Existence Result for Impulsive Differential Equations with Integral Boundary Conditions

We investigate the following differential equations: -(y[1](x))'+q(x)y(x)=λf(x,y(x)), with impulsive and integral boundary conditions -Δ(y[1](xi))=Ii(y(xi)), i=1,2,…,m, y(0)-ay[1](0)=∫0ωg0(s)y(s)ds, y(ω)-by[1](ω)=∫0ωg1(s)y(s)ds, where y[1](x)=p(x)y'(x). The expression of Green's function and the existence of positive solution for the system are obtained. Upper and lower bounds for positive solutions are also given. When p(t), I(·), g0(s), and g1(s) take different values, the system can be simplified to some forms which has been studied in the works by Guo and LakshmiKantham (1988), Guo et al. (1995), Boucherif (2009), He et al. (2011), and Atici and Guseinov (2001). Our discussion is based on the fixed point index theory in cones

Analysis of acceptance and influencing factors by real-time three-dimensional pelvic floor ultrasonography

Objective To investigate the acceptance， participation rate， and awareness rate of real-time three-dimensional pelvic floor ultrasonography among the female population， and to analyze the influence factors. Methods A total of 855 women were face-to-face surveyed by using the general data questionnaire. The acceptance， participation rate， and awareness rate of real-time three-dimensional pelvic floor ultrasonography were analyzed. According to the survey results， all participants were divided into those who accepted pelvic floor ultrasonography group （acceptance group） and those who rejected pelvic floor ultrasonography group （rejection group）. The differences in education level， type of medical insurance， annual household income per capita， clinical symptoms， history of disease and awareness of pelvic floor ultrasonography were compared between two groups. The influencing factors of low acceptance of pelvic floor ultrasonography in female population were analyzed. Results A total of 808 valid questionnaires were returned. Among all valid respondents （n=808）， 86.6% （n=700） were willing to receive real-time three-dimensional pelvic floor ultrasonography. 95 participants （11.8%） had received pelvic floor ultrasonography before. The majority of respondents （92.6%） had little or no knowledge of pelvic floor ultrasonography. “Paying attention to their health and finding problems as early as possible” was the main reason for being willing to accept pelvic floor ultrasound examination， while the main reason for rejection was“do not understand the work of the project”. Significant differences were observed in the educational level， type of medical insurance， annual household income per capita， clinical symptoms， and awareness rate between two groups （all P < 0.05）. Multivariate Logistic analysis showed that the population without urinary leakage symptoms （OR=0.162， 95%CI：0.064-0.408， P < 0.001） and the population with low annual household income per capita （OR=0.495， 95%CI： 0.319-0.766， P = 0.002） were less willing to receive pelvic floor ultrasonography. Conclusions Real-time three-dimensional pelvic floor ultrasonography has high acceptance， low participation rate， and low awareness rate in the female population. Clinical symptoms and annual household income per capita are important factors associated with the acceptance of pelvic floor ultrasonography

The Evaluation of the Oxidative Stress Parameters in Patients with Primary Angle-Closure Glaucoma

Objective: To clarify the presence of oxidative stress in patients with primary angle-closure glaucoma (PACG) and to investigate the relationship between oxidative stress and PACG. Methods: Fifty patients with primary angle-closure glaucoma and fifty healthy controls of matched age and gender were included in the study prospectively. Serum samples were obtained to detect the oxidation degradation products malondialdehyde (MDA), conjugated diene (CD), 4-hydroxynonenal (4-HNE), advanced oxidation protein products (AOPP), protein carbonyl (PC), ischemia-modified albumin (IMA) and 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosin (8-OHdG). Results: The concentration of MDA and CD in PACG patients was significantly higher than those of the control subjects (P,0.05, P,0.01). The serum 4-HNE concentrations were increased in PACG patients, but the differences with those of the healthy controls were not statistically significant. Compared to normal subjects, there was significant higher in serum AOPP and PC in PACG patients (P,0.01). PACG patients had higher levels of 8-OHdG in serum with respect to the comparative group of normal subjects (P,0.01). When plasma IMA levels in the PACG group were compared with those in the control group, significant increases in IMA were observed in the former (P,0.05). Conclusions: Our study demonstrated that IMA is a new biomarker available for assessing oxidative stress in PCAG. Oxidative stress is an important risk factor in the development of primary angle-closure glaucoma. Increased levels o

Hijacking Attacks against Neural Networks by Analyzing Training Data

Backdoors and adversarial examples are the two primary threats currently faced by deep neural networks (DNNs). Both attacks attempt to hijack the model behaviors with unintended outputs by introducing (small) perturbations to the inputs. Backdoor attacks, despite the high success rates, often require a strong assumption, which is not always easy to achieve in reality. Adversarial example attacks, which put relatively weaker assumptions on attackers, often demand high computational resources, yet do not always yield satisfactory success rates when attacking mainstream black-box models in the real world. These limitations motivate the following research question: can model hijacking be achieved more simply, with a higher attack success rate and more reasonable assumptions? In this paper, we propose CleanSheet, a new model hijacking attack that obtains the high performance of backdoor attacks without requiring the adversary to tamper with the model training process. CleanSheet exploits vulnerabilities in DNNs stemming from the training data. Specifically, our key idea is to treat part of the clean training data of the target model as "poisoned data," and capture the characteristics of these data that are more sensitive to the model (typically called robust features) to construct "triggers." These triggers can be added to any input example to mislead the target model, similar to backdoor attacks. We validate the effectiveness of CleanSheet through extensive experiments on 5 datasets, 79 normally trained models, 68 pruned models, and 39 defensive models. Results show that CleanSheet exhibits performance comparable to state-of-the-art backdoor attacks, achieving an average attack success rate (ASR) of 97.5% on CIFAR-100 and 92.4% on GTSRB, respectively. Furthermore, CleanSheet consistently maintains a high ASR, when confronted with various mainstream backdoor defenses.Comment: Full version with major polishing, compared to the Usenix Security 2024 editio

Audio-Visual Speaker Tracking: Progress, Challenges, and Future Directions

Audio-visual speaker tracking has drawn increasing attention over the past few years due to its academic values and wide application. Audio and visual modalities can provide complementary information for localization and tracking. With audio and visual information, the Bayesian-based filter can solve the problem of data association, audio-visual fusion and track management. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive overview of audio-visual speaker tracking. To our knowledge, this is the first extensive survey over the past five years. We introduce the family of Bayesian filters and summarize the methods for obtaining audio-visual measurements. In addition, the existing trackers and their performance on AV16.3 dataset are summarized. In the past few years, deep learning techniques have thrived, which also boosts the development of audio visual speaker tracking. The influence of deep learning techniques in terms of measurement extraction and state estimation is also discussed. At last, we discuss the connections between audio-visual speaker tracking and other areas such as speech separation and distributed speaker tracking

A comparative study of short-term efficacy and safety for thyroid micropapillary carcinoma patients after microwave ablation or surgery.

Background: Although papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC) has a high incidence and excellent clinical outcome, debate continues as to the therapeutic approach that would be most appropriate after confirming the diagnosis. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed the medical records of 311 patients with T1aN0M0 PTMC between January 2013 and September 2018. In all, 168 underwent microwave ablation (MWA), and 143 underwent surgery. MWA was performed using extensive ablation with hydrodissection. The surgery comprised thyroid lobectomy (TL) with unilateral central lymph node dissection (CND). We examined clinical outcomes during mean follow-up periods of 824 ± 452 days for the TL group and 753 ± 520 days for the MWA group. Results: Postprocedural follow-up revealed that, in the MWA group, the tumors had completely disappeared in 34 patients, and the remainder were reduced to necrotic or carbonized tissue. The incidence of transient hypoparathyroidism was significantly lower in the MWA group than in the TL group (p \u3c .001). In addition, during the follow-up, we found no statistically significant differences between the two groups (TL vs MWA) for PTMC recurrence (1 vs 2 cases), lymph node metastasis (5 vs 5 cases), or disease-free survival [2001 days (5.5 years) vs 1702 days (4.7 years)] (p = .659, p = .795, and p = .974, respectively). Conclusions: If low-risk thyroid carcinoma (i.e., T1N0M0 PTMC) is accurately diagnosed early, MWA could be a minimally invasive alternative to surgery based on our short-term follow-up regarding recurrence and the low rates of complications and disease-free survival

Comparative transcriptome profiling provides insights into plant salt tolerance in seashore paspalum (\u3ci\u3ePaspalum vaginatum\u3c/i\u3e)

Background Seashore paspalum (Paspalum vaginatum), a halophytic warm-seasoned perennial grass, is tolerant of many environmental stresses, especially salt stress. To investigate molecular mechanisms underlying salinity tolerance in seashore paspalum, physiological characteristics and global transcription profiles of highly (Supreme) and moderately (Parish) salinity-tolerant cultivars under normal and salt stressed conditions were analyzed. Results Physiological characterization comparing highly (Supreme) and moderately (Parish) salinity-tolerant cultivars revealed that Supreme’s higher salinity tolerance is associated with higher Na+ and Ca2+ accumulation under normal conditions and further increase of Na+ under salt-treated conditions (400 mM NaCl), possibly by vacuolar sequestration. Moreover, K+ retention under salt treatment occurs in both cultivars, suggesting that it may be a conserved mechanism for prevention of Na+ toxicity. We sequenced the transcriptome of the two cultivars under both normal and salt-treated conditions (400 mM NaCl) using RNA-seq. De novo assembly of about 153 million high-quality reads and identification of Open Reading Frames (ORFs) uncovered a total of 82,608 non-redundant unigenes, of which 3250 genes were identified as transcription factors (TFs). Gene Ontology (GO) annotation revealed the presence of genes involved in diverse cellular processes in seashore paspalum’s transcriptome. Differential expression analysis identified a total of 828 and 2222 genes that are responsive to high salinity for Supreme and Parish, respectively. “Oxidation-reduction process” and “nucleic acid binding” are significantly enriched GOs among differentially expressed genes in both cultivars under salt treatment. Interestingly, compared to Parish, a number of salt stress induced transcription factors are enriched and show higher abundance in Supreme under normal conditions, possibly due to enhanced Ca2+ signaling transduction out of Na+ accumulation, which may be another contributor to Supreme’s higher salinity tolerance. Conclusion Physiological and transcriptome analyses of seashore paspalum reveal major molecular underpinnings contributing to plant response to salt stress in this halophytic warm-seasoned perennial grass. The data obtained provide valuable molecular resources for functional studies and developing strategies to engineer plant salinity tolerance

Serum Antioxidative Enzymes Levels and Oxidative Stress Products in Age-Related Cataract Patients

Purpose. To investigate the activity of antioxidative enzymes and the products of oxidative stress in patients with age-related cataracts and compare the findings with those in healthy control subjects. Method. Sixty patients with age-related cataract and sixty healthy controls of matched age and gender were included in this study. Serum samples were obtained to detect the antioxidative enzymes of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT), and glutathione peroxidase (GSH-Px), and oxidation degradation products of malondialdehyde (MDA), 4-hydroxynonenal (4-HNE), conjugated diene (CD), advanced oxidation protein products (AOPP), protein carbonyl (PC), and 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OHdG). Results. Serum SOD, GSH-Px, and CAT activities in cataract group were significantly decreased as compared to the control subjects (P<0.05). The levels of MDA, 4-HNE, and CD in cataract patients were significantly higher than those in the control subjects (P<0.05, P<0.01). Cataract patients had higher levels of 8-OHdG, AOPP, and PC with respect to the comparative group of normal subjects (P<0.01). And there was no statistical significance in concentration of antioxidative enzymes and oxidative stress products in patients with different subtype cataract. Conclusions. Oxidative stress is an important risk factor in the development of age-related cataract, and augmentation of the antioxidant defence systems may be of benefit to prevent or delay cataractogenesis

Exploring the Genetic Correlation Between Growth and Immunity Based on Summary Statistics of Genome-Wide Association Studies

The relationship between growth and immune phenotypes has been presented in the context of physiology and energy allocation theory, but has rarely been explained genetically in humans. As more summary statistics of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) become available, it is increasingly possible to explore the genetic relationship between traits at the level of genome-wide summary statistics. In this study, publicly available summary statistics of growth and immune related traits were used to evaluate the genetic correlation coefficients between immune and growth traits, as well as the cause and effect relationship between them. In addition, pleiotropic variants and KEGG pathways were identified. As a result, we found negative correlations between birthweight and immune cell count phenotypes, a positive correlation between childhood head circumference and eosinophil counts (EO), and positive or negative correlations between childhood body mass index and immune phenotypes. Statistically significant negative effects of immune cell count phenotypes on human height, and a slight but significant negative influence of human height on allergic disease were also observed. A total of 98 genomic regions were identified as containing variants potentially related to both immunity and growth. Some variants, such as rs3184504 located in SH2B3, rs13107325 in SLC39A8, and rs1260326 located in GCKR, which have been identified to be pleiotropic SNPs among other traits, were found to also be related to growth and immune traits in this study. Meanwhile, the most frequent overlapping KEGG pathways between growth and immune phenotypes were autoimmune related pathways. Pleiotropic pathways such as the adipocytokine signaling pathway and JAK-STAT signaling pathway were also identified to be significant. The results of this study indicate the complex genetic relationship between growth and immune phenotypes, and reveal the genetic background of their correlation in the context of pleiotropy