268 research outputs found
Upregulation of NUAK2: A novel prognostic marker in breast cancer
Background. Breast cancer is the most
commonly diagnosed neoplasm in women worldwide.
New molecular biomarkers and effective prognostic
models are being developed. This study aimed to
investigate the clinical and prognostic significance of
NUAK2 expression in patients with breast cancer.
Methods. The expression of NUAK 2 was examined
in breast cancer cells and tissues by real-time PCR,
western blotting, and immunohistochemical staining.
CCK-8 and colony formation assays were performed to
verify the effect of NUAK2 on the proliferation and
tumor progression of breast cancer cells. A tumor
formation assay in nude mice was performed to analyze
the effect of NUAK2 on the tumorigenicity of breast
cancer cells.
Results. The expression of NUAK2 in breast cancer
tissues was higher than that in paracarcinoma and
normal breast tissues. The overall survival of patients
with high NUAK2 expression was significantly lower
than that of patients with low NUAK2 expression.
Multivariate analyses indicated that NUAK2 was an
independent prognostic indicator of survival in breast
cancer. In vitro experiments demonstrated that knocking
down NUAK2 in breast cancer cells inhibited cell
proliferation and tumor-forming ability, and overexpression of NUAK2 showed the opposite effects.
NUAK2 overexpression promoted the tumorigenicity of
breast cancer cells in vivo.
Conclusion. These findings suggest that NUAK2 is
involved in breast cancer development and progression.
NUAK2 may be a valuable prognostic indicator in
patients with breast cancer
Histone modifications in embryo implantation and placentation: insights from mouse models
Embryo implantation and placentation play pivotal roles in pregnancy by facilitating crucial maternal-fetal interactions. These dynamic processes involve significant alterations in gene expression profiles within the endometrium and trophoblast lineages. Epigenetics regulatory mechanisms, such as DNA methylation, histone modification, chromatin remodeling, and microRNA expression, act as regulatory switches to modulate gene activity, and have been implicated in establishing a successful pregnancy. Exploring the alterations in these epigenetic modifications can provide valuable insights for the development of therapeutic strategies targeting complications related to pregnancy. However, our current understanding of these mechanisms during key gestational stages remains incomplete. This review focuses on recent advancements in the study of histone modifications during embryo implantation and placentation, while also highlighting future research directions in this field
Plugin Speech Enhancement: A Universal Speech Enhancement Framework Inspired by Dynamic Neural Network
The expectation to deploy a universal neural network for speech enhancement,
with the aim of improving noise robustness across diverse speech processing
tasks, faces challenges due to the existing lack of awareness within static
speech enhancement frameworks regarding the expected speech in downstream
modules. These limitations impede the effectiveness of static speech
enhancement approaches in achieving optimal performance for a range of speech
processing tasks, thereby challenging the notion of universal applicability.
The fundamental issue in achieving universal speech enhancement lies in
effectively informing the speech enhancement module about the features of
downstream modules. In this study, we present a novel weighting prediction
approach, which explicitly learns the task relationships from downstream
training information to address the core challenge of universal speech
enhancement. We found the role of deciding whether to employ data augmentation
techniques as crucial downstream training information. This decision
significantly impacts the expected speech and the performance of the speech
enhancement module. Moreover, we introduce a novel speech enhancement network,
the Plugin Speech Enhancement (Plugin-SE). The Plugin-SE is a dynamic neural
network that includes the speech enhancement module, gate module, and weight
prediction module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Plugin-SE
approach is competitive or superior to other joint training methods across
various downstream tasks
YOLO-SCL: a lightweight detection model for citrus psyllid based on spatial channel interaction
Efficient and accurate detection and providing early warning for citrus psyllids is crucial as they are the primary vector of citrus huanglongbing. In this study, we created a dataset comprising images of citrus psyllids in natural environments and proposed a lightweight detection model based on the spatial channel interaction. First, the YOLO-SCL model was based on the YOLOv5s architecture, which uses an efficient channel attention module to perform local channel attention on the inputs in the recursive gated convolutional modules to achieve a combination of global spatial and local channel interactions, improving the model’s ability to express the features of the critical regions of small targets. Second, the lightweight design of the 21st layer C3 module in the neck network of the YOLO-SCL model and the small target feature information were retained to the maximum extent by deleting the two convolutional layers, whereas the number of parameters was reduced to improve the detection accuracy of the model. Third, with the detection accuracy of the YOLO-SCL model as the objective function, the black widow optimization algorithm was used to optimize the hyperparameters of the YOLO-SCL model, and the iterative mechanism of swarm intelligence was used to further improve the model performance. The experimental results showed that the YOLO-SCL model achieved a [email protected] of 97.07% for citrus psyllids, which was 1.18% higher than that achieved using conventional YOLOv5s model. Meanwhile, the number of parameters and computation amount of the YOLO-SCL model are 6.92 M and 15.5 GFlops, respectively, which are 14.25% and 2.52% lower than those of the conventional YOLOv5s model. In addition, after using the black widow optimization algorithm to optimize the hyperparameters, the [email protected] of the YOLO-SCL model for citrus psyllid improved to 97.18%, making it more suitable for the natural environments in which citrus psyllids are to be detected. The experimental results showed that the YOLO-SCL model has good detection accuracy for citrus psyllids, and the model was ported to the Jetson AGX Xavier edge computing platform, with an average processing time of 38.8 ms for a single-frame image and a power consumption of 16.85 W. This study provides a new technological solution for the safety of citrus production
RSPNet: Relative Speed Perception for Unsupervised Video Representation Learning
We study unsupervised video representation learning that seeks to learn both
motion and appearance features from unlabeled video only, which can be reused
for downstream tasks such as action recognition. This task, however, is
extremely challenging due to 1) the highly complex spatial-temporal information
in videos; and 2) the lack of labeled data for training. Unlike the
representation learning for static images, it is difficult to construct a
suitable self-supervised task to well model both motion and appearance
features. More recently, several attempts have been made to learn video
representation through video playback speed prediction. However, it is
non-trivial to obtain precise speed labels for the videos. More critically, the
learnt models may tend to focus on motion pattern and thus may not learn
appearance features well. In this paper, we observe that the relative playback
speed is more consistent with motion pattern, and thus provide more effective
and stable supervision for representation learning. Therefore, we propose a new
way to perceive the playback speed and exploit the relative speed between two
video clips as labels. In this way, we are able to well perceive speed and
learn better motion features. Moreover, to ensure the learning of appearance
features, we further propose an appearance-focused task, where we enforce the
model to perceive the appearance difference between two video clips. We show
that optimizing the two tasks jointly consistently improves the performance on
two downstream tasks, namely action recognition and video retrieval.
Remarkably, for action recognition on UCF101 dataset, we achieve 93.7% accuracy
without the use of labeled data for pre-training, which outperforms the
ImageNet supervised pre-trained model. Code and pre-trained models can be found
at https://github.com/PeihaoChen/RSPNet.Comment: Accepted by AAAI-2021. Code and pre-trained models can be found at
https://github.com/PeihaoChen/RSPNe
Oriented Three-Dimensional Magnetic Biskyrmion in MnNiGa Bulk Crystals
A biskyrmion consists of two bound, topologically stable skyrmion spin
textures. These coffee-bean-shaped objects have been observed in real-space in
thin plates using Lorentz transmission electron microscopy (LTEM). From LTEM
imaging alone, it is not clear whether biskyrmions are surface-confined
objects, or, analogously to skyrmions in non-centrosymmetric helimagnets,
three-dimensional tube-like structures in bulk sample. Here, we investigate the
biskyrmion form factor in single- and polycrystalline MnNiGa samples using
small angle neutron scattering (SANS). We find that biskyrmions are not
long-range ordered, not even in single-crystals. Surprisingly all of the
disordered biskyrmions have their in-plane symmetry axis aligned along certain
directions, governed by the magnetocrystalline anisotropy. This anisotropic
nature of biskyrmions may be further exploited to encode information
Advancements in 3D Lane Detection Using LiDAR Point Clouds: From Data Collection to Model Development
Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS) have successfully integrated
learning-based techniques into vehicle perception and decision-making. However,
their application in 3D lane detection for effective driving environment
perception is hindered by the lack of comprehensive LiDAR datasets. The sparse
nature of LiDAR point cloud data prevents an efficient manual annotation
process. To solve this problem, we present LiSV-3DLane, a large-scale 3D lane
dataset that comprises 20k frames of surround-view LiDAR point clouds with
enriched semantic annotation. Unlike existing datasets confined to a frontal
perspective, LiSV-3DLane provides a full 360-degree spatial panorama around the
ego vehicle, capturing complex lane patterns in both urban and highway
environments. We leverage the geometric traits of lane lines and the intrinsic
spatial attributes of LiDAR data to design a simple yet effective automatic
annotation pipeline for generating finer lane labels. To propel future
research, we propose a novel LiDAR-based 3D lane detection model, LiLaDet,
incorporating the spatial geometry learning of the LiDAR point cloud into
Bird's Eye View (BEV) based lane identification. Experimental results indicate
that LiLaDet outperforms existing camera- and LiDAR-based approaches in the 3D
lane detection task on the K-Lane dataset and our LiSV-3DLane.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure
DiffusionGPT: LLM-Driven Text-to-Image Generation System
Diffusion models have opened up new avenues for the field of image
generation, resulting in the proliferation of high-quality models shared on
open-source platforms. However, a major challenge persists in current
text-to-image systems are often unable to handle diverse inputs, or are limited
to single model results. Current unified attempts often fall into two
orthogonal aspects: i) parse Diverse Prompts in input stage; ii) activate
expert model to output. To combine the best of both worlds, we propose
DiffusionGPT, which leverages Large Language Models (LLM) to offer a unified
generation system capable of seamlessly accommodating various types of prompts
and integrating domain-expert models. DiffusionGPT constructs domain-specific
Trees for various generative models based on prior knowledge. When provided
with an input, the LLM parses the prompt and employs the Trees-of-Thought to
guide the selection of an appropriate model, thereby relaxing input constraints
and ensuring exceptional performance across diverse domains. Moreover, we
introduce Advantage Databases, where the Tree-of-Thought is enriched with human
feedback, aligning the model selection process with human preferences. Through
extensive experiments and comparisons, we demonstrate the effectiveness of
DiffusionGPT, showcasing its potential for pushing the boundaries of image
synthesis in diverse domains
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