An optimized fractional grey model based on weighted least squares and its application

The fractional grey model is an effective tool for modeling small samples of data. Due to its essential characteristics of mathematical modeling, it has attracted considerable interest from scholars. A number of compelling methods have been proposed by many scholars in order to improve the accuracy and extend the scope of the application of the model. Examples include initial value optimization, order optimization, etc. The weighted least squares approach is used in this paper in order to enhance the model's accuracy. The first step in this study is to develop a novel fractional prediction model based on weighted least squares operators. Thereafter, the accumulative order of the proposed model is determined, and the stability of the optimization algorithm is assessed. Lastly, three actual cases are presented to verify the validity of the model, and the error variance of the model is further explored. Based on the results, the proposed model is more accurate than the comparison models, and it can be applied to real-world situations

Altruism in nursing from 2012 to 2022: A scoping review

BackgroundBeing a nurse with non-altruistic orientation exists and altruism decline is being challenged as never before, which would be a disaster for medicine if left unnoticed.PurposeTo describe the meaning of altruism and altruistic behaviors in nursing, and to discuss dilemmas we face today.MethodCochrane, PROSPERO, PubMed, Web of Science, CINAHL, Scopus, Embase, ProQuest, and CNKI were searched for original research published in English or Chinese from 2012 to February 2022.ResultsBy screening 13 studies came from 12 different countries described altruism and altruistic behavior together were included in. Altruism has been described as value, vocation, or professionalism in nursing which can reflect nurses' compassion, level of expertise, and quality of care. Altruistic nursing care, body donation, financial endowment, volunteering, sharing, benefiting patients maximum, and helping colleagues represented most of the altruistic behaviors in nursing. There is a vacant that not any assessment tool designed for measuring altruism in nurse groups. Interventions from curriculums in class and support of organizations with psychological methods could be helpful to improve the nurses' level of altruism.ConclusionAltruism and altruistic behaviors in the past decades were described. A new concept of altruism in nursing was proposed based on the original meaning and the current changes, and interventions for promoting altruism and some of the dilemmas faced today were synthesized

VISinger 2: High-Fidelity End-to-End Singing Voice Synthesis Enhanced by Digital Signal Processing Synthesizer

End-to-end singing voice synthesis (SVS) model VISinger can achieve better performance than the typical two-stage model with fewer parameters. However, VISinger has several problems: text-to-phase problem, the end-to-end model learns the meaningless mapping of text-to-phase; glitches problem, the harmonic components corresponding to the periodic signal of the voiced segment occurs a sudden change with audible artefacts; low sampling rate, the sampling rate of 24KHz does not meet the application needs of high-fidelity generation with the full-band rate (44.1KHz or higher). In this paper, we propose VISinger 2 to address these issues by integrating the digital signal processing (DSP) methods with VISinger. Specifically, inspired by recent advances in differentiable digital signal processing (DDSP), we incorporate a DSP synthesizer into the decoder to solve the above issues. The DSP synthesizer consists of a harmonic synthesizer and a noise synthesizer to generate periodic and aperiodic signals, respectively, from the latent representation z in VISinger. It supervises the posterior encoder to extract the latent representation without phase information and avoid the prior encoder modelling text-to-phase mapping. To avoid glitch artefacts, the HiFi-GAN is modified to accept the waveforms generated by the DSP synthesizer as a condition to produce the singing voice. Moreover, with the improved waveform decoder, VISinger 2 manages to generate 44.1kHz singing audio with richer expression and better quality. Experiments on OpenCpop corpus show that VISinger 2 outperforms VISinger, CpopSing and RefineSinger in both subjective and objective metrics.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202

mRNA/microRNA Profile at the Metamorphic Stage of Olive Flounder (Paralichthys olivaceus)

Flatfish is famous for the asymmetric transformation during metamorphosis. The molecular mechanism behind the asymmetric development has been speculated over a century and is still not well understood. To date, none of the metamorphosis-related genes has been identified in flatfish. As the first step to screen metamorphosis-related gene, we constructed a whole-body cDNA library and a whole-body miRNA library in this study and identified 1051 unique ESTs, 23 unique miRNAs, and 4 snoRNAs in premetamorphosing and prometamorphosing Paralichthys olivaceus. 1005 of the ESTs were novel, suggesting that there was a special gene expression profile at metamorphic stage. Four miRNAs (pol-miR-20c, pol-miR-23c, pol-miR-130d, and pol-miR-181e) were novel to P. olivaceus; they were characterized as highly preserved homologies of published miRNAs but with at least one nucleotide differed. Representative 24 mRNAs and 23 miRNAs were quantified during metamorphosis of P. olivaceus by using quantitative RT PCR or stem-loop qRT PCR. Our results showed that 20 of mRNAs might be associated with early metamorphic events, 10 of mRNAs might be related with later metamorphic events, and 16 of miRNAs might be involved in the regulation of metamorphosis. The data provided in this study would be helpful for further identifying metamorphosis-related gene in P. olivaceus

Orally Administered Crocin Protects Against Cerebral Ischemia/Reperfusion Injury Through the Metabolic Transformation of Crocetin by Gut Microbiota

Our pilot study suggested that orally administered crocin was hardly absorbed into circulatory system, but it was effective against cerebral ischemic/reperfusion (I/R) injury. The pharmacologically active component and targeting site of crocin remain elusive. In this study, the cerebral-protective effect of crocin was evaluated on a rat transient middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) model. Our data showed that oral administration of crocin had better effectiveness in cerebral protection than an intravenous injection. Neither crocin nor its metabolite crocetin were determined in the brain of cerebral I/R rats, indicating a target site of periphery. Abundant crocetin was detected in plasma after oral administration instead of intravenous injection of crocin. Meanwhile, orally administered crocetin showed similar cerebral protection to that of crocin, but this exciting effect was not clearly observed by intravenous administration of crocetin, indicating the importance of crocetin in gut. Moreover, orally administered crocin showed less cerebral-protective effect in pseudo germ-free (pGF) MCAO rats. In vitro and in vivo experiments confirmed that crocin could be deglycosylated to crocetin in gut content of normal rats, rather than that of pGF rats, indicating that gut microbiota facilitated the transformation of crocin into crocetin, which played a key role in the activation of the pharmacological effect. Metabolomic study revealed that microbial-host co-metabolic molecules were significantly perturbed after oral administration of crocin, indicating a regulation on intestinal ecosystem. It was further suggested that gut microbiota may be the potential target of the cerebral-protective effect of crocin

The Effect of Chinese Herbal Medicine on Quality of Life and Exercise Tolerance in Heart Failure With Preserved Ejection Fraction: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Background: Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) has a good effect of alleviating symptoms and improving quality of life and exercise tolerance in patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), but it wasn't sufficiently valued and promoted because of the lack of evidence-based medical evidence.Aim: To systematically review the effect of CHM on quality of life and exercise tolerance in patients with HFpEF.Methods: We conducted a systematic literature search for Chinese and English studies in PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, China Knowledge Resource Integrated Database, Wanfang Data, and China Science and Technology Journal Database. Databases were searched using terms relating to or describing CHM, HFpEF and randomized controlled trials, without any exclusion criteria for other types of diseases or disorders. Literature retrieval, data extraction, and risk of bias assessments were performed independently by two investigators. Differences were resolved by consensus. RevMan 5.3.0 was used for data analysis. Quantitative synthesis was used when the included studies were sufficiently homogeneous and subgroup analyses were performed for studies with different sample sizes and blind methods. GRADEpro was used to grade the available evidence to minimize bias in our findings.Results: Seventeen studies with 2,724 patients were enrolled in this review. ROB assessments showed a relatively high selection and performance bias. Meta-analyses showed that compared with conventional western medicine, combined CHM and conventional western medicine could significantly improve 6-min walk distance (MD = 52.13, 95% CI [46.91, 57.34], P < 0.00001), and it seemed to be more effective as compared with combined placebo and conventional western medicine. Similar results were observed for quality of life and the results were better in a larger sample. The GRADEpro showed a very low to moderate level of the available evidence.Conclusion: Combined CHM and conventional western medicine might be effective to improve exercise tolerance and quality of life in HFpEF patients, but new well-designed studies with larger sample size, strict randomization, and clear description about detection and reporting processes are needed to further strengthen this evidence