Medical information is private, and medical data are valuable for medical research. Thus, medical information sharing is challenging because the data might be manipulated improperly and revealed ...during the operational process. The accuracy and integrity of medical information should be guaranteed throughout the sharing process. Medical institutions require shared information for scientific research and development; however, the issue of privacy inhibits the sharing process. In this article, we propose a new business process and a blockchain-based platform for medical information sharing. Our method exploits the advantages of blockchain in medical information recording and sharing. Information can be stored, shared, and credibly verified among parties in the distributed network. In addition, we propose a new consensus algorithm and a universal anonymous sharing model. These methods improve the efficiency and security of medical information sharing between users. In this way, both the information and the traces of the transaction can be stored in a distributed manner to prevent manipulation and fraud. Consequently, the value of medical information can be fully utilized.
Zusammenfassung
Der Fokus der chinesisch-deutschen Kommunikationsforschung liegt vor allem auf dem Vergleich kulturspezifischer Konventionen und den daraus resultierenden Konflikten und ...Missverständnissen. Die vorliegende Studie erweitert dieses Bild und betrachtet Interkulturalität als eine synergetische Ressource für erfolgreiches Beziehungsmanagement. Anhand der Methode der ethnographischen Gesprächsanalyse (Deppermann 2000) werden drei kommunikative Praktiken, die sich aus der Interkulturalität ergeben, in realen chinesisch-deutschen Unternehmenskommunikationssituationen identifiziert: die temporäre Verwendung der Sprache des Gegenübers, die Anpassung an dessen Diskursorganisation sowie die Thematisierung kultureller Besonderheiten. Wie diese kommunikativen Praktiken mit der Verbesserung und der Aufrechterhaltung der Beziehung zwischen den Interagierenden zusammenhängen, wird mittels des Rapport-Management-Modells (Spencer-Oatey 2000; 2008) aufgezeigt.
China's new urbanization strategy emphasizes the need to help more people enjoy equal access to urban public services while increasing the urbanization rate. With the implementation of the new ...urbanization strategy, how the villagers of the original rural settlements surrounded by the urban landscape (i.e., urban villages) turn into citizens (i.e., citizenization) has attracted much attention. However, few studies have attempted to deconstruct the influence of the entire change process in urban villages on the process of villagers' citizenization by associating the fate of villagers with external urbanization. To make up for this research gap, this study took Yangji Village of Guangzhou as an example, using the theoretical framework of citizenization to analyze the process and results of citizenization of villagers from the three perspectives of identity, economy, and cultural citizenization, focusing on discussing the relationship between the changes of Yangji Village and the citizenization of villagers and
The accurate measurement of CO
emissions is helpful for realizing the goals of "carbon neutralization" and "carbon peak". However, most current research on CO
emission measurements utilizes the ...traditional energy balance coefficient and top-down methods. The data granularity is large, and most studies are concentrated at the national, provincial, municipal, or district/county administrative unit scale. As an important part of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area of China, the Pearl River Delta region has good nighttime light vitality and faces huge carbon emission pressure. Using the Pearl River Delta as the research area, this study constructed an optimized pixel-scale regression model based on NPP-VIIRS (The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the Suomi National Polar-Orbiting Partnership spacecraft) nighttime light data and CO
emissions data at the district and county levels for 2017. In addition, the spatial pattern of CO
emissions in the Pearl River Delta was analyzed based on the predicted CO
emission status. The results showed that the spatial pattern of CO
emissions in the Pearl River Delta had the distinct characteristics of the "center-edge" effect, the spatial spillover effect, and high-value aggregation, which should be considered when making related social or public decisions.
•Rapid development of the economy coincided with severe resource consumption.•The ecological carrying capacity increased from the southern coastal area to the northern inland area.•The main factors ...influencing ecological carrying capacity included the ecological damage and economic development, showing a “U”-shaped relationship.
The Pan-Pearl River Basin (PPRB) has acted as a pioneer region of China’s reform and opening-up with rapid economic development. Quantitatively clarifying the evolution of ecological carrying capacity (ECC) is vital for the sustainable development of PPRB. Therefore, this study combined a comprehensive evaluation method of the pressure-state-response (PSR) index system with the ecological footprint based on net primary productivity (EF-NPP) method to analyze the spatial and temporal evolution of ecological carrying capacity (ECC) and the comprehensive ecological carrying capacity (CECC) in the PPRB from 2002 to 2019 with the development of economy and society. The random forest regression method was then used to analyze the factors driving ECC and the exponential smoothing was used to predict the future trend in the ECC and CECC of the PPRB. The results indicated that the rapid development of the economy of the PPRB coincided with some resource consumption and environmental damage. But the ECC and the CECC of the PPRB will improve continuously over the next six years according to the prediction results of exponential smoothing method. The per-capita ECC of the PPRB increased from the southern coastal area to the northern inland area. The ECC of Hunan Province decreased significantly during 2007–2010 and the ECC of Guangdong Province increased significantly during 2015–2019. The main factors influencing ECC included the damage of the ecological environment and economic development. These two driving factors showed a “U”-shaped relationship to the ECC of the PPRB, indicating a gradual emergence of the harmony of economic development and ecological damage. This study provides a theoretical basis for the ecological restoration and comprehensive ecological management in the PPRB.
In a downlink orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system, optimally allocating sub-channels across mobile users can require excessive feedback of channel state information (CSI). We ...consider an OFDMA model in which the feedback overhead is explicitly taken into account, given a fixed feedback rate and finite coherence time. The tradeoff between feedback rate and sum capacity is studied for two limited feedback schemes: a sequential scheme in which the users send compressed feedback bits over consecutive time slots, and a contention scheme in which users send their feedback via a random access protocol. For both schemes each feedback bit indicates a request for a group containing multiple subchannels. We show that the sum capacity for both schemes with optimized sub-channel groups grows linearly with the number of sub-channels N, and that the associated constant increases as the log of the normalized feedback rate measured in bits per coherence time per sub-channel. We also compare the asymptotic (large N) performance of the two limited feedback schemes as a function of the feedback rate and load (users per sub-channel). The sequential scheme performs best with moderate to large feedback rates, or small loads, whereas the contention scheme performs best with small feedback rates or large loads.
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a group of diseases that have a major impact on global health and are the leading cause of death. A large number of chemical base modifications in ribonucleic acid ...(RNA) are associated with cardiovascular diseases. A variety of ribonucleic acid modifications exist in cells, among which adenosine deaminase-dependent modification is one of the most common ribonucleic acid modifications. Adenosine deaminase acting on ribonucleic acid 1 (Adenosine deaminase acting on RNA 1) is a widely expressed double-stranded ribonucleic acid adenosine deaminase that forms inosine (A-to-I) by catalyzing the deamination of adenosine at specific sites of the target ribonucleic acid. In this review, we provide a comprehensive overview of the structure of Adenosine deaminase acting on RNA 1 and summarize the regulatory mechanisms of ADAR1-mediated ribonucleic acid editing in cardiovascular diseases, indicating Adenosine deaminase acting on RNA 1 as a promising therapeutic target in cardiovascular diseases.
Interleukin-6 (IL-6) has been reported to stimulate myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) in multiple cancers, but the molecular events involved in this process are not completely understood. We ...previously found that cancer-derived IL-6 induces T cell suppression of MDSCs
the activation of STAT3/IDO signaling pathway. In this study, we aimed to elucidate the underlying mechanisms. We found that in primary breast cancer tissues, cancer-derived IL-6 was positively correlated with infiltration of MDSCs
, which was accompanied by more aggressive tumor phenotypes and worse clinical outcomes
IL-6 stimulated the amplification of MDSCs and promoted their T cell suppression ability, which were fully inhibited by an IL-6-specific blocking antibody. Our results demonstrate that IL-6-dependent suppressor of cytokine signaling 3 (SOCS3) suppression in MDSCs induced phosphorylation of the JAK1, JAK2, TYK2, STAT1, and STAT3 proteins, which was correlated with T cell suppression of MDSCs
. Therefore, dysfunction in the SOCS feedback loop promoted long-term activation of the JAK/STAT signaling pathway and predominantly contributed to IL-6-mediated effects on MDSCs. Furthermore, IL-6-induced inhibition of SOCS3 and activation of the JAK/STAT pathway was correlated with an elevated expression of IL-6 receptor α (CD126), in which the soluble CD126-mediated IL-6
-signaling pathway significantly regulated IL-6-mediated effects on MDSCs. Finally, IL-6-induced SOCS3 dysfunction and sustained activation of the JAK/STAT signaling pathway promoted the amplification and immunosuppressive function of breast cancer MDSCs
and
, and thus blocking the IL-6 signaling pathway is a promising therapeutic strategy for eliminating and inhibiting MDSCs to improve prognosis.
Peel color is an important factor affecting commodity quality in vegetables; however, the genes controlling this trait remain unclear in wax gourd. Here, we used two F
2
genetic segregation ...populations to explore the inheritance patterns and to clone the genes associated with green and white skin in wax gourd. The F
2
and BC
1
trait segregation ratios were 3:1 and 1:1, respectively, and the trait was controlled by nuclear genes. Bulked segregant analysis of both F
2
plants revealed peaks on Chr5 exceeding the confidence interval. Additionally, 6,244 F
2
plants were used to compress the candidate interval into a region of 179 Kb; one candidate gene,
Bch05G003950
(
BhAPRR2
), encoding two-component response regulator-like protein
Arabidopsis
pseudo-response regulator2 (APRR2), which is involved in the regulation of peel color, was present in this interval. Two bases (GA) present in the coding sequence of
BhAPRR2
in green-skinned wax gourd were absent from white-skinned wax gourd. The latter contained a frameshift mutation, a premature stop codon, and lacked 335 residues required for the protein functional region. The chlorophyll content and
BhAPRR2
expression were significantly higher in green-skinned than in white-skinned wax gourd. Thus,
BhAPRR2
may regulate the peel color of wax gourd. This study provides a theoretical foundation for further studies of the mechanism of gene regulation for the fruit peel color of wax gourd.
No non-invasive method can accurately determine the presence of central cervical lymph node (CCLN) metastasis in papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) until now. This study aimed to investigate factors ...significantly associated with CCLN metastasis and then develop a model to preoperatively predict CCLN metastasis in fine-needle aspiration (FNA) reporting suspicious papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) or PTC without lateral neck metastasis.
Consecutive inpatients who were diagnosed as suspicious PTC or PTC in FNA and underwent partial or total thyroidectomy and CCLN dissection between May 1
, 2016 and June 30
, 2018 were included. The total eligible patients were randomly divided into a training set and an internal validation set with the ratio of 7:3. Univariate analysis and multivariate analysis were conducted in the training set to investigate factors associated with CCLN metastasis. The predicting model was built with factors significantly correlated with CCLN metastasis and validated in the validation set.
A total of 770 patients were eligible in this study. Among them, 268 patients had histologically confirmed CCLN metastasis, while the remaining patients did not. Factors including age,
mutation, multifocality, size, and capsule involvement were found to be significantly correlated with the CCLN metastasis in univariate and multivariate analysis. A model used to predict the presence CCLN metastasis based on these factors and US CCLN status yielded AUC, sensitivity, specificity and accuracy of 0.933 (95%CI: 0.905-0.960, p < 0.001), 0.816, 0.966 and 0.914 in the training set and 0.967 (95%CI: 0.943-0.991, p < 0.001), 0.897, 0.959 and 0.936 in the internal validation set.
Age,
mutation, multifocality, size, and capsule involvement were independent predictors of CCLN metastasis in FNA reporting suspicious PTC or PTC without lateral neck metastasis. A simple model was successfully built and showed excellent discrimination to distinguish patients with or without CCLN metastasis.
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