The code of manzana: invariability, simplicity and changeability

Originally, City is an enormous and intricate system. However, Cerdá simplified the complicated system into a basic unit, the Manzana, which is the unique code belonging to Barcelona found by Cerdá and based on his analysis to the history of the city, life of its citizens, and some other cases. Being at the core of Barcelona Eixample plan, it gradually formulates the enormous city system of Barcelona and thus paves the way for its future development. Starting with the rules of Invariability, Simplicity and Changeability, the three principles in Yi, this thesis regards the Manzana as a Yin-Yang body, with Yin and Yang power complementing and coexisting with each other. By restoring the codes hidden behind the 550 Manzanas in Barcelona, the thesis tries to explore the common ground between the physical space of the city and the binary life of the people living in it.Peer Reviewe

Multi-Scale Attention for Audio Question Answering

Audio question answering (AQA), acting as a widely used proxy task to explore scene understanding, has got more attention. The AQA is challenging for it requires comprehensive temporal reasoning from different scales' events of an audio scene. However, existing methods mostly extend the structures of visual question answering task to audio ones in a simple pattern but may not perform well when perceiving a fine-grained audio scene. To this end, we present a Multi-scale Window Attention Fusion Model (MWAFM) consisting of an asynchronous hybrid attention module and a multi-scale window attention module. The former is designed to aggregate unimodal and cross-modal temporal contexts, while the latter captures sound events of varying lengths and their temporal dependencies for a more comprehensive understanding. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that the proposed MWAFM can effectively explore temporal information to facilitate AQA in the fine-grained scene.Code: https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/MWAFMComment: Accepted by InterSpeech 202

Robust and accurate depth estimation by fusing LiDAR and Stereo

Depth estimation is one of the key technologies in some fields such as autonomous driving and robot navigation. However, the traditional method of using a single sensor is inevitably limited by the performance of the sensor. Therefore, a precision and robust method for fusing the LiDAR and stereo cameras is proposed. This method fully combines the advantages of the LiDAR and stereo camera, which can retain the advantages of the high precision of the LiDAR and the high resolution of images respectively. Compared with the traditional stereo matching method, the texture of the object and lighting conditions have less influence on the algorithm. Firstly, the depth of the LiDAR data is converted to the disparity of the stereo camera. Because the density of the LiDAR data is relatively sparse on the y-axis, the converted disparity map is up-sampled using the interpolation method. Secondly, in order to make full use of the precise disparity map, the disparity map and stereo matching are fused to propagate the accurate disparity. Finally, the disparity map is converted to the depth map. Moreover, the converted disparity map can also increase the speed of the algorithm. We evaluate the proposed pipeline on the KITTI benchmark. The experiment demonstrates that our algorithm has higher accuracy than several classic methods

The clinical value of progestin-primed ovarian stimulation protocol for women with diminished ovarian reserve undergoing IVF/ICSI: a systematic review and meta-analysis

BackgroundTo determine whether progestin-primed ovarian stimulation (PPOS) is more effective for women with diminished ovarian reserve (DOR) than clomiphene citrate (CC)/letrozole (LE) plus gonadotropin in IVF or ICSI treatment.MethodsNine databases were searched until May 24, 2023, to identify relevant studies. Forest plots were used to present the results of this meta-analysis. Begg’s and Egger’s tests were applied to estimate publication bias. Subgroup and sensitivity analysis were performed to check the potential sources of heterogeneity and verify the robustness of the pooled results, respectively.ResultsA total of 14 studies with 4182 participants were included for meta-analysis. There was evidence of a statistically notable increase in clinical pregnancy rate (OR = 1.39, 95%CI [1.01, 1.91], p = 0.05), optimal embryos rate (OR = 1.50, 95%CI [1.20, 1.88], p = 0.0004), and cumulative pregnancy rate (OR = 1.73, 95%CI [1.14, 2.60], p = 0.009), the duration and the amount of gonadotropin required (MD = 1.56, 95%CI [0.47, 2.66], p = 0.005; SMD = 1.51, 95%CI [0.90, 2.12], p < 0.00001), along with decrease cycle cancellation rate (OR = 0.78, 95%CI [0.64, 0.95], p = 0.02), luteinizing hormone (LH) level on the day of hCG (SMD = -0.81, 95%CI [-1.10, -0.53], p < 0.00001), and premature LH surge rate (OR = 0.10, 95%CI [0.07, 0.15], p < 0.00001) when PPOS was used. No evidence for publication bias within results was revealed.ConclusionsBased on evidence-based results, PPOS protocol seems to improve IVF/ICSI outcomes for women with DOR. More research with larger sample sizes and rigorous designs are required to further explore the value of PPOS among women diagnosed with DOR.Systematic review registrationwww.crd.york.ac.uk, identifier CRD42023430202

MicroRNA-520b Inhibits Growth of Hepatoma Cells by Targeting MEKK2 and Cyclin D1

Growing evidence indicates that the deregulation of microRNAs (miRNAs) contributes to the tumorigenesis. We previously revealed that microRNA-520b (miR-520b) was involved in the complement attack and migration of breast cancer cells. In this report, we show that miR-520b is an important miRNA in the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Our data showed that the expression levels of miR-520b were significantly reduced in clinical HCC tissues and hepatoma cell lines. We observed that the introduction of miR-520b dramatically suppressed the growth of hepatoma cells by colony formation assays, 5-ethynyl-2-deoxyuridine (EdU) incorporation assays and 3-(4,5- dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2,5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) assays. Moreover, ectopic expression of miR-520b was able to inhibit the growth of hepatoma cells in nude mice. Further studies revealed that the mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase kinase 2 (MEKK2) and cyclin D1 were two of direct target genes of miR-520b. Silencing of MEKK2 or cyclin D1 was able to inhibit the growth of hepatoma cells in vitro and in vivo, which is consistent with the effect of miR-520b overexpression on the growth of hepatoma cells. In addition, miR-520b significantly decreased the phosphorylation levels of c-Jun N-terminal kinase (p-JNK, a downstream effector of MEKK2) or retinoblastoma (p-Rb, a downstream effector of cyclin D1). In conclusion, miR-520b is able to inhibit the growth of hepatoma cells by targeting MEKK2 or cyclin D1 in vitro and in vivo. Our findings provide new insights into the role of miR-520b in the development of HCC, and implicate the potential application of miR-520b in cancer therapy