Hepatitis B virus (HBV) is one of the major risk factors for HCC (hepatocellular carcinoma) occurrence with a diverse role in the pathogenesis of HCC. More works need to be performed to elucidate a ...more thorough understanding of the molecular mechanisms involving in HBV-induced HCC, although some mechanisms such as genome integration have been reported. In the present study, aberrantly expressed lncRNAs were identified between HCC tumor tissues with or without HBV infection. Among these molecules, HBV specially-related long noncoding RNA (HBV-SRL) was further found to correlate with poor prognosis and a shorter overall survival time in HCC patients with HBV infection. Additionally, HBV-SRL was found function as oncogene by upregulating the NF-κB2 expression. These data suggest that HBV infection altered gene expression pattern in liver cells which contributed to HBV-related HCC development, and HBV-SRL may serve as a new molecular marker or potential therapeutic target of HBV-related HCC.
The thermal transport phenomenon in small-scale heterogeneous composites is essentially controlled by van der Waals interactions. In this article, thermal conductivity of nanocomposites with 33 wt% ...crystallized silicon dioxide is four times higher than that of epoxy (EP) resin composites. Nanocomposites with 33 wt% boron carbide exhibit seven times higher thermal conductivity than pure EP. Pal and Lewis-Nielsen multiscale models were used to infer that distance-associated van der Waals interactions vary between composites with different weight fractions. Such variation consequently affects the thermal conductivity of the composites. Scanning electron microscope images of crystallized silicon dioxide/EP composites provide evidence of our reasonable and accurate inferences with regard to the thermal conduction mechanism. Experimental values confirm that the Pal model is superior to the Lewis-Nielsen model. The observed enhancement in thermal conductivity indicates important implications for the development of highly and thermally conductive electrically insulating materials. Results of this study can also be considered to improve modeling for thermal conductivity under van der Waals interactions.
Dear Editor
Probing protein-protein interaction has become a routine practice in the post genomic era. Multiple in vitro or in vivo techniques have been developed to detect or report direct or ...indirect interactions of functionally related proteins （Lalonde et al., 2008）. These techniques sometimes are technically challenging, however, because the readout would demand sophisticated detectors and/or complicated calculations. Besides, a common drawback of many of these techniques is they can render inherent false positives to various degrees so that an interaction often cannot be judged unambiguously.
There is no information available about occult hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection (OBI) in individuals with intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC).
To investigate the correlation between OBI and ICC.
A ...retrospective case-control study was conducted. The cases were 183 cryptogenic ICC patients (group I), and the controls were 549 healthy individuals (group II). The cases and controls were matched for age, sex, and inhabitancy. Adjusted odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals were calculated. Intrahepatic total HBV DNA in 63 paraffin-embedded samples was collected from patients in group I (n=44), HBV-associated ICC patients (n=3), and hepatic cavernous hemangioma patients with seronegative HBsAg (hepatitis B S antigen) (group III; n=16). We determined the levels of serum and intrahepatic HBV DNA and compared the level of intrahepatic HBV DNA in 44 cryptogenic patients from group I with the level in the patients from group III.
Compared with group II, group I had a lower prevalence of anti-HBs (antibody against HBsAg) and a higher prevalence of anti-HBe (antibody against hepatitis B e antigen) and anti-HBc (antibody against hepatitis B c antigen). Multivariate analysis confirmed that anti-HBe and anti-HBc positivity were associated with ICC. The odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals for anti-HBe and anti-HBc were 2.482 and 1.482-4.158, 4.556 and 2.938-7.066, respectively. Compared with group III, cryptogenic ICC cases showed more frequent detection of intrahepatic total HBV DNA (63.64% vs. 18.75%, P=0.002).
OBI may represent an important risk factor for ICC. HBsAg seroclearance does not signify eradication of HBV and may not entirely prevent the development of ICC.
Incidence and mortality of intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) are increasing. However, its prognostic predictive system associated with outcome after surgery remains poorly defined. In this study, ...we conducted retrospective survival analyses in a primary cohort of 370 patients who underwent partial hepatectomy for ICC (2005 and 2009). We found that seven variables were significantly independent predictors for overall survival (OS): serum prealbumin (hazard ratio HR: 1.447; p = 0.015), carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (HR: 1.438; p = 0.009), carcinoembryonic antigen (HR: 1.732; p = 0.002), tumor number (HR: 1.781; p < 0.001), vascular invasion (HR: 1.784; p < 0.001), regional lymphatic metastasis (HR: 2.003; p < 0.001) and local extrahepatic metastasis (HR: 1.506; p = 0.008). Using these independent predictors, we created a simple clinicopathologic prognostic staging system for predicting survival of ICC patients after resection. The validity of the prognostic staging system was prospectively assessed in 115 patients who underwent partial hepatectomy between January 2010 and December 2010 at the same institution. The prognostic power was quantified using likelihood ratio test and Akaike information criteria. Compared with the 6(th) and 7(th) AJCC staging systems, the new staging system in the primary cohort had a higher predictive accuracy for OS in terms of homogeneity and discriminatory ability. In the validation cohort, the homogeneity and discrimination of the new staging system were also superior to the two other staging systems.
The new staging system based on clinicopathologic features may provide relatively higher accuracy in prognostic prediction for ICC patients after tumor resection.
Obesity is a critical healthcare issue affecting the United States. The least risky treatments available for obesity are behavioral interventions meant to promote diet and exercise. Often these ...interventions contain a mobile component that allows interventionists to collect participants level data and provide participants with incentives and goals to promote long term behavioral change. Recently, there has been interest in using direct financial incentives to promote behavior change. However, adherence is challenging in these interventions, as each participant will react differently to different incentive structure and amounts, leading researchers to consider personalized interventions. The key challenge for personalization, is that the clinicians do not know a priori how best to administer incentives to participants, and given finite intervention budgets how to disburse costly resources efficiently. In this paper, we consider this challenge of designing personalized weight loss interventions that use direct financial incentives to motivate weight loss while remaining within a budget. We create a machine learning approach that is able to predict how individuals may react to different incentive schedules within the context of a behavioral intervention. We use this predictive model in an adaptive framework that over the course of the intervention computes what incentives to disburse to participants and remain within the study budget. We provide both theoretical guarantees for our modeling and optimization approaches as well as demonstrate their performance in a simulated weight loss study. Our results highlight the cost efficiency and effectiveness of our personalized intervention design for weight loss.
The Analysis of Monitoring System of Wind Turbine Li, Qiao Mei; Cao, Yan Hua; Shi, Yu Juan ...
Applied Mechanics and Materials,
01/2014, Letnik:
487, Številka:
Mechanical Structures and Smart Materials
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Monitoring system of wind turbine is the guarantee of normal operation of the wind turbine. It has significance on the study, promotion and application of wind turbines. The research status of wind ...turbine monitoring system was mainly elaborated. The structure of wind turbine monitoring system was analyzed. The monitoring systems based on VB, VC, configuration software and LabVIEW have been made a comparison. And several further research directions of the wind turbine monitoring system have been proposed.
A key challenge for decision makers when incorporating black box machine learned models into practice is being able to understand the predictions provided by these models. One proposed set of methods ...is training surrogate explainer models which approximate the more complex model. Explainer methods are generally classified as either local or global, depending on what portion of the data space they are purported to explain. The improved coverage of global explainers usually comes at the expense of explainer fidelity. One way of trading off the advantages of both approaches is to aggregate several local explainers into a single explainer model with improved coverage. However, the problem of aggregating these local explainers is computationally challenging, and existing methods only use heuristics to form these aggregations. In this paper we propose a local explainer aggregation method which selects local explainers using non-convex optimization. In contrast to other heuristic methods, we use an integer optimization framework to combine local explainers into a near-global aggregate explainer. Our framework allows a decision-maker to directly tradeoff coverage and fidelity of the resulting aggregation through the parameters of the optimization problem. We also propose a novel local explainer algorithm based on information filtering. We evaluate our algorithmic framework on two healthcare datasets---the Parkinson's Progression Marker Initiative (PPMI) data set and a geriatric mobility dataset---which is motivated by the anticipated need for explainable precision medicine. Our method outperforms existing local explainer aggregation methods in terms of both fidelity and coverage of classification and improves on fidelity over existing global explainer methods, particularly in multi-class settings where state-of-the-art methods achieve 70% and ours achieves 90%.
The spindle of a 10 kw vertical axis wind turbine is designed in this paper, and the relevant geometric parameters is given, and build the geometry of the finite element model. Calculation of the ...spindle under wind load and dead weight , and analyse the spindle Von Mess stress, deformation nephogram, and give the former six order vibration mode of the spindle. Through the analysis, Then the design parameters of the spindle are optimized. and the optimized structure of spindle has been got. optimized spindle is in lower quality, more satisfy the requirement of wind turbine running under high load at the same time .
Objective To observe the killing and clearance effect of an Er:YAG laser combined with sodium hypo⁃ chlorite on Enterococcus faecalis at different depths of the root canal in vitro to provide a ...reference for clinical application. Methods A total of 75 models of Enterococcus faecalis infection were successfully established and randomly divided in⁃ to three groups (25 per group). Ten random samples per group underwent no processing. The remaining models in group A were treated with an Er:YAG laser combined with sodium hypochlorite 52.5 g/L. Group B was treated with 52.5 g/L sodi⁃ um hypochlorite (positive control), and group C was treated with normal saline (negative control). The bacterial reduc⁃tion rate was calculated for each group. The bactericidal effect on the surface of the root canal wall was observed in 5 samples by scanning electron microscopy. Results There was no statistically significant difference (P > 0.05) be⁃ tween group A (100.00 ± 0.00) and group B (98.62 ± 2.01) but was a statistically sign
