With the growing popularity of high-resolution videos, the demand for higher coding efficiency is increasing to cope with multimedia transmission challenges on the communication network. Since ...conventional linearly weighted bi-prediction does not handle inhomogeneous motion activities inside one block well, in recent works, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is explored to tackle inhomogeneous motion by utilizing patch-level information to predict each individual pixel. However, as only two reference blocks are used as input information, those works ignore the variation of pixel values between reference blocks and current block, and ignore the differences between extrapolation and interpolation. This work utilizes both spatial neighboring pixels and temporal display orders as extra inputs for CNN models to further improve the prediction accuracy of a bi-predictor. The extra input information has the following advantages. First, variations among spatial neighboring pixels of both reference blocks and the current block reflect variations between current block and reference blocks. Together with temporal distance, spatial neighboring pixels are able to address extrapolation and interpolation uniformly. Second, spatial neighboring pixels of the current block have a high correlation with current predicted signals, which helps to reduce prediction residuals around the block boundary and alleviate block artifacts. Last, temporal distances help to improve the accuracy of prediction signals based on its ability of reflecting the correlation of video frames. Experimental results show that our proposed network achieves 2.92% and 5.09% bit-rate savings on average compared with HEVC, under Low-Delay B (LDB) and Random-Access (RA) configurations, respectively. As temporal information is used in our network, the LDB and RA configurations share the same networks in this work.
Vulnerable atherosclerotic (AS) plaque is the major cause of cardiovascular death. However, clinical methods cannot directly identify the vulnerable AS plaque at molecule level. Herein, osteopontin ...antibody (OPN Ab) and NIR fluorescence molecules of ICG co‐assembled Ti3C2 nanosheets are reported as an advanced nanoprobe (OPN Ab/Ti3C2/ICG) with enhanced photoacoustic (PA) performance for direct and non‐invasive in vivo visual imaging of vulnerable AS plaque. The designed OPN Ab/Ti3C2/ICG nanoprobes successfully realize obvious NIR fluorescence imaging toward foam cells as well as the vulnerable AS plaque slices. After intravenous injection of OPN Ab/Ti3C2/ICG nanoprobes into AS model mice, in vivo imaging results show a significantly enhanced PA signal in the aortic arch accumulated with vulnerable plaque, well indicating the remarkable feasibility of OPN Ab/Ti3C2/ICG nanoprobes to distinguish the vulnerable AS plaque. The proposed OPN Ab/Ti3C2/ICG nanoprobes not only overcome the clinical difficulty to differentiate vulnerable plaque, but also achieve the non‐invasively specific in vivo imaging of vulnerable AS plaque at molecule level, greatly promoting the innovation of cardiovascular diagnosis technology.
Direct identification of vulnerable atherosclerotic plaque at the molecular level is critical to prevent cardiovascular death. Osteopontin antibody (OPN Ab)/Ti3C2/indocyanine green nanoprobes with excellent photoacoustic performance well realize the non‐invasive in vivo imaging of vulnerable plaque through the targeted recognition of OPN‐overexpressed foam cells that are the main ingredients of vulnerable plaque, significantly advancing the innovation of cardiovascular disease diagnosis technology.
Most recent methods for RGB (red-green-blue)-thermal salient object detection (SOD) involve several floating-point operations and have numerous parameters, resulting in slow inference, especially on ...common processors, and impeding their deployment on mobile devices for practical applications. To address these problems, we propose a lightweight spatial boosting network (LSNet) for efficient RGB-thermal SOD with a lightweight MobileNetV2 backbone to replace a conventional backbone (e.g., VGG, ResNet). To improve feature extraction using a lightweight backbone, we propose a boundary boosting algorithm that optimizes the predicted saliency maps and reduces information collapse in low-dimensional features. The algorithm generates boundary maps based on predicted saliency maps without incurring additional calculations or complexity. As multimodality processing is essential for high-performance SOD, we adopt attentive feature distillation and selection and propose semantic and geometric transfer learning to enhance the backbone without increasing the complexity during testing. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LSNet achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with 14 RGB-thermal SOD methods on three datasets while improving the numbers of floating-point operations (1.025G) and parameters (5.39M), model size (22.1 MB), and inference speed (9.95 fps for PyTorch, batch size of 1, and Intel i5-7500 processor; 93.53 fps for PyTorch, batch size of 1, and NVIDIA TITAN V graphics processor; 936.68 fps for PyTorch, batch size of 20, and graphics processor; 538.01 fps for TensorRT and batch size of 1; and 903.01 fps for TensorRT/FP16 and batch size of 1). The code and results can be found from the link of https://github.com/zyrant/LSNet.
In this study, we achieved magnetic control of reactive scattering in an ultracold mixture of
Na atoms and
Na
Li molecules. In most molecular collisions, particles react or are lost near short range ...with unity probability, leading to the so-called universal rate. By contrast, the Na + NaLi system was shown to have only ~4% loss probability in a fully spin-polarized state. By controlling the phase of the scattering wave function via a Feshbach resonance, we modified the loss rate by more than a factor of 100, from far below to far above the universal limit. The results are explained in analogy with an optical Fabry-Perot resonator by interference of reflections at short and long range. Our work demonstrates quantum control of chemistry by magnetic fields with the full dynamic range predicted by our models.
A large number of red cultural sites preserved in the Chinese countryside, as well as the red spirit are combined with cultural tourism, and the red cultural tourism industry comes into being. This ...paper takes the service personnel of the rural red cultural tourism industry in County M as the research object, designs the relevant questionnaire, conducts the reliability test, and then obtains the relevant data of rural revitalization and rural red cultural tourism industry chain through the questionnaire survey method. Then, using the industrial environment and policies of the rural red cultural tourism industry chain as the independent variables and rural revitalization as the dependent variable, a round-off multiple regression analysis was carried out to explore the interrelationship between the two. The results show that rural revitalization = 1.374+0.086*tourism projects + 0.147*infrastructure + 0.169*tourism market + 0.177*tourist distribution = 1.074+0.246*history and culture + 0.259*red culture + 0.214*government policies + 0.268*funding inputs. This paper assists Chinese villages in improving the red cultural tourism industry chain and promoting rural revitalization by developing the red cultural tourism industry chain.
With the continuous development of computer technology, the teaching of ancient Chinese has realized a quantitative and statistical research path for a large-scale corpus. In this paper, based on a ...multidimensional analysis model, six disciplines in the humanities domain (Chinese literature, history, philosophy) and social sciences domain (economics, sociology, law) of ancient Chinese were selected as dimensions, and 111 linguistic features of ancient Chinese in the corpus were factor analyzed. Multivariate ANOVA and post hoc tests were conducted on the discourse dimension scores of different disciplinary domains, and qualitative analyses were conducted in conjunction with the linguistic features in the specific corpus to further verify the linguistic domain coefficient of variation of ancient Chinese. The results of the study show that the results of the Levenes test for homogeneity of variance in the teaching of ancient Chinese in a single dimension are all
< 0.0001, while there are highly significant differences between the historical and philosophical domain features in the humanities (
= 0.001 ≤ 0.01), and extremely significant differences with the other four disciplines. The results of the multidimensional expression form of ancient Chinese teaching based on the multidimensional analysis method proposed in this paper effectively advance the advancement of ancient Chinese teaching and enable students to learn Chinese culture from other dimensions while learning ancient Chinese.
PurposePrefabricated construction concerns off-site production, multi-mode transportation and on-site installation of the prefabricated components, which are interdependent and dynamically ...interactive, so coordination among the multiple stages along the prefabricated component supply chain (PCSC) is indispensable. This study aims to solve the dynamic transportation planning problem for the PCSC by addressing the interdependency, dynamic interaction and coordination among the multiple stages and different objectives of the stakeholders.Design/methodology/approachThe PCSC is analyzed and then the formulation for the dynamic transportation planning problem is developed based on the just-in-time (JIT) strategy. The particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is applied to solve the dynamic optimization problem.FindingsThe proposed dynamic transportation planning method for the PCSC regarding component supplier selection, transportation planning for means, routes and schedule, site layout planning and transportation plan adjustment is able to facilitate coordination among the multiple stages by addressing their interdependencies and dynamic interactions, as well as different economic objectives of the stakeholders such as suppliers or the contractor.Originality/valueThe study helps to achieve the advantages of prefabricated construction by prompting coordination among multiple stages of the PCSC by realizing different benefits of the stakeholders. In addition, it provides the stakeholders with the competitive bidding prices and the evaluation data for the bids quote. Meanwhile, it contributes to the domain knowledge of the PCSC management with regard to the viewpoint of coordination and integration of multiple stages rather than only one stage as well as the dynamic optimization model based on the JIT strategy and the PSO algorithm.
A nanolaser is a key component for on-chip optical communications and computing systems. Here, we report on the low-threshold, continuous-wave operation of a subdiffraction nanolaser based on surface ...plasmon amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. The plasmonic nanocavity is formed between an atomically smooth epitaxial silver film and a single optically pumped nanorod consisting of an epitaxial gallium nitride shell and an indium gallium nitride core acting as gain medium. The atomic smoothness of the metallic film is crucial for reducing the modal volume and plasmonic losses. Bimodal lasing with similar pumping thresholds was experimentally observed, and polarization properties of the two modes were used to unambiguously identify them with theoretically predicted modes. The all-epitaxial approach opens a scalable platform for low-loss, active nanoplasmonics.
Sustained cardiac hypertrophy accompanied by maladaptive cardiac remodelling represents an early event in the clinical course leading to heart failure. Maladaptive hypertrophy is considered to be a ...therapeutic target for heart failure. However, the molecular mechanisms that regulate cardiac hypertrophy are largely unknown.
Here we show that a circular RNA (circRNA), which we term heart-related circRNA (HRCR), acts as an endogenous miR-223 sponge to inhibit cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure. miR-223 transgenic mice developed cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure, whereas miR-223-deficient mice were protected from hypertrophic stimuli, indicating that miR-223 acts as a positive regulator of cardiac hypertrophy. We identified ARC as a miR-223 downstream target to mediate the function of miR-223 in cardiac hypertrophy. Apoptosis repressor with CARD domain transgenic mice showed reduced hypertrophic responses. Further, we found that a circRNA HRCR functions as an endogenous miR-223 sponge to sequester and inhibit miR-223 activity, which resulted in the increase of ARC expression. Heart-related circRNA directly bound to miR-223 in cytoplasm and enforced expression of HRCR in cardiomyocytes and in mice both exhibited attenuated hypertrophic responses.
These findings disclose a novel regulatory pathway that is composed of HRCR, miR-223, and ARC. Modulation of their levels provides an attractive therapeutic target for the treatment of cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure.
In this study, we aimed to develop a multifunctional drug/gene delivery system for the treatment of glioblastoma multiforme by combining the ligand-mediated active targeting and the pH-triggered drug ...release features of graphene oxide (GO). Toward this end, we load irinotecan (CPT-11) to cetuximab (CET)-conjugated GO (GO-CET/CPT11) for pH-responsive drug release after endocytosis by epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) over-expressed U87 human glioblastoma cells. The ultimate injectable drug/gene delivery system was designed by co-entrapping stomatin-like protein 2 (SLP2) short hairpin RNA (shRNA) and GO-CET/CPT11 in thermosensitive chitosan-
-poly(
-isopropylacrylamide) (CPN) polymer solution, which offers a hydrogel depot for localized, sustained delivery of the therapeutics after the in situ formation of CPN@GO-CET/CPT11@shRNA hydrogel. An optimal drug formulation was achieved by considering both the loading efficiency and loading content of CPT-11 on GO-CET. A sustained and controlled release behavior was found for CPT-11 and shRNA from CPN hydrogel. Confocal microscopy analysis confirmed the intracellular trafficking for the targeted delivery of CPT-11 through interactions of CET with EGFR on the U87 cell surface. The efficient transfection of U87 using SLP2 shRNA was achieved using CPN as a delivery milieu, possibly by the formation of shRNA/CPN polyplex after hydrogel degradation. In vitro cell culture experiments confirmed cell apoptosis induced by CPT-11 released from acid organelles in the cytoplasm by flow cytometry, as well as reduced SLP2 protein expression and inhibited cell migration due to gene silencing. Finally, in vivo therapeutic efficacy was demonstrated using the xenograft of U87 tumor-bearing nude mice through non-invasive intratumoral delivery of CPN@GO-CET/CPT11@shRNA by injection. Overall, we have demonstrated the novelty of this thermosensitive hydrogel to be an excellent depot for the co-delivery of anticancer drugs and siRNA. The in situ forming hydrogel will not only provide extended drug release but also combine the advantages offered by the chitosan-based copolymer structure for siRNA delivery to broaden treatment modalities in cancer therapy.
PDF
