Endoscopic Retrograde Cholangiopancreatography in Elderly Patients

SUMMARYEndoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) is effective in the investigation and treatment of pan-creatic and biliary disease. As the prevalence of bile duct stones and malignant disease and the risk of surgery rise with age, studies on the therapeutic success of ERCP in the elderly become more popular. There have been publications documenting the safety of ERCP in elderly patients from the age of 65 to 85 years. Recent studies have also shown that ERCP is safe and effective in those aged 90 years and older. Outcomes of ERCP in terms of success and complication rates are similar to those in younger patients. Therefore, the decision to undergo ERCP should be determined by clinical need, and age alone should not be a contraindication to endoscopic intervention. Here, we review the indications, pre-procedure preparation, sedation and analgesia, monitoring/procedural care, complications, and outcomes of diagnostic and therapeutic ERCP in the elderly

Experimental analysis for the effect of dynamic capillarity on stress transformation in porous silicon

The evolution of real-time stress in porous silicon(PS) during drying is investigated using micro-Raman spectroscopy. The results show that the PS sample underwent non-negligible stress when immersed in liquid and suffered a stress impulsion during drying. Such nonlinear transformation and nonhomogeneneous distribution of stress are regarded as the coupling effects of several physical phenomena attributable to the intricate topological structure of PS. The effect of dynamic capillarity can induce microcracks and even collapse in PSstructures during manufacture and storage.This work is funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China Contract Nos. 10732080 and 10502014

Online Retailing Channel Addition: Risk Alleviation or Risk Maker?

The retailing industry traditionally considers the optimal products selection and pricing problem, a complex and challenging one, from marketing and consumer behavior\u27s perspectives. In this study, we take a risk perspective and offer an alternative solution to tackling the problem, echoing the most recent literature that looks at non-risk aspects, such as expected consumer preference, market size and predicted profitability. Adopting a mean-variance framework, our approach explicitly takes into account the interconnectedness of retail products and their impact on risk at the portfolio (retailer) level. Extending the analysis to multiple-channel decisions, our results suggest that the introduction of a new retailing channel (e.g. online shops) can reduce the portfolio risk, whereas a lack of synergy between the new channel and the existing ones may lead to a negative impact on the overall performance. We also provide managerial implications on several conditions when retailers are more economically inclined to introduce more retail channels. Interestingly, our model indicates that larger retailers are less likely to expand their online platform

StyleS2ST: Zero-shot Style Transfer for Direct Speech-to-speech Translation

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) has gradually become popular as it has many advantages compared with cascade S2ST. However, current research mainly focuses on the accuracy of semantic translation and ignores the speech style transfer from a source language to a target language. The lack of high-fidelity expressive parallel data makes such style transfer challenging, especially in more practical zero-shot scenarios. To solve this problem, we first build a parallel corpus using a multi-lingual multi-speaker text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) system and then propose the StyleS2ST model with cross-lingual speech style transfer ability based on a style adaptor on a direct S2ST system framework. Enabling continuous style space modeling of an acoustic model through parallel corpus training and non-parallel TTS data augmentation, StyleS2ST captures cross-lingual acoustic feature mapping from the source to the target language. Experiments show that StyleS2ST achieves good style similarity and naturalness in both in-set and out-of-set zero-shot scenarios.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 202

Circulant preconditioners for solving differential equations with multidelays

AbstractWe consider the solution of differential equations with multidelays by using boundary value methods (BVMs). These methods require the solution of some nonsymmetric, large and sparse linear systems. The GMRES method with the Strang-type block-circulant preconditioner is proposed to solve these linear systems. If an Ak1,k2-stable BVM is used, we show that our preconditioner is invertible and the spectrum of the preconditioned matrix is clustered. It follows that when the GMRES method is applied to solving the preconditioned systems, the method would converge fast. Numerical results are given to show the effectiveness of our methods