101 research outputs found
Studies on Time-Lag Effect of Corporate Performance Influenced by Competitive Strategy
Corporate performance has been analyzed by using quarterly economic data between 1st Quarter of 2003 and 1st Quarter of 2011 shown in the listing companies of the Chinese medical biologicals after implementing the formulated strategy. Studies show competitive strategy influenced corporate performance to some extent brings about time-lag effect and differentiation strategy influenced corporate performance related Duration of Lag inferior to that of Lowcost strategy; at the same time, competitive strategy has a long-term effect on corporate performance, with differentiation strategy influenced Duration of Lag in corporate performance which is more longer than that of Lowcost strategy. Finally, from test results we can also conclude that it is more difficult for implementing differentiation strategy than for Lowcost strategy, even bringing about highly risks and there is little possibility to succeed after being implemented.Key words: Differentiation strategy; Lowcost strategy; Coporate performance; Time-Lag effec
Impact of operative vaginal delivery on early postpartum pelvic floor function in primipara
Objective To evaluate the effect of operative vaginal delivery on early postpartum pelvic floor function in primipara. Methods Clinical data of 345 parturients with vaginal delivery were collected. According to the mode of delivery, all cases were divided into the natural delivery group (n = 170), vacuum-assisted delivery group (n = 130) and forceps-assisted delivery group(n = 45). The pelvic floor muscle strength and three-dimensional ultrasound of the pelvic floor were examined 6-12 weeks after delivery. The abnormal rate of pelvic floor muscle strength, bladder neck mobility rate, cystocele rate, enlargement rate of levator hiatal area, levator ani muscle injury rate, anal sphincter injury rate were statistically compared among three groups. Results There were no significant differences in the maternal age, body mass index, gestational weight gain, gestational age and newborn birth weight among three groups (all P > 0.05). The abnormal rate of pelvic floor muscle strength in the forceps-assisted delivery group was higher than that in the natural delivery group (P < 0.017), whereas there were no significant differences in the remaining pairwise comparison (both P > 0.017). The levator ani muscle injury rate in the forceps-assisted delivery group was higher than those in the natural delivery and vacuum-assisted delivery groups (both P < 0.017), and the levator ani muscle injury rate in the vacuum-assisted delivery group was higher than that in the natural delivery group (P < 0.001). There were no significant differences in the abnormal rate of bladder neck mobility, cystocele rate, enlargement rate of levator hiatal area and anal sphincter injury rate among three groups (all P > 0.05). Pelvic floor ultrasound indicated that among 52 women with pelvic floor muscle injury, 9 cases had normal pelvic floor muscle strength. The results of consistency test between two methods were Kappa = 0.061 and P = 0.029. Conclusions Compared with the natural delivery group, the pelvic floor injury is the most severe and the levator ani muscle injury rate is the highest in the forceps-assisted delivery group. These two methods are independent of each other. Pelvic floor ultrasound can clearly show pelvic floor muscle injury after delivery, which plays an important role in the postpartum screening of pelvic floor
An extensive study of blazar broad emission line: Changing-look blazars and Baldwin effect
It is known that the blazar jet emissions are dominated by non-thermal
radiation while the accretion disk jets are normally dominated by thermal
emission. In this work, our aim is to study the connection between the two
types of emission by investigating the correlation between the blazar emission
line intensity property, which embodies the nature of accretion disk, and the
-ray flux property, which is the representative of jet emission. We
compiled a sample of 656 blazars with available emission line equivalent widths
(), the GeV -ray flux, and the SED information from the literature.
In this work, we found 55 previous BCUs are now identified as FSRQs, and found
52 Changing-look blazars based on their and 45 of them are newly
confirmed. These Changing-look blazars have a larger accretion ratio () than BL Lac objects. In addition, we suggest that the
lower synchrotron peak blazars (LSPs) could be the source of Changing-look
blazars because 90.7\% of the Changing-look blazars in this work are confirmed
as LSPs. An anti-correlation between and continuum intensity, the
so-called global Baldwin effect (BEff) has been confirmed. We suggest the
steeper global BEff observed for blazar than for radio-quiet active galactic
nuclei (RQ-AGNs) is caused by the inverse Compton scattering of
broad-emission-line photons. This interpretation is further supported by the
positive correlation between the emission line and intrinsic inverse
Compton luminosity.Comment: Accepted to Ap
Deep Instance Segmentation with Automotive Radar Detection Points
Automotive radar provides reliable environmental perception in all-weather
conditions with affordable cost, but it hardly supplies semantic and geometry
information due to the sparsity of radar detection points. With the development
of automotive radar technologies in recent years, instance segmentation becomes
possible by using automotive radar. Its data contain contexts such as radar
cross section and micro-Doppler effects, and sometimes can provide detection
when the field of view is obscured. The outcome from instance segmentation
could be potentially used as the input of trackers for tracking targets. The
existing methods often utilize a clustering based classification framework,
which fits the need of real-time processing but has limited performance due to
minimum information provided by sparse radar detection points. In this paper,
we propose an efficient method based on clustering of estimated semantic
information to achieve instance segmentation for the sparse radar detection
points. In addition, we show that the performance of the proposed approach can
be further enhanced by incorporating the visual multi-layer perceptron. The
effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experimental results on the
popular RadarScenes dataset, achieving 89.53% mCov and 86.97% mAP0.5, which is
the best comparing to other approaches in the literature. More significantly,
the proposed algorithm consumes memory around 1MB, and the inference time is
less than 40ms. These two criteria ensure the practicality of the proposed
method in real-world system
Passive immunotherapy for influenza A H5N1 virus infection with equine hyperimmune globulin F(ab')(2 )in mice
BACKGROUND: Avian influenza virus H5N1 has demonstrated considerable pandemic potential. Currently, no effective vaccines for H5N1 infection are available, so passive immunotherapy may be an alternative strategy. To investigate the possible therapeutic effect of antibody against highly pathogenic H5N1 virus on a mammal host, we prepared specific equine anti-H5N1 IgGs from horses vaccinated with inactivated H5N1 virus, and then obtained the F(ab')(2 )fragments by pepsin digestion of IgGs. METHODS: The horses were vaccinated with inactivated H5N1 vaccine to prepare anti-H5N1 IgGs. The F(ab')(2 )fragments were purified from anti-H5N1 hyperimmune sera by a protocol for 'enhanced pepsin digestion'. The protective effect of the F(ab')(2 )fragments against H5N1 virus infection was determined in cultured MDCK cells by cytopathic effect (CPE) assay and in a BALB/c mouse model by survival rate assay. RESULTS: By the protocol for 'enhanced pepsin digestion', total 16 g F(ab')(2 )fragments were finally obtained from one liter equine antisera with the purity of over 90%. The H5N1-specific F(ab')(2 )fragments had a HI titer of 1:1024, and the neutralization titre of F(ab')(2 )reached 1: 2048. The in vivo assay showed that 100 μg of the F(ab')(2 )fragments could protect BALB/c mice infected with a lethal dose of influenza H5N1 virus. CONCLUSION: The availability of highly purified H5N1-specific F(ab')(2 )fragments may be promising for treatment of influenza H5N1 infection. Our work has provided experimental support for the application of the therapeutic equine immunoglobulin in future large primate or human trials
Osteocalcin Induces Proliferation via Positive Activation of the PI3K/Akt, P38 MAPK Pathways and Promotes Differentiation Through Activation of the GPRC6A-ERK1/2 Pathway in C2C12 Myoblast Cells
Dietary Modulation of Gut Microbiota Contributes to Alleviation of Both Genetic and Simple Obesity in Children
Gut microbiota has been implicated as a pivotal contributing factor in diet-related obesity; however, its role in development of disease phenotypes in human genetic obesity such as Prader–Willi syndrome (PWS) remains elusive. In this hospitalized intervention trial with PWS (n = 17) and simple obesity (n = 21) children, a diet rich in non-digestible carbohydrates induced significant weight loss and concomitant structural changes of the gut microbiota together with reduction of serum antigen load and alleviation of inflammation. Co-abundance network analysis of 161 prevalent bacterial draft genomes assembled directly from metagenomic datasets showed relative increase of functional genome groups for acetate production from carbohydrates fermentation. NMR-based metabolomic profiling of urine showed diet-induced overall changes of host metabotypes and identified significantly reduced trimethylamine N-oxide and indoxyl sulfate, host-bacteria co-metabolites known to induce metabolic deteriorations. Specific bacterial genomes that were correlated with urine levels of these detrimental co-metabolites were found to encode enzyme genes for production of their precursors by fermentation of choline or tryptophan in the gut. When transplanted into germ-free mice, the pre-intervention gut microbiota induced higher inflammation and larger adipocytes compared with the post-intervention microbiota from the same volunteer. Our multi-omics-based systems analysis indicates a significant etiological contribution of dysbiotic gut microbiota to both genetic and simple obesity in children, implicating a potentially effective target for alleviation
Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search
Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe
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Prevalence, associated factors and outcomes of pressure injuries in adult intensive care unit patients: the DecubICUs study
Funder: European Society of Intensive Care Medicine; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100013347Funder: Flemish Society for Critical Care NursesAbstract: Purpose: Intensive care unit (ICU) patients are particularly susceptible to developing pressure injuries. Epidemiologic data is however unavailable. We aimed to provide an international picture of the extent of pressure injuries and factors associated with ICU-acquired pressure injuries in adult ICU patients. Methods: International 1-day point-prevalence study; follow-up for outcome assessment until hospital discharge (maximum 12 weeks). Factors associated with ICU-acquired pressure injury and hospital mortality were assessed by generalised linear mixed-effects regression analysis. Results: Data from 13,254 patients in 1117 ICUs (90 countries) revealed 6747 pressure injuries; 3997 (59.2%) were ICU-acquired. Overall prevalence was 26.6% (95% confidence interval [CI] 25.9–27.3). ICU-acquired prevalence was 16.2% (95% CI 15.6–16.8). Sacrum (37%) and heels (19.5%) were most affected. Factors independently associated with ICU-acquired pressure injuries were older age, male sex, being underweight, emergency surgery, higher Simplified Acute Physiology Score II, Braden score 3 days, comorbidities (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, immunodeficiency), organ support (renal replacement, mechanical ventilation on ICU admission), and being in a low or lower-middle income-economy. Gradually increasing associations with mortality were identified for increasing severity of pressure injury: stage I (odds ratio [OR] 1.5; 95% CI 1.2–1.8), stage II (OR 1.6; 95% CI 1.4–1.9), and stage III or worse (OR 2.8; 95% CI 2.3–3.3). Conclusion: Pressure injuries are common in adult ICU patients. ICU-acquired pressure injuries are associated with mainly intrinsic factors and mortality. Optimal care standards, increased awareness, appropriate resource allocation, and further research into optimal prevention are pivotal to tackle this important patient safety threat
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