Dynamics of cold pulses induced by super-sonic molecular beam injection in the EAST tokamak

Evolution of electron temperature, electron density and its fluctuation with high spatial and temporal resolutions are presented for the cold pulse propagation induced by super-sonic molecular beam injection (SMBI) in ohmic plasmas in the EAST tokamak. The non-local heat transport occurs for discharges with plasma current $I_p$=450 kA ($q_{95}\sim5.55$), and electron density $n_{e0}$ below a critical value of $(1.35\pm0.25)\times10^{19}~\mathrm{m^{-3}}$. In contrary to the response of core electron temperature and electron density (roughly 10 ms after SMBI), the electron density fluctuation in the plasma core increases promptly after SMBI and reaches its maximum around 15 ms after SMBI. The electron density fluctuation in the plasma core begins to decrease before the core electron temperature reaches its maximum (roughly 30 ms). It was also observed that the turbulence perpendicular velocity close to the inversion point of the temperature perturbation changes sign after SMBI

Research Progress on the Stability of Edible Jiaosu Products

Edible jiaosu is one type of food with many bioactive substances, which is very beneficial to human health. The stability of edible jiaosu is the key and difficult point to the development to the new jiaosu products. Currently, many studies on edible jiaosu have been conducted both domestically and internationally. However, there has been no systematic induction and summary until now. Therefore, based on the existing research results, this article summarizes the detection models and evaluation indicators related to the stability of jiaosu products. It shows that the main models include the predicting shelf life dynamics models. The stability indicators mainly include the sensory evaluation, pH index, the functional evaluation, the content of activity, and the probiotic content, among which the sensory evaluation and the antioxidant activity are the main evaluation indicators for the most stability evaluation. The factors that affect the stability of edible jiaosu products include the production process conditions (breeding strain, and fermentation time), the post-processing and the storage environment. The summary shows that by selecting suitable strains or mixed strains for fermentation, reasonable adjustment of fermentation time, adopting appropriate sterilization and drying methods, other post-processing methods, and using the low temperature, dark, anaerobic conditions are all beneficial to improve the stability of jiaosu products. It is recommended to further explore the selection of advantageous strains, research on post processing techniques, and stability regulations for jiaosu processing in the future. In summary, this paper summarizes the evaluation models and indicators for the stability of edible jiaosu, pointed out that production the process conditions, the post-processing of edible enzyme products, and the storage environment have a significant impact on the stability of edible jiaosu, and proposed measures and suggestions to improve its stability. This work provides a theoretical reference basis and guidance for promoting the stability of edible jiaosu and the development of its related industries

Semi-supervised authentically distorted image quality assessment with consistency-preserving dual-branch convolutional neural network

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have provided a favoured prospect for authentically distorted image quality assessment (IQA). For good performance, most existing CNN-based methods rely on a large amount of labeled data for training, which is time-consuming and cumbersome to collect. By simultaneously exploiting few labeled data and many unlabeled data, we make a pioneering attempt to propose a semi-supervised framework (termed SSLIQA) with consistency-preserving dual-branch CNN for authentically distorted IQA in this paper. The proposed SSLIQA introduces a consistency-preserving strategy and transfers two kinds of consistency knowledge from the teacher branch to the student branch. Concretely, SSLIQA utilizes the sample prediction consistency to train the student to mimic output activations of individual examples represented by the teacher. Considering that subjects often refer to previous analogous cases to make scoring decisions, SSLIQA computes the semantic relation among different samples in a batch and encourages the consistency of sample semantic relation between two branches to explore extra quality-related information. Benefiting from the consistency-preserving strategy, we can exploit numerous unlabeled data to improve network's effectiveness and generalization. Experimental results on three authentically distorted IQA databases show that the proposed SSLIQA is stably effective under different student-teacher combinations and different labeled-to-unlabeled data ratios. In addition, it points out a new way on how to achieve higher performance with a smaller network

Adverse Effects of Simulated Hyper- and Hypo-Phosphatemia on Endothelial Cell Function and Viability

Dysregulation of phosphate homeostasis as occurs in chronic kidney disease is associated with cardiovascular complications. It has been suggested that both hyperphosphatemia and hypophosphatemia can cause cardiovascular disease. The molecular mechanisms by which high or low serum phosphate levels adversely affect cardiovascular function are poorly understood. The purpose of this study was to explore the mechanisms of endothelial dysfunction in the presence of non-physiologic phosphate levels.We studied the effects of simulated hyper- and hypophosphatemia in human umbilical vein endothelial cells in vitro. We found both simulated hyperphosphatemia and hypophosphatemia decrease eNOS expression and NO production. This was associated with reduced intracellular calcium, increased protein kinase C β2 (PKCβ2), reduced cell viability, and increased apoptosis. While simulated hyperphosphatemia was associated with decreased Akt/p-Akt, Bcl-xl/Bax ratios, NFkB-p65 and p-Erk abundance, simulated hypophosphatemia was associated with increased Akt/p-Akt and Bcl-xl/Bax ratios and p-Mek, p38, and p-p38 abundance.This is the first demonstration of endothelial dysfunction with hypophosphatemia. Our data suggests that both hyperphosphatemia and hypophosphatemia decrease eNOS activity via reduced intracellular calcium and increased PKCβ2. Hyperphosphatemia also appears to reduce eNOS transcription via reduced signaling through PI3K/Akt/NF-kB and MAPK/NF-kB pathways. On the other hand, hypophosphatemia appears to activate these pathways. Our data provides the basis for further studies to elucidate the relationship between altered phosphate homeostasis and cardiovascular disease. As a corollary, our data suggests that the level of phosphate in the culture media, if not in the physiologic range, may inadvertently affect experimental results

Dual-constraint coarse-to-fine network for camouflaged object detection

Camouflaged object detection (COD) is an important yet challenging task, with great application values in industrial defect detection, medical care, etc. The challenges mainly come from the high intrinsic similarities between target objects and background. In this paper, inspired by the biological studies that object detection consists of two steps, i.e., search and identification, we propose a novel framework, named DCNet, for accurate COD. DCNet explores candidate objects and extra object-related edges through two constraints (object area and boundary) and detects camouflaged objects in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, we first exploit an area-boundary decoder (ABD) to obtain initial region cues and boundary cues simultaneously by fusing multi-level features of the backbone. Then, an area search module (ASM) is embedded into each level of the backbone to adaptively search coarse regions of objects with the assistance of region cues from the ABD. After the ASM, an area refinement module (ARM) is utilized to identify fine regions of objects by fusing adjacent-level features with the guidance of boundary cues. Through the deep supervision strategy, DCNet can finally localize the camouflaged objects precisely. Extensive experiments on three benchmark COD datasets demonstrate that our DCNet is superior to 12 state-of-the-art COD methods. In addition, DCNet shows promising results on two COD-related tasks, i.e., industrial defect detection and polyp segmentation

Vagus nerve stimulation for refractory posttraumatic epilepsy: Efficacy and predictors of seizure outcome

BackgroundTraumatic brain injury (TBI) has been recognized as an important and common cause of epilepsy since antiquity. Posttraumatic epilepsy (PTE) is usually associated with drug resistance and poor surgical outcomes, thereby increasing the burden of the illness on patients and their families. Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is an adjunctive treatment for medically refractory epilepsy. This study aimed to determine the efficacy of VNS for refractory PTE and to initially evaluate the potential predictors of efficacy.MethodsWe retrospectively collected the outcomes of VNS with at least a 1-year follow-up in all patients with refractory PTE. Subgroups were classified as responders and non-responders according to the efficacy of VNS (≥50% or <50% reduction in seizure frequency). Preoperative data were analyzed to screen for potential predictors of VNS efficacy.ResultsIn total, forty-five patients with refractory PTE who underwent VNS therapy were enrolled. Responders were found in 64.4% of patients, and 15.6% of patients achieved seizure freedom at the last follow-up. In addition, the responder rate increased over time, with 37.8, 44.4, 60, and 67.6% at the 3-, 6-, 12-, and 24-month follow-ups, respectively. After multivariate analysis, generalized interictal epileptic discharges (IEDs) were found to be a negative predictor (OR: 4.861, 95% CI: 1.145–20.632) of VNS efficacy.ConclusionThe results indicated that VNS therapy was effective in refractory PTE patients and was well tolerated over a 1-year follow-up period. Patients with focal or multifocal IEDs were recognized to have better efficacy after VNS therapy