Action Sensitivity Learning for Temporal Action Localization

Temporal action localization (TAL), which involves recognizing and locating action instances, is a challenging task in video understanding. Most existing approaches directly predict action classes and regress offsets to boundaries, while overlooking the discrepant importance of each frame. In this paper, we propose an Action Sensitivity Learning framework (ASL) to tackle this task, which aims to assess the value of each frame and then leverage the generated action sensitivity to recalibrate the training procedure. We first introduce a lightweight Action Sensitivity Evaluator to learn the action sensitivity at the class level and instance level, respectively. The outputs of the two branches are combined to reweight the gradient of the two sub-tasks. Moreover, based on the action sensitivity of each frame, we design an Action Sensitive Contrastive Loss to enhance features, where the action-aware frames are sampled as positive pairs to push away the action-irrelevant frames. The extensive studies on various action localization benchmarks (i.e., MultiThumos, Charades, Ego4D-Moment Queries v1.0, Epic-Kitchens 100, Thumos14 and ActivityNet1.3) show that ASL surpasses the state-of-the-art in terms of average-mAP under multiple types of scenarios, e.g., single-labeled, densely-labeled and egocentric.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 202

Effective inhibition of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) replication in vitro by vector-delivered microRNAs targeting the 3D gene

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) causes an economically important and highly contagious disease of cloven-hoofed animals. RNAi triggered by small RNA molecules, including siRNAs and miRNAs, offers a new approach for controlling viral infections. There is no report available for FMDV inhibition by vector-delivered miRNA, although miRNA is believed to have more potential than siRNA. In this study, the inhibitory effects of vector-delivered miRNAs targeting the 3D gene on FMDV replication were examined.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Four pairs of oligonucleotides encoding 3D-specific miRNA of FMDV were designed and selected for construction of miRNA expression plasmids. In the reporter assays, two of four miRNA expression plasmids were able to significantly silence the expression of 3D-GFP fusion proteins from the reporter plasmid, p3D-GFP, which was cotransfected with each miRNA expression plasmid. After detecting the silencing effects of the reporter genes, the inhibitory effects of FMDV replication were determined in the miRNA expression plasmid-transfected and FMDV-infected cells. Virus titration and real-time RT-PCR assays showed that the p3D715-miR and p3D983-miR plasmids were able to potently inhibit the replication of FMDV when BHK-21 cells were infected with FMDV.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our results indicated that vector-delivered miRNAs targeting the 3D gene efficiently inhibits FMDV replication <it>in vitro</it>. This finding provides evidence that miRNAs could be used as a potential tool against FMDV infection.</p

Lentviral-mediated RNAi to inhibit target gene expression of the porcine integrin αv subunit, the FMDV receptor, and against FMDV infection in PK-15 cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>shRNA targeting the integrin αv subunit, which is the foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) receptor, plays a key role in virus attachment to susceptible cells. We constructed a RNAi lentiviral vector, iαv pLenti6/BLOCK -iT™, which expressed siRNA targeting the FMDV receptor, the porcine integrin αv subunit, on PK-15 cells. We also produced a lentiviral stock, established an iαv-PK-15 cell line, evaluated the gene silencing efficiency of mRNA using real-time qRT-PCR, integrand αv expression by indirect immunofluorescence assay (IIF) and cell enzyme linked immunosorbent assays (cell ELISA), and investigated the in vivo inhibitory effect of shRNA on FMDV replication in PK-15 cells.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Our results indicated successful establishment of the iαv U6 RNAi entry vector and the iαv pLenti6/BLOCK -iT expression vector. The functional titer of obtained virus was 1.0 × 10⁶TU/mL. To compare with the control and mock group, the iαv-PK-15 group αv mRNA expression rate in group was reduced by 89.5%, whilst IIF and cell ELISA clearly indicated suppression in the experimental group. Thus, iαv-PK-15 cells could reduce virus growth by more than three-fold and there was a > 99% reduction in virus titer when cells were challenged with 10²TCID₅₀of FMDV.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Iαv-PK-15 cells were demonstrated as a cell model for anti-FMDV potency testing, and this study suggests that shRNA could be a viable therapeutic approach for controlling the severity of FMD infection and spread.</p

Development and validation of novel immune-inflammation-based clinical predictive nomograms in HER2-negative advanced gastric cancer

PurposeTo explore the predictive value of multiple immune-inflammatory biomarkers including serum VEGFA and systemic immune-inflammation index (SII) in HER2-negative advanced gastric cancer (AGC) and establish nomograms for predicting the first-line chemotherapeutic efficacy, progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) of patients with this fatal disease.MethodsFrom November 2017 to April 2022, 102 and 34 patients with a diagnosis of HER2-negative AGC at the First Affiliated Hospital of Bengbu Medical College were enrolled as development and validation cohorts, respectively. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to evaluate the clinical value of the candidate indicators. The variables were screened using LASSO regression analysis. Predictive models were developed using significant predictors and are displayed as nomograms.ResultsBaseline VEGFA expression was significantly higher in HER2-negative AGC patients than in nonneoplastic patients and was associated with malignant serous effusion and therapeutic efficacy (all p&lt;0.001). Multivariate analysis indicated that VEGFA was an independent predictor for first-line therapeutic efficacy and PFS (both p&lt;0.01) and SII was an independent predictor for first-line PFS and OS (both p&lt;0.05) in HER2-negative AGC patients. The therapeutic efficacy model had an R2 of 0.37, a Brier score of 0.15, and a Harrell’s C-index of 0.82 in the development cohort and 0.90 in the validation cohort. The decision curve analysis indicated that the model added more net benefits than VEGFA assessment alone. The PFS/OS models had Harrell’s C-indexes of 0.71/0.69 in the development cohort and 0.71/0.62 in the validation cohort.ConclusionThe established nomograms integrating serum VEGFA/SII and commonly available baseline characteristics provided satisfactory performance in predicting the therapeutic efficacy and prognosis of HER2-negative AGC patients

Evolutionary Analysis of Structural Protein Gene VP1 of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus Serotype Asia 1

Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) serotype Asia 1 was mostly endemic in Asia and then was responsible for economically important viral disease of cloven-hoofed animals, but the study on its selection and evolutionary process is comparatively rare. In this study, we characterized 377 isolates from Asia collected up until 2012, including four vaccine strains. Maximum likelihood analysis suggested that the strains circulating in Asia were classified into 8 different groups (groups I–VIII) or were unclassified (viruses collected before 2000). On the basis of divergence time analyses, we infer that the TMRCA of Asia 1 virus existed approximately 86.29 years ago. The result suggested that the virus had a high mutation rate (5.745 × 10−3 substitutions/site/year) in comparison to the other serotypes of FMDV VP1 gene. Furthermore, the structural protein VP1 was under lower selection pressure and the positive selection occurred at many sites, and four codons (positions 141, 146, 151, and 169) were located in known critical antigenic residues. The remaining sites were not located in known functional regions and were moderately conserved, and the reason for supporting all sites under positive selection remains to be elucidated because the power of these analyses was largely unknown

Factors Influencing Chinese Male's Willingness to Undergo Circumcision: A Cross-Sectional Study in Western China

BACKGROUND: Male circumcision (MC) has been shown to reduce the risk of female to male transmission of HIV. The goal of this survey was to explore the acceptability of MC among the Chinese and to identify factors associated with circumcision preference. METHODS: A cross-sectional survey was conducted between September 2009 and December 2010. We interviewed 2,219 male community participants, from three high HIV prevalence provinces in western China. A structured questionnaire was used to collect data on MC knowledge, willingness to accept MC, reasons to accept or refuse MC, and sexual behaviors and health. For those who refused MC, a health education intervention providing information on the benefits of circumcision was conducted. We used multiple logistic regression models to identify factors associated with the acceptability of MC. RESULTS: Of the respondents (n = 2,219), 44.6% (989/2,219) reported they would accept MC for the following reasons: promotion of female partners' hygiene (60.3%), redundant foreskin (59.4%), prevention of penile cancer (50.2%), enhanced sexual pleasure (41.4%), and protection against HIV and STDs (34.2%). The multivariable logistic regression showed that five factors were associated with MC willingness: long foreskin (OR = 15.98), residing in Xinjiang province (OR = 3.69), being younger than 25 (OR = 1.60), knowing hazards of redundant foreskin (OR = 1.78), and having a friend who underwent circumcision (OR = 1.36). CONCLUSION: The acceptability of male circumcision was high among the general population in China. Our study elucidates the factors associated with circumcision preference and suggests that more health education campaigns about positive health effects are necessary to increase the MC rate in China

A Characterization of Maximally Entangled Two-Qubit States

As already known by Rana&rsquo;s result, all eigenvalues of any partial-transposed bipartite state fall within the closed interval [&minus;12,1]. In this note, we study a family of bipartite quantum states where the minimal eigenvalues of partial-transposed states are &minus;12. For a two-qubit system, we find that the minimal eigenvalue of its partial-transposed state is &minus;12 if and only if such a two-qubit state is maximally entangled. However this result does not hold in general for a two-qudit system when the dimensions of the underlying space are larger than two

Scattering Intensity Analysis and Classification of Two Types of Rice Based on Multi-Temporal and Multi-Mode Simulated Compact Polarimetric SAR Data

Because transmitting polarization can be an arbitrary elliptical wave, and theoretically, there are numerous possibilities of hybrid dual-pol modes, therefore, it is necessary to explore the feature recognition and classification ability of compact polarimetric (CP) parameters under different transmitting and receiving modes to different ground objects. In this paper, we first simulated, extracted, and analyzed the scattering intensity of two types of rice of six temporal CP synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data under three transmitting modes. Then, during different phenology stages, the optimal parameters for distinguishing transplanting hybrid rice (T&ndash;H) and direct-sown japonica rice (D&ndash;J) were acquired. Finally, a decision tree classification model was established based on the optimal parameters to carry out the fine classification of the two types of rice and to verify the results. The results showed that this strategy can obtain a high classification accuracy for the two types of rice with an overall classification accuracy of more than 95% and a kappa coefficient of more than 0.94. In addition, and importantly, we found that the CP parameters in the 1103 period (harvest stage) were the best CP parameters to distinguish the two types of rice, followed by the 0730 (seedling&ndash;elongation stage), 0612 (seedling stage), and 0916 (heading&ndash;flowering stage) periods