Improved blog clustering through automated weighting of text blocks

In this paper, a new clustering algorithm is proposed for blog data clustering. Considering the structure information of text blocks in blog data, we group the features of blog data into three groups and extend the k-means clustering algorithm to automatically calculate a weight for each feature group in the clustering process. We introduce a new objective function with group weight variables and present the Lagrangian method to derive the formula to calculate the group weights. This formula is added as a new step in the standard k-means iterative clustering process to automatically compute the group weights according to the distribution of features. This new process guarantees the convergency of the clustering process to a local optimal solution. The experimental results have shown that this new algorithm performed better than k-means without group feature weighting on different blog data sets.published_or_final_versio

Slow cooling and efficient extraction of C-exciton hot carriers in MoS2 monolayer

In emerging optoelectronic applications, such as water photolysis, exciton fission and novel photovoltaics involving low-dimensional nanomaterials, hot-carrier relaxation and extraction mechanisms play an indispensable and intriguing role in their photo-electron conversion processes. Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides have attracted much attention in above fields recently; however, insight into the relaxation mechanism of hot electron-hole pairs in the band nesting region denoted as C-excitons, remains elusive. Using MoS2 monolayers as a model two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide system, here we report a slower hot-carrier cooling for C-excitons, in comparison with band-edge excitons. We deduce that this effect arises from the favourable band alignment and transient excited-state Coulomb environment, rather than solely on quantum confinement in two-dimension systems. We identify the screening-sensitive bandgap renormalization for MoS2 monolayer/graphene heterostructures, and confirm the initial hot-carrier extraction for the C-exciton state with an unprecedented efficiency of 80%, accompanied by a twofold reduction in the exciton binding energy

Efficacy of Personalized Postoperative Epilepsy Management in Patients with Glioblastoma Utilizing IDH1 Gene Assessment

Gao-Qiang Meng,1,* Shu Chen,2,* Han-Bin Ye,1 Bao-Jun Ma,1 Shuo Tao,3 Zi Ye1 1Department of Neurosurgery, Affiliated Hospital 2 of Nantong University, Nantong First People’s Hospital, Nantong, 226000, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Endocrinology, Affiliated Hospital 2 of Nantong University, Nantong First People’s Hospital, Nantong, 226000, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Out-Patient, Affiliated Hospital 2 of Nantong University, Nantong First People’s Hospital, Nantong, 226000, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Zi Ye, Department of Neurosurgery, Affiliated Hospital 2 of Nantong University, Nantong First People’s Hospital, No. 666 of Shengli Road, Chongchuan District, Jiangsu, Nantong, 226000, People’s Republic of China, Email [email protected] Shuo Tao, Department of Out-patient, Affiliated Hospital 2 of Nantong University, Nantong First People’s Hospital, No. 666 of Shengli Road, Chongchuan District, Jiangsu, Nantong, 226000, People’s Republic of China, Tel +86 0513 81111429, Email [email protected]: We explored the correlation between the presence of isocitrate dehydrogenase-1 (IDH1) mutations and the incidence of postoperative epilepsy in patients with glioblastoma, as well as assessed the efficacy of preemptive administration of antiepileptic medications in mitigating the occurrence of postoperative epilepsy.Methods: Fifty-three patients who received a postoperative pathological diagnosis of glioblastoma, were enrolled in this study. Tumor specimens were subjected to IDH1 gene analysis. The patient cohort was stratified based on their IDH1 mutation status and the administration of prophylactic antiepileptic drugs during the postoperative phase. We subsequently conducted a comparative analysis of postoperative epileptic complications within each patient subgroup.Results: In the cohort of 53 patients under study, the occurrence of epilepsy was observed in 10 out of 21 patients carrying IDH1 mutations, while 5 out of 32 patients with wild-type IDH1 also experienced epilepsy, revealing a statistically significant difference (P 0.05). However, when performing a subgroup analysis, it was found that 3 out of 12 patients with IDH1 mutations who received prophylactic antiepileptic drugs experienced epilepsy, whereas 7 out of 9 patients who did not receive prophylactic antiepileptic drugs developed epilepsy, demonstrating a statistically significant difference (P 0.05).Conclusion: In individuals with IDH1 mutant glioblastoma who have undergone surgical resection, the implementation of preventive antiepileptic therapy demonstrates a potential to diminish the occurrence of postoperative epilepsy.Keywords: epilepsy, glioblastoma, isocitrate dehydrogenase-1, prophylactic antiepileptic therap

Vision-related quality of life and Appearance concerns are associated with anxiety and depression after eye enucleation: A cross-sectional study

© 2015 Ye et al. Aims: To investigate the association of demographic, clinical and psychosocial variables with levels of anxiety and depression in participants wearing an ocular prosthesis after eye enucleation. Methods: This cross-sectional study included 195 participants with an enucleated eye who were attending an ophthalmic clinic for prosthetic rehabilitation between July and November 2014. Demographic and clinical data, and self-reported feelings of shame, sadness and anger were collected. Participants also completed the National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire, the Facial Appearance subscale of the Negative Physical Self Scale, and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale. Regression models were used to identify the factors associated with anxiety and depression. Results: The proportion of participants with clinical anxiety was 11.8% and clinical depression 13.8%. More anxiety and depression were associated with poorer vision-related quality of life and greater levels of appearance concerns. Younger age was related to greater levels of anxiety. Less educated participants and those feeling more angry about losing an eye are more prone to experience depression. Clinical variables were unrelated to anxiety or depression. Conclusions: Anxiety and depression are more prevalent in eye-enucleated patients than the general population, which brings up the issues of psychiatric support in these patients. Psychosocialrather than clinical characteristics were associated with anxiety and depression. Longitudinal studies need to be conducted to further elucidate the direction of causality before interventions to improve mood states are developed. Copyright

Counter-current chromatography for the separation of terpenoids: A comprehensive review with respect to the solvent systems employed

Copyright @ 2014 The Authors.This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.Natural products extracts are commonly highly complex mixtures of active compounds and consequently their purification becomes a particularly challenging task. The development of a purification protocol to extract a single active component from the many hundreds that are often present in the mixture is something that can take months or even years to achieve, thus it is important for the natural product chemist to have, at their disposal, a broad range of diverse purification techniques. Counter-current chromatography (CCC) is one such separation technique utilising two immiscible phases, one as the stationary phase (retained in a spinning coil by centrifugal forces) and the second as the mobile phase. The method benefits from a number of advantages when compared with the more traditional liquid-solid separation methods, such as no irreversible adsorption, total recovery of the injected sample, minimal tailing of peaks, low risk of sample denaturation, the ability to accept particulates, and a low solvent consumption. The selection of an appropriate two-phase solvent system is critical to the running of CCC since this is both the mobile and the stationary phase of the system. However, this is also by far the most time consuming aspect of the technique and the one that most inhibits its general take-up. In recent years, numerous natural product purifications have been published using CCC from almost every country across the globe. Many of these papers are devoted to terpenoids-one of the most diverse groups. Naturally occurring terpenoids provide opportunities to discover new drugs but many of them are available at very low levels in nature and a huge number of them still remain unexplored. The collective knowledge on performing successful CCC separations of terpenoids has been gathered and reviewed by the authors, in order to create a comprehensive document that will be of great assistance in performing future purifications. © 2014 The Author(s)

Upregulated sirtuin 1 by miRNA-34a is required for smooth muscle cell differentiation from pluripotent stem cells

© 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. microRNA-34a (miR-34a) and sirtuin 1 (SirT1) have been extensively studied in tumour biology and longevityaging, but little is known about their functional roles in smooth muscle cell (SMC) differentiation from pluripotent stem cells. Using well-established SMC differentiation models, we have demonstrated that miR-34a has an important role in SMC differentiation from murine and human embryonic stem cells. Surprisingly, deacetylase sirtuin 1 (SirT1), one of the top predicted targets, was positively regulated by miR-34a during SMC differentiation. Mechanistically, we demonstrated that miR-34a promoted differentiating stem cells' arrest at G0G1 phase and observed a significantly decreased incorporation of miR-34a and SirT1 RNA into Ago2-RISC complex upon SMC differentiation. Importantly, we have identified SirT1 as a transcriptional activator in the regulation of SMC gene programme. Finally, our data showed that SirT1 modulated the enrichment of H3K9 tri-methylation around the SMC gene-promoter regions. Taken together, our data reveal a specific regulatory pathway that miR-34a positively regulates its target gene SirT1 in a cellular context-dependent and sequence-specific manner and suggest a functional role for this pathway in SMC differentiation from stem cells in vitro and in vivo

Aurora-A/STK15/BTAK overexpression induces centrosome amplification, chromosomal instability, and transformation in human urothelial cells

Aurora-A/STK15/BTAK kinase encoding gene, located on chromosome 20q13, is frequently amplified and overexpressed in human cancers. Sen et al. previously demonstrated that Aurora-A amplification and overexpression are associated with aneuploidy and clinically aggressive bladder cancer (J Natl Cancer Inst (2002) 94, 1320-1329). To examine if this association is the direct result of Aurora-A gene amplification and overexpression, an immortalized human urothelial cell line (SV-HUC) was infected with an adenoviral Aurora-A-green fluorescent protein (Ad-Aurora-A-GFP) fusion construct inducing ectopic expression of the resulting fusion protein. Controls included mock-infected and adenoviral-GFP infected cells. Ectopic expression of transduced Aurora-A did not alter the doubling time of the SV-HUC cells but significantly increased the number of cells with multiple centrosomes displaying aneuploidy and increased colony formation in soft agar. This is the first report demonstrating that overexpression of Aurora-A induces centrosome anomalies together with chromosomal instability and malignant transformation-associated phenotypic changes in immortalized human urothelial cells, thus supporting the hypothesis that this gene plays an important role in the development of aggressive bladder cancer

Observation of a ppb mass threshoud enhancement in \psi^\prime\to\pi^+\pi^-J/\psi(J/\psi\to\gamma p\bar{p}) decay

The decay channel $\psi^\prime\to\pi^+\pi^-J/\psi(J/\psi\to\gamma p\bar{p})$ is studied using a sample of $1.06\times 10^8$ $\psi^\prime$ events collected by the BESIII experiment at BEPCII. A strong enhancement at threshold is observed in the $p\bar{p}$ invariant mass spectrum. The enhancement can be fit with an $S$-wave Breit-Wigner resonance function with a resulting peak mass of $M=1861^{+6}_{-13} {\rm (stat)}^{+7}_{-26} {\rm (syst)} {\rm MeV/}c^2$ and a narrow width that is $\Gamma<38 {\rm MeV/}c^2$ at the 90% confidence level. These results are consistent with published BESII results. These mass and width values do not match with those of any known meson resonance.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Chinese Physics

Analytic philosophy for biomedical research: the imperative of applying yesterday's timeless messages to today's impasses

The mantra that "the best way to predict the future is to invent it" (attributed to the computer scientist Alan Kay) exemplifies some of the expectations from the technical and innovative sides of biomedical research at present. However, for technical advancements to make real impacts both on patient health and genuine scientific understanding, quite a number of lingering challenges facing the entire spectrum from protein biology all the way to randomized controlled trials should start to be overcome. The proposal in this chapter is that philosophy is essential in this process. By reviewing select examples from the history of science and philosophy, disciplines which were indistinguishable until the mid-nineteenth century, I argue that progress toward the many impasses in biomedicine can be achieved by emphasizing theoretical work (in the true sense of the word 'theory') as a vital foundation for experimental biology. Furthermore, a philosophical biology program that could provide a framework for theoretical investigations is outlined

Enhanced protein fold recognition through a novel data integration approach

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Protein fold recognition is a key step in protein three-dimensional (3D) structure discovery. There are multiple fold discriminatory data sources which use physicochemical and structural properties as well as further data sources derived from local sequence alignments. This raises the issue of finding the most efficient method for combining these different informative data sources and exploring their relative significance for protein fold classification. Kernel methods have been extensively used for biological data analysis. They can incorporate separate fold discriminatory features into kernel matrices which encode the similarity between samples in their respective data sources.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>In this paper we consider the problem of integrating multiple data sources using a kernel-based approach. We propose a novel information-theoretic approach based on a Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the output kernel matrix and the input kernel matrix so as to integrate heterogeneous data sources. One of the most appealing properties of this approach is that it can easily cope with multi-class classification and multi-task learning by an appropriate choice of the output kernel matrix. Based on the position of the output and input kernel matrices in the KL-divergence objective, there are two formulations which we respectively refer to as <it>MKLdiv-dc </it>and <it>MKLdiv-conv</it>. We propose to efficiently solve MKLdiv-dc by a difference of convex (DC) programming method and MKLdiv-conv by a projected gradient descent algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is evaluated on a benchmark dataset for protein fold recognition and a yeast protein function prediction problem.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our proposed methods MKLdiv-dc and MKLdiv-conv are able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the SCOP PDB-40D benchmark dataset for protein fold prediction and provide useful insights into the relative significance of informative data sources. In particular, MKLdiv-dc further improves the fold discrimination accuracy to 75.19% which is a more than 5% improvement over competitive Bayesian probabilistic and SVM margin-based kernel learning methods. Furthermore, we report a competitive performance on the yeast protein function prediction problem.</p