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Background: Thoracoscopic repair of esophageal atresia (EA) with tracheoesophageal fistula (TEF) has been performed with increasing frequency. Although many children have underwent surgery within three days after birth, the optimal timing for operation remains undetermined. This study aimed to investigate the appropriate timing for thoracoscopic repair of type C EA and its mid-term clinical outcomes. Method: We retrospectively analyzed 142 patients with EA between April 2009 and April 2023. A total of 109 patients with type C EA who underwent thoracoscopic one-stage repair surgery were included. The patients were divided into two groups based on surgical timing: the early repair group (< 5 days) and the delayed repair group (≥ 5 days). Patients in the two groups were matched using propensity score matching (PSM) to eliminate the imbalance between groups caused by confounding factors such as severe cardiac complications, gestational age, and birth weight. Result: The median age at surgery was 5 days (range: 1–16 days). After matching, 43 patients (out of 59) in the early repair group (group A) and 43 patients (out of 50) in the delayed repair group (group B) were included in the validation cohort. All cases (n = 86) successfully completed thoracoscopic one-stage repair surgery. Delayed surgery did not increase the incidence of preoperative and postoperative respiratory tract infections. Intraoperative and postoperative complications were comparable between the two groups. Intraoperative and postoperative complications were comparable between the two groups; however, patients in group B experienced a lower frequency of balloon dilation (1.8 ± 0.8 vs. 3.1 ± 1.1, P = 0.035) for anastomotic stricture during follow-up. Conclusions: With improvements in neonatal surveillance, appropriately delayed surgery does not increase the incidence of respiratory infections, allowing surgeons to optimize treatment plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to further improve the functionality of negative-ion functional fibers, Cu, CuO, Cu2O and tourmaline were selected as raw materials, a novel Cuprous Oxide/Tourmaline (Cu2O/TM) micro-nano composite with excellent properties was developed by using distributed synthesis and direct addition methods respectively. The micromorphology (SEM), phase composition (XRD), infrared spectrum (FTIR), electron spin resonance (ESR), UV-VIS diffuse reflection spectrum and negative ion emission of the samples were tested to further study the efficiency enhancement mechanism of negative ion emission. The results show that the molecular structure of tourmaline powder is not damaged by grinding. The properties of tourmaline composites prepared by stepwise synthesis method are better than those by direct addition method. When the milling time is controlled at 50 h (the first stage) and 20 h (the second stage), the particle size distribution and microstructure of the powder prepared by step synthesis are better. When the molar mass ratio of Cu, CuO and tourmaline powder is 1:1.25:2.50, the negative ion emission of the prepared composite is 1 647 ions/cm, which is 50.1% higher than that of the unground tourmaline powder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the requirement of nuclear radiation spectrum and positron annihilation coincidence Doppler broadening spectrum measurement, an all digital dual channel coincidence Doppler broadening system based on FPGA is designed. In this system, the analog signal collected by the high purity germanium detector is converted into digital signal by the front-end of 16 bit analog-to-digital conversion chip AD9269-80. The digital signal enters the FPGA chip at the back-end of the system for digital processing. FPGA realizes the processing of nuclear pulse signal through moving average window, ping-pong operation, custom IP core, etc., including waveform noise reduction, trapezoid filtering, baseline recovery, stack recognition, threshold judgment, data cache, etc., so as to obtain the amplitude information and time information of nuclear pulse. Then, the communication between the network port module and the upper computer is carried out, and the amplitude and time information are transmitted by UDP protocol to obtain the energy spectrum of the nuclear signal. The system uses two channels to measure the broadening spectrum of positron coincidence Doppler and obtains two-dimensional coincidence spectrum.

Centrifugal chillers have been widely used in medium- and large-scale air conditioning projects. However, equipment running with faults will result in additional energy consumption. Meanwhile, it is difficult to diagnose the minor faults of the equipment. Therefore, the Extreme Gradient Boost (XGBoost) algorithm was used to solve the above problem in this article. The ASHRAE RP-1043 dataset was employed for research, utilizing the feature splitting principle of XGBoost to reduce the data dimension to 23 dimensions. Subsequently, the five important parameters of the XGBoost algorithm were optimized using Multi-swarm Cooperative Particle Swarm Optimization (MSPSO). The minor fault diagnosis model, MSPSO-XGBoost, was established. The results show that the ability of the proposed MSPSO-XGBoost model to diagnose eight different states is uniform, and the diagnostic accuracy of the model reaches 99.67%. The accuracy rate is significantly improved compared to that of the support vector machine (SVM) and back propagation neural network (BPNN) diagnostic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fumarate hydratase-deficient renal cell carcinoma (FH-deficient RCC) is a rare and aggressive tumor characterized by pathogenic alterations in the fumarate hydratase (FH) gene. Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (clear cell RCC) is a common renal cell carcinoma (RCC) associated with von Hippel-Lindau (VHL) gene variations. Here, we reported a case of bilateral RCCs. A 60-year-old man was admitted to hospital with a 3.6 cm × 3.3 cm mass in the right kidney and a 2.8 cm × 2.3 cm nodule in the left kidney. Pathologically, the right tumor showed a nested growth pattern of cells with clear cytoplasm and was FH positive and 2-succinylcysteine (2SC) negative. The left tumor demonstrated a high-grade papillary pattern and was FH negative and 2SC positive. Whole-exome sequencing and Sanger sequencing identified a germline FH c.563A > T mutation in both the tumors and an additional somatic VHL c.479_480insA mutation in the right tumor, confirming the diagnosis of clear cell RCC and FH-deficient RCC in the right and left kidneys, respectively. We reported a rare case of synchronous bilateral clear cell RCC (right) and FH-deficient RCC (left) likely driven by somatic VHL mutation and germline FH mutation, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]