A new result on the distinctness of primitive sequences over Z(pq) modulo 2

Let Z/(pq) be the integer residue ring modulo pq with odd prime numbers p and q. This paper studies the distinctness problem of modulo 2 reductions of two primitive sequences over Z/(pq), which has been studied by H.J. Chen and W.F. Qi in 2009. First, it is shown that almost every element in Z/(pq) occurs in a primitive sequence of order n > 2 over Z/(pq). Then based on this element distribution property of primitive sequences over Z/(pq), previous results are greatly improved and the set of primitive sequences over Z/(pq) that are known to be distinct modulo 2 is further enlarged

Relationship between the morphology of A-1 segment of anterior cerebral artery and anterior communicating artery aneurysms

Background: The anterior communicating artery (ACoA) is one of the most frequent sites for cerebral aneurysm. The peculiar directions of projection of aneurysms offer great challenges to clinical treatment. Objetives: To establish the relationship between morphology of A-1 segment of anterior cerebral artery (ACA) and aneurismal projection. Methods: Randomly selected digital subtraction angiography data of 264 anterior communicating artery aneurysms (ACoAA) cases and 296 cases of other cerebral vascular diseases in the same period were retrospectively analyzed. Results: Among 264 ACoAA patients, the morphology of A-1 segment showed type Ⅰa in 158 sides, type Ⅰb in 11, type Ⅱa in 35, type Ⅱb in 87, type Ⅲ in 171 and absence in 66. The morphology of A-1 segment in 296 patients with other cerebral vascular diseases displayed type Ⅰa in 195 sides, type Ⅰb in 20, type Ⅱa in 47, type Ⅱ b in 74, type Ⅲ in 217 and absence in 39. The non-visualization of A-1 segment in the group of ACoAA occurred more than in the control group (χ2=11.482, p=0.001). The classifications of ACoAAs in 264 patients were confirmed as anterior-superior type in 121 cases, anterior-inferior type in 105, complicated type in 16, posterior-inferior type in 12 and posterior-superior type in 10. The correlation between morphology of A-1 segment of ACA and classifications of ACoAA was significant (p=0.000; C=0.619, p=0.000). The direction of ACoAA was downward when the A-1 segment of ACA was Type Ⅰa or Type Ⅱa, and was upward when it was Type Ⅰb or Type Ⅱb，and was upward or downward or complicated when it was Type Ⅲ. Conclusion: The relationship between morphology of A-1 segment of ACA and classification of ACoAA is clarified in the present study, which is helpful to surgical treatment.Keywords: anterior cerebral artery; morphology of A-1 segment; projection of anterior communicating artery aneurysmAfrican Health sciences Vol 14 No. 1 March 201

Apoptosis of supraoptic AVP neurons is involved in the development of central diabetes insipidus after hypophysectomy in rats

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>It has been reported that various types of axonal injury of hypothalamo-neurohypophyseal tract can result in degeneration of the magnocellular neurons (MCNs) in hypothalamus and development of central diabetes insipidus (CDI). However, the mechanism of the degeneration and death of MCNs after hypophysectomy in vivo is still unclear. This present study was aimed to disclose it and to figure out the dynamic change of central diabetes insipidus after hypophysectomy.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The analysis on the dynamic change of daily water consumption (DWC), daily urine volume(DUV), specific gravity of urine(USG) and plasma vasopressin concentration showed that the change pattern of them was triphasic and neuron counting showed that the degeneration of vasopressin neurons began at 10 d, aggravated at 20 d and then stabilized at 30 d after hypophysectomy. There was marked upregulation of cleaved Caspase-3 expression of vasopressin neurons in hypophysectomy rats. A "ladder" pattern of migration of DNA internucleosomal fragments was detected and apoptotic ultrastructure was found in these neurons. There was time correlation among the occurrence of diabetes insipidus, the changes of plasma vasopressin concentration and the degeneration of vasopressin neurons after hypophysectomy.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>This study firstly demonstrated that apoptosis was involved in degeneration of supraoptic vasopressin neurons after hypophysectomy in vivo and development of CDI. Our study on time course and correlations among water metabolism, degeneration and apoptosis of vasopressin neurons suggested that there should be an efficient therapeutic window in which irreversible CDI might be prevented by anti-apoptosis.</p

ONCache: A Cache-Based Low-Overhead Container Overlay Network

Recent years have witnessed a widespread adoption of containers. While containers simplify and accelerate application development, existing container network technologies either incur significant overhead, which hurts performance for distributed applications, or lose flexibility or compatibility, which hinders the widespread deployment in production. We design and implement ONCache (\textbf{O}verlay \textbf{N}etwork \textbf{Cache}), a cache-based container overlay network, to eliminate the overhead while keeping flexibility and compatibility. We carefully analyze the difference between an overlay network and a host network, and find that an overlay network incurs extra packet processing, including encapsulating, intra-host routing, namespace traversing and packet filtering. Fortunately, the extra processing exhibits an \emph{invariance property}, e.g., most packets of the same flow have the same processing results. This property motivates us to cache the extra processing results. With the proposed cache, ONCache significantly reduces the extra overhead while maintaining the same flexibility and compatibility as standard overlay networks. We implement ONCache using eBPF with only 524 lines of code, and deploy ONCache as a plugin of Antrea. With ONCache, container communication achieves similar performance as host communication. Compared to the standard overlay network, ONCache improves the throughput and request-response transaction rate by 12\% and 36\% for TCP (20\% and 34\% for UDP), while significant reduces per-packet CPU overhead. Many distributed applications also benefit from ONCache

Dmbg-Net: Dilated multiresidual boundary guidance network for COVID-19 infection segmentation

Accurate segmentation of infected regions in lung computed tomography (CT) images is essential for the detection and diagnosis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). However, lung lesion segmentation has some challenges, such as obscure boundaries, low contrast and scattered infection areas. In this paper, the dilated multiresidual boundary guidance network (Dmbg-Net) is proposed for COVID-19 infection segmentation in CT images of the lungs. This method focuses on semantic relationship modelling and boundary detail guidance. First, to effectively minimize the loss of significant features, a dilated residual block is substituted for a convolutional operation, and dilated convolutions are employed to expand the receptive field of the convolution kernel. Second, an edge-attention guidance preservation block is designed to incorporate boundary guidance of low-level features into feature integration, which is conducive to extracting the boundaries of the region of interest. Third, the various depths of features are used to generate the final prediction, and the utilization of a progressive multi-scale supervision strategy facilitates enhanced representations and highly accurate saliency maps. The proposed method is used to analyze COVID-19 datasets, and the experimental results reveal that the proposed method has a Dice similarity coefficient of 85.6% and a sensitivity of 84.2%. Extensive experimental results and ablation studies have shown the effectiveness of Dmbg-Net. Therefore, the proposed method has a potential application in the detection, labeling and segmentation of other lesion areas

ATP6L promotes metastasis of colorectal cancer by inducing epithelial-mesenchymal transition

ATP6L, the C subunit of the V-ATPase V0 domain, is involved in regulating the acidic tumor micro-environment and may promote tumor progression. However, the expression and functional role of ATP6L in tumors have not yet been well explored. In this study, we found that ATP6L protein overexpression was related to colorectal cancer histological differentiation (P <0.001), presence of metastasis (P <0.001) and recurrence (P = 0.02). ATP6L expression in the liver metastatic foci was higher than in the primary foci (P = 0.04). ATP6L expression was notably concomitant with epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) immunohistochemical features, such as reduced expression of the epithelial marker E-cadherin (P = 0.021) and increased expression of the mesenchymal marker vimentin (P = 0.004). Results of in vitro and in vivo experiments showed that ATP6L expression could alter cell morphology, regulate EMT-associated protein expression, and enhance migration and invasion. The effect of ATP6L on metastasis was further demonstrated in a tail vein injection mice model. In addition, the mouse xenograft model showed that ATP6L-overexpressing HCT116 cells grew into larger tumor masses, showed less necrosis and formed more micro-vessels than the control cells. Taken together, our results suggest that ATP6L promotes metastasis of colorectal cancer by inducing EMT and angiogenesis, and is a potential target for tumor therapy

Highland barley grain and soil surveys reveal the widespread deficiency of dietary selenium intake of Tibetan adults living along Yalung Zangpo River

ObjectiveIn order to assess selenium (Se) flux through the soil-plant-human chain in Tibet plateau and explore the reason why local Tibetan adult residents from large scale agricultural production areas in Tibet lacked daily Se intake.MethodsA total of 210 intact highland barley plants and their corresponding cultivated topsoil samples were collected in fields of 14 agricultural counties along Yalung Zangpo River and quantitative dietary data were collected from a cross-sectional survey using a cultural-specific food frequency questionnaire that contained all local Tibetan foods in 2020.ResultsThe mean value of The estimated daily Se dietary intake by each participant was 17.1 ± 1.9 μg/day/adult, the Se concentration in topsoil and highland barley grain were 0.128 ± 0.015 mg/kg and 0.017 ± 0.003 mg/kg, respectively. Although highland barley was the first contributor of dietary Se in local adult residents (34.2%), the dietary Se intake provided by highland barley only about 10% of the EAR value (50 μg/day/adult) currently. A significantly positive relationship was determined between soil total Se content (STSe), available Se content (SASe) and highland barley grain Se content (GSe). The amount of Se in food system depends on a number of soil properties (TOC, pH, clay content, Fe/Mn/Al oxides), climate variables (MAP, MAT) and terrain factor (altitude).ConclusionTo sum up, it can be inferred that the insufficient dietary Se intake of Tibetan adult population living along Yalung Zangbo River is mainly caused by the low Se content in highland barley grain, which was result from the low Se content in cultivated soil. In order to enable adult participants in the present study to achieve recommended dietary Se-intake levels, agronomic fortification with selenised fertilizers applied to highland barley could be a great solution. It is necessary to combine the influencing factors, and comprehensively consider the spatial variation of local soil properties, climatic and topographic conditions, and planting systems

The Bone Marrow Edema Links to an Osteoclastic Environment and Precedes Synovitis During the Development of Collagen Induced Arthritis

Objectives: To determine the relationship between bone marrow edema (BME), synovitis, and bone erosion longitudinally using a collagen induced arthritis mice (CIA) model and to explore the potential pathogenic role of BME in bone erosion.Methods: CIA was induced in DBA/1J mice. BME and corresponding clinical symptoms of arthritis and synovitis during the different time points of CIA development were assayed by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), arthritis sore, and histologic analyses. The expression of osteoclasts (OCs), OCs-related cytokines, and immune cells in bone marrow were determined by flow cytometry, immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence staining, and real-time PCR. The OCs formation was estimated using in vitro assays.Results: MRI detected BME could emerge at day 25 in 70% mice after the first immunization (n = 10), when there were not any arthritic symptoms, histological or MRI synovitis. At day 28, BME occurred in 90% mice whereas the arthritic symptom and histological synovitis were only presented in 30 and 20% CIA mice at that time (n = 10). The emergence of BME was associated with an increased bone marrow OCs number and an altered distribution of OCs adherent to subchondral bone surface, which resulted in increased subchondral erosion and decreased trabecular bone number during the CIA process. Obvious marrow environment changes were identified after BME emergence, consisting of multiple OCs related signals, including highly expressed RANKL, increased proinflammatory cytokines and chemokines, and highly activated T cells and monocytes.Conclusions: BME reflects a unique marrow “osteoclastic environment,” preceding the arthritic symptoms and synovitis during the development of CIA