Natural language guided visual relationship detection

Reasoning about the relationships between object pairs in images is a crucial task for holistic scene understanding. Most of the existing works treat this task as a pure visual classification task: each type of relationship or phrase is classified as a relation category based on the extracted visual features. However, each kind of relationships has a wide variety of object combination and each pair of objects has diverse interactions. Obtaining sufficient training samples for all possible relationship categories is difficult and expensive. In this work, we propose a natural language guided framework to tackle this problem. We propose to use a generic bi-directional recurrent neural network to predict the semantic connection between the participating objects in the relationship from the aspect of natural language. The proposed simple method achieves the state-of-the-art on the Visual Relationship Detection (VRD) and Visual Genome datasets, especially when predicting unseen relationships (e.g., recall improved from 76.42% to 89.79% on VRD zeroshot testing set)

Algorithms and methods for distributed interactive simulation

The main objective is to develop algorithms and methods that reduce the communication requirements in the distributed simulations without affecting the realism and causality in the simulation

Microstructures and mechanical properties of friction stir welded butt joints of 3003-H112 aluminum alloy to 304 stainless steel used in plate-fin heat exchanger

The valid joining of aluminum and steel plays an important role in support structure of heat exchanger, which was widely used in chemical, automobile and aircraft industries, etc. In this work, in order to improve the connection of aluminum to steel joints, the friction stir welding (FSW) method was applied to weld a 3003 aluminum alloy to a 304 stainless steel. The microstructures, mechanical properties and fracture mechanism of FSWed joints were studied. The results showed that an optimal joint was obtained at the rotational speed of 200 rpm, the traverse speed of 30 mm/min and the offset of 3.0 mm. The distance of root incomplete penetration increased with the raise of offset and the rotational speed. The offset had a more significant effect on the microstructure of the welded joints compared with the rotational speed. Both the tensile property and the microhardness of the stir zone improved with the decrease of rotational speed at the offset of 3.0 mm. The FSWed joints firstly generated stress concentration at the weld root during loading. With the further increase of the load, the weld root cracked and finally broke in the stir zone

Evaluation of Anti-Obesity Activity, Acute Toxicity, and Subacute Toxicity of Probiotic Dark Tea

Probiotic dark tea (PDT) is a novel kind of dark tea produced by fresh albino tea leaves and fermented with specific probiotics. Our study demonstrates that PDT can ameliorate high-fat diet-induced overweight and lipid metabolic disorders and shows no acute or subacute toxicity in Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats. Daily intragastric administration of 5% PDT infusion for 14 days caused no obvious effect on general physiological features and behaviors of rats. Oral administration of 1%, 2%, and 3% of PDT infusion for six weeks had no influence on the biochemistry and histopathology of rats’ organs and blood, as well as the body weight and ratios of organ/body weight. To investigate its anti-obesity activity, SD rats were randomly divided into four groups, treated with normal diet + water (Group I), high-fat diet + water (Group II), high-fat diet + 3% traditional dark tea infusion (Group III), high-fat diet + 3% PDT infusion (Group IV). After six weeks, the body weight, serum total triacylglycerol (TG) and serum total cholesterol (TC) levels of rats in Group II were significantly increased and the high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL) levels were significantly decreased compared with those in the other three groups. Both traditional dark tea and PDT treatment effectively counteracted the adverse effect of a high-fat diet in SD rats. These results suggest that PDT could be applied for the prevention of obesity, which ameliorates overweight and lipid metabolic disorders and which shows no acute or subacute toxicity

Endovascular therapy in acute ischaemic stroke with large infarction with matched or mismatched clinical-radiological severities: a post-hoc analysis of the ANGEL-ASPECT trialResearch in context

Summary: Background: Endovascular therapy (EVT) was demonstrated effective in acute large vessel occlusion (LVO) with large infarction. Revealing subgroups of patients who would or would not benefit from EVT will further inform patient selection for EVT. Methods: This post-hoc analysis of the ANGEL-ASPECT trial, a randomised controlled trial of 456 adult patients with acute anterior-circulation LVO and large infarction, defined by ASPECTS 3–5 or infarct core volume 70–100 mL, enrolled from 46 centres across China, between October 2, 2020 and May 18, 2022. Patients were randomly assigned (1:1) to receiving EVT and medical management or medical management alone. One patient withdrew consent, 455 patients were included in this post-hoc analysis and categorised into 4 subgroups by lower or higher NIHSS (< or ≥16) and smaller or larger infarct core (< or ≥70 mL). Those with lower NIHSS &amp; smaller core, and higher NIHSS &amp; larger core were considered clinical-radiological matched subgroups; otherwise clinical-radiological mismatched subgroups. Primary outcome was 90-day modified Rankin Scale (mRS). ANGEL-ASPECT is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04551664. Findings: Overall, 139 (30.5%) patients had lower NIHSS &amp; smaller core, 106 (23.3%) higher NIHSS &amp; larger core, 130 (28.6%) higher NIHSS &amp; smaller core, and 80 (17.6%) lower NIHSS &amp; larger core. There was significant ordinal shift in the 90-day mRS toward a better outcome with EVT in clinical-radiological matched subgroups: lower NIHSS &amp; smaller core (generalised OR, 1.76; 95% CI, 1.18–2.62; p = 0.01) and higher NIHSS &amp; larger core (1.64; 1.06–2.54; 0.01); but not in the two clinical-radiological mismatched subgroups. Interpretation: Our findings suggested that in patients with anterior-circulation LVO and large infarction, EVT was associated with improved 90-day functional outcomes in those with matched clinical and radiological severities, but not in those with mismatched clinical and radiological severities. Simultaneous consideration of stroke severity and infarct core volume may inform patient selection for EVT. Funding: Unrestricted grants from industry [Covidien Healthcare International Trading (Shanghai), Johnson &amp; Johnson MedTech, Genesis MedTech (Shanghai), and Shanghai HeartCare Medical Technology]