Two Chinese contemporary piano works. "Combination of Long and Short Meter” and "Thunder in a Drought"

Abstract This paper will analyze two contrasting Chinese pieces written in the late twentieth century. The researcher will address related aspects of Chinese folk music and present a comprehensive analysis discussing how composers apply western composition techniques to Chinese folk music. The “Combination of Long and Short Meter” is a three-movement work written in 1985. This work uses modern western composition techniques such as clusters, polyrhythm, bitonality, and pitch-class set. The composer combines these techniques with Chinese folk idioms resulting in an ingenious and well organized new work. The title "long and short" refers to one specific kind of Chinese folk music, which is highly influenced by Chao Xian ethnic music. Chao Xian music is characterized by using long and short rhythmic patterns. In this work, each movement has its own title, “Deng De Kong”, “Jin Yang Zhao” and “En Mao Li.” These titles indicate a different rhythmic pattern, tempo, meter, mood and style. This work has been well received and was chosen as the commission work for 1st China International piano competition in 1994. The “Combination of Long and Short Meter” is a popular work for advanced pianists demanding high level keyboard technique and musical ability. Many professional pianists and advanced students play this work in China. "Thunder in a Drought" is a piece that is transcribed for piano from another Chinese instrument’s music with the same title. There are many passages that imitate the sound of other Chinese instruments. This piece is from Guang Dong province in Southeast China. It has original tunes from Guang Dong and uses local musical idioms. The music depicts the festival scene of people celebrating the rain after a long drought. This piece is in intermediate level of keyboard technique and has been very popular especially for young pianists

Prognostic value of osteopontin splice variant-c expression in breast cancers: a meta-analysis

Objectives. Osteopontin (OPN) is overexpressed in breast cancers, while its clinical and prognostic significance remained unclear. This study aimed to assess the prognostic value of OPN, especially its splice variants, in breast cancers. Methods. Data were extracted from eligible studies concerning the OPN and OPN-c expression in breast cancer patients and were used to calculate the association between OPN/OPN-c and survival. Two reviewer teams independently screened the literatures according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria based on quality evaluation. Following the processes of data extraction, assessment, and transformation, meta-analysis was carried out via RevMan 5.3 software. Results. A total of ten studies involving 1,567 patients were included. The results demonstrated that high level OPN indicated a poor outcome in the OS (HR = 2.22, 95% CI: 1.23–4.00, and ; random-effects model) with heterogeneity (%) of breast cancer patients. High level OPN-c appeared to be more significantly associated with poor survival (HR = 2.14, 95% CI: 1.51–3.04, and ; fixed-effects model) with undetected heterogeneity (%). Conclusions. Our analyses indicated that both OPN and OPN-c could be considered as prognostic markers for breast cancers. The high level of OPN-c was suggested to be more reliably associated with poor survival in breast cancer patients

Chemical composition of the essential oil of whole plant of Elsholtizia dense Benth and its anti-tumor effect on human hepatoma cells

Purpose: To determine the chemical components of the essential oil of Elsholtizia dense in Sichuan Province and evaluate the effect of the oil on human hepatoma cells (SMMC-7721) in vitro.Methods: The essential oil was extracted using the modified steam-distillation  extraction method, and its chemical components were determined by gas  chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The effect of the essential oil on proliferation of SMMC-7721 cells was studied by 3-(4,5-dimethyl-2-thiazolyl)-2,5-diphenyl-2-H-tetrazolium bromide (MTT) assay, with L02 and HeLa cells serving as control groups.Results: GC-MS results show that the essential oil of E. dense contains 40  components. Thirty seven components were identified and accounted for 98.39 % of the essential oil. The two main components were rosefuran epoxide (53.12 %) and 2-ethyl imidazole (29.8 %). The oil significantly inhibited cell proliferation in a concentration- and time-dependent manner (p < 0.05). SMMC-7721 cells were more inhibited than L02 and HeLa cells by the oil, with half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) values of 26.23 and 25.46 μg/mL after 8-h and 24-h treatments, respectively.Conclusion: Out of the 40 chemical components of the essential oil of E. dense, rosefuran epoxide and 2-ethyl imidazole were the most abundant. The oil has a significant anti-tumor effect on SMMC-7721 cells, and thus has a potential to be developed as an anti-liver cancer drug.Keywords: Medicinal herb, Elsholtizia dense Benth, Essential oil, Rosefuran epoxide, 2-Ethyl imidazole, Anti-tumor activit

Hydroxytyrosol Improves Obesity and Insulin Resistance by Modulating Gut Microbiota in High-Fat Diet-Induced Obese Mice

Obesity is a common chronic metabolic disease that is harmful to human health and predisposes the affected individuals to a cluster of pathologies. Insulin resistance (IR) is one of the most frequent complications of obesity. Hydroxytyrosol (HT) may reduce obesity and IR in high-fat diet (HFD)-fed mice; however, the mechanism underlying is still unknown. Systemic low-grade inflammation and intestinal dysfunction are thought to be associated with obesity and IR. In this study, we found that HFD feeding for 8 weeks altered the intestinal microbiota, injured intestinal barrier function, increased endotoxin release into the blood, enhanced the expression of inflammatory factors (TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-6) and lipid accumulation in liver, caused obesity, and aggravated IR via the JNK/IRS (Ser 307) pathway in HFD mice. We also found that HT gavage could reverse those effects and the beneficial effects of HT were transferable through fecal microbiota transplantation. Our data indicate that HT can improve obesity and IR by altering the composition of the intestinal microbiota and improving integrity of the intestinal wall. We propose that HT replenishment may be used as a dietary intervention strategy to prevent obesity and IR

Radiomics analysis for predicting malignant cerebral edema in patients undergoing endovascular treatment for acute ischemic stroke

PURPOSERadiomics analysis is a promising image analysis technique. This study aims to extract a radiomics signature from baseline computed tomography (CT) to predict malignant cerebral edema (MCE) in patients with acute anterior circulation infarction after endovascular treatment (EVT).METHODSIn this retrospective study, 111 patients underwent EVT for acute ischemic stroke caused by middle cerebral artery (MCA) and/or internal carotid artery occlusion. The participants were randomly divided into two datasets: the training set (n = 77) and the test set (n = 34). The clinico-radiological profiles of all patients were collected, including cranial non-contrast-enhanced CT, CT angiography, and CT perfusion. The MCA territory on non-contrast-enhanced CT images was segmented, and the radiomics features associated with MCE were analyzed. The clinico-radiological parameters related to MCE were also identified. In addition, a routine visual radiological model based on radiological factors and a combined model comprising radiomics features and clinico-radiological factors were constructed to predict MCE.RESULTSThe areas under the curve (AUCs) of the radiomics signature for predicting MCE were 0.870 (P < 0.001) and 0.837 (P = 0.002) in the training and test sets, respectively. The AUCs of the routine visual radiological model were 0.808 (P < 0.001) and 0.813 (P = 0.005) in the training and test sets, respectively. The AUCs of the model combining the radiomics signature and clinico-radiological factors were 0.924 (P < 0.001) and 0.879 (P = 0.001) in the training and test sets, respectively.CONCLUSIONA CT image-based radiomics signature is a promising tool for predicting MCE in patients with acute anterior circulation infarction after EVT. For clinicians, it may assist in diagnostic decision-making

Continuously Controllable Facial Expression Editing in Talking Face Videos

Recently audio-driven talking face video generation has attracted considerable attention. However, very few researches address the issue of emotional editing of these talking face videos with continuously controllable expressions, which is a strong demand in the industry. The challenge is that speech-related expressions and emotion-related expressions are often highly coupled. Meanwhile, traditional image-to-image translation methods cannot work well in our application due to the coupling of expressions with other attributes such as poses, i.e., translating the expression of the character in each frame may simultaneously change the head pose due to the bias of the training data distribution. In this paper, we propose a high-quality facial expression editing method for talking face videos, allowing the user to control the target emotion in the edited video continuously. We present a new perspective for this task as a special case of motion information editing, where we use a 3DMM to capture major facial movements and an associated texture map modeled by a StyleGAN to capture appearance details. Both representations (3DMM and texture map) contain emotional information and can be continuously modified by neural networks and easily smoothed by averaging in coefficient/latent spaces, making our method simple yet effective. We also introduce a mouth shape preservation loss to control the trade-off between lip synchronization and the degree of exaggeration of the edited expression. Extensive experiments and a user study show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various evaluation criteria.Comment: Demo video: https://youtu.be/WD-bNVya6k

NHERF1 regulates the progression of colorectal cancer through the interplay with VEGFR2 pathway

The oncogenic role of ectopic expression of Na+/H+ exchanger regulatory factor 1 (NHERF1) was recently suggested in colorectal cancer, where it was implicated in playing a role in the tumor hypoxia microenvironment. Here we showed that a high level expression of NHERF1 was found in colorectal cancer tissues and that the expression of NHERF1 was positively correlated with VEGFR2 expression. The prognostic value of VEGFR2 expression in colorectal cancer relied on the expression of NHERF1. The up-regulation of NHERF1 induced by the exposure to hypoxia in colon cancer cells depended on the activation of VEGFR2 signaling. NHERF1 in turn inhibited the activation of VEGFR2 signaling which could be regulated by the interaction between NHERF1 and VEGFR2, resulting in the reduction of migration and invasion of colon cancer cells. These results suggest a dynamic interplay between NHERF1 and VEGFR2 signaling in colorectal cancer, which could explain the contribution of NHERF1 to the regulation of tumor cell responses to the hypoxia microenvironment

Ion-exchange voltammetry at polymer film-coated nanoelectrode ensembles.

Ensembles of nanoscopic disk-shaped electrodes have been shown to offer enhancements in electroanalytical detection limits relative to electrodes of macroscopic dimensions (e.g., disk electrodes with diameters of 1 mm). Enhancements in electroanalytical detection limits have also been observed at macroscopic electrodes that have been coated with films of ion-exchange polymers. In this paper we combine these two concepts. We demonstrate that a nanoelectrode ensemble (NEE) that has been coated with a thin film of the Kodak ion-exchange polymer AQ 55 shows enhanced electroanalytical detection limits relative to the uncoated NEE and to the coated macroscopic electrode. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation of the electrochemistry, and the electroanalytical advantages, of polymer film-coated NEEs