Progress on genetic polymorphism associated with diabetic retinopathy

Diabetic retinopathy(DR)is one of the most serious complications of diabetes, as the second general blindness disease in the world currently. The development of procedures for prevention and treatment of DR is one of the most important problems that should be solved currently. A lot of researches show that the development of DR is determined by genetics. The current research advance in DR relevant gene is reviewed in this article

An Iterative Path-Breaking Approach with Mutation and Restart Strategies for the MAX-SAT Problem

Although Path-Relinking is an effective local search method for many combinatorial optimization problems, its application is not straightforward in solving the MAX-SAT, an optimization variant of the satisfiability problem (SAT) that has many real-world applications and has gained more and more attention in academy and industry. Indeed, it was not used in any recent competitive MAX-SAT algorithms in our knowledge. In this paper, we propose a new local search algorithm called IPBMR for the MAX-SAT, that remedies the drawbacks of the Path-Relinking method by using a careful combination of three components: a new strategy named Path-Breaking to avoid unpromising regions of the search space when generating trajectories between two elite solutions; a weak and a strong mutation strategies, together with restarts, to diversify the search; and stochastic path generating steps to avoid premature local optimum solutions. We then present experimental results to show that IPBMR outperforms two of the best state-of-the-art MAX-SAT solvers, and an empirical investigation to identify and explain the effect of the three components in IPBMR

Doubly Heavy Baryon Production at A High Luminosity e+e−e^+ e^- Collider

Within the framework of nonrelativistic QCD, we make a detailed discussion on the doubly heavy baryon production through the $e^+ e^-$ annihilation channel, $e^{+}e^{-}\rightarrow\gamma/Z^0 \rightarrow \Xi_{QQ^{\prime}} +\bar{Q} +\bar{Q^{\prime}}$, at a high luminosity $e^{+}e^{-}$ collider. Here $Q^{(\prime)}$ stands for the heavy $b$ or $c$ quark. In addition to the channel through the usually considered diquark state $(QQ^{\prime})[^3S_1]_{\bf\bar{3}}$, contributions from the channels through other same important diquark states such as $(QQ^{\prime})[^1S_0]_{\bf 6}$ have also been discussed. Uncertainties for the total cross sections are predicted by taking $m_c=1.80\pm0.30$ GeV and $m_b=5.10\pm0.40$ GeV. At a super $Z$-factory running around the $Z^0$ mass and with a high luminosity up to ${\cal L} \propto 10^{34}\sim 10^{36}{\rm cm}^{-2} {\rm s}^{-1}$, we estimate that about $1.1\times10^{5 \sim 7}$ $\Xi_{cc}$ events, $2.6\times10^{5 \sim 7}$ $\Xi_{bc}$ events and $1.2\times 10^{4 \sim 6}$ $\Xi_{bb}$ events can be generated in one operation year. Such a $Z$-factory, thus, will provide a good platform for studying the doubly heavy baryons in comparable to the CERN large hadronic collider.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. To be published in Phys.Rev.

Conflict-Based Cross-View Consistency for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS) has recently gained increasing research interest as it can reduce the requirement for large-scale fully-annotated training data. The current methods often suffer from the confirmation bias from the pseudo-labelling process, which can be alleviated by the co-training framework. The current co-training-based SSS methods rely on hand-crafted perturbations to prevent the different sub-nets from collapsing into each other, but these artificial perturbations cannot lead to the optimal solution. In this work, we propose a new conflict-based cross-view consistency (CCVC) method based on a two-branch co-training framework which aims at enforcing the two sub-nets to learn informative features from irrelevant views. In particular, we first propose a new cross-view consistency (CVC) strategy that encourages the two sub-nets to learn distinct features from the same input by introducing a feature discrepancy loss, while these distinct features are expected to generate consistent prediction scores of the input. The CVC strategy helps to prevent the two sub-nets from stepping into the collapse. In addition, we further propose a conflict-based pseudo-labelling (CPL) method to guarantee the model will learn more useful information from conflicting predictions, which will lead to a stable training process. We validate our new CCVC approach on the SSS benchmark datasets where our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaoyao3302/CCVC.Comment: accepted by CVPR202

The role of EGFR mutation as a prognostic factor in survival after diagnosis of brain metastasis in non-small cell lung cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract Background The brain is a common site for metastasis in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). This study was designed to evaluate the relationship between the mutational of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and overall survival (OS) in NSCLC patients with brain metastases. Methods Searches were performed in PubMed, EmBase, and the Cochrane Library to identify studies evaluating the association of EGFR mutation with OS in NSCLC patients through September 2017. Results 4373 NSCLC patients with brain metastases in 18 studies were involved. Mutated EGFR associated with significantly improved OS compared with wild type. Subgroup analyses suggested that this relationship persisted in studies conducted in Eastern, with retrospective design, with sample size ≥500, mean age of patients ≥65.0 years, percentage male < 50.0%, percentage of patients receiving tyrosine kinase inhibitor ≥30.0%. Finally, although significant publication bias was observed using the Egger test, the results were not changed after adjustment using the trim and fill method. Conclusions This meta-analysis suggests that EGFR mutation is an important predictive factor linked to improved OS for NSCLC patients with brain metastases. It can serve as a useful index in the prognostic assessment of NSCLC patients with brain metastases

MicroRNA-148b is frequently down-regulated in gastric cancer and acts as a tumor suppressor by inhibiting cell proliferation

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are involved in cancer development and progression, acting as tumor suppressors or oncogenes. Our previous studies have revealed that miR-148a and miR-152 are significantly down-regulated in gastrointestinal cancers. Interestingly, miR-148b has the same "seed sequences" as miR-148a and miR-152. Although aberrant expression of miR-148b has been observed in several types of cancer, its pathophysiologic role and relevance to tumorigenesis are still largely unknown. The purpose of this study was to elucidate the molecular mechanisms by which miR-148b acts as a tumor suppressor in gastric cancer.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We showed significant down-regulation of miR-148b in 106 gastric cancer tissues and four gastric cancer cell lines, compared with their non-tumor counterparts by real-time RT-PCR. <it>In situ </it>hybridization of ten cases confirmed an overt decrease in the level of miR-148b in gastric cancer tissues. Moreover, the expression of miR-148b was demonstrated to be associated with tumor size (P = 0.027) by a Mann-Whitney U test. We also found that miR-148b could inhibit cell proliferation <it>in vitro </it>by MTT assay, growth curves and an anchorage-independent growth assay in MGC-803, SGC-7901, BGC-823 and AGS cells. An experiment in nude mice revealed that miR-148b could suppress tumorigenicity <it>in vivo</it>. Using a luciferase activity assay and western blot, CCKBR was identified as a target of miR-148b in cells. Moreover, an obvious inverse correlation was observed between the expression of CCKBR protein and miR-148b in 49 pairs of tissues (P = 0.002, Spearman's correlation).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>These findings provide important evidence that miR-148b targets CCKBR and is significant in suppressing gastric cancer cell growth. Maybe miR-148b would become a potential biomarker and therapeutic target against gastric cancer.</p