The price impact of ESG ratings: Evidence from market reactions to earnings surprises

Ph.D

ControlMTR: Control-Guided Motion Transformer with Scene-Compliant Intention Points for Feasible Motion Prediction

The ability to accurately predict feasible multimodal future trajectories of surrounding traffic participants is crucial for behavior planning in autonomous vehicles. The Motion Transformer (MTR), a state-of-the-art motion prediction method, alleviated mode collapse and instability during training and enhanced overall prediction performance by replacing conventional dense future endpoints with a small set of fixed prior motion intention points. However, the fixed prior intention points make the MTR multi-modal prediction distribution over-scattered and infeasible in many scenarios. In this paper, we propose the ControlMTR framework to tackle the aforementioned issues by generating scene-compliant intention points and additionally predicting driving control commands, which are then converted into trajectories by a simple kinematic model with soft constraints. These control-generated trajectories will guide the directly predicted trajectories by an auxiliary loss function. Together with our proposed scene-compliant intention points, they can effectively restrict the prediction distribution within the road boundaries and suppress infeasible off-road predictions while enhancing prediction performance. Remarkably, without resorting to additional model ensemble techniques, our method surpasses the baseline MTR model across all performance metrics, achieving notable improvements of 5.22% in SoftmAP and a 4.15% reduction in MissRate. Our approach notably results in a 41.85% reduction in the cross-boundary rate of the MTR, effectively ensuring that the prediction distribution is confined within the drivable area

Ferroptosis in hematological malignant tumors

Ferroptosis is a kind of iron-dependent programmed cell death discovered in recent years. Its main feature is the accumulation of lipid reactive oxygen species in cells, eventually leading to oxidative stress and cell death. It plays a pivotal role in normal physical conditions and the occurrence and development of various diseases. Studies have shown that tumor cells of the blood system, such as leukemia cells and lymphoma cells, are sensitive to the response to ferroptosis. Regulators that modulate the Ferroptosis pathway can accelerate or inhibit tumor disease progression. This article reviews the mechanism of ferroptosis and its research status in hematological malignancies. Understanding the mechanisms of ferroptosis could provide practical guidance for treating and preventing these dreaded diseases

Characterizing the Structural Pattern Predicting Medication Response in Herpes Zoster Patients Using Multivoxel Pattern Analysis

Herpes zoster (HZ) can cause a blistering skin rash with severe neuropathic pain. Pharmacotherapy is the most common treatment for HZ patients. However, most patients are usually the elderly or those that are immunocompromised, and thus often suffer from side effects or easily get intractable post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN) if medication fails. It is challenging for clinicians to tailor treatment to patients, due to the lack of prognosis information on the neurological pathogenesis that underlies HZ. In the current study, we aimed at characterizing the brain structural pattern of HZ before treatment with medication that could help predict medication responses. High-resolution structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of 14 right-handed HZ patients (aged 61.0 ± 7.0, 8 males) with poor response and 15 (aged 62.6 ± 8.3, 5 males) age- (p = 0.58), gender-matched (p = 0.20) patients responding well, were acquired and analyzed. Multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) with a searchlight algorithm and support vector machine (SVM), was applied to identify the spatial pattern of the gray matter (GM) volume, with high predicting accuracy. The predictive regions, with an accuracy higher than 79%, were located within the cerebellum, posterior insular cortex (pIC), middle and orbital frontal lobes (mFC and OFC), anterior and middle cingulum (ACC and MCC), precuneus (PCu) and cuneus. Among these regions, mFC, pIC and MCC displayed significant increases of GM volumes in patients with poor response, compared to those with a good response. The combination of sMRI and MVPA might be a useful tool to explore the neuroanatomical imaging biomarkers of HZ-related pain associated with medication responses

Maternal physical activity levels in early pregnancy and the risk of spinal deformity among preschoolers at age 4: findings from the Shanghai birth cohort study

ObjectiveTo study the impact of maternal physical activity levels before and after birth on the risk of spinal deformity in preschool children.MethodsA cohort study of 760 preschoolers and their mothers tracked maternal physical activity levels during the prenatal period and the two years postnatally, as well as for two years after the child's birth, using standardized questionnaires at 6, 12, and 24 months. The risk of spinal deformity was assessed by the angle of trunk rotation (ATR) at the thoracic (T5), thoracic-lumbar (T12), and lumbar (L4) segments of the spine, with max values noted. An adjusted logistic regression model was used to explore the relationships between prenatal and postnatal physical activity levels and the risk of spinal deformity in preschoolers.ResultsIn 98 children (12.9%), ATRs were 3 or above, and 3 had ATRs of 5 at age 4. The duration of physical activity during early pregnancy (min/week) indicated a moderate risk of spinal deformity (with an ATR between 3 and 5) in children at age 4 (OR: 0.986, 95% CI: 0.976–1.001, P = 0.084). Exercising outdoors <1 h/day during 0–6 months reduced spinal deformity risk (3 ≤ ATRs < 5) compared to >1 h (OR = 0.525, 95% CI 0.301–0.917, p = 0.024). The risen risk of high ATR with long outdoor time was more significant when maternal blood calcium levels were low (OR=0.302, 95% CI 0.134–0.682; p = 0.004).ConclusionLong outdoor times (>1 h/day) in infants under 6 months may be associated with changes in trunk rotation angle or postural stress. Exercise during early pregnancy may relate to good spine development in children. Further studies are needed on physical activity's role in scoliosis prevention

The Effect of Global Prior on Conscious Perception and its Gender Differences

Previous studies have found that conscious experience of a stimulus in the previous recent trials could elevate the subjective conscious experience in current trials. However, despite this robust elevation effect of subjective consciousness report, the perceptual priming effect was not found amplified despite the elevation of subjective experience. This is in odds with a major literature in which it was robustly found that perceptual priming effect is strongly positively correlated with subjective conscious level. Therefore, one account is that prior experience could only influence our current perception in an illusionary fashion by reducing the subjective threshold so that despite elevated conscious experience, the deeper level perceptual processing effect remains untouched by prior experience. Another account is that the prior experience in the recent local previous trials is too weak to generate a prior that is strong enough to impact the deeper level perceptual processing. Thus, we aim to use block design to manipulate different levels of global prior in the conscious experience of a stimulus across blocks while remaining the strength of a physical input in the critical trials unchanged. If objective identification accuracy and perceptual priming effect in critical trials indeed varies across different global prior conditions, it would be the evidence for the second account that prior experience could influence perceptual processing. Also, gender differences in how global prior influence subjective visibility, objective performance and perceptual priming effect would be compared. Specifically, it is hypothesized that conscious perception of female subjects are more influenced by global prior experiences than male subjects

Top-down and Bottom-up Interaction as a Correlate of Conscious Access

Many theories of consciousness have pointed out the critical role of interaction between top-down and bottom-up networks for conscious perception. This project aims to find evidence for such interaction using a novel priming-effect-based behavioural approach