficiencies. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient approach for mesh denoising while preserving geometric features. Specifically, our method consists of three steps: initial vertex filtering, normal estimation, and vertex update. At the initial vertex filtering step, we introduce a fast iterative vertex filter to substantially reduce noise interference. With the initially filtered mesh from the above step, we then estimate face and vertex normals: an unstandardized bilateral filter to efficiently smooth face normals, and an efficient scheme to estimate vertex normals with the filtered face normals. Finally, at the vertex update step, by utilizing both the filtered face normals and estimated vertex normals obtained from the previous step, we propose a novel iterative vertex update algorithm to efficiently update vertex positions. The qualitative and quantitative comparisons show that our method can outperform the selected state of the art methods, in particular, its computational efficiency (up to about 32 times faster). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the molecular adsorption behavior of the SnO 2 (221) crystal plane is simulated by density functional theory, and the photoelectric properties of the crystal plane are studied. Through theoretical simulation, H 2 O, O 2 , and N 2 molecules are located on three different adsorption active sites of the crystal plane. The individual adsorption of the three molecules reduces the conductivity of the crystal plane. The conductivity increases when the molecules are co-adsorbed. The characteristic adsorption species (CAS) of the crystal plane are H 2 O and O 2 molecules. This is consistent with the experimental results of electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The O 2 molecule shifts the response peak of the photocurrent spectrum to a low wavelength. Understanding the CAS of the crystal plane and its influence on the optical and electrical properties of materials has enlightening significance for further analysis of the photoelectric behavior of materials, and is helpful to provide the theoretical and experimental basis for the controllable design and synthesis of gas-sensitive materials. [Display omitted] • The characteristic adsorption species of the SnO 2 (221) crystal plane are H 2 O and O 2 molecules. • H 2 O, O 2 , and N 2 molecules have different adsorption active sites. • The individual adsorption of the three molecules alone decreases the crystal plane conductivity, but the co-adsorption increases it. • The response peak of the photocurrent spectrum for O 2 molecule adsorption shifts to a lower wavelength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• (Fe 0.82 Si 0.04 B 0.13 C 0.01) 95 Co 5 amorphous alloy with 5 at. % Co addition exhibits a high B s of 1.73 T and a low H c of 8.9 A/m. • The (Fe 0.82 Si 0.04 B 0.13 C 0.01) 90 Co 10 alloy without nucleating elements could form a controllable amorphous/nanocrystalline dual-phase microstructure. • Magnetic properties and domain wall structure of amorphous and amorphous/nanocrystalline two-phase alloy are characterized. • The coarse grains result in strong pinning of the domain walls, leading to poor magnetic properties. Amorphous ribbons of (Fe 0.82 Si 0.04 B 0.13 C 0.01) 100- x Co x (x = 0, 5, 10, and 15) were prepared by the melt-spinning technique, and their microstructure and magnetic properties were investigated. It was observed that the saturation magnetic flux density (B s) of the alloys could be efficiently increased from 1.64 to 1.78 T by Co addition. Particularly, the (Fe 0.82 Si 0.04 B 0.13 C 0.01) 95 Co 5 amorphous alloy with 5 at. % Co exhibited a high B s of 1.73 T and a low coercivity (H c) of 8.9 A/m, which implies a potential industrial application. The (Fe 0.82 Si 0.04 B 0.13 C 0.01) 90 Co 10 alloy developed a dual-phase microstructure composed of the bcc-Fe(Co) crystalline phase of size 54 nm that was nonuniformly embedded in the amorphous matrix and exhibited an approximately linear hysteresis loop after annealing at 380 ℃ for 20 min. Magnetic domain walls were observed to support the variation of soft magnetic properties with different annealing temperatures. It is demonstrated that the (Fe 0.82 Si 0.04 B 0.13 C 0.01) 90 Co 10 alloy can form a controllable amorphous/nanocrystalline dual-phase microstructure after appropriate heat treatment even without the nucleating elements such as Cu or Au. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]