An Automatic Ship Detection Method Based on Local Gray-Level Gathering Characteristics in SAR Imagery

This paper proposes an automatic ship detection method based on gray-level gathering characteristics of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery. The method does not require any prior knowledge about ships and background observation. It uses a novel local gray-level gathering degree (LGGD) to characterize the spatial intensity distribution of SAR image, and then an adaptive-like LGGD thresholding and filtering scheme to detect ship targets. Experiments on real SAR images with varying sea clutter backgrounds and multiple targets situation have been conducted. The performance analysis confirms that the proposed method works well in various circumstances with high detection rate, fast detection speed and perfect shape preservation

N 2,N 2′-Bis(3-nitro­benzyl­idene)pyridine-2,6-dicarbohydrazide dimethyl­formamide disolvate trihydrate

In the title compound, C21H15N7O6·2C3H7NO·3H2O, the N 2,N 2′-bis­(3-nitro­benzyl­idene)pyridine-2,6-dicarbohydrazide and one water mol­ecule are located on a twofold rotation axis. The mol­ecules are connected by hydrogen bonds. One dimethylformamide molecule is disordered over two positions; the site occupancy factors are ca 0.8 and 0.2

Construction of Papaya Male and Female BAC Libraries and Application in Physical Mapping of the Sex Chromosomes

Papaya is a major fruit crop in the tropics and has recently evolved sex chromosomes. Towards sequencing the papaya sex chromosomes, two bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) libraries were constructed from papaya male and female genomic DNA. The female BAC library was constructed using restriction enzyme BstY I and consists of 36,864 clones with an average insert size of 104 kb, providing 10.3x genome equivalents. The male BAC library was constructed using restriction enzyme EcoR I and consists of 55,296 clones with an average insert size of 101 kb, providing 15.0x genome equivalents. The male BAC library was used in constructing the physical map of the male-specific region of the male Y chromosome (MSY) and in filling gaps and extending the physical map of the hermaphrodite-specific region of the Yh chromosome (HSY) and the X chromosome physical map. The female BAC library was used to extend the X physical map gap. The MSY, HSY, and X physical maps offer a unique opportunity to study chromosomal rearrangements, Y chromosome degeneration, and dosage compensation of the papaya nascent sex chromosomes

Biochemistry and Molecular Biology DNA Duplex-Based Photodynamic Molecular Beacon for Targeted Killing of Retinoblastoma Cell

PURPOSES. Retinoblastoma (RB) is the most common primary intraocular malignancy of infancy. An alternative RB treatment protocol is proposed and tested. It is based on a photodynamic therapy (PDT) with a designed molecular beacon that specifically targets the murine double minute x (MDMX) high-expressed RB cells. METHODS. A MDMX mRNA triggered photodynamic molecular beacon is designed by binding a photosensitizer molecule (pyropheophorbide-a, or PPa) and a black hole quencher-3 (BHQ3) through a complementary oligonucleotide sequence. Cells with and without MDMX highexpression are incubated with the beacon and then irradiated with a laser. The fluorescence and reactive oxygen species are detected in solution to verify the specific activation of PPa by the perfectly matched DNA targets. The cell viabilities are evaluated with CCK-8 and flow cytometry assay. RESULTS. The fluorescence and photo-cytoxicity of PPa is recovered and significantly higher in the MDMX high-expressed Y79 and WERI-Rb1 cells, compared to that with the MDMX lowexpressed cells. CONCLUSIONS. The synthesized beacon exhibits high PDT efficiency toward MDMX highexpressed RB cells. The data suggest that the designed beacon may provide a potential alternative for RB therapy and secures the ground for future investigation

Clinical Study Age-Associated Reduction of Asymmetry in Human Central Auditory Function: A 1H-Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy Study

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of age on hemispheric asymmetry in the auditory cortex after pure tone stimulation. Ten young and 8 older healthy volunteers took part in this study. Two-dimensional multivoxel 1H-magnetic resonance spectroscopy scans were performed before and after stimulation. The ratios of N-acetylaspartate (NAA), glutamate/glutamine (Glx), and -amino butyric acid (GABA) to creatine (Cr) were determined and compared between the two groups. The distribution of metabolites between the left and right auditory cortex was also determined. Before stimulation, left and right side NAA/Cr and right side GABA/Cr were significantly lower, whereas right side Glx/Cr was significantly higher in the older group compared with the young group. After stimulation, left and right side NAA/Cr and GABA/Cr were significantly lower, whereas left side Glx/Cr was significantly higher in the older group compared with the young group. There was obvious asymmetry in right side Glx/Cr and left side GABA/Cr after stimulation in young group, but not in older group. In summary, there is marked hemispheric asymmetry in auditory cortical metabolites following pure tone stimulation in young, but not older adults. This reduced asymmetry in older adults may at least in part underlie the speech perception difficulties/presbycusis experienced by aging adults

Case-control study on fragility fractures in coal miners: A comparison between surface and underground workers

BackgroundThe prevalence of osteoporosis and osteopenia is higher among underground coal miners than surface workers. The special underground work environment and unhealthy habits such as smoking, drinking, and a high-salt diet may lead to changes in bone metabolism, increasing the risk of fragility fractures and placing a heavy economic burden on individuals and society. ObjectiveTo identify potential factors influencing fragility fractures among coal miners in different working environments and to provide a basis for targeted preventive measures to reduce the occurrence of fragility fractures.MethodsMale participants who attended at least one of the physical examinations in Kailuan Group between June 2006 and December 2020 were included in the study. The participants were divided into two groups based on their working environment: surface or underground. A case-control study was conducted, where patients with new fragility fractures served as the case group and participants without fragility fractures served as the control group. The two groups were matched with a case:control ratio of 1:4 by age (±1 year) and the same year of physical examination. The matching process was repeated twice, once for the surface working population and once for the underground working population. The analysis of risk factors was conducted using conditional logistic regression models.ResultsAmong a total of 113138 employees in Kailuan Group, 82631 surface workers and 30507 underground workers were included, respectively. The number of individuals who suffered fragility fractures was 1375, accounting for 1.22% of the total population. The incidence of fragility fractures in underground workers was significantly higher than that in surface workers (1.63%>1.07%, P<0.001). The results of conditional logistic regression model showed that current smoking (OR=1.26, 95%CI: 1.05, 1.51), manual labor (OR=1.37, 95%CI: 1.06, 1.78), diabetes (OR=1.26, 95%CI: 1.04, 1.54), sinus tachycardia (OR=1.81, 95%CI: 1.23, 2.66), history of stroke (OR=1.51, 95%CI: 1.09, 2.09), education at college and above (OR=0.65, 95%CI: 0.45, 0.95), high income level (OR=0.69, 95%CI: 0.54, 0.90), elevated hemoglobin (OR=0.91, 95%CI: 0.85, 0.98), and elevated total cholesterol (OR=0.90, 95%CI: 0.82, 0.99) were associated with fragility fractures in the surface working population of coal mines; current smoking (OR=1.48, 95%CI: 1.17, 1.87), current drinking (OR=1.26, 95%CI: 1.01, 1.56), manual labor (OR=2.64, 95%CI: 1.41, 4.94), history of dust exposure (OR=1.28, 95%CI: 1.03, 1.58), and obesity (OR=0.72, 95%CI: 0.52, 0.96) were associated with fragility fractures in the underground working population of coal mines.ConclusionIn preventing fragility fractures, special attention should be paid to the bone health of underground workers engaged in manual labor or having a history of dust exposure. It is important to correct their unhealthy behaviors in a timely manner, such as smoking and drinking, and to appropriately increase body weight to prevent fragility fractures. For surface workers, particular attention should be given to the high-risk group for fragility fractures, such as low family income per capita, manual labor, and having a history of stroke or diabetes; in addition, close monitoring of their resting heart rate, hemoglobin levels, and total cholesterol levels may help prevent fragility fractures

SceneSketcher-v2: Fine-grained scene-level sketch-based image retrieval using adaptive GCNs

Sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR) is a long-standing research topic in computer vision. Existing methods mainly focus on category-level or instance-level image retrieval. This paper investigates the fine-grained scene-level SBIR problem where a free-hand sketch depicting a scene is used to retrieve desired images. This problem is useful yet challenging mainly because of two entangled facts: 1) achieving an effective representation of the input query data and scene-level images is difficult as it requires to model the information across multiple modalities such as object layout, relative size and visual appearances, and 2) there is a great domain gap between the query sketch input and target images. We present SceneSketcher-v2, a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based architecture to address these challenges. SceneSketcher-v2 employs a carefully designed graph convolution network to fuse the multi-modality information in the query sketch and target images and uses a triplet training process and end-to-end training manner to alleviate the domain gap. Extensive experiments demonstrate SceneSketcher-v2 outperforms state-of-the-art scene-level SBIR models with a significant margin

Fine-Grained Video Retrieval With Scene Sketches

Benefiting from the intuitiveness and naturalness of sketch interaction, sketch-based video retrieval (SBVR) has received considerable attention in the video retrieval research area. However, most existing SBVR research still lacks the capability of accurate video retrieval with fine-grained scene content. To address this problem, in this paper we investigate a new task, which focuses on retrieving the target video by utilizing a fine-grained storyboard sketch depicting the scene layout and major foreground instances’ visual characteristics (e.g., appearance, size, pose, etc.) of video; we call such a task “fine-grained scene-level SBVR”. The most challenging issue in this task is how to perform scene-level cross-modal alignment between sketch and video. Our solution consists of two parts. First, we construct a scene-level sketch-video dataset called SketchVideo, in which sketch-video pairs are provided and each pair contains a clip-level storyboard sketch and several keyframe sketches (corresponding to video frames). Second, we propose a novel deep learning architecture called Sketch Query Graph Convolutional Network (SQ-GCN). In SQ-GCN, we first adaptively sample the video frames to improve video encoding efficiency, and then construct appearance and category graphs to jointly model visual and semantic alignment between sketch and video. Experiments show that our fine-grained scene-level SBVR framework with SQ-GCN architecture outperforms the state-of-the-art fine-grained retrieval methods. The SketchVideo dataset and SQ-GCN code are available in the project webpage https://iscas-mmsketch.github.io/FG-SL-SBVR/

Microcollinearity between autopolyploid sugarcane and diploid sorghum genomes

Abstract\ud \ud \ud \ud Background\ud \ud Sugarcane (Saccharum spp.) has become an increasingly important crop for its leading role in biofuel production. The high sugar content species S. officinarum is an octoploid without known diploid or tetraploid progenitors. Commercial sugarcane cultivars are hybrids between S. officinarum and wild species S. spontaneum with ploidy at ~12×. The complex autopolyploid sugarcane genome has not been characterized at the DNA sequence level.\ud \ud \ud \ud Results\ud \ud The microsynteny between sugarcane and sorghum was assessed by comparing 454 pyrosequences of 20 sugarcane bacterial artificial chromosomes (BACs) with sorghum sequences. These 20 BACs were selected by hybridization of 1961 single copy sorghum overgo probes to the sugarcane BAC library with one sugarcane BAC corresponding to each of the 20 sorghum chromosome arms. The genic regions of the sugarcane BACs shared an average of 95.2% sequence identity with sorghum, and the sorghum genome was used as a template to order sequence contigs covering 78.2% of the 20 BAC sequences. About 53.1% of the sugarcane BAC sequences are aligned with sorghum sequence. The unaligned regions contain non-coding and repetitive sequences. Within the aligned sequences, 209 genes were annotated in sugarcane and 202 in sorghum. Seventeen genes appeared to be sugarcane-specific and all validated by sugarcane ESTs, while 12 appeared sorghum-specific but only one validated by sorghum ESTs. Twelve of the 17 sugarcane-specific genes have no match in the non-redundant protein database in GenBank, perhaps encoding proteins for sugarcane-specific processes. The sorghum orthologous regions appeared to have expanded relative to sugarcane, mostly by the increase of retrotransposons.\ud \ud \ud \ud Conclusions\ud \ud The sugarcane and sorghum genomes are mostly collinear in the genic regions, and the sorghum genome can be used as a template for assembling much of the genic DNA of the autopolyploid sugarcane genome. The comparable gene density between sugarcane BACs and corresponding sorghum sequences defied the notion that polyploidy species might have faster pace of gene loss due to the redundancy of multiple alleles at each locus.We acknowledge our colleagues at the University of Oklahomas Advanced Center for Genome Technology, Chunmei Qu and Ping Wang for their assistance with 454 GSFLX sequencing sample preparation and Steve Kenton for his help with deconvoluting the pooled BACs and their subsequent assembly. We also thank Eric Tang for assistance on sequencing two BACs using Sanger sequencers. This project is supported by startup funds from the University of Illinois to RM and a grant from the Energy Bioscience Institute (EBI) to SPM, MEH, RM, and DSR.We acknowledge our colleagues at the University of Oklahoma's Advanced Center for Genome Technology, Chunmei Qu and Ping Wang for their assistance with 454 GS-FLX sequencing sample preparation and Steve Kenton for his help with deconvoluting the pooled BACs and their subsequent assembly. We also thank Eric Tang for assistance on sequencing two BACs using Sanger sequencers. This project is supported by start-up funds from the University of Illinois to RM and a grant from the Energy Bioscience Institute (EBI) to SPM, MEH, RM, and DSR