Cultural Issues in Using the SF-36 Health Survey in Asia: Results from Taiwan

BACKGROUND: The feasibility of using the SF-36 in non-Western cultures is important for researchers seeking to understand cultural influences upon health status perceptions. This paper reports on the performance of the Taiwan version of the SF-36, including the implications of cultural influences. METHODS: A total of 1191 volunteered subjects from the general population answered the translated SF-36 Taiwan version, which was developed following IQOLA project protocols. RESULTS: Results from tests of scaling assumptions and reliability generally were satisfactory. Convergent validity, as assessed by comparing the SF-36 to a mental health oriented inventory, was acceptable. Results of principal components analysis were similar to US results for many scales. However, differences were seen for the Vitality scale which was a stronger measure of mental health than physical health in Taiwan. Results are compared to those from other Asian studies and the U.S. CONCLUSION: The results raise important questions regarding cultural influences in international studies of health status assessment. Further research into the conceptualization and components of mental health in Asian countries is warranted

TOXICOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF LEPISTA NUDA (BULL. EX FR.) COOKE MYCELIUM PRODUCED BY AN IN VITRO CULTURE METHODOLOGY

Objective: Considering the interest in L. nuda as a source of ingredients for the development of functional food and nutraceuticals has increased, the objective of this study was to evaluate its general toxicity and possible genotoxic effects in rats to assess its safety.Methods: This study evaluated the safety of L. nuda mycelium by using genotoxicity assays (reverse mutation, chromosomal aberration, and micronuclei tests) and a short-term toxicity test.Results: Our results have indicated that L. nuda mycelium did not significantly increase the number of revertant colonies and chromosomal aberration in both in vitro assays. Furthermore, it did not induce any increase in micronuclei formation in mouse bone marrow.Conclusion: In summary, no mutagenic effects and no evidence of systemic toxicity were found in this safety assessment, and the use of L. nuda mycelia is safe at a dose of 3 g/kg body weight in S-D rats. Using a safety factor of 100, the calculated acceptable daily intake in humans is 30 mg/kg body weight/d

Factors that influence survival in colorectal cancer with synchronous distant metastasis

AbstractBackgroundTreatments for the purposes of curing or more effectively managing metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC) are evolving. Our study focused on patients with primary CRC with synchronous distant metastasis, and we analyzed the factors influencing patient survival.MethodsData review was conducted retrospectively. Clinicopathological parameters included age, sex, site of primary cancer, tumor cell differentiation, number of liver metastasis, presence of extrahepatic metastasis, treatment of liver metastasis, pre-treatment carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) level, status of treatment response, salvage treatment and survival.ResultsA total of 420 patients were identified and considered for our study. Of those, 275 patients (65.4%) had liver-only metastasis, 100 patients (23.8%) had concomitant lung metastasis, and 40 patients (9.5%) had other metastases. Additionally, 145 patients (34.5%) had liver-directed treatment including surgical resection (28.5%), radiofrequency ablation (RFA) (10.6%) and transcatheter arterial chemoembolization (TAE) (1.2%). There were 80 patients (19%) with CEA levels < 10, 135 patients (32.1%) with CEA 10–100, and 165 patients (39.2%) with CEA > 100. There were 200 patients (47.6%) who had received chemotherapy, 130 patients (30.9%) with target therapy, and 40 patients (9.5%) who had not undergone any salvage treatment. Three significant factors were identified, including treatment of liver metastasis (p=0.027), pre-treatment CEA (p=0.04), and salvage treatment (p=0.005).ConclusionWe demonstrated three factors influencing patient survival including treatment of liver metastasis, pre-treatment CEA level, and salvage treatment. Aggressive treatment of liver metastasis including surgical resection or RFA combined with chemotherapeutic agents appear to provide an increased rate of survival to patients

Developing Blue Ocean Strategy of Sustainable Product Design and Development for Business Opportunities of BOP Groups in Taiwan

This study expands the definition of the poor group and attempts to delve into and make known the phenomenon of poverty in Taiwan and aims to explore the goals and possibilities of the BOP consumer market. Through a questionnaire survey and expert interviews, this research adopts the concept of sustainability to discuss the lifestyle and consumption characteristics of the BOP group and establishes a design strategic norm of the sustainable products. The findings show that the BOP group in Taiwan is new poverty or working poor and high quality and common prices are the main requirements; these should be introduced into the development model of sustainable design

PGT-Net: Progressive Guided Multi-task Neural Network for Small-area Wet Fingerprint Denoising and Recognition

Fingerprint recognition on mobile devices is an important method for identity verification. However, real fingerprints usually contain sweat and moisture which leads to poor recognition performance. In addition, for rolling out slimmer and thinner phones, technology companies reduce the size of recognition sensors by embedding them with the power button. Therefore, the limited size of fingerprint data also increases the difficulty of recognition. Denoising the small-area wet fingerprint images to clean ones becomes crucial to improve recognition performance. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end trainable progressive guided multi-task neural network (PGT-Net). The PGT-Net includes a shared stage and specific multi-task stages, enabling the network to train binary and non-binary fingerprints sequentially. The binary information is regarded as guidance for output enhancement which is enriched with the ridge and valley details. Moreover, a novel residual scaling mechanism is introduced to stabilize the training process. Experiment results on the FW9395 and FT-lightnoised dataset provided by FocalTech shows that PGT-Net has promising performance on the wet-fingerprint denoising and significantly improves the fingerprint recognition rate (FRR). On the FT-lightnoised dataset, the FRR of fingerprint recognition can be declined from 17.75% to 4.47%. On the FW9395 dataset, the FRR of fingerprint recognition can be declined from 9.45% to 1.09%

Quantum state tomography via non-convex Riemannian gradient descent

The recovery of an unknown density matrix of large size requires huge computational resources. The recent Factored Gradient Descent (FGD) algorithm and its variants achieved state-of-the-art performance since they could mitigate the dimensionality barrier by utilizing some of the underlying structures of the density matrix. Despite their theoretical guarantee of a linear convergence rate, the convergence in practical scenarios is still slow because the contracting factor of the FGD algorithms depends on the condition number $\kappa$ of the ground truth state. Consequently, the total number of iterations can be as large as $O(\sqrt{\kappa}\ln(\frac{1}{\varepsilon}))$ to achieve the estimation error $\varepsilon$. In this work, we derive a quantum state tomography scheme that improves the dependence on $\kappa$ to the logarithmic scale; namely, our algorithm could achieve the approximation error $\varepsilon$ in $O(\ln(\frac{1}{\kappa\varepsilon}))$ steps. The improvement comes from the application of the non-convex Riemannian gradient descent (RGD). The contracting factor in our approach is thus a universal constant that is independent of the given state. Our theoretical results of extremely fast convergence and nearly optimal error bounds are corroborated by numerical results.Comment: Comments are welcome

Comparison of laparoscopic versus open surgery in a three-stage operation for obstructive left-sided colorectal cancer

AbstractBackgroundTreatment for obstructive left-sided colorectal cancer (OLCC) typically consists of a three-staged procedure. During the first stage, the obstruction is managed with diversion colostomy. Traditionally in the second stage, we perform open resection for the primary tumor. In this study, we evaluated the feasibility of laparoscopic resection of OLCC with diversion colostomy in terms of operative results and short-term outcomes.MethodsA total of 20 patients underwent laparoscopic resection for OLCC (study group), 48 patients underwent open resection for OLCC (control group 1), and 53 patients underwent laparoscopic resection for non-OLCC (control group 2). Afterwards, results from the procedures were obtained and clinical data were analyzed.ResultsThe operative time was significantly longer in the study group than in the control group 1 (153 minutes vs. 126 minutes, p = 0.041), and the length of hospitalization was shorter in the study group than in the control group 1 (5.3 days vs. 7.6 days, p = 0.032). Regarding the operative results and short-term outcomes, there were no significant differences between the study group and control group 2. Colostomy retraction was a specific morbidity which occurred in two patients of the study group.ConclusionLaparoscopic resection of OLCC with diversion colostomy is feasible. Abdominal cavity adhesion is only limited. We strongly recommend that laparoscopic resection should be performed at least 2 weeks after diversion colostomy, and the plastic rod should be left in place during the pneumoperitoneum to reduce the risk of colostomy retraction

Utilization of IκB–EGFP Chimeric Gene as an Indicator to Identify Microbial Metabolites with NF-κB Inhibitor Activity

NF-κB regulates several important expressions, such as cytokine release, anti-apoptosis, adhesion molecule expression, and cell cycle processing. Several NF-κB inhibitors have been discovered as an anti-tumor or anti-inflammatory drug. The activity of NF-κB transcription factor is negatively regulated by IκB binding. In this study, IκB assay system was established and IκB–EGFP fusion protein was used as an indicator to monitor the effects of substances on the IκB degradation. The results indicated that the chosen hydroquinone could inhibit the IκB degradation and cause the cell de-attachment from the bottom of culture plate. In addition, this system could also monitor the IκB degradation of microbial metabolite of natural mixtures of propolis. Thus, the IκB assay system may be a good system for drug discovery related to microbial metabolite