•Ground glass opacities in subpleural regions are the main CT features of COVID-19.•Pulmonary consolidation mostly occurs in critical patient.•Imaging features vary according to disease severity.•CT ...imaging can evaluate the severity and treatment outcome.
To report CT features of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) in patients with various disease severity.
The CT manifestations and clinical data of 73 patients with COVID-19 were retrospectively collected in 6 hospitals from Jan 21 to Feb 3, 2020. We analyzed the initial and follow-up CT features of patients with disease severity, according to the Guidelines for the Diagnosis and Treatment of New Coronavirus Pneumonia.
Six patients (8%) were diagnosed as mild type pneumonia; these patients had no obvious abnormal CT findings or manifested mild changes of lung infection. All 43 patients (59 %) with common type presented unique or multiple ground-glass opacities (GGO) in the periphery of the lungs, with or without interlobular septal thickening. In the 21 patients (29 %) with severe type, extensive GGO and pulmonary consolidation were found in 16 cases (16/21, 76 %) and 5 cases (24 %), respectively. An extensive "white lung", with atelectasis and pleural effusion were found in critical type patients (3, 4%). On the resolutive phase of the disease, CT abnormalities showed complete resolution, or demonstrated residual linear opacities.
Different CT features are seen according to disease severity, which can help COVID-19 stratification.
Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is a powerful technique to analyze the transcriptomic heterogeneities at the single cell level. It is an important step for studying cell sub-populations and ...lineages, with an effective low-dimensional representation and visualization of the original scRNA-Seq data. At the single cell level, the transcriptional fluctuations are much larger than the average of a cell population, and the low amount of RNA transcripts will increase the rate of technical dropout events. Therefore, scRNA-seq data are much noisier than traditional bulk RNA-seq data. In this study, we proposed the deep variational autoencoder for scRNA-seq data (VASC), a deep multi-layer generative model, for the unsupervised dimension reduction and visualization of scRNA-seq data. VASC can explicitly model the dropout events and find the nonlinear hierarchical feature representations of the original data. Tested on over 20 datasets, VASC shows superior performances in most cases and exhibits broader dataset compatibility compared to four state-of-the-art dimension reduction and visualization methods. In addition, VASC provides better representations for very rare cell populations in the 2D visualization. As a case study, VASC successfully re-establishes the cell dynamics in pre-implantation embryos and identifies several candidate marker genes associated with early embryo development. Moreover, VASC also performs well on a 10× Genomics dataset with more cells and higher dropout rate.
Among 28 early confirmed cases of Covid-19 in South Korea, diagnosis was delayed in 11 patients because of subclinical symptoms and diverse initial manifestations. Covid-19 was diagnosed by ...surveillance testing in 3 patients who were asymptomatic.
It is a long-standing challenge to achieve efficient and highly selective aerobic oxidation of methylarenes to benzaldehydes, owing to overoxidation problem stemming from the oxidizability of ...benzaldehyde far higher than the toluene under usual aerobic conditions. Herein we report a bio-inspired iron-catalyzed polymethylhydrosiloxane-promoted aerobic oxidation of methylarenes to benzaldehydes with high yields and selectivities. Notably, this method can tolerate oxidation-labile and reactive boronic acid group, which is normally required to be transformed immediately after its introduction, and represents a significant advance in the area of the chemistry of organoboronic acids, including the ability to incorporate both aldehyde and ketone functionalities into unprotected arylboronic acids, a class that can be difficult to access by current means. The robustness of this protocol is demonstrated on the late-stage oxidation of complex bioactive molecules, including dehydroabietic acid, Gemfibrozil, Tocopherol nicotinate, a complex polyol structure, and structurally complex arylboronic acids.
Two multifunctional, ether-bridged tricarboxylic acids, 2-(4-carboxylphenoxy)terephthalic acid (H3cpta) and 2-(3,5-dicarboxylatobenzyloxy)benzoic acid (H3dbba), were used as unexplored and highly ...versatile building blocks for the hydrothermal generation of a novel series of cadmium(ii) metal-organic architectures. These were formulated as Cd(μ-Hcpta)(phen)(py)n (1), {Cd3(μ5-cpta)2(phen)3·8H2O}n (2), {Cd3(μ5-cpta)2(2,2'-bipy)3·6H2O}n (3), {Cd(μ3-cpta)(Hbpa)·2H2O}n (4), {Cd6(μ4-cpta)2(μ6-cpta)2(H2biim)2(H2O)6·5H2O}n (5), Cd3(μ4-cpta)2(μ-prz)(H2O)4n (6), {Cd3(μ4-dbba)2(phen)3·H2O}n (7), and {Cd3(μ3-dbba)2(2,2'-bipy)3(H2O)3·2H2O}n (8) on the basis of single-crystal X-ray diffraction, elemental analysis, FTIR, PXRD, and TGA data. Products 1-8 were assembled in the presence of N-donor crystallization mediators selected from pyridine (py), 1,10-phenanthroline (phen), 2,2'-bipyridine (2,2'-bipy), bis(4-pyridyl)amine (bpa), 2,2'-biimidazole (H2biim), or piperazine (prz). The nature of the crystallization mediator and/or the type of principal tricarboxylate building block have a significant effect on the structural diversity, dimensionality, and topology of the resulting cadmium-organic architectures. These span from 1D (1, 8) and 2D (7) coordination polymers to 3D metal-organic frameworks (2-6) with intricate topologies (3,4,5T64 in 2 and 3, utp (103)-d in 4, 3,4,4T9 in 6) that also include unprecedented types in 5 and 7. Besides, MOF 6 features a 3D + 3D two-fold interpenetrated framework. Luminescent and photocatalytic properties of selected materials were investigated, showing that coordination polymer 7 is a promising photocatalyst for the UV-light-driven degradation of methylene blue as a model organic dye pollutant. Moreover, products 7 and 8 are the first examples of structurally characterized coordination compounds derived from H3dbba.
This paper proposed a triangular inequality-based rewiring method for the rapidly exploring random tree (RRT)-Connect robot path-planning algorithm that guarantees the planning time compared to the ...RRT algorithm, to bring it closer to the optimum. To check the proposed algorithm's performance, this paper compared the RRT and RRT-Connect algorithms in various environments through simulation. From these experimental results, the proposed algorithm shows both quicker planning time and shorter path length than the RRT algorithm and shorter path length than the RRT-Connect algorithm with a similar number of samples and planning time.
Extending the lifetime and stability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) through efficient energy consumption remains challenging. Though clustering has improved energy efficiency through cluster-head ...selection, its application is still complicated. In existing cluster-head selection methods, the locations where cluster-heads are desirable are first searched. Next, the nodes closest to these locations are selected as the cluster-heads. This location-based approach causes problems such as increased computation, poor selection accuracy, and the selection of duplicate nodes. To solve these problems, we propose the sampling-based spider monkey optimization (SMO) method. If the sampling population consists of nodes to select cluster-heads, the cluster-heads are selected among the nodes. Thus, the problems caused by different locations of nodes and cluster-heads are resolved. Consequently, we improve lifetime and stability of WSNs through sampling-based spider monkey optimization and energy-efficient cluster head selection (SSMOECHS). This study describes how the sampling method is used in basic SMO and how to select cluster-heads using sampling-based SMO. The experimental results are compared to similar protocols, namely low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy centralized (LEACH-C), particle swarm optimization clustering protocol (PSO-C), and SMO based threshold-sensitive energy-efficient delay-aware routing protocol (SMOTECP), and the results are shown in both homogeneous and heterogeneous setups. In these setups, SSMOECHS improves network lifetime and stability periods by averages of 13.4%, 7.1%, 34.6%, and 1.8%, respectively.
...I operated on the patient in consideration of their circumstances, specifically their dignity and quality of life. ...we must consider whether the surgeon's decisions are consistent with the ...patient's subjective wishes. ...the mutual trust between physicians and patients is a basic and essential requirement of the practice of medicine.
To safeguard proteomic integrity, cells rely on the proteasome to degrade aberrant polypeptides, but it is unclear how cells remove defective proteins that have escaped degradation owing to ...proteasome insufficiency or dysfunction. Here we report a pathway termed misfolding-associated protein secretion, which uses the endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-associated deubiquitylase USP19 to preferentially export aberrant cytosolic proteins. Intriguingly, the catalytic domain of USP19 possesses an unprecedented chaperone activity, allowing recruitment of misfolded proteins to the ER surface for deubiquitylation. Deubiquitylated cargos are encapsulated into ER-associated late endosomes and secreted to the cell exterior. USP19-deficient cells cannot efficiently secrete unwanted proteins, and grow more slowly than wild-type cells following exposure to a proteasome inhibitor. Together, our findings delineate a protein quality control (PQC) pathway that, unlike degradation-based PQC mechanisms, promotes protein homeostasis by exporting misfolded proteins through an unconventional protein secretion process.
The use of antimicrobial materials, for example, silver nanoparticles, has been a cause for concern because they often exert an adverse effect on environmental and safety during their preparation and ...use. In this study, we report a class of green antimicrobial coating based on a supramolecular assembly of a protein extracted from daily food, without the addition of any other hazardous agents. It is found that a self-assembled nanofilm by mere hen egg white lysozyme has durable in vitro and in vivo broad-spectrum antimicrobial efficacy against Gram-positive/negative and fungi. Such enhanced antimicrobial capability over native lysozyme is attributed to a synergistic combination of positive charge and hydrophobic amino acid residues enriched on polymeric aggregates in the lysozyme nanofilm. Accompanied with high antimicrobial activity, this protein-based PTL material simultaneously exhibits the integration of multiple functions including antifouling, antibiofilm, blood compatibility, and low cytotoxicity due to the existence of surface hydration effect. Moreover, the bioinspired adhesion mediated by the amyloid structure contained in the nanofilm induces robust transfer and self-adhesion of the material onto virtually arbitrary substrates by a simple one-step aqueous coating or solvent-free printing in 1 min, thereby allowing an ultrafast route into practical implications for surface-functionalized commodity and biomedical devices. Our results demonstrate that the application of pure proteinaceous substance may afford a cost-effective green biomaterial that has high antimicrobial activity and low environmental impact.
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