Assigning personality/identity to a chatting machine for coherent conversation generation

Endowing a chatbot with personality or an identity is quite challenging but critical to deliver more realistic and natural conversations. In this paper, we address the issue of generating responses that are coherent to a pre-specified agent profile. We design a model consisting of three modules: a profile detector to decide whether a post should be responded using the profile and which key should be addressed, a bidirectional decoder to generate responses forward and backward starting from a selected profile value, and a position detector that predicts a word position from which decoding should start given a selected profile value. We show that general conversation data from social media can be used to generate profile-coherent responses. Manual and automatic evaluation shows that our model can deliver more coherent, natural, and diversified responses.Comment: an error on author informatio

Prevention of injury by resveratrol in a rat model of adenine-induced chronic kidney disease

Purpose: To investigate the preventive effect of resveratrol against renal pathological changes in a rat model of chronic kidney disease (CKD).Methods: CKD was induced by daily intragastric administration of adenine (200 mg/kg) for 1 month. The effect of 10, 15, and 20 mg/kg doses of resveratrol on the levels of parathyroid hormone, phosphorous, and fibroblast growth factor-23 (FGF-23) in rat urine samples after 2 months of adenine administration were analyzed using an auto-analyzer.Results: Resveratrol treatment significantly inhibited the adenine-mediated increase in serum parathyroid hormone, phosphorous and FGF-23 levels (p < 0.002). In rats treated with 10, 15 and 20 mg/kg doses of resveratrol after adenine, urine protein/creatinine ratio was reduced to 5, 675.6 ± 2453.7, 4, 789.8 ± 1,534.9, and 1, 965 ± 576.8 mg/g, respectively. In the untreated and normal control groups, the respective values were 7, 004 ± 1, 653.3 and 1, 627.5 ± 568.7 mg/g. Treatment with resveratrol after administration of adenine inhibited increases in creatinine, blood urea nitrogen, and uric acid levels in a dose-dependent manner (p < 0.002). Resveratrol treatment also inhibited adeninemediated increases in monocytes and inflammatory cells. Furthermore, resveratrol prevented renal tubule swelling and expansion induced by adenine administration.Conclusion: Resveratrol treatment prevent the renal pathological changes induced by adenine administration in a rat model of CKD by inhibiting FGF-23, parathyroid hormone, and phosphate. Thus, resveratrol may be of therapeutic importance for the treatment of CKD.Keyword: Parathyroid hormone, Phosphate, Creatinine, Monocytes, Chronic kidney disease, Fibroblast growth factor-2

Persistence, extinction and practical exponential stability of impulsive stochastic competition models with varying delays

This paper studies the persistence, extinction and practical exponential stability of impulsive stochastic competition models with time-varying delays. The existence of the global positive solutions is investigated by the relationship between the solutions of the original system and the equivalent system, and the sufficient conditions of system persistence and extinction are given. Moreover, our study shows the following facts: (1) The impulsive perturbation does not affect the practical exponential stability under the condition of bounded pulse intensity. (2) In solving the stability of non-Markovian processes, it can be transformed into solving the stability of Markovian processes by applying Razumikhin inequality. (3) In some cases, a non-Markovian process can produce Markovian effects. Finally, numerical simulations obtained the importance and validity of the theoretical results for the existence of practical exponential stability through the relationship between parameters, pulse intensity and noise intensity

Preparation and Characterization of NiO Nanoparticles by Anodic Arc Plasma Method

NiO nanoparticles with average particle size of 25 nm were successfully prepared by anodic arc plasma method. The composition, morphology, crystal microstructure, specific surface area, infrared spectra, and particle size distribution of product were analyzed by using X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and the corresponding selected area electron diffraction (SAED), Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrum, and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) N2 adsorption. The experiment results show that the NiO nanoparticles are bcc structure with spherical shape and well dispersed, the particle size distribution ranging from 15 to 45 nm with the average particle size is about 25 nm, and the specific surface area is 33 m2/g. The infrared absorption band of NiO nanoparticles shows blue shifts compared with that of bulk NiO

Neoadjuvant SBRT combined with immunotherapy in NSCLC: from mechanisms to therapy

The utilisation of neoadjuvant immunotherapy has demonstrated promising preliminary clinical outcomes for early-stage resectable non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Nevertheless, it is imperative to develop novel neoadjuvant combination therapy regimens incorporating immunotherapy to further enhance the proportion of patients who derive benefit. Recent studies have revealed that stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) not only induces direct tumour cell death but also stimulates local and systemic antitumour immune responses. Numerous clinical trials have incorporated SBRT into immunotherapy for advanced NSCLC, revealing that this combination therapy effectively inhibits local tumour growth while simultaneously activating systemic antitumour immune responses. Consequently, the integration of SBRT with neoadjuvant immunotherapy has emerged as a promising strategy for treating resectable NSCLC, as it can enhance the systemic immune response to eradicate micrometastases and recurrent foci post-resection. This review aims to elucidate the potential mechanism of combination of SBRT and immunotherapy followed by surgery and identify optimal clinical treatment strategies. Initially, we delineate the interplay between SBRT and the local tumour immune microenvironment, as well as the systemic antitumour immune response. We subsequently introduce the preclinical foundation and preliminary clinical trials of neoadjuvant SBRT combined with immunotherapy for treating resectable NSCLC. Finally, we discussed the optimal dosage, schedule, and biomarkers for neoadjuvant combination therapy in its clinical application. In conclusion, the elucidation of potential mechanism of neoadjuvant SBRT combined immunotherapy not only offers a theoretical basis for ongoing clinical trials but also contributes to determining the most efficacious therapy scheme for future clinical application

An Efficient Drug Metabolism Strategy Based on Microsome-Mesoporous Organosilica Nanoreactors

A rapid and accurate in-vitro drug metabolism strategy has been proposed based on the design of a biomimetic nanoreactor composed of amino-functionalized periodic mesoporous organosilica (NH2-PMO) and microsomes. The amphiphilic and positive charged NH2-PMO makes it highly suited for the immobilization of hydrophobic and negatively charged microsomes to form nanoreactors, which can in turn extract substrates from solutions. Such nanoreactors provide a suitable environment to confine multiple enzymes and substrates with high local concentrations, as well as to maintain their catalytic activities for rapid and highly effective drug metabolic reactions. Coupled with high performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS) analysis, the metabolites of nifedipine and testosterone were characterized and the reaction kinetics was quantitatively evaluated. Both the metabolism conversion and reaction rate were significantly improved with the NH2-PMO nanoreactors compared to bulk reactions. This strategy is simple and cost-effective for promising advances in biomimetic metabolism study

The molybdate-binding protein ModA is required for Proteus mirabilis-induced UTI

BackgroundProteus mirabilis is one of the pathogens commonly causing urinary tract infections (UTIs). The molybdate-binding protein ModA encoded by modA binds molybdate with high affinity and transports it. Increasing evidence shows that ModA promotes the survival of bacteria in anaerobic environments and participates in bacterial virulence by obtaining molybdenum. However, the role of ModA in the pathogenesis of P. mirabilis remains unknown.ResultsIn this study, a series of phenotypic assays and transcriptomic analyses were used to study the role of ModA in the UTIs induced by P. mirabilis. Our data showed that ModA absorbed molybdate with high affinity and incorporated it into molybdopterin, thus affecting the anaerobic growth of P. mirabilis. Loss of ModA enhanced bacterial swarming and swimming and up-regulated the expression of multiple genes in flagellar assembly pathway. The loss of ModA also resulted in decreased biofilm formation under anaerobic growth conditions. The modA mutant significantly inhibited bacterial adhesion and invasion to urinary tract epithelial cells and down-regulated the expression of multiple genes associated with pilus assembly. Those alterations were not due to anaerobic growth defects. In addition, the decreased bacteria in the bladder tissue, the weakened inflammatory damage, the low level of IL-6, and minor weight change was observed in the UTI mouse model infected with modA mutant.ConclusionHere, we reported that in P. mirabilis, ModA mediated the transport of molybdate, thereby affecting the activity of nitrate reductase and thus affecting the growth of bacteria under anaerobic conditions. Overall, this study clarified the indirect role of ModA in the anaerobic growth, motility, biofilm formation, and pathogenicity of P. mirabilis and its possible pathway, and emphasized the importance of the molybdate-binding protein ModA to P. mirabilis in mediating molybdate uptake, allowing the bacterium to adapt to complex environmental conditions and cause UTIs. Our results provided valuable information on the pathogenesis of ModA-induced P. mirabilis UTIs and may facilitate the development of new treatment strategies

Multi-classifier fusion based on belief-value for the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder

IntroductionAutism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has a significant impact on the health of patients, and early diagnosis and treatment are essential to improve their quality of life. Machine learning methods, including multi-classifier fusion, have been widely used for disease diagnosis and prediction with remarkable results. However, current multi-classifier fusion methods lack the ability to measure the belief level of different samples and effectively fuse them jointly.MethodsTo address these issues, a multi-classifier fusion classification framework based on belief-value for ASD diagnosis is proposed in this paper. The belief-value measures the belief level of different samples based on distance information (the output distance of the classifier) and local density information (the weight of the nearest neighbor samples on the test samples), which is more representative than using a single type of information. Then, the complementary relationships between belief-values are captured via a multilayer perceptron (MLP) network for effective fusion of belief-values.ResultsThe experimental results demonstrate that the proposed classification framework achieves better performance than a single classifier and confirm that the fusion method used can effectively fuse complementary relationships to achieve accurate diagnosis.DiscussionFurthermore, the effectiveness of our method has only been validated in the diagnosis of ASD. For future work, we plan to extend this method to the diagnosis of other neuropsychiatric disorders