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Purpose: Laparoscopy is the most frequently performed surgery in children with high-level intra-abdominal testes. The aim of the study was to compare outcomes of transumbilical single-site laparoscopy and traditional laparoscopy in children with high-level intra-abdominal testes at Hainan Women and Children's Medical Center. Methods:Retrospective review of children with high-level intra-abdominal testes undergoing transumbilical single-site laparoscopy between March 2019 and March 2022 was performed.The patients were divided into transumbilical single-site laparoscopy and traditional laparoscopy groups. The age, clinical characteristics of high-level intra-abdominal testes, and internal ring were evaluated. The results were assessed for complications, operative time, tension of spermatic cord, location of the testis being fixed, hospital stay, and satisfaction Results: Seventy-two children were included in the analysis, thirty-eight patients in traditional laparoscopy, thirty-four patients in intransumbilical single-site laparoscopy. The median duration of surgery was 89.29 mintues in intransumbilical single-site laparoscopy versus 91.26 mintues in traditional laparoscopy (p=0.699) .The median age in intransumbilical single-site laparoscopy was 21.00 months, traditional laparoscopy was 20.53 months.There was no signifcant difference in spermatic cord location of the testis being fixed,and hospital stay in both groups, and no postoperative complications were reported in both groups. However, parents of intransumbilical single-site laparoscopy have higher satisfaction than traditional group(p=0.048). Conclusion:The transumbilical single-site laparoscopy for children with high-level intra-abdominal testes was safely adopted at our institution, should be considered as the preferred surgical approach.

A very important function of an issue tracking system is to assign labels to issue reports, such as bug, feature, enhancement, etc., in order to categorize issues to facilitate various development activities. In practice, it is very common that an issue has multiple labels. However, current works are mainly based on single-label prediction, which are not suitable for just-in-time multi-labeling services, due to the low efficiency. Therefore, in this paper, we propose MULA, a just-in-time MUlti-LAbeling system, which learns and automatically assigns multiple labels to issue reports. We have built a dataset with 81,601 entries and 11 labels, as the first benchmark for this task, and implemented a GitHub app. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work and tool for online multi-labeling GitHub issues based on their categories. We conduct a comprehensive empirical study, including comparisons with five commonly adopted labeling models that show the superiority of MULA, as well as an evaluation that shows high consistency between MULA’s suggestions and developers’ opinions.

Considering the success of generative adversarial networks (GANs) for image-to-image translation, researchers have attempted to translate satellite images to maps (si2map) through GAN for cartography. However, these studies involved limited scales, which hinders multi-scale map creation. By extending their method, high-resolution satellite images can be trivially translated to multi-scale maps through scale-wise si2map generators trained for certain scales. However, this strategy has two theoretical limitations. First, inconsistency between high-resolutions satellite images and object generalization on multi-scale maps (SI-M inconsistency) increasingly complicates the extraction of geographical information from satellite images for generators with decreasing scale. Second, as si2map translation is cross-domain, generators incur high computation costs to transform the pixel distribution on satellite images to that on maps. Thus, we designed a series strategy of generators for multi-scale si2map translation to address these limitations. In this strategy, high-resolution satellite images are inputted to an si2map generator to output large-scale maps, which are translated to multi-scale maps through series multi-scale map generators. The series strategy avoids SI-M inconsistency as high-resolution satellite images are only translated to large-scale maps, and transforms cross-domain translation to approximately intradomain translation when generates multi-scale maps. Our experimental results showed better quality multi-scale map generation with the series strategy, as shown by average increases of 11.69%, 53.78%, 55.42%, and 72.34% in the structural similarity index, edge structural similarity index, intersection over union (road), and intersection over union (water) for data from Mexico City and Tokyo at zoom level 17–13.

Curved bridge deck pavement materials are easy to be damaged due to their complex stress conditions. Hence, the application of a high-viscosity modified asphalt mixture in curved bridge deck pavement is studied in this paper. Firstly, the severity of pavement diseases on curved bridge decks was introduced and compared with the deck pavement diseases in straight sections. Then, compared with SBS-modified asphalt mixture SMA-13, the advantages of high-viscosity modified asphalt mixture HM-SMA-13 in resistance to deformation, water damage, shear deformation, and fatigue were analyzed. The results show that HM-SMA-13 has 1.6 times the high-temperature deformation resistance, 1.2 times the shear deformation resistance, 1.1 times the low-temperature performance, 1.05 times the water stability, and 7 times the fatigue resistance of the SMA-13 mixture. Finally, HM-SMA-13 was applied to the curved bridge deck pavement. After one year of operation, slight rutting and cracking appear on the bridge deck pavement, which indicated that HM-SMA-13 is a suitable material for curved bridge pavement.

Question Answering (QA) is an attractive and challenging area in NLP community. With the development of QA technique, plenty of QA software has been applied in daily human life to provide convenient access of information retrieval. To investigate the performance of QA software, many benchmark datasets have been constructed to provide various test cases. However, current QA software is mainly tested in a reference-based paradigm, in which the expected outputs (labels) of test cases are mandatory to be annotated with much human effort before testing. As a result, neither the just-in-time test during usage nor the extensible test on massive unlabeled real-life data is feasible, which keeps the current testing of QA software from being flexible and sufficient. In this work, we propose a novel testing method, QAAskeR+, with five new Metamorphic Relations for QA software. QAAskeR+ does not refer to the annotated labels of test cases. Instead, based on the idea that a correct answer should imply a piece of reliable knowledge that always conforms with any other correct answer, QAAskeR+ tests QA software by inspecting its behaviors on multiple recursively asked questions that are relevant to the same or some further enriched knowledge. Experimental results show that QAAskeR+ can reveal quite a few violations that indicate actual answering issues on various mainstream QA software without using any pre-annotated labels.

This study uses two typical subgrade soil samples selected from a highway construction site in Jilin Province, China, to formulate an empirical predictive model for the dynamic resilient modulus (E...

To assess the testicular volume in children with unilateral cryptorchidism of different ages in Hainan Province, China.The study included 424 children (ranging in age from 0 month to 4 years) with unilateral cryptorchidism or normal who were treated from 2017 to 2021 at our institution. They were divided into different groups according to age. We evaluated the correlation of testicular volume between the children with cryptorchidism and the normal children among different groups.There was a significant difference in testicular volume between the affected side and the healthy side. There was no difference in testicular volume between the left side and the right side of each control group. There were significant differences between the affected side of cryptorchid groups and the same side of the control groups. There were no significant differences between the healthy side of cryptorchid groups and the same side of the control groups. There were no significant differences between the affected side of left cryptorchid groups and right cryptorchid groups. There were no significant differences between the healthy side of left cryptorchid groups and right cryptorchid groups. There were significant differences in testicular volume among different age groups of the control group, while there were no differences in the cryptorchid groups.The development of testicular volume in children with unilateral inguinal cryptorchidism is affected in earlier age, and there was no compensatory testicular adaptation in the healthy testis.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) in Natural Language Processing has seen great progress recently. But almost all the current MRC software is validated with a reference-based method, which requires well-annotated labels for test cases and tests the software by checking the consistency between the labels and the outputs. However, labeling test cases of MRC could be very costly due to their complexity, which makes reference-based validation hard to be extensible and sufficient. Furthermore, solely checking the consistency and measuring the overall score may not be sensible and flexible for assessing the language understanding capability. In this paper, we propose a property-based validation method for MRC software with Metamorphic Testing to supplement the reference-based validation. It does not refer to the labels and hence can make much data available for testing. Besides, it validates MRC software against various linguistic properties to give a specific and in-depth picture on linguistic capabilities of MRC software. Comprehensive experimental results show that our method can successfully reveal violations to the target linguistic properties without the labels. Moreover, it can reveal problems that have been concealed by the traditional validation. Comparison according to the properties provides deeper and more concrete ideas about different language understanding capabilities of the MRC software.

The relaxation modulus of an asphalt mixture is adopted for evaluation of pavement structural soundness. However, it is difficult to perform a strain-controlled relaxation test on an asphalt mixture to obtain the relaxation modulus. The aim of this paper is to obtain the relaxation modulus expression in the Laplace transform domain and then perform a Laplace transform to derive the relaxation modulus from creep compliance. A uniaxial static creep test was conducted on four types of asphalt mixtures at 20 °C, 30 °C, and 40 °C and under a load of 0.3 MPa. The Prony series and power law were used to model creep compliance with good fitting of R2 > 0.95. Because the Laplace transform of the power law was a gamma function, the Prony series was used to simulate creep compliance and then applied to interconverting the viscoelastic functions. The Simpson and Gauss methods were used to convert the relaxation modulus from creep compliance based on a convolution formula and the calculation results from the two methods were shown to be equivalent. Based on the Laplace transform formula for creep compliance and the relaxation modulus, an equation for calculating the relaxation modulus in the Laplace domain was proposed. Numerical inversion of the Laplace transform, using the fixed Talbot method, was implemented to compute the relaxation modulus in the time domain and the results were compared with those derived by using the Gauss method. The average error is less than 10−4 and the computational speed of the fixed Talbot method is a factor of 25 faster than that of the Gauss method, demonstrating the high precision and high efficiency of the Laplace transform method for computing the relaxation modulus. The method developed in this study provides an effective tool for interconverting viscoelastic functions of asphalt mixtures.

Exception handling is an effective mechanism to guarantee software reliability in modern programming languages. An exception interrupts the program execution and propagates backwards along the call chain until the exception is caught by an exception handler. In software development practices, developers may be confused in determining where to place the exception handler in the call chain. The reason is that exception handling requires a developer to take a comprehensive consideration from a global perspective of the software project. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach EHAdvisor, which recommends exception handling locations from the global perspective of the project. EHAdvisor first trains a binary classification model based on four types of features, including architectural features, project features, functional features, and exception features. Then, for a new code snippet with exceptions, EHAdvisor predicts the exception catching probability for each method in the call chain based on the classification model and recommends Top-K exception handling locations based on the probability ranking. We conducted experiments on a dataset from 29 high-quality open source projects. Experimental results show that EHAdvisor achieves an average Top-1 recommendation success rate of 70.83% for across-project location recommendation and an average Top-1 accuracy of 86.21% for intra-project recommendation. Experiments on the importance scores show that global features, such as project features and architectural features, are evidently important to the recommendation of exception handling locations.

Bug reports in a repository are generally organized line by line in a list-view, with their titles and other meta-data displayed. In this list-view, a concise and precise title plays an important role that enables project practitioners to quickly and correctly digest the core idea of the bug, without carefully reading the corresponding details. However, the quality of bug report titles varies in open-source communities, which may be due to the limited time and unprofessionalism of authors. To help report authors efficiently draft good-quality titles, we propose a method, named iTAPE, to automatically generate titles for their bug reports. iTAPE formulates title generation into a one-sentence summarization task. By properly tackling two domain-specific challenges (i.e. lacking off-the-shelf dataset and handling the low-frequency human-named tokens), iTAPE then generates titles using a Seq2Seq-based model. A comprehensive experimental study shows that iTAPE can obtain fairly satisfactory results, in terms of the comparison with three latest one-sentence summarization works, as well as the feedback from human evaluation.

Since the linear elastic layered theory was developed in 1940s, it has been widely used to evaluate asphalt pavement soundness, and the mechanical responses have been used to analyze the be...

Since the linear elastic solution for multilayered systems was developed in the 1940s, it has been widely used to evaluate the soundness of pavement structure. The primary assumption in the analysi...

OBJECTIVE To compare the efficacy of transcervical resection of the cervix (TCRC) and loop electrosurgical excision procedure (LEEP) in the treatment of high-grade cervical squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSIL). METHODS A retrospective case record review was conducted of patients with HSIL treated with TCRC or LEEP at Guangdong General Hospital, Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences and Zhujiang Hospital, Guangzhou, China, from 2009 to 2015. The clinical characteristics, cone margin statuses, clinical outcomes, and adverse events were compared between the two groups. RESULTS Among 647 included patients, 292 (45.1%) were treated with TCRC and 355 (54.9%) with LEEP. The incidences of positive margins, persistent and recurrent lesions, and intraoperative bleeding were lower in the TCRC group than in the LEEP group (P