Feature-aware conditional GAN for category text generation

Category text generation receives considerable attentions since it is beneficial for various natural language processing tasks. Recently, the generative adversarial network (GAN) has attained promising performance in text generation, attributed to its adversarial training process. However, there are several issues in text GANs, including discreteness, training instability, mode collapse, lack of diversity and controllability etc. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel GAN framework, the feature-aware conditional GAN (FA-GAN), for controllable category text generation. In FA-GAN, the generator has a sequence-to-sequence structure for improving sentence diversity, which consists of three encoders including a special feature-aware encoder and a category-aware encoder, and one relational-memory-core-based decoder with the Gumbel SoftMax activation function. The discriminator has an additional category classification head. To generate sentences with specified categories, the multi-class classification loss is supplemented in the adversarial training. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted, and the results show that FA-GAN consistently outperforms 10 state-of-the-art text generation approaches on 6 text classification datasets. The case study demonstrates that the synthetic sentences generated by FA-GAN can match the required categories and are aware of the features of conditioned sentences, with good readability, fluency, and text authenticity.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure

Database to Dynamically Aid Probe Design for Virus Identification

[[abstract]]Viral infection poses a major problem for public health, horticulture, and animal husbandry, possibly causing severe health crises and economic losses. Viral infections can be identified by the specific detection of viral sequences in many ways. The microarray approach not only tolerates sequence variations of newly evolved virus strains, but can also simultaneously diagnose many viral sequences. Many chips have so far been designed for clinical use. Most are designed for special purposes, such as typing enterovirus infection, and compare fewer than 30 different viral sequences. None considers primer design, increasing the likelihood of cross hybridization to similar sequences from other viruses. To prevent this possibility, this work establishes a platform and database that provides users with specific probes of all known viral genome sequences to facilitate the design of diagnostic chips. This work develops a system for designing probes online. A user can select any number of different viruses and set the experimental conditions such as melting temperature and length of probe. The system then returns the optimal sequences from the database. We have also developed a heuristic algorithm to calculate the probe correctness and show the correctness of the algorithm. (The system that supports probe design for identifying viruses has been published on our web page http://bioinfo.csie.ncu.edu.tw/.

Leczenie oksytocyną zapobiega stłuszczeniu szpiku kostnego obserwowanemu u królików z cukrzycą wywołaną alloksanem — badanie przy użyciu protonowej spektroskopii rezonansu magnetycznego

Introduction: Oxytocin might be used therapeutically as an ally to rescue osteopathy resulting from diabetes. However, the in vivo effects of oxytocin on marrow adipogenesis in diabetes remain unknown. In this longitudinal study, we aimed to investigate the protective ef­fects of oxytocin on diabetes-induced marrow adiposity in rabbits using proton MR spectroscopy. Material and methods: Forty-five female New Zealand rabbits were randomly divided into controls, diabetes, and diabetes treated with oxytocin (ip, 0.78 mg/kg) for six months. Marrow fat fraction (FF) was determined by proton MR spectroscopy at baseline, and at three and six months. Bone mineral density was measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. Serum biomarkers, glycolipid metabolism, and histological analysis of marrow adipocytes were determined. Results: Oxytocin treatment had positive metabolic effects in diabetic rabbits, which was based on the changes in glucose metabolism, insulin sensitivity, and lipid profiles. The diabetic rabbits demonstrated dramatic marrow adiposity in a time-dependent manner; at three and six months the FF percentage changes from baseline were 10.1% and 25.8%, respectively (all P < 0.001). Moreover, oxytocin treatment significantly reversed FF values and quantitative parameters of marrow adipocyte in diabetic rabbits to levels of naive control rabbits. Oxytocin improved bone formation marker in diabetic rabbits compared to the saline group. Also, treatment of diabetic rabbits with oxytocin significantly mitigated bone deterioration when compared with the saline-treated diabetic group (all P < 0.05). Conclusions: Oxytocin appears to alleviate harmful effects of hyperglycaemia on marrow adiposity. Proton MR spectroscopy may be a valuable tool, providing complementary information on efficacy assessments.Wstęp: Oksytocyna może być stosowana terapeutycznie w osteopatii wynikającej z cukrzycy, jednakże jej wpływ in vivo na stłuszczenie szpiku kostnego w przebiegu cukrzycy pozostaje niezbadany. Niniejsze badanie przekrojowe ma na celu zbadać ochronne działanie oksy­tocyny na wywołane cukrzycą stłuszczenie szpiku kostnego u królików przy użyciu protonowej spektroskopii rezonansu magnetycznego. Materiał i metody: Czterdzieści pięć samic królików nowozelandzkich podzielono losowo na grupę kontrolną, grupę z cukrzycą oraz grupę z cukrzycą leczoną oksytocyną (0.78 mg/kg, i.p.) przez sześć miesięcy. Frakcja tłuszczu (ang. fat fraction; FF) szpiku kostnego została określona za pomocą protonowej spektroskopii rezonansu magnetycznego na początku badania oraz po trzech i sześciu miesiącach. Gęstość mineralną kości zmierzono za pomocą absorpcjometrii promieniowania rentgenowskiego o podwójnej energii. Określono również biomarkery surowicy krwi, metabolizm glikolipidów oraz sporządzono analizę histologiczną adipocytów szpiku kostnego. Wyniki: Leczenie oksytocyną przyniosło pozytywne efekty metaboliczne u królików z cukrzycą, co stwierdzono na podstawie zmian w me­tabolizmie glukozy, wrażliwości na insulinę oraz profili lipidowych. Zauważono drastyczny wzrost stłuszczenia szpiku kostnego u królików z cukrzycą w sposób zależny od czasu; po trzech i sześciu miesiącach, procentowe zmiany frakcji tłuszczu w stosunku do wartości wyjściowej wynosiły odpowiednio 10,1% i 25,8% (wszystkie P &lt; 0.001). Co więcej, leczenie oksytocyną znacząco odwracało wartości frakcji tłuszczu oraz ilościowe parametry adipocytów szpiku kostnego u królików z cukrzycą do poziomu królików z grupy kontrolnej. Oksytocyna poprawiała marker tworzenia kości u królików z cukrzycą w porównaniu do grupy, której podawano sól fizjologiczną. Ponadto, leczenie oksytocyną królików z cukrzycą znacząco łagodziło niszczenie kości w porównaniu do grupy z cukrzycą, której podawano sól fizjologiczną (wszystkie P &lt; 0.05). Wnioski: Oksytocyna wydaje się zmniejszać szkodliwy wpływ hiperglikemii na stłuszczenie szpiku kostnego. Protonowa spektroskopia rezonansu magnetycznego może być cennym narzędziem, dostarczającym uzupełniających informacji na temat oceny skuteczności leczenia

A “Double-Multi” Model for Electromigration of Lithiums and Chlorides in ASR Affected Concrete

Existing reinforced concrete structures experience severe durability degradation when subjected to alkali– silica reaction (ASR) and chloride attack. A special electrochemical rehabilitation treatment, containing lithium compound anolyte, has been developed to drive lithium ions into concrete as well as remove chlorides simultaneously, for mitigating both the ASR-induced cracks and the chloride-induced corrosion. Good performance of introduced lithiums in controlling ASR-induced expansion has already been proved. Unfortunately, the migration mechanism of lithium in concrete under an external electric field is seldom investigated in existing literature. In this study, with help of the “double-multi” model, the efficiency of impregnation of lithium ions and simultaneously the removal of chloride ions through a specific electrochemical treatment are numerically evaluated, which results into the distribution profiles of all typical ionic species. The heterogeneous concrete model examines the aggregate effect, especially on the interaction with lithiums which are supposed to mitigate ASR. The ionic interaction between different species and the electrochemical reaction at electrodes are also considered. Through a relative thorough modelling of multi-phase and multi-species, a systemic parametric analysis based on a series of significant factors during electrochemical treatment (e.g., current density, treatment time, temperature, cathode position and concentration of lithium solution) reveals some important tendencies of ionic electromigration in concrete, which are supposed to guide the field application

i-Genome: A database to summarize oligonucleotide data in genomes

BACKGROUND: Information on the occurrence of sequence features in genomes is crucial to comparative genomics, evolutionary analysis, the analyses of regulatory sequences and the quantitative evaluation of sequences. Computing the frequencies and the occurrences of a pattern in complete genomes is time-consuming. RESULTS: The proposed database provides information about sequence features generated by exhaustively computing the sequences of the complete genome. The repetitive elements in the eukaryotic genomes, such as LINEs, SINEs, Alu and LTR, are obtained from Repbase. The database supports various complete genomes including human, yeast, worm, and 128 microbial genomes. CONCLUSIONS: This investigation presents and implements an efficiently computational approach to accumulate the occurrences of the oligonucleotides or patterns in complete genomes. A database is established to maintain the information of the sequence features, including the distributions of oligonucleotide, the gene distribution, the distribution of repetitive elements in genomes and the occurrences of the oligonucleotides. The database can provide more effective and efficient way to access the repetitive features in genomes

Multiresolution Feature Guidance Based Transformer for Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is represented as an unsupervised learning to identify deviated images from normal images. In general, there are two main challenges of anomaly detection tasks, i.e., the class imbalance and the unexpectedness of anomalies. In this paper, we propose a multiresolution feature guidance method based on Transformer named GTrans for unsupervised anomaly detection and localization. In GTrans, an Anomaly Guided Network (AGN) pre-trained on ImageNet is developed to provide surrogate labels for features and tokens. Under the tacit knowledge guidance of the AGN, the anomaly detection network named Trans utilizes Transformer to effectively establish a relationship between features with multiresolution, enhancing the ability of the Trans in fitting the normal data manifold. Due to the strong generalization ability of AGN, GTrans locates anomalies by comparing the differences in spatial distance and direction of multi-scale features extracted from the AGN and the Trans. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed GTrans achieves state-of-the-art performance in both detection and localization on the MVTec AD dataset. GTrans achieves image-level and pixel-level anomaly detection AUROC scores of 99.0% and 97.9% on the MVTec AD dataset, respectively

Development of Bionic Air Cooler Used in High Temperature Coal Mine

In high temperature coal mine, the surface air cooler heat exchange efficiency decreases greatly because of high humidity and dust. In order to improve the heat exchange efficiency, the surface of the air cooler needs to be designed to reduce the dust adhesion, and improve the heat exchange efficiency. Based on the self-cleaning effect of lotus leaf, the surface of air cooler is designed and fin and tube are processed into the constructure of lotus leaf surface. With Ansys, the cooling effect of air cooler is simulated, and the experiment is done to test the heat exchange effect of the common air cooler and bionic air cooler in lab. By analysis, it can be concluded that the surface of bionic air cooler has the function of self-cleaning, and the structure can increase the heat exchange efficiency, which is higher above 30% than that of common air cooler. Key words: High temperature coal mine; Air cooler; Self-cleaning; Heat exchange efficienc

miRExpress: Analyzing high-throughput sequencing data for profiling microRNA expression

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>MicroRNAs (miRNAs), small non-coding RNAs of 19 to 25 nt, play important roles in gene regulation in both animals and plants. In the last few years, the oligonucleotide microarray is one high-throughput and robust method for detecting miRNA expression. However, the approach is restricted to detecting the expression of known miRNAs. Second-generation sequencing is an inexpensive and high-throughput sequencing method. This new method is a promising tool with high sensitivity and specificity and can be used to measure the abundance of small-RNA sequences in a sample. Hence, the expression profiling of miRNAs can involve use of sequencing rather than an oligonucleotide array. Additionally, this method can be adopted to discover novel miRNAs.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This work presents a systematic approach, miRExpress, for extracting miRNA expression profiles from sequencing reads obtained by second-generation sequencing technology. A stand-alone software package is implemented for generating miRNA expression profiles from high-throughput sequencing of RNA without the need for sequenced genomes. The software is also a database-supported, efficient and flexible tool for investigating miRNA regulation. Moreover, we demonstrate the utility of miRExpress in extracting miRNA expression profiles from two Illumina data sets constructed for the human and a plant species.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>We develop miRExpress, which is a database-supported, efficient and flexible tool for detecting miRNA expression profile. The analysis of two Illumina data sets constructed from human and plant demonstrate the effectiveness of miRExpress to obtain miRNA expression profiles and show the usability in finding novel miRNAs.</p

Honokiol Protected against Heatstroke-Induced Oxidative Stress and Inflammation in Diabetic Rats

We aimed at investigating the effect of honokiol on heatstroke in an experimental rat model. Sprogue-Dawley rats were divided into 3 groups: normothermic diabetic rats treated with vehicle solution (NTDR+V), heatstroke-diabetic rats treated with vehicle (HSDR+V), and heatstroke rats treated with konokiol (0.5–5 mg/ml/kg) (HSDR+H). Sixty minutes before the start of heat stress, honokiol or vehicle solution was administered. (HSDR+H) significantly (a) attenuated hyperthermia, hypotension and hypothalamic ischemia, hypoxia, and neuronal apoptosis; (b) reduced the plasma index of the toxic oxidizing radicals; (c) diminished the indices of hepatic and renal dysfunction; (d) attenuated the plasma systemic inflammatory response molecules; (e) promoted plasma levels of an anti-inflammatory cytokine; (f) reduced the index of infiltration of polymorphonuclear neutrophils in the serum; and (g) promoted the survival time fourfold compared with the (HSDR+V) group. In conclusion, honokiol protected against the outcome of heatstroke by reducing inflammation and oxidative stress-mediated multiple organ dysfunction in diabetic rats