Clinical relevance of miR-423-5p levels in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients

Objective: This study aimed to examine changes in miRNAs expression profile of COPD patients. Methods: Thirty-six COPD patients as well as thirty-three healthy volunteers were recruited. Total RNAs were collected from the plasma of each participant. The differentially expressed miRNAs in COPD were screened from the GEO database. RT-qPCR was carried out to detect miRNA expression. Results: In total, 9 out of 55 miRNAs were expressed differentially in COPD patients. Confirmed by RT-qPCR validation, 6 miRNAs increased while 3 miRNAs decreased. Further analysis of miR-423-5p, which has not been reported in COPD, showed that AUC for the diagnosis of COPD was 0.9651, and miR-423-5p levels was inversely correlated with the duration of smoking. Conclusion: The present study demonstrates that miR-423-5p is a potential marker for identifying COPD patients

Failure probability estimation of long pipeline

It is well known that, for the majority of pressurized pipelines, both the load and the resistance parameters show evident uncertainty, and a probabilistic approach should be applied to assess their behaviors. Concerning reliability estimation of passive components such as pressure vessel and pipeline, there are two kinds of approaches – direct estimation using statistics of historical failure event data, and indirect estimation using probabilistic analysis of the failure phenomena of consideration. The direct estimation method can be validated relatively easily. However, it suffers statistical uncertainty due to scarce data. Indirect estimation method relies on the statistics of material property and those of environment load which are more readily available. As to systems composed of passive components, statistical dependence among component failures is a complex issue that cannot be ignored in reliability estimation

Evaluation of Performance of Background Traffic-based CMT-SCTP with Active Queue Management Algorithms

Abstract Existing researches on performance analysis of SCTP's Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT-SCTP) usually use DropTail algorithm as queue management algorithm without considering the impact of the background traffic. However, the background traffic of realistic network environments has an important impact on the QoS of SCTP. Besides, more and more Active Queue Management (AQM) algorithms have been proposed as a router-based mechanism for early congestion detection to keep the stability of the whole network. This paper investigates the effect of background traffic on the performance of CMT-SCTP, and evaluates the performance of CMT-SCTP under two realistic simulation topologies with reasonable background traffic and different AQM algorithms in NS-2. The simulation results show that: 1) the performance of CMT-SCTP depends on characteristic of background traffic; and 2) the different AQM algorithms used as queue management algorithm under same background traffic have the different effects. Finally, this paper summarizes the proposals to satisfy the QoS requirements in terms of throughput, end-to-end packet delay and loss rate. Since CMT-PF2 is recommended by RFC4960 but without taking impact of cross traffic into account. In the second part, we use the most promising topology which meets the developing network and base on result of analysis mentioned in the first part to analyze the performance CMT-PF1/2/3/4 played respectively, in this part, the most common scenario, symmetric CMT-SCTP, is adopted and CMT-PF algorithm is turned on. A conclusion had been nailed down that, CMT-PF3 can get more advantage in terms of average throughput than CMT-PF2 which is recommended by RFC4960. Per reasonable analyzing, we lastly recommend a more reasonable resolution for realistic network in order to reaching more satisfied QoS

Adaptive Routing Forwarding Strategy Based on Neural Network Algorithm

With the profound changes in global digital media, the focus of Internet users has gradually shifted to how to quickly obtain information without paying attention to where the information is stored. However, the current TCP/IP network protocol architecture cannot adapt to the rapid development of today#39s content applications. In order to adapt to the changes in the Internet, information-centric networking (ICN)has received extensive attention. Besides, the optimization of the user service request scheduling problem is the core issue affecting the performance of the ICN , and it is one of the hot research topics in the ICN network. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an adaptive routing forwarding strategy based on neural network algorithm. Through the modeling of the classic architecture named data networking (NDN) network delay model of ICN network, a neural network algorithm is used to delay prediction, and a forwarding strategy mechanism based on predict delay is designed to innovate in the NDN. The interface information Stat is added to the forwarding information base (FIB) of the network component to implement the dynamic selection of the forwarding routing. In addition, routing dynamic self-adaptation adjustment mechanism and fault rerouting function are designed in consideration of the situation of route congestion and interruption. Simulation results show that this strategy effectively reduces network delay and improves network performance

The reference intervals for thyroid hormones: A four year investigation in Chinese population

IntroductionThe reference intervals (RIs) are of great importance for physicans to determine whether or not an individual is healthy. However, many clinical laboratories in China still adopted the default RI provided by the manufacturers; and these “uncalibrated” RIs might lead to the misdiagnosis of diseases. In the present study, we enroll reference people with the purpose of determining the RIs of serum triiodothyronine (T3), thyroxine (T4), free triiodothyronine (FT3), free thyroxine (FT4) and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) in Chinese population, and explore the possible roles of age and sex on the levels of biomarkers.MethodsSerum samples from 66,609 individuals who met the inclusion criteria were analyzed using an Roche Cobas E 601 hormone analyzer. The dynamic trends of biomarker were visually assessed by their concentrations over age and sex. Specific partitions were determined by the method of Harris and Boyd. RIs, corresponding to the 2.5th and 97.5th percentiles, as well as the 0.5th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 99.5th percentiles were calculated for each reference partition using a non-parametric rank approach.ResultsThe serum level of T3, T4, FT4 or TSH showed a right-skewed distribution in both males and females while FT3 presented an approximate normal distribution. Females had a higher mode value of serum T3 or T4, but a lower mode value of serum TSH, FT3 or FT4. All five biomarkers did not need age partitioning according to the approach of harris and boyd, while T3 and FT3 need sex partitioning.ConclusionsThe present study not only determined the age- and sex-specific trends of the five thyroid hormones, but provided sex-stratified RIs for T3 and FT3, valuably contributing to the current literature and timely evaluation of thyroid health and disease

A phase 1 dose-escalation study of the poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase inhibitor senaparib in Australian patients with advanced solid tumors

Background: Senaparib is a novel, selective poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1/2 inhibitor with strong antitumor activity in preclinical studies. This first-in-human, phase 1, dose-escalation study examined the safety and preliminary efficacy of senaparib in patients with advanced solid tumors. Methods: Patients with advanced solid tumors were enrolled from three centers in Australia, using a conventional 3 + 3 design. Dose-escalation cohorts continued until the maximum tolerated dose or a recommended phase 2 dose was determined. Patients received one dose of oral senaparib and, if no dose-limiting toxicity occurred within 7 days, they received senaparib once daily in 3-week cycles. The primary end points were safety and tolerability. Results: Thirty-nine patients were enrolled at 10 dose levels ranging from 2 to 150 mg. No dose-limiting toxicities were observed in any cohort. Most treatment-emergent adverse events were grade 1–2 (91%). Seven patients (17.9%) reported hematologic treatment-emergent adverse events. Treatment-related adverse events occurred in eight patients (20.5%), and the most frequent was nausea (7.7%). Two deaths were reported after the end of study treatment, one of which was considered a complication from senaparib-related bone marrow failure. Pharmacokinetic analysis indicated that senaparib the accumulation index was 1.06–1.67, and absorption saturation was 80–150 mg daily. In 22 patients with evaluable disease, the overall response rate was 13.6%, and the disease control rate was 81.8%. The overall response rate was 33.3% for the BRCA mutation-positive subgroup and 6.3% for the nonmutated subgroup. Conclusions: Senaparib was well tolerated in Australian patients with advanced solid tumors, with encouraging signals of antitumor activity. The recommended phase 2 dose for senaparib was determined to be 100 mg daily. ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT03507543

Search for light dark matter from atmosphere in PandaX-4T

We report a search for light dark matter produced through the cascading decay of $\eta$ mesons, which are created as a result of inelastic collisions between cosmic rays and Earth's atmosphere. We introduce a new and general framework, publicly accessible, designed to address boosted dark matter specifically, with which a full and dedicated simulation including both elastic and quasi-elastic processes of Earth attenuation effect on the dark matter particles arriving at the detector is performed. In the PandaX-4T commissioning data of 0.63 tonne$\cdot$year exposure, no significant excess over background is observed. The first constraints on the interaction between light dark matter generated in the atmosphere and nucleus through a light scalar mediator are obtained. The lowest excluded cross-section is set at $5.9 \times 10^{-37}{\rm cm^2}$ for dark matter mass of $0.1$ MeV$/c^2$ and mediator mass of 300 MeV$/c^2$. The lowest upper limit of $\eta$ to dark matter decay branching ratio is $1.6 \times 10^{-7}$

A Search for Light Fermionic Dark Matter Absorption on Electrons in PandaX-4T

We report a search on a sub-MeV fermionic dark matter absorbed by electrons with an outgoing active neutrino using the 0.63 tonne-year exposure collected by PandaX-4T liquid xenon experiment. No significant signals are observed over the expected background. The data are interpreted into limits to the effective couplings between such dark matter and electrons. For axial-vector or vector interactions, our sensitivity is competitive in comparison to existing astrophysical bounds on the decay of such dark matter into photon final states. In particular, we present the first direct detection limits for an axial-vector (vector) interaction which are the strongest in the mass range from 25 to 45 (35 to 50) keV/c$^2$