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Moyamoya disease (MMD) is an idiopathic cerebrovascular disease with unknown etiology. Long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) and messenger RNA (mRNA) profiles in MMD remain unknown. In this current study, we aim to investigate lncRNA-mRNA co-expression pattern and their biological functions in superficial temporal artery (STA) of MMD.STA of 3 MMD patients without RNF213 mutation and 3 age-matched controls were obtained for transcriptomic RNA sequencing. Bioinformatics analysis was performed to investigate their molecular functions and interactions. Then, differentially expressed genes relative to vascular remodeling were further validated by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction and immunofluorescence. WNT5A functions were tested by tube formation assay and wound scratching assay in human microvascular endothelial cells (HMECs).We detected 6235 different lncRNAs and 2065 different mRNAs from the RNA-sequencing between MMD patients and controls (P0.05; fold change2.0). Gene ontology showed that altered mRNAs were enriched for endothelial cell morphogenesis and positive regulation of angiogenesis, which were closely related with vascular remodeling. We then searched 76 altered genes related with vascular remodeling and applied Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes analysis. Integrated analysis of lncRNA-TF-mRNA co-expression networks and gene verifications indicated that molecular including WNT5A, TEK, and GATA2 may contribute to the vascular malformation of MMD. Overexpression of WNT5A in HMECs promoted tube formation and cell migration.In MMD patients, genes related to vascular remodeling including WNT5A and their regulators were aberrantly disrupted. These results will help elucidate the complicated pathogenic mechanism of MMD and develop potential therapeutic targets facilitating MMD angiogenesis in the future.

The study aimed to investigate the hemodynamic features and independent predictors of neoangiogenesis after revascularization in moyamoya disease (MMD) by pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling magnetic resonance imaging (pCASL MRI).Thirty-nine MMD patients were categorized into infarction group, hemorrhagic group, and atypical group. All patients underwent combined bypass surgery and pCASL MRI with postlabeling delays (PLD) of 1525 ms and 2525 ms. Absolute CBFPreoperative CBFpCASL-MRI with multiple PLDs could reflect preoperative hemodynamic impairment and predict the neoangiogenesis after combined bypass surgery in moyamoya patients.

The headway-based control method is usually used to regulate the bus headways and improve reliability of public transit. In general, the holding control strategy is applied at the control point, because enough space for dwell longer at the control point is required, while the stop-skipping control strategy can be used at any bus stop. However, in the headway-based control method, too much stop-skipping will bring longer waiting time and make the passengers impatient. The number and distribution of control points for stop-skipping are not considered in previous self-equalizing bus headway control works. Therefore, in this paper, the control points selection rules for stop-skipping involving their number and distribution on the bus route are discussed. A second by second discrete system is formulated to describe the bus operation. In the proposed control method, the threshold value for activating stop-skipping strategy is raised, avoiding provoking much additional waiting time because of boarding rejected. In the numerical analysis, a set of cases are conducted to evaluate the performance of control method under different number and distribution of control points for stop-skipping. The numerical results show that distribution of control points for stop-skipping has a greater influence on the public transit than the number.

Headway fluctuation and bus bunching are common in transit operations, while holding control is a proven strategy for the reduction of bus bunching. Recently, benefited from the advances in technology and tools, adaptive control method for equalising bus headways on the bus route gradually has become successful. Although this method performs well in regulating the bus operation, it does not consider the impact of the number of buses on the bus route. The control method may fail to regulate bus headways due to an insufficient number of buses, despite the control method itself being effective. Therefore, this paper explores the relationship between the number of buses on the bus route and the performance of the self-equalise bus headway control method. A model is proposed to search the suitable number of buses on the bus route by analysing the changes of the bus headway standard deviations with increasing the number of buses. Furthermore, a set of numerical tests were conducted. According to the results of the analysis, under high demand, the performance of the self-equalise bus headway control method is more sensitive to changes of bus number on the bus route.

Bus bunching and the unevenly dispersed buses along a bus line commonly appear in an unstable high-frequency bus line system. They will lead to unreliable transit service and long waiting times for many passengers. To resist bus bunching and improve the stability of a bus line, researchers proposed some methods of adjusting the cruising speeds of buses. But their methods generally need to adjust the speeds in all road segments included in the bus line and sometimes need to coordinate the speeds of successively cruising buses. These requirements impede their implementations in practice. This paper presents a new strategy to overcome the above obstacles by adjusting the speeds of buses in the dedicated bus lanes. The regulating speed will be determined by looking multiple critical time points ahead to estimate the influence of the chosen speed. Numerical experiments show that the new strategy can not only stabilize a strongly unstable bus line but also shorten the waiting and riding times of passengers. Several insights have also been uncovered during numerical analyses. a. The set of regulating speeds used by an effective speed adjustment strategy should include refined elements and has a wide range for the values of its elements. b. Only with nonnegative elements in the above set, the strategy will be out of work. c. The more dedicated bus lanes in a bus line, the more effective the strategy becomes. The negligible computational time to supply the proper regulating speed makes the implementation of our strategy practical.

BackgroundCaveolin-1 (Cav-1) plays pivotal roles in the endothelial function and angiogenesis postischemia. Moyamoya disease (MMD) is characterized by progressive artery stenosis with unknown etiology. We aim to determine whether serum Cav-1 levels of patients with MMD were associated with collateral vessel formation after bypass surgery.MethodsWe studied serum Cav-1 levels of 130 patients with MMD (16 with RNF213 p.R4810K mutation and 114 without RNF213 p.R4810K mutation), 15 patients with acute stroke, and 33 healthy controls. Cerebral perfusion and collateral circulation were evaluated preoperation and at 6 months after operation using pseudocontinuous arterial spin labeling MRI (pCASL-MRI) and digital subtraction angiography (DSA), respectively. Endothelial expression of Cav-1 was verified in the superficial temporal artery (STA) wall of patients with MMD by immunofluorescence double staining. We also investigated whether overexpression of Cav-1 affects cell migration and tube formation using human microvascular endothelial cells (HMECs).ResultsThe serum Cav-1 level of patients with MMD intermediated between the stroke group and healthy controls and it was enhanced after the bypass surgery (681.87 ± 311.63 vs. 832.91 ± 464.41 pg/ml, p = 0.049). By 6 months after bypass surgery, patients with MMD with better collateral compensation manifested higher postoperative/preoperative Cav-1 ratio (rCav-1) than bad compensation patients. Consistently, cerebral blood flow (CBF) determined by pCASL-MRI (nCBFMCA ratio) was positively in line with rCav-1 ratio (r = 0.8615, p < 0.0001). Cav-1 was expressed in the endothelial cells of the STA vessels of patients with MMD. Overexpression of Cav-1 by plasmid transfection in HMECs promoted tube formation and cell migration.ConclusionThis study indicated that Cav-1 may be a potential driver to promote angiogenesis and collateral formation after bypass surgery in patients with MMD, providing a better understanding of MMD pathophysiology and potential non-surgical targets of MMD.

In an uncontrolled bus line, buses tend to bunch due to the stochastic nature of traffic flow and passenger demand at bus stops. Although bus holding has been shown to effectively prevent bus bunch...

The multi-energy conversion system (MCS) plays an important role in improving the utilization of energy resources and realizing the energy transition. With the application of the new generation of information technologies, the new MCS can realize real-time information interaction, multi-energy collaboration, and real-time demand response, in which energy suppliers can intelligently motivate consumers' energy use behavior. In this paper, an MCS coupled with a cloud platform is proposed to address information explosion and data security issues. Due to the development of Internet technology, the increasing energy data, and the serious energy coupling, it is difficult for traditional optimization methods to deal with the interaction between participants of the MCS. Therefore, the non-cooperative game is used to formulate the interactions between participants with the aim of maximizing the energy suppliers' profit and minimizing the customers' cost. It is proved that the game model is an ordinary game with one Nash equilibrium. The simulation was performed with a gradient projection algorithm and the results show that the proposed MCS improves energy utilization efficiency through energy conversion while ensuring consumer satisfaction, and benefits both the customers and suppliers by reducing the energy consumption cost and the peak load demand, which effectively improve the supply quality and enrich the energy consumption patterns.

The headway-based control method is usually used to regulate the bus headways to improve the bus operation. However, these control methods only focus on equalizing bus headways, neglecting analysis for STD (standard deviation) of passengers on the buses. Therefore, in order to fix this gap, this paper analyzed performance of the control method in terms of regulating bus headways and number of passengers on the buses under variable number of buses on the route. First, as an enhanced version of headways-based control method, a coordinated control method based on the self-equalizing bus headways concept involving bus holding and stop-skipping is proposed. A discrete system is formulated to describe the bus operation, and the coordinated control method is imbedded into it. In order to reflect the performance in regulating bus headways and the number of passengers, two indexes are formulated, respectively. Finally, a set of numerical analysis was conducted. The test results showed that the regulated bus headways can make the number of passengers on buses equalized. As a by-product, the headway-based control method can make the bus capacity be well utilized by equalizing bus headways on the bus route.

Surgical approaches for Chiari malformation type I (CM-I) complicated with syringomyelia (SM) are controversial, so we assessed the efficacy and safety of two widely used procedures.We retrospectively analyzed results from posterior fossa decompression (PFD) using bony decompression with dura-splitting or a combined technique (duraplasty with arachnoid dissection and coagulation of the herniated tonsils) for CM-I associated with SM between Jan 2008 and Feb 2016. Patients were followed up for at least one year. General data, primary outcomes (symptom improvement, syrinx reductions, and complications) and secondary outcomes (operating time, blood loss, postoperative hospital stay) for each procedure were compared.Of the 49 patients treated, 17 had dura-splitting decompression and 32 had the combined technique. There were no significant differences in general data. The combined technique was significantly superior to dura-splitting for long-term syrinx reductions (length, 100.03 ± 44.79 vs 72.73 ± 34.79 mm, p = 0.040; diameter, 8.09 ± 3.46 vs 5.73 ± 3.02 mm, p = 0.026) and symptom improvement (75.00% vs 47.06%, p = 0.036). No postoperative complications occurred during dura-splitting cases; however, complications occurred in 9 combined technique cases (31.25%, p = 0.010) and surgical time was longer for the combined technique (248.03 ± 60.12 vs 167.94 ± 60.11 min, p0.001).The combined technique improved long-term symptoms and reduced syringes compared to dura-splitting; however, postoperative complications are more likely.

In recent years, with the development of advanced technologies for data collection, real-time bus control strategies have been implemented to improve the daily operation of transit systems, especially headway-based holding control which is a proven strategy to reduce bus bunching and improve service reliability for high-frequency bus routes, with the concept of regulating headways between successive buses. This hot topic has inspired the reconsideration of the traditional issue of fleet size optimization and the integrated bus holding control strategy. The traditional headway-based control method only focused on the regulation of bus headways, without considering the number of buses on the route. The number of buses is usually assumed as a given in advance and the task of the control method is to regulate the headways between successive buses. They did not consider the bus fleet size problem integrated with headway-based holding control method. Therefore, this work has presented a set of optimal control formulations to minimize the costs for the passengers and the bus company through calculating the optimal number of buses and the dynamic holding time, taking into account the randomness of passenger arrivals. A set of equations were formulated to obtain the operation of the buses with headway-based holding control or the schedule-based control method. The objective was to minimize the total cost for the passengers and the bus company in the system, and a Monte Carlo simulation based solution method was subsequently designed to solve the optimization model. The effects of this optimization method were tested under different operational settings. A comparison of the total costs was conducted between the headway-based holding control and the schedule-based holding control. It was found that the model was capable of reducing the costs of the bus company and passengers through utilizing headway-based bus holding control combined with optimization of the bus fleet size. The proposed optimization model could minimize the number of buses on the route for a guaranteed service level, alleviating the problem of redundant bus fleet sizes caused by bus bunching in the traditional schedule-based control method.

// Hua Liu 1, * , Rong Xu 2, * , Jian Yang 1 , Guanghui Ren 1 , Shengxue He 3 1 Department of Neurosurgery, The First People’s Hospital of Kunshan Affiliated with Jiangsu University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China 2 Department of Pediatric Surgery, The First People’s Hospital of Kunshan Affiliated with Jiangsu University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China 3 Department of Neurosurgery, The Affiliated Brain Hospital, Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Shengxue He, email: heshengxue77@126.com Keywords: initial intracranial pressure, traumatic brain injury, decompressive craniectomy Received: June 06, 2016 Accepted: August 15, 2016 Published: August 26, 2016 ABSTRACT Purpose: To examine the prognostic discrimination and prediction of initial intracranial pressure (ICP) in patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) undergoing decompressive craniectomy (DC). Results: The relationship between the initial ICP value and prognosis was quantified, and higher values indicated worse patient outcomes. Univariate analysis showed that the initial ICP value was significantly associated with mortality (odds ratio: 1.272, 95% confidence interval: 1.116-1.449; P

An approach based on cell transmission model (CTM) is proposed to estimate the impact of variable free-flow speeds (FFS) on the performance of a freeway system. Based on the basic CTM, four typical freeway control strategies consisting of non control, local ramp metering, coordinated ramp metering and global control are first formulated. Then the method of adjusting model parameters to the changed free-flow speeds is presented. Among the adjustments, an experimental function based on Fan and Seibold (2014) is proposed to change the jam density. Several useful measures are defined to estimate and compare the performances of different freeways. The following three main observations are obtained from numerical experiments. (a) With the gradually increasing FFS, the throughput of freeway will increase at the beginning and then change to decrease. (b) With the increasing FFS, the average delay of vehicles will decrease at the beginning and then change to increase. (c) A series of free-flow speeds associate with the best performance of freeway. These observations are theoretically analyzed through investigating the location and capacity of bottleneck. Study shows that in general the actual bottleneck capacity will increase at the beginning and then change to decrease with the continually increasing FFS. In view of the positive correlation between traffic delay and bottleneck capacity, the theoretical analysis confirms the numerical observations. The findings of this study can deepen the understanding of freeway systems and help management agents adopt proper measures to improve the performance of the whole system.

Bus bunching commonly appears in a high-frequency bus line and will bring the lengthened waiting and riding times to passengers. Among the existing strategies of resisting bus bunching, only a few tried to cope with a high-frequency bus line which has not any pre-specified schedule or headway required to be adhered to. To stabilize a bus line as above, we propose a target-headway-based holding strategy in this paper. The average of the instantaneous time headways is used as the dynamic target headway. Based on the difference between the dynamic target headway and the forward headway of the current bus, the new strategy determines a proper holding time in a dynamic traffic situation. After removing the stochastic factors influencing on the headway, we proved the effectiveness of the new strategy to stabilize an unstable bus line. Different from the existing theoretical analyses which only focus on the single control point situation, the theoretical analysis in this paper takes into account any given number of control points. The numerical experiment demonstrated the effectiveness of the strategy by comparing with other strategies. The following insights were uncovered from the numerical analysis. With the increase of control points in a bus line, the stability performance and the service level of the bus line will increase at the beginning and then change to decrease. With the increase of the stochastic level of travel time, the performance of the bus line will decrease gradually. The new strategy can effectively cope with the non-peak, single-peak and double-peak demand patterns in a similar way.

The present retrospective study was performed to evaluate the clinical outcome, as well as post-operative collateral formation and revascularization patterns in combined bypass. Surgical revascularization has been the mainstay of treatment for moyamoya patients. A total of 76 hemispheres from 64 moyamoya patients undergoing combined superficial temporal artery-middle cerebral artery (STA-MCA) anastomosis and encephalo-duro-myo-synangiosis (EDMS) were retrospectively reviewed. Computed tomography perfusion and DSA were routinely performed. Modified Rankin scale (mRS) scoring and Kaplan-Meier analysis were performed, and post-operative collateral grading on digital subtraction angiography (DSA), reconstruction patterns and vessel diameter were measured to evaluate the revascularization area and vascular compensatory effect. During the follow-up period, the chief complaint was partially alleviated in 57/64 patients (89.1%). In all patients, mRS was significantly decreased after the operation. Good revascularization was established in most patients at 6 months after the surgery: 92.1% of sides were scored as 2 and 77.6% were scored as 3 by post-operative collateral grading on DSA. Dominant collateral revascularization originating from EDMS was more frequent than that from STA-MCA anastomosis (31 vs. 19 hemispheres) at 6-month follow-up. Morphologically, the calibers of the STA main trunk (2.60±0.65 mm) increased profoundly at the first 10 post-operative days (3.32±1.05 mm) and shrank back to pre-operative status at 6 months (2.20±1.01 mm) and 12 months (2.36±0.73 mm) according to DSA examination. Middle meningeal artery (MMA) and deep temporal artery (DTA) demonstrated continuous augmentation during the follow-up time (from 1.30±0.46 to 1.87±0.69 mm for MMA and 1.11±0.25 to 2.11±1.16 mm for DTA). These results strongly suggested that combined STA-MCA bypass and EDMS provided efficient revascularization and reduced acute cerebral events. The direct STA-MCA bypass provided early augmentation of cerebral perfusion, whereas the indirect EDMS provided a more durable long-term revascularization, indicating a complementary association between the two revascularization methods.

To analyze the morphological parameters of small intracranial aneurysms using two-dimensional digital subtraction angiography (DSA) and to identify their relationship with rupture risk.Clinical and radiologic data from patients with DSA-confirmed small intracranial aneurysms and who received intravascular treatment were retrospectively analyzed. Morphological parameters such as maximum height, transverse diameter, aneurysm neck width, and aspect ratio (AR) were compared between patients with ruptured and unruptured aneurysms. Logistic regression analysis was performed to identify the predictors of rupture risk.There were no significant differences between the unruptured (n = 40) and ruptured groups (n = 34) with respect to maximum height (p = 0.087) and transverse diameter (p = 0.736). However, aneurysm neck width (p = 0.006) and AR (p0.001) were found to be significantly different between the groups. AR value was analyzed through the receiver operating characteristic curve, and the best AR threshold was determined to be 1.49. A stepwise multivariate analysis showed that AR was the only independent factor for rupture risk.Two-dimensional DSA could be used to determine AR, which was an independent predictor of rupture risk of small aneurysms. Further studies with large sample sizes are needed to validate these results.

A generalized framework is presented to analyze the existing control methods.An anti-bunching method is proposed to improve bus schedule reliability.Bounded deviations from a schedule and the ideal headway are guaranteed. Bus bunching could seriously damage the stability of transit system. This resultant instability always causes a dissatisfying performance of transit system. The strategies of resisting bus bunching aim at improving schedule and headway reliability so as to improve the level of service of transit system. From a perspective of effectively using accurate and reliable information, a generalized framework is proposed to deal with bus bunching and explain the potential efficiencies of various existing anti-bunching strategies. In particular, a strategy that adaptively determines the actual holding time and/or adjusts the bus cruising speed when a bus arrives at a bus stop is studied in depth. The information required by this new strategy includes only the arrival time of the current bus at the current bus stop and the arrival times of the preceding bus at this bus stop and the next. The nonlinearity of boarding process is also taken into account in this new strategy. Numerical analysis and simulation experiment show that the new strategy can not only alleviate bus bunching and keep high schedule and headway reliability with less slack added in schedule, but also generate a relatively high commercial speed for the cruising buses.

Objective: Surgical revascularization is the mainstay of treatment for moyamoya patients. This study was to evaluate the progonosis of combined direct and indirect procedure for moyamoya disease patients. Methods: 76 cerebral hemispheres from 64 adult moyamoya patients undergoing combined superficial temporal artery-middle cerebral artery (STA-MCA) anastomosis and encephalo-duro-myo-synangiosis (EDMS) were reviewed retrospectively. The mean follow-up period was 23±14m (6m-70m). CT or MR perfusion and Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) were performed for preoperative diagnosis and postoperative evaluation of cerebral perfusion and revascularization. mRS score, angiographic collateralization score, vessel diameter were recorded to measure neurological dysfunction, revascularization area and vascular compensatory effect respectively. Results: Among the 64 MMD patients, 69 hemispheres received combined direct and indirect operations; 7 hemispheres only received indirect operations. During our follow-up periods, neurological deficits of 57/64 patients (89.1%) were partially alleviated. mRS was significantly decreased after operations not only in all patients, but also in stroke subgroup or hemorrhage subgroup. Generally, good revascularization was established in most of the patients by combined bypass. 92.1% (70/74) sides was scored 2 and 77.6% (59/74) sides was scored 3 determined by angiographic collateralization score. Compared to the preoperative situations (2.60±0.65mm), the calibers of STA main trunk increased profoundly in at postoperative 10 days (3.32±1.05mm, pversus pre-operation), and shrinked back to preoperative status at 6 months (2.24±1.00mm, p>0.05 versus pre-operation) and 12 months (2.36±0.73mm, p>0.05 versus pre-operation). Conclusion: Our findings strongly suggested that combined STA-MCA bypass and EDMS provided efficient revascularization and excellent results in preventing strokes and hemorrhage in adult patients. The direct STA-MCA bypass provided early augmentation of cerebral perfusion, whereas the indirect EDMS provided a more durable long-term revascularization, indicating a complementary relationship between the two revascularization methods.

The dynamic lane assignment at signalized intersections is a possible countermeasure to address the traffic demand variability problem. However, the operational efficiency is affected by the unfamiliarity of the drivers. This paper evaluates the operational efficiency of the intersections with dynamic lane assignment using field data collected at five intersections in China. A total of 63488 vehicles were captured, which were divided into four groups according to the lanes they drive on: Group 1, the variable approach lane; group 2, the lane adjacent to the variable lane with the same lane-use; group 3, the lane adjacent to the variable lane with different lane-use of the variable lane; and group 4, the lanes with the same lane-use as the variable lane at other approaches of the intersection. The statistical analysis was conducted to identify the difference of saturation flow rate among the four groups. A saturation flow rate adjustment model was established accordingly. Results indicate that the using of the dynamic lane assignment decreases the saturation flow rate of the variable lane and the adjacent lane with different lane-use 22.86% and 9.80%, respectively. For the variable lane, the reduction of the saturation flow rate comes from three aspects: the unequal distribution of traffic (8.9%), the mandatory lane-changing (10.7%), and the lane blockage (4.9%).

Information of link flows in a traffic network becomes increasingly critical in contemporary transportation practice and researches. The network sensor installation is carried out to supply such information. In this paper, we present a graphical approach to determine the smallest subset of links in a traffic network for counting sensor installation, so as to infer the flows on all remaining links. The elegant assumption-free character of the problem introduced by Hu, Peeta and Chu is still kept in this approach. This study points out the topological tree feature of solutions that makes it possible for traffic management agencies to easily and flexibly select links for sensor installation in practice. Addressing from the same graphical perspective, we provide solutions to four other important problems about sensor locations. The preceding two problems are, in traffic networks that already have sensors installed on some links, to identify the subset of links on which link flows can be inferred from sensor measurements and to determine the smallest subset of links on which counting sensors also need to be installed so as to infer link flows on all remaining non-equipped links. The third is to identify the optimal locations for a given number of sensors so as to infer flows on as many links as possible by gradually enlarging the number of links included in circuits. The last one is to determine the smallest subset of links on which to install sensors, in such a way that it becomes possible at the same time to satisfy prior requirements and infer the flows on all remaining links, through building a minimum spanning tree. These methods can be applied to all kinds of long-term planning and link-based applications in traffic networks.

Intracranial bleeding and inflammatory reactions are common consequences of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Neutrophil gelatinase-associated lipocalin (NGAL), an iron-handling and acute phase protein, may participate in the pathogenesis of TBI. Therefore, we hypothesize that NGAL may be of high diagnostic and therapeutic relevance in the prognosis of TBI.74 subjects were recruited in this study. 30 TBI patients receiving emergent operation were designated as severe TBI group (sTBI), 24 TBI patients receiving conservative treatment as mild TBI group (mTBI), while 20 age-matched healthy volunteers as healthy controls (CNT). We detected the expression and localization of NGAL in brain tissue by Q-PCR, western blotting, and immunofluorescence. Serum NGAL was evaluated by ELISA. Clinical manifestations and outcomes were measured by Glasgow Score (GCS), Trauma score (TS), Revised Trauma score (RTS), APACHEII, Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA), and Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) 85 at admission. Glasgow outcome score (GOS) and Karnofsky Performance Score (KPS) were documented at discharge.NGAL mRNA and protein levels in brain tissue from sTBI group were profoundly higher than control tissue. Double labeled NGAL with GFAP, NeuN and Iba-1 by immunofluroscence demonstrated that increased NGAL was mainly located in neurons. Compared to CNT and mTBI groups, serum NGAL were significantly increased in sTBI group (sTBI: 532.6±71.77ng/ml vs. mTBI: 230.5±29.59ng/ml, p0.01; sTBI: 532.6±71.77ng/ml vs. CNT 178.0±19.83ng/ml, p0.01). Linear regression analysis indicated that there was a negative correlation between the NGAL levels and GCS (r=-0.427, p=0.033), TS (r=-0.429, p=0.032), RTS (r=-0.413, p=0.040) in sTBI group. However, NGAL levels did not correlated with GOS and KPS scores. The NAGL cut-off value of 244.13ng/ml yielded good sensitivity at 84% and specificity at 78.9%.NGAL may be a novel biomarker reflecting TBI severity, which increased obviously and negatively correlated with GCS, TS, and RTS scores; additionally, this characteristic of NGAL may be helpful in guiding clinical TBI therapeutic strategies.

One side constrained traffic assignment model is presented based on the local nearsighted user equilibrium principle by taking advantage of network dual equilibrium theorem. The traffic flow and travel time are regarded as a pair of dual variables. The analysis is started from the basic elements of network. At first, the dual relationships between the conservation conditions of node's flow and the shortest travel time from origin to the node are considered. Then the dual relationships between link flow and travel time constrains on link with nearsighted users are also analyzed. At last, through combining these dual relationships and adding generalized side constraints, new traffic assignment model is built. How to embody two behavioral assumptions (priority of playing cards and elasticity of route adjusting on route) in the proposed algorithm to the model is analyzed. A searching method of effective path set is given by using the model's solution results of unique link flow with respect to origin and destination pair. Several numeral examples are given to prove the validity and efficiency of the model and related algorithm. The results for the side constrained model are explained by congestion pricing and queue delay on links.

Regional transportation can be regarded as a complex system consisting of many subsystems. If it is assumed that the decisions of others are known, one of the subsystems, such as a manufacturer, will make decisions from the viewpoint of individual optimal. But among these subsystems, there are noncooperative interactions. The first Wardrop principle can be used to explain the interplay between the subsystems and the second Wardrop principle to explain the internal decision making of one subsystem. To capture the feature of hierarchical behavior, classical Wardrop principles need to be generalized. The new behavior principle is named the generalized Wardrop principle. With the substitution of actual path sets for the simple links in a spatial price equilibrium network and constructing the generalized transportation cost functions, the regional transportation network equilibrium model is formulated. The new model combines the spatial price equilibrium model with the network optimization model. It can be explained by the generalized Wardrop principle and reflects the multicommodity, multimodal characteristics of regional transportation. The modified projection algorithm is used to solve the model. One numerical example is given to show the efficiency of the algorithm.

Background Inflammatory responses are correlated with secondary brain injury after aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH). Galectin‐3 (Gal‐3) is a novel biomarker reflecting inflammation status, and its elevated circulating levels are associated with poor prognosis of some inflammatory diseases. The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between Gal‐3 plasma levels and prognosis in a group of aSAH patients. Materials and Methods We assessed plasma Gal‐3 levels in 120 patients and 120 healthy individuals. 6‐month clinical outcomes included mortality and unfavorable outcome (Glasgow Outcome Scale score of 1–3). Associations of plasma Gal‐3 levels with clinical outcomes were investigated using multivariate analysis. Results Patients showed significantly higher Gal‐3 levels as compared to controls. Circulating Gal‐3 was significantly and independently associated with 6‐month clinical outcomes in the logistic regression analysis. Moreover, we observed a significant correlation between circulating Gal‐3 and World Federation of Neurological Surgeons scores and modified Fisher scores. Furthermore, Gal‐3 possessed high area under receiver operating characteristic curve for prognostic assessment. Conclusion Our findings indicate the associations between Gal‐3 levels and the severity and poor prognosis following aSAH. This suggests the possible role of Gal‐3 in the prognostic prediction after aSAH.

One of cornerstones for urban transit planning and public transportation management is topological properties of transit network. Through analyzing the real transit networks, the conclusion was gotten that transit networks are robust against random vertex removal but considerably less robust against targeted removal of the highest-degree vertices. “Betweenness centrality” of transit networks was used to explain the conclusion obtained. The research approaches of this article can be directly applied to determining the public transit hub and evaluating the performance of the whole transit network.

Variable message signs (VMS), a component of intelligent transportation system (ITS) technologies, have been more and more widely applied in urban traffic management. A new model to determine optimal locations for VMS has been proposed in this paper. First, the optimal VMS location problem is formulated as a bi-level programming problem which takes into account the interaction between VMS and network-wide traffic flow distribution. The upper level model of the bi-level problem aims at maximizing the benefits of the VMS system regarding the amount of information provided by VMS. The lower level model is a stochastic user equilibrium traffic assignment model. Second, the solution algorithm for the bi-level model is presented. Next, the validity of the new model is verified by numerical analyses through a case study. Research results of this paper provide a technical tool to make plausible decisions regarding optimal VMS location plans.