150 research outputs found
Hypoxic conditions differentially regulate TAZ and YAP in cancer cells
The Hippo-YAP pathway is altered and implicated as an oncogenic signaling pathway in many human cancers. Hypoxia is an important microenvironmental factor that promotes tumorigenesis. However, the effects of hypoxia on the two most important Hippo-YAP effectors, YAP (Yes-associated protein) and TAZ (transcriptional co-activator with PDZ-binding motif), have not been reported. In this work, we demonstrated that TAZ was functionally involved in cell proliferation and/or migration in epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) or human ovarian surface epithelial (HOSE) cells. Hypoxic conditions (1% O2 or hypoxia mimics) induced a reduction of YAP phosphorylation (S127) and total YAP expression in EOC cell lines OVCAR5 and SKOV3. However, these conditions up-regulated levels of S69 phosphorylated TAZ in EOC cells. The known TAZ kinases, Lats1 and Akt, were unlikely to be involved in up-regulated pTAZ by hypoxic conditions. Together, our data revealed new and differential regulating mechanisms of TAZ and YAP in cancer cells by hypoxia conditions
Safety and efficacy of early radiofrequency catheter ablation in patients with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation complicated with amiodarone-induced thyrotoxicosis
Background: Amiodarone is an antiarrhythmic drug that is frequently used to control atrial fibrillation (AF). Many patients with AF are afraid of the risk of ablation and take amiodarone, some patients develop amiodarone-induced thyrotoxicosis (AIT). The purpose of the study was to investigate the safety and efficacy of early radiofrequency catheter ablation in patients with paroxysmal AF complicated with AIT.
Methods: From the 146 consecutive patients with paroxysmal AF who had been treated with amiodarone and underwent 3-dimensional mapping system guided circumferential pulmonary vein isolation (PVI) at our center from January 2013 to June 2014, 20 had developed AIT. Thirty controls with normal thyroid function and matched for baseline characteristics were selected.
Results: Pulmonary vein isolation was completed in all patients without serious complications and with similar procedural (170.60 ± 14.80 vs. 158.18 ± 9.06 min; p = 0.062) and X-ray exposure (16.48 ± 2.15 vs. 15.36 ± 1.57 min; p = 0.058) time in AIT vs. control groups; however, upon coronary sinus catheter pacing (from 300 ms to 200 ms) after intravenous isoproterenol administration 30 min post PVI, rates of induction of AF (35% vs. 3.33%; p = 0.005) and of non-pulmonary vein-related atrial tachyarrhythmias (50% vs. 6.67%; p = 0.01) were higher, while those for atrial flutter (15% vs. 3.33%; p = 0.17) and atrial tachycardia (15% vs. 6.67%; p = 0.31) were similar, as was the recovery of conduction of pulmonary vein potential (15% vs. 30%; p = 0.191). In AIT vs. control group, atrial tachyarrhythmia recurrence rate was higher at 3 months (45% vs. 16.67%, p = 0.032) but not between 3 and 12 months (30% vs. 23.33%; p = 0.418) follow-up.
Conclusions: Early catheter ablation for paroxysmal AF in patients with AIT appeared safe and effective albeit with higher atrial tachyarrhythmia recurrence rate up to 3 months but not beyond 12 months after PVI relative to controls.
A Survey on Causal Reinforcement Learning
While Reinforcement Learning (RL) achieves tremendous success in sequential
decision-making problems of many domains, it still faces key challenges of data
inefficiency and the lack of interpretability. Interestingly, many researchers
have leveraged insights from the causality literature recently, bringing forth
flourishing works to unify the merits of causality and address well the
challenges from RL. As such, it is of great necessity and significance to
collate these Causal Reinforcement Learning (CRL) works, offer a review of CRL
methods, and investigate the potential functionality from causality toward RL.
In particular, we divide existing CRL approaches into two categories according
to whether their causality-based information is given in advance or not. We
further analyze each category in terms of the formalization of different
models, ranging from the Markov Decision Process (MDP), Partially Observed
Markov Decision Process (POMDP), Multi-Arm Bandits (MAB), and Dynamic Treatment
Regime (DTR). Moreover, we summarize the evaluation matrices and open sources
while we discuss emerging applications, along with promising prospects for the
future development of CRL.Comment: 29 pages, 20 figure
Rethinking Object Detection in Retail Stores
The convention standard for object detection uses a bounding box to represent
each individual object instance. However, it is not practical in the
industry-relevant applications in the context of warehouses due to severe
occlusions among groups of instances of the same categories. In this paper, we
propose a new task, ie, simultaneously object localization and counting,
abbreviated as Locount, which requires algorithms to localize groups of objects
of interest with the number of instances. However, there does not exist a
dataset or benchmark designed for such a task. To this end, we collect a
large-scale object localization and counting dataset with rich annotations in
retail stores, which consists of 50,394 images with more than 1.9 million
object instances in 140 categories. Together with this dataset, we provide a
new evaluation protocol and divide the training and testing subsets to fairly
evaluate the performance of algorithms for Locount, developing a new benchmark
for the Locount task. Moreover, we present a cascaded localization and counting
network as a strong baseline, which gradually classifies and regresses the
bounding boxes of objects with the predicted numbers of instances enclosed in
the bounding boxes, trained in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments are
conducted on the proposed dataset to demonstrate its significance and the
analysis discussions on failure cases are provided to indicate future
directions. Dataset is available at
https://isrc.iscas.ac.cn/gitlab/research/locount-dataset.Comment: Information Erro
MMSD2.0: Towards a Reliable Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection System
Multi-modal sarcasm detection has attracted much recent attention.
Nevertheless, the existing benchmark (MMSD) has some shortcomings that hinder
the development of reliable multi-modal sarcasm detection system: (1) There are
some spurious cues in MMSD, leading to the model bias learning; (2) The
negative samples in MMSD are not always reasonable. To solve the aforementioned
issues, we introduce MMSD2.0, a correction dataset that fixes the shortcomings
of MMSD, by removing the spurious cues and re-annotating the unreasonable
samples. Meanwhile, we present a novel framework called multi-view CLIP that is
capable of leveraging multi-grained cues from multiple perspectives (i.e.,
text, image, and text-image interaction view) for multi-modal sarcasm
detection. Extensive experiments show that MMSD2.0 is a valuable benchmark for
building reliable multi-modal sarcasm detection systems and multi-view CLIP can
significantly outperform the previous best baselines.Comment: Accepted by ACL2023 Finding
Branching Ratio and CP Asymmetry of Decays in the Perturbative QCD Approach
In this paper,we calculate the branching ratios and CP-violating asymmetries
for and B^+\to \rho^+ \etap decays in the
perturbative QCD factorization approach. In this approach, we not only
calculate the usual factorizable contributions, but also evaluate the
non-factorizable and annihilation type contributions. Besides the
current-current operators, the contributions from the QCD and electroweak
penguin operators are also taken into account. The theoretical predictions for
the branching ratios are and ,
which agree well with the measured values and currently available experimental
upper limits. We also predict large CP-violating asymmetries in these decays:
, , ,
, , and , which
can be tested by the current or future B factory experiments.Comment: 29 pages, 9 ps figures, more phenomenological discussions added,
scale dependence of computed observables are considered, typos corrected, the
figures and conclusions remain unchange
Autonomous stabilization of Fock states in an oscillator against multi-photon losses
Fock states with a well-defined number of photons in an oscillator have shown
a wide range of applications in quantum information science. Nonetheless, their
usefulness has been marred by single and multiple photon losses due to
unavoidable environment-induced dissipation. Though several dissipation
engineering methods have been developed to counteract the leading single-photon
loss error, averting multiple photon losses remains elusive. Here, we
experimentally demonstrate a dissipation engineering method that autonomously
stabilizes multi-photon Fock states against losses of multiple photons using a
cascaded selective photon-addition operation in a superconducting quantum
circuit. Through measuring the photon-number populations and Wigner tomography
of the oscillator states, we observe a prolonged preservation of quantum
coherence properties for the stabilized Fock states with
for a duration of about ~ms, far surpassing their intrinsic
lifetimes of less than s. Furthermore, the dissipation engineering
method demonstrated here also facilitates the implementation of a non-unitary
operation for resetting a binomially-encoded logical qubit. These results
highlight the potential application in error-correctable quantum information
processing against multi-photon-loss errors.Comment: Main text: 6 pages, 4 figures; Supplementary material: 6 pages, 4
figures, 4 table
The presence of autoantibodies is associated with improved overall survival in lung cancer patients
ObjectiveAutoantibodies have been reported to be associated with cancers. As a biomarker, autoantibodies have been widely used in the early screening of lung cancer. However, the correlation between autoantibodies and the prognosis of lung cancer patients is poorly understood, especially in the Asian population. This retrospective study investigated the association between the presence of autoantibodies and outcomes in patients with lung cancer.MethodsA total of 264 patients diagnosed with lung cancer were tested for autoantibodies in Henan Provincial People’s Hospital from January 2017 to June 2022. The general clinical data of these patients were collected, and after screening out those who met the exclusion criteria, 151 patients were finally included in the study. The Cox proportional hazards model was used to analyze the effect of autoantibodies on the outcomes of patients with lung cancer. The Kaplan-Meier curve was used to analyze the relationship between autoantibodies and the overall survival of patients with lung cancer.ResultsCompared to lung cancer patients without autoantibodies, those with autoantibodies had an associated reduced risk of death (HRs: 0.45, 95% CIs 0.27~0.77), independent of gender, age, smoking history, pathological type, and pathological stage of lung cancer. Additionally, the association was found to be more significant by subgroup analysis in male patients, younger patients, and patients with small cell lung cancer. Furthermore, lung cancer patients with autoantibodies had significantly longer survival time than those without autoantibodies.ConclusionThe presence of autoantibodies is an independent indicator of good prognosis in patients with lung cancer, providing a new biomarker for prognostic evaluation in patients with lung cancer
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