The present study examines a specific type of referee biases, home bias, and analyzes how the presence of fans affects home bias by using NBA games played in empty arenas during the COVID-19 pandemic ...in the 2020–2021 season and matches played before the pandemic from 2017 to 2020. This research also uses a unique data set from NBA Last Two Minute Reports to assess referees’ performance at the play level. The findings show crowd support does not cause referees to treat home and away teams differently in crucial situations during the NBA regular season, contrary to the results in most prior studies.
Individuals participate in the purchase and sale of securities affiliated with corporations on the stock market, which increases economic prosperity. The intricate interplay between economic factors, ...market dynamics, and investor psychology poses a significant challenge in accurately predicting outcomes within the field of finance. Additionally, the presence of non-stationarity, non-linearity, and high volatility in stock price time series data exacerbates the challenge of making precise estimations about stock prices in the securities market. The use of conventional techniques has the capacity to augment the accuracy of predictive modeling. However, it is important to acknowledge that these approaches also include computational intricacies, which might result in a higher likelihood of errors in predicting. This research introduces a novel model that adeptly addresses several issues via the integration of the Ant lion optimization methodology with the radial basis function method. The hybrid model showed greater effectiveness and performance in comparison to other models in the current study. The proposed model demonstrated a significant degree of effectiveness, characterized by optimum performance. The usefulness of a proposed predictive model for projecting stock prices was assessed by an analysis of data obtained from the Nasdaq index. The data covered the time period from January 1, 2015, to June 29, 2023. The findings suggest that the suggested model demonstrates reliability and effectiveness in its ability to analyze and predict the time series of stock prices. The empirical results suggest that the suggested model has a higher level of predictive accuracy in comparison to the other approaches by having the highest value of 0.991 for the coefficient of determination.
•The QDFrHT is proposed to generalize the discrete fractional Hartley transform into quaternion transform domain.•A large-capacity image compression and encryption scheme based on QDFrHT and an ...improved adaptive pixel diffusion is developed.•The storage and transmission of the keys are more convenient due to small key consumption.•Secret keys utilized in the proposed scheme are independent to original images.•An improved adaptive pixel diffusion operation makes the proposed cryptosystem immune to the known-plaintext attack and the chosen-plaintext attack.
A new multi-image encryption scheme based on quaternion discrete fractional Hartley transform (QDFrHT) and an improved pixel adaptive diffusion is proposed, which can simultaneously increase the encryption capacity and reduce the consumption of keys. In the proposed scheme, the QDFrHT is proposed to generalize the discrete fractional Hartley transform to quaternion transform domain and then applied to multi-image encryption. The original images are compressed into four fusion images by discrete cosine transform (DCT) and Zigzag operations and then the resulting four images are represented as quaternion algebra. Afterward, the quaternion signal is processed with the proposed QDFrHT and the double random phase encoding technique. To enhance the security of the algorithm, the plaintext-related pixel adaptive diffusion and the pixel scrambling operation based on chaotic systems are followed to obtain the final encryption image. Different from the traditional cryptosystem whose secret keys are dependent on the plaintext, the designed cryptosystem ensures the sensitivity of the cryptosystem to plaintext while the selection of the secret keys is independent on plaintext by introducing an improved diffusion mechanism. Numerical experiments verify the feasibility and the efficiency of the proposed multi-image compression and encryption scheme.
This article reviews the latest progresses regarding the applications of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), including single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWNTs), as ...multifunctional nano-probes for biomedical imaging. Utilizing the intrinsic band-gap fluorescence of semi-conducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs), fluorescence imaging in the near infrared II (NIR-II) region with enhanced tissue penetration and spatial resolution has shown great promise in recent years. Raman imaging based on the resonance Raman scattering of SWNTs has also been explored by a number of groups for in vitro and in vivo imaging of biological samples. The strong absorbance of CNTs in the NIR region can be used for photoacoustic imaging, and their photoacoustic signals can be dramatically enhanced by adding organic dyes, or coating with gold shells. Taking advantages of metal nanoparticle impurities attached to nanotubes, CNTs can also serve as a T2-contrast agent in magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. In addition, when labeled with radioactive isotopes, many groups have developed nuclear imaging with functionalized CNTs. Therefore CNTs are unique imaging probes with great potential in biomedical multimodal imaging.
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Intratumoral immunotherapy is an emerging modality for the treatment of solid tumors. Toll-like receptor (TLR) agonists have shown promise for eliciting immune responses, but systemic administration ...often results in the development of adverse side effects. Herein, we investigate whether localized delivery of the TLR agonist, resiquimod (R848), via platelet membrane-coated nanoparticles (PNP-R848) elicits antitumor responses. The membrane coating provides a means of enhancing interactions with the tumor microenvironment, thereby maximizing the activity of R848. Intratumoral administration of PNP-R848 strongly enhances local immune activation and leads to complete tumor regression in a colorectal tumor model, while providing protection against repeated tumor re-challenges. Moreover, treatment of an aggressive breast cancer model with intratumoral PNP-R848 delays tumor growth and inhibits lung metastasis. Our findings highlight the promise of locally delivering immunostimulatory payloads using biomimetic nanocarriers, which possess advantages such as enhanced biocompatibility and natural targeting affinities.
In this paper, a small series of novel quinoline sulfonamide derivatives was synthesized, and their structure of the target compounds were confirmed by 1H NMR and MS. The screening of the news target ...compounds' in vitro cytotoxic activities against tumor cell lines by the MTT method was performed. Among them, compound
(N-(4-methoxybenzyl)-2-oxo-N-(3,4,5-trimethoxyphenyl)-1,2,3,4-tetrahydroquinoline-6-sulfonamide exhibited the strongest inhibitory effect on the proliferation of HeLa (IC
: 1.34 μM), and this value correlated well with the inhibitory activities of the compound against tubulin polymerization (IC
: 6.74 μM). In summary, a new type of quinoline-sulfonamide derivative with tubulin polymerization inhibitory activity was discovered, and it can be used as a lead compound for further modification.
•An optical image encryption algorithm with phase-truncation in the short-time FrFT domain is proposed.•The wave-based permutation makes the phase part confused in the encryption unit.•The sub-images ...obtained by decomposing the original image is encoded with the encryption unit.
To increase the robustness against common attacks, a novel image encryption algorithm is proposed based on the phase-truncated short-time fractional Fourier transform (PTSTFrFT) and the hyper-chaotic system. In the algorithm, the original image is divided into four sub-images to be encoded independently. Different from the traditional phase truncation coding, the PTSTFrFT is combined with wave-based permutation to construct the encryption unit (EU) for encoding the sub-images, where the confused phase information is recombined with the amplitude information to guarantee the integrity of image information and the nonlinearity of phase truncation. Besides, the encryption unit can be achieved optically. Furthermore, the corresponding results compose an interim image, whose pixel values and pixel positions are modified by the permutation and the diffusion operations. The diffusion operation is designed with the feedback system to increase the anti-interference ability. The proposed image encryption algorithm has large enough key space and high sensitivity to the keys because of the use of hyper-chaotic system. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed image encryption algorithm based on the PTSTFrFT is secure and robust enough against the common attacks.
Recently, two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have received tremendous attention in many fields including biomedicine. Herein, we develop a general method to dope different types ...of metal ions into WS2 nanoflakes, a typical class of TMDCs, and choose Gd3+-doped WS2 (WS2:Gd3+) with polyethylene glycol (PEG) modification as a multifunctional agent for imaging-guided combination cancer treatment. While WS2 with strong near-infrared (NIR) absorbance and X-ray attenuation ability enables contrasts in photoacoustic (PA) imaging and computed tomography (CT), Gd3+ doping offers the nanostructure a paramagnetic property for magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. As revealed by trimodal PA/CT/MR imaging, WS2:Gd3+-PEG nanoflakes showed efficient tumor homing after intravenous injection. In vivo cancer treatment study further uncovered that WS2:Gd3+-PEG could not only convert NIR light into heat for photothermal therapy (PTT) but also enhance the ionizing irradiation-induced tumor damage to boost radiation therapy (RT). Owing to the improved tumor oxygenation after the mild PTT, the combination of PTT and RT induced by WS2:Gd3+-PEG resulted in a remarkable synergistic effect to destroy cancer. Our work highlights the promise of utilizing inherent physical properties of TMDC-based nanostructures, whose functions could be further enriched by elementary doping, for applications in multimodal bioimaging and synergistic cancer therapy.
Conjugated polymers with strong absorbance in the near‐infrared (NIR) region have been widely explored as photothermal therapy agents due to their excellent photostability and high photothermal ...conversion efficiency. Herein, polypyrrole (PPy) nanoparticles are fabricated by using bovine serum albumin (BSA) as the stabilizing agent, which if preconjugated with photosensitizer chlorin e6 (Ce6) could offer additional functionalities in both imaging and therapy. The obtained PPy@BSA‐Ce6 nanoparticles exhibit little dark toxicity to cells, and are able to trigger both photodynamic therapy (PDT) and photothermal therapy (PTT). As a fluorescent molecule that in the meantime could form chelate complex with Gd3+, Ce6 in PPy@BSA‐Ce6 nanoparticles after being labeled with Gd3+ enables dual‐modal fluorescence and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, which illustrate strong tumor uptake of those nanoparticles after intravenous injection into tumor‐bearing mice. In vivo combined PDT and PTT treatment is then carried out after systemic administration of PPy@BSA‐Ce6, achieving a remarkably improved synergistic therapeutic effect compared to PDT or PTT alone. Hence, a rather simple one‐step approach to fabricate multifunctional nanoparticles based on conjugated polymers, which appear to be promising in cancer imaging and combination therapy, is presented.
Bovine serum albumin (BSA) preconjugated with the photosensitizer chlorin e6 (Ce6) is used as the stabilizing agent to facilitate the synthesis of polypyrrole (PPy), obtaining PPy@BSA‐Ce6 nanoparticles by a simple one‐step method. Utilizing such nanoparticles, an in vivo multimodal imaging‐guided combined photodynamic and photothermal therapy is carried out, achieving a remarkably improved synergistic therapeutic effect compared to the respective mono‐therapy.
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