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Background To explore the survival and side effects of repeated CyberKnife stereotactic body radiation therapy (CK-SBRT) on hepatocellular carcinoma patients. Methods 24 HCC patients were collected at The Fifth Medical Center of PLA General Hospital from November 2011 to July 2016. They received second-course CK-SBRT with a prescribed dose of 50(48–55) Gy/5-8fx, and a single dose of 10 (7–11) Gy/fx. Cumulative overall survival rates (OS), progression-free survival rates (PFS) and local control rates (LC) were calculated by Kaplan-Meier method. Results All patients finished their radiotherapy plans. The 1-,2- and 3-year cumulative OS rate were 95.8,81.1 and 60.8%. The 1-,2- and 3-year LC rate were 95.5,90.7 and 90.7%, respectively. The 1-, 2- and 3-year PFS were 74.8, 49.2 and 39.4%, respectively. 16 patients complained of fatigue during second-course therapy, 2 patients showed Grade 2 gastrointestinal reaction, 1 patient was diagnosed radiation-induced liver disease and none died. PFS was significantly higher in the interval time p = 0.030). Conclusions It is preliminarily believed that re-CK-SBRT is an effective and safe treatment for HCC patients, but the treatment criteria should be strictly controlled.

This paper presents a multi-task learning architecture named SegPoseNet for 3D hand estimation problem. Previous methods usually gather image features from one perspective, which are unable to make full use of information. In this work, we dig into the hand part segmentation task and introduce semantic guidance information to help the hand pose estimation task. The use of segmentation information is novel but effective in hand pose estimation. Since predicting 3D hand pose directly is hard, we design a two-stage network, which consists of the 2D-StageNet and the 3D-StageNet. For an RGB image, 2D-StageNet carries out 2D hand pose estimation and 2D hand part segmentation at the same time under the multi-task learning mechanism. The 3D-StageNet utilizes the fusion of 2D heatmaps and 2D segmentation silhouette to predict 3D heatmaps, converting them into estimated 3D joint coordinates in the end. We conduct experiments on the pubic hand benchmark called the Rendered Hand Dataset (RHD) and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Extended ablation experiments prove the effectiveness brought by segmentation information.

Background Escherichia coli are mostly commensals but also contain pathogenic lineages. It is largely unclear whether the commensal E. coli as the potential origins of pathogenic lineages may consist of monophyletic or polyphyletic populations, elucidation of which is expected to lead to novel insights into the associations of E. coli diversity with human health and diseases. Methods Using genomic sequencing and pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) techniques, we analyzed E. coli from the intestinal microbiota of three groups of healthy individuals, including preschool children, university students, and seniors of a longevity village, as well as colorectal cancer (CRC) patients, to probe the commensal E. coli populations for their diversity. Results We delineated the 2280 fresh E. coli isolates from 185 subjects into distinct genome types (genotypes) by PFGE. The genomic diversity of the sampled E. coli populations was so high that a given subject may have multiple genotypes of E. coli, with the general diversity within a host going up from preschool children through university students to seniors. Compared to the healthy subjects, the CRC patients had the lowest diversity level among their E. coli isolates. Notably, E. coli isolates from CRC patients could suppress the growth of E. coli bacteria isolated from healthy controls under nutrient-limited culture conditions. Conclusions The coexistence of multiple E. coli lineages in a host may help create and maintain a microbial environment that is beneficial to the host. As such, the low diversity of E. coli bacteria may be associated with unhealthy microenvironment in the intestine and hence facilitate the pathogenesis of diseases such as CRC.

Plant natural products have long been considered to be important sources of bioactive molecules. A large number of antimicrobial and anticancer agents have been isolated form plants. In the present study we evaluated the antimicrobial and anticancer activity of a plant derived secondery metabolite, Polyphyllin G. The results of antibacterial assays showed that Polyphyllin G prevented the growth of both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria with minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging from 13.1 to 78 μg/ml. Antifungal activity measured as inhibition of mycelium growth ranged between 38.32 and 56.50%. Further Polyphyllin G was also evaluated against a panel of cancer cell lines. The IC50 of Polyphyllin G ranged from 10 to 65 μM. However the IC50 of Polyphyllin G was found to be comparatively high (120 μM) against the normal FR2 cancer cell line. The lowest IC50 of 10 μM was found against the oral cancer cell line OECM-1. Therefore further studies were carried out on this cell line only. Our results indicated that Polyphyllin G induced cell arrest in oral cancer OECM-1 cells by inactivation of cdc25C-cdc22 via ATM-Chk 1/2 stimulation. Therefore, we propose that Polyphyllin G might prove a lead molecule in the management of oral cancers and at the same time may prevent the growth of opportunistic microbes.

The HIV-1 membrane proximal external region (MPER) that is targeted by several broadly neutralizing antibodies (BNAbs) has been considered a potential immunogen for vaccine development. However, to date the immunogenicity of these BNAb epitopes has not been made sufficiently adequate. In the present work, we used live attenuated Salmonella as a platform to present the HIV-1 MPER 10E8 epitope in the fimbriae. The insertion of the 10E8 epitope into the fimbriae had no significant influence on the expression and the absorption capacity of bacterial fimbriae, nor on the virulence and invasiveness of the attenuated Salmonella. After oral administration of the vaccine construct to mice followed by 10E8 epitope peptide boost, specific antibody responses in serum and mucosa as well as memory lymphocytes in spleen and plasma cells in bone marrow were induced. We also found that the live attenuated Salmonella vector directed the immunity toward Th1 bias, induced Th1 and Th2 cytokine responses and stimulated significant B cell differentiation into GC B, memory B and plasma cells. Therefore, we propose that the live attenuated Salmonella constitutively expressing HIV-1 BNAb epitopes on the fimbriae will be an effective approach to improving immune microenvironment and enhancing the immunogenicity of HIV-1 epitope vaccines.

When the onshore, long-distance natural gas pipeline operates the normal gas transmission, its starting pressure is 4.5-6.4 MPa. Ending pressure is generally more than 1 Mpa. Once the injection happens, the gas leakage speed is big and the Reynolds number can reach 10 to the 4th power orders of magnitude, which is a turbulent jet. It inevitably leads to an injection fire encountering the fire source and causing casualties and property losses in the industry-high-density and living-high-density areas. Therefore, studying the injection fire hazards and figuring out its basic parameters - such as the hazard radius, the hazard strength and the damage mechanism - are of great significance for effective prediction of the failure risk of the natural gas pipeline, effective protection for people's property and life safety. Based on the history data and test, the paper: (1) establishes and improves the relevant mathematical model; and (2) preliminarily establishes the consequence calculation method (which can quantitatively analyze and research the injection fire hazards resulting from the natural gas pipeline leakage), thereby providing the decision support for natural gas pipeline risk assessment, risk management, and pipeline maintenance, as well as the hazard consequence assessment after the injection fire occurred.

The leakage rate is the essential parameters of risk assessment and failure consequence analysis for the natural gas pipeline, the size of the parameter values represents the severity of the risk to some extent. The determination of the gas leakage rate is closely related to pipeline characteristics, medium flow state as well as the leakage holes geometry, it is a complex fluid dynamics problem. Based on the gas diffusion theory, fluid mechanics theory and numerical methods, comprehensively considering the steady state when the natural gas continued to leak, leak moment and non-steady flow after the pipeline upstream valve is closed, the paper establishes the hole - tube integrated model of media leakage rate calculation for long-distance natural gas pipeline. Through the computer simulation: the model calculation results of hole leakage (without consideration of tube gas expansion, and friction loss is small), big hole leakage or fracture, are very close to the actual. It not only solves the lack of calculation model of the condition between holes and fracture leaks in traditional leak rate model, and also achieves to solve computational problems of leakage rate for a variety of gas pipeline leak mode through an integrated model, and it has practical value for the quantitative risk assessment and integrity management of onshore natural gas pipeline.