Summary
Background
Transient elastography is a non‐invasive method for staging liver fibrosis. The meta‐analysis using the hierarchical models to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of transient ...elastography for the staging of liver fibrosis in patients with chronic hepatitis B was rarely reported.
Aim
A meta‐analysis using the hierarchical models was performed to assess transient elastography for diagnosing and stage liver fibrosis in patients with chronic hepatitis B.
Methods
Electronic databases were searched and studies were identified to assess the diagnostic accuracy of transient elastography in CHB patients for staging fibrosis F ≥ 2, F ≥ 3 and F = 4 with liver biopsy as a reference standard. The hierarchical summary receiver operating characteristic curve and the bivariate models were performed to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of transient elastography, and meta‐regression analyses were performed to explore the heterogeneity. The quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies‐2 tool was used to assess the quality of studies.
Results
Twenty‐seven studies with a total of 4386 patients were included in the meta‐analysis. The summary sensitivity of transient elastography for staging fibrosis F ≥ 2, F ≥ 3 and F = 4 was 0.806 (95% CI, 0.756–0.847), 0.819 (95% CI, 0.748–0.874) and 0.863 (95% CI, 0.818–0.898), respectively, and the summary specificity was 0.824 (95% CI, 0.761–0.873), 0.866 (95% CI, 0.824–0.899) and 0.875 (95% CI, 0.840–0.903), respectively. The corresponding area under the summary receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.88 (95% CI, 0.85–0.91), 0.91 (95% CI, 0.88–0.93) and 0.93 (95% CI, 0.91–0.95), respectively. Meta‐regression showed that patient age contributed to heterogeneity.
Conclusions
Transient elastography performs well to diagnose liver fibrosis in patients with chronic hepatitis B, which may reduce the use of liver biopsy.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, with metastasis underlying majority of related deaths. Angiomotin (AMOT), a scaffold protein, has been shown to interact with oncogenic ...Yes-associated protein/transcriptional co-activator with a PDZ-binding motif (YAP/TAZ) proteins, suggesting a potential role in tumor progression. However, the functional role of AMOT in lung cancer remains unknown. This study aimed to identify the patho-physiological characteristics of AMOT in lung cancer progression. Results revealed that AMOT expression was significantly decreased in clinical lung cancer specimens. Knockdown of AMOT in a low metastatic CL1-0 lung cancer cell line initiated cancer proliferation, migration, invasion and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. The trigger of cancer progression caused by AMOT loss was transduced by decreased cytoplasmic sequestration and increased nuclear translocation of oncogenic co-activators YAP/TAZ, leading to increased expression of the growth factor, Cyr61. Tumor promotion by AMOT knockdown was reversed when YAP/TAZ or Cyr61 was absent. Further, AMOT knockdown increased the growth and spread of Lewis lung carcinoma in vivo. These findings suggest that AMOT is a crucial suppressor of lung cancer metastasis and highlight its critical role as a tumor suppressor and its potential as a prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target for lung cancer.
This phase II, open-label study evaluated the efficacy and safety of erlotinib as second-line therapy in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients with brain metastases (BM).
Forty-eight patients ...aged 18–75 years with Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status 0–2, confirmed adenocarcinoma or activating epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation-positive NSCLC, and asymptomatic BM without extracranial progressive disease after first-line platinum-doublet chemotherapy were recruited. Treatment comprised erlotinib 150 mg/day. The primary end point was progression-free survival (PFS) determined by RECIST.
The median PFS was 10.1 months 95% confidence interval (CI) 7.1–12.3 for intracranial progression and 9.7 months (95% CI 2.5–17.8) for intracranial and systemic progression. Patients with EGFR mutation-positive disease had significantly longer median PFS versus EGFR wild-type disease 15.2 months (95% CI 8.3–22.2) versus 4.4 months (95% CI 0.0–11.6); P = 0.02. The median overall survival was 18.9 months (95% CI 14.4–23.4); 6-month and 1-year survival rates were 85% and 73%, respectively. Overall response rate was 58.3%. Most common adverse events were rash (77.1%), paronychia (20.8%), hyperbilirubinemia (16.7%), and diarrhea (14.6%); these were predominantly of grade 1/2.
Single-agent erlotinib was active and well tolerated in NSCLC patients with BM. Further studies are warranted.
Atmospheric blocking due to anomalous, persistent meandering of the jet stream often causes weather extremes in the midlatitudes. Despite its ubiquity, the onset mechanism of blocking is not well ...understood. Here we demonstrate with meteorological data that there exists a close analogy between blocking and traffic congestion on a highway, and that they can be described by a common mathematical theory. The theory predicts that the jet stream has a capacity for the flux of wave activity (a measure of meandering), just as the highway has traffic capacity, and when it is exceeded, blocking manifests as congestion. Stationary waves modulate the jet stream's capacity for transient waves and localize block formation. Climate change likely affects blocking frequency by modifying the jet stream's proximity to capacity.
Dipolarization fronts (DFs) are frequently detected in the Earth's magnetotail from XGSM = −30 RE to XGSM = −7 RE. How these DFs are formed is still poorly understood. Three possible mechanisms have ...been suggested in previous simulations: (1) jet braking, (2) transient reconnection, and (3) spontaneous formation. Among these three mechanisms, the first has been verified by using spacecraft observation, while the second and third have not. In this study, we show Cluster observation of DFs inside reconnection diffusion region. This observation provides in situ evidence of the second mechanism: Transient reconnection can produce DFs. We suggest that the DFs detected in the near‐Earth region (XGSM > −10 RE) are primarily attributed to jet braking, while the DFs detected in the mid‐ or far‐tail region (XGSM < −15 RE) are primarily attributed to transient reconnection or spontaneous formation. In the jet‐braking mechanism, the high‐speed flow “pushes” the preexisting plasmas to produce the DF so that there is causality between high‐speed flow and DF. In the transient‐reconnection mechanism, there is no causality between high‐speed flow and DF, because the frozen‐in condition is violated.
Key Points
DFs are observed inside reconnection diffusion region
Three formation mechanisms of DF are compared
Causality between flow and DF is discussed
Ultrahigh energy neutrinos are interesting messenger particles since, if detected, they can transmit exclusive information about ultrahigh energy processes in the Universe. These particles, with ...energies above 10 super(16)eV , interact very rarely. Therefore, detectors that instrument several gigatons of matter are needed to discover them. The ARA detector is currently being constructed at the South Pole. It is designed to use the Askaryan effect, the emission of radio waves from neutrino-induced cascades in the South Pole ice, to detect neutrino interactions at very high energies. With antennas distributed among 37 widely separated stations in the ice, such interactions can be observed in a volume of several hundred cubic kilometers. Currently three deep ARA stations are deployed in the ice, of which two have been taking data since the beginning of 2013. In this article, the ARA detector "as built" and calibrations are described. Data reduction methods used to distinguish the rare radio signals from overwhelming backgrounds of thermal and anthropogenic origin are presented. Using data from only two stations over a short exposure time of 10 months, a neutrino flux limit of 1.5x10 super(-6)GeV/cm super(2)/s/sr is calculated for a particle energy of 10 super(18)eV , which offers promise for the full ARA detector.
The climate anomalies leading to the May 2015 floods in Texas and Oklahoma were analyzed in the context of El Niño teleconnection in a warmer climate. A developing El Niño tends to increase ...late‐spring precipitation in the southern Great Plains, and this effect has intensified since 1980. Anthropogenic global warming contributed to the physical processes that caused the persistent precipitation in May 2015: Warming in the tropical Pacific acted to strengthen the teleconnection toward North America, modification of zonal wave 5 circulation that deepened the stationary trough west of Texas, and enhanced Great Plains low‐level southerlies increasing moisture supply from the Gulf of Mexico. Attribution analysis using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 single‐forcing experiments and the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble Project indicated a significant increase in the El Niño‐induced precipitation anomalies over Texas and Oklahoma when increases in the anthropogenic greenhouse gases were taken into account.
Key Points
Increased GHG affects the May 2015 floods in Texas
Climate warming intensifies the El Niño teleconnection and climate impacts
Amplified synoptic waves and strengthened LLJ are part of climate trends
Tumor metastasis is the major cause of death among cancer patients, with >90% of cancer-related death attributable to the spreading of metastatic cells to secondary organs. Store-operated Ca(2+) ...entry (SOCE) is the predominant Ca(2+) entry mechanism in most cancer cells, and stromal interaction molecule 1 (STIM1) is the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) Ca(2+) sensor for store-operated channels. Here we reported that the STIM1 was overexpressed in colorectal cancer (CRC) patients. STIM1 overexpression in CRC was significantly associated with tumor size, depth of invasion, lymph node metastasis status and serum levels of carcinoembryonic antigen. Furthermore, ectopic expression of STIM1 promoted CRC cell motility, while depletion of STIM1 with short hairpin RNA inhibited CRC cell migration. Our data further suggested that STIM1 promoted CRC cell migration through increasing the expression of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) and production of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). Importantly, ectopically expressed COX-2 or exogenous PGE2 were able to rescue migration defect in STIM1 knockdown CRC cells, and inhibition of COX-2 with ibuprofen and indomethacin abrogated STIM1-mediated CRC cell motility. In short, our data provided clinicopathological significance for STIM1 and SOCE in CRC progression, and implicated a role for COX-2 in STIM1-mediated CRC metastasis. Our studies also suggested a new approach to inhibit STIM1-mediated metastasis with COX-2 inhibitors.
We report one sort of weak physical unclonable functions (PUFs) composed of 14-nm nFinFETs with entropy of the random-trap-fluctuation (RTF). After the positive-bias-temperature-instability (PBTI) ...stress at high temperatures (85 °C ~ 150 °C), the generation of abundant random traps at the interface of gate-dielectric layers and channel efficiently improves cryptographic parameters of nFinFET-PUFs. Results show that bit-error-rates of the MOSAIC plots reduce to 1.4%; average values/standard-deviation of the inter- and intra- Hamming-distance reach 50.28%/1.7% and 0.38%/0.42%, respectively. This work provides an implacable technique to boost characteristics of weak PUFs through combinations of device-reliability and cryptography.
In natural and social science, many events happened at different space-times may be closely correlated. Two events, A (Alice) and B (Bob) are defined correlated if one event is determined by another, ...say, Formula: see text for suitable Formula: see text operators. Taking KdV and coupled KdV systems as examples, we can find some types of models (AB-KdV systems) to exhibit the existence on the correlated solutions linked with two events. The idea of this report is valid not only for physical problems related to KdV systems but also for problems described by arbitrary continuous or discrete models. The parity and time reversal symmetries are extended to shifted parity and delayed time reversal. The new symmetries are found to be useful not only to establish AB-systems but also to find group invariant solutions of numerous AB-systems. A new elegant form of the N-soliton solutions of the KdV equation and then the AB-KdV systems is obtained. A concrete AB-KdV system derived from the nonlinear inviscid dissipative and barotropic vorticity equation in a β-plane channel is applied to the two correlated monople blocking events which is responsible for the snow disaster in the winter of 2007/2008 happened in Southern China.
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