Curriculum Temperature for Knowledge Distillation

Most existing distillation methods ignore the flexible role of the temperature in the loss function and fix it as a hyper-parameter that can be decided by an inefficient grid search. In general, the temperature controls the discrepancy between two distributions and can faithfully determine the difficulty level of the distillation task. Keeping a constant temperature, i.e., a fixed level of task difficulty, is usually sub-optimal for a growing student during its progressive learning stages. In this paper, we propose a simple curriculum-based technique, termed Curriculum Temperature for Knowledge Distillation (CTKD), which controls the task difficulty level during the student's learning career through a dynamic and learnable temperature. Specifically, following an easy-to-hard curriculum, we gradually increase the distillation loss w.r.t. the temperature, leading to increased distillation difficulty in an adversarial manner. As an easy-to-use plug-in technique, CTKD can be seamlessly integrated into existing knowledge distillation frameworks and brings general improvements at a negligible additional computation cost. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-2012, and MS-COCO demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhengli97/CTKD.Comment: AAAI 202

Role of vascular smooth muscle cell clonality in atherosclerosis

Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide. While many cell types contribute to the growing atherosclerotic plaque, the vascular smooth muscle cell (SMC) is a major contributor due in part to its remarkable plasticity and ability to undergo phenotype switching in response to injury. SMCs can migrate into the fibrous cap, presumably stabilizing the plaque, or accumulate within the lesional core, possibly accelerating vascular inflammation. How SMCs expand and react to disease stimuli has been a controversial topic for many decades. While early studies relying on X-chromosome inactivation were inconclusive due to low resolution and sensitivity, recent advances in multi-color lineage tracing models have revitalized the concept that SMCs likely expand in an oligoclonal fashion during atherogenesis. Current efforts are focused on determining whether all SMCs have equal capacity for clonal expansion or if a “stem-like” progenitor cell may exist, and to understand how constituents of the clone decide which phenotype they will ultimately adopt as the disease progresses. Mechanistic studies are also beginning to dissect the processes which confer cells with their overall survival advantage, test whether these properties are attributable to intrinsic features of the expanding clone, and define the role of cross-talk between proliferating SMCs and other plaque constituents such as neighboring macrophages. In this review, we aim to summarize the historical perspectives on SMC clonality, highlight unanswered questions, and identify translational issues which may need to be considered as therapeutics directed against SMC clonality are developed as a novel approach to targeting atherosclerosis

Risk factors for symptomatic rotator cuff tears: a retrospective case–control study

BackgroundThe incidence and diagnostic rate of rotator cuff tears (RCTs) have increased significantly. The purpose of this study was to investigate and analyze the risk factors for symptomatic RCTs to provide a basis for their prevention and treatment.MethodsWe retrospectively analyzed the relevant clinical indicators of 193 patients with RCTs and 161 patients without RCTs hospitalized with shoulder pain as the main complaint from January 1, 2017, to August 31, 2021. Univariate analysis and multivariate logistic regression analysis were used to analyze the differences in potential risk factors between the two groups.ResultsUnivariate analysis revealed that age (p < 0.001), body mass index (BMI) (p = 0.036), hypertension (p < 0.001), coronary heart disease (p = 0.028), history of shoulder trauma (p < 0.001), hyperlipidemia (p = 0.025), type III acromion (p = 0.012) and critical shoulder angle (CSA) (p < 0.001) increased the risk of RCTs. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that age ≥ 60 years (OR = 2.61, 95% CI = 1.23 to 5.12), CSA ≥ 35° (OR = 4.24, 95% CI = 1.60 to 11.22), hypertension (OR = 2.34, 95% CI = 1.33 to 4.11) and history of shoulder trauma (OR = 5.20, 95% CI = 2.87 to 9.45) were independent risk factors for symptomatic RCTs.ConclusionThe results of this study showed that age ≥ 60 years, CSA ≥35°, hypertension and history of shoulder trauma are independent risk factors for symptomatic RCTs and can provide directions for further development of prevention and treatment strategies. Future studies need to clarify the mechanism underlying the association between these risk factors and symptomatic RCTs

Mechanisms of action and synergetic formulas of plant-based natural compounds from traditional Chinese medicine for managing osteoporosis: a literature review

Osteoporosis (OP) is a systemic skeletal disease prevalent in older adults, characterized by substantial bone loss and deterioration of microstructure, resulting in heightened bone fragility and risk of fracture. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) herbs have been widely employed in OP treatment owing to their advantages, such as good tolerance, low toxicity, high efficiency, and minimal adverse reactions. Increasing evidence also reveals that many plant-based compounds (or secondary metabolites) from these TCM formulas, such as resveratrol, naringin, and ginsenoside, have demonstrated beneficial effects in reducing the risk of OP. Nonetheless, the comprehensive roles of these natural products in OP have not been thoroughly clarified, impeding the development of synergistic formulas for optimal OP treatment. In this review, we sum up the pathological mechanisms of OP based on evidence from basic and clinical research; emphasis is placed on the in vitro and preclinical in vivo evidence-based anti-OP mechanisms of TCM formulas and their chemically active plant constituents, especially their effects on imbalanced bone homeostasis regulated by osteoblasts (responsible for bone formation), osteoclasts (responsible for bone resorption), bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells as well as bone microstructure, angiogenesis, and immune system. Furthermore, we prospectively discuss the combinatory ingredients from natural products from these TCM formulas. Our goal is to improve comprehension of the pharmacological mechanisms of TCM formulas and their chemically active constituents, which could inform the development of new strategies for managing OP

Systematic benchmarking of nanopore Q20+ kit in SARS-CoV-2 whole genome sequencing

Whole genome sequencing provides rapid insight into key information about the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), such as virus typing and key mutation site, and this information is important for precise prevention, control and tracing of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in conjunction with the epidemiological information of the case. Nanopore sequencing is widely used around the world for its short sample-to-result time, simple experimental operation and long sequencing reads. However, because nanopore sequencing is a relatively new sequencing technology, many researchers still have doubts about its accuracy. The combination of the newly launched nanopore sequencing Q20+ kit (LSK112) and flow cell R10.4 is a qualitative improvement over the accuracy of the previous kits. In this study, we firstly used LSK112 kit with flow cell R10.4 to sequence the SARS-CoV-2 whole genome, and summarized the sequencing results of the combination of LSK112 kit and flow cell R10.4 for the 1200bp amplicons of SARS-CoV-2. We found that the proportion of sequences with an accuracy of more than 99% reached 30.1%, and the average sequence accuracy reached 98.34%, while the results of the original combination of LSK109 kit and flow cell R9.4.1 were 0.61% and 96.52%, respectively. The mutation site analysis showed that it was completely consistent with the final consensus sequence of next generation sequencing (NGS). The results showed that the combination of LSK112 kit and flow cell R10.4 allowed rapid whole-genome sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 without the need for verification of NGS

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Interval forecasting of renewable power generation

With the development of renewable power generation, forecasting of renewable power generation output is significant for modern power grids. Solar power generation, which is the important component of renewable power generation, is selected as the analysis direction in this project. The solar incoming radiation (SIR), the main factor of uncertainty for solar power generation, is used as training and testing data. By comparing the forecast accuracy of gradient descent, normal equation and extreme learning machine (ELM), optimal result of point forecasting is provided, which is the initial data for interval forecasting. The main process is the conversion from value of point forecasting to prediction intervals (PIs) with the help of hourly standard deviation (HSD) of SIR. Because of HSD is connected to the uncertainty of SIR, PIs is capable of reduce the uncertainty of output of solar power generation. This method has good reference value for other renewable power generation with high uncertainty.Bachelor of Engineerin