Exemplar-Based Image and Video Stylization Using Fully Convolutional Semantic Features

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Polymeric routes to silicon carbide and silicon oxycarbide CMC

An overview of two approaches to the formation of ceramic composite matrices from polymeric precursors is presented. Copolymerization of alkyl- and alkenylsilanes (RSiH3) represents a new precursor system for the production of Beta-SiC on pyrolysis, with copolymer composition controlling polymer structure, char yield, and ceramic stoichiometry and morphology. Polysilsesquioxanes which are synthesized readily and can be handled in air serve as precursors to Si-C-O ceramics. Copolymers of phenyl and methyl silsesquioxanes display rheological properties favorable for composite fabrication; these can be tailored by control of pH, water/methoxy ratio and copolymer composition. Composites obtained from these utilize a carbon coated, eight harness satin weave Nicalon cloth reinforcement. The material exhibits nonlinear stress-strain behavior in tension

Embracing corruption burstiness: Fast error recovery for ZigBee under wi-Fi interference

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.The ZigBee communication can be easily and severely interfered by Wi-Fi traffic. Error recovery, as an important means for ZigBee to survive Wi-Fi interference, has been extensively studied in recent years. The existing works add upfront redundancy to in-packet blocks for recovering a certain number of random corruptions. Therefore the bursty nature of ZigBee in-packet corruptions under Wi-Fi interference is often considered harmful, since some blocks are full of errors which cannot be recovered and some blocks have no errors but still requiring redundancy. As a result, they often use interleaving to reshape the bursty errors, before applying complex FEC codes to recover the re-shaped random distributed errors. In this paper, we take a different view that burstiness may be helpful. With burstiness, the in-packet corruptions are often consecutive and the requirement for error recovery is reduced as ”recovering any k consecutive errors” instead of ”recovering any random k errors”. This lowered requirement allows us to design far more efficient code than the existing FEC codes. Motivated by this implication, we exploit the corruption burstiness to design a simple yet effective error recovery code using XOR operations (called ZiXOR). ZiXOR uses XOR code and the delay is significantly reduced. More, ZiXOR uses RSSI-hinted approach to detect in packet corruptions without CRC, incurring almost no extra transmission overhead. The testbed evaluation results show that ZiXOR outperforms the state-of-the-art works in terms of the throughput (by 47%) and latency (by 22%)This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61602095 and No. 61472360), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. ZYGX2016KYQD098 and No. 2016FZA5010), National Key Technology R&D Program (Grant No. 2014BAK15B02), CCFIntel Young Faculty Researcher Program, CCF-Tencent Open Research Fund, China Ministry of Education—China Mobile Joint Project under Grant No. MCM20150401 and the EU FP7 CLIMBER project under Grant Agreement No. PIRSES-GA- 2012-318939. Wei Dong is the corresponding author

Adding Chinese herbal medicine to probiotics for irritable bowel syndrome-diarrhea: A systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

© 2020 Beijing University of Chinese Medicine Objective: This study assessed whether Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) combined with probiotics/synbiotics for irritable bowel syndrome - diarrhea (IBS-D) was more effective and safer than probiotics/synbiotics alone. Methods: Ten databases were searched for randomized control trials (RCTs) of IBS-D as diagnosed by Manning or Rome criteria. Trials comparing probiotics and probiotics with CHM were included. The Cochrane risk of bias (ROB) was evaluated for each trial. RevMan 5.3 was used to conduct a meta-analysis. Results: Twenty-six RCTs were included (25 Chinese, 1 English), involving 2045 participants. Meta-analysis was conducted on two outcomes: overall symptom improvement and relapse. CHM combined with live Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus preparations reduced relapse rate (RR 0.28, 95%CI 0.15–0.52, 3 trials, n = 205) compared with probiotics alone. The subgroup analysis showed the benefit of CHM prescriptions based on soothing liver and invigorating spleen (1.28, 1.14–1.44, 3, 244), invigorating spleen and resolving dampness (1.20, 1.03–1.41, 2, 128), or warming and invigorating spleen and kidney formulae (1.27, 1.09–1.46, 2, 210) combined with triple Bifidobacterium preparations than the same probiotics alone which improved overall symptoms for IBS-D. There was unclear bias in almost domains of ROB. Most studies had a high risk of bias due to lack of blinding of investigator and participants, and selective reporting. Conclusions: This study showed that CHM combined with probiotics may reduce relapse rate by 72%, and improve overall symptoms of IBS-D (as diagnosed by Rome II and III) compared to probiotics alone. From the limited subgroup analysis, only soothing liver and invigorating spleen formulae, represented by Tongxie Yaofang, added to triple Bifidobacterium preparations may be superior to the single preparations in terms of overall symptoms. However, due to the poor methodological quality and small sample size of the trials, these findings must be interpreted with caution

Whistle detection and classification for whales based on convolutional neural networks

Passive acoustic observation of whales is an increasingly important tool for whale research. Accurately detecting whale sounds and correctly classifying them into corresponding whale species are essential tasks, especially in the case when two species of whales vocalize in the same observed area. Whistles are vital vocalizations of toothed whales, such as killer whales and long-finned pilot whales. In this paper, based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a novel method is proposed to detect and classify whistles of both killer whales and long-finned pilot whales. Compared with traditional methods, the proposed one can automatically learn the sound characteristics from the training data, without specifying the sound features for classification and detection, and thus shows better adaptability to complex sound signals. First, the denoised sound to be analyzed is sent to the trained detection model to estimate the number and positions of the target whistles. The detected whistles are then sent to the trained classification model, which determines the corresponding whale species. A GUI interface is developed to assist with the detection and classification process. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve 97% correct detection rate and 95% correct classification rate on the testing set. In the future, the presented method can be further applied to passive acoustic observation applications for some other whale or dolphin species

Polo-like kinase 1 siRNA-607 induces mitotic arrest and apoptosis in human nasopharyngeal carcinoma cells

Polo-like kinase (Plk) 1 is overexpressed in many human malignancies including nasopharyngeal carcinoma, indicating its potential as a therapeutic target. Recently, using a simple cellular morphologybased strategy, we have identified several novel effective siRNAs against Plk1 including Plk1 siRNA- 607. In this study, we further investigated the effects of Plk1 siRNA-607 in human nasopharyngeal carcinoma cell line, HNE-1. Real time RT-PCR and Western blot indicated that Plk1 siRNA-607 transfection resulted in a significant inhibition in Plk1 expression in the HNE-1 cells. Furthermore, cell cycle, cell growth and apoptosis analysis clearly indicated that Plk1 siRNA-607 caused a dramatic mitotic cell cycle arrest followed by massive apoptotic cell death, and eventually resulted in a significant decrease in growth and viability of the nasopharyngeal carcinoma cells. Given that Plk1 has been widely accepted as a novel efficient target for cancer therapy, these results suggested that Plk1 siRNA-607 could be further developed for the treatment of human nasopharyngeal carcinoma.Key words: Nasopharyngeal carcinoma, Plk1, RNA silencing, cell cycle, apoptosis

Negative CT Contrast Agents for the Diagnosis of Malignant Osteosarcoma

© 2019 The Authors. Published by WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim The current positive computed tomography (CT) contrast agents (PCTCAs) including clinical iodides, present high CT density value (CT-DV). However, they are incapable for the accurate diagnosis of some diseases with high CT-DV, such as osteosarcoma. Because bones and PCTCAs around osteosarcoma generate similar X-ray attenuations. Here, an innovative strategy of negative CT contrast agents (NCTCAs) to reduce the CT-DV of osteosarcoma is proposed, contributing to accurate detection of osteosarcoma. Hollow mesoporous silica nanoparticles, loading ammonia borane molecules and further modified by polyethylene glycol, are synthesized as NCTCAs for the diagnosis of osteosarcoma. The nanocomposites can produce H2 in situ at osteosarcoma areas by responding to the acidic microenvironment of osteosarcoma, resulting in nearly 20 times reduction of CT density in osteosarcoma. This helps form large CT density contrast between bones and osteosarcoma, and successfully achieves accurate diagnosis of osteosarcoma. Meanwhile, The NCTCAs strategy greatly expands the scope of CT application, and provides profound implications for the precise clinical diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of diseases

A novel remote plasma sputtering technique for depositing high-performance optical thin films

This paper describes a novel remote plasma sputtering technique for depositing optical thin films. This technology is based on generating intensive plasma remotely from the target and then magnetically steering the plasma to the target to realize the sputter deposition. It overcomes several of inherent limitations in conventional sputtering techniques and realizes the fully uniform erosion over the surface of the target and less target poison. This allows a uniform reaction in the plasma phase when performing reactive sputtering, leading to the formation and deposition of material with a uniform stoichiometry and gives pseudo-independence of target current and voltage. This pseudo-independence offers a great deal of flexibility with regard to the control of growth conditions and film properties, the benefits include control of stress, very low deposition rates for ultra thin films. By remote reactive sputtering, dense metal-oxide optical thin films (SiO2, Ta2O5, Nb2O5) with a high deposition rate, excellent optical properties are achieved. High process stability shows an excellent time terminating accuracy for multilayer coating thickness control. Typically, thin film thickness control to <+/- 1% is accomplished simply using time. The multilayer coating, including anti-reflection, dichroic mirror and 2 mu m laser mirrors are presented

High rate and low loss Ta2O5 thin films deposited by novel remote plasma reactive sputtering

National Natural Science Foundation of China [50802080]; Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province of China [2010J01349]In this work we report a novel remote plasma deposition technology for high-rate DC reactive sputtering deposition of low loss Ta2O5 films. Deposition rate and optical properties were mainly investigated with process conditions change. This technique is based on generating an intensive plasma remotely from the target and magnetically steering plasma to the target to realize sputtering deposition. It overcomes inherent limitations such as racetrack formation on target and low rate deposition in conventional sputtering technology and realizes fully uniform erosion over the target. Dense Ta2O5 thin films with a high deposition rate 0.53nm/s, excellent optical properties are obtained