1,366 research outputs found
Undergraduate geotechnical engineering education of the 21st century
Forum papers are thought-provoking opinion pieces or essays founded in fact, sometimes containing speculation, on a civil engineering topic of general interest and relevance to the readership of the journal.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Effect of Bushen yixue decoction on follicular development in experimental androgen-sterilized anovulatory rats and its possible mechanism of action
Purpose: To explore the activities of Bushen yixue decoction (BSY) against follicular development in anovulatory rats.Methods: Rats were divided into normal, normal control, clomifene citrate (positive control, orally, 5 mg/kg), and BSY (orally, 50, 100, 200 mg/kg) groups. Anovulatory rats were prepared by testosterone propionate injection (1.5 mg/rat). After 70 days, daily vaginal smears were performed for 10 days until no obvious sexual cycle was observed, indicating that androgen-sterilized anovulatory rats were successfully established. High performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) was used to analyse BSY chemical composition. Levels of follicular stimulating hormone (FSH), luteinizing hormone (LH), oestradiol (E2), progesterone (P), prolactin (PRL), inhibin (INH), activin (ACT) and follistatin (FS) were determined by radioimmunoassay or enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Western blotting was used to determine Bcl-2, cleaved-caspase-3, Bax, MMP-9 and VEGF in ovarian tissues.Results: BSY increased (p < 0.05) the levels of FSH, LH, E2 (p < 0.05) and ACT, but decreased (p < 0.05) the levels of PRL, INH and FS, relative to control rats. Expressions of VEGF (p < 0.01), MMP-9 (p < 0.05) and Bcl-2 (p < 0.01) were up-regulated by BSY, whereas Bax (p < 0.01) and C-caspase-3 (p < 0.01) were down-regulated.Conclusion: BSY promotes follicular development of anovulatory rats via regulating INH-ACT-FS hormones, VEGF, MMP-9, Caspase-3, Bax, and Bcl-2. Thus, BSY may have the potential to be developed for clinical management of infertility.Keywords: Bushen yixue decoction, Follicular development, Inhibin-Activin-Follistatin (INH-ACT-FS) system, Androgen-sterilized anovulatory rat
Improving Audio-Visual Speech Recognition by Lip-Subword Correlation Based Visual Pre-training and Cross-Modal Fusion Encoder
In recent research, slight performance improvement is observed from automatic
speech recognition systems to audio-visual speech recognition systems in the
end-to-end framework with low-quality videos. Unmatching convergence rates and
specialized input representations between audio and visual modalities are
considered to cause the problem. In this paper, we propose two novel techniques
to improve audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) under a pre-training and
fine-tuning training framework. First, we explore the correlation between lip
shapes and syllable-level subword units in Mandarin to establish good
frame-level syllable boundaries from lip shapes. This enables accurate
alignment of video and audio streams during visual model pre-training and
cross-modal fusion. Next, we propose an audio-guided cross-modal fusion encoder
(CMFE) neural network to utilize main training parameters for multiple
cross-modal attention layers to make full use of modality complementarity.
Experiments on the MISP2021-AVSR data set show the effectiveness of the two
proposed techniques. Together, using only a relatively small amount of training
data, the final system achieves better performances than state-of-the-art
systems with more complex front-ends and back-ends.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, published in ICME202
Preparation and properties of a washable flame-retardant coated fabric
In this study, a flame-retardant-coating (FRC) agent has been prepared using hydrophobic organic silicone-phosphorus-nitrogen flame retardant and acrylic emulsion. Polyester-cotton blend fabric (P/C) has been treated with FRC agent, and the finishing process, thermal decomposition, flame retardancy, washability, softness and other properties are studied. Results show that the treated fabrics are of good flame retardancy; LOI is up to 32%, thermal degradation rate reduces by 7.8 %/min and thermal damage reduces by 74%. Limiting oxygen index (LOI) is found to be 24.6% and 23.7% for 5 and 10 times washing. The fastness shows excellent washability
PCT: Point cloud transformer
The irregular domain and lack of ordering make it challenging to design deep
neural networks for point cloud processing. This paper presents a novel
framework named Point Cloud Transformer(PCT) for point cloud learning. PCT is
based on Transformer, which achieves huge success in natural language
processing and displays great potential in image processing. It is inherently
permutation invariant for processing a sequence of points, making it
well-suited for point cloud learning. To better capture local context within
the point cloud, we enhance input embedding with the support of farthest point
sampling and nearest neighbor search. Extensive experiments demonstrate that
the PCT achieves the state-of-the-art performance on shape classification, part
segmentation and normal estimation tasks.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
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