The aerosol transmission was academically recognized as a possible transmission route of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We established an approach to assess the indoor tempo-spatial ...airborne-disease infection risks through aerosol transmission via real-time CO2 field measurement and occupancy monitoring. Compared to former studies, the proposed method can evaluate real-time airborne disease infection risks through aerosol transmission routes. The approach was utilized in a university office. The accumulated infection risk was calculated for three occupants with practical working schedules (from occupancy recording) and one hypothesis occupant with a typical working schedule. COVID-19 was used as an example. Results demonstrated that the individual infection risks diversified with different dwell times and working places in the office. For the three occupants with a practical working schedule, their 3-day accumulated infection risks were respectively 0.050%, 0.035%, 0.027% and 0.041% due to 11.6, 9.0 and 13.8 h exposure with an initial infector percentage of 1%. The results demonstrate that location and dwell time are both important factors influencing the infection risk of certain occupant in built environment, whereas existing literature seldom took these two points into consideration simultaneously. On the contrary, our proposed approach treated the infection risks as place-by-place, time-by-time and person-by-person diversified in the built environment. The risk assessment results can provide early warning for building occupants and contribute to the transmission control of air-borne disease.
•New approach was established to evaluate airborne-disease infection risks.•CO2 concentrations are measured and utilized as tracer gas of viral aerosols.•Tempo-spatial infection risks are calculated individually based on occupancy.•Accumulated COVID-19 infection risks are assessed for occupants in an office.
Ulcerative colitis (UC) was the most frequently diagnosed inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and closely linked to colorectal carcinogenesis. By far, the underlying mechanisms associated with the ...disease are still unclear. With the increasing accumulation of microarray gene expression profiles, it is profitable to gain a systematic perspective based on gene regulatory networks to better elucidate the roles of genes associated with disorders. However, a major challenge for microarray data analysis is the integration of multiple-studies generated by different groups.
In this study, firstly, we modeled a signaling regulatory network associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) initiation via integration of cross-study microarray expression data sets using Empirical Bayes (EB) algorithm. Secondly, a manually curated human cancer signaling map was established via comprehensive retrieval of the publicly available repositories. Finally, the co-differently-expressed genes were manually curated to portray the layered signaling regulatory networks.
Overall, the remodeled signaling regulatory networks were separated into four major layers including extracellular, membrane, cytoplasm and nucleus, which led to the identification of five core biological processes and four signaling pathways associated with colorectal carcinogenesis. As a result, our biological interpretation highlighted the importance of EGF/EGFR signaling pathway, EPO signaling pathway, T cell signal transduction and members of the BCR signaling pathway, which were responsible for the malignant transition of CRC from the benign UC to the aggressive one.
The present study illustrated a standardized normalization approach for cross-study microarray expression data sets. Our model for signaling networks construction was based on the experimentally-supported interaction and microarray co-expression modeling. Pathway-based signaling regulatory networks analysis sketched a directive insight into colorectal carcinogenesis, which was of significant importance to monitor disease progression and improve therapeutic interventions.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
As one of the most complex types of vulnerabilities, reentrancy poses a significant threat to smart contract development. Indeed, millions of dollars have evaporated due to reentrancy vulnerabilities ...of smart contracts in past years. In this article, we propose a new approach to detect reentrancy vulnerabilities using fuzz testing and develop a novel tool named ReDefender. Our approach consists of three main steps: 1) preprocess contract to be detected: when a contract is uploaded, its source code will be preprocessed to extract candidate pool for fuzzing and dependency graph which guides the automatic deployment of contracts; 2) fuzzing input generation: fuzzing input is generated to constitute transactions which will be sent to an agent contract to stimulate attacks, where runtime information is collected and recorded in the execution log during each execution; and 3) vulnerability verification: the execution log is analyzed to determine whether a reentrancy process occurs and whether the reentrancy process is malicious. We conduct comparative experiments on 204 tagged smart contracts and 90 injected contracts. The results show higher accuracy and lower false negative rate of ReDefender than that of the other three famous tools. Moreover, we conduct an experiment on 4776 real-world contracts demonstrating the ability of ReDefender to find reentrancy vulnerabilities that really cause economic losses.
Gefitinib is frequently used to treat patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and is excreted out from cells via the ATP-binding cassette transporter ABCG2. ABCG2 gene polymorphisms have ...been suggested to be associated with ABCG2 protein expression and function and may influence the risk of gefitinib toxicity in NSCLC patients. Previous studies on the associations between ABCG2 gene polymorphisms and the toxicity of gefitinib in NSCLC patients have produced conflicting results. The aim of this meta-analysis was to determine whether ABCG2 gene polymorphisms are associated with the risk of gefitinib-induced toxicity in NSCLC patients.
The PubMed and EMBASE databases were searched systematically for all eligible studies. A relative risk with corresponding 95% CI was calculated to evaluate the associations between ABCG2 gene polymorphisms and gefitinib-induced toxicity.
Data were finally extracted from seven studies and 515 patients were found to meet the inclusion criteria of the meta-analysis. A dominant model showed that there was no significant association between the ABCG2 C421A polymorphism and the risk of gefitinib-induced toxicity, while the ABCG2 G34A polymorphism might be associated with an increased risk of skin toxicity in gefitinib therapy (relative risk =1.54, 95% CI 1.08-2.21,
=0.02). However, more reliable data are required to confirm the associations between the ABCG2 C421A and ABCG2 G34A polymorphisms and the toxicity of gefitinib in NSCLC patients.
While the ABCG2 C421A polymorphism might not be a reliable marker of gefitinib-related toxicity, the ABCG2 G34A genotype may be predictive of the skin toxicity of gefitinib in NSCLC patients. These conclusions need to be verified in further large-scale studies.
The aerosol transmission was academically recognized as a possible transmission route of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We established an approach to assess the indoor tempo-spatial ...airborne-disease infection risks through aerosol transmission via real-time CO
field measurement and occupancy monitoring. Compared to former studies, the proposed method can evaluate real-time airborne disease infection risks through aerosol transmission routes. The approach was utilized in a university office. The accumulated infection risk was calculated for three occupants with practical working schedules (from occupancy recording) and one hypothesis occupant with a typical working schedule. COVID-19 was used as an example. Results demonstrated that the individual infection risks diversified with different dwell times and working places in the office. For the three occupants with a practical working schedule, their 3-day accumulated infection risks were respectively 0.050%, 0.035%, 0.027% and 0.041% due to 11.6, 9.0 and 13.8 h exposure with an initial infector percentage of 1%. The results demonstrate that location and dwell time are both important factors influencing the infection risk of certain occupant in built environment, whereas existing literature seldom took these two points into consideration simultaneously. On the contrary, our proposed approach treated the infection risks as place-by-place, time-by-time and person-by-person diversified in the built environment. The risk assessment results can provide early warning for building occupants and contribute to the transmission control of air-borne disease.
Smart contract security is one of the core issues in any application based on blockchain. There are many techniques focusing on smart contract security, however, due to the diversity of Solidity ...versions and limitations of detection time, it is difficult for them to comprehensively localize defects in different versions of smart contracts. In this article, we propose a static defect detection method based on the knowledge graph of the Solidity language and present a defect detection tool called SoliDetector . First, we define the ontology layer of the knowledge graph and construct the instance layer in which syntactic and logical relationships are captured. Second, we introduce the defect pattern to describe each defect and design inference rules to infer complex relationships and judge whether a defect exists. Finally, we localize defects by executing SPARQL queries. SoliDetector can support the detection of 20 kinds of defects and the automatic SPARQL query generation. We conducted several experiments on multiple datasets. SoliDetector obtains a high F-score (i.e., 92.97% on Dataset1 and 91.54% on the SmartBug dataset). To compare SoliDetector with SmartCheck , Slither , and Mythril , we conducted experiments on a labeled benchmark Dataset3 and real-world contracts. SoliDetector has a high F-score of 94.04% and is faster than other tools with an average time of 0.37 s for each contract.
Background and Aim
Patients with 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID‐19) could present with gastrointestinal symptoms without fever or respiratory manifestations, which could be overlooked by ...health‐care providers. We aimed to evaluate the clinical characteristics of COVID‐19 in patients presenting with initial gastrointestinal symptoms.
Methods
We evaluated all confirmed cases of COVID‐19 in Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University between January 10 and February 29, 2020. We divided these patients into two groups: patients with initial gastrointestinal symptoms (group A, n = 183) and patients with respiratory syndrome and/or fever (group B, n = 1228). The clinical characteristics, radiological features, and laboratory data were assessed.
Results
The clinical procedures of both groups underwent 1–2 weeks rising period and were downward trend at 3 weeks; less than 5% of patients progressed to critical illness. In both groups, mean leukocyte count (P = 0.354) and lymphocyte count (P = 0.386) were below normal, and C‐reactive protein level was elevated (P = 0.412). There was mild liver function injury (aspartate aminotransferase, 65.8 ± 12.7 vs 67.4 ± 9.3 U/L, P = 0.246; alanine aminotransferase, 66.4 ± 13.2 vs 69.6 ± 12.7 U/L, P = 0.352), and normal renal function was intact (blood urea nitrogen 6.4 ± 2.5 vs 5.6 ± 2.8 mmol/L P = 0.358; creatinine 85.7 ± 37.2, 91.2 ± 32.6 μmol/L, P = 0.297). After a series of treatment, 176 and 1169 were stable and alive in groups A and B, respectively. The survival rate did not differ significantly between the groups (P = 0.313).
Conclusion
COVID‐19 patients presented with initial gastrointestinal symptoms had similar clinical characteristics and outcomes, when compared with patients with fever and respiratory symptoms.
Abstract
Introduction
The purpose was to quantify the health effects of tobacco using data from the 2019 Global Burden of Disease study.
Aims and Methods
We collected detailed information on tobacco ...consumption overall as well as its individual aspects (smoking, secondhand smoke, and chewing tobacco) for the deaths and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for all-cause disease, cardiovascular disease, neoplasms, and chronic respiratory diseases, and their age-standardized rates (ASRs).
Results
Tobacco was responsible for 8.71 million deaths and 229.77 million DALYs globally in 2019. The ASRs of all tobacco-related deaths and DALYs declined from 1990 to 2019, to 108.55 deaths per 100 000 population and 2791.04 DALYs per 100 000 population in 2019. During any year the ASRs of all tobacco-related deaths and DALYs were higher in males than in females. The ASRs of all tobacco-related deaths and DALYs were highest in countries with a low-middle sociodemographic index (SDI) and lowest in high-SDI countries in 2019. Cardiovascular disease, neoplasms, and chronic respiratory diseases were the three leading causes of tobacco-related mortality.
Conclusions
Although the ASRs of deaths and DALYs related to tobacco have declined, the absolute number remain high. Tobacco control policies need to be strengthened further in order to reduce the heavy health burden of tobacco.
Implications
This study provides a detailed description on the health effects of tobacco, including maps of the current global burden of tobacco-related disease. Although the ASRs of tobacco-related deaths and DALYs have declined, the absolute numbers remain high—tobacco was responsible for 8.71 million deaths and 229.77 million DALYs globally in 2019. The findings may have implications for tobacco control. Countries where progress has been slower in reducing tobacco-related disease burden should study and consider implementing policies and strategies that have been applied in countries like Singapore which show the greatest declines for recent decades.
•Hospital environment was contaminated when providing care to COVID-19 patients.•Contaminated surfaces included COVID-19 patient care areas, hospital objects, and PPE.•Hospital environment could be a ...source of virus spread among HCWs and patients.•Contacting with contaminated surfaces may account for the early cases in HWCs.
A large number of healthcare workers (HCWs) were infected by SARS-CoV-2 during the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. Hospitals are significant epicenters for the human-to-human transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 for HCWs, patients, and visitors. No data has been reported on the details of hospital environmental contamination status in the epicenter of Wuhan.
We collected 626 surface swabs within the Zhongnan Medical Center in Wuhan in the mist of the COVID-19 outbreak between February 7 - February 27, 2020. Dacron swabs were aseptically collected from the surfaces of 13 hospital function zones, five major objects, and three major PPE. The SARS-CoV-2 RNAs were detected by reverse transcription-PCR.
The most contaminated zones were the intensive care unit specialized for taking care of novel coronavirus pneumonia (NCP) (31.9%), Obstetric Isolation Ward specialized for pregnant women with NCP (28.1%), and Isolation Ward for NCP (19.6%). We classified the 13 zones into four contamination levels. The most contaminated objects were self-service printers (20.0%), desktop/keyboard (16.8%), and doorknob (16.0%). Both hand sanitizer dispensers (20.3%) and gloves (15.4%) were the most contaminated PPE.
Our findings emphasize the urgent need to ensure adequate environmental cleaning, strengthen infection prevention training, and improve infection prevention among HCWs during the outbreak of COVID-19.