With the rapid development of remote sensing technology, how to accurately detect changes that have occurred on the land surface has been a critical task, particularly when images come from different ...satellite sensors. In this letter, we propose an unsupervised change detection method for heterogeneous synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and optical images based on the logarithmic transformation feature learning framework. First, the logarithmic transformation is applied to the SAR image that aims to achieve similar statistical distribution properties as the optical image. Then, high-level feature representations can be learned from the transformed image pair via joint feature extraction, which are used to select reliable samples for training a neural network classifier. When it is trained well, a robust change map can be obtained, thus identifying changed regions accurately. The experimental results on three real heterogeneous data sets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method compared with other existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Emerging evidence has shown that dysregulation function of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) implicated in gastric cancer (GC). However, the role of the differentially expressed lncRNAs in GC has not ...fully explained.
LncRNA expression profiles were determined by lncRNA microarray in five pairs of normal and GC tissues, further validated in another 75 paired tissues by quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR). Overexpression of lncRNA MT1JP was conducted to assess the effect of MT1JP in vitro and in vivo. The biological functions were demonstrated by luciferase reporter assay, western blotting and rescue experiments.
LncRNA MT1JP was significantly lower in GC tissues than adjacent normal tissues, and higher MT1JP was remarkably related to lymph node metastasis and advance stage. Besides, GC patients with higher MT1JP expression had a well survival. Functionally, overexpression of lncRNA MT1JP inhibited cell proliferation, migration, invasion and promoted cell apoptosis in vitro, and inhibited tumor growth and metastasis in vivo. Functional analysis showed that lncRNA MT1JP regulated FBXW7 expression by competitively binding to miR-92a-3p. MiR-92a-3p and down-regulated FBXW7 reversed cell phenotypes caused by lncRNA MT1JP by rescue analysis.
MT1JP, a down-regulated lncRNA in GC, was associated with malignant tumor phenotypes and survival of GC. MT1JP regulated the progression of GC by functioning as a competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) to competitively bind to miR-92a-3p and regulate FBXW7 expression. Our study provided new insight into the post-transcriptional regulation mechanism of lncRNA MT1JP, and suggested that MT1JP may act as a potential therapeutic target and prognosis biomarker for GC.
Purpose Most existing literature describes Lynch syndrome (LS) as a hereditary syndrome leading to high risks of colorectal cancer (CRC) and endometrial cancer mainly as a result of mutations in MLH1 ...and MSH2. Most of these studies were performed on cohorts with disease suggestive of hereditary CRC and population-based CRC and endometrial cancer cohorts, possibly biasing results. We aimed to describe a large cohort of mismatch repair (MMR) mutation carriers ascertained through multigene panel testing, evaluate their phenotype, and compare the results with those of previous studies. Methods We retrospectively reviewed clinical histories of patients who had multigene panel testing, including the MMR and EPCAM genes, between March 2012 and June 2015 (N = 34,981) and performed a series of statistical comparisons. Results Overall, MSH6 mutations were most frequent, followed by PMS2, MSH2, MLH1, and EPCAM mutations, respectively. Of 528 patients who had MMR mutations, 63 (11.9%) had breast cancer only and 144 (27.3%) had CRC only. When comparing those with breast cancer only to those with CRC only, MSH6 and PMS2 mutations were more frequent than MLH1 and MSH2 mutations ( P = 2.3 × 10
). Of the 528 patients, 22.2% met BRCA1 and BRCA2 ( BRCA1/2) testing criteria and not LS criteria, and 5.1% met neither BRCA1/2 nor LS testing criteria. MSH6 and PMS2 mutations were more frequent than MLH1 and MSH2 mutations among patients who met BRCA1/2 testing criteria but did not meet LS testing criteria ( P = 4.3 × 10
). Conclusion These results provide a new perspective on LS and suggest that individuals with MSH6 and PMS2 mutations may present with a hereditary breast and ovarian cancer phenotype. These data also highlight the limitations of current testing criteria in identifying these patients, as well as the need for further investigation of cancer risks in patients with MMR mutations.
Exosomes have emerged as vital biomarkers of multiple cancers and contain abundant circular RNAs (circRNAs). However, the potential for exosomal circRNAs to be used in diagnostics and their molecular ...mechanism of action in colorectal cancer (CRC) remain unclear.
CRC-specific exosomal circRNAs were identified by RNA sequencing, exoRBase database and a tissue microarray. The diagnostic performance of plasma exosomal circRNAs was evaluated among cancer-free controls, precancer individuals, CRC patients, and patients with other types of cancer. The corresponding biological functions were mainly assessed using circRNA pull-down, proteomic analysis, and RNA immunoprecipitation assay underlying cellular and mouse models.
CircLPAR1 was encapsulated in exosomes with high stability and detectability, and its expression in plasma exosomes was remarkably decreased during CRC development but recovered after surgery. Exosomal circLPAR1 showed cancer specificity in CRC diagnosis and increased the diagnostic performance to an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.875, as determined by analysing its performance in combination with common clinical biomarkers CEA and CA19-9. Additionally, circLPAR1 was downregulated in CRC tissues and was associated with overall survival. Mechanistically, exosomal circLPAR1 was internalized by CRC cells, and it suppressed tumor growth, likely because exosomal circLPAR1 directly bound with eIF3h specifically suppressed the METTL3-eIF3h interaction, decreasing the translation of oncogene BRD4.
This comprehensive study highlights plasma exosomal circLPAR1 as a promising predictor in CRC diagnosis and describes its biological regulation of colorectal tumorigenesis. This study provides a new perspective on early diagnosis in the clinic and pathogenesis in disease development.
Failure time data frequently occur in many medical studies and often accompany with various types of censoring. In some applications, left truncation may occur and can induce biased sampling, which ...makes the practical data analysis become more complicated. The existing analysis methods for left-truncated data have some limitations in that they either focus only on a special type of censored data or fail to flexibly utilize the distribution information of the truncation times for inference. Therefore, it is essential to develop a reliable and efficient method for the analysis of left-truncated failure time data with various types of censoring.
This paper concerns regression analysis of left-truncated failure time data with the proportional hazards model under various types of censoring mechanisms, including right censoring, interval censoring and a mixture of them. The proposed pairwise pseudo-likelihood estimation method is essentially built on a combination of the conditional likelihood and the pairwise likelihood that eliminates the nuisance truncation distribution function or avoids its estimation. To implement the presented method, a flexible EM algorithm is developed by utilizing the idea of self-consistent estimating equation. A main feature of the algorithm is that it involves closed-form estimators of the large-dimensional nuisance parameters and is thus computationally stable and reliable. In addition, an R package LTsurv is developed.
The numerical results obtained from extensive simulation studies suggest that the proposed pairwise pseudo-likelihood method performs reasonably well in practical situations and is obviously more efficient than the conditional likelihood approach as expected. The analysis results of the MHCPS data with the proposed pairwise pseudo-likelihood method indicate that males have significantly higher risk of losing active life than females. In contrast, the conditional likelihood method recognizes this effect as non-significant, which is because the conditional likelihood method often loses some estimation efficiency compared with the proposed method.
The proposed method provides a general and helpful tool to conduct the Cox's regression analysis of left-truncated failure time data under various types of censoring.
Improving the detection efficiency and maintenance benefits is one of the greatest challenges in road testing and maintenance. To address this problem, this paper presents a method for combining the ...you only look once (YOLO) series with 3D ground-penetrating radar (GPR) images to recognize the internal defects in asphalt pavement and compares the effectiveness of traditional detection and GPR detection by evaluating the maintenance benefits. First, traditional detection is conducted to survey and summarize the surface conditions of tested roads, which are missing the internal information. Therefore, GPR detection is implemented to acquire the images of concealed defects. Then, the YOLOv5 model with the most even performance of the six selected models is applied to achieve the rapid identification of road defects. Finally, the benefits evaluation of maintenance programs based on these two detection methods is conducted from economic and environmental perspectives. The results demonstrate that the economic scores are improved and the maintenance cost is reduced by $49,398/km based on GPR detection; the energy consumption and carbon emissions are reduced by 792,106 MJ/km (16.94%) and 56,289 kg/km (16.91%), respectively, all of which indicates the effectiveness of 3D GPR in pavement detection and maintenance.
The rapid change in environmental protection in China raises our interests in evaluating the shadow price of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and chemical oxygen demand (COD), and in developing a framework for ...analyzing the association between pollutants’ shadow prices and their driving forces: technological change, scale efficiency change, and pure efficiency change. The imbalance across the provinces also draws our attention to a provincial-level analysis. The results show that the national average shadow prices of SO2 and COD showed a substantial upward trend during 2001 and 2015, with the mean value being $2582.67/ton and $1639.79/ton, respectively. In most eastern provinces, the shadow prices of both pollutants were relatively higher than those in the central and western regions. For the eastern region, technological change, scale efficiency change, and pure efficiency change that brought about by a variety of measures impacted the social marginal abatement cost of SO2 significantly. For the western region, these three factors significantly impacted the marginal abatement cost of COD. For the central region, a change in scale efficiency brought about by the adjustment of production scale and/or industrial structure significantly impacted the marginal abatement cost of SO2, and the other two factors significantly impacted the marginal abatement cost of COD. The results suggest the importance of establishing a regionally differentiated policy framework, emphasizing on the measures that previously have not impacted the social marginal abatement cost, and setting up better coordination of synergies between multiple pollutants.
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•The loss in economic from curbing pollutants can be measured using shadow prices.•The national average shadow price of SO2 and COD substantially increased.•The shadow prices of pollutants vary across provinces.•The driving forces of the shadow price of SO2 and COD were analyzed.
Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has rapidly replaced Sanger sequencing as the method of choice for diagnostic gene-panel testing. For hereditary-cancer testing, the technical sensitivity and ...specificity of the assay are paramount as clinicians use results to make important clinical management and treatment decisions. There is significant debate within the diagnostics community regarding the necessity of confirming NGS variant calls by Sanger sequencing, considering that numerous laboratories report having 100% specificity from the NGS data alone. Here we report our results from 20,000 hereditary-cancer NGS panels spanning 47 genes, in which all 7845 nonpolymorphic variants were Sanger- sequenced. Of these, 98.7% were concordant between NGS and Sanger sequencing and 1.3% were identified as NGS false-positives, located mainly in complex genomic regions (A/T-rich regions, G/C-rich regions, homopolymer stretches, and pseudogene regions). Simulating a false-positive rate of zero by adjusting the variant-calling quality-score thresholds decreased the sensitivity of the assay from 100% to 97.8%, resulting in the missed detection of 176 Sanger-confirmed variants, the majority in complex genomic regions ( n = 114) and mosaic mutations ( n = 7). The data illustrate the importance of setting quality thresholds for panel testing only after thousands of samples have been processed and the necessity of Sanger confirmation of NGS variants to maintain the highest possible sensitivity.
Access to phosphoproteins with stoichiometric and site-specific phosphorylation status is key to understanding the role of protein phosphorylation. Here we report an efficient method to generate ...pure, active phosphotyrosine-containing proteins by genetically encoding a stable phosphotyrosine analog that is convertible to native phosphotyrosine. We demonstrate its general compatibility with proteins of various sizes, phosphotyrosine sites and functions, and reveal a possible role of tyrosine phosphorylation in negative regulation of ubiquitination.
We report on highly uniform resistive switching properties of amorphous InGaZnO (a-IGZO) thin films. The thin films were fabricated by a low temperature photochemical solution deposition method, a ...simple process combining chemical solution deposition and ultraviolet (UV) irradiation treatment. The a-IGZO based resistive switching devices exhibit long retention, good endurance, uniform switching voltages, and stable distribution of low and high resistance states. Electrical conduction mechanisms were also discussed on the basis of the current–voltage characteristics and their temperature dependence. The excellent resistive switching properties can be attributed to the reduction of organic- and hydrogen-based elements and the formation of enhanced metal-oxide bonding and metal-hydroxide bonding networks by hydrogen bonding due to UV irradiation, based on Fourier-transform-infrared spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and Field emission scanning electron microscopy analysis of the thin films. This study suggests that a-IGZO thin films have potential applications in resistive random access memory and the low temperature photochemical solution deposition method can find the opportunity for further achieving system on panel applications if the a-IGZO resistive switching cells were integrated with a-IGZO thin film transistors.
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