Relationship of arterial tonometry and exercise in patients with chronic heart failure: a systematic review with meta-analysis and trial sequential analysis

Background: Arterial stiffness is a common characteristic in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF), and arterial tonometric technologies related to arterial stiffness are novel and effective methods and have an important value in the diagnosis and prognosis of CHF. In terms of ameliorating arterial stiffness in patients with CHF, exercise training is considered an adjuvant treatment and also an effective means in the diagnosis and judgment of prognosis. However, there are huge controversies and inconsistencies in these aspects. The objective of this meta-analysis was to systematically test the connection of arterial tonometry and exercise in patients with CHF. Methods: Databases, including MEDLINE, EMBASE, and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) in The Cochrane Library, were accessed from inception to 7 March 2022. The meta-analysis was then conducted, and trial sequential analysis (TSA) was performed jointly to further verify our tests and reach more convincing conclusions by using RevMan version 5.4 software, STATA version 16.0 software, and TSA version 0.9.5.10 Beta software. Results: Eighteen articles were included, with a total of 876 participants satisfying the inclusion criteria. The pooling revealed that flow-mediated dilation (FMD) was lower in basal condition [standardized mean difference (SMD): - 2.28%, 95% confidence interval (CI) - 3.47 to - 1.08, P < 0.001] and improved significantly after exercise (SMD: 5.96%, 95% CI 2.81 to 9.05, P < 0.001) in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) compared with healthy participants. The high-intensity training exercise was more beneficial (SMD: 2.88%, 95% CI 1.78 to 3.97, P < 0.001) than the moderate-intensity training exercise to improve FMD in patients with CHF. For augmentation index (AIx), our study indicated no significant differences (SMD: 0.50%, 95% CI - 0.05 to 1.05, P = 0.074) in patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) compared with healthy participants. However, other outcomes of our study were not identified after further verification using TSA, and more high-quality studies are needed to reach definitive conclusions in the future. Conclusions: This review shows that FMD is lower in basal condition and improves significantly after exercise in patients with HFrEF compared with healthy population; high-intensity training exercise is more beneficial than moderate-intensity training exercise to improve FMD in patients with CHF; besides, there are no significant differences in AIx in patients with HFpEF compared with the healthy population. More high-quality studies on this topic are warranted

O pensamento e a influência dos missionários na China : o caso de Tomás Pereira

Mestrado em Línguas, Literaturas e CulturasOs portugueses chegaram à China após a abertura do caminho marítimo. Em simultâneo, e como resultado do contexto da Reforma católica, surge a Companhia de Jesus que tem como objetivo enviar jesuítas para divulgarem o catolicismo no mundo. Sendo um dos jesuítas mais marcantes, Tomás Pereira chegou à China em 1673, desempenhando um papel importante na evangelização da China. Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar a evangelização católica na China. Através dos contributos de Tomás Pereira, podemos compreender melhor a sua vida e a época em que viveu.The Portuguese arrived in China after the opening of the sea route. At the same time, and because of the context of the Catholic Reformation, there is the company of Jesus whose purpose is to send Jesuits to spread the faith of the world. Being one of the most outstanding Jesuits, Tomas Pereira arrived in China in 1673, playing an important role in the evangelization of China. This work aims to analyze the evangelization of Christianity in China. Through the contributions of Thoms Pereira, we can better understand his life and the time in which he lived

Content-Adaptive Non-Stationary Projector Resolution Enhancement

For any projection system, one goal will surely be to maximize the quality of projected imagery at a minimized hardware cost, which is considered a challenging engineering problem. Experience in applying different image filters and enhancements to projected video suggests quite clearly that the quality of a projected enhanced video is very much a function of the content of the video itself. That is, to first order, whether the video contains content which is moving as opposed to still plays an important role in the video quality, since the human visual system tolerates much more blur in moving imagery but at the same time is significantly sensitive to the flickering and aliasing caused by moving sharp textures. Furthermore, the spatial and statistical characteristics of text and non-text images are quite distinct. We would, therefore, assert that the text-like, moving and background pixels of a given video stream should be enhanced differently using class-dependent video enhancement filters to achieve maximum visual quality. In this thesis, we present a novel text-dependent content enhancement scheme, a novel motion-dependent content enhancement scheme and a novel content-adaptive resolution enhancement scheme based on a text-like / non-text-like classification and a pixel-wise moving / non-moving classification, with the actual enhancement obtained via class--dependent Wiener deconvolution filtering. Given an input image, the text and motion detection methods are used to generate binary masks to indicate the location of the text and moving regions in the video stream. Then enhanced images are obtained by applying a plurality of class-dependent enhancement filters, with text-like regions sharpened more than the background and moving regions sharpened less than the background. Later, one or more resulting enhanced images are combined into a composite output image based on the corresponding mask of different features. Finally, a higher resolution projected video stream is conducted by controlling one or more projectors to project the plurality of output frame streams in a rapid overlapping way. Experimental results on the test images and videos show that the proposed schemes all offer improved visual quality over projection without enhancement as well as compared to a recent state-of-the-art enhancement method. Particularly, the proposed content-adaptive resolution enhancement scheme increases the PSNR value by at least 18.2% and decreases MSE value by at least 25%

Bayesian detection of embryonic gene expression onset in C. elegans

To study how a zygote develops into an embryo with different tissues, large-scale 4D confocal movies of C. elegans embryos have been produced recently by experimental biologists. However, the lack of principled statistical methods for the highly noisy data has hindered the comprehensive analysis of these data sets. We introduced a probabilistic change point model on the cell lineage tree to estimate the embryonic gene expression onset time. A Bayesian approach is used to fit the 4D confocal movies data to the model. Subsequent classification methods are used to decide a model selection threshold and further refine the expression onset time from the branch level to the specific cell time level. Extensive simulations have shown the high accuracy of our method. Its application on real data yields both previously known results and new findings.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS820 in the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org