9-Hexyl-3-iodo-9H-carbazole

In the title mol­ecule, C18H20IN, the tricyclic carbazole system is essentially planar with the two outer rings forming a dihedral angle of 0.43 (8)°. The crystal packing exhibits no short inter­molecular contacts

9-Ethyl-3,6-bis­(5-iodo-2-thien­yl)-9H-carbazole

In the title compound, C22H15I2NS2, the two thio­phene rings are twisted out of the plane of the central pyrrole ring, making dihedral angles of 32.4 (2)° and 9.8 (2). In the crystal, neighboring mol­ecules are linked into centrosymmetric dimers by pairs of C—H⋯I inter­actions

Edge-aware Feature Aggregation Network for Polyp Segmentation

Precise polyp segmentation is vital for the early diagnosis and prevention of colorectal cancer (CRC) in clinical practice. However, due to scale variation and blurry polyp boundaries, it is still a challenging task to achieve satisfactory segmentation performance with different scales and shapes. In this study, we present a novel Edge-aware Feature Aggregation Network (EFA-Net) for polyp segmentation, which can fully make use of cross-level and multi-scale features to enhance the performance of polyp segmentation. Specifically, we first present an Edge-aware Guidance Module (EGM) to combine the low-level features with the high-level features to learn an edge-enhanced feature, which is incorporated into each decoder unit using a layer-by-layer strategy. Besides, a Scale-aware Convolution Module (SCM) is proposed to learn scale-aware features by using dilated convolutions with different ratios, in order to effectively deal with scale variation. Further, a Cross-level Fusion Module (CFM) is proposed to effectively integrate the cross-level features, which can exploit the local and global contextual information. Finally, the outputs of CFMs are adaptively weighted by using the learned edge-aware feature, which are then used to produce multiple side-out segmentation maps. Experimental results on five widely adopted colonoscopy datasets show that our EFA-Net outperforms state-of-the-art polyp segmentation methods in terms of generalization and effectiveness.Comment: 20 pages 8 figure

Detection of hepatitis B virus DNA among accepted blood donors in Nanjing, China

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Posttransfusion hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection still occurs although its incidence has been substantially reduced since the introduction of screening of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) in blood donors. This study aimed to investigate the occult HBV infection in accepted blood donors in Nanjing, China.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The lower detection limit of the nested PCR in this study was estimated to be 20 copies/ml HBV DNA. The positive rate of occult HBV infection was 0.13% (5 of 2972) in the accepted blood donors. Sequencing data showed that the amplified HBV sequences were not identical each other and to the known sequences cloned in our laboratory, excluding the false-positive caused by cross-contamination. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the HBV in all five donors was genotype B; a single base deletion was detected in the S region of HBV DNA from one donor, and no mutation was observed in the "a" determinant of HBsAg from four other donors. All five donors were negative for anti-HBs and one was positive for anti-HBc.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The prevalence of occult HBV infection in the accepted blood donors in Nanjing, China is relatively high. The data would be meaningful in adapting strategy to eliminate posttransfusion HBV infection in China.</p

Testing Technicolor Models via Top Quark Pair Production in High Energy Photon Collisions

Pseudo-Goldstone boson contributions to $t\bar{t}$ production rates in technicolor models with and without topcolor at the $\sqrt{s}=0.5 and 1.5$ TeV photon colliders and hadron colliders are reviewed. For reasonable ranges of the parameters, the contributions are large enough to be experimentally observable. Models with topcolor, without topcolor and the MSSM with $\tan\beta\geq 1$ can be experimentally distinguished.Comment: Talk given by H.Y. Zhou at the III International Conference on Hyperons,Charm and Beauty Hadrons,Genova,Italy,June 30-July 3 199

B-vitamin consumption and the prevalence of diabetes and obesity among the US adults: population based ecological study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The global increased prevalence of obesity and diabetes occurred after the worldwide spread of B-vitamins fortification, in which whether long-term exposure to high level of B vitamins plays a role is unknown. Our aim was to examine the relationships between B-vitamins consumption and the obesity and diabetes prevalence.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This population based ecological study was conducted to examine possible associations between the consumption of the B vitamins and macronutrients and the obesity and diabetes prevalence in the US population using the per capita consumption data from the US Economic Research Service and the prevalence data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The prevalences of diabetes and adult obesity were highly correlated with per capita consumption of niacin, thiamin and riboflavin with a 26-and 10-year lag, respectively (<it>R</it>²= 0.952, 0.917 and 0.83 for diabetes, respectively, and <it>R</it>²= 0.964, 0.975 and 0.935 for obesity, respectively). The diabetes prevalence increased with the obesity prevalence with a 16-year lag (<it>R</it>²= 0.975). The relationships between the diabetes or obesity prevalence and per capita niacin consumption were similar both in different age groups and in male and female populations. The prevalence of adult obesity and diabetes was highly correlated with the grain contribution to niacin (<it>R</it>²= 0.925 and 0.901, respectively), with a 10-and 26-year lag, respectively. The prevalence of obesity in US adults during 1971-2004 increased in parallel with the increase in carbohydrate consumption with a 10-year lag. The per capita energy and protein consumptions positively correlated with the obesity prevalence with a one-year lag. Moreover, there was an 11-year lag relationship between per capita energy and protein consumption and the consumption of niacin, thiamin and riboflavin (<it>R</it>²= 0.932, 0.923 and 0.849 for energy, respectively, and <it>R</it>²= 0.922, 0.878 and 0.787 for protein, respectively).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Long-term exposure to high level of the B vitamins may be involved in the increased prevalence of obesity and diabetes in the US in the past 50 years. The possible roles of B-vitamins fortification and excess niacin consumption in the increased prevalence of obesity and diabetes were discussed.</p