Student preferences impact outcome of flipped classroom in dental education: Students favoring flipped classroom benefited more

Many reports in dental education showed that student learning improved with the flipped classroom method. However, there are few reports that describe how different subsets of students may benefit from the flipped classroom. In this study, we investigated how students’ preference for the flipped classroom impacted their learning outcome. We used a flipped classroom module on the physiology of the autonomic nervous system taught to year one Doctor of Dental Surgery students to test the hypothesis that students who favored the flipped classroom performed better on assessment quizzes. The module was composed of pre-class activity, out-of-class assignment, in-class discussion, and two in-class quizzes. Quiz 1 was given after students self-studied the foundational content online through the pre-class activity, and Quiz 2 was at the end of the module. Students filled out a survey to report learning experiences and preferences. Fewer students scored below 75% on Quiz 2 than on Quiz 1. Students’ self-evaluated understanding of content significantly improved after finishing the assignment and discussion compared to finishing the pre-class activity alone. Moreover, students who preferred to learn through the flipped classroom scored higher in Quiz 2. Students with higher overall grades in the course preferred the flipped classroom more than low performers. Our results indicated that students favoring the flipped classroom method spent more time on the assignment, understood the content better, and performed better on assessments than students who prefer traditional lectures

Recombinant immunotoxin anti-c-Met/PE38KDEL inhibits proliferation and promotes apoptosis of gastric cancer cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Our study aims to evaluate the anti-growth effects of recombinant immunotoxin (IT) anti-c-Met/PE38KDEL on gastric cancer cells, and its mechnisms.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Gastric cancer cells were treated with increasing doses of IT and c-Met protein was quantified by Western blotting. Cell proliferation was determined by Cell Counting Kit-8 assay (CCK). [³H]-leucine incorporation assay was used to evaluate IT inhibition of protein synthesis. Cell apoptosis was quantified by flow cytometry. Caspase activities were measured using colorimetric protease assays.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Cell growth and protein synthesis of the gastric cancer cell lines were suppressed by IT in a dose- and time-dependent manner. IT also induced apoptosis in a dose-dependent manner. The apoptosis rates of gastric cancer cell lines MKN-45 and SGC7901 were 19.19% and 27.37%, respectively when treated with 50 ng/ml of IT. There were significant increase ofcaspase-3 activity at 24 hr of IT treatment (100 ng/ml) (P < 0.01) in these gastric cancer cell lines.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>IT anti-c-Met/PE38KDEL has anti-growth effects on the gastric cancer cell lines <it>in vitro</it>, and it provides an experimental basis for c-Met-targeted therapy towards <it>in vivo </it>testing.</p

A Generative Deep Learning Approach for Crash Severity Modeling with Imbalanced Data

Crash data is often greatly imbalanced, with the majority of crashes being non-fatal crashes, and only a small number being fatal crashes due to their rarity. Such data imbalance issue poses a challenge for crash severity modeling since it struggles to fit and interpret fatal crash outcomes with very limited samples. Usually, such data imbalance issues are addressed by data resampling methods, such as under-sampling and over-sampling techniques. However, most traditional and deep learning-based data resampling methods, such as synthetic minority oversampling technique (SMOTE) and generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) are designed dedicated to processing continuous variables. Though some resampling methods have improved to handle both continuous and discrete variables, they may have difficulties in dealing with the collapse issue associated with sparse discrete risk factors. Moreover, there is a lack of comprehensive studies that compare the performance of various resampling methods in crash severity modeling. To address the aforementioned issues, the current study proposes a crash data generation method based on the Conditional Tabular GAN. After data balancing, a crash severity model is employed to estimate the performance of classification and interpretation. A comparative study is conducted to assess classification accuracy and distribution consistency of the proposed generation method using a 4-year imbalanced crash dataset collected in Washington State, U.S. Additionally, Monte Carlo simulation is employed to estimate the performance of parameter and probability estimation in both two- and three-class imbalance scenarios. The results indicate that using synthetic data generated by CTGAN-RU for crash severity modeling outperforms using original data or synthetic data generated by other resampling methods

Isopropyl 3-(3,4-dihydroxy­phen­yl)-2-hydroxy­propanoate

The title compound, C12H16O5, is a derivative of β-(3,4-dihydroxy­phen­yl)-α-hydr­oxy acid. The crystal packing is stabilized by inter­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds

siRNA-mediated inhibition of HBV replication and expression

AIM: RNA interference (RNAi) is a newly discovered phenomenon provoked by dsRNA. The dsRNA is initially cleaved by Dicer into 21-23 nt small interfering RNA (siRNA) and can then specifically target homologous mRNA for degradation by cellular ribonucleases. RNAi has been successfully utilized to down-regulate the endogenous gene expression or suppress the replication of various pathogens in mammalian cells. In this study, we investigated whether vector-based siRNA promoted by U6 (pSilencer1.0-U6) could efficiently inhibit HBV replication in cell culture.METHODS: pSilencer vectors with inserts targeting on different regions of HBV genome were constructed. These plasmids were co-transfected with pHBV3.8 into Huh-7 cells via lipofection and viral antigens were measured by ELISA. Viral RNA was analyzed by Northern blot. The mRNA of MxA and 2'-5'OAS was reverse transcribed and quantified by real-time PCR.RESULTS: Vector-based siRNA could potently reduce hepatitis B virus antigen expression in transient replicative cell culture. Furthermore, Northern blot analysis showed that viral RNA was effectively degraded, thus eliminating the messengers for protein expression as well as template for reverse transcription. Real-time PCR analysis of cellular MxA and 2'-5'OAS gene expression revealed that vector-based siRNA did not provoke the interferon pathway which reassured the specificity of the vector-based RNA interference technique.CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that RNA interference may be a potential tool to control HBV infection.</p