Stochastic scheduling of autonomous mobile robots at hospitals

The outbreak of the New Coronavirus has significantly increased the vulnerability of medical staff. This paper addresses the safety and stress relief of medical personnel by proposing a solution to the scheduling problem of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in a stochastic environment. Considering the stochastic nature of travel and service times for AMRs affected by the surrounding environment, the routes of AMRs are planned to minimize the daily cost of the hospital (including the AMR fixed cost, penalty cost of violating the time window, and transportation cost). To efficiently generate high-quality solutions, we identify several properties and incorporate them into an improved Tabu Search (I-TS) algorithm for problem-solving. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the I-TS algorithm outperforms existing methods by producing higher-quality solutions. By leveraging the characteristics of medical request environments, we intelligently allocate an appropriate number of AMRs to efficiently provide services, resulting in substantial cost reductions for hospitals and enhanced utilization of medical resources. These findings confirm the effectiveness of the proposed stochastic programming model in determining the optimal number of AMRs and their corresponding service routes across various environmental settings

High Capacity Reversible Data Hiding for Encrypted 3D Mesh Models Based on Topology

Reversible data hiding in encrypted domain(RDH-ED) can not only protect the privacy of 3D mesh models and embed additional data, but also recover original models and extract additional data losslessly. However, due to the insufficient use of model topology, the existing methods have not achieved satisfactory results in terms of embedding capacity. To further improve the capacity, a RDH-ED method is proposed based on the topology of the 3D mesh models, which divides the vertices into two parts: embedding set and prediction set. And after integer mapping, the embedding ability of the embedding set is calculated by the prediction set. It is then passed to the data hider for embedding additional data. Finally, the additional data and the original models can be extracted and recovered respectively by the receiver with the correct keys. Experiments declare that compared with the existing methods, this method can obtain the highest embedding capacity

CIR at the NTCIR-17 ULTRE-2 Task

The Chinese academy of sciences Information Retrieval team (CIR) has participated in the NTCIR-17 ULTRE-2 task. This paper describes our approaches and reports our results on the ULTRE-2 task. We recognize the issue of false negatives in the Baidu search data in this competition is very severe, much more severe than position bias. Hence, we adopt the Dual Learning Algorithm (DLA) to address the position bias and use it as an auxiliary model to study how to alleviate the false negative issue. We approach the problem from two perspectives: 1) correcting the labels for non-clicked items by a relevance judgment model trained from DLA, and learn a new ranker that is initialized from DLA; 2) including random documents as true negatives and documents that have partial matching as hard negatives. Both methods can enhance the model performance and our best method has achieved nDCG@10 of 0.5355, which is 2.66% better than the best score from the organizer.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, NTCIR-1

Determination of Optimal Cell and Plasmid Concentration for Transfection of I-SceI by DR-GFP Reporter

https://openworks.mdanderson.org/sumexp21/1195/thumbnail.jp

Period-2: a tumor suppressor gene in breast cancer

Previous reports have suggested that the ablation of the Period 2 gene (Per 2) leads to enhanced development of lymphoma and leukemia in mice. Employing immunoblot analyses, we have demonstrated that PER 2 is endogenously expressed in human breast epithelial cell lines but is not expressed or is expressed at significantly reduced level in human breast cancer cell lines. Expression of PER 2 in MCF-7 breast cancer cells significantly inhibited the growth of MCF-7 human breast cancer cells, and, when PER 2 was co-expressed with the Crytochrome 2 (Cry 2) gene, an even greater growth-inhibitory effect was observed. The inhibitory effect of PER 2 on breast cancer cells was also demonstrated by its suppression of the anchorage-independent growth of MCF-7 cells as evidenced by the reduced number and size of colonies. A corresponding blockade of MCF-7 cells in the G1 phase of the cell cycle was also observed in response to the expression of PER 2 alone or in combination with CRY 2. Expression of PER 2 also induced apoptosis of MCF-7 breast cancer cells as demonstrated by an increase in PARP [poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase] cleavage. Finally, our studies demonstrate that PER 2 expression in MCF-7 breast cancer cells is associated with a significant decrease in the expression of cyclin D1 and an up-regulation of p53 levels

Optogenetic dissection of ictal propagation in the hippocampal–entorhinal cortex structures

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is one of the most common drug-resistant forms of epilepsy in adults and usually originates in the hippocampal formations. However, both the network mechanisms that support the seizure spread and the exact directions of ictal propagation remain largely unknown. Here we report the dissection of ictal propagation in the hippocampal–entorhinal cortex (HP–EC) structures using optogenetic methods in multiple brain regions of a kainic acid-induced model of TLE in VGAT-ChR2 transgenic mice. We perform highly temporally precise cross-area analyses of epileptic neuronal networks and find a feed-forward propagation pathway of ictal discharges from the dentate gyrus/hilus (DGH) to the medial entorhinal cortex, instead of a re-entrant loop. We also demonstrate that activating DGH GABAergic interneurons can significantly inhibit the spread of ictal seizures and largely rescue behavioural deficits in kainate-exposed animals. These findings may shed light on future therapeutic treatments of TLE

Assembly, annotation, and comparative analysis of Ipomoea chloroplast genomes provide insights into the parasitic characteristics of Cuscuta species

In the Convolvulaceae family, around 1650 species belonging to 60 genera are widely distributed globally, mainly in the tropical and subtropical regions of America and Asia. Although a series of chloroplast genomes in Convolvulaceae were reported and investigated, the evolutionary and genetic relationships among the chloroplast genomes of the Convolvulaceae family have not been extensively elucidated till now. In this study, we first reported the complete chloroplast genome sequence of Ipomoea pes-caprae, a widely distributed coastal plant with medical values. The chloroplast genome of I. pes-caprae is 161667 bp in length, and the GC content is 37.56%. The chloroplastic DNA molecule of I. pes-caprae is a circular structure composed of LSC (large-single-copy), SSC (small-single-copy), and IR (inverted repeat) regions, with the size of the three regions being 88210 bp, 12117 bp, and 30670 bp, respectively. The chloroplast genome of I. pes-caprae contains 141 genes, and 35 SSRs are identified in the chloroplast genome. Our research results provide important genomic information for the molecular phylogeny of I. pes-caprae. The Phylogenetic analysis of 28 Convolvulaceae chloroplast genomes showed that the relationship of I. pes-caprae with I. involucrata or I. obscura was much closer than that with other Convolvulaccae species. Further comparative analyses between the Ipomoea species and Cuscuta species revealed the mechanism underlying the formation of parasitic characteristics of Cuscuta species from the perspective of the chloroplast genome