Associations between Aquaglyceroporin Gene Polymorphisms and Risk of Stroke among Patients with Hypertension

Background: Dysregulations ofAQP7andAQP9were found to be related to lipid metabolism abnormality, which had been provento be one of the mechanisms of stroke. However, limited epidemiological studies explore the associations betweenAQP7andAQP9and the risk of stroke among patients with hypertension in China. Aims: We aimed to investigate the associations between genetic variants in AQP7andAQP9and the risk of stroke among patients with hypertension, as well as to explore gene-gene andgene-environment interactions. Methods: Baseline blood samples were drawn from 211 cases with stroke and 633 matched controls. Genomic DNA was extracted by a commercially available kit. Genotyping of 5 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in AQP7 (rs2989924, rs3758269, and rs2542743) and AQP9 (rs57139208, rs16939881) was performed by the polymerase chain reaction assay with TaqMan probes. Results: Participants with the rs2989924 GG genotype were found to be with a 1.74-fold increased risk of stroke compared to those with the AA+AG genotype, and this association remained significant after adjustment for potential confounders (odds ratio (OR): 1.74, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.23-2.46). The SNP rs3758269 CC+TT genotype was found to be with a 33% decreased risk of stroke after multivariate adjustment (OR: 0.67, 95% CI: 0.45-0.99) compared to the rs3758269 CC genotype. The significantly increased risk of stroke was prominent among males, patients aged 60 or above, and participants who were overweight and with a harbored genetic variant in SNP rs2989924. After adjusting potential confounders, the SNP rs3758269 CT+TT genotype was found to be significantly associated with a decreased risk of stroke compared to the CC genotype among participants younger than 60 years old or overweight. No statistically significant associations were observed between genotypes of rs2542743, rs57139208, or rs16939881 with the risk of stroke. Neither interactions nor linkage disequilibrium had been observed in this study. Conclusions: This study suggests that SNPs rs2989924 and rs3758269 are associated with the risk of stroke among patients with hypertension, while there were no statistically significant associations between rs2542743, rs57139208, and rs16939881 and the risk of stroke being observed

Anticoagulant effect of low molecular weight heparin on central venous catheters in haemodialysis patients

Purpose: To analyse the effect of low molecular weight heparin on venous catheters in haemodialysis patients.Methods: This study included 140 eligible patients who were randomly and evenly divided into two groups, viz, a study group that received low molecular weight heparin and a control group that received conventional heparin. The clinical effects and incidence of complications were compared for the two groups.Results: No significant difference in general characteristics or the incidence of tube occlusion was detected between the two groups. The mean blood flow volume of the study and control groups were 223.50 ± 19.10 and 222.70 ± 18.70 mL/min, respectively (t = 0.940, p > 0.05), and the incidences of complications (long-term vascular secondary changes and bleeding tendency within 1 year after tube in dwelling) were lower in the study group than in the control group. After haemodialysis, the activated partial thromboplastin time and prothrombin time were shortened in the study group compared with the control group, whereas the platelet level was higher in the study group (146 ± 33 × 109/L) than in the control group (95 ± 36 × 109/L).Conclusion: The use of low molecular weight heparin as an anticoagulant solution for patients undergoing haemodialysis with central venous catheters (CVCs) is less likely to induce haemodialysisassociated complications and has fewer effects on coagulation function than conventional heparin. Thus, low molecular weight heparin seems to be more suitable as an anticoagulant solution in patients with venous catheters.Keywords: Low molecular weight heparin, Haemodialysis, Central venous catheter, Vascular acces

The influences of phytohormones on triacylglycerol accumulation in an oleaginous marine diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum

Environmental stresses such as nitrate deprivation and high light are effective at increasing lipid content in microalgae, but they can also slow down and even stop growth. In this study, the phytohormones methyl jasmonate, salicylic acid, gibberellin, abscisic acid, and ethephon were introduced to cultures of the oleaginous marine diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum in an attempt to increase growth and lipid production. Single-factor experiments showed that the influences of some of the phytohormones were closely related to their concentrations. Methyl jasmonate, abscisic acid, and salicylic acid promoted P. tricornutum growth and lipid accumulation at certain concentrations. The differing effects of the three phytohormones on P. tricornutum may be related to the respective phytohormone's responsive cis-regulatory elements in the upstream regions of the triacylglycerol (TAG) synthesis genes. Methyl jasmonate, abscisic acid, and salicylic acid were further studied in response surface experiments, through which a 141% increase in TAG production was attained for 10-L cultures of P. tricornutum grown under optimal conditions. This study suggests that some phytohormones can promote P. tricornutum lipid accumulation without hindering growth. It also provides another strategy for improving the production of microalgae for use as biodiesel

Laugh Betrays You? Learning Robust Speaker Representation From Speech Containing Non-Verbal Fragments

The success of automatic speaker verification shows that discriminative speaker representations can be extracted from neutral speech. However, as a kind of non-verbal voice, laughter should also carry speaker information intuitively. Thus, this paper focuses on exploring speaker verification about utterances containing non-verbal laughter segments. We collect a set of clips with laughter components by conducting a laughter detection script on VoxCeleb and part of the CN-Celeb dataset. To further filter untrusted clips, probability scores are calculated by our binary laughter detection classifier, which is pre-trained by pure laughter and neutral speech. After that, based on the clips whose scores are over the threshold, we construct trials under two different evaluation scenarios: Laughter-Laughter (LL) and Speech-Laughter (SL). Then a novel method called Laughter-Splicing based Network (LSN) is proposed, which can significantly boost performance in both scenarios and maintain the performance on the neutral speech, such as the VoxCeleb1 test set. Specifically, our system achieves relative 20% and 22% improvement on Laughter-Laughter and Speech-Laughter trials, respectively. The meta-data and sample clips have been released at https://github.com/nevermoreLin/Laugh_LSN.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP202

Visual-UWB Navigation System for Unknown Environments

Navigation applications relying on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) are limited in indoor environments and GNSS-denied outdoor terrains such as dense urban or forests. In this paper, we present a novel accurate, robust and low-cost GNSS-independent navigation system, which is composed of a monocular camera and Ultra-wideband (UWB) transceivers. Visual techniques have gained excellent results when computing the incremental motion of the sensor, and UWB methods have proved to provide promising localization accuracy due to the high time resolution of the UWB ranging signals. However, the monocular visual techniques with scale ambiguity are not suitable for applications requiring metric results, and UWB methods assume that the positions of the UWB transceiver anchor are pre-calibrated and known, thus precluding their application in unknown and challenging environments. To this end, we advocate leveraging the monocular camera and UWB to create a map of visual features and UWB anchors. We propose a visual-UWB Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm which tightly combines visual and UWB measurements to form a joint non-linear optimization problem on Lie-Manifold. The 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) state of the vehicles and the map are estimated by minimizing the UWB ranging errors and landmark reprojection errors. Our navigation system starts with an exploratory task which performs the real-time visual-UWB SLAM to obtain the global map, then the navigation task by reusing this global map. The tasks can be performed by different vehicles in terms of equipped sensors and payload capability in a heterogeneous team. We validate our system on the public datasets, achieving typical centimeter accuracy and 0.1% scale error.Comment: Proceedings of the 31st International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2018

Analysis of contrast sensitivity on examination for pilots

AIM: To study the influential factors of the contrast sensitivity function(CSF), we tested and investigated the CSF of navy pilots. METHODS: Totally 58 pilots(116 eyes)were examined by CSF under the nighttime, nighttime & periglare, daytime, daytime & periglare conditions for 5 spacial frequencies with OPTEC6 500 Vision Tester. RESULTS: From mean diagram of curves, the peak of CSF under the nighttime, nighttime & periglare conditions was at 3-6c/d, daytime, daytime & periglare conditions was at 6c/d. CONCLUSION: The distant CSF is better than the near CSF in navy pilots,the binoculus CSF is better than that of the single eye. The spatial characteristics of CSF in navy pilots were reflected by present study

Preparation of ZnO-Zn 2

Ti-doped ZnO sol-composite films were prepared on the glass substrate by the two-step sol-gel technique. X-ray diffraction, Uv-Vis spectrophotometer, and FS spectrum of composite films were used to help make structure characterization and optical performance testing. The results showed that the composite was a mixture of ZnO + Zn2TiO4. Because of synergistic effect of both semiconductor oxides, composite films had a wide range of spectral response in the visible region, and the absorption band edge was about 510 nm, and the Green Belt of composite films luminous significantly enhanced. Photocatalytic oxidation experiments showed that using the composite films treatment (16.5 ml, l0 mg/L methyl orange aqueous solution)/cm2, the decolorization rate of methyl-orange was 90% after 3 hours irradiation

Preparation of ZnO-Zn 2 TiO 4 Sol Composite Films and Its Photocatalytic Activities

Ti-doped ZnO sol-composite films were prepared on the glass substrate by the two-step sol-gel technique. X-ray diffraction, Uv-Vis spectrophotometer, and FS spectrum of composite films were used to help make structure characterization and optical performance testing. The results showed that the composite was a mixture of ZnO + Zn 2 TiO 4 . Because of synergistic effect of both semiconductor oxides, composite films had a wide range of spectral response in the visible region, and the absorption band edge was about 510 nm, and the Green Belt of composite films luminous significantly enhanced. Photocatalytic oxidation experiments showed that using the composite films treatment (16.5 ml, l0 mg/L methyl orange aqueous solution)/cm 2 , the decolorization rate of methyl-orange was 90% after 3 hours irradiation

ChatFace: Chat-Guided Real Face Editing via Diffusion Latent Space Manipulation

Editing real facial images is a crucial task in computer vision with significant demand in various real-world applications. While GAN-based methods have showed potential in manipulating images especially when combined with CLIP, these methods are limited in their ability to reconstruct real images due to challenging GAN inversion capability. Despite the successful image reconstruction achieved by diffusion-based methods, there are still challenges in effectively manipulating fine-gained facial attributes with textual instructions.To address these issues and facilitate convenient manipulation of real facial images, we propose a novel approach that conduct text-driven image editing in the semantic latent space of diffusion model. By aligning the temporal feature of the diffusion model with the semantic condition at generative process, we introduce a stable manipulation strategy, which perform precise zero-shot manipulation effectively. Furthermore, we develop an interactive system named ChatFace, which combines the zero-shot reasoning ability of large language models to perform efficient manipulations in diffusion semantic latent space. This system enables users to perform complex multi-attribute manipulations through dialogue, opening up new possibilities for interactive image editing. Extensive experiments confirmed that our approach outperforms previous methods and enables precise editing of real facial images, making it a promising candidate for real-world applications. Project page: https://dongxuyue.github.io/chatface