Expert Consensus on Microtransplant for Acute Myeloid Leukemia in Elderly Patients -Report From the International Microtransplant Interest Group

Recent studies have shown that microtransplant (MST) could improve outcome of patients with elderly acute myeloid leukemia (EAML). To further standardize the MST therapy and improve outcomes in EAML patients, based on analysis of the literature on MST, especially MST with EAML from January 1st, 2011 to November 30th, 2022, the International Microtransplant Interest Group provides recommendations and considerations for MST in the treatment of EAML. Four major issues related to MST for treating EAML were addressed: therapeutic principle of MST (1), candidates for MST (2), induction chemotherapy regimens (3), and post-remission therapy based on MST (4). Others included donor screening, infusion of donor cells, laboratory examinations, and complications of treatment

Incorporation of aquaporins into polymeric membranes for water purification

Many regions of the world are facing the water shortages as urgent and major challenge. Biomimetic membrane desalination is proposed as the most promising among various technologies of water purification, using the aquaporin as robust water channel with high transport efficiency. However, the vulnerability and functionality of the aquaporins still remain challenging in the biomimetic membrane fabrication and applications. The thesis objectives are to fabricate and study robust aquaporin-incorporated polymeric vesicles for the protein deposition and functionality in the biomimetic membranes and also to propose and investigate novel strategies of aquaporin embedment in different membrane substrates. So two different strategies of copolymer/lipid hybrid and polyelectrolyte-adsorbed vesicles are studied and proved to enhanced vesicle stability and protein functionality. Also two different approaches of aquaporin-incorporated vesicle integration in the commercial membranes and aquaporin embedment in hydrogel membrane for nanofiltration are studied and the latter is proved of high feasibility and promising.Doctor of Philosophy (MSE

Recent advances and potential applications of the photo-induced macroscopic response of self-assembled azopolymer in aqueous media

This mini-review highlights issues related to the photo-triggered macroscopic response of azopolymer in supramolecular hydrogel and polymer vesicles. Cyclodextrin (CD) can form an inclusion complex with trans-azobenzene while cis-azobenzene is expelled out of the CD's cavity. This photo-reversible supramolecular host − guest interaction is used to trigger sol − gel transitions and to induce macroscopic assembly. When substituted azobenzene is located at chain ends of linear polyethylene glycol, monodisperse vesicles are formed exhibiting a photo-induced pulsating behavior. The macroscopic phase transition and assembly or pulsating behavior of azopolymers can be expected to have potential applications as smart biomedical materials

Prevalence of pre-high blood pressure and high blood pressure among non-overweight children and adolescents using international blood pressure references in developed regions in China

Background: There is a lack of data on the prevalence of pre-high blood pressure (PreHBP) and high blood pressure (HBP), based on recent international blood pressure references, in non-overweight children and adolescents. Aim: To describe the prevalence of PreHBP and HBP in non-overweight children and adolescents in developed regions of China. Subjects and methods: In total, 588 097 non-overweight children and adolescents aged 6–17 years from the National Surveys on Chinese Students’ Constitution and Health in 2015 were included. Results: The prevalence of PreHBP was 13.41% and subjects in urban areas had a higher prevalence of PreHBP (14.14%) than those in rural areas (12.92%). Subjects in regions with a high (13.56%) or moderate (13.61%) socioeconomic status showed a higher prevalence of PreHBP than those in regions with a relatively low socioeconomic status (12.76%). A similar pattern was found for the prevalence of HBP, and the prevalence of HBP was 18.25% for all participants, 20.55% for subjects in urban areas, 16.71% in rural areas, 18.76% in high socioeconomic areas, 18.62% in moderate socioeconomic areas and 16.70% in relatively low socioeconomic areas. Conclusion: A large proportion of non-overweight children and adolescents had elevated blood pressure and there were urban–rural and socioeconomic disparities in the prevalence of elevated blood pressure

Toward Measuring Target Perception: First-Order and Second-Order Deep Network Pipeline for Classification of Fixation-Related Potentials

The topdown determined visual object perception refers to the ability of a person to identify a prespecified visual target. This paper studies the technical foundation for measuring the target-perceptual ability in a guided visual search task, using the EEG-based brain imaging technique. Specifically, it focuses on the feature representation learning problem for single-trial classification of fixation-related potentials (FRPs). The existing methods either capture only first-order statistics while ignoring second-order statistics in data, or directly extract second-order statistics with covariance matrices estimated with raw FRPs that suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio. In this paper, we propose a new representation learning pipeline involving a low-level convolution subnetwork followed by a high-level Riemannian manifold subnetwork, with a novel midlevel pooling layer bridging them. In this way, the discriminative power of the first-order features can be increased by the convolution subnetwork, while the second-order information in the convolutional features could further be deeply learned with the subsequent Riemannian subnetwork. In particular, the temporal ordering of FRPs is well preserved for the components in our pipeline, which is considered to be a valuable source of discriminant information. The experimental results show that proposed approach leads to improved classification performance and robustness to lack of data over the state-of-the-art ones, thus making it appealing for practical applications in measuring the target-perceptual ability of cognitively impaired patients with the FRP technique

Tightly-Coupled Data Compression for Efficient Face Alignment

Face alignment is the key component for applications such as face and expression recognition, face based AR (Augmented Reality), etc. Among all the algorithms, cascaded-regression based methods have become popular in recent years for their low computational costs and satisfactory performances in uncontrolled environments. However, the size of the trained model is large for cascaded-regression based methods, which makes it difficult to be applied in resource restricted scenarios such as applications on mobile phones. In this paper, a data compression method for the trained model of supervised descent method (SDM) is proposed. Firstly, according to the distribution of the model data estimated with the non-parametric method, a K-means based data quantization algorithm with probability density-aware initialization was proposed to efficiently quantize the model data. Then, a tightly-coupled SDM training algorithm was proposed so that the training process reduced the errors caused by data quantization. Quantitative experimental results proved that our proposed method compressed the trained model to less than 19% of its original size with very similar feature localization performance. The proposed method opens the gates to efficient mobile face alignment applications based on SDM