Weight Analysis for Multiattribute Group Decision-Making with Interval Grey Numbers Based on Decision-Makers’ Psychological Criteria

open access articleTo address the problem of multiattribute group decision-making with interval grey numbers, decision matrices are adjusted using kernels of interval grey numbers to reduce the psychological effects of decision-makers. The comprehensive weights of attributes are obtained by aggregating the subjective weights with objective weights, which are calculated based on the accuracy and difference of attributes. Considering the consistent, best, and worst decision-making abilities of decision-makers, grey incidence models are established to obtain the consistency weights and individual bipolar weights of decision-makers; then, the comprehensive weights of decision-makers are determined. A clustering approach of interval grey numbers is presented, and overall evaluations are obtained. Finally, an example is provided and its validity is tested to verify the feasibility of the proposed method

Clinical characteristics and management of immune checkpoint inhibitor-related cardiotoxicity: A single-center experience

BackgroundImmune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) have revolutionized cancer therapy in the past decade and amplify T-cell-mediated immune responses by disrupting immunoinhibitory signals. The augmented T-cell immune response has led to a range of immune-related adverse effects (irAEs). Immune-related cardiotoxicity has been reported in case series but has been underappreciated due to difficulties in diagnosis. This article describes epidemiological, clinical presentation, subtype, and treatment data and a new systematic framework for the clinical management of cardiotoxicity.MethodsData were extracted for cancer patients who received ICIs in a single center between January 1, 2020, and February 28, 2022. ICI-associated cardiotoxicity was clinically diagnosed based on clinical presentations, biochemical biomarkers, and imaging features.ResultsWe identified a total of 12 (2.46%) cases of ICI-related cardiotoxicity from 487 patients who received PD-1 or PD-L1 inhibitors. All patients were diagnosed with advanced or metastatic solid tumors. The severity of ICI-related cardiotoxicity ranged from subclinical cardiac abnormalities (subclinical type) with only asymptomatic troponin-I (TnI) elevations (25.0%) to symptomatic cardiac abnormalities (clinical type) (75.0%). Patients with symptomatic cardiac abnormalities had several manifestations, including tachyarrhythmia (16.7%), bradyarrhythmia (41.7%), or cardiac failure (8.3%). The median immunotherapy exposure time was 1.5 doses (range: 1 to 5), and the median time from the initial immunotherapy to the onset of ICI-related cardiotoxicity was 33.5 days (IQR: 20.3 to 46.8). Most patients, including those with subclinical cardiac abnormalities, were administered systemic corticosteroids (58.3%). One (8.3%) patient was put on mechanical ventilation, one (8.3%) received plasma exchange therapy, one (8.3%) was implanted with a pacemaker, and one (8.3%) was admitted to the ICU. Three patients with symptomatic cardiac abnormalities (25.0%) died, and other patients presented with significant clinical improvement with good outcomes.ConclusionICI-related cardiotoxicity is uncommon but critical with a high mortality rate and poor prognosis, especially for a small group of patients with symptomatic cardiac abnormalities. More attention should be given to cardiotoxicity associated with ICIs, and these patients should be given baseline examinations and biochemical analyses before and after the initiation of immunotherapy, intensive cardiac assessments, an accurate and rapid diagnosis, and timely multidisciplinary management with immunosuppressive agents and other necessary clinical interventions

Raffinose degradation-related gene GhAGAL3 was screened out responding to salinity stress through expression patterns of GhAGALs family genes

A-galactosidases (AGALs), the oligosaccharide (RFO) catabolic genes of the raffinose family, play crucial roles in plant growth and development and in adversity stress. They can break down the non-reducing terminal galactose residues of glycolipids and sugar chains. In this study, the whole genome of AGALs was analyzed. Bioinformatics analysis was conducted to analyze members of the AGAL family in Gossypium hirsutum, Gossypium arboreum, Gossypium barbadense, and Gossypium raimondii. Meanwhile, RT-qPCR was carried out to analyze the expression patterns of AGAL family members in different tissues of terrestrial cotton. It was found that a series of environmental factors stimulated the expression of the GhAGAL3 gene. The function of GhAGAL3 was verified through virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS). As a result, GhAGAL3 gene silencing resulted in milder wilting of seedlings than the controls, and a significant increase in the raffinose content in cotton, indicating that GhAGAL3 responded to NaCl stress. The increase in raffinose content improved the tolerance of cotton. Findings in this study lay an important foundation for further research on the role of the GhAGAL3 gene family in the molecular mechanism of abiotic stress resistance in cotton

Characterization and gene expression patterns analysis implies BSK family genes respond to salinity stress in cotton

Identification, evolution, and expression patterns of BSK (BR signaling kinase) family genes revealed that BSKs participated in the response of cotton to abiotic stress and maintained the growth of cotton in extreme environment. The steroidal hormone brassinosteroids (BR) play important roles in different plant biological processes. This study focused on BSK which were downstream regulatory element of BR, in order to help to decipher the functions of BSKs genes from cotton on growth development and responses to abiotic stresses and lean the evolutionary relationship of cotton BSKs. BSKs are a class of plant-specific receptor-like cytoplasmic kinases involved in BR signal transduction. In this study, bioinformatics methods were used to identify the cotton BSKs gene family at the cotton genome level, and the gene structure, promoter elements, protein structure and properties, gene expression patterns and candidate interacting proteins were analyzed. In the present study, a total of 152 BSKs were identified by a genome-wide search in four cotton species and other 11 plant species, and phylogenetic analysis revealed three evolutionary clades. It was identified that BSKs contain typical PKc and TPR domains, the N-terminus is composed of extended chains and helical structures. Cotton BSKs genes show different expression patterns in different tissues and organs. The gene promoter contains numerous cis-acting elements induced by hormones and abiotic stress, the hormone ABA and Cold-inducing related elements have the highest count, indicating that cotton BSK genes may be regulated by various hormones at different growth stages and involved in the response regulation of cotton to various stresses. The expression analysis of BSKs in cotton showed that the expression levels of GhBSK06, GhBSK10, GhBSK21 and GhBSK24 were significantly increased with salt-inducing. This study is helpful to analyze the function of cotton BSKs genes in growth and development and in response to stress

Coordinated Resource Optimization in Behavioral Synthesis

Abstract—Reducing resource usage is one of the most important optimization objectives in behavioral synthesis due to its direct impact on power, performance and cost. The datapath in a typical design is composed of different kinds of components, including functional units, registers and multiplexers. To optimize the overall resource usage, a behavioral synthesis tool should consider all kinds of components at the same time. However, most previous work on behavioral synthesis has the limitations of (i) not being able to consider all kinds of resources globally, and/or (ii) separating the synthesis process into a sequence of optimization steps without a consistent optimization objective. In this paper we present a behavioral synthesis flow in which all types of components in the datapath are modeled and optimized consistently. The key idea is to feed to the scheduler the intentions for sharing functional units and registers in favor of the global optimization goal (such as total area), so that the scheduler could generate a schedule that makes the sharing intentions feasible. Experiments show that compared to the solution of minimizing functional unit requirements in scheduling and using the least number of functional units and registers in binding, our solution achieves a 24 % reduction in total area; compared to the online tool provided by c-to-verilog.com, our solution achieves a 30% reduction on average. I

Tackling Air Pollution in China—What do We Learn from the Great Smog of 1950s in LONDON

Since the prolonged, severe smog that blanketed many Chinese cities in first months of 2013, living in smog has become “normal” to most people living in mainland China. This has not only caused serious harm to public health, but also resulted in massive economic losses in many other ways. Tackling the current air pollution has become crucial to China’s long-term economic and social sustainable development. This paper aims to find the causes of the current severe air quality and explore the possible solutions by reviewing the current literature, and by comparing China’s air pollution regulations to that of the post London Killer Smog of 1952, in the United Kingdom (UK). It is hoped that China will learn the lesson from the UK, and decouple its economic growth from the detrimental impact of environment. Policy suggestions are made

The Advantage of Word-Based Processing in Chinese Reading: Evidence From Eye Movements

In 2 experiments, we tested the prediction that reading is more efficient when characters belonging to a word are presented simultaneously than when they are not in Chinese reading using a novel variation of the moving window paradigm (McConkie &amp; Rayner, 1975). In Experiment 1, we found that reading was slowed down when Chinese readers could not see characters belonging to a word simultaneously compared to when they could do so. In Experiment 2, when Chinese readers could choose whether the 2 characters in the moving window contained a word or 2 characters that did not constitute a word, they had a clear tendency to look at 2 characters belonging to a word simultaneously. The results of the current study provide strong evidence that character processing is affected by word knowledge and the processing of other characters belonging to the same word in Chinese reading, and add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that words do have psychological reality for Chinese readers. The results also suggest that the eye movement control strategy of Chinese readers is rather flexible in that it can be adjusted online to modify the characteristics of the window.</p

Study on Dynamic Characteristics of the Bistable Nonlinear Damper

A conventional dynamic vibration absorber based on resonance effect can hardly satisfy the requirement for low-frequency and broadband vibration control in actual engineering. Combined with passive and nonlinear vibration absorption strategy, this study employed nonlinear characteristics of the magnetic force, bistable structure to establish the dynamic model of the main system with a bistable vibration absorber. The nonlinear motion states of the structure under different excitation conditions were analyzed to explore the inherent relation between the chaotic and large amplitude motion and the vibration absorber’s operating performance. The effect laws of the structural parameters on the dynamic characteristics of the nonlinear vibration absorber and the main system were developed to obtain the optimal parameter settings in the case of resonance and off-resonance of the main system. These results provide an insightful theoretical foundation for the optimal design of the nonlinear vibration absorber