Transitions To the Long-Resident State in coupled chaotic oscillators

The behaviors of coupled chaotic oscillators before complete synchronization were investigated. We report three phenomena: (1) The emergence of long-time residence of trajectories besides one of the saddle foci; (2) The tendency that orbits of the two oscillators get close becomes faster with increasing the coupling strength; (3) The diffusion of two oscillator's phase difference is first enhanced and then suppressed. There are exact correspondences among these phenomena. The mechanism of these correspondences is explored. These phenomena uncover the route to synchronization of coupled chaotic oscillators.Comment: 3 pages, 5 figure

Visual processing recruits the auditory cortices in prelingually deaf children and influences cochlear implant outcomes.

Objective: Although visual processing recruitment of the auditory cortices has been reported previously in prelingually deaf children who have a rapidly developing brain and no auditory processing, the visual processing recruitment of auditory cortices might be different in processing different visual stimuli and may affect cochlear implant (CI) outcomes. Methods: Ten prelingually deaf children, 4–6 years old, were recruited for the study. Twenty prelingually deaf subjects, 4–6 years old with CIs for 1 year, were also recruited; 10 with well-performing CIs, 10 with poorly performing CIs. Ten age and sex-matched normal-hearing children were recruited as controls. Visual (‘sound’ photo (photograph with imaginative sound) and ‘non-sound’ photo (photograph without imaginative sound)) evoked potentials were measured in all subjects. P1 at Oz and N1 at the bilateral temporal-frontal areas (FC3 and FC4) were compared. Results: N1 amplitudes were strongest in the deaf children, followed by those with poorly performing CIs, controls and those with well-performing CIs. There was no significant difference between controls and those with well-performing CIs. ‘Sound’ photo stimuli evoked a stronger N1 than ‘non-sound’ photo stimuli. Further analysis showed that only at FC4 in deaf subjects and those with poorly performing CIs were the N1 responses to ‘sound’ photo stimuli stronger than those to ‘non-sound’ photo stimuli. No significant difference was found for the FC3 and FC4 areas. No significant difference was found in N1 latencies and P1 amplitudes or latencies. Conclusions: The results indicate enhanced visual recruitment of the auditory cortices in prelingually deaf children. Additionally, the decrement in visual recruitment of auditory cortices was related to good CI outcomes

A refined equilibrium generative adversarial network for retinal vessel segmentation

OBJECTIVE: Retinal vessel morphological parameters are vital indicator for early diagnosis of ophthalmological diseases and cardiovascular events. However, segmentation performance is highly influenced by elusive vessels, especially in low-contrast background and lesion regions. In this work, we present an end-to-end synthetic neural network to strengthen elusive vessels segmentation capability, containing a symmetric equilibrium generative adversarial network (SEGAN), multi-scale features refine blocks (MSFRB), and attention mechanism (AM). METHOD: The proposed network is superior in detail information extraction by maximizing multi-scale features representation. First, SEGAN constructs a symmetric adversarial architecture in which generator is forced to produce more realistic images with local details. Second, MSFRB are devised to optimize the feature merging process, thereby maximally maintaining high resolution information. Finally, the AM is employed to encourage the network to concentrate on discriminative features. RESULTS: On public dataset DRIVE, STARE, CHASEDB1, and HRF, we evaluate our network quantitatively and compare it with state-of-the-art works. The ablation experiment shows that SEGAN, MSFRB, and AM both contribute to the desirable performance. Conclusion: The proposed network outperforms the existing methods and effectively functions in elusive vessels segmentation, achieving highest scores in Sensitivity, G-Mean, Precision, and F1-Score while maintaining the top level in other metrics. Significance: The satisfactory performance and computational efficiency offer great potential in clinical retinal vessel segmentation application. Meanwhile, the network could be utilized to extract detail information in other biomedical image computing

Assessing mental health for China's police: psychometric features of the Self-Rating Depression Scale and Symptom Checklist 90-Revised

Police mental health is important because police officers usually encounter stressors that cause high levels of stress. In order to better understand mental health for Chinese police, the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS) and Symptom Checklist 90-Revised (SCL-90-R) are commonly used in mainland China. Unfortunately, both the SDS and SCL-90-R lack detailed information on their psychometric properties. More specifically, factor structures of the SDS and SCL-90-R have yet to be confirmed among the police population in mainland China. Therefore, the present study compared several factor structures of the SDS and SCL-90-R proposed by prior research and to determine an appropriate structure for the police population. Utilizing cluster sampling, 1151 traffic police officers (1047 males; mean age = 36.6 years [SD = 6.10]) from 49 traffic police units in Jiangxi Province (China) participated in this study. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) with Akaike information criterion (AIC) was used to decide the best fit structure. In the SDS, the three-factor model (first posited by Kitamura et al.) had the smallest AIC and outperformed other models. In the SCL-90-R, the eight-factor model had the smallest AIC and outperformed the one-factor and nine-factor models. CFA fit indices also showed that both the three-factor model in the SDS and the eight-factor model in the SCL-90-R had satisfactory fit. The present study's results support the use of both SDS and SCL-90-R for police officers in mainland China

Metropolitan Trends and Challenges in China: The Demographic Dimension

Over the past century China has been transforming from a rural to an urban economy. In the course of this transition, significant regional variations have emerged in urban growth, with a gap forming between coastal and inland areas. This report focuses on Chinas metropolitan regions: Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangdong which are the most socioeconomically advanced regions in China. It is the first outcome of the joint IIASA and Beijing University project on "Regional Urbanization and Human Capital Projections for China," which focuses on demographic matters, and it will analyze the following major issues: What factors have contributed to the growth of Chinas metropolitan areas over the last two decades? What specific urbanization patterns occur in the transformation from a rural to an urban economy? How does demography drive the speed of urbanization, in particular, in the metropolitan areas? How is IIASAs multistate method used for urbanization projections and what are its advantages and disadvantages? What challenges will China face in the near future as a result of rapid metropolitan growth? This paper suggests that the growth of Chinese mega-urban regions will have knock-on effects at the global level in the medium term