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Abstract A Mueller matrix covers all the polarization information of the measured sample, however the combination of its 16 elements is sometimes not intuitive enough to describe and identify the key characteristics of polarization changes. Within the Poincaré sphere system, this study achieves a spatial representation of the Mueller matrix: the Global-Polarization Stokes Ellipsoid (GPSE). With the help of Monte Carlo simulations combined with anisotropic tissue models, three basic characteristic parameters of GPSE are proposed and explained, where the V parameter represents polarization maintenance ability, and the E and D † parameters represent the degree of anisotropy. Furthermore, based on GPSE system, a dynamic analysis of skeletal muscle dehydration process demonstrates the monitoring effect of GPSE from an application perspective, while confirming its robustness and accuracy.

The security issue of CPS (cyber-physical systems) is of great importance for their stable operation. Within the framework of system identification, this paper proposed a maximum likelihood estimation algorithm for FIR (finite impulse response) systems with binary observations and data tampering attacks. In the case of data transmission in the communication network being subjected to data tampering attacks after the FIR system sends out data, the objective of this study was to design an algorithm for estimating the system parameters and infer the attack strategies using the proposed algorithm. To begin, the maximum likelihood function of the available data was established. Then, parameter estimation algorithms were proposed for both known and unknown attack strategies. Meanwhile, the convergence condition and convergence proof of these algorithms were provided. Finally, the effectiveness of the designed algorithm was verified by numerical simulations.

Myricetin, a natural flavonoid found in various foods, was investigated for its antiviral effect against transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV). This α-coronavirus causes significant economic losses in the global swine industry. The study focused on the papain-like protease (PLpro), which plays a crucial role in coronavirus immune evasion by mediating deubiquitination. Targeting PLpro could potentially disrupt viral replication and enhance antiviral responses. The results demonstrated that myricetin effectively inhibited TGEV-induced cytopathic effects in a dose-dependent manner, with an EC50 value of 31.19 μM. Myricetin significantly reduced TGEV viral load within 48 h after an 8-h co-incubation period. Further investigations revealed that myricetin at a concentration of 100 μM directly inactivated TGEV and suppressed its intracellular replication stage. Moreover, pretreatment with 100 μM myricetin conferred a protective effect on PK-15 cells against TGEV infection. Myricetin competitively inhibited PLpro with an IC50 value of 6.563 μM. Molecular docking experiments show that myricetin binds to the Cys102 residue of PLpro through conventional hydrogen bonds, Pi-sulfur, and Pi-alkyl interactions. This binding was confirmed through site-directed mutagenesis experiments, indicating myricetin as a potential candidate for preventing and treating TGEV infection.

Pullorum disease (PD) is a bacterial infection caused by Salmonella pullorum (S. pullorum) that affects poultry. It is highly infectious and often fatal. Antibiotics are currently the mainstay of prophylactic and therapeutic treatments for PD, but their use can lead to the development of resistance in pathogenic bacteria and disruption of the host's intestinal flora. We added neomycin sulfate and different doses of tannic acid (TA) to the drinking water of chicks at 3 days of age and infected them with PD by intraperitoneal injection of S. pullorum at 9 days of age. We analyzed intestinal histopathological changes and the expression of immune-related genes and proteins by using the plate smear method, histological staining, real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR, ELISA kits, and 16S rRNA Analysis of intestinal flora. The results demonstrate that S. pullorum induces alterations in the immune status and impairs the functionality of the liver and intestinal barrier. We found that tannic acid significantly ameliorated S. pullorum-induced liver and intestinal damage, protected the intestinal physical and chemical barriers, restored the intestinal immune barrier function, and regulated the intestinal flora. Our results showed that TA has good anti-diarrhoeal, growth-promoting, immune-regulating, intestinal barrier-protecting and intestinal flora-balancing effects, and the best effect was achieved at an additive dose of 0.2%.

Gaze estimation, as a technique that reflects individual attention, can be used for disability assistance and assisting physicians in diagnosing diseases such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Parkinson’s disease, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Various techniques have been proposed for gaze estimation and achieved high resolution. Among these approaches, electrooculography (EOG)-based gaze estimation, as an economical and effective method, offers a promising solution for practical applications. Objective: In this paper, we systematically investigated the possible EOG electrode locations which are spatially distributed around the orbital cavity. Afterward, quantities of informative features to characterize physiological information of eye movement from the temporal-spectral domain are extracted from the seven differential channels. Methods and procedures: To select the optimum channels and relevant features, and eliminate irrelevant information, a heuristical search algorithm (i.e., forward stepwise strategy) is applied. Subsequently, a comparative analysis of the impacts of electrode placement and feature contributions on gaze estimation is evaluated via 6 classic models with 18 subjects. Results: Experimental results showed that the promising performance was achieved both in the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) within a wide gaze that ranges from −50° to +50°. The MAE and RMSE can be improved to 2.80° and 3.74° ultimately, while only using 10 features extracted from 2 channels. Compared with the prevailing EOG-based techniques, the performance improvement of MAE and RMSE range from 0.70° to 5.48° and 0.66° to 5.42°, respectively. Conclusion: We proposed a robust EOG-based gaze estimation approach by systematically investigating the optimal channel/feature combination. The experimental results indicated not only the superiority of the proposed approach but also its potential for clinical application. Clinical and translational impact statement: Accurate gaze estimation is a key step for assisting disabilities and accurate diagnosis of various diseases including ASD, Parkinson’s disease, and ADHD. The proposed approach can accurately estimate the points of gaze via EOG signals, and thus has the potential for various related medical applications.

Abstract Background Lung cancer (LC) is a fatal malignancy and often accompanied with converting normal fibroblasts to cancer‐associated fibroblasts (CAFs). Exosomal lncRNA AGAP2‐AS1 has been elucidated to be a potent prognostic factor for LC, while its role in activating CAFs is largely unknown. Methods We first extracted exosomes from LC patients and co‐cultured them with MRC5 cells to observe the state of MRC5 cells, detect AGAP2‐AS1 using real‐time quantitative polymerase chain reaction, and then analyze the interaction between EIF4A3 and AGAP2‐AS1 using RNA pull down experiments. CCK‐8 assay was used to detect cell proliferation. Transwell experiments demonstrated the regulation of MRC5 cells and, finally, the role of MyD88/NF‐κB in the downstream mechanism of EIF4A3/AGAP2‐AS1 was explored by RNA interference technology and pyrrolidinedithiocarbamic acid inhibition. Results We demonstrated that exosomes from the LC patients (cancer‐exo) notably increased the metastatic ability of MRC‐5 cells, promoting the expressions of the CAF biomarkers and lncRNA AGAP2‐AS1. Overexpression of lncRNA AGAP2‐AS1 prominently activated MRC‐5 cells. Moreover, EIF4A3 was upregulated in the cancer‐exo‐treated MRC‐5 cells, and EIF4A3 was verified to bind with lncRNA AGAP2‐AS1 to improve its stability. The MyD88/NF‐κB signaling pathway was subsequently proved to be positively regulated by lncRNA AGAP2‐AS1, and the promotive role of lncRNA AGAP2‐AS1 in LC and activating CAFs was confirmed in vivo. Conclusions The positive feedback of EIF4A3/AGAP2‐AS1/MyD88/NF‐κB signaling pathway contributed to the activation of CAFs and exacerbated LC in turn, revealing a novel regulatory axis underlying LC.

In recent years, automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology has improved significantly. However, the training process for an ASR model is complex, involving large amounts of data and a large number of algorithms. The task of training a new model for air traffic control (ATC) is considerable, as it may require many researchers for its maintenance and upgrading. In this paper, we developed an improved fusion method that can adapt the language model (LM) in ASR to the domain of air traffic control. Instead of using vocabulary in traditional fusion, this method uses the ATC instructions to improve the LM. The perplexity shows that the LM of the improved fusion is much better than that of the use of vocabulary. With vocabulary fusion, the CER in the ATC corpus decreases from 0.3493 to 0.2876. The improved fusion reduces the CER of the ATC corpora from 0.3493 to 0.2761. Although there is only a difference of less than 2% between the two fusions, the perplexity shows that the LM of the improved fusion is much better.

BackgroundAdvanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is characterized as symptomatic tumors [performance status (PS) score of 1-2], vascular invasion and extrahepatic spread, but patients with PS1 alone may be eliminated from this stage. Although liver resection is used for liver-confined HCC, its role in patients with PS1 alone remains controversial. Therefore, we aimed to explore its application in such patients and identify potential candidates.MethodsEligible liver-confined HCC patients undergoing liver resection were retrospectively screened in 15 Chinese tertiary hospitals, with limited tumor burden, liver function and PS scores. Cox-regression survival analysis was used to investigate the prognostic factors and develop a risk-scoring system, according to which patients were substratified using fitting curves and the predictive values of PS were explored in each stratification.ResultsFrom January 2010 to October 2021, 1535 consecutive patients were selected. In the whole cohort, PS, AFP, tumor size and albumin were correlated with survival (adjusted P

Atomically precise boundaries of two-dimensional crystals can play host to novel electronic properties. Here, the authors identify distinct one dimensional electronic states corresponding to different atomically sharp edge terminations of monolayer 1H-NbSe2 and, as a result, the intrinsic charge density wave in the material is reconstructed into a stripe ordering near the crystal edge.

Elimination of intra-artifacts in EEG has been overlooked in most of the existing sleep staging systems, especially in deep learning-based approaches. Whether intra-artifacts, originated from the eye movement, chin muscle firing, or heart beating, etc., in EEG signals would lead to a positive or a negative masking effect on deep learning-based sleep staging systems was investigated in this paper. We systematically analyzed several traditional pre-processing methods involving fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA), Information Maximization (Infomax), and Second-order Blind Source Separation (SOBI). On top of these methods, a SOBI-WT method based on the joint use of the SOBI and Wavelet Transform (WT) is proposed. It offered an effective solution for suppressing artifact components while retaining residual informative data. To provide a comprehensive comparative analysis, these pre-processing methods were applied to eliminate the intra-artifacts and the processed signals were fed to two ready-to-use deep learning models, namely two-step hierarchical neural network (THNN) and SimpleSleepNet for automatic sleep staging. The evaluation was performed on two widely used public datasets, Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies (MASS) and Sleep-EDF Expanded, and a clinical dataset that was collected in Huashan Hospital of Fudan University, Shanghai, China (HSFU). The proposed SOBI-WT method increased the accuracy from 79.0% to 81.3% on MASS, 83.3% to 85.7% on Sleep-EDF Expanded, and 75.5% to 77.1% on HSFU compared with the raw EEG signal, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the intra-artifacts bring out a masking negative impact on the deep learning-based sleep staging systems and the proposed SOBI-WT method has the best performance in diminishing this negative impact compared with other artifact elimination methods.

Electrical status epilepticus during sleep (ESES) is an epileptic encephalopathy in children with complex clinical manifestations. It is accompanied by specific electroencephalography (EEG) patterns of continuous spike and slow-waves. Quantifying such EEG patterns is critical to the diagnosis of ESES. While most of the existing automatic ESES quantification systems ignore the morphological variations of the signal as well as the individual variability among subjects. To address these issues, this paper presents a hybrid expert system that dedicates to mimicking the decision-making process of clinicians in ESES quantification by taking the morphological variations, individual variability, and medical knowledge into consideration. The proposed hybrid system not only offers a general scheme that could propel a semi-auto morphology analysis-based expert decision model to a fully automated ESES quantification with biogeography-based optimization (BBO), but also proposes a more precise individualized quantification system to involve the personalized characteristics by adopting an individualized parameters-selection framework. The feasibility and reliability of the proposed method are evaluated on a clinical dataset collected from twenty subjects at Children’s Hospital of Fudan University, Shanghai, China. The estimation error for the individualized quantitative descriptor ESES is 0-4.32% and the average estimation error is 0.95% for all subjects. Experimental results show the presented system outperforms existing works and the individualized system significantly improves the performance of ESES quantification. The favorable results indicate that the proposed hybrid expert system for automatic ESES quantification is promising to support the diagnosis of ESES.

Deep sleep staging networks have reached top performance on large-scale datasets. However, these models perform poorer when training and testing on small sleep cohorts due to data inefficiency. Transferring well-trained models from large-scale datasets (source domain) to small sleep cohorts (target domain) is a promising solution but still remains challenging due to the domain-shift issue. In this work, an unsupervised domain adaptation approach, domain statistics alignment (DSA), is developed to bridge the gap between the data distribution of source and target domains. DSA adapts the source models on the target domain by modulating the domain-specific statistics of deep features stored in the Batch Normalization (BN) layers. Furthermore, we have extended DSA by introducing cross-domain statistics in each BN layer to perform DSA adaptively (AdaDSA). The proposed methods merely need the well-trained source model without access to the source data, which may be proprietary and inaccessible. DSA and AdaDSA are universally applicable to various deep sleep staging networks that have BN layers. We have validated the proposed methods by extensive experiments on two state-of-the-art deep sleep staging networks, DeepSleepNet+ and U-time. The performance was evaluated by conducting various transfer tasks on six sleep databases, including two large-scale databases, MASS and SHHS, as the source domain, four small sleep databases as the target domain. Thereinto, clinical sleep records acquired in Huashan Hospital, Shanghai, were used. The results show that both DSA and AdaDSA could significantly improve the performance of source models on target domains, providing novel insights into the domain generalization problem in sleep staging tasks.

Motor function assessment is crucial for post-stroke rehabilitation. Conventional evaluation methods are subjective, heavily depending on the experience of therapists. In light of the strong correlation between the stroke severity level and the performance of activities of daily living (ADLs), we explored the possibility of automatically evaluating the upper-limb Brunnstrom Recovery Stage (BRS) via three typical ADLs (tooth brushing, face washing and drinking). Multimodal data (acceleration, angular velocity, surface electromyography) were synchronously collected from 5 upper-limb-worn sensor modules. The performance of BRS evaluation system is known to be variable with different system parameters (e.g., number of sensor modules, feature types and classifiers). We systematically searched for the optimal parameters from different data segmentation strategies (five window lengths and four overlaps), 42 types of features, 12 feature optimization techniques and 9 classifiers with the leave-one-subject-out cross-validation. To achieve reliable and low-cost monitoring, we further explored whether it was possible to obtain a satisfactory result using a relatively small number of sensor modules. As a result, the proposed approach can correctly recognize the stages of all 27 participants using only three sensor modules with the optimized data segmentation parameters (window length: 7s, overlap: 50%), extracted features (simple square integral, slope sign change, modified mean absolute value 1 and modified mean absolute value 2), the feature optimization method (principal component analysis) and the logistic regression classifier. According to the literature, this is the first study to comprehensively optimize sensor configuration and parameters in each stage of the BRS classification framework. The proposed approach can serve as a factor-screening tool towards the automatic BRS classification and is promising to be further used at home.

Estimating the finger forces from surface electromyography (sEMG) is essential for diverse applications (e.g., human-machine interfacing). The performance of pre-trained sEMG-force models degenerates significantly when applied on a second day, due to the large cross-day variation of sEMG characteristics. Previous studies mainly employed transfer learning algorithms to tackle this problem. However, transfer learning algorithms normally require data collected on the second day for model calibration, increasing the inconvenience in practical use. In this work, we investigated the effect of model regularization on this issue. Specifically, 256-channel high-density sEMG (HDsEMG) signals with varying finger forces were collected on different days (3–25 days apart). We applied randomly generated channel perturbations (“masks”) to feature maps of randomly selected channels in training dataset. The channel masks of the training set were generated randomly and independently in each narrow time window (~20 ms). We assumed that by learning from randomly masked feature maps (randomness is the central aspect), the model would not be biased by a small number of features but would be based on learning from a global perspective, therefore avoiding overfitting to the within-day EMG patterns. Moore-Penrose inverse model regularization was also employed as a baseline method, with results showing that cross-day EMG-force models require a higher tolerance parameter compared with within-day applications. In combination with the Moore-Penrose inverse model regularization, further applying random channel masks to the training set significantly improved model performance in cross-day validation.

Abstract Two-dimensional (2D) Stiefel-Whitney insulator (SWI), which is characterized by the second Stiefel-Whitney class, is a class of topological phases with zero Berry curvature. As an intriguing topological state, it has been well studied in theory but seldom realized in realistic materials. Here we propose that a large class of liganded Xenes, i.e., hydrogenated and halogenated 2D group-IV honeycomb lattices, are 2D SWIs. The nontrivial topology of liganded Xenes is identified by the bulk topological invariant and the existence of protected corner states. Moreover, the large and tunable bandgap (up to 3.5 eV) of liganded Xenes will facilitate the experimental characterization of the 2D SWI phase. Our findings not only provide abundant realistic material candidates that are experimentally feasible but also draw more fundamental research interest towards the topological physics associated with Stiefel-Whitney class in the absence of Berry curvature.

BackgroundHepatoma arterial-embolization prognostic (HAP) series scores have been proposed for prognostic prediction in patients with unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma (uHCC) undergoing transarterial chemoembolization (TACE). However, their prognostic value in TACE plus sorafenib (TACE-S) remains unknown. Here, we aim to evaluate their prognostic performance in such conditions and identify the best model for this combination therapy.MethodsBetween January 2012 and December 2018, consecutive patients with uHCC receiving TACE-S were recruited from 15 tertiary hospitals in China. Cox regression analyses were used to investigate the prognostic values of baseline factors and every scoring system. Their prognostic performance and discriminatory performance were evaluated and confirmed in subgroup analyses.ResultsA total of 404 patients were enrolled. In the whole cohort, the median follow-up period was 44.2 (interquartile range (IQR), 33.2–60.7) months, the median overall survival (OS) time was 13.2 months, and 336 (83.2%) patients died at the end of the follow-up period. According to multivariate analyses, HAP series scores were independent prognostic indicators of OS. In addition, the C-index, Akaike information criterion (AIC) values, and time-dependent area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) indicated that modified HAP (mHAP)-III had the best predictive performance. Furthermore, the results remained consistent in most subsets of patients.ConclusionHAP series scores exhibited good predictive ability in uHCC patients accepting TACE-S, and the mHAP-III score was found to be superior to the other HAP series scores in predicting OS. Future prospective high-quality studies should be conducted to confirm our results and help with treatment decision-making.

Potato holds significant importance as a staple food crop worldwide, particularly in addressing the needs of a growing population. Accurate estimation of the potato Leaf Area Index (LAI) plays a crucial role in predicting crop yield and facilitating precise management practices. Leveraging the capabilities of UAV platforms, we harnessed their efficiency in capturing multi-source, high-resolution remote sensing data. Our study focused on estimating potato LAI utilizing UAV-based digital red–green–blue (RGB) images, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) points, and hyperspectral images (HSI). From these data sources, we computed four sets of indices and employed them as inputs for four different machine-learning regression models: Support Vector Regression (SVR), Random Forest Regression (RFR), Histogram-based Gradient Boosting Regression Tree (HGBR), and Partial Least-Squares Regression (PLSR). We assessed the accuracy of individual features as well as various combinations of feature levels. Among the three sensors, HSI exhibited the most promising results due to its rich spectral information, surpassing the performance of LiDAR and RGB. Notably, the fusion of multiple features outperformed any single component, with the combination of all features of all sensors achieving the highest R2 value of 0.782. HSI, especially when utilized in calculating vegetation indices, emerged as the most critical feature in the combination experiments. LiDAR played a relatively smaller role in potato LAI estimation compared to HSI and RGB. Additionally, we discovered that the RFR excelled at effectively integrating features.

Abstract Background Maresin-1 (MaR1) is an anti-inflammatory pro-resolving mediator and is considered a potential regulator of metabolic diseases. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a very common metabolic liver disease. However, little information is available on the relationship between MaR1 and NAFLD in humans. Therefore, the study explored the association between serum MaR1 levels and NAFLD. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted in 240 Chinese people, including 116 non-NAFLD subjects and 124 NAFLD patients. Serum MaR1 levels were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The association between MaR1 and NAFLD was assessed. Results Circulating MaR1 levels in NAFLD patients were markedly lower than those in non-NAFLD subjects (63.63 [59.87–73.93] vs 73.11 [65.12–84.50] pg/mL, P = 0.000). The percentages of patients with NAFLD gradually decreased with the increase of MaR1 quartiles (P

BackgroundRegulator of calcineurin 2 (RCAN2) has been reported to promote food intake and weight gain in animal studies. However, its effect on body weight in humans is unclear.ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate the relationship between serum RCAN2 concentrations and participants with overweight/obesity.MethodsA cross-sectional study was performed in 872 Chinese adults, including 348 participants with normal weight (NW), 397 participants with overweight (OW), and 127 participants with obesity (OB). All participants were divided into NW, OW and OB groups according to their body mass index (BMI). Serum RCAN2 concentrations were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay.ResultsSerum RCAN2 concentrations gradually increased with the increase of BMI (p < 0.001). The percentages of OW/OB gradually increased in tandem with increasing tertiles of RCAN2 (p < 0.001). Additionally, serum RCAN2 concentrations were significantly correlated with a series of anthropometric and metabolic parameters, predominantly including body weight, BMI, SBP, DBP, total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL-C, LDL-C (all p < 0.05). Furthermore, logistic regression analysis showed that the risk of OW/OB was significantly increased with the increase of serum RCAN2 concentrations. Receiver operation characteristic (ROC) curve analysis revealed that serum RCAN2, especially serum RCAN2/(AST/ALT) ratio, might serve as a candidate biomarker for obesity.ConclusionSerum RCAN2 concentrations were increased in subjects with OW/OB. The increased serum RCAN2 concentrations were associated with the increased risks of OW/OB.

The behavior decision-making algorithm plays an important role in ensuring the safe driving of autonomous vehicles. However, existing behavior decision-making methods lack the capability to cope with future motion uncertainty in traffic, because the historical state of vehicles are not considered. This article proposes a novel driving behavior decision-making method EnMFO-ImGRU based on Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) and Moth-Flame Optimization algorithm (MFO). Four improvements are proposed in EnMFO-ImGRU. First, to consider the driving information of the vehicles on the road, ImGRU is designed based on a double-layer GRU. Second, to promote decisions accuracy, Support Vector Machine (SVM), which has good performance in classification problems, replaces the softmax classifier to train the output of the ImGRU. Third, to promote the classification capability of SVM, MFO is introduced to optimize the key parameters that affect the performance of SVM. Finally, to promote the optimization capability of MFO, we propose the Enhanced Moth-Flame Optimization algorithm (EnMFO). A new position updating method is proposed in EnMFO. The experimental results on the NGSIM dataset show that EnMFO-ImGRU brings higher accuracy than existing methods for the behavior decision-making results of autonomous vehicles.

The Ba(Fe0.5Ta0.5)O3@DA/PVDF flexible composite films with sandwich-structured are prepared by solution-casting method. According to SEM image, the thickness of the composite film is about 15 μm and the each layer is about 5 μm. The sandwich-structured nanocomposite films not only have higher permittivity but also lower AC conductivity. The high permittivity is due to the large permittivity of BFT and the enhanced interface polarization between ceramic particles and polymer matrix. The low AC conductivity is due to the absence of conductive pathways in the PVDF layer. At low electric field strength of 150 MV/m, the energy density of sandwich-structure composite films filled with 1 vol% is 1.93 J/cm3. When the breakdown strength is 250 MV/m, the maximum energy storage density is increased to 4.87 J/cm3. The sandwich-structure Ba(Fe0.5Ta0.5)O3@DA/PVDF flexible composite films with outstanding energy storage properties in lower electric field can be used for wearable devices in the future. Keywords: Sandwich structure, Conductive pathways, Energy storage, Lower electric field

Background: The promoting effect of the regulator of calcineurin 2 (RCAN2) in hepatic steatosis has been observed in animal studies. However, the association of RCAN2 with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in humans remains unclear. This study aimed to evaluate the expression of RCAN2 in the liver of mice with hepatic steatosis and in the serum of NAFLD patients and to explore the relationship between serum RCAN2 levels and NAFLD.Methods: The mRNA and protein expression of RCAN2 were detected by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) and Western blot. NAFLD was diagnosed by abdominal ultrasonography. Circulating RCAN2 levels were measured by ELISA kits. The relationship between serum RCAN2 levels and NAFLD was assessed.Results: qRT-PCR and Western blot analysis showed that compared with the corresponding controls, the mRNA and protein expression of RCAN2 were significantly increased in the liver tissues of db/db and mice on a high-fat diet. Serum RCAN2 levels were markedly elevated in NAFLD patients compared with non-NAFLD subjects. Binary logistic regression analysis showed that serum RCAN2 levels were significantly associated with NAFLD. Receiver operation characteristic (ROC) curve analysis showed that serum RCAN2 might act as a predictive biomarker for NAFLD [area under the curve (AUC) = 0.663, 95% CI = 0.623–0.702], and the serum RCAN2/(AST/ALT) ratio displayed improved predictive accuracy (AUC = 0.816, 95% CI = 0.785–0.846).Conclusion: Elevated serum RCAN2 levels were associated with an increased risk of NAFLD. Serum RCAN2, especially the serum RCAN2/(AST/ALT) ratio, might be a candidate diagnostic marker for NAFLD.

In this paper, a novel method based on edge spread information fitting (ESIF) is proposed to accurately calibrate the geometric parameters of a focused light field camera. A focused light field camera with flexible adjustment of spatial resolution and angular resolution is designed and built to capture the four-dimensional light field information of the scenes, and the geometric relationship between the focus plane of the camera and its internal parameters is derived to establish and simplify the calibration model. After that, a new algorithm based on sub-pixel edge fitting is designed to accurately detect corners, and the minimum corner size can be calculated to confirm the focus plane. In the simulation experiments, the error is 0.083% between the ground truth and the calibration result. The physical experiments show that our method is effective and reliable for the geometric calibration of a focused light field camera. Our method cleverly utilizes the special imaging geometric relationship of the focused light field camera to ensure the better calibration accuracy, which makes the calibration process more reliable.

Three-dimensional (3D) image reconstruction is an important field of computer vision for restoring the 3D geometry of a given scene. Due to the demand for large amounts of memory, prevalent methods of 3D reconstruction yield inaccurate results, because of which the highly accuracy reconstruction of a scene remains an outstanding challenge. This study proposes a cascaded depth residual inference network, called DRI-MVSNet, that uses a cross-view similarity-based feature map fusion module for residual inference. It involves three improvements. First, a combined module is used for processing channel-related and spatial information to capture the relevant contextual information and improve feature representation. It combines the channel attention mechanism and spatial pooling networks. Second, a cross-view similarity-based feature map fusion module is proposed that learns the similarity between pairs of pixel in each source and reference image at planes of different depths along the frustum of the reference camera. Third, a deep, multi-stage residual prediction module is designed to generate a high-precision depth map that uses a non-uniform depth sampling strategy to construct hypothetical depth planes. The results of extensive experiments show that DRI-MVSNet delivers competitive performance on the DTU and the Tanks & Temples datasets, and the accuracy and completeness of the point cloud reconstructed by it are significantly superior to those of state-of-the-art benchmarks.

Pure pursuit algorithm is one of the most effective ways of path tracking in autonomous vehicles. Nevertheless, the tracking accuracy of the existing pure pursuit algorithm is limited by the look-ahead distance. In this paper, to improve the tracking accuracy of the pure pursuit algorithm, a novel pure pursuit algorithm based on the optimized look-ahead distance named OLDPPA is proposed. Four improvements are presented in OLDPPA. Firstly, to find a better look-ahead distance of pure pursuit algorithm, salp swarm algorithm (SSA) is used in pure pursuit algorithm. Secondly, Brownian motion, a random motion mechanism of particles, is introduced in SSA to enhance its exploitation and exploration capabilities. Thirdly, to accelerate the convergence speed of SSA, a weighted mechanism which uses two different weights in the search process to adjust the salps closer to the food source quickly is assigned. Based on innovations 2 and 3, adaptive Brownian motion salp swarm algorithm (ABMSSA) is proposed and applied to pure pursuit algorithm. Finally, a velocity controller which outputs the speed of the next moment according to the distance and time interval between the look-ahead point and the current vehicle position is designed in OLDPPA, to ensure that the vehicle reaches its destination at a specified time. To verify the effectiveness and efficiency of OLDPPA, OLDPPA is applied in four different paths and the corresponding results are compared with other pure pursuit algorithms that use different look-ahead distances. Experimental results show that the tracking accuracy of OLDPPA is better than other algorithms.

Long short-term memory network is one of the most important network architectures of decision-making for self-driving vehicles. Nevertheless, the decision-making accuracy of long short-term memory network is limited, the information of the surrounding vehicles is not taken into consideration, which is critical for the decision-making of the ego vehicle, and the classification capability of long short-term memory network is poor. In this article, a novel network architecture called improved long short-term memory network with support vector machine classifier optimized by grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA-ImLSTM) is proposed. Three improvements are presented in GOA-ImLSTM. Firstly, to consider the information of the surrounding vehicles, a new network architecture, used to extract vital features for self-driving vehicles, with three parallel long short-term memory network units and a network unit serial connected according to vehicle location is designed. Secondly, to improve classification accuracy, support vector machine with stronger classification capability than softmax is introduced to accomplish the classification task. Thirdly, to promote the classification capability of support vector machine, grasshopper optimization algorithm is employed to optimize the parameters of support vector machine. Moreover, to balance exploration and exploitation ability of grasshopper optimization algorithm, dynamic weights in position movement formula are defined. The experiments indicate that GOA-ImLSTM improves the accuracy of results compared with other decision-making methods for self-driving vehicles on the Next Generation SIMulation.

Feature selection, which eliminates irrelevant and redundant features, is one of the most efficient classification methods. However, searching for an optimal subset from the original set is still a challenging problem. This paper proposes a novel feature selection algorithm named hybrid improved dragonfly algorithm (HIDA) which combines the advantages of both mRMR and improved dragonfly algorithm (IDA) in order to generate promising candidate subset and achieve higher classification accuracy rate. Firstly, to generate promising subset, features with small weight have chance to be selected into candidate subset with a small probability in mRMR. Secondly, to balance the exploitation and exploration capabilities of IDA, dynamic swarming factors are proposed to balance global and local capability. Lastly, to enhance the exploitation capability of IDA, quantum local optimum and global optimum are introduced in the position updating mechanism. The performance of HIDA is investigated on ten gene expression datasets and eight UCI data sets from the UCI Machine Learning Data Repository. Results show that the performance of HIDA is superior to BBA, BDA, CDA, LBPSO, MPMDWOA and MSMCCS.

Potato growth depends largely on nitrogen (N) availability in the soil. However, the shallow-root crop coupled with its common cultivation in coarse-textured soils leads to its poor N use efficiency. Fast and accurate estimations of potato tissue N concentrations are urgently needed to assist the decision making in precision fertilization management. Remote sensing has been utilized to evaluate the potato N status by correlating spectral information with lab tests on leaf N concentrations. In this study, a systematic comparison was conducted to quantitatively evaluate the performance of hyperspectral and multispectral images in estimating the potato N status, providing a reference for the trade-off between sensor costs and performance. In the experiment, two potato varieties were planted under four fertilization rates with replicates. UAV images were acquired multiple times during the season with a narrow-band hyperspectral imager. Multispectral reflectance was simulated by merging the relevant narrow bands into broad bands to mimic commonly used multispectral cameras. The whole leaf total N concentration and petiole nitrate-N concentration were obtained from 160 potato leaf samples. A partial least square regression model was developed to estimate the two N status indicators using different groups of image features. The best estimation accuracies were given by reflectance of the full spectra with 2.2 nm narrow, with the coefficient of determination (R2) being 0.78 and root mean square error (RMSE) being 0.41 for the whole leaf total N concentration; while, for the petiole nitrate-N concentration, the 10 nm bands had the best performance (R2 = 0.87 and RMSE = 0.13). Generally, the model performance decreased with an increase of the spectral bandwidth. The hyperspectral full spectra largely outperformed all three multispectral cameras, but there was no significant difference among the three brands of multispectral cameras. The results also showed that spectral bands in the visible regions (400–700 nm) were the most highly correlated with potato N concentrations.

In recent years, automatic sleep staging methods have achieved competitive performance using electroencephalography (EEG) signals. However, the acquisition of EEG signals is cumbersome and inconvenient. Therefore, we propose a novel sleep staging approach using electrooculogram (EOG) signals, which are more convenient to acquire than the EEG. A two-scale convolutional neural network first extracts epoch-wise temporary-equivalent features from raw EOG signals. A recurrent neural network then captures the long-term sequential information. The proposed method was validated on 101 full-night sleep data from two open-access databases, the montreal archive of sleep studies and Sleep-EDF, achieving an overall accuracy of 81.2 and 76.3%, respectively. The results are comparable to those models trained with EEG signals. In addition, comparisons with six state-of-the-art methods further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Overall, this study provides a new avenue for sleep monitoring.

Maize (Zea mays L.) is one of the most consumed grains in the world. Within the context of continuous climate change and the reduced availability of arable land, it is urgent to breed new maize varieties and screen for the desired traits, e.g., high yield and strong stress tolerance. Traditional phenotyping methods relying on manual assessment are time-consuming and prone to human errors. Recently, the application of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) has gained increasing attention in plant phenotyping due to their efficiency in data collection. Moreover, hyperspectral sensors integrated with UAVs can offer data streams with high spectral and spatial resolutions, which are valuable for estimating plant traits. In this study, we collected UAV hyperspectral imagery over a maize breeding field biweekly across the growing season, resulting in 11 data collections in total. Multiple machine learning models were developed to estimate the grain yield and flowering time of the maize breeding lines using the hyperspectral imagery. The performance of the machine learning models and the efficacy of different hyperspectral features were evaluated. The results showed that the models with the multi-temporal imagery outperformed those with imagery from single data collections, and the ridge regression using the full band reflectance achieved the best estimation accuracies, with the correlation coefficients (r) between the estimates and ground truth of 0.54 for grain yield, 0.91 for days to silking, and 0.92 for days to anthesis. In addition, we assessed the estimation performance with data acquired at different growth stages to identify the good periods for the UAV survey. The best estimation results were achieved using the data collected around the tasseling stage (VT) for the grain yield estimation and around the reproductive stages (R1 or R4) for the flowering time estimation. Our results showed that the robust phenotyping framework proposed in this study has great potential to help breeders efficiently estimate key agronomic traits at early growth stages.

Metaheuristic optimization algorithms are one of the most effective methods for solving complex engineering problems. However, the performance of a metaheuristic algorithm is related to its exploration ability and exploitation ability. Therefore, to further improve the African vultures optimization algorithm (AVOA), a new metaheuristic algorithm, an improved African vultures optimization algorithm based on tent chaotic mapping and time-varying mechanism (TAVOA), is proposed. First, a tent chaotic map is introduced for population initialization. Second, the individual's historical optimal position is recorded and applied to individual location updating. Third, a time-varying mechanism is designed to balance the exploration ability and exploitation ability. To verify the effectiveness and efficiency of TAVOA, TAVOA is tested on 23 basic benchmark functions, 28 CEC 2013 benchmark functions and 3 common real-world engineering design problems, and compared with AVOA and 5 other state-of-the-art metaheuristic optimization algorithms. According to the results of the Wilcoxon rank-sum test with 5%, among the 23 basic benchmark functions, the performance of TAVOA has significantly better than that of AVOA on 13 functions. Among the 28 CEC 2013 benchmark functions, the performance of TAVOA on 9 functions is significantly better than AVOA, and on 17 functions is similar to AVOA. Besides, compared with the six metaheuristic optimization algorithms, TAVOA also shows good performance in real-world engineering design problems.

Feature selection enhances classification accuracy by removing irrelevant and redundant feature. Feature selection plays an important role in data mining and pattern recognition. In this paper, we propose a hybrid feature subset selection algorithm called the maximum Pearson maximum distance improved whale optimization algorithm (MPMDIWOA). First, based on Pearson's correlation coefficient and correlation distance, a filter algorithm is proposed named maximum Pearson maximum distance (MPMD). Two parameters are proposed in MPMD to adjust the weights of the relevance and redundancy. Second, the modified whale optimization algorithm can act as a wrapper algorithm. After introducing the maximum value without change (MVWC) and the threshold, the filter algorithm and the wrapper algorithm are combined to form an algorithm called MPMDIWOA. In MPMDIWOA, the filter algorithm and wrapper algorithm are called different times according to changes in MVWC and threshold. Finally, the optimal classification accuracy was found. The proposed method is tested on 10 benchmark datasets from UCI machine learning databases. The experimental results show that the classification accuracy of the proposed algorithm is significantly higher than that of the other three wrapper algorithms and one hybrid algorithm.

3D point cloud simplification is an important pretreatment in surface reconstruction for sparing computer resources and improving reconstruction speed. However, existing methods often sacrifice the simplification precision to improve the simplification speed, or sacrifice the speed to improve precision. A proper balance between the simplification speed and the simplification accuracy is still a challenge. In this paper, we propose a new simplification method based on the importance of point. Named as detail feature points simplified algorithm (DFPSA), this algorithm has distinct processes to achieve improvements in three aspects. First, a rule of k neighborhood search is set to ensure the points found are the closest to the sample point. In this way, the accuracy of calculated normal vector of the point cloud is significantly improved, and the search speed is largely increased. Second, a formula that considers multiple characteristics for measuring the importance of point is proposed. Thereupon, the main detail features of the point cloud are preserved. Finally, an octree structure is employed to simplify the remaining points, through which holes in reconstructing point cloud are obviously reduced. The DFPSA is applied to four different data sets, and the corresponding results are compared with those of other five algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that the DFPSA brings better simplification effects than existing counterparts, and the DFPSA not only can simplify point cloud but also has good effect in simplifying subject's narrow contours.

Sleep stage classification is a fundamental but cumbersome task in sleep analysis. To score the sleep stage automatically, this study presents a stage classification method based on a two-stage neural network. The feature learning stage as the first stage can fuse network trained features with traditional hand-crafted features. A recurrent neural network (RNN) in the second stage is fully utilized for learning temporal information between sleep epochs and obtaining classification results. To solve serious sample imbalance problem, a novel pre-training process combined with data augmentation was introduced. The proposed method was evaluated by two public databases, the Sleep-EDF and Sleep Apnea (SA). The proposed method can achieve the F1-score and Kappa coefficient of 0.806 and 0.80 for healthy subjects, respectively, and achieve 0.790 and 0.74 for the subjects with suspect sleep disorders, respectively. The results show that the method can achieve better performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods for the same databases. Model analysis displayed that the combination of the hand-crafted features and network trained features can improve the classification performance via the comparison experiments. In addition, the RNN is a good choice for learning temporal information in sleep epochs. Besides, the pre-training process with data augmentation is verified that can reduce the impact of sample imbalance. The proposed model has potential to exploit sleep information comprehensively.

Commonly used sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, surface electromyography sensors, etc., which provide a convenient and practical solution for human activity recognition (HAR), have gained extensive attention. However, which kind of sensor can provide adequate information in achieving a satisfactory performance, or whether the position of a single sensor would play a significant effect on the performance in HAR are sparsely studied. In this paper, a comparative study to fully investigate the performance of the aforementioned sensors for classifying four activities (walking, tooth brushing, face washing, drinking) is explored. Sensors are spatially distributed over the human body, and subjects are categorized into three groups (able-bodied people, stroke survivors, and the union of both). Performances of using accelerometer, gyroscope, sEMG, and their combination in each group are evaluated by adopting the Support Vector Machine classifier with the Leave-One-Subject-Out Cross-Validation technique, and the optimal sensor position for each kind of sensor is presented based on the accuracy. Experimental results show that using the accelerometer could obtain the best performance in each group. The highest accuracy of HAR involving stroke survivors was 95.84 ± 1.75% (mean ± standard error), achieved by the accelerometer attached to the extensor carpi ulnaris. Furthermore, taking the practical application of HAR into consideration, a novel approach to distinguish various activities of stroke survivors based on a pre-trained HAR model built on healthy subjects is proposed, the highest accuracy of which is 77.89 ± 4.81% (mean ± standard error) with the accelerometer attached to the extensor carpi ulnaris.