Pathologists visually examine cell morphology by observing the biopsy slides under a microscope through different magnifying factors, which is time-consuming and error-prone. In this regard, ...computer-aided whole slide image (WSI) analysis is necessary to help pathologists reduce time effort, and human error. With the recent advances in deep learning for computer vision, convolutional neural networks (ConvNets) have gained attention in the medical domain and have shown significant progress in whole slide image classification. Existing deep learning approaches work by feeding ConvNet with small patches extracted from WSIs. However, it is unknown how the size of the extracted patches and the magnifying factor of the WSI affect the performance of the ConvNet. Therefore, we construct several datasets by extracting patches from stomach histopathological imagery, varying the size of the patches and the magnifying factor of the WSIs. Densely Connected Convolutional Neural Network (DenseNet) is used to classify dysplasia, malignant, and benign patches. We observe the impact of the patch extraction variables using precision and recall. This study shines a light on why these factors would affect the model performance concerning data representation and provides a guideline for histopathological imagery data extraction methods.
Although the smart speaker market has experienced massive growth in recent years, there is a lack of research on what consumers really consider important for so called "smart" speakers, which are ...supposedly distinguished from traditional products. Therefore, this study aims at identifying key smartness dimensions that are related to the satisfaction of smart speaker users. First, a total of seven topics were extracted from the Amazon's review data through Latent Dirichlet Allocation, and the topics were mapped, through group discussion, to three smartness elements defined from the literature review. Then, sentiment scores of each topic were calculated using SentiWordNet, which were then used as variables to develop star rating classifiers. The feature importance of the classifiers revealed that the connectivity issue is the most influential factor in determining the customer satisfaction of smart speakers. The next important topics are sound quality and its use as a media player. The study findings have direct practical implications on smart speaker development.
•We propose simplicity and interactivity as key determinants of usability.•We examine the effects of usability on user satisfaction, trust, and brand loyalty.•Increasing simplicity will increase ...interactivity and usability experience.•Usability is a distal determinant of brand loyalty.•Satisfaction and trust mediate the effects usability on brand loyalty.
Usability is a central issue for mobile phone design and service because users need to access various functionalities via limited user interfaces (UI) often while they are on the road. In this paper, we propose simplicity and interactivity as the key determinants of mobile phone usability and assess their significance in an empirical setting. Furthermore, we examine the effects of mobile phone usability on user satisfaction, trust, and brand loyalty and provide a holistic view of the causal relationships between the proposed UI features and important organizational variables for building and maintaining long-term customer relationships. The study was conducted using survey questionnaire data collected from 310 mobile phone users in South Korea. The findings of the study confirm that simplicity and interactivity are two significant determinants of mobile phone usability and that interface simplicity is an important precondition for positive interactivity and usability experience. Our findings also show that usability is a distal determinant of brand loyalty, exerting its influence indirectly through the mediators of satisfaction and trust. We discuss the implications of the study findings for usability research and UI design.
Characterizing the microbial communities inhabiting specimens is one of the primary objectives of microbiome studies. A short-read sequencing platform for reading partial regions of the 16S rRNA gene ...is most commonly used by reducing the cost burden of next-generation sequencing (NGS), but misclassification at the species level due to its length being too short to consider sequence similarity remains a challenge. Loop Genomics recently proposed a new 16S full-length-based synthetic long-read sequencing technology (sFL16S). We compared a 16S full-length-based synthetic long-read (sFL16S) and V3-V4 short-read (V3V4) methods using 24 human GUT microbiota samples. Our comparison analyses of sFL16S and V3V4 sequencing data showed that they were highly similar at all classification resolutions except the species level. At the species level, we confirmed that sFL16S showed better resolutions than V3V4 in analyses of alpha-diversity, relative abundance frequency and identification accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrated that sFL16S could overcome the microbial misidentification caused by different sequence similarity in each 16S variable region through comparison the identification accuracy of Bifidobacterium, Bacteroides, and Alistipes strains classified from both methods. Therefore, this study suggests that the new sFL16S method is a suitable tool to overcome the weakness of the V3V4 method.
Autophagic receptor p62 is a critical mediator of cell detoxification, stress response, and metabolic programs and is commonly deregulated in human diseases. The diverse functions of p62 arise from ...its ability to interact with a large set of ligands, such as arginylated (Nt-R) substrates. Here, we describe the structural mechanism for selective recognition of Nt-R by the ZZ domain of p62 (p62
). We show that binding of p62
to Nt-R substrates stimulates p62 aggregation and macroautophagy and is required for autophagic targeting of p62. p62 is essential for mTORC1 activation in response to arginine, but it is not a direct sensor of free arginine in the mTORC1 pathway. We identified a regulatory linker (RL) region in p62 that binds p62
in vitro and may modulate p62 function. Our findings shed new light on the mechanistic and functional significance of the major cytosolic adaptor protein p62 in two fundamental signaling pathways.
Background and Objectives: The Chinese Dietary Guidelines (CDGs) were first released to the public in 1989 by the Chinese Nutrition Society (CNS). In 2016, the Ministry of Health commissioned the CNS ...to revise and publish new CDGs.
Methods and Study Design: The CNS convened an expert committee of leaders in the fields of nutrition, epidemiology, public health, preventive medicine, and food science. The CDGs were revised according to the World Health Organization Handbook for Guideline Development procedures. The expert committee recommended key inclusions for the CDGs on the basis of the current status of public health and priority health challenges affecting the Chinese population, as well as the quality of scientific evidence.
Results: The CDGs (2016) provide six key dietary recommendations for the general Chinese population aged 2 years and above. In addition to a newly revised Chinese Food Guide Pagoda, both the Chinese Food Guide Plate and Chinese Food Guide Abacus are newly created pictorial models in the CDGs (2016); the Chinese Food Guide Abacus is specifically designed for children. Seven additional dietary guidelines targeting specific populations are included; these guidelines emphasize the different physiological and nutritional requirements of particular populations, including dietary guidelines for vegetarians for the first time.
Conclusions: The CDGs (2016) is an official document published by the National Health Commission of China. Its content highlights the current status of public health and offers advice to address health concerns faced by the Chinese population. The CDGs (2016) have been widely disseminated and accepted in the Chinese population; the National Nutrition Week is a major national event in which the CDG are used as its core to increase public awareness towards a healthy diet and lifestyle.
Primary EBV+ nodal T/NK-cell lymphoma (PTCL-EBV) is a poorly understood disease which shows features resembling extranodal NK/T-cell lymphoma (ENKTL) and is currently not recognized as a distinct ...entity but categorized as a variant of PTCL-NOS. Herein, we analyzed copy-number aberrations (n=77) with focus on global measures of genomic instability (GI) and homologous recombination deficiency (HRD) and performed gene expression (n=84) and EBV miRNA expression profiling (n=24) and targeted mutational analysis (n=16) to further characterize PTCL-EBV in relation to ENKTL and PTCL-NOS. Multivariate analysis revealed a significantly worse outcome of PTCL-EBV compared to PTCL-NOS (P=0.002) but not ENKTL. Remarkably, PTCL-EBV exhibited significantly lower GI and HRD scores compared to ENKTL and PTCL-NOS. Gene Set Enrichment Analysis revealed many immune-related pathways, interferon alpha/gamma response, and IL6_JAK_STAT3 signaling to be significantly upregulated in PTCL-EBV and correlated with lower GI-scores. We also identified NFκB-associated genes, BIRC3, NFκB1 (p50) and CD27, and their proteins to be upregulated in PTCLEBV. PTCL-EBV demonstrated mostly type 2 EBV latency pattern and, strikingly, exhibited downregulated expression of most EBV miRNAs compared to ENKTL and their target genes were also enriched in immune-related pathways. PTCL-EBV also showed frequent mutations of TET2, PIK3CD and STAT3, and are microsatellite stable. Overall, the poor outcome, low genomic instability, upregulation of immune pathways and downregulation of EBV miRNAs are distinctive features of PTCL-EBV. Our data support the consideration of PTCL-EBV as a distinct entity, provide novel insights into the disease pathogenesis and offer potential new therapeutic targets for this tumor.
Osteoporosis is an abnormal bone remodeling condition characterized by decreased bone density, which leads to high risks of fracture. Previous study has demonstrated that
Cortex (LRC) extract ...inhibits bone loss in ovariectomized (OVX) mice by enhancing osteoblast differentiation. A bioactive compound, kukoamine B (KB), was identified from fractionation of an LRC extract as a candidate component responsible for an anti-osteoporotic effect. This study investigated the anti-osteoporotic effects of KB using in vitro and in vivo osteoporosis models. KB treatment significantly increased the osteoblastic differentiation and mineralized nodule formation of osteoblastic MC3T3-E1 cells, while it significantly decreased the osteoclast differentiation of primary-cultured monocytes derived from mouse bone marrow. The effects of KB on osteoblastic and osteoclastic differentiations under more physiological conditions were also examined. In the co-culture of MC3T3-E1 cells and monocytes, KB promoted osteoblast differentiation but did not affect osteoclast differentiation. In vivo experiments revealed that KB significantly inhibited OVX-induced bone mineral density loss and restored the impaired bone structural properties in osteoporosis model mice. These results suggest that KB may be a potential therapeutic candidate for the treatment of osteoporosis.
Summary
The present study aimed to directly compare the efficacy and safety of azacitidine and decitabine in patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). We compared the overall response rate (ORR) ...(complete responses, partial responses, marrow complete responses, and haematological improvements), overall survival (OS), event‐free survival (EFS), time to leukaemic transformation, and adverse outcomes between azacitidine and decitabine. To minimize the effects of treatment selection bias in this observational study, adjustments were made using the propensity‐score matching method. Among 300 patients, 203 were treated with azacitidine and 97 with decitabine. Propensity‐score matching yielded 97 patient pairs. In the propensity‐matched cohort, there were no significant differences between the azacitidine and decitabine groups regarding ORR (44% vs. 52%), OS (26 vs. 22·9 months), EFS (7·7 vs. 7·0 months), and rate of leukaemic transformation (16% vs. 22% at 1 year). In patients ≥65 years of age, survival was significantly better in the azacitidine group (P = 0·017). Patients who received decitabine experienced more frequent episodes of grade 3 or 4 cytopenia and infectious episodes. We found that azacitidine and decitabine showed comparable efficacy. Among patients ≥65 years of age, survival was significantly better in the azacitidine group (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01409070).
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