A multiscale non-orthogonal model for tensile properties of uncoated and coated F-12 aramid fabric

Coated F-12 aramid fabric can be used as the balloon envelopes material because of the high strength and light weight performance. In this paper, a multiscale non-orthogonal material model was established to capture the tensile properties of F-12 fabric with and without polyethylene terephthalate-aluminum (PET-Al) coating. Off-axial monotonic tensile tests were carried out to validate the material model. The nonlinearity and anisotropic properties of the coated and uncoated fabrics were investigated. In this model, the stress was obtained based on the equilibrium equations and yarn constitutive model in mesoscale. The mesoscale configuration was observed through optical microscope and SEM. The material orientation was aligned with the yarn directions and the stress was updated in real time. The material model was implemented by user material subroutine in ABAQUS and simulate fabric off-axial tensile test. In addition, a theory model to calculate the elastic property of the fabric was also set up using the mesoscale deformation mechanism. The simulation results were compared with the test and theory results. Results suggest that simulation results were agree well with test results. The fabrics were nearly linearity in weft direction, while the stressstrain curve exhibited obvious nonlinearity in warp direction. The tensile modulus of the fabric showed orthotropic behaviour rather than the strength. The coating can affect the strength and failure model of F-12 fabric. Yarn slip was the mostly failure model in uncoated fabric while break in coated fabric. Research in this study provides certain reference in analysis and design for balloon envelops

Plasma Levels of Amino Acids Related to Urea Cycle and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus in Chinese Adults

Objective: This study aimed to test associations between type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) and metabolites in urea cycle including arginine, citrulline and ornithine.Methods:This study used a hospital-based cross-sectional study design. We retrieved medical notes of 401 in-patients with onset of T2DM within 2 years and 1,522 healthy subjects who attended annual physical examination. All cases were admitted to a tertiary care center in Jinzhou, China from May 2015 to August 2016. Binary logistic regression analyses were performed to obtain odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).Results:Patients with T2DM had higher arginine, and lower ornithine than control subjects. Levels of citrulline were similar in two groups. Arginine was positively associated with T2DM (ORs: 1.20, 1.17–1.23) while ornithine was negatively associated with T2DM (OR: 0.89, 0.88–0.91). After adjustment for other amino acids and traditional risk factors, these associations were still significant and persistent for arginine and ornithine. The association between citrulline and T2DM was not significant. Their ratios of pairs of two amino acids were associated with increased risk of T2DM. After adjustment for other ratios of amino acids, effect size for T2DM remained significant. Further adjustment for traditional risk factors did not lead to large changes (ORs: 1.78, 1.20–2.65 for the ratio of arginine to ornithine; ORs: 1.59, 1.37–1.86 for the ratio of citrulline to ornithine, respectively) except the ratio of arginine to citrulline.Conclusions: Plasma levels of amino acids related to urea cycle and their ratios of these amino-acids were associated with T2DM in Chinese adults

SkyMath: Technical Report

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential to solve varieties of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including mathematical reasoning. In this work, we present SkyMath, a large language model for mathematics with 13 billion parameters. By applying self-compare fine-tuning, we have enhanced mathematical reasoning abilities of Skywork-13B-Base remarkably. On GSM8K, SkyMath outperforms all known open-source models of similar size and has established a new SOTA performance

Skywork: A More Open Bilingual Foundation Model

In this technical report, we present Skywork-13B, a family of large language models (LLMs) trained on a corpus of over 3.2 trillion tokens drawn from both English and Chinese texts. This bilingual foundation model is the most extensively trained and openly published LLMs of comparable size to date. We introduce a two-stage training methodology using a segmented corpus, targeting general purpose training and then domain-specific enhancement training, respectively. We show that our model not only excels on popular benchmarks, but also achieves \emph{state of the art} performance in Chinese language modeling on diverse domains. Furthermore, we propose a novel leakage detection method, demonstrating that test data contamination is a pressing issue warranting further investigation by the LLM community. To spur future research, we release Skywork-13B along with checkpoints obtained during intermediate stages of the training process. We are also releasing part of our SkyPile corpus, a collection of over 150 billion tokens of web text, which is the largest high quality open Chinese pre-training corpus to date. We hope Skywork-13B and our open corpus will serve as a valuable open-source resource to democratize access to high-quality LLMs

Potential candidates for liver resection in liver-confined advanced HCC: a Chinese multicenter observational study

BackgroundAdvanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is characterized as symptomatic tumors [performance status (PS) score of 1-2], vascular invasion and extrahepatic spread, but patients with PS1 alone may be eliminated from this stage. Although liver resection is used for liver-confined HCC, its role in patients with PS1 alone remains controversial. Therefore, we aimed to explore its application in such patients and identify potential candidates.MethodsEligible liver-confined HCC patients undergoing liver resection were retrospectively screened in 15 Chinese tertiary hospitals, with limited tumor burden, liver function and PS scores. Cox-regression survival analysis was used to investigate the prognostic factors and develop a risk-scoring system, according to which patients were substratified using fitting curves and the predictive values of PS were explored in each stratification.ResultsFrom January 2010 to October 2021, 1535 consecutive patients were selected. In the whole cohort, PS, AFP, tumor size and albumin were correlated with survival (adjusted P<0.05), based on which risk scores of every patient were calculated and ranged from 0 to 18. Fitting curve analysis demonstrated that the prognostic abilities of PS varied with risk scores and that the patients should be divided into three risk stratifications. Importantly, in the low-risk stratification, PS lost its prognostic value, and patients with PS1 alone achieved a satisfactory 5-year survival rate of 78.0%, which was comparable with that PS0 patients (84.6%).ConclusionSelected patients with PS1 alone and an ideal baseline condition may benefit from liver resection and may migrate forward to BCLC stage A

Identify optimal HAP series scores for unresectable HCC patients undergoing TACE plus sorafenib: A Chinese multicenter observational study

BackgroundHepatoma arterial-embolization prognostic (HAP) series scores have been proposed for prognostic prediction in patients with unresectable hepatocellular carcinoma (uHCC) undergoing transarterial chemoembolization (TACE). However, their prognostic value in TACE plus sorafenib (TACE-S) remains unknown. Here, we aim to evaluate their prognostic performance in such conditions and identify the best model for this combination therapy.MethodsBetween January 2012 and December 2018, consecutive patients with uHCC receiving TACE-S were recruited from 15 tertiary hospitals in China. Cox regression analyses were used to investigate the prognostic values of baseline factors and every scoring system. Their prognostic performance and discriminatory performance were evaluated and confirmed in subgroup analyses.ResultsA total of 404 patients were enrolled. In the whole cohort, the median follow-up period was 44.2 (interquartile range (IQR), 33.2–60.7) months, the median overall survival (OS) time was 13.2 months, and 336 (83.2%) patients died at the end of the follow-up period. According to multivariate analyses, HAP series scores were independent prognostic indicators of OS. In addition, the C-index, Akaike information criterion (AIC) values, and time-dependent area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) indicated that modified HAP (mHAP)-III had the best predictive performance. Furthermore, the results remained consistent in most subsets of patients.ConclusionHAP series scores exhibited good predictive ability in uHCC patients accepting TACE-S, and the mHAP-III score was found to be superior to the other HAP series scores in predicting OS. Future prospective high-quality studies should be conducted to confirm our results and help with treatment decision-making