Recurrent Syncope Attributed to Left Main Coronary Artery Severe Stenosis

Patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) rarely manifest as recurrent syncope due to malignant ventricular arrhythmia. We report a case of a 56-year-old Chinese male with complaints of paroxysmal chest burning sensation and distress for 2 weeks as well as loss of consciousness for 3 days. The electrocardiogram (ECG) revealed paroxysmal multimorphologic ventricular tachycardia during attack and normal heart rhythm during intervals. Coronary angiograph showed 90% stenosis in left main coronary artery and 80% stenosis in anterior descending artery. Two stents sized 4.0*18 mm and 2.75*18 mm were placed at left main coronary artery and anterior descending artery, respectively, during percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). The patient was discharged and never had ventricular arrhythmia again during a 3-month follow-up since the PCI. This indicated that ventricular tachycardia was correlated with persistent severe myocardial ischemia. Coronary vasospasm was highly suspected to be the reason of the sudden attack and acute exacerbation. PCI is recommended in patients with both severe coronary artery stenosis and ventricular arrhythmia. Removing myocardial ischemia may stop or relieve ventricular arrhythmia and prevent cardiac arrest

Surface-exposed loops L7 and L8 of Haemophilus (Glaesserella) parasuis OmpP2 contribute to the expression of proinflammatory cytokines in porcine alveolar macrophages

International audienceOuter membrane protein P2 (OmpP2) of the virulent Haemophilus (Glaesserella) parasuis has been shown to induce the release of proinflammatory cytokines. The OmpP2 protein is composed of eight or nine surface-exposed loops, but it is unclear which of them participates in the OmpP2-induced inflammatory response. In this study, we synthesized linear peptides corresponding to surface-exposed loops L1–L8 of OmpP2 from the virulent H. parasuis SC096 strain to stimulate porcine alveolar macrophages (PAMs) in vitro. We found that both L7 and L8 significantly upregulated the mRNA expression of interleukin (IL)-1α, IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8, IL-17, and IL-23 and the chemokines CCL-4 and CCL-5 in a time- and dose-dependent manner. Additionally, we constructed ompP2ΔLoop7 and ompP2ΔLoop8 mutant SC096 strains and extracted their native OmpP2 proteins to stimulate PAMs. These mutant proteins induced significantly less mRNA expression of inflammatory cytokines than SC096 OmpP2. Next, the amino acid sequences of L7 and L8 from 15 serovars of H. parasuis OmpP2 were aligned. These sequences were relatively conserved among the most virulent reference strains, suggesting that L7 and L8 are the most active peptides of the OmpP2 protein. Furthermore, L7 and L8 significantly upregulated the NF-κB and AP-1 activity levels based on luciferase reporter assays in a dose-dependent manner. Therefore, our results demonstrated that both surface-exposed loops L7 and L8 of H. parasuis OmpP2 induced the expression of proinflammatory cytokines possibly by activating the NF-κB and MAPK signalling pathways in cells infected by H. parasuis

ChanEstNet: A Deep Learning Based Channel Estimation for High-Speed Scenarios

Aiming at the problem that the downlink channel estimation performance is limited due to the fast time-varying and non-stationary characteristics in the high-speed mobile scenarios, we propose a channel estimation network based on deep learning, called ChanEstNet. ChanEstNet uses the convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract channel response feature vectors and recurrent neural network (RNN) for channel estimation. We use a large amount of high-speed channel data to conduct offline training for the learning network, fully exploit the channel information in the training sample, make it learn the characteristics of fast time-varying and non-stationary channels, and better track the features of channels changing in high-speed environments. The simulation results show that in the high-speed mobile scenarios, compared with the traditional methods, the proposed channel estimation method has low computational complexity and significant performance improvement

Phylogenetic signal in gut microbial community rather than in rodent metabolic traits

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32090020, 32271575, 32070449, 31872232, and 32270508) and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDPB16).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

HI-Kyber: A novel high-performance implementation scheme of Kyber based on GPU

CRYSTALS-Kyber, as the only public key encryption (PKE) algorithm selected by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the third round, is considered one of the most promising post-quantum cryptography (PQC) schemes. Lattice-based cryptography uses complex discrete alogarithm problems on lattices to build secure encryption and decryption systems to resist attacks from quantum computing. Performance is an important bottleneck affecting the promotion of post quantum cryptography. In this paper, we present a High-performance Implementation of Kyber (named HI-Kyber) on the NVIDIA GPUs, which can increase the key-exchange performance of Kyber to the million-level. Firstly, we propose a lattice-based PQC implementation architecture based on kernel fusion, which can avoid redundant global-memory access operations. Secondly, We optimize and implement the core operations of CRYSTALS-Kyber, including Number Theoretic Transform (NTT), inverse NTT (INTT), pointwise multiplication, etc. Especially for the calculation bottleneck NTT operation, three novel methods are proposed to explore extreme performance: the sliced layer merging (SLM), the sliced depth-first search (SDFS-NTT) and the entire depth-first search (EDFS-NTT), which achieve a speedup of 7.5%, 28.5%, and 41.6% compared to the native implementation. Thirdly, we conduct comprehensive performance experiments with different parallel dimensions based on the above optimization. Finally, our key exchange performance reaches 1,664 kops/s. Specifically, based on the same platform, our HI-Kyber is 3.52$\times$ that of the GPU implementation based on the same instruction set and 1.78$\times$ that of the state-of-the-art one based on AI-accelerated tensor core

A service-oriented energy assessment system based on BPMN and machine learning

Increasing energy cost and environmental problems push forward research on energy saving and emission reduction strategy in the manufacturing industry. Energy assessment of machining, as the basis for energy saving and emission reduction, plays an irreplaceable role in engineering service and maintenance for manufacturing enterprises. Due to the complex energy nature and relationships between machine tools, machining parts, and machining processes, there is still a lack of practical energy evaluation methods and tools for manufacturing enterprises. To fill this gap, a serviced-oriented energy assessment system is designed and developed to assist managers in clarifying the energy consumption of machining in this paper. Firstly, the operational requirements of the serviced-oriented energy assessment system are analyzed from the perspective of enterprises. Then, based on the establishment of system architecture, three key technologies, namely data integration, process integration, and energy evaluation, are studied in this paper. In this section, the energy characteristics of machine tools and the energy relationships are studied through the working states of machine tools, machining features of parts and process activities of processes, and the relational database, BPMN 2.0 specification, and machine learning approach are employed to implement the above function respectively. Finally, a case study of machine tool center stand base machining in a manufacturing enterprise was applied to verify the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed approach and system

Compound Kushen Injection suppresses human breast cancer stem-like cells by down-regulating the canonical Wnt/β-catenin pathway

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Cancer stem cells (CSCs) play an important role in cancer initiation, relapse and metastasis. To date, no specific medicine has been found to target CSCs as they are resistant to most conventional therapies and proliferate indefinitely. Compound Kushen Injection (CKI) has been widely used for cancer patients with remarkable therapeutic effects in Chinese clinical settings for many years. This study focused on whether CKI could inhibit MCF-7 SP cells in vitro and in vivo.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The analysis of CKI on SP population and the main genes of Wnt signaling pathway were studied first. Then we studied the tumorigenicity of SP cells and the effects of CKI on SP cells in vivo. The mice inoculated with 10,000 SP cells were randomly divided into three groups (6 in each group) and treated with CKI, cisplatin and saline (as a control) respectively for 7 weeks. The tumor formation rates of each group were compared. The main genes and proteins of the Wnt signaling pathway were analyzed by RT-PCR and western blot.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>CKI suppressed the size of SP population (approximately 90%), and down-regulated the main genes of Wnt signaling pathway. We also determined that MCF-7 SP cells were more tumorigenic than non-SP and unsorted cells. The Wnt signaling pathway was up-regulated in tumors derived from SP cells compared with that in tumors from non-SP cells. The tumor formation rate of the CKI Group was 33% (2/6, <it>P </it>< 0.05), and that of Cisplatin Group was 50%(3/6, <it>P </it>< 0.05), whereas that of the Control Group was 100% (6/6).The RT-PCR and western blot results indicated that CKI suppressed tumor growth by down-regulating the Wnt/β-catenin pathway, while cisplatin activated the Wnt/β-catenin pathway and might spare SP cells.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>It suggested that CKI may serve as a novel drug targeting cancer stem-like cells, though further studies are recommended.</p

Evolutionary Analyses Reveal Diverged Patterns of SQUAMOSA Promoter Binding Protein-Like (SPL) Gene Family in Oryza Genus

The SPL (SQUAMOSA promoter binding protein-like) gene family is one of the plant-specific transcription factor families and controls a considerable number of biological functions, including floral development, phytohormone signaling, and toxin resistance. However, the evolutionary patterns and driving forces of SPL genes in the Oryza genus are still not well-characterized. In this study, we investigated a total of 105 SPL genes from six AA genome Oryza representative species (O. barthii, O. glumipatula, O. nivara, O. rufipogon, O. glaberrima, and O. sativa). Phylogenetic and motif analyses indicated that SPL proteins could be divided into two distinct lineages (I and II), and further studies showed lineage II consisted of three clades (IIA, IIB, and IIC). We found that clade I had comparable structural features with clade IIA, whereas genes in clade IIC displayed intrinsic differences, such as lower exon numbers and the presence of miR156 regulation elements. Nineteen orthologous groups of OsSPLs in Oryza were also identified, and most exons within those genes maintained constant length, whereas length of intron changed relatively. All groups were constrained by stronger purifying selection and diversified continually including alterative gene number, intron length, and miR156 regulation. Subsequently, cis-acting element analyses revealed the potential role of SPLs in wild rice, which might participate in light-responsive, phytohormone response, and plant growth and development. Our results shed light on that different evolutionary rates and duplication events might result in divergent evolutionary patterns in each lineage of SPL genes, providing a guide in exploring diverse function in the rice gene family among six closely related Oryza species

Impermeable inorganic “walls” sandwiching perovskite layer toward inverted and indoor photovoltaic devices

Interfaces between the perovskite active layer and the charge-transport layers (CTLs) play a critical role in both efficiency and stability of halide-perovskite photovoltaics. One of the major concerns is that surface defects of perovskite could cause detrimental nonradiative recombination and material degradation. In this work, we addressed this challenging problem by inserting ultrathin alkali-fluoride (AF) films between the tri-cation lead-iodide perovskite layer and both CTLs. This bilateral inorganic “walls” strategy makes use of both physical-blocking and chemical-anchoring functionalities of the continuous, uniform and compact AF framework: on the one hand, the uniformly distributed alkali-iodine coordination at the perovskite-AF interfaces effectively suppresses the formation of iodine-vacancy defects at the surfaces, thus reducing the trap-assisted recombination at the perovskite-CTL interfaces and therewith the open-voltage loss; on the other hand, the impermeable AF buffer layers effectively prevent the bidirectional ion migration at the perovskite-CTLs interfaces even under harsh working conditions. As a result, a power-conversion efficiency (PCE) of 22.02% (certified efficiency 20.4%) with low open-voltage deficit (<0.4 V) was achieved for the low-temperature processed inverted planar perovskite solar cells. Exceptional operational stability (500 h, ISOS-L-2) and thermal stability (1000 h, ISOS-D-2) were obtained. Meanwhile, a 35.7% PCE was obtained under dim-light source (1000 lux white LED light) with the optimized device, which is among the best records in perovskite indoor photovoltaics