Circulating Long Noncoding RNAs as Biomarkers for Predicting Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Background/Aims: The anatomical complexity of the head and neck region and the lack of sufficiently specific and sensitive biomarkers often lead to the diagnosis of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) at advanced stages. To identify novel biomarkers for early diagnosis of primary HNSCC through a minimally invasive method, we investigated circulating long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) levels in plasma of HNSCC patients. Methods: The global lncRNA expression profiles of HNSCC patients were measured using microarray and next-generation RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) data from both circulating and tissue samples. The diagnosis prediction model based on the lncRNA signatures and clinical features was evaluated by multi-stage validation and risk score analysis. Results: The data showed that 432 lncRNA transcripts were differentially expressed by fold changes of > 4 in circulating samples and 333 in tissues samples, respectively. Only 12 lncRNAs consistently emerged in these two kinds of samples. After the risk score analysis including a multistage validation, we identified three lncRNAs, namely, HOXA11-AS, LINC00964 and MALAT1, which were up-regulated in the plasma of HNSCC patients compared with those in healthy controls with merged areas under the curve (AUCs) in training and validation sets of 0.925 and 0.839, respectively. Conclusion: HOXA11-AS, LINC00964 and MALAT1 might be potential circulating biomarkers for the early detection of HNSCC in the future

Improvement in EMI Shielding Properties of Silicone Rubber/POE Blends Containing ILs Modified with Carbon Black and MWCNTs

Silicone rubber (SR)/polyolefin elastomer (POE) blends containing ionic liquids modified with carbon blacks (CB-IL) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNT-IL) were prepared by melt-blending and hot pressing. SR/POE/CB-IL and SR/POE/CB-CNT-IL composites showed co-continuous structural morphologies. The cation−π interactions between ILs and CNTs were stronger than those between ILs and CBs due to the large length and high surface area of CNTs, which promoted better dispersion of carbon fillers. SR/POE/CB-CNT-IL composites showed higher EMI SE than SR/POE/CB-IL composites containing identical filler contents because the CNTs with larger aspect ratios helped form more electrically-conductive networks

Ballistic cluster–cluster aggregation model optimization

In this paper, an optimized model based on the ballistic cluster–cluster aggregation model is proposed to study the optical properties of aggregated particle structures. The critical improvement of the optimized model is the ability to arbitrarily select the original number of particles in the simulation and set different sizes of particles, whereas the original model is limited to 2n particles. Herein, the discrete dipole approximation method was used to calculate the optical extinction properties of the aggregation structure. First, the effect of porosity, which is a significant parameter, is explored, and acceptable error values are calculated. Second, simulations are performed using the optimized model for conditions applicable to the original model (N = 2n), and the difference between the two model calculations is assessed. Finally, the extinction performance of the aggregate with an arbitrary number of particles (N ≠ 2n) simulated by the optimized model is calculated and compared with the results obtained by the interpolation method. The numerical results verify the generalizability and accuracy of the optimized model

Continuous Human Activity Recognition through Parallelism LSTM with Multi-Frequency Spectrograms

According to the real-living environment, radar-based human activity recognition (HAR) is dedicated to recognizing and classifying a sequence of activities rather than individual activities, thereby drawing more attention in practical applications of security surveillance, health care and human–computer interactions. This paper proposes a parallelism long short-term memory (LSTM) framework with the input of multi-frequency spectrograms to implement continuous HAR. Specifically, frequency-division short-time Fourier transformation (STFT) is performed on the data stream of continuous activities collected by a stepped-frequency continuous-wave (SFCW) radar, generating spectrograms of multiple frequencies which introduce different scattering properties and frequency resolutions. In the designed parallelism LSTM framework, multiple parallel LSTM sub-networks are trained separately to extract different temporal features from the spectrogram of each frequency and produce corresponding classification probabilities. At the decision level, the probabilities of activity classification from these sub-networks are fused by addition as the recognition output. To validate the proposed method, an experimental data set is collected by using an SFCW radar to monitor 11 participants who continuously perform six activities in sequence with three different transitions and random durations. The validation results demonstrate that the average accuracies of the designed parallelism unidirectional LSTM (Uni-LSTM) and bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM) based on five frequency spectrograms are 85.41% and 96.15%, respectively, outperforming traditional Uni-LSTM and Bi-LSTM networks with only a single-frequency spectrogram by 5.35% and 6.33% at least. Additionally, the recognition accuracy of the parallelism LSTM network reveals an upward trend as the number of multi-frequency spectrograms (namely the number of LSTM subnetworks) increases, and tends to be stable when the number reaches 4

Aqueous humor monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 predicted long-term visual outcome of proliferative diabetic retinopathy undergone intravitreal injection of bevacizumab and vitrectomy.

PurposeWe aim to investigate the risk factors associated with the prognosis of proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) after a sequential treatment of intravitreal injection of bevacizumab (IVB) and pars plana vitrectomy (PPV).MethodsIn this cohort study, 63 eyes from 55 patients (21 females) diagnosed with PDR, who needed PPV for non-clearing vitreous hemorrhage or fibrovascular membrane proliferation were enrolled. All the eyes underwent IVB followed by PPV. Anterior chamber tap was performed at the beginning of both procedures to evaluate the concentration of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), interleukin (IL)-6, IL-8, and monocyte chemoattractant protein (MCP)-1.ResultsForty-seven patients (54 eyes) were followed over six months, averaging 12±5 (6-19) months. The concentration of VEGF significantly decreased after IVB (PConclusionsMCP-1 was a predictor for the unfavorable visual outcome of PDR after IVB pretreatment and PPV

Cytoplasm Types Affect DNA Methylation among Different Cytoplasmic Male Sterility Lines and Their Maintainer Line in Soybean (Glycine max L.)

Cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) lines and their maintainer line have the same nucleus but different cytoplasm types. We used three soybean (Glycine max L.) CMS lines, JLCMS9A, JLCMSZ9A, and JLCMSPI9A, and their maintainer line, JLCMS9B, to explore whether methylation levels differed in their nuclei. Whole-genome bisulfite sequencing of these four lines was performed. The results show that the cytosine methylation level in the maintainer line was lower than in the CMS lines. Compared with JLCMS9B, the Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis of DMR (differentially methylated region, DMR)-related genes of JLCMS9A revealed that their different 5-methylcytosine backgrounds were enriched in molecular function, whereas JLCMSZ9A and JLCMSPI9A were enriched in biological process and cellular component. The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genome (KEGG) analysis of DMR-related genes and different methylated promoter regions in different cytosine contexts, hypomethylation or hypermethylation, showed that the numbers of DMR-related genes and promoter regions were clearly different. According to the DNA methylation and genetic distances separately, JLCMS9A clustered with JLCMS9B, and JLCMSPI9A with JLCMSZ9A. Thus, the effects of different cytoplasm types on DNA methylation were significantly different. This may be related to their genetic distances revealed by re-sequencing these lines. The detected DMR-related genes and pathways that are probably associated with CMS are also discussed