Camera sensors often fail to capture clear images or videos in a poorly lit environment. In this paper, we propose a trainable hybrid network to enhance the visibility of such degraded images. The ...proposed network consists of two distinct streams to simultaneously learn the global content and the salient structures of the clear image in a unified network. More specifically, the content stream estimates the global content of the low-light input through an encoder-decoder network. However, the encoder in the content stream tends to lose some structure details. To remedy this, we propose a novel spatially variant recurrent neural network (RNN) as an edge stream to model edge details, with the guidance of another auto-encoder. The experimental results show that the proposed network favorably performs against the state-of-the-art low-light image enhancement algorithms.
Glucose sensors based blood glucose detection are of great significance for the diagnosis and treatment of diabetes because diabetes has aroused wide concern in the world. In this study, bovine serum ...albumin (BSA) was used to cross-link glucose oxidase (GOD) on a glassy carbon electrode (GCE) modified by a composite of hydroxy fullerene (HFs) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and protected with a glutaraldehyde (GLA)/Nafion (NF) composite membrane to prepare a novel glucose biosensor. The modified materials were analyzed by UV-visible spectroscopy (UV-vis), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and cyclic voltammetry (CV). The prepared MWCNTs-HFs composite has excellent conductivity, the addition of BSA regulates MWCNTs-HFs hydrophobicity and biocompatibility, and better immobilizes GOD on MWCNTs-HFs. MWCNTs-BSA-HFs plays a synergistic role in the electrochemical response to glucose. The biosensor shows high sensitivity (167 μA·mM
·cm
), wide calibration range (0.01-3.5 mM), and low detection limit (17 μM). The apparent Michaelis-Menten constant Kmapp is 119 μM. Additionally, the proposed biosensor has good selectivity and excellent storage stability (120 days). The practicability of the biosensor was evaluated in real plasma samples, and the recovery rate was satisfactory.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Methodological quality (risk of bias) assessment is an important step before study initiation usage. Therefore, accurately judging study type is the first priority, and the choosing proper tool is ...also important. In this review, we introduced methodological quality assessment tools for randomized controlled trial (including individual and cluster), animal study, non-randomized interventional studies (including follow-up study, controlled before-and-after study, before-after/ pre-post study, uncontrolled longitudinal study, interrupted time series study), cohort study, case-control study, cross-sectional study (including analytical and descriptive), observational case series and case reports, comparative effectiveness research, diagnostic study, health economic evaluation, prediction study (including predictor finding study, prediction model impact study, prognostic prediction model study), qualitative study, outcome measurement instruments (including patient - reported outcome measure development, content validity, structural validity, internal consistency, cross-cultural validity/ measurement invariance, reliability, measurement error, criterion validity, hypotheses testing for construct validity, and responsiveness), systematic review and meta-analysis, and clinical practice guideline. The readers of our review can distinguish the types of medical studies and choose appropriate tools. In one word, comprehensively mastering relevant knowledge and implementing more practices are basic requirements for correctly assessing the methodological quality.
Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), as a cost effective and eco-friendly photovoltaic technology for utilizing solar energy, are promising in meeting the increasing demand of clean and renewable ...energy resources. Among various sensitizers, porphyrins are crucial candidates with the advantages of strong absorption in a wide spectral range, tunable photophysical and electrochemical properties, and long-lived excited states facilitating electron injection. After decades of development, the power conversion efficiencies of porphyrin-based DSSCs have exceeded 13%, showing the great potential of porphyrins in fabricating highly efficient DSSCs. This review summarizes effective molecular engineering strategies for optimizing porphyrin sensitizers as well as intermolecular engineering of coadsorption and cosensitization systems, with the aim to provide further insight into the molecular structure-photovoltaic performance correlations and an outlook on possible exploration directions in the future for achieving DSSCs with high efficiencies, long-term stability and low cost feasible for practical applications. In addition, the recent advances of porphyrin-based organic solar cells (OSCs) are briefly introduced considering similar design strategies employed for developing porphyrin dyes for DSSCs and active materials for OSCs.
In this review, intra- and intermolecular engineering strategies for improving the efficiencies of porphyrin based dye-sensitized solar cells are briefly summarized, revealing the in-depth structure-photovoltaic performance correlations.
Camera shake or target movement often leads to undesired blur effects in videos captured by a hand-held camera. Despite significant efforts having been devoted to video-deblur research, two major ...challenges remain: (1) how to model the spatio-temporal characteristics across both the spatial domain (i.e., image plane) and the temporal domain (i.e., neighboring frames) and (2) how to restore sharp image details with respect to the conventionally adopted metric of pixel-wise errors. In this paper, to address the first challenge, we propose a deblurring network (DBLRNet) for spatial-temporal learning by applying a 3D convolution to both the spatial and temporal domains. Our DBLRNet is able to capture jointly spatial and temporal information encoded in neighboring frames, which directly contributes to the improved video deblur performance. To tackle the second challenge, we leverage the developed DBLRNet as a generator in the generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture and employ a content loss in addition to an adversarial loss for efficient adversarial training. The developed network, which we name as deblurring GAN, is tested on two standard benchmarks and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
In this paper, an accurate full-reference image quality assessment (IQA) model developed for assessing screen content images (SCIs), called the edge similarity (ESIM), is proposed. It is inspired by ...the fact that the human visual system (HVS) is highly sensitive to edges that are often encountered in SCIs; therefore, essential edge features are extracted and exploited for conducting IQA for the SCIs. The key novelty of the proposed ESIM lies in the extraction and use of three salient edge features-i.e., edge contrast, edge width, and edge direction. The first two attributes are simultaneously generated from the input SCI based on a parametric edge model, while the last one is derived directly from the input SCI. The extraction of these three features will be performed for the reference SCI and the distorted SCI, individually. The degree of similarity measured for each above-mentioned edge attribute is then computed independently, followed by combining them together using our proposed edge-width pooling strategy to generate the final ESIM score. To conduct the performance evaluation of our proposed ESIM model, a new and the largest SCI database (denoted as SCID) is established in our work and made to the public for download. Our database contains 1800 distorted SCIs that are generated from 40 reference SCIs. For each SCI, nine distortion types are investigated, and five degradation levels are produced for each distortion type. Extensive simulation results have clearly shown that the proposed ESIM model is more consistent with the perception of the HVS on the evaluation of distorted SCIs than the multiple state-of-the-art IQA methods.
A photoinduced flexible Li‐CO2 battery with well‐designed, hierarchical porous, and free‐standing In2S3@CNT/SS (ICS) as a bifunctional photoelectrode to accelerate both the CO2 reduction and ...evolution reactions (CDRR and CDER) is presented. The photoinduced Li‐CO2 battery achieved a record‐high discharge voltage of 3.14 V, surpassing the thermodynamic limit of 2.80 V, and an ultra‐low charge voltage of 3.20 V, achieving a round trip efficiency of 98.1 %, which is the highest value ever reported (<80 %) so far. These excellent properties can be ascribed to the hierarchical porous and free‐standing structure of ICS, as well as the key role of photogenerated electrons and holes during discharging and charging processes. A mechanism is proposed for pre‐activating CO2 by reducing In3+ to In+ under light illumination. The mechanism of the bifunctional light‐assisted process provides insight into photoinduced Li‐CO2 batteries and contributes to resolving the major setbacks of the system.
Battery life on Mars: A photoinduced flexible Li‐CO2 battery with hierarchical, porous, and free‐standing In2S3@CNT/SS as a bifunctional photoelectrode to accelerate both CO2 reduction and evolution is presented. The Li‐CO2 battery achieved a record‐high discharge voltage of 3.14 V (thermodynamic limit: 2.80 V), and an ultra‐low charge voltage of 3.20 V, and a roundtrip efficiency of 98.1 %.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
The triglyceride-glucose (TyG) index is a reliable surrogate marker of insulin resistance and previous studies have confirmed the association of TyG index with incident chronic kidney disease (CKD). ...However, the impact of longitudinal patterns of TyG index on CKD risk among non-diabetic population is still unknown. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the association of longitudinal patterns of TyG index with incident CKD among non-diabetic population.
A total of 5484 non-diabetic participants who underwent one health examination per year from 2015 to 2017 were included in this prospective study. TyG index variability and cumulative TyG index were calculated to assess the longitudinal patterns of TyG index. Cox proportional hazard models were performed to estimate the association of TyG index variability or cumulative TyG index with incident CKD.
During a median of 3.82 years follow-up, 879 participants developed CKD. Compared with participants in the lowest quartile, the hazard ratio (HR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) of incident CKD were 1.772 (95% CI: 1.453, 2.162) for the highest TyG index variability quartile and 2.091 (95% CI: 1.646, 2.655) for the highest cumulative TyG index quartile in the fully adjusted models. The best discrimination and reclassification improvement were observed after adding baseline TyG, TyG index variability and cumulative TyG index to the clinical risk model for CKD.
Both TyG index variability and cumulative TyG index can independently predict incident CKD among non-diabetic population. Monitoring longitudinal patterns of TyG index may assist with prediction and prevention of incident CKD.
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DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Ovarian cancer is the most lethal gynecological cancer. In spite of recent advances, clinical outcomes remain poor, urgently needing novel therapeutic approaches. Growing evidence indicates that ...microRNAs play crucial roles in ovarian carcinogenesis and progression and that ferroptosis serves as a novel tumor suppressor. However, the molecular mechanisms of miRNA-mediated ferroptosis regulation in ovarian cancer are still largely unknown. In the present study, we show that miR-424-5p negatively regulates ferroptosis by directly targeting ACSL4 in ovarian cancer cells. Upregulation of miR-424-5p suppressed ACSL4 by directly binding to its 3'-UTR, which subsequently reduced erastin- and RSL3-induced ferroptosis. Meanwhile, knockdown of miR-424-5p increased the sensitivity of ovarian cancer cells to erastin and RSL3. Furthermore, ACSL4 was upregulated in ovarian cancer tissues, and high ACSL4 expression predicted worse prognosis and sensitized ovarian cancer cells to erastin- and RSL3-induced ferroptosis. Importantly, decreases in lipid peroxides and ferroptotic cell death mediated by miR-424-5p could be abrogated by ACSL4 overexpression. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that miR-424-5p regulates ferroptosis by targeting ACSL4 in ovarian cancer cells and suggest a potential therapeutic approach for ovarian cancer.
► The BRICS’ economies have flourished with increasingly energy consumptions. ► The analyses and comparison of energy efficiency are conducted among the BRICS. ► As a whole, there is low energy ...efficiency but a growing trend of BRICS. ► The BRICS should adopt relevant energy policies based on their own conditions.
As a representative of many emerging economies, BRICS’ economies have been greatly developed in recent years. Meanwhile, the proportion of energy consumption of BRICS to the whole world consumption has increased. Therefore, it is significant to analyze and compare the energy efficiency among them. This paper firstly utilizes a Super-SBM model to measure and calculate the energy efficiency of BRICS, then analyzes their present status and development trend. Further, Bootstrap is applied to modify the values based on DEA derived from small sample data, and finally the relationship between energy efficiency and carbon emissions is measured. Results show that energy efficiency of BRICS as a whole is low but has a quickly increasing trend. Also, the relationship between energy efficiency and carbon emissions vary from country to country because of their different energy structures. The governments of BRICS should make some relevant energy policies according to their own conditions.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
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