A Retrospective Study on the Timing of Perioperative Antimicrobial Interventions in Class I Incisions

 This retrospective case-control study was conducted to provide reference for the timing of antimicrobial drug use for clinical prevention. Cases of patients with type I incision surgery of 2019 at a 3A hospital were selected for statistical analysis, and 336 cases each with surgical duration ≥3h and equivalent surgical duration <3h of the same type were selected as the case and control groups, respectively. The focus was on the type of surgery, length of surgery, timing of medication, days of medication, and the occurrence or not of surgical site infection (SSI)in patients. There was a significant difference in the incidence of SSI between the case and control groups (18.15% Vs. 6.15%, P<0.001). The number of cases of intraoperative additional antimicrobial drugs for surgical duration ≥3h was 155 (57.83%), of which the number of cases with SSI was 40 and the number of cases with SSI without additional 113 was 21 (25.81% Vs. 18.58%, P=0.145). Additional intraoperative antimicrobial drugs for surgery ≥3 h were not effective in reducing the incidence of SSI, but significantly reduced the number of days patients were hospitalized. The occurrence of SSI is related to many factors and should not be overly dependent on the use of antimicrobial drugs

SnakeGAN: A Universal Vocoder Leveraging DDSP Prior Knowledge and Periodic Inductive Bias

Generative adversarial network (GAN)-based neural vocoders have been widely used in audio synthesis tasks due to their high generation quality, efficient inference, and small computation footprint. However, it is still challenging to train a universal vocoder which can generalize well to out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios, such as unseen speaking styles, non-speech vocalization, singing, and musical pieces. In this work, we propose SnakeGAN, a GAN-based universal vocoder, which can synthesize high-fidelity audio in various OOD scenarios. SnakeGAN takes a coarse-grained signal generated by a differentiable digital signal processing (DDSP) model as prior knowledge, aiming at recovering high-fidelity waveform from a Mel-spectrogram. We introduce periodic nonlinearities through the Snake activation function and anti-aliased representation into the generator, which further brings the desired inductive bias for audio synthesis and significantly improves the extrapolation capacity for universal vocoding in unseen scenarios. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we train SnakeGAN with only speech data and evaluate its performance for various OOD distributions with both subjective and objective metrics. Experimental results show that SnakeGAN significantly outperforms the compared approaches and can generate high-fidelity audio samples including unseen speakers with unseen styles, singing voices, instrumental pieces, and nonverbal vocalization.Comment: Accepted by ICME 202

A Sustainable, Regional Agricultural Development Measurement System Based on Dissipative Structure Theory and the Entropy Weight Method: A Case Study in Chengdu, China

As a large agricultural nation, China attaches great importance to agricultural development, as sustainable, regional agricultural development affects the sustainable development of China. Taking Chengdu, Sichuan Province as an example, this paper selected indicators and data from the past 15 years from the Chengdu Statistical Yearbook and applied the dissipative structure theory to establish an evaluation system for sustainable, regional agricultural development based on five main factors including economy, society, environment, education, and population. The entropy weight method was used to empower each indicator, and the changes in Chengdu’s sustainable agricultural development in the past 15 years were calculated. It was found that Chengdu’s sustainable agricultural development has been annually increasing, among which, economic and education subsystems had the greatest support for sustainable agricultural development. From 2003 to 2017, the entropy change of the total agricultural sustainable development system in Chengdu was negative, and the total entropy of the system gradually decreased. The sustainable agricultural development system in Chengdu has been developing towards a more orderly dynamic equilibrium state

Research on the Relationship Between Self-improvement Values and Green Brand Identity

In order to clarify the relationship between self-improvement values and green brand identity, we take the consumers’ self-improvement values as the antecedent variable, consider the self-monitoring as the moderating variable, regard consumers’ environmental self-accountability as the intermediary variable, and conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of consumers’ self-improvement values on green brand identity. The research found that:1) Self-improvement values positively affect consumers’ recognition of green brands;2) Self-improvement values positively affect consumers’ environmental self-accountability;3) Environmental self-accountability positively mediates the relationship between self-improvement values and green brand identity;4) Self-monitoring positively regulates the impact of consumer values on consumers’ environmental self-accountability and the mediating role of environmental self-accountability

Effects of LED light on Acacia melanoxylon bud proliferation in vitro and root growth ex vitro

This study examines the effects of light emitting diodes (LEDs) on tissue culture proliferation of Acacia melanoxylon plantlets among five different clones (FM1, FM2, FM4, FM5, and FM10). Shoot bud apex cuttings were transplanted onto Murashige and Skoog basal medium containing 0.1 mg L-1 6-benzyladenine and 0.5 mg L-1 naphthalene acetic acid and cultured in vitro for 40 days. Root growth was studied under different light intensities and photoperiods ex vitro. The bud proliferation coefficient was greatest under a light intensity of 45 μmol m-2 s-1 photosynthetic photon flux and photoperiod of 16 h light, but decreased as the light intensity increased. However, the greatest light intensity was beneficial for the growth of robust plantlets. Plantlets exposed to red and blue LED combinations grew tall and green, with a small number of roots. Plantlets also grew taller and some roots expanded under the longer photoperiod. Increased light intensity had positive effects on root number and rooting rate, and prolonged light greatly increased root number. Therefore, lower light intensity and a short photoperiod were beneficial for bud proliferation, while red/blue LED combinations, increased light intensity, and longer light illumination were beneficial for plantlet growth and root growth of Acacia melanoxylon

Ketamine for bipolar depression: an updated systematic review

Background: The therapeutic potential of subanesthetic doses of ketamine appears promising in unipolar depression; however, its effectiveness in treating bipolar depression (BD) remains uncertain. Objective: This systematic review aimed to summarize findings on the use of ketamine for the treatment of BD by assessing its efficacy, safety, and tolerability. Design: Systematic review. Methods: We conducted a systematic review of studies that investigated the use of ketamine for adults with BD. We searched PubMed and Embase for relevant randomized-controlled trials, open-label trials, and retrospective chart analyses published from inception to 13 March 2023. Results: Eight studies were identified [pooled n  = 235; mean (SD) age: 45.55 (5.54)]. All participants who received intravenous (IV) ketamine were administered a dose of 0.5–0.75 mg/kg as an adjunctive treatment to a mood-stabilizing agent, whereas participants who received esketamine were administered a dosage ranging from 28 to 84 mg. Flexible dosing was used in real-world analyses. A total of 48% of participants receiving ketamine achieved a response (defined as ⩾50% reduction in baseline depression severity), whereas only 5% achieved a response with a placebo. Real-world studies demonstrated lower rates of response (30%) compared to the average across clinical trials (63%). Reductions in suicidal ideation were noted in some studies, although not all findings were statistically significant. Ketamine and esketamine were well tolerated in most participants; however, six participants (2% of the overall sample pool, 5 receiving ketamine) developed hypomanic/manic symptoms after infusions. Significant dissociative symptoms were observed at the 40-min mark in some trials. Conclusion: Preliminary evidence suggests IV ketamine as being safe and effective for the treatment of BD. Future studies should focus on investigating the effects of repeated acute and maintenance infusions using a randomized study design