Improved management of the donor site of free radial forearm flap

Conference Theme: Challenges to specialists in the 21st centurypublished_or_final_versio

Use of deltopectoral flap for head and neck reconstruction

Theme: Challenges to specialists in the 21st centurypublished_or_final_versio

IsaB Inhibits Autophagic Flux to Promote Host Transmission of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has emerged as a major nosocomial pathogen that is widespread in both health-care facilities and in the community at large, as a result of direct host-to-host transmission. Several virulence factors are associated with pathogen transmission to naive hosts. Immunodominant surface antigen B (IsaB) is a virulence factor that helps Staphylococcus aureus to evade the host defense system. However, the mechanism of IsaB on host transmissibility remains unclear. We found that IsaB expression was elevated in transmissible MRSA. Wild-type isaB strains inhibited autophagic flux to promote bacterial survival and elicit inflammation in THP-1 cells and mouse skin. MRSA isolates with increased IsaB expression showed decreased autophagic flux, and the MRSA isolate with the lowest IsaB expression showed increased autophagic flux. In addition, recombinant IsaB rescued the virulence of the isaB deletion strain and increased the group A streptococcus (GAS) virulence in vivo. Together, these results reveal that IsaB diminishes autophagic flux, thereby allowing MRSA to evade host degradation. These findings suggest that IsaB is a suitable target for preventing or treating MRSA infection

Towards InAs nanowire double quantum dots for quantum information processing

Currently, a major challenge for solid-state spin qubit systems is achieving one-qubit operations on a timescale shorter than the spin coherence time, T2*, a goal currently two orders of magnitude away. By taking advantage of the quasi-one-dimensional structure of a nanowire and the strong spin-orbit interaction of InAs, it is estimated that π-rotations can be implemented using electric dipole spin resonance on the order of 10 ns. To this end, a procedure for the fabrication of homogeneous InAs nanowire quantum dot devices is presented herein for future investigations of solid state spin qubits as a test bed for quantum computing. Both single and double quantum dot systems are formed using local gating of InAs nanowires. Single quantum dot systems were characterized through electron transport measurements in a dilution refrigerator; in one case, the charging energy was measured to be 5.0 meV and the orbital energy was measured to be 1.5-3.5 meV. The total capacitance of the single quantum dot system was determined to be approximately 30 aF. An estimate of the quantum dot geometry resulting from confinement suggests that the quantum dot is approximately 115 nm long. The coupling energy of the double quantum dot system was measured to be approximately 4.5 meV. The electron temperature achieved with our circuitry in the dilution refrigerator is estimated to be approximately 125 mK

The Research of Infrared Thermal Image Diagnostic Model for Building External Wall Tiles

This study focuses on a deterioration diagnostic standard and inspection time for external wall tiles.  The study was carried out using a tap tone test, followed by fast Fourier transform and pattern recognition to analyse the tapping results.  Based on the test results, the study recommends that for frequencies between 200 and 800 Hz on the spectrogram, it can be deduced that a cavity is present in the tiles.  The study was carried out using infrared thermal imaging record to deterioration and normal tile position. This study observed temperature changes per hour, it is obvious temperature difference with deterioration tiles and normal tiles between 09: 00-11: 00 (East), 10:00-14:00 (West), 10:00-12:00 (South) and 11:00-13:00 (North), the study was calculated that the average temperature difference of 1.0 degrees. This study suggests that the best experimental inspection time is 09: 00-14:00. Exclude the impact of external factors, if the temperature difference more than 1.0 degrees, it can be deduced that a cavity is present in the tiles, and this can be used as basis for determining tile deterioration

Treatment outcome of rhabdomyosarcoma in Hong Kong Chinese children

Objectives: To review the treatment outcome of rhabdomyosarcoma in Hong Kong Chinese children. Design: Retrospective review. Setting: University teaching hospital, Hong Kong. Patients: Consecutive cases of rhabdomyosarcoma diagnosed and treated by the Department of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine of Queen Mary Hospital between 1989 and 2005. Each patient was staged and treated according to the Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study guidelines. Main outcome measures: Overall and event-free survival rates, and toxicity data. Results: Of 19 patients (8 males and 11 females), 14 (74%) were younger than 10 years old. The median age at diagnosis was 6 (range, 0.5-17) years. Primary sites of rhabdomyosarcoma included: the head and neck (n=8; 6 classified as cranial parameningeal), genitourinary (3), extremity (3), pelvis (3), and trunk (2). Thirteen (68%) had embryonal and six (32%) had alveolar histology. Two, 2, 9, and 6 were classified as belonging to Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study groups 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. Respective 5-year overall and event-free survival rates of the entire cohort were 49% (95% confidence interval, 26-73%) and 32% (10-55%), with a median follow-up of 3.4 (range, 0.2-16.7) years. In non-metastatic cases (Intergroup Rhabdomyosarcoma Study groups 1-3), the 5-year overall survival rate was 66% (95% confidence interval, 39-93%) and in metastatic cases (group 4) it was 17% (0-46%). The 5-year overall survival rate for patients aged less than 10 years was 60% (95% confidence interval, 33-87%) compared to 20% (0-55%) in those aged 10 years and over. Significant treatment-related toxicities including myelosuppression, infections, peripheral neuropathy, and second cancers were encountered. Conclusions: Treatment outcome of rhabdomyosarcoma in this cohort of Chinese children was less favourable than that reported in international studies. Whilst the main reason could have been related to the high proportion of metastatic cases, also non-metastatic cases faired worse. Improved outcomes may be achieved by advances in multidisciplinary (paediatric oncology, pathology, radiotherapy, and surgery) management and supportive care.published_or_final_versio

Counting Crowds in Bad Weather

Crowd counting has recently attracted significant attention in the field of computer vision due to its wide applications to image understanding. Numerous methods have been proposed and achieved state-of-the-art performance for real-world tasks. However, existing approaches do not perform well under adverse weather such as haze, rain, and snow since the visual appearances of crowds in such scenes are drastically different from those images in clear weather of typical datasets. In this paper, we propose a method for robust crowd counting in adverse weather scenarios. Instead of using a two-stage approach that involves image restoration and crowd counting modules, our model learns effective features and adaptive queries to account for large appearance variations. With these weather queries, the proposed model can learn the weather information according to the degradation of the input image and optimize with the crowd counting module simultaneously. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective in counting crowds under different weather types on benchmark datasets. The source code and trained models will be made available to the public.Comment: including supplemental materia

High-energy scale revival and giant kink in the dispersion of a cuprate superconductor

In the present photoemission study of a cuprate superconductor Bi1.74Pb0.38Sr1.88CuO6+delta, we discovered a large scale dispersion of the lowest band, which unexpectedly follows the band structure calculation very well. The incoherent nature of the spectra suggests that the hopping-dominated dispersion occurs possibly with the assistance of local spin correlations. A giant kink in the dispersion is observed, and the complete self-energy containing all interaction information is extracted for a doped cuprate in the low energy region. These results recovered significant missing pieces in our current understanding of the electronic structure of cuprates.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. on May 21, 200

A Schwarz lemma for K\"ahler affine metrics and the canonical potential of a proper convex cone

This is an account of some aspects of the geometry of K\"ahler affine metrics based on considering them as smooth metric measure spaces and applying the comparison geometry of Bakry-Emery Ricci tensors. Such techniques yield a version for K\"ahler affine metrics of Yau's Schwarz lemma for volume forms. By a theorem of Cheng and Yau there is a canonical K\"ahler affine Einstein metric on a proper convex domain, and the Schwarz lemma gives a direct proof of its uniqueness up to homothety. The potential for this metric is a function canonically associated to the cone, characterized by the property that its level sets are hyperbolic affine spheres foliating the cone. It is shown that for an $n$-dimensional cone a rescaling of the canonical potential is an $n$-normal barrier function in the sense of interior point methods for conic programming. It is explained also how to construct from the canonical potential Monge-Amp\`ere metrics of both Riemannian and Lorentzian signatures, and a mean curvature zero conical Lagrangian submanifold of the flat para-K\"ahler space.Comment: Minor corrections. References adde