Signals in Single-Event Pion Interferometry for Granular Sources of Quark-Gluon Plasma Droplets

We investigate two-pion Bose-Einstein correlations of quark-gluon plasma droplet sources in single-event measurements. We find that the distribution of the fluctuation between correlation functions of the single- and mixed-events provide useful signals to detect the granular structure of the source.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, in LaTe

A Novel Image Segmentation Algorithm Based on Graph Cut Optimization Problem

Image segmentation, a fundamental task in computer vision, has been widely used in recent years in many fields. Dealing with the graph cut optimization problem obtains the image segmentation results. In this study, a novel algorithm with weighted graphs was constructed to solve the image segmentation problem through minimization of an energy function. A binary vector of the segmentation label was defined to describe both the foreground and the background of an image. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, four various types of images were used to construct a series of experiments. Experimental results indicate that compared with other methods, the proposed algorithm can effectively promote the quality of image segmentation under three performance evaluation metrics, namely, misclassification error rate, rate of the number of background pixels, and the ratio of the number of wrongly classified foreground pixels

A Unified Geometric Model of Repeating and Non-Repeating Fast Radio Bursts

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration extragalactic radio transients. They apparently fall into repeaters and non-repeaters. However, such a classification has lacked a motivation on the physical picture. Here we propose a unified geometric model to distinguish between the repeaters and non-repeaters, in which the quasi-tangential (QT) propagation effect within the magnetospheric polar cap of a neutron star is considered. In this model, the non-repeaters arise from the sources whose emitting region has a smaller impact angle with respect to the magnetic axis, while the repeaters come from the sources whose emitting region has a larger impact angle. The observational discriminant polarization properties between the repeaters and non-repeaters are an important clue to verifying this unified geometric model since the polarization is sensitive to the QT propagation effect. Moreover, our model effectively explains all of the other discriminant properties, including bandwidth, duration, peak luminosity, energy, brightness temperature, time-frequency downward drifting, and repetition rate, providing compelling evidence for the magnetospheric origin of FRBs.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

Depletion of Tissue-Specific Ion Transporters Causes Differential Expression of PRL Targets in Response to Increased Levels of Endogenous PRL

Prolactin (PRL) has been considered a key regulator of ion uptake in zebrafish. The genes slc12a10.2 and slc12a3, which are Na+ and chloride Cl− co-transporters, have been reported to be regulated by PRL in freshwater fish. The integrative network of PRL signaling dissected from the knockout of tissue-specific downstream PRL ion transporters remains poor. In the present study, zebrafish models with increased endogenous levels of PRL were generated through the knockout of slc12a10.2 or slc12a3, and the developmental consequences were analyzed. The increased levels of pituitary PRL were observed in both slc12a10.2- and slc12a3-deficient fish. Unlike the slc12a3-deficient fish, which could survive to adulthood, the slc12a10.2-deficient fish began to die at 9 days post-fertilization (dpf) and did not survive beyond 17 dpf. This survival defect is a result of defective Cl− uptake in this mutant, indicating that Slc12a10.2 plays an essential role in Cl− uptake. Intriguingly, compared to the levels in control fish, no significant differences in the levels of Na+ in the body were observed in slc12a10.2- or slc12a3-deficient zebrafish. The upregulations of the PRL downstream transporters, slc9a3.2, slc12a10.2, and atp1a1a.5 were observed in slc12a3-deficient fish in both the gills/skin and the pronephric duct. However, this type of response was not observed in the pronephric duct of slc12a10.2-deficient fish, except under Na+-deprived conditions. Our results show that PRL is susceptible to deficiencies in downstream ion transporters. Moreover, both the gills/skin and pronephric duct show differential expression of downstream PRL targets in response to increased levels of pituitary PRL caused by the depletion of tissue-specific ion transporters

PO-188 Effects of Tai-Chi exercise on blood lipids, inflammatory factors and baPWV of middle-aged and elderly people

Objective To investigate the interventional effects of 12 months Tai-Chi exercise on blood lipids, inflammatory factors and the interventional mechanism of exercise in arteriosclerosis of middle-aged and elderly people Methods 30 in middle-aged and elderly people with average age of 63.50±2.91 joined 12 months taijiquan exercise that conducted 60 minutes ecth time, six times per week. Left brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity (L-baPWV), right brachial-ankle pulse wave velocity(R-baPWV) , left ankle brachial index (L-ABI), right ankle brachial index(R-ABI), serum triglyceride(TG), total cholesterol(TC), high density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), interleukin 6 (IL-6) and hypersensitive c-reactive protein (hs-CRP) were detected at 3 time points including before exercise programme, by the end of exercise for 6th and 12th month. Results ①Compared with pre-exercise, the R-baPWV and R-ABI of the elderly people were decreased at the end of the 6th month, and the L-baPWV, R-baPWV, R-ABI and L-ABI were decreased significantly at the end of the 12th month. ②Compared with pre-exercise, TC and LDL-c were declined markedly (P<0.01) at the end of the 6th and the 12th month, and there was no difference of the level of TG and LDL-c between pre-exercise and post-exercise.③Compared with before exercise, the subjects had significantly decreased IL-6 at the end of  6th months of exercise (P < 0.01), and the decrease of hs-CRP was not obvious. At the end of 12 th months, IL-6 and hs-CRP decreased significantly (P < 0.01). ④According to the correlation analysis, baPWV were positively correlated with TC, IL-6 and hs-CRP. Conclusions 12 months of exercise intervention can effectively reduce the elderly baPWV and ABI level, improve the blood pressure, blood lipid and body inflammation levels, thus to prevent the happening of the atherosclerosis development plays an important role

First-line single agent treatment with gefitinib in patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Lung cancer is a malignant carcinoma which has the highest morbidity and mortality in Chinese population. Gefitinib, a tyrosine kinase (TK) inhibitor of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), displays anti-tumor activity. The present data regarding first-line treatment with single agent gefitinib against non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in Chinese population are not sufficient.</p> <p>Purpose</p> <p>To assess the efficacy and toxicity of gefitinib in Chinese patients with advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC), a study of single agent treatment with gefitinib in Chinese patients was conducted.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>45 patients with advanced NSCLC were treated with gefitinib (250 mg daily) until the disease progression or intolerable toxicity.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Among the 45 patients, 15 patients achieved partial response (PR), 17 patients experienced stable disease (SD), and 13 patients developed progression disease (PD). None of the patients achieved complete response (CR). The tumor response rate and disease control rate was 33% and 71.1%, respectively. Symptom remission rate was 72.5%, and median remission time was 8 days. Median overall survival and median progression-free survival was 15.3 months and 6.0 months, respectively. The main induced toxicities by gefitinib were skin rash and diarrhea (53.3% and 33.3%, respectively). The minor induced toxicities included dehydration and pruritus of skin (26.7% and 22.2%, respectively). In addition, hepatic toxicity and oral ulceration occurred in few patients (6.7% and 4.4%2, respectively).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Single agent treatment with gefitinib is effective and well tolerated in Chinese patients with advanced NSCLC.</p

Sexual dimorphic effects of igf1 deficiency on metabolism in zebrafish

Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) is an essential effector of the growth hormone (GH)/IGF1 axis for somatic growth regulation in mammals. However, its functions have not been thoroughly investigated in zebrafish in vivo. In this study, the igf1-deficient zebrafish model was developed using the CRISPR/Cas9 technique. In this study all the results were performed on both male and female animals. The growth of both male and female igf1-deficient zebrafish were reduced. The igf1 deficiency leads to significant complementary up-regulation of transcriptional expression levels of insulin, igf2 and igf3. This suggested that igf2 and igf3 may act with redundant functions. While the upregulation of gh1 expression can only be detected in igf1-deficient females. At the same time, significant growth retardation, fatty liver, reduced activated levels of ribosomal S6 (S6) are seen only in igf1-deficient males. On the other hand, significant hyperglycemia, elevated transcriptional expression levels of phosphenolpyruvate carboxykinase (pepck) and levels of phosphorylated extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK1/2), with additional reduced hepatic lactate/pyruvate (L/P) ratios can only observed in igf1-deficient females. Impaired glucose uptake has been recorded in the primary cultured hepatocytes from igf1-deficient females, but not males. Intriguingly, exposure to 17beta-estroadiol (E2) can partially ameliorated the defects of fatty liver and activation of AKT/mTOR signaling in igf1-deficient males. Our studies demonstrate the significant functions of IGF1 on somatic regulation in zebrafish, with asymmetric gender-related consequences. Our data thus suggest that the zebrafish IGF1 is preferentially required for the activation of AKT/mTOR signaling in male zebrafish, but glucose uptake in females

Liver Tumor Screening and Diagnosis in CT with Pixel-Lesion-Patient Network

Liver tumor segmentation and classification are important tasks in computer aided diagnosis. We aim to address three problems: liver tumor screening and preliminary diagnosis in non-contrast computed tomography (CT), and differential diagnosis in dynamic contrast-enhanced CT. A novel framework named Pixel-Lesion-pAtient Network (PLAN) is proposed. It uses a mask transformer to jointly segment and classify each lesion with improved anchor queries and a foreground-enhanced sampling loss. It also has an image-wise classifier to effectively aggregate global information and predict patient-level diagnosis. A large-scale multi-phase dataset is collected containing 939 tumor patients and 810 normal subjects. 4010 tumor instances of eight types are extensively annotated. On the non-contrast tumor screening task, PLAN achieves 95% and 96% in patient-level sensitivity and specificity. On contrast-enhanced CT, our lesion-level detection precision, recall, and classification accuracy are 92%, 89%, and 86%, outperforming widely used CNN and transformers for lesion segmentation. We also conduct a reader study on a holdout set of 250 cases. PLAN is on par with a senior human radiologist, showing the clinical significance of our results.Comment: MICCAI 2023, code: https://github.com/alibaba-damo-academy/pixel-lesion-patient-networ

Effect of Superfine Mulberry Leaf Powder on Farinographical Properties of Dough and Quality of Steamed Bread

We replaced wheat flour by superfine mulberry leaf powder at 5%, 10%, 15%, 20 % and 25% to make dough and steamed bread. The effect of superfine mulberry leaf powder on farinographical properties of dough and quality of steamed bread were studied. The results showed that partial substitution of wheat flour with superfine mulberry leaf powder could improve the water absorption of dough. The dough stability showed the transformation rule of first increasingand then decreasing with the mass increasing of mulberry leaf powder. When the substitution rate exceeds 15%, the dough stability time significantly reduced and the degree of softening significantly increased. Steamed bread quality research results showed that with the increase of mulberry leaf powder level, bread specific volume declined, the height-diameter ratio firstly increased and then decreased, and the bread hardness and adhesion increased. With the addition of 15% of superfine mulberry leaf powder, mulberry leaf steamed bread showed a green color and had a higher overall sensory quality. Staling results showed that the mulberry leaf powder reduced hardening rate of steamed bread and could effectively delay the staling rate of steamed bread during storage. The above experiment showed that steamed bread with 15% superfine mulberry leaf powder had a higher overall sensory acceptance with the best quality