To improve the search ability of biogeography-based optimization (BBO), this work proposed an improved biogeography-based optimization based on Affinity Propagation. We introduced the Memetic ...framework to the BBO algorithm, and used the simulated annealing algorithm as the local search strategy. MBBO enhanced the exploration with the Affinity Propagation strategy to improve the transfer operation of the BBO algorithm. In this work, the MBBO algorithm was applied to IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2015 benchmarks optimization problems to conduct analytic comparison with the first three winners of the CEC 2015 competition. The results show that the MBBO algorithm enhances the exploration, exploitation, convergence speed and solution accuracy and can emerge as the best solution-providing algorithm among the competing algorithms.
Abstract Acidosis and alkalosis, associated with metabolic disorders, lead to the pathological changes of cognition and behaviors in clinical practices of neurology and psychology. Cellular ...mechanisms for these functional disorders in the central nervous system remain unclear. We have investigated the influences of acidosis and alkalosis on the functions of cortical GABAergic neurons. Both acidosis and alkalosis impair the ability of encoding sequential spikes at these GABAergic neurons. The impairments of their spiking are associated with the increases of refractory periods, threshold potential and afterhyperpolarization. Our studies reveal that acidosis and alkalosis impair cortical GABAergic neurons and in turn deteriorate brain functions, in which their final targets may be voltage-gated channels of sodium and potassium.
Background
Cetirizine has been shown to be effective for relief of seasonal allergic rhinitis (SAR) symptoms. Allergic rhinitis symptoms have been reported to have circadian variations, with symptoms ...tending to be most bothersome overnight and in the morning.
Objective
To evaluate the effects of different cetirizine dosing schedules in comparison to twice daily (BID) chlorpheniramine and placebo on SAR symptoms at 12 and 24 hours postdose.
Methods
Study 1 subjects received cetirizine 10-mg once daily in the morning (QAM), cetirizine 10-mg once daily at bedtime (QHS), cetirizine 5-mg twice daily, or placebo. Study 2 subjects received cetirizine 5-mg QAM, cetirizine 10-mg QHS, chlorpheniramine 8-mg BID, or placebo. The primary end point was total symptom severity complex (TSSC); TSSC was the sum of symptom severity ratings averaged over the 2-week study period. Post hoc analyses of reflective symptom severity assessed in the morning (TSSCAM) and in the evening (TSSCPM) were conducted to evaluate cetirizine’s effects at 12 and 24 hours postdose.
Results
In study 1, subject- and investigator-assessed TSSC was significantly lower in all cetirizine groups versus placebo (P ≤ .003). In study 2, subject-assessed TSSC was significantly lower in all cetirizine groups versus placebo (P ≤ .04) and was numerically lower for investigator-assessed TSSC. Post hoc analyses demonstrated that cetirizine significantly improved TSSCAM at 12 and 24 hours postdose versus placebo in both studies regardless of dosing schedule. TSSCPM significantly improved at 12 and 24 hours postdose in all study 1 cetirizine groups versus placebo. In study 2, versus placebo, TSSCPM significantly improved at 12 hours postdose in cetirizine 5-mg QAM group and numerically improved at 24 hours postdose in cetirizine 10-mg QHS group.
Conclusion
Regardless of dosing regimen, cetirizine demonstrates effective 24-hour relief of SAR symptoms, particularly on TSSCAM, which assesses overnight and early morning symptom control.
Facing the demand of industry for metal surface detection, this article addresses the segmentation of metal surface defects. Metal surface defect segmentation has many technical problems, such as ...serious imbalance in quantity and distribution, low contrast, and weak boundary information. To solve these problems, this article proposes a multi-scale attention feature fusion module, normalized mean square frequency category weight strategy, biased weight training sampling strategy, and category-boundary loss calculation strategy. The multi-scale attention feature fusion module fuses different levels of feature information to obtain defect features in images more effectively. The normalized mean square frequency category weight strategy suppresses the excessive weight of small defect categories and false positive classification. The biased weight training sampling strategy allocates different training frequencies to training samples and increases the attention to defect samples. The category-boundary loss calculation strategy imposes weights on the defect boundary and increases the attention to the boundary information. On four public datasets (Severstal, SD900, Magnetic-tile, and Crack), the proposed method achieves improvements of 7.8%, 4.0%, 18.4%, and 9.4% (absolute quantity), respectively, compared with the baseline method, while the calculation amount and number of parameters remain almost unchanged. Hence, our method ranks as state of the art.
The integrity of the blood-brain barrier (BBB) is mainly maintained by the brain vascular endothelial cells and the tight junctions amongst them. Pimavanserin is a novel agent approved for the ...treatment of Parkinson's disease and exerts neuroprotective properties. The present study aims to explore the possibility that Pimavanserin might be an effective agent used for the treatment of cerebral ischemia stroke. Middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) was established in mice, and oxygen-glucose deprivation/reoxygenation (OGD/R) was established in brain bEND.3 endothelial cells. Mice were randomly divided into four groups: (1) Sham operation group; (2). Pimavanserin (1 mg/kg); (3). MCAO; (4). Pimavanserin+ MCAO. We found that compared to the Sham group, the elevated neurological deficit score and brain water content increased production of inflammatory factors, increased BBB permeability, and downregulated Claudin 5 expression were observed in the MCAO group and were all dramatically reversed by the administration of Pimavanserin. Brain bEND.3 endothelial cells were treated with Pimavanserin before the exposure to OGD/R. The significantly increased lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) release, declined cell viability, increased endothelial permeability, downregulated Claudin 5 and Krüppel-like factors 6 (KLF6) were observed in the OGD/R group and were all reversed by the introduction of Pimavanserin. Lastly, the effects of Pimavanserin on the expression level of Claudin 5 and endothelial permeability in OGD/R-challenged endothelial cells were both abolished by the knockdown of KLF6. Taken together, our data revealed that Pimavanserin protected against cerebral ischemia injury by regulating the BBB integrity in a KLF6-dependent manner.
CO2 methanation produces synthetic natural gas, which reduces CO2 emission and generates sustainable energy. Exploring effective approach and developing high performance Ni catalysts are the main ...focus for the reaction. In this study, we report photocatalytic methanation over Ni/SiO2 catalysts. Through physicochemical properties of BET, XRD, H2-TPR and TEM, optical properties of UV–visual light absorbance and light-illuminated H2-TPR, and the performance of photocatalytic methanation, the structure-performance relationship is tentatively discussed. The strong absorbance of light, the small size of Ni nanoparticles and the strong metal-support interaction of the Ni/SiO2 catalysts, as well as the low activation energy of CH4 production, are correlated to the enhanced photocatalytic performance compared to the conventional catalytic performance. The photocatalytic pathway of methanation on Ni nanoparticles are suggested to understand the enhanced performance. The work demonstrates the higher photocatalytic methanation performance than conventional catalytic methanation, which is applicable for other reactions using photo-sensitive catalysts.
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•Ni/SiO2 catalysts are prepared by simple electrostatic adsorption method.•Ni size is less than 5 nm by the method.•Photocatalytic methanation performance is higher than the conventional catalytic performance.•The synergism of temperature and photo contribute to the high photocatalytic performance.•The photocatalytic and conventional catalytic pathways of methanation are proposed.
The objective of video summarization is to develop a concise and condensed summary that accurately captures the original video content. The methods currently used to summarize supervised videos and ...consider the task a sequence-to-sequence problem. However, modeling the order of long videos presents three challenges: (1) capturing both local and global relationships simultaneously is challenging; (2) the boundaries of video highlight segments are often incorrectly located, indicating that semantic integrity is incomplete; (3) efficient relation computing is difficult to do well. We design a novel coarse-to-fine network (C2F) for video summarization adapted to the multi-level semantic video structure, thus addressing these limitations. The multiscale representation scheme initially captures different scales of temporal relationships for the coarse classification results; Meanwhile, the action-wise proposal module is intended to provide the fine prediction of importance scores and regress the temporal locations of key-frames. In addition, a loss function is proposed to identify local differences among frames and analyze combinations of various loss functions. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets have demonstrated that the proposed C2F achieves significant performance compared with state-of-the-art methods, and performs satisfactorily in efficient relation computing. For example, on the TVSum dataset, we improve the F-score from 69.4% to 72.8% by 3.4%. Furthermore, C2F includes 4.7 M parameters, accounting for only 10.7% of the parameters used in the SASUM model.
•A novel coarse-to-fine architecture is adapted for the task of video summarization.•A multiscale representation scheme is to capture complex temporal relationships.•The local adaptive loss is to identify local differences among frames.•We demonstrate promising results on the SumMe and TVSum datasets.
The infection of canine coronavirus (CCoV) causes a highly contagious disease in dogs with acute gastroenteritis. The efficient serological diagnostics is critical for controlling the disease caused ...by CCoV. Nucleocapsid (N) protein of CCoV is an important target for developing serological approaches. However, little is known about the antigenic sites in the N protein of CCoV. In this study, we generated a monoclonal antibody (mAb) against the N protein of CCoV, designated as 13E8, through the fusion of the sp2/0 cells with the spleen cells from a mouse immunized with the purified recombinant GST-N protein. Epitope mapping revealed that mAb 13E8 recognized a novel linear B cell epitope in N protein at 294–314aa (named as EP-13E8) by using a serial of truncated N protein through Western blot and ELISA. Sequence analysis showed that the sequence of EP-13E8 was highly conserved (100 %) among different CCoV strains analyzed, but exhibited a low similarity (31.8–63.6 %) with the responding sequence in other coronaviruses of the same genus such as FCoV, PEDV and HCoV except for TGEV (95.5 % identity). Structural assay suggested that the epitope of EP-13E8 were located in the close proximity on the surface of the N protein. Overall, the mAb 13E8 against N protein generated and its epitope EP-13E8 identified here paid the way for further developing epitope-based serological diagnostics for CCoV.
•A monoclonal antibody (mAb) against the CCoV N protein was generated.•The first conserved B-cell epitope 294-TAKEDGDQIEVTFTHKYHLPK-314 on the CCoV N protein was identified.
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