The oral Biome in the aetiology and management of dental disease: current concepts and ethical considerations

龋齿和牙周病是两种常见口腔疾病，益生菌、益生元、口腔菌群移植等菌群干预手段可能有助于预防和治疗牙病并促进口腔健康，然而上述治疗手段涉及四个核心伦理问题：知情同意、风险受益评估、菌群供体评估、商业化和管理。本文重点关注菌群干预在维护口腔健康中的伦理问题。 该论文的一个合作者是南方医科大学马克思主义学院医学伦理学中心陈化教授。 该论文也是厦门大学医学院和卡迪夫大学合作研究的首个学术成果。【Abstract】Our understanding of the complexity of the oral biome and of the role of the various constituent bacteria in the aetiology of dental disease is growing. Probiotics and their relationship with prebiotics, as well as other microbiome‐based interventions, could be useful in preventing and treating dental disease and in promoting oral health.However, given the promise and early stage of this treatment approach, there are also a number of ethical, social and regulatory issues associated with innovative probiotic therapy. In this article, a brief update is given on contemporary theories of the aetiology and management of the two commonest dental diseases, and on the roles of pre‐and probiotics and oral biome transplant in the management of these diseases. The focus is primarily on four core issues: informed consent, risk–benefit assessment, how to determine suitable healthy donors, and commercialization and regulation. We discuss the safety and benefits of oral probiotics, not only concerning the products and quality control during their manufacture, but also regarding the depth of public knowledge about this topic. We point out that the requirement of listing ingredients honestly might be insufficient, and that the prevalent rhetoric of ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ as well as some health claims in the translational, innovative probiotic industry and markets are themselves misleading and should be carefully scrutinized. Finally, we suggest an ethical imperative to find a balance between scientific research and industry, and public health in the regulation of probiotics.This study was supported by China Social Science Foundation, Grant/Award Number:16CZX064。 该工作得到国家社科基金青年项目（16CZX064）的资助

Classification of Arrhythmia by Using Deep Learning with 2-D ECG Spectral Image Representation

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most extensively employed signals used in the diagnosis and prediction of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). The ECG signals can capture the heart's rhythmic irregularities, commonly known as arrhythmias. A careful study of ECG signals is crucial for precise diagnoses of patients' acute and chronic heart conditions. In this study, we propose a two-dimensional (2-D) convolutional neural network (CNN) model for the classification of ECG signals into eight classes; namely, normal beat, premature ventricular contraction beat, paced beat, right bundle branch block beat, left bundle branch block beat, atrial premature contraction beat, ventricular flutter wave beat, and ventricular escape beat. The one-dimensional ECG time series signals are transformed into 2-D spectrograms through short-time Fourier transform. The 2-D CNN model consisting of four convolutional layers and four pooling layers is designed for extracting robust features from the input spectrograms. Our proposed methodology is evaluated on a publicly available MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset. We achieved a state-of-the-art average classification accuracy of 99.11\%, which is better than those of recently reported results in classifying similar types of arrhythmias. The performance is significant in other indices as well, including sensitivity and specificity, which indicates the success of the proposed method.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted for future publication in Remote Sensing MDPI Journa

Optimization of Coastal Cruise Lines in China

The paper analyzes the current state of the Chinese cruise market and presents the idea of building a business model of coastal cruising. The cruise demand of middle-income families, which includes the desired travel days, ports of call, is surveyed. The data of the previous non-cruise travels and the data of future cruises of middle-income families are used to develop a model designed to identify the maximum passenger volume with minimum operating costs while taking cruise itineraries and schedules into account. A matrix coding genetic algorithm was designed to solve the model. The case study found that a voyage of 4.79 days results in equilibrium, that the annual demand is 200,840 passengers, and that the daily voyage cost is 0.843 million Yuan

China and the Multilateral Trading System

This paper reviews China's multilateral and preferential trade policies. It reviews the demanding terms of China's WTO accession, its current tariff and trade regime and its participation in the Doha Round negotiations and the institution's regular activities. The analysis concludes that China's trade policies are broadly supportive of a rules based multilateral trading order and its behavior at the WTO is that of a status quo power rather than one seeking major systemic changes. The discussion then turns to China's regional trade initiatives. China has been extremely active in negotiating these and their implications remain uncertain. Concerns about an East Asian fortress, though, appear misplaced. Directly, and through their impact in inducing others to respond, these FTAs could provide a powerful impetus to the process of competitive global liberalization. Countries that do implement agreements with China will find it relatively easy to open their markets to other developing countries. There is also a risk however that the proliferation of FTAs will lead to web of overlapping agreements that could make the trading system unnecessarily complex

Civil service reform in China: Impacts on civil servants' behaviour

China's civil service reforms sought to improve the performance of civil servants by introducing more competitive selection processes, incentives to reward performance, and tightened monitoring and supervision. The impact of the reforms was undermined by clashes with other policies being implemented at the time and by a failure to address elements of organization culture that have rewarded various forms of illegal behaviour, such as corruption. Empirical material for our study is drawn from government data and the experience of civil service reform in three Chinese urban areas (Beijing's Haidian district, Changchun and Ningbo) since the 1990s. Copyright. © The China Quarterly 2010.published_or_final_versio

Skeleton Marching-based Parallel Vascular Geometry Reconstruction Using Implicit Functions

Fast high-precision patient-specific vascular tissue and geometric structure reconstruction is an essential task for vascular tissue engineering and computer-aided minimally invasive vascular disease diagnosis and surgery. In this paper, we present an effective vascular geometry reconstruction technique by representing a highly complicated geometric structure of a vascular system as an implicit function. By implicit geometric modelling, we are able to reduce the complexity and level of difficulty of this geometric reconstruction task and turn it into a parallel process of reconstructing a set of simple short tubular-like vascular sections, thanks to the easy-blending nature of implicit geometries on combining implicitly modelled geometric forms. The basic idea behind our technique is to consider this extremely difficult task as a process of team exploration of an unknown environment like a cave. Based on this idea, we developed a parallel vascular modelling technique, called Skeleton Marching, for fast vascular geometric reconstruction. With the proposed technique, we first extract the vascular skeleton system from a given volumetric medical image. A set of sub-regions of a volumetric image containing a vascular segment is then identified by marching along the extracted skeleton tree. A localised segmentation method is then applied to each of these sub-image blocks to extract a point cloud from the surface of the short simple blood vessel segment contained in the image block. These small point clouds are then fitted with a set of implicit surfaces in a parallel manner. A high-precision geometric vascular tree is then reconstructed by blending together these simple tubular-shaped implicit surfaces using the shape-preserving blending operations. Experimental results show the time required for reconstructing a vascular system can be greatly reduced by the proposed parallel technique