Pontine infarction with pure motor hemiparesis or hemiplegia: A prospective study

BACKGROUND: The study aimed to prospectively observe the clinical and neuroimaging features of pontine infarction with pure motor hemiparesis (PMH) or hemiplegia at early stage. METHODS: In 118 consecutive selected patients with the first-ever ischemic stroke within 6 hours after onset, fifty of them presented with PMH or hemiplegia and had negative acute computed tomography (CT) scans, then magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) confirmed the corresponding infarcts in pons or cerebrum. The clinical and neuroimaging features of the pontine infarctions were compared with those of cerebral infarctions. RESULTS: The pontine infarction with PMH or hemiplegia accounted for 10.2% (12/118) of all first-ever ischemic stroke patients and 24% (12/50) of the patients with both PMH or hemiplegia and acute negative CT scans. Compared to the patients with cerebral infarction, the patients with pontine infarction had more frequency of diabetes mellitus (50.0% vs 5.3%, P = 0.001), nonvertiginous dizziness at onset (58.3% vs 21.1%, P = 0.036) and a progressive course (33.3% vs 2.6%, P = 0.011). CONCLUSION: The pontine infarction may present as PMH or hemiplegia with more frequency of nonvertiginous dizziness, a progressive course and diabetes mellitus. MRI can confirm the infarct location in the basal pons at early stage after stroke onset

Application of Multi-Beam Sounding System in the Monitoring of Pile Foundation Erosion of Offshore Wind Turbines

[Introduction] The purpose is to study the influence of tidal current and wave on the sub-aqueous foundation of wind turbine in offshore wind farm. [Method] Through two seabed topography surveys, the changes of seabed topography were compared. [Result] The study shows that the erosion of the foundation of offshore wind turbines mainly occur in the direction of local tides. In the early stage of construction, a deep scour pit will be formed, and scour troughs will appear after two years, and siltation will appear around the foundation after the scour troughs are formed. [Conclusion] Long-term monitoring of the foundation erosion of offshore wind turbines is helpful to understand the changes in the extent and depth of erosion. Hydrological surveys will help to establish ocean hydrodynamic models to predict the foundation erosion of wind turbines. Measures such as rock dumping and solidified soil should be carried out for erosion filling to delay the occurrence of erosion

Room-Temperature Blue Luminescence of Thermally Oxidized Si\u3csub\u3e1-x-y\u3c/sub\u3eGe\u3csub\u3ex\u3c/sub\u3eC\u3csub\u3ey\u3c/sub\u3e Thin Films on Si (100) Substrates

We measured at room temperature the photoluminescence spectra of the thermally oxidized Si1-x-yGexCy thin films which were grown on silicon substrates by plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition and the wet oxidized at 1100 °C for 20 min. The photoluminescence band with a peak at ~393 nm under the exciting radiation of λ = 241 nm was observed. Possible mechanism of this photoluminescence is discussed

Staircase Band Gap Si \u3csub\u3e1-x\u3c/sub\u3eGe\u3csub\u3ex\u3c/sub\u3e/Si Photodectectors

We fabricated Si 1-xGex/Si photodetectors by using a staircase band gap Si 1-xGex/Si structure. These devices exhibit a high optical response with a peak responsive wavelength at 0.96 μm and a responsivity of 27.8 A/W at -5 V bias. Excellent electrical characteristics evidenced by good diode rectification are also demonstrated. The dark current density is 0.1 pA/μm2 at V bias, and the breakdown voltage is -27 V. The high response is explained as the result of a staircase band gap by theoretical analysis

Beyond Control: Exploring Novel File System Objects for Data-Only Attacks on Linux Systems

The widespread deployment of control-flow integrity has propelled non-control data attacks into the mainstream. In the domain of OS kernel exploits, by corrupting critical non-control data, local attackers can directly gain root access or privilege escalation without hijacking the control flow. As a result, OS kernels have been restricting the availability of such non-control data. This forces attackers to continue to search for more exploitable non-control data in OS kernels. However, discovering unknown non-control data can be daunting because they are often tied heavily to semantics and lack universal patterns. We make two contributions in this paper: (1) discover critical non-control objects in the file subsystem and (2) analyze their exploitability. This work represents the first study, with minimal domain knowledge, to semi-automatically discover and evaluate exploitable non-control data within the file subsystem of the Linux kernel. Our solution utilizes a custom analysis and testing framework that statically and dynamically identifies promising candidate objects. Furthermore, we categorize these discovered objects into types that are suitable for various exploit strategies, including a novel strategy necessary to overcome the defense that isolates many of these objects. These objects have the advantage of being exploitable without requiring KASLR, thus making the exploits simpler and more reliable. We use 18 real-world CVEs to evaluate the exploitability of the file system objects using various exploit strategies. We develop 10 end-to-end exploits using a subset of CVEs against the kernel with all state-of-the-art mitigations enabled.Comment: 14 pages, in submission of the 31th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 202

You Do (Not) Belong Here: Detecting DPI Evasion Attacks with Context Learning

As Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) middleboxes become increasingly popular, a spectrum of adversarial attacks have emerged with the goal of evading such middleboxes. Many of these attacks exploit discrepancies between the middlebox network protocol implementations, and the more rigorous/complete versions implemented at end hosts. These evasion attacks largely involve subtle manipulations of packets to cause different behaviours at DPI and end hosts, to cloak malicious network traffic that is otherwise detectable. With recent automated discovery, it has become prohibitively challenging to manually curate rules for detecting these manipulations. In this work, we propose CLAP, the first fully-automated, unsupervised ML solution to accurately detect and localize DPI evasion attacks. By learning what we call the packet context, which essentially captures inter-relationships across both (1) different packets in a connection; and (2) different header fields within each packet, from benign traffic traces only, CLAP can detect and pinpoint packets that violate the benign packet contexts (which are the ones that are specially crafted for evasion purposes). Our evaluations with 73 state-of-the-art DPI evasion attacks show that CLAP achieves an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC-ROC) of 0.963, an Equal Error Rate (EER) of only 0.061 in detection, and an accuracy of 94.6% in localization. These results suggest that CLAP can be a promising tool for thwarting DPI evasion attacks.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures; accepted to ACM CoNEXT 202

Improving hindlimb locomotor function by non-invasive AAV-mediated manipulations of propriospinal neurons in mice with complete spinal cord injury

After complete spinal cord injury, spinal segments below the lesion maintain inter-segmental communication via the intraspinal propriospinal network. Here, the authors show that neurons in these circuits can be chemogenetically modulated to improve locomotor function in mice after spinal cord injury

Evaluation of genipin-crosslinked chitosan hydrogels as a potential carrier for silver sulfadiazine nanocrystals

In the present study genipin crosslinked chitosan (CHI) hydrogels, which had been constructed and reported in our previous studies (Lei Gao, et al. Colloids Surf. B Biointerfaces. 2014, 117: 398), were further evaluated for their advantage as a carrier for silver sulfadiazine (AgSD) nanocrystal systems. Firstly, AgSD nanocrystals with a mean particle size of 289 nm were prepared by wet milling method and encapsulated into genipin crosslinked CHI hydrogels. AgSD nanocrystals displayed a uniform distribution and very good physical stability in the hydrogel network. Swelling-dependent release pattern was found for AgSD nanocrystals from hydrogels and the release profile could be well fitted with Peppas equation. When AgSD nanocrystals were encapsulated in hydrogels their fibroblast cytotoxicity decreased markedly, and their antibacterial effects against Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were still comparable to unencapsulated AgSD nanocrystals. In vivo evaluation in excision and burn cutaneous wound models in mice showed that AgSD nanocrystal hydrogels markedly decreased the expression of inflammatory cytokine IL-6, but increased the levels of growth factors VEGF-A and TGF-β1. Histopathologically, the wounds treated by hydrogels containing AgSD nanocrystals showed the best healing state compared with commercial AgSD cream, hydrogels containing AgSD bulk powders and blank hydrogels. The wounds treated by AgSD nanocrystal hydrogels were dominated by marked fibroblast proliferation, new blood vessels and thick regenerated epithelial layer. Sirius Red staining assay indicated that AgSD nanocrystal hydrogels resulted in more collagen deposition characterized by a large proportion of type I fibers. Our study suggested that genipin-crosslinked CHI hydrogel was a potential carrier for local antibacterial nanomedicines