On the center-stable manifolds for some fractional differential equations of Caputo type

This paper is devoted to study the existence of center-stable manifolds for some planar fractional differential equations of Caputo type with relaxation factor. After giving some necessary estimation for Mittag–Leffler functions, some existence results for center-stable manifolds are established under the mild conditions by virtue of a suitable Lyapunov–Perron operator. Moreover, an explicit example is given to illustrate the above result. Finally, high-dimensional case is considered

Vasculogenic mimicry contributes to lymph node metastasis of laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Survival of laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (LSCC) patients has remained unchanged over recent years due to its uncontrolled recurrence and local lymph node metastasis. Vasculogenic mimicry (VM) is an alternative type of blood supplement related to more aggressive tumor biology and increased tumor-related mortality. This study aimed to investigate the unique role of VM in the progression of LSCC.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We reviewed clinical pathological data of 203 cases of LSCC both prospectively and retrospectively. VM and endothelium-dependent vessel (EDV) were detected by immunohistochemistry and double staining to compare their different clinical pathological significance in LSCC. Survival analyses were performed to assess their prognostic significance as well.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Both VM and EDV existed in LSCC type of blood supply. VM is related to pTNM stage, lymph node metastasis and pathology grade. In contrust, EDV related to location, pTNM stage, T stage and distant metastasis. Univariate analysis showed VM, pTNM stage, T classification, nodal status, histopathological grade, tumor size, and radiotherapy to be related to overall survival (OS). While, VM, location, tumor size and radiotherapy were found to relate to disease free survival (DFS). Multivariate analysis indicated that VM, but not EDV, was an adverse predictor for both OS and DFS.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>VM existed in LSCC. It contributed to the progression of LSCC by promoting lymph node metastasis. It is an independent predictors of a poor prognosis of LSCC.</p

Long-term surgical outcomes of primary congenital glaucoma in China

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the long-term outcomes of three surgical procedures for the treatment of primary congenital glaucoma (PCG). INTRODUCTION: PCG is one of the main causes of blindness in children. There is a paucity of contemporary data on PCG in China. METHODS: A retrospective study of 48 patients (81 eyes) with PCG who underwent primary trabeculectomy, trabeculotomy, or combined trabeculotomy and trabeculectomy (CTT). RESULTS: All patients were less than 4 years (yrs) of age, with a mean age of 2.08 ± 1.23 yrs. The mean duration of follow-up was 5.49 ± 3.09 yrs. The difference in success rates among the three surgical procedures at 1, 3, 6 and 9 yrs was not statistically significant (p = 0.492). However, in patients with over 4 yrs of follow-up, Kaplan-Meier survival analysis revealed that the success rates of trabeculectomy and CTT declined more slowly than that of trabeculotomy. Among the patients, 66.22% acquired good vision (VA >; 0.4), 17.57% acquired fair vision (VA = 0.1 - 0.3), and 16.22% acquired poor vision (VA < 0.1). The patients with good vision were mostly in the successful surgery group. Myopia was more prevalent postoperatively (p = 0.009). Reductions in the cup-disc ratio and corneal diameter were only seen in the successful surgery group (p = 0.000). In addition, the successful surgery group contained more patients that complied with a regular follow-up routine (p = 0.002). DISCUSSION: Our cases were all primary surgeries. Primary trabeculectomy was performed in many cases because no treatment was sought until an advanced stage of disease had been reached. CONCLUSIONS: In contrast to most reports, in the present study, trabeculectomy and CTT achieved higher long-term success rates than trabeculotomy. The patients with successful surgical results had better vision. Compliance with a routine of regular follow-up may increase the chances of a successful surgical outcome

Discovery and identification of potential biomarkers of pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a common form of cancer in children. Currently, bone marrow biopsy is used for diagnosis. Noninvasive biomarkers for the early diagnosis of pediatric ALL are urgently needed. The aim of this study was to discover potential protein biomarkers for pediatric ALL.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Ninety-four pediatric ALL patients and 84 controls were randomly divided into a "training" set (45 ALL patients, 34 healthy controls) and a test set (49 ALL patients, 30 healthy controls and 30 pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients). Serum proteomic profiles were measured using surface-enhanced laser desorption/ionization-time-of-flight mass spectroscopy (SELDI-TOF-MS). A classification model was established by Biomarker Pattern Software (BPS). Candidate protein biomarkers were purified by HPLC, identified by LC-MS/MS and validated using ProteinChip immunoassays.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of 7 protein peaks (9290 m/z, 7769 m/z, 15110 m/z, 7564 m/z, 4469 m/z, 8937 m/z, 8137 m/z) were found with differential expression levels in the sera of pediatric ALL patients and controls using SELDI-TOF-MS and then analyzed by BPS to construct a classification model in the "training" set. The sensitivity and specificity of the model were found to be 91.8%, and 90.0%, respectively, in the test set. Two candidate protein peaks (7769 and 9290 m/z) were found to be down-regulated in ALL patients, where these were identified as platelet factor 4 (PF4) and pro-platelet basic protein precursor (PBP). Two other candidate protein peaks (8137 and 8937 m/z) were found up-regulated in the sera of ALL patients, and these were identified as fragments of the complement component 3a (C3a).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Platelet factor (PF4), connective tissue activating peptide III (CTAP-III) and two fragments of C3a may be potential protein biomarkers of pediatric ALL and used to distinguish pediatric ALL patients from healthy controls and pediatric AML patients. Further studies with additional populations or using pre-diagnostic sera are needed to confirm the importance of these findings as diagnostic markers of pediatric ALL.</p

REFUGE Challenge: A unified framework for evaluating automated methods for glaucoma assessment from fundus photographs

[EN] Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of irreversible but preventable blindness in working age populations. Color fundus photography (CFP) is the most cost-effective imaging modality to screen for retinal disorders. However, its application to glaucoma has been limited to the computation of a few related biomarkers such as the vertical cup-to-disc ratio. Deep learning approaches, although widely applied for medical image analysis, have not been extensively used for glaucoma assessment due to the limited size of the available data sets. Furthermore, the lack of a standardize benchmark strategy makes difficult to compare existing methods in a uniform way. In order to overcome these issues we set up the Retinal Fundus Glaucoma Challenge, REFUGE (https://refuge.grand-challenge.org), held in conjunction with MIC-CAI 2018. The challenge consisted of two primary tasks, namely optic disc/cup segmentation and glaucoma classification. As part of REFUGE, we have publicly released a data set of 1200 fundus images with ground truth segmentations and clinical glaucoma labels, currently the largest existing one. We have also built an evaluation framework to ease and ensure fairness in the comparison of different models, encouraging the development of novel techniques in the field. 12 teams qualified and participated in the online challenge. This paper summarizes their methods and analyzes their corresponding results. In particular, we observed that two of the top-ranked teams outperformed two human experts in the glaucoma classification task. Furthermore, the segmentation results were in general consistent with the ground truth annotations, with complementary outcomes that can be further exploited by ensembling the results.This work was supported by the Christian Doppler Research Association, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs and the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development, J.I.O is supported by WWTF (Medical University of Vienna: AugUniWien/FA7464A0249, University of Vienna: VRG12- 009). Team Masker is supported by Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province of China (Grant 2017A030310647). Team BUCT is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 11571031). The authors would also like to thank REFUGE study group for collaborating with this challenge.Orlando, JI.; Fu, H.; Breda, JB.; Van Keer, K.; Bathula, DR.; Diaz-Pinto, A.; Fang, R.... (2020). 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The FilZ protein contains a single PilZ domain and facilitates the swarming motility of pseudoalteromonas sp. SM9913

Swarming regulation is complicated in flagellated bacteria, especially those possessing dual flagellar systems. It remains unclear whether and how the movement of the constitutive polar flagellum is regulated during swarming motility of these bacteria. Here, we report the downregulation of polar flagellar motility by the c-di-GMP effector FilZ in the marine sedimentary bacterium Pseudoalteromonas sp. SM9913. Strain SM9913 possesses two flagellar systems, and filZ is located in the lateral flagellar gene cluster. The function of FilZ is negatively controlled by intracellular c-di-GMP. Swarming in strain SM9913 consists of three periods. Deletion and overexpression of filZ revealed that, during the period when strain SM9913 expands quickly, FilZ facilitates swarming. In vitro pull-down and bacterial two-hybrid assays suggested that, in the absence of c-di-GMP, FilZ interacts with the CheW homolog A2230, which may be involved in the chemotactic signal transduction pathway to the polar flagellar motor protein FliMp, to interfere with polar flagellar motility. When bound to c-di-GMP, FilZ loses its ability to interact with A2230. Bioinformatic investigation indicated that filZ-like genes are present in many bacteria with dual flagellar systems. Our findings demonstrate a novel mode of regulation of bacterial swarming motility

CFD study on thermal transport in open-cell metal foams with and without a washcoat: Effective thermal conductivity and gas-solid interfacial heat transfer

publisher: Elsevier articletitle: CFD study on thermal transport in open-cell metal foams with and without a washcoat: Effective thermal conductivity and gas-solid interfacial heat transfer journaltitle: Chemical Engineering Science articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ces.2016.12.006 content_type: article copyright: © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: CFD study on thermal transport in open-cell metal foams with and without a washcoat: Effective thermal conductivity and gas-solid interfacial heat transfer journaltitle: Chemical Engineering Science articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ces.2016.12.006 content_type: article copyright: © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.publisher: Elsevier articletitle: CFD study on thermal transport in open-cell metal foams with and without a washcoat: Effective thermal conductivity and gas-solid interfacial heat transfer journaltitle: Chemical Engineering Science articlelink: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ces.2016.12.006 content_type: article copyright: © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51276181, 21306192) and the National Key Research and Development Program – China (2016YFB0601203)

Establishment of Prognostic Nomograms for Early-Onset Prostate Cancer Patients: A SEER Database Analysis

Objective Clinical prostate cancer (PCa) is rare in men aged <50 years (early-onset). A well-designed nomogram for prognosis prediction in patients with early-onset PCa has not been studied. Here, we tried to establish nomogram models of overall survival (OS) and cancer-specific survival (CSS) in patients with early-onset PCa. Methods The clinical variables of patients diagnosed with early-onset PCa between 2004 and 2016 were retrieved from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database and randomly divided into training and validation groups at a ratio of 7:3. Multivariate Cox regression analyses were used to select prognostic factors associated with OS or CSS, followed by the construction and validation of nomograms. Results We enrolled 8259 patients with early-onset PCa. New nomograms were established and showed good discriminative abilities. Finally, ROC curve analysis demonstrated that these nomograms were superior to the TNM stage and Gleason score in predicting both OS and CSS for patients with early-onset PCa. Conclusion This is the first study to establish nomograms with effective and high accuracy for prognosis in patients with early-onset PCa

Construction and Verification of Spherical Thin Shell Model for Revealing Walnut Shell Crack Initiation and Expansion Mechanism

Walnut shell breaking is the first step of deep walnut processing. This study aims to investigate the mechanical properties and fracture state of the Qingxiang walnut shell under unidirectional load and guide the complete separation of the walnut shell and kernel. The spherical thin shell model of the walnut (the fitting error is less than 5%) was established and verified. The process from the initiation to the expansion of walnut cracks was analyzed. The crack expansion rate was estimated in terms of the crack fracture regularity on the shell&rsquo;s surface. Based on the momentless theory and finite element simulation analysis, we found that the stress on the shell surface in the concentrated force action region was gradient distributed from inside to outside and that the internal forces were equal in all directions in the peripheral force action region. The unidirectional impact shell-breaking experiments confirmed the reliability of our spherical thin shell model and verified our hypothesis of walnut shell fracture along the longitudinal grain. Our results can provide a theoretical basis for the development and structural optimization of shell-breaking machinery