Characterizing Intermittency of 4-Hz Quasi-periodic Oscillation in XTE J1550-564 using Hilbert-Huang Transform

We present the time-frequency analysis results based on the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) for the evolution of a 4-Hz low-frequency quasi-periodic oscillation (LFQPO) around the black hole X-ray binary XTE J1550-564. The origin of LFQPOs is still debated. To understand the cause of the peak broadening, we utilized a recently developed time-frequency analysis, HHT, for tracking the evolution of the 4-Hz LFQPO from XTE J1550 564. By adaptively decomposing the ~4-Hz oscillatory component from the light curve and acquiring its instantaneous frequency, the Hilbert spectrum illustrates that the LFQPO is composed of a series of intermittent oscillations appearing occasionally between 3 Hz and 5 Hz. We further characterized this intermittency by computing the confidence limits of the instantaneous amplitudes of the intermittent oscillations, and constructed both the distributions of the QPO's high and low amplitude durations, which are the time intervals with and without significant ~4-Hz oscillations, respectively. The mean high amplitude duration is 1.45 s and 90% of the oscillation segments have lifetimes below 3.1 s. The mean low amplitude duration is 0.42 s and 90% of these segments are shorter than 0.73 s. In addition, these intermittent oscillations exhibit a correlation between the oscillation's rms amplitude and mean count rate. This correlation could be analogous to the linear rms-flux relation found in the 4-Hz LFQPO through Fourier analysis. We conclude that the LFQPO peak in the power spectrum is broadened owing to intermittent oscillations with varying frequencies, which could be explained by using the Lense-Thirring precession model.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Evaluation the activity of alveolar echinococcosis: A comparison between 18F-FDG PET and spectral CT

AbstractPurposeTo assess the iodine concentration of hepatic alveolar echinococcosis (HAE) using spectral computed tomography (CT) with comparison of [18F] fluorodeoxyglucose positron-emission tomography (18F-FDG PET), and to estimate the value of spectral CT for evaluation of HAE activity.Materials and methods18 patients with histologically confirmed or clinically proved HAE underwent spectral CT and 18F-FDG PET examinations. After three-phase scanning, the quantitative iodine-based material decomposition images and optimal monochromatic image of spectral CT were reconstructed and iodine concentration (IC) was measured in different organizational structures.Results18F-FDG PET identified increased metabolic activity in the corresponding lesions in 13 patients (13/18, 72.2%). The iodine concentration in marginal zone of lesion were significantly higher than in solid component of lesion and normal liver parenchyma during PVP and VP. The iodine value of edge tissue of the lesion and normal liver and iodine value of normal liver tissues showed statistically significant difference (P < 0.001). There was correlation between IC and SUVmax in marginal zone of HAE lesion, it was highest during PVP (r = 0.873, p < 0.001). There was low correlation between CT values and SUVmax.ConclusionThere was good correlation between spectral CT and 18F-FDG PET. Spectral CT could be recommended as a more practical tool in the clinical routine

Preventive and therapeutic role of traditional Chinese herbal medicine in hepatocellular carcinoma

AbstractHepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most prevalent malignancies worldwide. The clinical management of HCC remains a substantial challenge. Although surgical resection of tumor tissues seems promising, a high recurrence and/or metastasis rate accounting for disease-related death has led to an urgent need for improved postsurgical preventive/therapeutic clinical intervention. Developing advanced target-therapy agents such as sorafenib appears to be the only effective clinical intervention for patients with HCC to date, but only limited trials have been conducted in this regard. Because of their enhanced preventive/therapeutic effects, traditional Chinese herbal medicine (CHM)-derived compounds are considered suitable agents for HCC treatment. The CHM-derived compounds also possess multilevel, multitarget, and coordinated intervention effects, making them ideal candidates for inhibition of tumor progression and HCC metastasis. This article reviews the anticancer activity of various CHMs with the hope of providing a better understanding of how to best use CHM for HCC treatment

Intraocular Pressure Changes: An Important Determinant of the Biocompatibility of Intravitreous Implants

Background: In recent years, research efforts exploring the possibility of using biomaterial nanoparticles for intravitreous drug delivery has increased significantly. However, little is known about the effect of material properties on intravitreous tissue responses. Principal Findings: To find the answer, nanoparticles made of hyaluronic acid (HA), poly (l-lactic acid) (PLLA), polystyrene (PS), and Poly N-isopropyl acrylamide (PNIPAM) were tested using intravitreous rabbit implantation model. Shortly after implantation, we found that most of the implants accumulated in the trabecular meshwork area followed by clearance from the vitreous. Interestingly, substantial reduction of intraocular pressure (IOP) was observed in eyes implanted with particles made of PS, PNIPAM and PLLA, but not HA nanoparticles and buffered salt solution control. On the other hand, based on histology, we found that the particle implantation had no influence on cornea, iris and even retina. Surprisingly, substantial CD11b+ inflammatory cells were found to accumulate in the trabecular meshwork area in some animals. In addition, there was a good relationship between recruited CD11b+ cells and IOP reduction. Conclusions: Overall, the results reveal the potential influence of nanoparticle material properties on IOP reduction and inflammatory responses in trabecular meshwork. Such interactions may be critical for the development of future ocula

UniMSE: Towards Unified Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition

Multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA) and emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) are key research topics for computers to understand human behaviors. From a psychological perspective, emotions are the expression of affect or feelings during a short period, while sentiments are formed and held for a longer period. However, most existing works study sentiment and emotion separately and do not fully exploit the complementary knowledge behind the two. In this paper, we propose a multimodal sentiment knowledge-sharing framework (UniMSE) that unifies MSA and ERC tasks from features, labels, and models. We perform modality fusion at the syntactic and semantic levels and introduce contrastive learning between modalities and samples to better capture the difference and consistency between sentiments and emotions. Experiments on four public benchmark datasets, MOSI, MOSEI, MELD, and IEMOCAP, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and achieve consistent improvements compared with state-of-the-art methods.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 2022 main conferenc

Tensed Ontology Based on Simple Partial Logic

Simple partial logic (=SPL) is, broadly speaking, an extensional logic which allows for the truth-value gap. First I give a system of propositional SPL by partializing classical logic, as well as extending it with several non-classical truth-functional operators. Second I show a way based on SPL to construct a system of tensed ontology, by representing tensed statements as two kinds of necessary statements in a linear model that consists of the present and future worlds. Finally I compare that way with other two ways based on Łukasiewicz’s three-valued logic and branching temporal logic