Efficacy of endoluminal interventional therapy in diabetic peripheral arterial occlusive disease: a retrospective trial

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The purpose of this study was to assess the efficacy of interventional therapy for peripheral arterial occlusive disease and the difference between diabetic patients and non-diabetic patients.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>139 consecutive patients between September 2006 and September 2010 who underwent percutaneous lower extremity revascularization for arterial lesions were divided into diabetes group (n = 62) and non-diabetes group (n = 77). Before intervention, rest ankle brachial indexes and three dimensional computed tomography angiography from abdominal aorta to tiptoe were performed. The interventional treatments included angioplasty with or without stenting. The clinical outcomes included rest ankle-brachial indexes, primary patency rates, secondary patency rates and limb-salvage rates for 6-month, 12-month, 24-month and 36-month after treatment. The primary and secondary patency rates of all interventions and the limb-salvage rates of the patients are illustrated by Kaplan-Meier curves and compared by log-rank analysis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The interventional operation success rates were 98.4% (61/62) in diabetes group and 100% (77/77) in non-diabetes group. The re-interventional operation success rates were 85.7% (18/21) in diabetes group and 76.9% (20/26) in non-diabetes group. The mean value of ankle brachial indexes was significantly increased after intervention (0.397 ± 0.125 versus 0.779 ± 0.137, t = -25.780, <it>P </it>< 0.001) in diabetes group and (0.406 ± 0.101 versus 0.786 ± 0.121, t = -37.221, <it>P </it>< 0.001) in non-diabetes group. Perioperative 30-day mortality was 0%. Major complications included groin hematoma in 7.2%, and pseudoaneurysm formation 2.2%. In diabetes group, 6, 12, 24, and 36-month primary patency rates were 88.7% ± 4.0%, 62.3% ± 6.6%, 55.3% ± 7.0%, and 46.5% ± 7.5%; secondary patency rates were 93.5% ± 3.1%, 82.3% ± 5.1%, 70.8% ± 6.5%, and 65.7% ± 7%; limb-salvage rates were 95.2% ± 2.7%, 87.7% ± 4.4%, 85.5% ± 4.8%, and 81.9% ± 5.8%. In non-diabetes group, 6, 12, 24, and 36-month primary patency rates were 90.9% ± 3.3%, 71.8% ± 5.4%, 71.8% ± 5.4%, and 60.9% ± 6.2%; secondary patency rates were 96.1% ± 2.2%, 91.6% ± 3.3%, 82.7% ± 4.8%, and 71.8% ± 6.2%; limb-salvage rates were 97.4% ± 1.8%, 94.4% ± 2.7%, 90.6% ± 3.7%, and 83.1% ± 5.4%. The differences between two groups were not significant (<it>P </it>> 0.05).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>With a low risk of morbidity and mortality, the percutaneous revascularization accepted by patients does not affect ultimate necessary surgical revascularization and consequently should be considered as the preferred therapy for chronic lower extremity ischemia. The efficacy and prognosis of interventional therapy in diabetic patients is similar that in non-diabetic patients.</p

Environment Diversification with Multi-head Neural Network for Invariant Learning

Neural networks are often trained with empirical risk minimization; however, it has been shown that a shift between training and testing distributions can cause unpredictable performance degradation. On this issue, a research direction, invariant learning, has been proposed to extract invariant features insensitive to the distributional changes. This work proposes EDNIL, an invariant learning framework containing a multi-head neural network to absorb data biases. We show that this framework does not require prior knowledge about environments or strong assumptions about the pre-trained model. We also reveal that the proposed algorithm has theoretical connections to recent studies discussing properties of variant and invariant features. Finally, we demonstrate that models trained with EDNIL are empirically more robust against distributional shifts.Comment: In Proceedings of 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022

2D perovskite stabilized phase-pure formamidinium perovskite solar cells.

Compositional engineering has been used to overcome difficulties in fabricating high-quality phase-pure formamidinium perovskite films together with its ambient instability. However, this comes alongside an undesirable increase in bandgap that sacrifices the device photocurrent. Here we report the fabrication of phase-pure formamidinium-lead tri-iodide perovskite films with excellent optoelectronic quality and stability. Incorporation of 1.67 mol% of 2D phenylethylammonium lead iodide into the precursor solution enables the formation of phase-pure formamidinium perovskite with an order of magnitude enhanced photoluminescence lifetime. The 2D perovskite spontaneously forms at grain boundaries to protect the formamidinium perovskite from moisture and suppress ion migration. A stabilized power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 20.64% (certified stabilized PCE of 19.77%) is achieved with a short-circuit current density exceeding 24 mA cm-2 and an open-circuit voltage of 1.130 V, corresponding to a loss-in-potential of 0.35 V, and significantly enhanced operational stability

Clinical research on liver reserve function by 13C-phenylalanine breath test in aged patients with chronic liver diseases

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The objective of this study was to investigate whether the ¹³C-phenylalanine breath test could be useful for the evaluation of hepatic function in elderly volunteers and patients with chronic hepatitis B and liver cirrhosis.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>L-[1-¹³C] phenylalanine was administered orally at a dose of 100 mg to 55 elderly patients with liver cirrhosis, 30 patients with chronic hepatitis B and 38 elderly healthy subjects. The breath test was performed at 8 different time points (0, 10, 20, 30, 45, 60, 90, 120 min) to obtain the values of Delta over baseline, percentage ¹³CO₂exhalation rate and cumulative excretion (Cum). The relationships of the cumulative excretion with the ¹³C-%dose/h and blood biochemical parameters were investigated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The ¹³C-%dose/h at 20 min and 30 min combined with the cumulative excretion at 60 min and 120 min correlated with hepatic function tests, serum albumin, hemoglobin, platelet and Child-Pugh score. Prothrombin time, total and direct bilirubin were significantly increased, while serum albumin, hemoglobin and platelet, the cumulative excretion at 60 min and 120 min values decreased by degrees of intensity of the disease in Child-Pugh A, B, and C patients (P < 0.01).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The ¹³C-phenylalanine breath test can be used as a non-invasive assay to evaluate hepatic function in elderly patients with liver cirrhosis. The ¹³C-%dose/h at 20 min, at 30 min and cumulative excretion at 60 min may be the key value for determination at a single time-point. ¹³C-phenylalanine breath test is safe and helpful in distinguishing different stages of hepatic dysfunction for elderly cirrhosis patients.</p

First asymmetric synthesis of piperidine alkaloid (-)-morusimic acid D

The first asymmetric synthesis of (-)-morusimic acid D, a 2,3-trans-2,6-cis-2-methyl-6-substituted piperidin-3-ol containing alkaloid is reported. The key steps are the reductive alkylation of N,O-diprotected 3-hydroxyglutarimide, a stepwise reductive alkylation, and an asymmetric aldol-type reaction using a modified Evans chiral auxiliary

A Sliced Inverse Regression (SIR) Decoding the Forelimb Movement from Neuronal Spikes in the Rat Motor Cortex

Several neural decoding algorithms have successfully converted brain signals into commands to control a computer cursor and prosthetic devices. A majority of decoding methods, such as population vector algorithms (PVA), optimal linear estimators (OLE), and neural networks (NN), are effective in predicting movement kinematics, including movement direction, speed and trajectory but usually require a large number of neurons to achieve desirable performance. This study proposed a novel decoding algorithm even with signals obtained from a smaller numbers of neurons. We adopted sliced inverse regression (SIR) to predict forelimb movement from single-unit activities recorded in the rat primary motor (M1) cortex in a water-reward lever-pressing task. SIR performed weighted principal component analysis (PCA) to achieve effective dimension reduction for nonlinear regression. To demonstrate the decoding performance, SIR was compared to PVA, OLE, and NN. Furthermore, PCA and sequential feature selection (SFS) which are popular feature selection techniques were implemented for comparison of feature selection effectiveness. Among SIR, PVA, OLE, PCA, SFS, and NN decoding methods, the trajectories predicted by SIR (with a root mean square error, RMSE, of 8.47 ± 1.32 mm) was closer to the actual trajectories compared with those predicted by PVA (30.41 ± 11.73 mm), OLE (20.17 ± 6.43 mm), PCA (19.13 ± 0.75 mm), SFS (22.75 ± 2.01 mm), and NN (16.75 ± 2.02 mm). The superiority of SIR was most obvious when the sample size of neurons was small. We concluded that SIR sorted the input data to obtain the effective transform matrices for movement prediction, making it a robust decoding method for conditions with sparse neuronal information

Qubitization of Bosons

A binary mapping from Fock space of bosonic state to qubits is given. Based on the binary mapping, we construte an algorithm of qubitization of bosons with complexity O(log(N)). As an example, the algorithm of qubitization of bosons in matrix product state to simulate real time dynamics of Yukawa coupling is realized. The calculation error bar is estimated by random sampling method. This proposal may be achieved in superconductivity noisy intermediate--scale quantum computer not far future.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

MicroRNA-203 inhibits cell proliferation by repressing ΔNp63 expression in human esophageal squamous cell carcinoma

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>This study was performed to investigate the effect of microRNA-203 (miR-203) and ΔNp63 on cell proliferation and the functional connection between miR-203 and ΔNp63 in ESCC.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We employed 2 human ESCC cell lines, Eca109 and TE-1, as the model system. The effect of miR-203 and ΔNp63 on cell proliferation was determined in cells transfected with miR-203 mimic and ΔNp63 small interfering RNA (siRNA), respectively. The regulation of ΔNp63 expression in ESCC cells by miR-203 was studied by luciferase reporter assay, RT-PCR and western blot analysis in cells transfected with miR-203. The effect of ΔNp63 re-expression on miR-203 induced inhibition of cell proliferation was studied by cell proliferation assay in cells cotransfected with miR-203 and pcDNA-ΔNp63 plasmid (without the 3'-UTR of <it>ΔNp63</it>).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We found that both miR-203 and ΔNp63 siRNA signicantly inhibited cell proliferation in ESCC. MiR-203 could down-regulate endogenous ΔNp63 expression at the posttranscriptional level. Moreover, re-expression of ΔNp63 in cells transfected with miR-203 significantly attenuated the miR-203 induced inhibition of cell proliferation.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our data implied that miR-203 could inhibit cell proliferation in human ESCC through ΔNp63-mediated signal pathway. Therefore, we propose that miR-203 might be used as a therapeutic agent for human ESCC.</p

Effect of meteorological factors on influenza-like illness from 2012 to 2015 in Huludao, a northeastern city in China

Background This study aims to describe the epidemiological patterns of influenza-like illness (ILI) in Huludao, China and seek scientific evidence on the link of ILI activity with weather factors. Methods Surveillance data of ILI cases between January 2012 and December 2015 was collected in Huludao Central Hospital, meteorological data was obtained from the China Meteorological Data Service Center. Generalized additive model (GAM) was used to seek the relationship between the number of ILI cases and the meteorological factors. Multiple Smoothing parameter estimation was made on the basis of Poisson distribution, where the number of weekly ILI cases was treated as response, and the smoothness of weather was treated as covariates. Lag time was determined by the smallest Akaike information criterion (AIC). Smoothing coefficients were estimated for the prediction of the number of ILI cases. Results A total of 29, 622 ILI cases were observed during the study period, with children ILI cases constituted 86.77%. The association between ILI activity and meteorological factors varied across different lag periods. The lag time for average air temperature, maximum air temperature, minimum air temperature, vapor pressure and relative humidity were 2, 2, 1, 1 and 0 weeks, respectively. Average air temperature, maximum air temperature, minimum air temperature, vapor pressure and relative humidity could explain 16.5%, 9.5%, 18.0%, 15.9% and 7.7% of the deviance, respectively. Among the temperature indexes, the minimum temperature played the most important role. The number of ILI cases peaked when minimum temperature was around −13 °C in winter and 18 °C in summer. The number of cases peaked when the relative humidity was equal to 43% and then began to decrease with the increase of relative humidity. When the humidity exceeded 76%, the number of ILI cases began to rise. Conclusions The present study first analyzed the relationship between meteorological factors and ILI cases with special consideration of the length of lag period in Huludao, China. Low air temperature and low relative humidity (cold and dry weather condition) played a considerable role in the epidemic pattern of ILI cases. The trend of ILI activity could be possibly predicted by the variation of meteorological factors