Prevention measures of the infection disease in Belgium and its revelation to COVID-19

Abstract: The outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has brought great challenges to China and even the world public health. Belgium has rich experiences in the prevention and control of infectious diseases. By searching the related literature and policy documents, this study reviews the emergency management laws and regulations, organization framework, funding, emergency system in Belgium and summarizes the successful experience of Belgian policies and measures for the prevention and control of epidemic Ebola in 2014.On this basis, the paper puts forward suggestions for COVID-19: To establish permanent infectious disease risk assessment team, build a cloud platform for prevention and control of infectious diseases by using big data and conduct practices regularly for the prevention of the infectious diseases. Key words: Belgium, prevention and control of infectious diseases, COVID-1

ZeroPrompt: Streaming Acoustic Encoders are Zero-Shot Masked LMs

In this paper, we present ZeroPrompt (Figure 1-(a)) and the corresponding Prompt-and-Refine strategy (Figure 3), two simple but effective \textbf{training-free} methods to decrease the Token Display Time (TDT) of streaming ASR models \textbf{without any accuracy loss}. The core idea of ZeroPrompt is to append zeroed content to each chunk during inference, which acts like a prompt to encourage the model to predict future tokens even before they were spoken. We argue that streaming acoustic encoders naturally have the modeling ability of Masked Language Models and our experiments demonstrate that ZeroPrompt is engineering cheap and can be applied to streaming acoustic encoders on any dataset without any accuracy loss. Specifically, compared with our baseline models, we achieve 350 $\sim$ 700ms reduction on First Token Display Time (TDT-F) and 100 $\sim$ 400ms reduction on Last Token Display Time (TDT-L), with theoretically and experimentally equal WER on both Aishell-1 and Librispeech datasets.Comment: accepted by interspeech 202

Comparative venom gland transcriptome analysis of the scorpion Lychas mucronatus reveals intraspecific toxic gene diversity and new venomous components

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Lychas mucronatus </it>is one scorpion species widely distributed in Southeast Asia and southern China. Anything is hardly known about its venom components, despite the fact that it can often cause human accidents. In this work, we performed a venomous gland transcriptome analysis by constructing and screening the venom gland cDNA library of the scorpion <it>Lychas mucronatus </it>from Yunnan province and compared it with the previous results of Hainan-sourced <it>Lychas mucronatus</it>.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A total of sixteen known types of venom peptides and proteins are obtained from the venom gland cDNA library of Yunnan-sourced <it>Lychas mucronatus</it>, which greatly increase the number of currently reported scorpion venom peptides. Interestingly, we also identified nineteen atypical types of venom molecules seldom reported in scorpion species. Surprisingly, the comparative transcriptome analysis of Yunnan-sourced <it>Lychas mucronatus </it>and Hainan-sourced <it>Lychas mucronatus </it>indicated that enormous diversity and vastly abundant difference could be found in venom peptides and proteins between populations of the scorpion <it>Lychas mucronatus </it>from different geographical regions.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This work characterizes a large number of venom molecules never identified in scorpion species. This result provides a comparative analysis of venom transcriptomes of the scorpion <it>Lychas mucronatus </it>from different geographical regions, which thoroughly reveals the fact that the venom peptides and proteins of the same scorpion species from different geographical regions are highly diversified and scorpion evolves to adapt a new environment by altering the primary structure and abundance of venom peptides and proteins.</p

TrimTail: Low-Latency Streaming ASR with Simple but Effective Spectrogram-Level Length Penalty

In this paper, we present TrimTail, a simple but effective emission regularization method to improve the latency of streaming ASR models. The core idea of TrimTail is to apply length penalty (i.e., by trimming trailing frames, see Fig. 1-(b)) directly on the spectrogram of input utterances, which does not require any alignment. We demonstrate that TrimTail is computationally cheap and can be applied online and optimized with any training loss or any model architecture on any dataset without any extra effort by applying it on various end-to-end streaming ASR networks either trained with CTC loss [1] or Transducer loss [2]. We achieve 100 $\sim$ 200ms latency reduction with equal or even better accuracy on both Aishell-1 and Librispeech. Moreover, by using TrimTail, we can achieve a 400ms algorithmic improvement of User Sensitive Delay (USD) with an accuracy loss of less than 0.2.Comment: submitted to ICASSP 202

Very Short-Term Wind Direction Multistep Forecast Based on VMD-LSTM

[Introduction] In order to accurately forecast the wind direction in the next 4 hours, a very short-term wind direction multistep forecast algorithm based on VMD-LSTM（Variational Mode Decomposition-Long Short-Term Memory） is proposed. [Method] Wind direction sequence was collected from 3 wind turbines of a wind farm of Mingyang Smart Energy Group for preprocessing and analysis. The correlation of wind direction in different periods was calculated using the autocorrelation function (ACF) to select the characteristic length of wind direction sequence. Based on variational mode decomposition (VMD), the wind direction sequence was decomposed into relatively intrinsic mode functions, the number of which was determined by minimum sample entropy. Models were build for each intrinsic mode function to make very short-term wind direction 24-step forecast. Finally, the wind direction sequence was reconstructed from the forecasted intrinsic mode functions. [Result] The results obtained demonstrate that the average MAE（Mean Absolute Error）, RMSE（Root Mean Square Error） and MAPE（Mean Absolute Percentage Error） of the 24-step wind direction forecast based on VMD-LSTM in 4 quarters are 8.430°, 16.870° and 9.155, respectively. The algorithm performs better than other common data modeling methods regarding each error evaluation index at different time scales in each quarter. [Conclusion] The proposed algorithm can optimize the control yaw angle in the actual production of wind farms

Single-cell RNA-seq reveals cellular heterogeneity from deep fascia in patients with acute compartment syndrome

IntroductionHigh stress in the compartment surrounded by the deep fascia can cause acute compartment syndrome (ACS) that may result in necrosis of the limbs. The study aims to investigate the cellular heterogeneity of the deep fascia in ACS patients by single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq).MethodsWe collected deep fascia samples from patients with ACS (high-stress group, HG, n=3) and patients receiving thigh amputation due to osteosarcoma (normal-stress group, NG, n=3). We utilized ultrasound and scanning electron microscopy to observe the morphologic change of the deep fascia, used multiplex staining and multispectral imaging to explore immune cell infiltration, and applied scRNA-seq to investigate the cellular heterogeneity of the deep fascia and to identify differentially expressed genes.ResultsNotably, we identified GZMK+interferon-act CD4 central memory T cells as a specific high-stress compartment subcluster expressing interferon-related genes. Additionally, the changes in the proportions of inflammation-related subclusters, such as the increased proportion of M2 macrophages and decreased proportion of M1 macrophages, may play crucial roles in the balance of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory in the development of ACS. Furthermore, we found that heat shock protein genes were highly expressed but metal ion-related genes (S100 family and metallothionein family) were down-regulated in various subpopulations under high stress.ConclusionsWe identified a high stress-specific subcluster and variations in immune cells and fibroblast subclusters, as well as their differentially expressed genes, in ACS patients. Our findings reveal the functions of the deep fascia in the pathophysiology of ACS, providing new approaches for its treatment and prevention

Prodrugs of Fluoro-Substituted Benzoates of EGC as Tumor Cellular Proteasome Inhibitors and Apoptosis Inducers

The most potent catechin in green tea is (-)-epigallocatechin-3-gallate [(-)-EGCG], which, however, is unstable under physiological conditions. To discover more stable and more potent polyphenol proteasome inhibitors, we synthesized several novel fluoro-substituted (-)-EGCG analogs, named F-EGCG analogs, as well as their prodrug forms with all of -OH groups protected by acetate. We report that the prodrug form of one F-EGCG analog exhibited greater potency than the previously reported peracetate of (-)-EGCG to inhibit proteasomal activity, suppress cell proliferation, and induce apoptosis in human leukemia Jurkat T cells, demonstrating the potential of these compounds to be developed into novel anti-cancer and cancer-preventive agents

Net ultrafiltration prescription and practice among critically ill patients receiving renal replacement therapy : a multinational survey of critical care practitioners

Objectives: To assess the attitudes of practitioners with respect to net ultrafiltration prescription and practice among critically ill patients with acute kidney injury treated with renal replacement therapy. Design: Multinational internet-assisted survey. Setting: Critical care practitioners involved with 14 societies in 80 countries. Subjects: Intensivists, nephrologists, advanced practice providers, ICU and dialysis nurses. Intervention: A cross-sectional survey. Measurement and Main Results: Of 2,567 practitioners who initiated the survey, 1,569 (61.1%) completed the survey. Most practitioners were intensivists (72.7%) with a median duration of 13.2 years of practice (interquartile range, 7.2-22.0 yr). Two third of practitioners (71.0%; regional range, 55.0-95.5%) reported using continuous renal replacement therapy with a net ultrafiltration rate prescription of median 80.0 mL/hr (interquartile range, 49.0-111.0 mL/hr) for hemodynamically unstable and a maximal rate of 299.0 mL/hr (interquartile range, 200.0-365.0 mL/hr) for hemodynamically stable patients, with regional variation. Only a third of practitioners (31.5%; range, 13.7-47.8%) assessed hourly net fluid balance during continuous renal replacement therapy. Hemodynamic instability was reported in 20% (range, 20-38%) of patients and practitioners decreased the rate of fluid removal (70.3%); started or increased the dose of a vasopressor (51.5%); completely stopped fluid removal (35.8%); and administered a fluid bolus (31.6%), with significant regional variation. Compared with physicians, nurses were most likely to report patient intolerance to net ultrafiltration (73.4% vs 81.3%; p = 0.002), frequent interruptions (40.4% vs 54.5%; p < 0.001), and unavailability of trained staff (11.9% vs 15.6%; p = 0.04), whereas physicians reported unavailability of dialysis machines (14.3% vs 6.1%; p < 0.001) and costs associated with treatment as barriers (12.1% vs 3.0%; p < 0.001) with significant regional variation. Conclusions: Our study provides new knowledge about the presence and extent of international practice variation in net ultrafiltration. We also identified barriers and specific targets for quality improvement initiatives. Our data reflect the need for evidence-based practice guidelines for net ultrafiltration

The safety and efficacy of PD-1 inhibitors in patients with advanced cancers and HIV/AIDS in China

Purpose-Immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer therapy, becoming the standard of care for various malignancy treatments. Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) patients, however, are an underserved group with limited access to clinical trials and cancer therapy. This study was to evaluate the safety and efficacy of programmed cell death 1 (PD - 1) inhibitors in patients with advanced cancer and HIV/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Methods and Materials-We performed a prospective, open-label, nonrandomized, phase 1 single center study. Patients with advanced cancer and HIV/AIDS received the treatment of PD - 1 inhibitors (camrelizumab, 200 mg, administered intravenously every 3 weeks), along with combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) for HIV. Results-Sixteen participants (12 men and 4 women; median age, 46.5 (29 - 78) years) were enrolled; 1 had non - Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), and 15 had non - AIDS - defining cancers. Safety was observed over 130 cycles of treatment with camrelizumab. Most treatment-emergent adverse events at least possibly attributed to camrelizumab were grade 1 or 2, including reactive cutaneous capillary endothelial proliferation (RCCEP) (9 participants), hearing loss (1 participant), hypophysitis (1 participant). 3 participants experienced hemorrhage due to poor performance status. HIV was controlled in all participants. Best tumor responses included 3 complete response, 5 partial response, 2 stable disease, and 6 progressive disease. The 2 years progression-free survival (PFS) was 67.0% (95% CI: -0.05, 0.00) and overall survival (OS) was 55.3% (95% CI: -0.05, 0.01) for the 16 patients who had received camrelizumab. Conclusions-This study demonstrates that camrelizumab treatment in patients with advanced cancers and HIV/AIDS was feasible and the clinical outcomes were acceptable