Therapeutic efficacy of combined administration of thymosin and oxaliplatin in elderly gastric ulcer patients and its effect on cellular immunity and matrix metalloproteinase

Purpose: To investigate the clinical efficacy of thymosin combined with oxaliplatin and tiggio in aged gastric cancer (GC) sufferers, as well as their impact on cellular immunity and matrix metalloproteinase.Methods: Elderly GC sufferers (n = 82) were divided into study and control groups by random allocation (41 patients/group). Control group was treated with oxaliplatin combined with tiggio, while the study group was treated with thymopeptide injection, in addition to oxaliplatin combined with tiggio. Each treatment course lasted 21 days, and the study involved three courses. Clinical effectiveness and toxicity in the two groups were determined and compared before and after treatment.Results: Total effectiveness in the study group (73.16 %) and disease remission (95.11 %) were superior to the corresponding values for control patients given oxaliplatin and tiggio (48.78 and 85.37 %, respectively, p ˂ 0.05). There were markedly lower incidences of nausea, vomiting and leukopenia in the study group than in control (p ˂ 0.05).Conclusion: The use of thymosin-oxaliplatin-tigeo triple therapy for aged GC sufferers has a definite clinical benefits and low toxic side effects.Keywords: Thymosin, Asha Leigh Per, Teggio, Gastric cancer, Cellular immunity, Matrix metalloproteinas

Business Value of Enterprise Micro-Blogs: Empirical Study from weibo.com in Sina

The increasing use of micro-blogs as marketing tools has increased the research attention on the usage and performance of enterprise micro-blogs. Based on research on information system (IS) usage and the resource-based view (RBV) theory, this study develops a model to measure the business value of enterprise micro-blogs. The model consists of metrics on micro-blog usage, micro-blog operational performance, firm capability, and performance. Questionnaires were distributed to firms that use micro-blogs. This study collects 317 valid responses for empirical analysis. The result suggests that the extent of micro-blog usage improves the operational performance of enterprise micro-blogs directly and indirectly by increasing firm capability. The operational performance of enterprise micro-blogs significantly affects firm performance. This study reveals the mechanism of business value generation of enterprise micro-blogs and extends the stream of research that combines IS usage and the RBV theory

Event-Centric Query Expansion in Web Search

In search engines, query expansion (QE) is a crucial technique to improve search experience. Previous studies often rely on long-term search log mining, which leads to slow updates and is sub-optimal for time-sensitive news searches. In this work, we present Event-Centric Query Expansion (EQE), a novel QE system that addresses these issues by mining the best expansion from a significant amount of potential events rapidly and accurately. This system consists of four stages, i.e., event collection, event reformulation, semantic retrieval and online ranking. Specifically, we first collect and filter news headlines from websites. Then we propose a generation model that incorporates contrastive learning and prompt-tuning techniques to reformulate these headlines to concise candidates. Additionally, we fine-tune a dual-tower semantic model to function as an encoder for event retrieval and explore a two-stage contrastive training approach to enhance the accuracy of event retrieval. Finally, we rank the retrieved events and select the optimal one as QE, which is then used to improve the retrieval of event-related documents. Through offline analysis and online A/B testing, we observe that the EQE system significantly improves many metrics compared to the baseline. The system has been deployed in Tencent QQ Browser Search and served hundreds of millions of users. The dataset and baseline codes are available at https://open-event-hub.github.io/eqe .Comment: ACL 2023 Industry Trac

Aberrant resting-state brain activity in Huntington's disease: A voxel-based meta-analysis

IntroductionFunctional neuroimaging could provide abundant information of underling pathophysiological mechanisms of the clinical triad including motor, cognitive and psychiatric impairment in Huntington's Disease (HD).MethodsWe performed a voxel-based meta-analysis using anisotropic effect size-signed differential mapping (AES-SDM) method.Results6 studies (78 symptomatic HD, 102 premanifest HD and 131 healthy controls) were included in total. Altered resting-state brain activity was primarily detected in the bilateral medial part of superior frontal gyrus, bilateral anterior cingulate/paracingulate gyrus, left insula, left striatum, right cortico-spinal projections area, right inferior temporal gyrus area, right thalamus, right cerebellum and right gyrus rectus area. Premanifest and symptomatic HD patients showed different alterative pattern in the subgroup analyses.DiscussionThe robust and consistent abnormalities in the specific brain regions identified in the current study could help to understand the pathophysiology of HD and explore reliable neuroimaging biomarkers for monitoring disease progression, or even predicting the onset of premanifest HD patients

Research on duplex underwater wireless laser communication system

To improve the bit error rate (BER) of underwater wireless laser communication and increase communication speed, a duplex underwater wireless laser communication system is designed. The system uses both blue and green lasers to transmit signals simultaneously, and adopts an improved modulation and demodulation algorithm to achieve separate modulation of the two sets of signals. A duplex underwater wireless laser communication system builds based on 440 and 550 nm lasers. On the basis of analyzing the absorption and scattering characteristics of seawater in laser communication, the influence of turbulence on communication efficiency is discussed. Improved the traditional duplex modulation algorithm and conducted communication testing at a depth of 2.0 m underwater. The experimental results show that when the communication distance increases from 5 to 50 m, the BER of the unoptimized duplex mode increases from 2.34 × 10−7 to 3.5 × 10−5. After adopting the optimization algorithm, the BER increases from 2.81 × 10−7 to 1.18 × 10−6, and the signal attenuation has been significantly suppressed. The duplex communication structure and algorithm can effectively reduce the impact of communication distance on bit BER

Transition from continental collision to tectonic escape? A geophysical perspective on lateral expansion of the northern Tibetan Plateau

A number of tectonic models have been proposed for the Tibetan Plateau, which origin, however, remains poorly understood. In this study, investigations of the shear wave velocity (Vs) and density (ρ) structures of the crust and upper mantle evidenced three remarkable features: (1) There are variations in Vs and ρ of the metasomatic mantle wedge in the hanging wall of the subduction beneath different tectonic blocks of Tibet, which may be inferred as related to the dehydration of the downgoing slab. (2) Sections depicting gravitational potential energy suggest that the subducted lithosphere is less dense than the ambient rocks, and thus, being buoyant, it cannot be driven by gravitational slab pull. The subduction process can be inferred by the faster SW-ward motion of Eurasia relative to India as indicated by the plate motions relative to the mantle. An opposite NE-ward mantle flow can be inferred beneath the Himalaya system, deviating E and SE-ward toward China along the tectonic equator. (3) The variation in the thickness of the metasomatic mantle wedge suggests that the leading edge of the subducting Indian slab reaches the Bangoin-Nujiang suture (BNS), and the metasomatic mantle wedge overlaps with a region with poor Sn-wave propagation in north Tibet. The metasomatic layer, north of the BNS, deforms in the E-W direction to accommodate lithosphere shortening in south Tibet

Suppression of <i>TREX1</i> deficiency-induced cellular senescence and interferonopathies by inhibition of DNA damage response

TREX1 encodes a major DNA exonuclease and mutations of this gene are associated with type I interferonopathies in human. Mice with Trex1 deletion or mutation have shortened life spans accompanied by a senescence-associated secretory phenotype. However, the contribution of cellular senescence in TREX1 deficiency-induced type I interferonopathies remains unknown. We found that features of cellular senescence present in Trex1−/− mice are induced by multiple factors, particularly DNA damage. The cGAS-STING and DNA damage response pathways are required for maintaining TREX1 deletion-induced cellular senescence. Inhibition of the DNA damage response, such as with Checkpoint kinase 2 (CHK2) inhibitor, partially alleviated progression of type I interferonopathies and lupus-like features in the mice. These data provide insights into the initiation and development of type I interferonopathies and lupus-like diseases, and may help inform the development of targeted therapeutics