The factors associated with sleep disturbances in cancer patients remains unclear. This study aimed to explore the prevalence of sleep disorders and predictors associated with sleep disturbance in ...cancer patients from a radiotherapy department.
Patients with cancers were recruited before the start of radiotherapy from our institution between January 2019 and February 2020. Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) scale was used to assess sleep quality. Descriptive statistics, Chi-square test, and multivariate logistic regression analysis were used to conduct statistical analysis.
A total of 330 eligible patients were included. Of them, 38.3% (
= 127) had the globe PSQI score >7, indicating that they suffered from sleep disorders. Patients with lung cancer (45.2%) were more likely to suffer from sleep disturbance, followed by cervical cancer (43.8%), nasopharyngeal carcinoma (41.7%), esophageal cancer (41.5%), breast cancer (37.7%), and colorectal cancer (30%). With regard to the PSQI components, the mean sleep duration was 8 h, 20.3% (
= 67) of them reported poor subjective sleep quality, 6.1% (
= 20) needed medication to improve sleep, and 53.6% (
= 177) suffered daytime dysfunction. Multivariate logistic regression models showed body mass index (BMI) ≥ 20 kg/m
odds ratio (OR) 0.599, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.329-0.948,
= 0.031 and the receipt of surgery (OR 0.507, 95% CI 0.258-0.996,
= 0.048) were the significant favorable predictors for sleep disturbance, while age, gender, marital status, education level, comorbidity, metastasis status, diagnostic status, and cancer type were not significantly associated with sleep disturbance.
Approximately 40% of the cancer patients suffer from sleep disturbance before the start of radiotherapy. Patients with BMI ≥ 20 kg/m
and receiving surgery are less likely to develop sleep disturbance in comparison with others.
With the popularization of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, mixed traffic flows that consist of AVs and human-driven vehicles (HDVs) will appear in the real world. Although many studies of the ...features of mixed traffic flow have been carefully evaluated, few studies have focused on the effect of aggressive driving performance on mixed traffic flow. This study aims to develop an approach to evaluate the effects of aggressive driving on the stability and capacity performance under the conditions of AV and HDV mixed traffic flow. First, since a car-following model can describe the relationship between vehicles, we calibrate a car-following model for aggressive driving and nonaggressive driving behaviors based on real traffic data and previous research results. Then, in a mixed traffic flow environment, a basic linear stability formula and capacity calculation expression are developed that consider the effects of vehicle order on the capacity. Finally, because the proportion of aggressive driving and aggressive driving parameters may change, nine combinations of three aggressive driving proportions and three driving parameter cases are used for the sensitivity analysis. The results indicate that the effect of aggressive driving on mixed traffic flow is complex. When the proportion of aggressive driving is less than 35%, the increase in the proportion of aggressive driving increases the traffic capacity and reduces the unstable part. However, when the proportion of aggressive driving is greater than 35%, the increase in the proportion of aggressive driving increases the unstable part. When the penetration rate of AVs exceeds 0.490, mixed traffic flow remains stable at all aggressive driving proportions. In addition, the capacity of a mixed traffic flow may be improved as the penetration rate of AVs increases. To a certain extent, these conclusions provide a theoretical basis for formulating different management modes of AVs and HDVs.
Amide-linked covalent organic frameworks (amide COFs) possess enormous potentials in practical applications benefiting from their high stability and polyamide structures. However, they suffer from ...very limited accessibility. Herein, we report a new linkage conversion method to rapidly synthesize crystalline amide COFs through oxidation of imine linkages in their corresponding imine-linked frameworks with KHSO5 as an oxidant under very mild conditions. This synthetic strategy is general, facile, efficient, and scalable, as demonstrated by the procedure of simply stirring mixtures of imine-linked COFs (seven examples) and KHSO5 in anhydrous dimethylformamide for several hours to complete the conversions and gram-scale synthesis. The high efficiency of this approach enables facile production of amide COFs from widely available imine-linked COFs, which lays the foundation for exploring practical applications of this unique type of polyamide material.
A novel optical color image watermarking scheme considering human visual characteristics is presented in gyrator transform domain. Initially, an appropriate reference image is constructed of ...significant blocks chosen from the grayscale host image by evaluating visual characteristics such as visual entropy and edge entropy. Three components of the color watermark image are compressed based on compressive sensing, and the corresponding results are combined to form the grayscale watermark. Then, the frequency coefficients of the watermark image are fused into the frequency data of the gyrator-transformed reference image. The fused result is inversely transformed and partitioned, and eventually the watermarked image is obtained by mapping the resultant blocks into their original positions. The scheme can reconstruct the watermark with high perceptual quality and has the enhanced security due to high sensitivity of the secret keys. Importantly, the scheme can be implemented easily under the framework of double random phase encoding with the 4f optical system. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first report on embedding the color watermark into the grayscale host image which will be out of attacker's expectation. Simulation results are given to verify the feasibility and its superior performance in terms of noise and occlusion robustness.
•The color watermark is embedded into the significant blocks of host image based on visual characteristics.•The proposed scheme can reconstruct the watermark with high perceptual quality.•The initial values of logistic maps and rotation angles with high sensitivity are considered as the secret keys.•The proposed scheme can be implemented easily under the framework of DRPE.
The use of floating-point numbers inevitably leads to inaccurate results and, in certain cases, significant program failures. Detecting floating-point errors is critical to ensuring that ...floating-point programs outputs are proper. However, due to the sparsity of floating-point errors, only a limited number of inputs can cause significant floating-point errors, and determining how to detect these inputs and to selecting the appropriate search technique is critical to detecting significant errors. This paper proposes characteristic particle swarm optimization (CPSO) algorithm based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The floating-point expression error detection tool PSOED is implemented, which can detect significant errors in floating-point arithmetic expressions and provide corresponding input. The method presented in this paper is based on two insights: (1) treating floating-point error detection as a search problem and selecting reliable heuristic search strategies to solve the problem; (2) fully utilizing the error distribution laws of expressions and the distribution characteristics of floating-point numbers to guide the search space generation and improve the search efficiency. This paper selects 28 expressions from the FPBench standard set as test cases, uses PSOED to detect the maximum error of the expressions, and compares them to the current dynamic error detection tools S3FP and Herbie. PSOED detects the maximum error 100% better than S3FP, 68% better than Herbie, and 14% equivalent to Herbie. The results of the experiments indicate that PSOED can detect significant floating-point expression errors.
Egg white protein is a kind of protein resource with distinctive nutritional value and functional properties, while performing weak emulsifying stability under neutral and alkaline conditions, ...limiting application in food industry. This study, we investigated the effect of enzyme on characteristics of egg white protein (EWP) and synergistic efficiency of pectin addition on properties (thermal stability, salt resistance and antioxidant activity) of emulsions stabilized by original or hydrolyzed EWP. The EWP solutions were incubated at pH 7.0, under 50 °C for 2 h, with various amount of enzyme (0%, 0.5%, 1%, 2%, and 4%) added in. With enzyme concentration increased, more ovotransferrin and ovalbumin were hydrolyzed, and more hydrophobic amino acids exposed to polar environment, especially tyrosine. In addition, the DPPH and ABTS radical scavenging activity of EWP increased with enzyme concentration increased. Pectin addition can effectively improve the stabilization of the emulsion droplets, inducing smaller effective diameter and polydispersity index. In comparison, the emulsions stabilized by hydrolyzed EWP with 0.3% pectin behaved better thermal and salty stability, while with poorer antioxidant capacity attributed to weaker intermolecular interactions. The rheological measurement showed that the viscosity of hydrolyzed EWP stabilized emulsion was relatively lower and G′ was more dependent on frequency, indicating weaker cross-links among droplets. The results may provide theoretical guidance for application of enzymatic and polysaccharide blends in improving protein functionality.
Display omitted
•Hydrolysis induce hydrophobic residues especially tyrosine exposed.•Hydrolysis improve free radical scavenging activity of EWP.•Pectin addition increase creaming stability of EWP-stabilized emulsions.•Hydrolyzed EWP stabilized emulsions behave better heat and salty stability.•Hydrolysis weaken antioxidant activity and G′ independence of emulsions.
In order to improve the detection accuracy of the surface defect detection of industrial hot rolled strip steel, the advanced technology of deep learning is applied to the surface defect detection of ...strip steel. In this paper, we propose a framework for strip surface defect detection based on a convolutional neural network (CNN). In particular, we propose a novel multi-scale feature fusion module (ATPF) for integrating multi-scale features and adaptively assigning weights to each feature. This module can extract semantic information at different scales more fully. At the same time, based on this module, we build a deep learning network, CG-Net, that is suitable for strip surface defect detection. The test results showed that it achieved an average accuracy of 75.9 percent (mAP50) in 6.5 giga floating-point operation (GFLOPs) and 105 frames per second (FPS). The detection accuracy improved by 6.3% over the baseline YOLOv5s. Compared with YOLOv5s, the reference quantity and calculation amount were reduced by 67% and 59.5%, respectively. At the same time, we also verify that our model exhibits good generalization performance on the NEU-CLS dataset.
The metallic complex is widely used in agricultural applications. Due to the oxidation of the metal and environmental unfriendliness of ligand, maintaining an efficient mineral supply for plants ...without causing environmental damage is difficult. Herein, an antioxidative trimetallic complex with high stability was synthesized by interacting Ca
, Fe
, and Zn
with the biocompatible ligands from the Maillard reaction. The composite structure elucidation was carried out by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and Fourier transform infrared (FTIR). Thermal stability was measured by thermogravimetric (TG). Antioxidative activities were evaluated by ferric reducing antioxidant power and radical scavenging activity assays. The three metals were successfully fabricated on the Maillard reaction products (MRPs) with contents of Ca (9.01%), Fe (8.25%), and Zn (9.67%). Microscopy images revealed that the three metals were uniformly distributed on the MRPs with partial aggregation of <30 nm. FTIR and XPS results revealed that the metals were interacted with MRPs by metal-O and metal-N bonds. TG and antioxidative activity assays showed that the trimetallic complex meets the requirements of thermodynamics and oxidation resistance of horticultural applications. Additionally, the results of the exogenous spraying experiment showed that the trimetallic complex significantly increased the mineral contents of the "Fuji" apple. By treatment with the complex, the concentrations of Ca, Fe, and Zn were increased by 85.4, 532.5, and 931.1% in the leaf; 16.0, 225.2, and 468.6% in the peel; and 117.6, 217.9, and 19.5% in the flesh, respectively. The MRP-based complexes offered a higher growth rate of the mineral content in apples than ones based on sugars or amino acids. The results of the spraying experiment carried out in 2 years show that the method has high reproducibility. This study thus promotes the development of green metallic complexes and expands the scope of agrochemical strategy.
Changes in decidual macrophage polarization affect local inflammatory microenvironment and lead to adverse pregnancy outcomes. However, the regulatory mechanism of macrophage polarization in ...preeclampsia (PE) remains unclear. In this study, we found that α7nAChR expression was significantly down-regulated in decidual macrophages in PE patients compared to normal pregnant women, accompanied by a reduced proportion of M2 phenotype and an increased proportion of M1 phenotype; these results suggested that the reduced α7nAChR activity might contribute to changes in the polarization of decidual macrophages. Then, we further investigated the regulatory role of α7nAChR activation by nicotine on decidual macrophage polarization and placental remodeling in the PE-like mouse model. The PE mice were obtained by i.p. injection of 10 µg/kg lipopolysaccharide (LPS) gestational day (GD) 13, and 40 µg/kg LPS daily until GD16. Subcutaneous injection of 1.0 mg/kg nicotine was administrated from GD14 to GD18. Nicotine treatment increased the decreased M2 phenotype and inhibited the increased M1 phenotype in decidua of pregnant mice induced by LPS. The levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines in decidua were higher but the levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines were lower in PE mice compared to the controls, nicotine reversed these changes. The level of choline acetyltransferase (CHAT) was reduced in the LPS-treated group, it was increased following nicotine treatment. Damage of spiral artery remodeling and down-regulation of markers related to trophoblast invasion in placentas were found in PE mice; nicotine improved these pathological structures of placentas. α-bungarotoxin (α-BGT) which is specific antagonist for α7nAChR could abolish the effects of nicotine on decidual macrophage polarization, trophoblast arrangement and vascular structure in placental tissue in PE mice. These results suggest that α7nAChR plays an important regulatory role in maternal-fetal inflammation and placental remodeling in preeclampsia and may provide a theoretical basis for the discovery of new strategies for preeclampsia.
PDF
