Radiomics optimizing the evaluation of endometrial receptivity for women with unexplained recurrent pregnancy loss

BackgroundThe optimization of endometrial receptivity (ER) through individualized therapies has been shown to enhance the likelihood of successful gestation. However, current practice lacks comprehensive methods for evaluating the ER of patients with recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL). Radiomics, an emerging AI-based technique that enables the extraction of mineable information from medical images, holds potential to offer a more objective and quantitative approach to ER assessment. This innovative tool may facilitate a deeper understanding of the endometrial environment and enable clinicians to optimize ER evaluation in RPL patients.ObjectiveThis study aimed to identify ultrasound radiomics features associated with ER, with the purpose of predicting successful ongoing pregnancies in RPL patients, and to assess the predictive accuracy of these features against regular ER parameters.MethodsThis retrospective, controlled study involved 262 patients with unexplained RPL and 273 controls with a history of uncomplicated full-term pregnancies. Radiomics features were extracted from ultrasound endometrial segmentation images to derive a radiomics score (rad-score) for each participant. Associations between rad-scores, baseline clinical variables, and sonographic data were evaluated using univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses to identify potential indicators of RPL. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was performed to evaluate the predictive accuracy of the rad-score and other identified indicators in discriminating RPL cases. Furthermore, the relationships between age and these identified indicators were assessed via Pearson correlation analysis.ResultsFrom the 1312 extracted radiomics features, five non-zero coefficient radiomics signatures were identified as significantly associated with RPL, forming the basis of the rad-score. Following multivariate logistic regression analysis, age, spiral artery pulsatility index (SA-PI), vascularisation index (VI), and rad-score emerged as independent correlates of RPL (all P<0.05). ROC curve analyses revealed the superior discriminative capability of the rad-score (AUC=0.882) over age (AUC=0.778), SA-PI (AUC=0.771), and VI (AUC=0.595). There were notable correlations between age and rad-score (r=0.275), VI (r=-0.224), and SA-PI (r=0.211), indicating age-related variations in RPL predictors.ConclusionThis study revealed a significant association between unexplained RPL and elevated endometrial rad-scores during the WOI. Furthermore, it demonstrated the potential of rad-scores as a promising predictive tool for successful ongoing pregnancies in RPL patients

SARS-CoV-2: The Monster Causes COVID-19

Coronaviruses are viruses whose particles look like crowns. SARS-CoV-2 is the seventh member of the human coronavirus family to cause COVID-19 which is regarded as a once-in-a-century pandemic worldwide. It holds has the characteristics of a pandemic, which has broy -55ught many serious negative impacts to human beings. It may take time for humans to fight the pandemic. In addition to humans, SARS-CoV-2 also infects animals such as cats. This review introduces the origins, structures, pathogenic mechanisms, characteristics of transmission, detection and diagnosis, evolution and variation of SARS-CoV-2. We summarized the clinical characteristics, the strategies for treatment and prevention of COVID-19, and analyzed the problems and challenges we face

Advances in immunotherapy of advanced non-small cell lung cancer with EGFR mutation

The incidence of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in Asians is significantly higher than that in Westerners. For the past few years, immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) that target the programmed cell death 1 (PD-1) /programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1) axis have become a part of the treatment paradigm for advanced NSCLC, opening a new era of immunotherapy for lung cancer. However, previous clinical trials reported that advanced NSCLC patients with EGFR mutation could not benefit from ICIs monotherapy. The immunotherapy outcomes of different EGFR mutant subtypes showed diverse. The interim results of the latest clinical trial ORIENT-31 showed that immunotherapy combined with chemotherapy and anti-angiogenesis significantly improved the progression-free survival of EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) resistant advanced NSCLC patients, providing a new therapeutic strategy for those EGFR mutant patients. The tumor microenvironment of EGFR-mutated NSCLC is immunosuppressed. Targeting the key immunomodulatory factors that play important roles in the immunosuppression may promote the response of EGFR-mutated tumors to immunotherapy and provide a new synergistic immune combination therapy strategy, which will enrich the clinical treatment options and improve the survival prognosis of EGFR-TKIs-resistant NSCLC patients. This article summarizes the latest clinical progression of immunotherapy in advanced NSCLC with EGFR mutation, the differences of immunotherapy efficacy among different EGFR mutation subtypes, the synergistic mechanism of combined immunotherapy and the potential molecular target combining with immunotherapy in EGFR-mutated NSCLC

A cohort study of factors influencing the physical fitness of preschool children: a decision tree analysis

ObjectiveBased on the decision tree model, to explore the key influencing factors of children’s physical fitness, rank the key influencing factors, and explain the complex interaction between the influencing factors.MethodsA cohort study design was adopted. 1,276 children (ages 3–6) from 23 kindergartens in Nanchang, China, were chosen for the study to measure the children’s physical fitness at baseline and a year later and to compare the physical fitness scores at the two stages. The study was conducted following the Chinese National Physical Fitness Testing Standard (Children Part); To identify the primary influencing factors of changes in physical fitness, a decision tree model was developed, and a questionnaire survey on birth information, feeding patterns, SB, PA, dietary nutrition, sleep, parental factors, and other relevant information was conducted.ResultsThe levels of physical fitness indicators among preschool children showed a significant increase after 1 year. The accuracy of the CHAID model is 84.17%. It showed that 7 variables were strongly correlated with the physical changes of children’s fitness, the order of importance of each variable was weekend PA, weekend MVPA, mother’s BMI, mother’s sports frequency, father’s education, mother’s education, and school day PA. Three factors are related to PA. Four factors are related to parental circumstances. In addition to the seven important variables mentioned, variables such as breakfast frequency on school day, puffed food, frequency of outing, school day MVPA, parental feeling of sports, father’s occupation, and weekend breakfast frequency are all statistically significant leaf node variables.ConclusionPA, especially weekend PA, is the most critical factor in children’s physical fitness improvement and the weekend MVPA should be increased to more than 30 min/d based on the improvement of weekend PA. In addition, parental factors and school day PA are also important in making decisions about changes in fitness for children. The mother’s efforts to maintain a healthy BMI and engage in regular physical activity are crucial for enhancing the physical fitness of children. Additionally, other parental factors, such as the parents’ educational levels and the father’s occupation, can indirectly impact the level of physical fitness in children

Genetically determined blood pressure, antihypertensive drug classes, and frailty: A Mendelian randomization study

Observational studies have suggested that the use of antihypertensive drugs was associated with the risk of frailty; however, these findings may be biased by confounding and reverse causality. This study aimed to explore the effect of genetically predicted lifelong lowering blood pressure (BP) through different antihypertensive medications on frailty. One‐sample Mendelian randomization (MR) and summary data‐based MR (SMR) were applied. We utilized two kinds of genetic instruments to proxy the antihypertensive medications, including genetic variants within or nearby drugs target genes associated with systolic/diastolic BP, and expression level of the corresponding gene. Among 298,618 UK Biobank participants, one‐sample MR analysis observed that genetically proxied BB use (relative risk ratios, 0.76; 95% CI, 0.65–0.90; p = 0.001) and CCB use (0.83; 0.72–0.95; p = 0.007), equivalent to a 10‐mm Hg reduction in systolic BP, was significantly associated with lower risk of pre‐frailty. In addition, although not statistically significant, the effect directions of systolic BP through ACEi variants (0.72; 0.39–1.33; p = 0.296) or thiazides variants (0.74; 0.53–1.03; p = 0.072) on pre‐frailty were also protective. Similar results were obtained in analyses for diastolic BP. SMR of expression in artery showed that decreased expression level of KCNH2, a target gene of BBs, was associated with lower frailty index (beta −0.02, p = 2.87 × 10−4). This MR analysis found evidence that the use of BBs and CCBs was potentially associated with reduced frailty risk in the general population, and identified KCNH2 as a promising target for further clinical trials to prevent manifestations of frailty

Identification and characterization of the Remorin gene family in Saccharum and the involvement of ScREM1.5e-1/-2 in SCMV infection on sugarcane

IntroductionRemorins (REMs) are plant-specific membrane-associated proteins that play important roles in plant–pathogen interactions and environmental adaptations. Group I REMs are extensively involved in virus infection. However, little is known about the REM gene family in sugarcane (Saccharum spp. hyrid), the most important sugar and energy crop around world.MethodsComparative genomics were employed to analyze the REM gene family in Saccharum spontaneum. Transcriptomics or RT-qPCR were used to analyze their expression files in different development stages or tissues under different treatments. Yeast two hybrid, bimolecular fluorescence complementation and co-immunoprecipitation assays were applied to investigate the protein interaction.ResultsIn this study, 65 REMs were identified from Saccharum spontaneum genome and classified into six groups based on phylogenetic tree analysis. These REMs contain multiple cis-elements associated with growth, development, hormone and stress response. Expression profiling revealed that among different SsREMs with variable expression levels in different developmental stages or different tissues. A pair of alleles, ScREM1.5e-1/-2, were isolated from the sugarcane cultivar ROC22. ScREM1.5e-1/-2 were highly expressed in leaves, with the former expressed at significantly higher levels than the latter. Their expression was induced by treatment with H2O2, ABA, ethylene, brassinosteroid, SA or MeJA, and varied upon Sugarcane mosaic virus (SCMV) infection. ScREM1.5e-1 was localized to the plasma membrane (PM), while ScREM1.5e-2 was localized to the cytoplasm or nucleus. ScREM1.5e-1/-2 can self-interact and interact with each other, and interact with VPgs from SCMV, Sorghum mosaic virus, or Sugarcane streak mosaic virus. The interactions with VPgs relocated ScREM1.5e-1 from the PM to the cytoplasm.DiscussionThese results reveal the origin, distribution and evolution of the REM gene family in sugarcane and may shed light on engineering sugarcane resistance against sugarcane mosaic pathogens

Enhanced multiclass SVM with thresholding fusion for speech-based emotion classification

As an essential approach to understanding human interactions, emotion classification is a vital component of behavioral studies as well as being important in the design of context-aware systems. Recent studies have shown that speech contains rich information about emotion, and numerous speech-based emotion classification methods have been proposed. However, the classification performance is still short of what is desired for the algorithms to be used in real systems. We present an emotion classification system using several one-against-all support vector machines with a thresholding fusion mechanism to combine the individual outputs, which provides the functionality to effectively increase the emotion classification accuracy at the expense of rejecting some samples as unclassified. Results show that the proposed system outperforms three state-of-the-art methods and that the thresholding fusion mechanism can effectively improve the emotion classification, which is important for applications that require very high accuracy but do not require that all samples be classified. We evaluate the system performance for several challenging scenarios including speaker-independent tests, tests on noisy speech signals, and tests using non-professional acted recordings, in order to demonstrate the performance of the system and the effectiveness of the thresholding fusion mechanism in real scenarios.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Challenges in QCD matter physics - The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment at FAIR

Substantial experimental and theoretical efforts worldwide are devoted to explore the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter. At LHC and top RHIC energies, QCD matter is studied at very high temperatures and nearly vanishing net-baryon densities. There is evidence that a Quark-Gluon-Plasma (QGP) was created at experiments at RHIC and LHC. The transition from the QGP back to the hadron gas is found to be a smooth cross over. For larger net-baryon densities and lower temperatures, it is expected that the QCD phase diagram exhibits a rich structure, such as a first-order phase transition between hadronic and partonic matter which terminates in a critical point, or exotic phases like quarkyonic matter. The discovery of these landmarks would be a breakthrough in our understanding of the strong interaction and is therefore in the focus of various high-energy heavy-ion research programs. The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at FAIR will play a unique role in the exploration of the QCD phase diagram in the region of high net-baryon densities, because it is designed to run at unprecedented interaction rates. High-rate operation is the key prerequisite for high-precision measurements of multi-differential observables and of rare diagnostic probes which are sensitive to the dense phase of the nuclear fireball. The goal of the CBM experiment at SIS100 (sqrt(s_NN) = 2.7 - 4.9 GeV) is to discover fundamental properties of QCD matter: the phase structure at large baryon-chemical potentials (mu_B > 500 MeV), effects of chiral symmetry, and the equation-of-state at high density as it is expected to occur in the core of neutron stars. In this article, we review the motivation for and the physics programme of CBM, including activities before the start of data taking in 2022, in the context of the worldwide efforts to explore high-density QCD matter.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures. Published in European Physical Journal

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead