Nonlinear consolidation of vertical drains with coupled radial-vertical flow considering time and depth dependent vacuum pressure

The system of vacuum pressure combined with vertical drains to accelerate soil consolidation is one of the most effective ground improvement methods. The consolidation theories of soft soil improved by vertical drains including void ratio–dependent compressibility and permeability have been widely applied in practice to predict the consolidation behavior. In this paper, analytical solutions of the consolidation of vertical drains are derived incorporating the loss and propagating stage of vacuum pressure. In addition, special solutions are obtained for the cases of instantaneous surcharge loading and staged surcharge loading, based on the general solution. The solution is verified by ignoring the propagating stage of vacuum pressure formation and comparing it with an existing solution. The effects of vacuum pressure loss and propagating stage combined with other parameters are investigated through the ratio between excess pore water pressure and surcharge loading

Polo-like kinase 1 regulates mitotic arrest after UV irradiation through dephosphorylation of p53 and inducing p53 degradation

AbstractUltraviolet (UV) irradiation can result in cell cycle arrest. The reactivation of Polo-like kinase 1 (Plk1) is necessary for cell cycle reentry. But the mechanism of how Plk1 regulates p53 in UV-induced mitotic arrest cells remained elusive. Here we find that UV treatment leads HEK293 cells to inverse changes of Plk1 and p53. Over-expression of Plk1 rescue UV-induced mitotic arrest cells by inhibiting p53 activation. Plk1 could also inhibit p53 phosphorylation at Ser15, thus facilitates its nuclear export and degradation. Further examination shows that Plk1, p53 and Cdc25C can form a large complex. Plk1 could bind to the sequence-specific DNA-binding domain of p53 and active Cdc25C by hyperphosphorylation. These results hypothesize that Plk1 and Cdc25C participate in recovery the mitotic arrest through binding to the different domain of p53. Cdc25C may first be actived by Plk1, and then its phosphatase activity makes p53 dephosphorylated at Ser15

Assessment of plasma B7-H3 levels in pediatric patients with different degrees of surgical stress

Background: Surgical stress initiates a series of host hormone, metabolism and immune responses, which predominantly affect the homeostatic mechanism of patients with major surgery. B7-H3 is a co-stimulatory molecule and has been shown to participate in both adaptive and innate immune responses. In this study we evaluated the clinical significance of plasma B7-H3 levels in pediatric patients with different types of operation and degrees of surgical stress. Methods: A total of 48 children received pediatric general and cardiac surgery were recruited into this study. Based on the surgical stress scoring, children were divided into moderate stress (n?=?14) and severe stress (n?=?34) groups. Plasma B7-H3 levels were assessed at selected time points: before surgery, immediately after surgery, at day 1, day 3, and day 7 after surgery. Correlations between plasma B7-H3 levels and surgical stress scores were also examined. Results: Plasma B7-H3 levels were significantly decreased in all 48 pediatric patients after surgery compared to the B7-H3 level before surgery (p?<?0.01). Children with general surgery showed significant decreases in plasma B7-H3 immediately after surgery, and at day 3 and day 7 after surgery (p?<?0.05, p?<?0.01), whereas children with cardiac surgery showed reduced plasma B7-H3 immediately after surgery and at day 3 after surgery (p?<?0.05). Plasma B7-H3 in cardiac surgery group was dropped much lower than that in general surgery group at day 1 (p?<?0.05) and day 3 (p?<?0.01) after surgery. Significantly reduced plasma B7-H3 was observed in the severe stress group, but not in the moderate stress group, immediately after surgery and at day 3 after surgery (p?<?0.05), and severe stress group had significantly lower plasma B7-H3 levels than moderate stress group at day 1, day 3, and day 7 after surgery (p?<?0.05). Furthermore, plasma B7-H3 levels at day 1 (p?=?0.01) and day 3 (p?=?0.025) after surgery correlated negatively with surgical stress scores. Conclusions: Plasma B7-H3 levels were decreased significantly in children subjected to pediatric general and cardiac surgery, which is closely associated with the severity of surgical stress. The negative correlation of plasma B7-H3 levels at day 1 and day 3 after surgery with surgical stress scoring implicates that the plasma B7-H3 level might be a useful biomarker for monitoring stress intensity during pediatric surgery

Risk factors of distant brain failure for patients with newly diagnosed brain metastases treated with stereotactic radiotherapy alone

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Objective</p> <p>To explore the risk factors of distant brain failure (DBF) for patients with brain metastasis (BM) who were treated with stereotactic radiotherapy alone and to group the patients on the basis of their risk levels.</p> <p>Methods and Materials</p> <p>We retrospectively analyzed 132 newly diagnosed BM patients who were treated with stereotactic radiotherapy alone from May 2000 to April 2010. Kaplan-Meier and Cox proportional hazards regression analyses were performed for univariate and multivariate analyses.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The 1-year incidence rate of DBF was 44.7%, and the median DBF time (MDBFT) was 18 months. In multivariate analysis, the risk factors of DBF were the number of BMs greater than 1 (p = 0.041), uncontrolled extracranial disease (p = 0.005), interval time (IT) of less than 60 months between the diagnosis of primary tumor and BM (p = 0.024), and total volume of BM was greater than 6 cc (p = 0.049). Each risk factor was assigned 1 score. The median survival times for the patients with scores of 0-1, 2-3, and 4 were 31, 12, and 10 months, respectively, and the corresponding MDBFTs were not reached, 13, and 3 months, respectively, (p < 0.001). The crude DBF incidence rates in patients with scores of 0-1, 2-3, and 4 were 14.8%, 50.0%, and 76.9%, respectively, (p < 0.001).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The patients with scores of 0-1 had a lower risk of DBF than the patients with higher scores did, and it may be reasonable to treat these patients with SRS alone and resort to whole-brain radiation therapy only for salvage. The patients with a score of 4 had the highest risk of developing DBF after stereotactic radiotherapy alone, these patients may be candidates for initial whole-brain radiation therapy or clinical trials. The patients with a score of 2-3 had a moderate risk of developing DBF, SRT alone combined with close clinical monitoring would be the optimal treatment regimen for such patients, and for those patients with difficulties in receiving close clinical mornitoring, SRT combined with WBRT will be more suitable.</p

A new score system for predicting response to cardiac resynchronization therapy

Background: The aim of this study was to establish a score system derived from clinical, echocardiographic and electrocardiographic indexes and evaluate its clinical value for cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) patient selection. Methods: Ninety-three patients receiving CRT were enrolled. A patient selection score system was generated by the clinical, echocardiographic and electrocardiographic parameters achieving a significant level by univariate and multivariate Cox regression model. The positive response to CRT was a left ventricular end systolic volume decrease of ≥ 15% and not reaching primary clinical endpoint (death or re-hospitalization for heart failure) at the end of follow-up. Results: Thirty-nine patients were CRT non-responders (41.94%) and 54 were responders (58.06%). A 4-point score system was generated based on tricuspid annular plane systolic ex­cursion (TAPSE), longitudinal strain (LS), and complete left bundle branch block (CLBBB) combined with a wide QRS duration (QRSd). The sensitivity and specificity for prediction of a positive response to CRT at a score &gt; 2 were 0.823 and 0.850, respectively (AUC: 0.92295% CI 0.691–0.916, p&lt; 0.001). Conclusions: A patient selection score system based on the integration of TAPSE, LS and CLBBB combined with a wide QRSd can help to predict positive response to CRT effectively and reliably

The Protective Antibodies Induced by a Novel Epitope of Human TNF-α Could Suppress the Development of Collagen-Induced Arthritis

Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) is a major inflammatory mediator that exhibits actions leading to tissue destruction and hampering recovery from damage. At present, two antibodies against human TNF-α (hTNF-α) are available, which are widely used for the clinic treatment of certain inflammatory diseases. This work was undertaken to identify a novel functional epitope of hTNF-α. We performed screening peptide library against anti-hTNF-α antibodies, ELISA and competitive ELISA to obtain the epitope of hTNF-α. The key residues of the epitope were identified by means of combinatorial alanine scanning and site-specific mutagenesis. The N terminus (80–91 aa) of hTNF-α proved to be a novel epitope (YG1). The two amino acids of YG1, proline and valine, were identified as the key residues, which were important for hTNF-α biological function. Furthermore, the function of the epitope was addressed on an animal model of collagen-induced arthritis (CIA). CIA could be suppressed in an animal model by prevaccination with the derivative peptides of YG1. The antibodies of YG1 could also inhibit the cytotoxicity of hTNF-α. These results demonstrate that YG1 is a novel epitope associated with the biological function of hTNF-α and the antibodies against YG1 can inhibit the development of CIA in animal model, so it would be a potential target of new therapeutic antibodies

BaTiO3 piezoelectric microfiber composites for mechanical energy harvesting

Conference Name:2011 International Symposium on Advanced Packaging Materials, APM 2011. Conference Address: Xiamen, China. Time:October 25, 2011 - October 28, 2011.In this paper, green microfibers of barium titanate precursor were prepared by the combination of Sol-Gel processing and Gel-spinning technique. The piezoelectric microfibers of ceramic BaTiO3 were sintered, with diameter of 15μm and length of 20mm, respectively. Interdigitated electrodes were printed on an epoxy resin substrate. BaTiO3 microfibers were then aligned on the interdigitated electrodes and covered with the solution of epoxy resin, so as to obtain Inter-Digitated Electrodes Piezoelectric Fiber/polymer Composites, IDEPFC. The periodic output voltages with maximum value of 0.86V were obtained under harmonic excitation, by using a finger to apply a dynamic load on the top of the IDEPFC. ? 2011 IEEE

LyricWhiz: Robust Multilingual Zero-shot Lyrics Transcription by Whispering to ChatGPT

We introduce LyricWhiz, a robust, multilingual, and zero-shot automatic lyrics transcription method achieving state-of-the-art performance on various lyrics transcription datasets, even in challenging genres such as rock and metal. Our novel, training-free approach utilizes Whisper, a weakly supervised robust speech recognition model, and GPT-4, today's most performant chat-based large language model. In the proposed method, Whisper functions as the "ear" by transcribing the audio, while GPT-4 serves as the "brain," acting as an annotator with a strong performance for contextualized output selection and correction. Our experiments show that LyricWhiz significantly reduces Word Error Rate compared to existing methods in English and can effectively transcribe lyrics across multiple languages. Furthermore, we use LyricWhiz to create the first publicly available, large-scale, multilingual lyrics transcription dataset with a CC-BY-NC-SA copyright license, based on MTG-Jamendo, and offer a human-annotated subset for noise level estimation and evaluation. We anticipate that our proposed method and dataset will advance the development of multilingual lyrics transcription, a challenging and emerging task.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables, accepted by ISMIR 202

A new diagnostic model of primary open angle glaucoma based on FD-OCT parameters

AIM: To build a clinical diagnostic model of primary open angle glaucoma (POAG) using the normal probability chart of frequency-domain optical coherence tomography (FD-OCT). METHODS: This is a cross-sectional study. Total 133 eyes from 133 healthy subjects and 99 eyes from 99 early POAG patients were included in the study. The retinal nerve fibre layer (RNFL) thickness parameters of optic nerve head (ONH) and RNFL3.45 scan were measured in one randomly selected eye of each subject using RTVue-100 FD-OCT. Then, we used these parameters to establish the diagnostic models. Four different diagnostic models based on two different area partition strategies on ONH and RNFL3.45 parameters, including ONH traditional area partition model (ONH-T), ONH new area partition model (ONH-N), RNFL3.45 traditional area partition model (RNFL3.45-T) and RNFL3.45 new area partition model (RNFL3.45-N), were built and tested by cross-validation. RESULTS: The new area partition models had higher area under the receiver operating characteristic (AROC; ONH-N: 0.990; RNFL3.45-N: 0.939) than corresponding traditional area partition models (ONH-T: 0.979; RNFL3.45-T: 0.881). There was no statistical difference among AROC of ONH-T, ONH-N, and RNFL3.45-N. Nevertheless, ONH-N was the simplest model. CONCLUSION: The new area partition models had higher diagnostic accuracy than corresponding traditional area partition models, which can improve the diagnostic ability of early POAG. In particular, the simplest ONH-N diagnostic model may be convenient for clinical application