Hybrid monovision therapy in a patient with retinitis pigmentosa

AbstractA 41-year-old female was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) after bilateral implantation of multifocal intraocular lenses (IOLs). Due to persistent dissatisfaction with her visual performance, she came to our hospital for medical help. We exchanged the multifocal IOL in the dominant eye with a monofocal IOL (hybrid monovision therapy), and the visual inconvenience was alleviated to a large extent. To our knowledge, this is the first case report on the effect of hybrid monovision therapy applied to a patient with RP

How Do Alibaba Penetrate into and Benefit from the Internet Finance Sector Successfully? An Ecosystem Perspective

The internet finance (or online financial) industry in China has boomed in recent years. Amongst the players, Internet attackers are quoted as key facilitators, fostering innovation and possessing a uniquely competitive landscape. To explore the methods through which such companies penetrate and benefit from the online financial sector, this study analyzes the evolutionary path of Alibaba’s ecosystem during 2013 and 2015, discovering how Alibaba positions and shapes interactions within the ecosystem. Based on our findings, Alibaba first expanded to the investment and financial management sectors with regard to the entry strategy. Second, owing to its lack of experience in the financial landscape, Alibaba applied the evolutionary strategy and placed a higher focus on cooperating with Internet-based companies. Finally, to ensure sustainable and mutually beneficial relationships amongst most ecosystem players, Ant Financial became a keystone player, enabling Alibaba to serve as the physical dominator

Restricted VAR Hedging with the Presence of Multiple Breaks

Distinct from the existing literatures that most of them focussed on the case of a single change on issues related to structural change. This study addresses the practical advantage of hedging ratio when time varying structural breakings are considered. Data used in this study include daily observations of spot prices of WTI (Cushing, Oklahoma FOB), U.S. crude oil production, and futures closing prices of NYMEX over the period of 2002/1/2 ~ 2005/7/26. We compare on out-of-sample hedging effectiveness of this structural break with restricted VAR hedging model against standard VAR hedge model. It has been found that there are four structural breaks. And the improvement in hedging performance is clearly presented. Smaller hedging of a futures position can therefore reduce the investors cost extensively

BadCLIP: Dual-Embedding Guided Backdoor Attack on Multimodal Contrastive Learning

Studying backdoor attacks is valuable for model copyright protection and enhancing defenses. While existing backdoor attacks have successfully infected multimodal contrastive learning models such as CLIP, they can be easily countered by specialized backdoor defenses for MCL models. This paper reveals the threats in this practical scenario that backdoor attacks can remain effective even after defenses and introduces the \emph{\toolns} attack, which is resistant to backdoor detection and model fine-tuning defenses. To achieve this, we draw motivations from the perspective of the Bayesian rule and propose a dual-embedding guided framework for backdoor attacks. Specifically, we ensure that visual trigger patterns approximate the textual target semantics in the embedding space, making it challenging to detect the subtle parameter variations induced by backdoor learning on such natural trigger patterns. Additionally, we optimize the visual trigger patterns to align the poisoned samples with target vision features in order to hinder the backdoor unlearning through clean fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our attack significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (+45.3% ASR) in the presence of SoTA backdoor defenses, rendering these mitigation and detection strategies virtually ineffective. Furthermore, our approach effectively attacks some more rigorous scenarios like downstream tasks. We believe that this paper raises awareness regarding the potential threats associated with the practical application of multimodal contrastive learning and encourages the development of more robust defense mechanisms.Comment: The paper lacks some work that needs to be cite

Liquid biopsy genotyping in lung cancer: ready for clinical utility?

Liquid biopsy is a blood test that detects evidence of cancer cells or tumor DNA in the circulation. Despite complicated collection methods and the requirement for technique-dependent platforms, it has generated substantial interest due, in part, to its potential to detect driver oncogenes such as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutants in lung cancer. This technology is advancing rapidly and is being incorporated into numerous EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (EGFR-TKI) development programs. It appears ready for integration into clinical care. Recent studies have demonstrated that biological fluids such as saliva and urine can also be used for detecting EGFR mutant DNA through application other user-friendly techniques. This review focuses on the clinical application of liquid biopsies to lung cancer genotyping, including EGFR and other targets of genotype-directed therapy and compares multiple platforms used for liquid biopsy