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To investigate the safety and efficacy of intravenous thrombolysis with recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA) in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) and cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) and analyze the risk factors for hemorrhagic transformation (HT).The clinical data of 220 patients with CMB within the first 4.5 h after the onset of acute ischemic stroke treated in our hospital from September 2018 to December 2019 were retrospectively analyzed. Then, these patients were evenly assigned into two groups based on whether the intravenous thrombolysis with rt-PA was adopted or not. Next, the neurological deficit was scored using the National Institute of Health stroke scale (NIHSS) before and after treatment, the modified Rankin scale (mRs) score of patients was recorded at 90 d after treatment, and the incidence rate and death rate of intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) after treatment were recorded and evaluated. Additionally, the univariate and logistic regression analyses were employed for the risk factors for HT in patients after thrombolysis.The NIHSS score declined to (7.08±3.75) points and (7.83±4.22) points at 24 h after treatment and (3.67±3.63) points and (4.92±3.87) points at 7 d after treatment, respectively, in Thrombolysis group and Control group, which were significantly lower than those before treatment (p0.05). The NIHSS score displayed no statistically significant difference between the two groups at 24 h after treatment (p=0.165), whereas it was markedly lower in Thrombolysis group than that in Control group at 7 d after treatment (p=0.015). At 90 d after treatment, there were 98 (89.1%) and 79 (71.8%) cases of good prognosis in Thrombolysis group and Control group, respectively, and the difference was statistically significant between the two groups (p=0.002). Besides, the number of patients with SICH and aSICH was 3 and 2 (2.7% vs. 1.8%, p=0.651) and 9 and 4 (8.2% vs. 3.6%, p=0.152) in Thrombolysis group and Control group, respectively, and the number of deaths was 7 and 5 (6.4% vs. 4.5%, p=0.553) in the two groups, showing no statistically significant difference. The results of univariate and multivariate analyses revealed that the time from stroke onset to thrombolysis, baseline NIHSS score, and history of atrial fibrillation were independent risk factors affecting the HT of patients undergoing intravenous thrombolysis [odds ratio (OR) =1.330, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) =1.079-1.851, p=0.019; OR=1.592, 95% CI=1.025-2.767, p=0.010; OR=2.428, 95% CI=1.814-3.643, p=0.016].Compared with those undergoing no intravenous thrombolysis with rt-PA, patients with acute ischemic stroke and CMB who received intravenous thrombolysis with rt-PA exhibit significantly improved short-term neurological function recovery and long-term prognosis, but the incidence and mortality rates of ICH have no statistically significant differences. Moreover, the time from stroke onset to thrombolysis, baseline NIHSS score, and history of atrial fibrillation are independent risk factors affecting the HT of patients treated with intravenous thrombolysis.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the clinical efficacy of laparoscopic and open gastrectomy in enhanced recovery after surgery (ERAS) for gastric cancer. METHODS: We retrospectively collected the clinicopathological data of gastric cancer patients undergoing radical gastrectomy at 12 Chinese medical centers between January, 2015 and December, 2017. We analyzed the clinical outcomes of a total of 1569 patients, including 552 patients undergoing open surgery, 1004 receiving laparoscopic surgery, and 43 experiencing conversion of laparoscopic surgery to open surgery. The operative outcomes and postoperative complications of the patients in laparoscopic group and open surgery group were analyzed. The primary outcome was the short-term postoperative complications. The secondary outcomes included operation time, estimated blood loss, number of lymph node dissection, time to first liquid diet intake, time to first passage of flatus and defecation, time to ambulation, postoperative hospitalization days and occurrence of readmission within 30 days. RESULTS: Of the total of 1569 patients, 1037 (66.1%) were males and 532 (33.9%) were females, with a mean age at diagnosis of 58.4±11.3 years. A total of 105 patients (6.7%) underwent proximal gastrectomy, 877 (55.9%) underwent distal gastrectomy, and 587 (37.4%) underwent total gastrectomy. In the overall patients, the operation time was 274.7±80.7 mins, blood loss was 150 (20-1300) mL, and the number of lymph nodes dissected was 29.9±13.5. The time to first ambulation, flatus, defecation and liquid food intake were 2.3±1.2, 3.4±1.6, 4.8±1.8 and 5.5±3.1 days, respectively. The postoperative hospital stay was 11.4±5.0 days. The incidence of postoperative complications (Clavien-Dindo score ≥Ⅱ) was 6.5%, and the rate of readmission within 30 days after discharge was 1.1%. Subgroup analysis of the patients based on the surgical approach (conversion of laparoscopic surgery to open surgery was considered open surgery) showed no significant differences in the extent of gastrectomy between laparoscopic and open surgery groups (P > 0.05). Compared with those in the open surgery group, the patients having laparoscopic gastrectomy had a greater number of lymph nodes retrieved with earlier ambulation, first flatus, defecation and oral intake and a shorter postoperative hospital stay (P < 0.05). The laparoscopic group had a lower intraoperative blood loss but a longer operation time than the open surgery group (P < 0.05). The incidence of postoperative complications did not differ significantly between the two groups (P > 0.05). CONCLUSION: Compared with open surgery, laparoscopic surgery in ERAS can shorten the time to ambulation, first flatus, defecation, and oral intake and the length of hospital stay. Laparoscopic surgery can achieve the same oncological outcomes as open surgery without increasing postoperative complications.

Recent years have witnessed substantial research efforts on computation offloading for mobile edge computing (MEC) systems. User mobility is an intrinsic trait of many MEC applications, which has posed significant challenges for realizing reliable computing. However, existing works studying this problem mainly focus on the movements of users while another high-dynamic behavior due to the randomness of computation task is largely ignored. To fill this gap, in this paper, we formulate the computation offloading decision problem in MEC system as a combinatorial optimization problem, and then we use Log-Sum-Exp function to approximate the optimal objective. Thereafter, we construct a Markov chain with steady-state distribution specifying to our problem in a distributed manner, such that the user mobility problem is transformed into the state transition problem. Moreover, this Markov chain is further extended to consider a dynamic scenario where the number of active users in the MEC system changes due to the random arrivals of new computation task or completions of old tasks. Numerical results show that our proposed computation offloading distributed algorithm can converge very fast to the optimal solution, and has a provable performance with a guaranteed loss bound. This work is supported by Natural Science Funds of Fujian (nos. 2021J011002, 2021J011004, 2020J01813) and Zhangzhou Municipal Natural Science Foundation (ZZ2021J23).

OBJECTIVE: To explore the association of methylation levels of C19orf57, MAP9, EMR3, NEK6 and PCOLCE2 genes in peripheral blood with breast cancer (BC) in Chinese women. METHODS: We collected peripheral blood samples from 258 early-stage BC patients and 272 healthy women. Agena matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF-MS) was utilized to quantitatively measure the methylation levels of CpG sites in the genes. The association between DNA methylation and BC was analyzed using a logistic regression model adjusted for covariants. Spearman's correlation analysis was performed to analyze the association between the gene methylation levels and age. The methylation levels of the genes in the BC patients with different clinical characteristics were investigated using non-parametric tests. RESULTS: In stead of EMR3 gene hypermethylation as found in BC patients as found in the Caucasian population, EMR3 gene hypomethylation was found to correlate with BC in Chinese women, but this correlation was significant only in women beyond the age of 50 years (for every 10% reduction of the methylation level, EMR3_CpG_1: OR=1.40; EMR3_CpG_2: OR=2.31; EMR3_CpG_3: OR=2.76, P < 0.05). EMR3 methylation was not or was only weakly correlated with tumor stage, size, lymphatic metastasis, ER, PR, HER2, or Ki67. Our data did not show a correlation between C19orf57 methylation and BC. CONCLUSION: Peripheral blood EMR3 gene hypomethylation is associated with BC in Chinese women, especially in those at an old age and in postmenopausal women.

OBJECTIVE: To study the response characteristics of the secondary auditory cortex (A2) to wriggling calls (WC) and the mechanism of response modulation in female mice. METHODS: We used patch-clamp and immunofluorescence labeling technique to mark and record the action potential and cell type of A2 neurons. Female C57 mice were stimulated with pure tone and white noise (control), 4.5 kHz, 9 kHz, or 13.5 kHz sound waves extracted from WC (single-frequency simulation group), the combinations of every two of the 3 single-frequency sound waves (two-tone frequency simulation group), or the combinations of 4.5 kHz+7.7 kHz+13.5 kHz and 4.5 kHz+9 kHz+13.5 kHz sound waves (three-frequency simulation group). The firing pattern, firing number, threshold, and latency of the action potential of the A2 neurons were recorded in response to the stimulations. RESULTS: By comparison of the spikes elicited by different sound stimulations, we identified 3 types of neurons with different sensitivities to WC. The WC-sensitive neurons had a significantly greater number of spikes in response to WC than to other sounds and noise (P < 0.001). Comparison of the latency and threshold revealed significantly longer latencies of the WC-sensitive neurons and WC-insensitive neurons in response to WC stimulation than to pure tone stimulation (P=0.002), but their latencies to WC and noise stimulation were similar (P=0.093). The WC-sensitive neurons also had lower threshold to WC than to pure tone and noise stimulations (P=0.02). Analysis of the firing patterns of action potentials showed that the WCsensitive neurons consisted mainly of parvalbumin interneurons. The results of immunofluorescence labeling indicated that inhibitory interneurons were present in the A2 neurons that responded to WC. CONCLUSION: A2 contains 3 types of neurons with different sensitivities to WC. Among them, the WC-sensitive neurons is mainly PV neurons, whose response characteristics to different types of sounds can help to explain the mechanism of communication sound recognition and response modification in A2.

Chinese materia medica decoction pieces (CMMDPs), one of the three pillars of the Chinese materia medica industry, are a key link in the Chinese materia medica industrial chain. Industrialization is the only way for the modernization of CMMDPs. This review mainly summarizes the characteristics, history, current situation and prospect of CMMDPs industry, providing a new reference for promoting the flourishing development of the industrialization of CMMDPs and for serving massive health industry. The literature was collected from databases including Web of Science, PubMed, Elsevier and CNKI (Chinese). CMMDPs industry has the characteristics of regionalism, resource dependency, customer diversity and low industrial concentration. Deeply processed products include traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) formula granules, small-packed decoction pieces, ultrafine decoction pieces, puffed decoction pieces, compressed decoction pieces and instant decoction pieces. Integration of treatment and processing at the place of origin is emerging. However, there is still room for improvement, for example, the manufacturing technologies of CMMDPs industry need to be continually improved. The management of CMMDPs' normalized production also needs to be strengthened. The quality of CMMDPs should be strengthened supervision and it should establish the objective and feasible quality evaluation system for CMMDPs. At present, China has attached unprecedented importance to the development of TCM, and issued a number of supporting policies, sparing no effort to support its development.

Aim To profile molecular changes in lipopolysaccharide (LPS)‐induced experimental pulpitis in a rat model and explore the feasibility of a molecular‐based diagnostic strategy for pulpitis. Methodology Seventy‐three maxillary incisors of Sprague‐Dawley rats were used to establish pulpitis models with LPS. Inflammatory grading was performed in four equal sections of the pulp divided from the injured site to the root apex. An antibody array was used to compare the expression of 67 molecules between control pulp and inflamed pulp 12 and 72 h after LPS application. The levels of differentially expressed molecules in the control and inflamed pulp (collected at 3, 6, 9, 12, 24 and 72 h after LPS treatment) were examined via ELISA, and correlations between inflammatory scores and molecule expression were assessed. The molecule distributions in the pulp were investigated by immunofluorescence staining. Data were analysed with paired t‐test, one‐way anova, Kruskal–Wallis tests, and Spearman’s and Pearson’s correlations with significance set at P

Purpose Postmastectomy radiation therapy is an important component of the multimodality approach to later-stage breast cancers. Unfortunately, despite its proven survival benefits, postmastectomy radiation therapy is deleterious to the skin and soft tissue, causing increased complications and worse aesthetic outcomes after breast reconstruction.There is currently no effective pharmaceutical agent to mitigate the soft tissue fibrosis and hypovascularity associated with soft tissue radiation. We hypothesized that a novel topical formulation of deferoxamine (DFX) will result in improved cutaneous vascularity and soft tissue pliability in an animal model of irradiated tissue expander-based breast reconstruction. Methods This study consisted of 16 hairless rats divided into 4 equal groups: a control group (expander only), a tissue expanded and irradiated group, a tissue expanded + DFX group, and a tissue expanded/irradiated/DFX group. A novel topical formulation of DFX consisted of reconstituted drug dissolved in agents designed to enhance dermal penetrance. Vessels per high-power field (vHPF) were quantified histologically; micro-computed tomography angiography was used to assess vessel volume fraction (VVF) and vessel length density. Results Irradiated skin had less vascularity compared with control (3.81 vHPF vs 8.25 vHPF, P = 0.03; 0.79% VVF vs 1.53% VVF, P = 0.06). Treatment of irradiated skin with topical DFX reversed these effects, resulting in vascular findings similar to the control group histologically (7.94 vHPF vs 8.25 HPF, P = 0.985) and via micro-computed tomography angiography (1.05% VVF vs 1.53% VVF, P = 0.272). Similarly, radiation resulted in less volume expansion compared with controls (0.72 vs 0.8 mL, P = 0.04), whereas treatment with topical DFX reversed this effect, allowing for an expansion volume similar to the control group (0.81 vs 0.80 mL, P = 0.999). Conclusions In an animal model of irradiated tissue expander-based breast reconstruction, treatment with topical DFX improved the cutaneous vascularity and tissue pliability, resulting in vascular density and final tissue expansion volumes similar to those found in the nonirradiated control group. Topical DFX may be an effective agent for the treatment of soft tissue radiation injury; future studies are indicated to further characterize this novel drug formulation.

In offshore engineering long slender risers are simultaneously subjected to both axial and transverse excitations. The\ud axial load is the fluctuating top tension which is induced by the floater's heave motion, while the transverse excitation\ud comes from environmental loads such as waves. As the time-varying axial load may trigger classical parametric\ud resonance, dynamic analysis of a deepwater riser with combined axial and transverse excitations becomes more\ud complex. In this study, to fully capture the coupling effect between the planar axial and transverse vibrations, the\ud nonlinear coupled equations of a riser's dynamic motion are formulated and then solved by the central difference\ud method in the time domain. For comparison, numerical simulations are carried out for both linear and nonlinear\ud models. The results show that the transverse displacements predicted by both models are similar to each other when\ud only the random transverse excitation is applied. However, when the combined axial dynamic tension and transverse\ud wave forces are both considered, the linear model underestimates the response because it ignores the coupling effect.\ud Thus the coupled model is more appropriate for deep water. It is also found that the axial excitation can significantly\ud increase the riser's transverse response and hence the bending stress, especially for cases when the time-varying\ud tension is located at the classical parametric resonance region. Such time-varying effects should be taken into account\ud in fatigue safety assessment.

Eliminating the influence of environment temperature is critical for high-accuracy carbon nanotube polymer nanocomposites sensors. In this work, the temperature effects on the nanocomposite are studied by both experiment investigation and simulation calculation. Nearly constant resistance values were found at a CNT loading around 3 wt%. By considering the temperature effect and CNT structural distortion in the developed percolation network model, simulation results agree well with experimental data. On this basis, results show that the thermally assisted tunneling on CNT junctions and thermal expansion of polymer matrix are the two core mechanisms, relaxed CNT junctions in CNT/polymer nanocomposite depressed the temperature effect, and the influence of environment temperature could be significantly reduced by adjusting CNT loadings and choosing a matching polymer matrix. All of these findings will benefit for the design of high-accuracy sensors.

Adipocyte sizes from adipose tissue of mature animals form a bimodal distribution, thus reporting mean cell size is misleading. The objectives of this study were to develop a robust method for testing bimodality of porcine adipocytes, describe the size distribution with an informative metric, and statistically test hypertrophy and appearance of new small adipocytes, possibly resulting from hyperplasia or lipid filling of previously divided fibroblastic cells. Ninety-three percent of adipose samples measured were bimodal (P < 0.0001); therefore, we describe and propose a method of testing hyperplasia or lipid filling of previously divided fibroblastic cells based upon the probability of an adipocyte falling into 2 chosen competing “bins” as adiposity increases. We also conclude that increased adiposity is correlated positively with an adipocyte being found in the minor mode (r = 0.46) and correlated negatively with an adipocyte being found in the major mode (r = −0.22), providing evidence of either hyperplasia or lipid filling of previously divided fibroblastic cells. We additionally conclude that as adiposity increases, the mode of the major distribution of cells occurs at a larger diameter of adipocyte, indicating hypertrophy.

The omega transition process was firstly analyzed combined with martensitic transformation in this investigation. In order to avoid the influence of auto-tempering on metastable omega phase, martensitic transformation process was inspired by deformation at room temperature. Omega phase was found only exist within twinned martensite with single variant, and the results indicate that omega phase formed by the lattice invariant twin shear during the dynamic transformation of twinned martensite. Besides, the nature poor ductility of twinned martensite was discussed.

As conventional energy sources are non-renewable, the world's major countries are investing heavily in renewable energy research. Wind power represents the development trend of future energy, but the intermittent and volatility of wind energy are the main reasons that leads to the poor accuracy of wind power prediction. However, by analyzing the error level at different time points, it can be found that the errors of adjacent time are often approximately the same, the least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) model with error correction is used to predict the wind power in this paper. According to the simulation of wind power data of two wind farms, the proposed method can effectively improve the prediction accuracy of wind power, and the error distribution is concentrated almost without deviation. The improved method proposed in this paper takes into account the error correction process of the model, which improved the prediction accuracy of the traditional model (RBF, Elman, LS-SVM). Compared with the single LS-SVM prediction model in this paper, the mean absolute error of the proposed method had decreased by 52 percent. The research work in this paper will be helpful to the reasonable arrangement of dispatching operation plan, the normal operation of the wind farm and the large-scale development as well as fully utilization of renewable energy resources.

Due to the sustainable and pollution-free characteristics, wind energy has been one of the fastest growing renewable energy sources. However, the intermittent and random fluctuation of wind speed presents many challenges for reliable wind power integration and normal operation of wind farm. Accurate wind speed prediction is the key to ensure the safe operation of power system and to develop wind energy resources. Therefore, this paper has presented a wavelet time series wind speed prediction model based on Lorenz disturbance. Therefore, in this paper, combined with the atmospheric dynamical system, a wavelet-time series improved wind speed prediction model based on Lorenz disturbance is proposed and the wind turbines of different climate types in Spain and China are used to simulate the disturbances of Lorenz equations with different initial values. The prediction results show that the improved model can effectively correct the preliminary prediction of wind speed, improving the prediction. In a word, the research work in this paper will be helpful to arrange the electric power dispatching plan and ensure the normal operation of the wind farm.

Objective: To develop a mouse cell biosensor system for the high-throughput genotoxicity detection of chemicals, such as environmental pollutants. Method: We developed a novel reporter vector pGL4-GFP, wherein the firefly luciferase reporter gene in the pGL4.82 vector was replaced by the green fluorescent protein (GFP) gene from the pAcGFP1-N1 vector. To construct the reporter pGL4-p53-GFP (p53 promoter linked to GFP), a fragment containing the p53 gene promoter was generated by amplifying a region from −481 to +180 of mouse genomic DNA isolated from mouse tail tissue. We developed a mouse cell biosensor system for the high-throughput genotoxicity detection of new drugs by stably integrating the reporter plasmid of pGL4-p53-GFP into the mouse embryonic fibroblast cells. Various genotoxic agents were used to treat this biosensor system. The resulting fluorescence was directly observed under a fluorescence microscope, and the GFP protein level was measured through Western blot analysis. Result: The biosensor system was treated with genotoxic agents, such as doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide, and benzo(a)pyrene. The GFP protein expression was significantly increased in cells exposed to genotoxic agents but negatively responded to the non-genotoxic agent dimethyl sulfoxide, thereby proving the specificity and sensitivity of the biosensor system. Conclusion: This novel in vitro biosensor system can be especially useful in genotoxicity detection.

The random distribution of single-fibre tensile strength has been commonly characterized by the two-parameter Weibull statistics. However, the calibrated Weibull model from one set of strength data at a given gauge length cannot accurately predicts the strength variation of the fibre at different gauge lengths. Instead of presuming the two-parameter Weibull distribution or any other specific statistical distribution for the single-fibre strength to begin with, this work proposes an approach to incorporating the appropriate spatial flaw distribution within a fibre and synchronizing multiple sets of tensile strength data to evaluate the single-fibre strength distribution. The approach is examined and validated by published single-fibre strength data sets of glass, ceramic and synthetic and natural carbon fibres. It is shown that the single-fibre strength statistics does not necessarily always follow the two-parameter Weibull distribution.

Nine cross-cutting issues which could foster or impede food and nutrition security are discussed. These are the concept of the right to food; gendering food security; land tenure; population growth pressure on land and water resources; empowerment and resilience through access to factors of production; food security governance; government capacity to formulate, implement, and institutionalize change and reform; food sovereignty; and climate change.