The disparity between human and machine perception of spatial information presents a challenge for machines to accurately sense their surroundings and improve target detection performance. ...Cross-modal data fusion emerges as a potential solution to enhance the perceptual capabilities of systems. This article introduces a novel spatial perception method that integrates dual-modality feature fusion and coupled attention mechanisms to validate the improvement in detection performance through cross-modal information fusion. The proposed approach incorporates cross-modal feature extraction through a multi-scale feature extraction structure employing a dual-flow architecture. Additionally, a transformer is integrated for feature fusion, while the information perception of the detection system is optimized through the utilization of a linear combination of loss functions. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm over single-modality target detection using visible images, exhibiting an average accuracy improvement of 30.4%. Furthermore, our algorithm outperforms single-modality infrared image detection by 3.0% and comparative multimodal target detection algorithms by 3.5%. These results validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm in fusing dual-band features, significantly enhancing target detection accuracy. The adaptability and robustness of our approach are showcased through these results.
With the continuing growth of urbanization and the boom of the construction sector in China, a substantial quantity of construction and demolition waste has been generated. However, there has been ...little research to characterize the waste from buildings’ interior renovation (repair and maintenance) or decoration activities. The primary purpose of this study was to provide a systematic analysis for the generation and flows of decoration and renovation waste based on field investigation. Taking Shenzhen city - a fast-growing megacity (over 20 M population) in South China - as an example, the results show that approximately 1 Mt of decoration and renovation waste was generated in Shenzhen city in 2017, with an annual growth rate of 10% over the past decade. Concrete waste and brick (block) account for 72% of the total decoration and renovation waste. The landfilling rate of decoration and renovation waste has reached 83%, of which a majority was disposed of by open dumping. The renovation of older residential buildings produced more than half of the total decoration and renovation waste. Although the amount of hazardous materials such as gypsum and painting materials only account for a very low weight fraction of 2%, they could still pose significant environmental impacts, compared to other types of construction and demolition waste. Accelerating the construction of sorting facilities to separate toxic and valuable materials is crucial, to realize decoration and renovation waste minimization and lower environmental risks. Overall, the findings of this study could be applied to formulate environmentally sound management measures from a policy standpoint, for Shenzhen city. The methods could also be useful for decoration and renovation waste estimation and projection in other cities in China and beyond.
•This study characterizes the generation and flow of D&R waste in a megacity in China.•Approximately 1 Mt (50 kg per person per year) D&R waste were generated in 2017.•Landfilling rate reached to 83% and a majority were disposed of by open dumping.•D&R waste from residential building renovation is the major generator, by 27.5 kg/m2.•The cumulative generation of D&R waste could reach to 19 Mt from 2018 to 2030.
Intestinal infectious diseases (IIDs) have caused numerous deaths worldwide, particularly among children. In China, eight IIDs are listed as notifiable infectious diseases, including cholera, ...poliomyelitis, dysentery, typhoid and paratyphoid (TAP), viral Hepatitis A, viral Hepatitis E, hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) and other infectious diarrhoeal diseases (OIDDs). The aim of the study is to analyse the spatio-temporal distribution of IIDs from 2006 to 2016.
Data on the incidence of IIDs from 2006 to 2016 were collected from the public health science data centre issued by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. This study applied seasonal decomposition analysis, spatial autocorrelation analysis and space-time scan analysis. Plots and maps were constructed to visualize the spatio-temporal distribution of IIDs.
Regarding temporal analysis, the incidence of HFMD and Hepatitis E showed a distinct increasing trend, while the incidence of TAP, dysentery, and Hepatitis A presented decreasing trends over the last decade. The incidence of OIID remained steady. Summer is the season with the greatest number of cases of different IIDs. Regarding the spatial distribution, approximately all p values for the global Moran's I from 2006 to 2016 were less than 0.05, indicating that the incidences of the epidemics were unevenly distributed throughout the country. The high-risk areas for HFMD and OIDD were located in the Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan (BTT) region and south China. The high-risk areas for TAP were located in some parts of southwest China. A higher incidence rates for dysentery and Hepatitis A were observed in the BTT region and some west provincial units. The high-risk areas for Hepatitis E were the BTT region and the Yangtze River Delta area.
Based on our temporal and spatial analysis of IIDs, we identified the high-risk periods and clusters of regions for the diseases. HFMD and OIDD exhibited high incidence rates, which reflected the negligence of Class C diseases by the government. At the same time, the incidence rate of Hepatitis E gradually surpassed Hepatitis A. The authorities should pay more attention to Class C diseases and Hepatitis E. Regardless of the various distribution patterns of IIDs, disease-specific, location-specific, and disease-combined interventions should be established.
Current chemotherapy regimens on acute myeloid leukemia (AML) still have some drawbacks, such as intolerance and drug resistance, which calls need for the development of targeted therapy. Signal ...transducer and activator of transcription 5 (STAT5) is often overexpressed or abnormally activated in leukemia and involved in cell self‐renewal, proliferation, and stress adaptation. Overexpressed Aurora A (AURKA) is associated with poor prognosis in tumors, and inhibitors against AURKA are already in clinical trials. However, it has rarely been reported whether AURKA inhibitors restrain STAT5‐activated leukemia cells. In this study, we constructed STAT5 constitutively activated (cS5) cells and found that STAT5 promoted cell proliferation and colony formation. Moreover, cS5 cells showed elevated reactive oxygen species (ROS) and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) levels, which indicated higher mitochondrial metabolism in cS5 cells. A novel AURKA inhibitor AKI604 was synthesized and showed significant inhibitory effects to the proliferation and colony formation in both STAT5 constitutively activated and nonactivated AML cells. AKI604 induced mitochondrial impairment, leading to the disruption of mitochondrial membrane potential and the elevation of ROS as well as cellular calcium (Ca2+) levels. AKI604 could also decline basal oxygen consumption rate and ATP biosynthesis, indicating the damage of oxidative phosphorylation. Furthermore, AKI604 exhibited significant antitumor effect in the HL‐60 cS5 xenograft model of the BALB/c nude mice without an obvious influence on mice body weight and other healthy indicators. This study suggested that AKI604 was a potential strategy to overcome STAT5‐induced leukemic proliferation in AML treatment by inducing mitochondrial impairment.
AKI604 exhibited significant antitumor effect both in vitro and in vivo by inducing mitochondrial impairment.
Summary
Rice (Oryza sativa) tiller angle is a key component for achieving ideal plant architecture and higher grain yield. However, the molecular mechanism underlying rice tiller angle remains ...elusive.
We characterized a novel rice tiller angle mutant lazy2 (la2) and isolated the causative gene LA2 through map‐based cloning. Biochemical, molecular and genetic studies were conducted to elucidate the LA2‐involved tiller angle regulatory mechanism.
The la2 mutant shows large tiller angle with impaired shoot gravitropism and defective asymmetric distribution of auxin. We found that starch granules in amyloplasts are completely lost in the gravity‐sensing leaf sheath base cells of la2, whereas the seed development is not affected. LA2 encodes a novel chloroplastic protein that can interact with the starch biosynthetic enzyme Oryza sativa plastidic phosphoglucomutase (OspPGM) to regulate starch biosynthesis in rice shoot gravity‐sensing cells. Genetic analysis showed that LA2 regulates shoot gravitropism and tiller angle by acting upstream of LA1 to mediate lateral auxin transport.
Our studies revealed that LA2 acts as a novel regulator of rice tiller angle by specifically regulating starch biosynthesis in gravity‐sensing cells, and established the framework of the starch‐statolith‐dependent rice tiller angle regulatory pathway, providing new insights into the rice tiller angle regulatory network.
ObjectivesChinese county hospitals have been excessively enlarging their scale during the healthcare reform since 2009. The purpose of this paper is to examine the technical efficiency and ...productivity of county hospitals during the reform process, and to determine whether, and how, efficiency is affected by various factors.Setting and participants114 sample county hospitals were selected from Henan province, China, from 2010 to 2012.Outcome measuresData envelopment analysis was employed to estimate the technical and scale efficiency of sample hospitals. The Malmquist index was used to calculate productivity changes over time. Tobit regression was used to regress against 4 environmental factors and 5 institutional factors that affected the technical efficiency.Results(1) 112 (98.2%), 112 (98.2%) and 104 (91.2%) of the 114 sample hospitals ran inefficiently in 2010, 2011 and 2012, with average technical efficiency of 0.697, 0.748 and 0.790, respectively. (2) On average, during 2010–2012, productivity of sample county hospitals increased by 7.8%, which was produced by the progress in technical efficiency changes and technological changes of 0.9% and 6.8%, respectively. (3) Tobit regression analysis indicated that government subsidy, hospital size with above 618 beds and average length of stay assumed a negative sign with technical efficiency; bed occupancy rate, ratio of beds to nurses and ratio of nurses to physicians assumed a positive sign with technical efficiency.ConclusionsThere was considerable space for technical efficiency improvement in Henan county hospitals. During 2010–2012, sample hospitals experienced productivity progress; however, the adverse change in pure technical efficiency should be emphasised. Moreover, according to the Tobit results, policy interventions that strictly supervise hospital bed scale, shorten the average length of stay and coordinate the proportion among physicians, nurses and beds, would benefit hospital efficiency.
Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) have grown rapidly in recent years owing to the increased adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications across various industries, ...including smart homes, industrial automation, healthcare, and smart cities. Owing to the characteristics of LLNs, such as Lossy channels and limited power, generic routing solutions designed for non-LLNs may not be adequate in terms of delivery reliability and routing efficiency. Consequently, a routing protocol for LLNs (RPL) was designed. Several RPL objective functions have been proposed to enhance the routing reliability in LLNs. This paper analyses these solutions against performance and security requirements to identify their limitations. Firstly, it discusses the characteristics and security issues of LLN and their impact on packet delivery reliability and routing efficiency. Secondly, it provides a comprehensive analysis of routing solutions and identifies existing limitations. Thirdly, based on these limitations, this paper highlights the need for a reliable and efficient path-finding solution for LLNs.
Internet of vehicles (IoV) is an emerging paradigm for accommodating the requirements of future intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) with the overwhelming trend of equipping vehicles with ...versatile sensors and communications modules, and facilitating drivers and passengers with a variety of innovative ITS applications. However, the implementation of IoV still faces many challenges, such as flexible and efficient connections, quality of service guarantee, and multiple concurrent support requests. To this end, in this paper we introduce the software-defined IoV (SD-IoV), which is able to tackle the above-mentioned issues by adopting the software-defined networking framework. We first present the architecture of SD-IoV and develop a centralized vehicular connection management approach. Then, we aim to allocate dedicated communications resources and underlying vehicular nodes to satisfy each service. We formulate the dynamic vehicular connection as an overlay vehicular network creation (OVNC) problem. A comprehensive utility function is also designed to serve as the optimization objective of OVNC. Finally, we solve the OVNC problem by developing a graph-based genetic algorithm and a heuristic algorithm, respectively. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution of dynamic vehicular connection management.
The past decade has witnessed the booming developments of the new methodologies for noninvasive tumor treatment, which are considered to overcome the current limitation of low treating efficacy, high ...risk of tumor recurrence, and severe side effects. Among a variety of novel therapeutic methods, photothermal therapy, employing nanometer-sized agents as the heat generators under near-infrared (NIR) light irradiation to ablate tumors, gives new insights into noninvasive tumor treatments with minimal side effects. Although many nanomaterials possess photothermal effects, inorganic nanoparticles and polymers are the most competitive alternatives considering the high photothermal performance and good biocompatibility. In this review, we summarized the tumor photothermal therapy using the nanocomposites composed of inorganic nanoparticles and polymers. Extinction coefficient and photothermal transduction efficiency are the two main factors to evaluate the photothermal performance of nanocomposites
in vitro
. Considering the improvement in the stability, biocompatibility, blood circulation half-life, and tumor uptake rate after polymer coating, these nanocomposites should be designed with inorganic core and polymer shell, thus improving the tumor treating efficacy
in vivo
. Such structure fulfills the requirements of high photothermal performance and good bio-security, making it possible to achieve complete ablation for shallow and small tumors under the safe limitation of NIR laser power density.
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