Exploring semantic information in disease: Simple Data Augmentation Techniques for Chinese Disease Normalization

The disease is a core concept in the medical field, and the task of normalizing disease names is the basis of all disease-related tasks. However, due to the multi-axis and multi-grain nature of disease names, incorrect information is often injected and harms the performance when using general text data augmentation techniques. To address the above problem, we propose a set of data augmentation techniques that work together as an augmented training task for disease normalization. Our data augmentation methods are based on both the clinical disease corpus and standard disease corpus derived from ICD-10 coding. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of our proposed methods. The results demonstrate that our methods can have up to 3\% performance gain compared to non-augmented counterparts, and they can work even better on smaller datasets

An approach for medical event detection in Chinese clinical notes of electronic health records

Abstract Background Medical event detection in narrative clinical notes of electronic health records (EHRs) is a task designed for reading text and extracting information. Most of the previous work of medical event detection treats the task as extracting concepts at word granularity, which omits the overall structural information of the clinical notes. In this work, we treat each clinical note as a sequence of short sentences and propose an end-to-end deep neural network framework. Methods We redefined the task as a sequence labelling task at short sentence granularity, and proposed a novel tag system correspondingly. The dataset were derived from a third-level grade-A hospital, consisting of 2000 annotated clinical notes according to our proposed tag system. The proposed end-to-end deep neural network framework consists of a feature extractor and a sequence labeller, and we explored different implementations respectively. We additionally proposed a smoothed Viterbi decoder as sequence labeller without additional parameter training, which can be a good alternative to conditional random field (CRF) when computing resources are limited. Results Our sequence labelling models were compared to four baselines which treat the task as text classification of short sentences. Experimental results showed that our approach significantly outperforms the baselines. The best result was obtained by using the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) feature extractor and the sequential CRF sequence labeller, achieving an accuracy of 92.6%. Our proposed smoothed Viterbi decoder achieved a comparable accuracy of 90.07% with reduced training parameters, and brought more balanced performance across all categories, which means better generalization ability. Conclusions Evaluated on our annotated dataset, the comparison results demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach for medical event detection in Chinese clinical notes of EHRs. The best feature extractor is the CNNs feature extractor, and the best sequence labeller is the sequential CRF decoder. And it was empirically verified that our proposed smoothed Viterbi decoder could bring better generalization ability while achieving comparable performance to the sequential CRF decoder

Effect of Annealing Process and Molecular Weight on the Polymorphic Transformation from Form II to Form I of Poly(1-butene)

Poly(1-butene) (PB-1) resin has excellent mechanical properties, outstanding creep resistance, environmental stress crack resistance and other excellent properties. However, PB-1 resin experiences a crystal transformation for a period, which seriously affects the production efficiency and directly restricts its large-scale commercial production and application. The factors affecting the crystal transformation of PB-1 are mainly divided into external and internal factors. External factors include crystallization temperature, thermal history, nucleating agent, pressure, solvent induction, etc., and internal factors include chain length, copolymerization composition, isotacticity, its distribution, etc. In this study, to avoid the interference of molecular weight distribution on crystallization behavior, five PB-1 samples with narrow molecular weight distribution (between 1.09 and 1.44) and different molecular weights (from 23 to 710 k) were chosen to research the influence of temperature and time in the step-by-step annealing process and molecular weight on the crystal transformation by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). When the total annealing time was the same, the step-by-step annealing process can significantly accelerate the rate of transformation from crystal form II to I. PB-1 samples with different molecular weights have the same dependence on annealing temperature, and the optimal nucleation temperature (i.e., low annealing temperature, Tl) and growth temperature (i.e., high annealing temperature, Th) were −10 °C and 40 °C, respectively. At these two temperatures, the crystal form I obtained by step-by-step annealing had the highest content; other lower or higher annealing temperatures would reduce the rate of crystal transformation. When the annealing temperature was the same, crystal form I first increased with annealing time tl, then gradually reached a plateau, but the time to reach a plateau was different. The crystalline form I contents of the samples with lower molecular weight increased linearly with annealing time th. However, the crystalline form I contents of the samples with higher molecular weight increased rapidly with annealing time th at the beginning, and then transformation speed from form II to form I slowed down, which implied that controlling Tl/tl and Th/th can tune the different contents of form I and form II. At the same Tl/tl or Th/th, with increasing molecular weight, the transformation speed from form II to form I via the step-by-step annealing process firstly increased and then slowed down due to the competition of the number of linked molecules and molecular chain mobility during crystallization. This study definitely provides an effective method for accelerating the transformation of poly(1-butene) crystal form, which not only has important academic significance, but also has vital industrial application

Effect of Annealing Process and Molecular Weight on the Polymorphic Transformation from Form II to Form I of Poly(1-butene)

Poly(1-butene) (PB-1) resin has excellent mechanical properties, outstanding creep resistance, environmental stress crack resistance and other excellent properties. However, PB-1 resin experiences a crystal transformation for a period, which seriously affects the production efficiency and directly restricts its large-scale commercial production and application. The factors affecting the crystal transformation of PB-1 are mainly divided into external and internal factors. External factors include crystallization temperature, thermal history, nucleating agent, pressure, solvent induction, etc., and internal factors include chain length, copolymerization composition, isotacticity, its distribution, etc. In this study, to avoid the interference of molecular weight distribution on crystallization behavior, five PB-1 samples with narrow molecular weight distribution (between 1.09 and 1.44) and different molecular weights (from 23 to 710 k) were chosen to research the influence of temperature and time in the step-by-step annealing process and molecular weight on the crystal transformation by differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). When the total annealing time was the same, the step-by-step annealing process can significantly accelerate the rate of transformation from crystal form II to I. PB-1 samples with different molecular weights have the same dependence on annealing temperature, and the optimal nucleation temperature (i.e., low annealing temperature, Tl) and growth temperature (i.e., high annealing temperature, Th) were −10 °C and 40 °C, respectively. At these two temperatures, the crystal form I obtained by step-by-step annealing had the highest content; other lower or higher annealing temperatures would reduce the rate of crystal transformation. When the annealing temperature was the same, crystal form I first increased with annealing time tl, then gradually reached a plateau, but the time to reach a plateau was different. The crystalline form I contents of the samples with lower molecular weight increased linearly with annealing time th. However, the crystalline form I contents of the samples with higher molecular weight increased rapidly with annealing time th at the beginning, and then transformation speed from form II to form I slowed down, which implied that controlling Tl/tl and Th/th can tune the different contents of form I and form II. At the same Tl/tl or Th/th, with increasing molecular weight, the transformation speed from form II to form I via the step-by-step annealing process firstly increased and then slowed down due to the competition of the number of linked molecules and molecular chain mobility during crystallization. This study definitely provides an effective method for accelerating the transformation of poly(1-butene) crystal form, which not only has important academic significance, but also has vital industrial application

Influence of Heating Rate on the Structure and Mechanical Properties of Aromatic BPDA–PDA Polyimide Fiber

Aromatic polyimide fibers (PI) are usually produced in two steps. The precursor fibers of polyamic acid (PAA) are fabricated first, and then the fabricated fibers are converted into PI fibers through thermal treatment. In the second step (thermal treatment), the mechanical properties of the obtained PI fibers are remarkably affected. Here, the PAA fibers derived from 3,3’,4,4’-biphenyltetra-carboxylic dianhydride and p-phenylenediamine are fabricated by a dry-jet wet-spinning method. Then, the PI fibers are prepared by heating PAA fibers from room temperature to 300, 350 and 400 °C under different heating rates, ranging from 1 °C/min to 80 °C/min. When the heating rate is low, the crystallization lags behind the imidization process, and begins only when the imidization degree reaches a high level. As the heating rate increases, the crystallization tends to occur simultaneously with the imidization process, and the degree of crystallinity of the PI fibers also greatly increases. Our findings suggest that a high heating rate causes the polymer chains to undergo high mobility during thermal treatment. The tensile modulus of the PI fiber further demonstrates a high dependence on the heating rate. Moreover, a short annealing process after treatment proves to be efficient in releasing residual stress and improving tensile strength

Emerging Roles of 1D Vertical Nanostructures in Orchestrating Immune Cell Functions

Engineered nano–bio cellular interfaces driven by 1D vertical nanostructures (1D‐VNS) are set to prompt radical progress in modulating cellular processes at the nanoscale. Here, tuneable cell–VNS interfacial interactions are probed and assessed, highlighting the use of 1D‐VNS in immunomodulation, and intracellular delivery into immune cells—both crucial in fundamental and translational biomedical research. With programmable topography and adaptable surface functionalization, 1D‐VNS provide unique biophysical and biochemical cues to orchestrate innate and adaptive immunity, both ex vivo and in vivo. The intimate nanoscale cell–VNS interface leads to membrane penetration and cellular deformation, facilitating efficient intracellular delivery of diverse bioactive cargoes into hard‐to‐transfect immune cells. The unsettled interfacial mechanisms reported to be involved in VNS‐mediated intracellular delivery are discussed. By identifying up‐to‐date progress and fundamental challenges of current 1D‐VNS technology in immune‐cell manipulation, it is hoped that this report gives timely insights for further advances in developing 1D‐VNS as a safe, universal, and highly scalable platform for cell engineering and enrichment in advanced cancer immunotherapy such as chimeric antigen receptor‐T therapy