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Tea plant can enrich a large amount of fluorine (F) in the cell wall of its mature leaves, thus posing the risk of excessive intake of F for tea consumers. This study investigated the effect of foliar calcium (Ca) application (0.05-1 mM) on F accumulation in tea plant leaves by analyzing the association of F with cell wall materials, pectin methylesterification structure, and cell wall genes. Ca spray could effectively reduce the F level, the content of wall carbohydrates (excluding the chelate pectin fraction) and the pectin methylesterification degree in tea plant leaves. Correlation analysis further revealed that the tea leaf F content was positively correlated with most of the cell wall materials. Transcriptomics analysis indicated that the key genes involved in reorganization of cell wall polysaccharides (such as CslE6, XTH32, PG, PGIP, PME18, PMEU1, and PMEI9) were associated with the variations in F content and cell wall components. All the results suggest that Ca may lessen the tea leaf F level by reducing the accumulation of cell wall materials and intervening the cell wall structure and gene expression. This study provided useful information for reducing the F level and solving the F safety problem in tea plant.

In recent years, intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) has garnered significant attention as a severe cerebrovascular disorder. To enhance the accuracy of ICH detection and segmentation, this study proposed an improved fuzzy C-means (FCM) algorithm and performed a comparative analysis with both traditional FCM and advanced convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms. Experiments conducted on the publicly available CT-ICH dataset evaluated the performance of these three algorithms in predicting ICH volume. The results demonstrated that the improved FCM algorithm offered notable improvements in computational time and resource consumption compared to the traditional FCM algorithm, while also showing enhanced accuracy. However, it still lagged behind the CNN algorithm in areas such as feature extraction, model generalization, and the ability to handle complex image structures. The study concluded with a discussion of potential directions for further optimizing the FCM algorithm, aiming to bridge the performance gap with CNN algorithms and provide a reference for future research in medical image processing.

The distinctive electron structures of luminescent radicals offer considerable potential for a diverse array of applications. Up to now, the luminescent properties of radicals have been modulated through the introduction of electron-donating substituents, predominantly derivatives of carbazole and polyaromatic amines with more and more complicated structures and redshifted luminescent spectra. Herein, four kinds of (N-carbazolyl)bis(2,4,6-tirchlorophenyl)-methyl (CzBTM) radicals, Ph2CzBTM, Mes2CzBTM, Ph2PyIDBTM, and Mes2PyIDBTM, were synthesized and characterized by introducing simple phenyl and 2,4,6-trimethylphenyl groups to CzBTM and PyIDBTM. These radicals exhibit rare blueshifted emission spectra compared to their parent radicals. Furthermore, modifications to CzBTM significantly enhanced the photoluminescence quantum yields (PLQYs), with a highest PLQY of 21% for Mes2CzBTM among CzBTM-type radicals. Additionally, the molecular structures, photophysical properties of molecular orbitals, and stability of the four radicals were systematically investigated. This study provides a novel strategy for tuning the luminescent color of radicals to shorter wavelengths and improving thermostability.

As a special case of a quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) code, a full-length row-multiplier (FLRM) QC-LDPC code is described by a compact exponent matrix based on two sequences of integers. The codes designed by a framework known as greatest-common-divisor (GCD) method, belong to a salient class of FLRM QC-LDPC codes, which can eliminate cycles of length up to six by carefully selecting a special sequence subject to a set of simple inequalities. However, the GCD method ensures the absence of these cycles only if circulant sizes are larger than a certain threshold. By combining the existing GCD method, novel sequences and a new analysis method (based on new lemmas of circulants and integers) for modulo equations, a group of novel FLRM QC-LDPC codes free of 4-cycles and 6-cycles are explicitly proposed for column weights from three to five in this paper, which possess circulant sizes much smaller than the forgoing threshold. Simulations show that the new FLRM QC-LDPC codes with shorter lengths perform almost the same as the existing FLRM QC-LDPC codes with longer lengths, and that the novel FLRM QC-LDPC codes noticeably outperform their counterparts with (nearly) identical lengths.

While cycloid pin-wheel precision reducers (referred to as RV reducers) are widely used in industrial robots, a widely accepted design standard or verification method of their test platforms is not available. In this study, a comprehensive sliding-separation test platform of RV reducers was developed. The test platform can test various measurement items such as transmission error, static measurement of lost motion, dynamic measurement of lost motion, torsional rigidity, no-load running torque, starting torque, backdriving torque, and transmission efficiency of the RV reducer for robots. The principle and method of dynamic measurement of lost motion tests based on the two-way transmission error method were studied and this test function was successfully integrated with the comprehensive test platform in order to increase the test items of the dynamic performance parameters of RV reducers. The measurement results of the no-load running torque of the RV reducer were consistent with the Stribeck curve. Based on the concept of optimal measurement speed, a decomposition test method of the geometric component of the dynamic measurement of lost motion and the elastic component of the dynamic measurement of lost motion was proposed in the dynamic measurement test of lost motion. Through precision calibration, function test and repeatability test, the results were compared with the data of enterprise’s samples. The consistent results have proved that the test platform met engineering requirements and measurement accuracy requirements. Based on the new test principle, the developed platform can test more parameters of RV reducers with high precision and display the comprehensive test performance.

BackgroundInfectious mononucleosis (IM) is an acute infectious disease, caused by Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection, which can invade various systemic systems, among which hepatic injury is the most common. In this study, ultra performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS) was used to detect serum bile acid spectrum in IM children quantitatively, and to investigate its role in the early assessment of hepatic injury.MethodsThis case-control study was conducted at Yuhuan People's Hospital. A total of 60 IM children and 30 healthy children were included in the study. Among 60 children with IM, 30 had hepatic injury, and 30 without hepatic injury. The clinical and laboratory data were analyzed, and the serum bile acid spectrum and lymphocyte subsets were evaluated in the three groups.ResultsThere were statistically significant differences in cholic acid (CA), chenodeoxycholic acid (CDCA), deoxycholic acid (DCA), lithocholic acid (LCA), glycochenodeoxycholic acid (GCDCA), glycodeoxycholic acid(GDCA), glycolithocholic acid (GLCA), taurocholic acid (TCA), taurochenodeoxycholic acid (TCDCA), taurodeoxycholic acid (TDCA), ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA), glycoursodeoxycholic acid (GUDCA), tauroursodeoxycholic acid(TUDCA), percentage of NK cells, CD4+ and CD8+ in IM hepatic injury group, without hepatic injury group, and the healthy control group (P

This work aims to evaluate the use of miniaturized tensile specimen (MTS) to characterise the mechanical properties of alloys developed through rapid alloy prototyping (RAP), where high throughput tests are required on relatively small amounts of material. Tensile tests were conducted at a variety of strain rates and with increasingly smaller specimen sizes, ranging from larger specimens conforming to ASTM/ISO standards, down to small non-standard specimens. The gauge lengths of the specimens ranged from 50 to 80 mm for the standard specimens down to 5–10 mm for the non-standard specimens. To generalize the non-standard MTS designs, three alloys, DP800, DP600 and 316L stainless steel, were adopted. The results obtained from non-standard designs were compared with those from standard designs. The results show that non-standard designs can give repeatable results for yield strength (YS), ultimate tensile strength (UTS) and uniform elongation (eU). The maximum result differences of YS, UTS and eU are 7.37%, 7.71% and 11.9%, respectively, for DP alloys comparing standard and non-standard dimensions. These values are 13.56%, 14.03% and 19.5%, respectively 316L steel. The total elongation (ef) increases as the specimen dimension decreases. The geometrically dependent constants (n) are 0.2, 0.31 and 0.11 for DP800, DP600 and 316L, respectively. However, the Young's modulus is hard to determine precisely from the miniaturized designs. The conclusion from this work is that miniaturized tensile testing can be used with confidence as a high throughput means of predicting standard mechanical properties across a range of steels.

The kinetic isotope effect (KIE) is beneficial to improve the performance of luminescent molecules and relevant light-emitting diodes. In this work, the influences of deuteration on the photophysical property and stability of luminescent radicals are investigated for the first time. Four deuterated radicals based on biphenylmethyl, triphenylmethyl, and deuterated carbazole were synthesized and sufficiently characterized. The deuterated radicals exhibited excellent redox stability, as well as improved thermal and photostability. The appropriate deuteration of relevant C-H bonds would effectively suppress the non-radiative process, resulting in the increase in photoluminescence quantum efficiency (PLQE). This research has demonstrated that the introduction of deuterium atoms could be an effective pathway to develop high-performance luminescent radicals.

Deep-learning-based registration methods can not only save time but also automatically extract deep features from images. In order to obtain better registration performance, many scholars use cascade networks to realize a coarse-to-fine registration progress. However, such cascade networks will increase network parameters by an n-times multiplication factor and entail long training and testing stages. In this paper, we only use a cascade network in the training stage. Unlike others, the role of the second network is to improve the registration performance of the first network and function as an augmented regularization term in the whole process. In the training stage, the mean squared error loss function between the dense deformation field (DDF) with which the second network has been trained and the zero field is added to constrain the learned DDF such that it tends to 0 at each position and to compel the first network to conceive of a better deformation field and improve the network’s registration performance. In the testing stage, only the first network is used to estimate a better DDF; the second network is not used again. The advantages of this kind of design are reflected in two aspects: (1) it retains the good registration performance of the cascade network; (2) it retains the time efficiency of the single network in the testing stage. The experimental results show that the proposed method effectively improves the network’s registration performance compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Accurate medical image registration is highly important for the quantitative analysis of infant brain dynamic development in the first year of life. However, the deformable registration of infant brain magnetic resonance (MR) images is highly challenging for the following two reasons: First, there are very large anatomical and appearance variations in these longitudinal images; Second, there is a one-to-many correspondence in appearance between global anatomical tissues and the small local tissues therein. In this paper, we use a CNN (convolution neural network)-based global-and-local-label-driven deformable registration scheme. Two to-be-registered image patches are input into the UNet-style regression network. Then, a dense displacement field (DDF) between them is obtained by optimizing the total loss function between two corresponding label patches. Global and local label patches are used only during training. During inference, two new MR images are divided into many patch pairs and fed into the trained network. By averaging the deformation of the patches at the same location, the final 3D DDF between the two whole images is obtained. The highlight is that the global (white matter (WM), gray matter (GM), and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF)) and local tissues can be registered simultaneously without any prior ground-truth deformation. Especially for the local hippocampal tissues, the Dice ratios are substantially improved after registration via our method. Experimental results are presented on the intrasubject and intersubject registration of infant brain MR images between different time points, and the intersubject registration of brain T1-weighted MR images on the OASIS-1 dataset, according to which the proposed method realizes higher accuracy on both global and local tissues compared with state-of-the-art registration methods.

Based on the principle of single flank measurement, a dynamic testing machine for plastic gear transmission error is developed and can simulate the actual working condition of the plastic gear and realize the dynamic measurement of transmission error under the condition of no-load, load and different speed of plastic gear with different parameters. The working principle, configuration and design of key parts of the testing machine are mainly introduced. The dynamic measurement test of the transmission error is carried out, and the variation of the transmission error at no load, load and different speeds is briefly analyzed. The test results show that the test machine can realize the fast measurement of plastic gear transmission error, which can improve the plastic gear transmission performance and provide scientific basis for the design and improvement of plastic gear.

Background: The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinical performance of VersaTrek 528 compared to BACTEC FX 400 blood culture (BC) systems.Materials and Methods: Simulated and clinically obtained BCs were used in the study. Confirmed bacterial species (n = 78), including 43 Gram-positives, 30 Gram-negatives, and 5 Candida albicans strains, were each inoculated into BC bottles. Clinically obtained BCs were subdivided into two groups, A and B. In group A were 72 BC sets (pair: aerobic and anaerobic) in which a set inoculated with 5 ml blood was processed in the VersaTrek BC system, whilst the one inoculated with 10 ml blood was processed in the FX BC system. In group B, 76 BC sets (pairs) corresponding to 152 VersaTrek bottles and 152 FX bottles were inoculated with the same volume (10 ml) of blood, and processed in each system.Results: In the simulated BC study, 90% (63/70) of the VersaTrek aerobic bottles were positive, which was higher than that of FX 400 (59/70, 84%), but was not statistically significant (P = 0.423). In contrast, FX 400 anaerobic bottles had a higher positive rate than the other BC system (84 vs. 77%), although it was statistically insignificant (P = 0.267). Time to detection of organisms in the two BCs was comparable for both aerobic (P = 0.131) and anaerobic bottles (P = 0.104). In clinical BCs of group A, FX BC system had slightly higher positive rates for both aerobic (11.1 vs. 9.7%, P = 0.312) and anaerobic (8.3 vs. 6.9%, P = 0.375) bottles. However, the difference was not statistically significant. In group B, VersaTrek aerobic bottles had a higher positive rate compared to the other BC system (10.5 vs. 5.2%, P = 0.063). In terms of positive rates of sub-studies A and B, VersaTrek and FX BC systems were comparable.Conclusion: There was no significant difference between the two BC systems in the detection of bacteria and fungi in simulated BCs. In clinical BCs, the performance of the VersaTrek BC system, with inoculation of 5 or 10 ml patient’s blood, was comparable to the FX system with inoculation of 10 ml patient’s blood.

We experimentally investigate the influence of an alternating electromagnetic field on the surface and internal qualities of Incoloy800H superalloy billets. The electromagnetic continuous casting experiments for Incoloy800H superalloy were successfully conducted and the billets (0.1 m × 0.1 m × 1.2 m) were obtained. We figure out that the high frequency (20.4 kHz) electromagnetic field which is applied in the mould region can improve the surface quality of Incoloy800H superalloy billet remarkably; the depth of oscillation mark decreases from 1.2 mm (without electromagnetic field) to 0.3 mm (with electromagnetic field). The internal quality of the billet was studied using a variety of characterization techniques. The low frequency (5 Hz) electromagnetic field which is applied in the second cooling region can improve the internal quality; the region of the equiaxed grain increases from 2.45% (without electromagnetic field) to 41.45% (with electromagnetic field). Furthermore, macro- and micro-segregation are suppressed and the TiN inclusion number is decreased as well.