What Disease does this Patient Have? A Large-scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams

Open domain question answering (OpenQA) tasks have been recently attracting more and more attention from the natural language processing (NLP) community. In this work, we present the first free-form multiple-choice OpenQA dataset for solving medical problems, MedQA, collected from the professional medical board exams. It covers three languages: English, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese, and contains 12,723, 34,251, and 14,123 questions for the three languages, respectively. We implement both rule-based and popular neural methods by sequentially combining a document retriever and a machine comprehension model. Through experiments, we find that even the current best method can only achieve 36.7\%, 42.0\%, and 70.1\% of test accuracy on the English, traditional Chinese, and simplified Chinese questions, respectively. We expect MedQA to present great challenges to existing OpenQA systems and hope that it can serve as a platform to promote much stronger OpenQA models from the NLP community in the future.Comment: Submitted to AAAI 202

Y-DWMS - A digital watermark management system based on smart contracts

With the development of information technology, films, music, and other publications are inclined to be distributed in digitalized form. However, the low cost of data replication and dissemination leads to digital rights problems and brings huge economic losses. Up to now, existing digital rights management (DRM) schemes have been powerless to deter attempts of infringing digital rights and recover losses of copyright holders. This paper presents a YODA-based digital watermark management system (Y-DWMS), adopting non-repudiation of smart contract and blockchain, to implement a DRM mechanism to infinitely amplify the cost of infringement and recover losses copyright holders suffered once the infringement is reported. We adopt game analysis to prove that in Y-DWMS, the decision of non-infringement always dominates rational users, so as to fundamentally eradicate the infringement of digital rights, which current mainstream DRM schemes cannot reach

Positron emission tomography imaging sheds new light on hypoxia and antitumor therapies

Abstract The effect of the hypoxic tumor microenvironment (TME) on the effectiveness of cancer treatments has received widespread attention. It is crucial to investigate the mechanisms by which hypoxia influences the efficacy of these treatments in order to improve the therapeutic outcomes for malignant tumors and the prognoses of patients. Positron emission tomography (PET) imaging is a non‐invasive, reproducible, and quantitative imaging technique that can visualize molecular biological changes in vivo. By utilizing specific PET probes, it is possible to both depict in vivo oxygen levels within the TME and evaluate cancer treatment effectiveness at various targets. This review summarizes the effect of hypoxia on various cancer treatments and examines the role of PET imaging in understanding the mechanisms of hypoxia during and after cancer treatments. It is anticipated that this review will provide new insights for improving tumor therapy from the hypoxia perspective and for early prediction and assessment of therapeutic efficacy via PET imaging

A Fine-Grained User-Divided Privacy-Preserving Access Control Protocol in Smart Watch

A smart watch is a kind of emerging wearable device in the Internet of Things. The security and privacy problems are the main obstacles that hinder the wide deployment of smart watches. Existing security mechanisms do not achieve a balance between the privacy-preserving and data access control. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained privacy-preserving access control architecture for smart watches (FPAS). In FPAS, we leverage the identity-based authentication scheme to protect the devices from malicious connection and policy-based access control for data privacy preservation. The core policy of FPAS is two-fold: (1) utilizing a homomorphic and re-encrypted scheme to ensure that the ciphertext information can be correctly calculated; (2) dividing the data requester by different attributes to avoid unauthorized access. We present a concrete scheme based on the above prototype and analyze the security of the FPAS. The performance and evaluation demonstrate that the FPAS scheme is efficient, practical, and extensible

What Disease Does This Patient Have? A Large-Scale Open Domain Question Answering Dataset from Medical Exams

Open domain question answering (OpenQA) tasks have been recently attracting more and more attention from the natural language processing (NLP) community. In this work, we present the first free-form multiple-choice OpenQA dataset for solving medical problems, MedQA, collected from the professional medical board exams. It covers three languages: English, simplified Chinese, and traditional Chinese, and contains 12,723, 34,251, and 14,123 questions for the three languages, respectively. We implement both rule-based and popular neural methods by sequentially combining a document retriever and a machine comprehension model. Through experiments, we find that even the current best method can only achieve 36.7%, 42.0%, and 70.1% of test accuracy on the English, traditional Chinese, and simplified Chinese questions, respectively. We expect MedQA to present great challenges to existing OpenQA systems and hope that it can serve as a platform to promote much stronger OpenQA models from the NLP community in the future

Study on the Amphibious Adaptability of Mudskippers Based on Intestinal Metagenome

【Objective】In this study, we report the adaptability of two representative amphibian species, blue-spotted mudskipper (Boleophthalmus Periophthalmodon, BP) and giant-fin mudskipper (Periophthalmus magnuspinnatus, PM) to live on land, with a view to revealing the key role of gastrointestinal microbiota in the adaptation and specific immunity of mudskippers to amphibious life.【Method】By using 16S amplicon sequencing and metagenomic tec hniques, the microbial composition, diversity, abundance and function of the intestines of amphibian and aquatic fish species were compared. The metagenomic data were utilized to compare two representative mudskippers (BP, PM) and three typical aquatic fish species including Ctenopharyngodon idella (CI), Hypophthalmichthys molitri (HM) and Aristichthys nobilis (AN) and the potential terrestrial marker gastrointestinal microbiota in mudskippers were investigated. In addition, the representative data of gastrointestinal microbiota from marine fish, freshwater fish, amphibians and terrestrial animals were obtained through extensive literature to compare the composition and function of intestinal microbiota in mudskippers.【Result】Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Fusobacteria were dominant in the gastrointestinal microbiota of mudskippers. The contents of various dominant phyla were strikingly different among BP, PM and aquatic fishes. Th e most significant difference in the gastrointestinal microbiota between the two groups was the proportion of CKC4, a gastrointestinal bacterial phylum that is speculated to be related to host lipid metabolism, which ranged from 4% to 27% in CI, HM, AN but was not found in the mudskipper. In addition, the gastrointestinal microbiota of mudskipper containeds typical bacterial families in terrestrial animals, freshwater and seawater fishes fish and amphibians, which was consistent with their life characteristics at the salt-water interface between water and land. It was also observed that fishes had a higher proportion of Clostridium and Proteobacteria than terrestrial animals, which had more Bacteroides species. More interestingly, certain bacteria strains like S24-7, previously thought to be specific in terrestrial animals, were also identified in both BP and PM.【Conclusion】The results suggest that the gastrointestinal microbial communities of mudskipper are more complex and diverse than those of aquatic fishes, which subsequently stimulate the host to form innate immune receptor gene families with higher diversity and more copy numbers through pathogen-related molecular pattern (PAMP) to a more complicated amphibian environment

Anti-tumor activity of nanomicelles encapsulating CXCR4 peptide antagonist E5

<div><p>Cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide, and metastasis is the main attribute to cancer death. CXCR4 and its natural ligand CXCL12 have been known to play a critical role in tumorigenesis, angiogenesis and metastasis. Therefore, designing a new CXCR4 antagonist to prevent tumor metastasis will be of great significance. Herein, a novel chemically synthesized peptide (E5) that has an ability to target CXCR4/CXCL12 axis was loaded in micelle glycol-phosphatidylethanolamine (PEG-PE) block copolymer to form micelle-encapsulated E5 (M-E5). We demonstrated that M-E5 exhibited higher affinity for CXCR4-overexpressing MCF-7 and HepG2 tumor cells as compared to free E5, and efficiently inhibited the tumor cells migration. Mechanistic studies implied that PEG-PE micelle can encapsulate E5 and improve E5 targeting efficiency for CXCR4 by accumulating E5 on the tumor cell membrane. Furthermore, through encapsulation of chemotherapeutic drug doxorubicin (Dox) in PEG-PE micelle, we proved that PEG-PE micelle could serve as a co-carrier for both E5 and Dox (M-E5-Dox). M-E5 enhanced the efficiency of Dox by down-regulating the phosphorylation level of Akt, Erk and p38/MAPK proteins. In conclusion, PEG-PE micelle demonstrated a promising delivery system for E5, and M-E5 is expected to be a potential therapeutic agent that will help to improve the clinical benefits in current therapies used for solid tumors.</p></div