Psychological Status of High School Students 1 Year After the COVID-19 Emergency

Background: With the control of the epidemic, adolescents\u27 mental outlook might have improved. However, little evidence existed with regard to the psychological status of adolescents in post-COVID-19 era. This present study aimed to explore the psychological status of high school students after the epidemic getting eased. Methods: A web-based cross-sectional survey was used to obtain data from three high schools, including the demographic information, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), the Self-Rating Scale of Sleep (SRSS), and self-designed general recent-status questionnaire. Correlation analysis was performed to explore potential associations between the depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and sleep status. The PHQ-9 and GAD-7 differences between nowadays data and the data enrolled 12 months before were also compared. Result: A total of 1,108 qualified questionnaires were obtained. The prevalence of depressive and anxious symptoms was 27.5 and 21.3%, respectively, from mild to severe in all students, while 11.8% of these high students got sleep disturbances. Both the rate and the severity of depression, anxiety and sleep problems of female students were higher than male students. Grade three students suffered higher prevalence and severer mental disturbances than the other two grades. There were significant correlations between the depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and sleep status. The psychological status has been improved in nowadays high school students compared with the sample enrolled 12 months before. Conclusion: As a supplement to our former study, this present research provided a perspective on the psychological status of high school students 1 year after the COVID-19 pandemic being well controlled. We should pay attention to the psychological status of high school students, and should also notice the progresses made by this special group after the epidemic

Prevalence of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms of High School Students in Shandong Province During the COVID-19 Epidemic

© Copyright © 2020 Zhang, Zhai, Yang, Zhang, Zhou, Yang, Duan and Zhou. Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) has brought physical risks as well as psychological challenges to the whole world. High school students are a special group suffering from both the academic pressure and the threat of the epidemic. The present study aims to conduct an online survey to investigate the psychological status of high school students in Shandong Province. Methods: Using a web-based cross-sectional survey, data was collected from 1,018 voluntary high school students assessed with demographic information, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) and a self-designed online-study effect survey. Correlation analysis was performed to explore the relationships between depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and study effect. Result: The prevalence of depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, and a combination of depressive and anxiety symptoms was 52.4, 31.4, and 26.8%, respectively, among high school students in Shandong Province during the COVID-19 epidemic. And from moderate to severe severity level, the rates of depressive symptoms and anxious symptoms were 17.6 and 4.6%. Female students exhibited a higher rate and severity of mental symptoms than male, and grade one senior high school students got a higher rate and severity of mental symptoms than the other two grades. Nearly half of the students were not satisfied with their online-study effect. The PHQ-9 score had a strong positive correlation with the GAD-7 score. Both the PHQ-9 score the GAD-7 score had a negative correlation with the study-effect survey score. Conclusion: Quite a number of high school students suffered from depression and anxiety symptoms during the COVID-19 epidemic. Sufficient attentions should be paid, and necessary supports should be provided, to protect the mental health of this special group

Intelligent Robotic Sonographer: Mutual Information-based Disentangled Reward Learning from Few Demonstrations

Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely used for biometric measurement and diagnosis of internal organs due to the advantages of being real-time and radiation-free. However, due to high inter-operator variability, resulting images highly depend on operators' experience. In this work, an intelligent robotic sonographer is proposed to autonomously "explore" target anatomies and navigate a US probe to a relevant 2D plane by learning from expert. The underlying high-level physiological knowledge from experts is inferred by a neural reward function, using a ranked pairwise image comparisons approach in a self-supervised fashion. This process can be referred to as understanding the "language of sonography". Considering the generalization capability to overcome inter-patient variations, mutual information is estimated by a network to explicitly extract the task-related and domain features in latent space. Besides, a Gaussian distribution-based filter is developed to automatically evaluate and take the quality of the expert's demonstrations into account. The robotic localization is carried out in coarse-to-fine mode based on the predicted reward associated to B-mode images. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach, representative experiments for the "line" target and "point" target are performed on vascular phantom and two ex-vivo animal organ phantoms (chicken heart and lamb kidney), respectively. The results demonstrated that the proposed advanced framework can robustly work on different kinds of known and unseen phantoms

ERCC2, ERCC1 polymorphisms and haplotypes, cooking oil fume and lung adenocarcinoma risk in Chinese non-smoking females

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Excision repair cross-complementing group 1 (ERCC1) and group 2 (ERCC2) proteins play important roles in the repair of DNA damage and adducts. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of DNA repair genes are suspected to influence the risk of lung cancer. This study aimed to investigate the association between the <it>ERCC2 </it>751, 312 and <it>ERCC1 </it>118 polymorphisms and the risk of lung adenocarcinoma in Chinese non-smoking females.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A hospital-based case-control study of 285 patients and 285 matched controls was conducted. Information concerning demographic and risk factors was obtained for each case and control by a trained interviewer. After informed consent was obtained, each person donated 10 ml blood for biomarker testing. Three polymorphisms were determined by polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) method.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>This study showed that the individuals with the combined <it>ERCC2 </it>751AC/CC genotypes were at an increased risk for lung adenocarcinoma compared with those carrying the AA genotype [adjusted odds ratios (OR) 1.64, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.06-2.52]. The stratified analysis suggested that increased risk associated with <it>ERCC2 </it>751 variant genotypes (AC/CC) was more pronounced in individuals without exposure to cooking oil fume (OR 1.98, 95%CI 1.18-3.32) and those without exposure to fuel smoke (OR 2.47, 95%CI 1.46-4.18). Haplotype analysis showed that the A-G-T and C-G-C haplotypes were associated with increased risk of lung adenocarcinoma among non-smoking females (ORs were 1.43 and 2.28, 95%CIs were 1.07-1.91 and 1.34-3.89, respectively).</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p><it>ERCC2 </it>751 polymorphism may be a genetic risk modifier for lung adenocarcinoma in non-smoking females in China.</p

Autonomous Robotic Screening of Tubular Structures based only on Real-Time Ultrasound Imaging Feedback

Ultrasound (US) imaging is widely employed for diagnosis and staging of peripheral vascular diseases (PVD), mainly due to its high availability and the fact it does not emit radiation. However, high inter-operator variability and a lack of repeatability of US image acquisition hinder the implementation of extensive screening programs. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end workflow for automatic robotic US screening of tubular structures using only the real-time US imaging feedback. We first train a U-Net for real-time segmentation of the vascular structure from cross-sectional US images. Then, we represent the detected vascular structure as a 3D point cloud and use it to estimate the longitudinal axis of the target tubular structure and its mean radius by solving a constrained non-linear optimization problem. Iterating the previous processes, the US probe is automatically aligned to the orientation normal to the target tubular tissue and adjusted online to center the tracked tissue based on the spatial calibration. The real-time segmentation result is evaluated both on a phantom and in-vivo on brachial arteries of volunteers. In addition, the whole process is validated both in simulation and physical phantoms. The mean absolute radius error and orientation error ($\pm$ SD) in the simulation are $1.16\pm0.1~mm$ and $2.7\pm3.3^{\circ}$, respectively. On a gel phantom, these errors are $1.95\pm2.02~mm$ and $3.3\pm2.4^{\circ}$. This shows that the method is able to automatically screen tubular tissues with an optimal probe orientation (i.e. normal to the vessel) and at the same to accurately estimate the mean radius, both in real-time.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAaNZL0I5i

Ultra-Low-Frequency Radio Astronomy Observations from a Selenocentric Orbit: first results of the Longjiang-2 experiment

This paper introduces the first results of observations with the Ultra-Long-Wavelength (ULW) -- Low Frequency Interferometer and Spectrometer (LFIS) on board the selenocentric satellite Longjiang-2. We present a brief description of the satellite and focus on the LFIS payload. The in-orbit commissioning confirmed a reliable operational status of the instrumentation. We also present results of a transition observation, which offers unique measurements on several novel aspects. We estimate the RFI suppression required for such a radio astronomy instrumentation at the Moon distances from Earth to be of the order of 80 dB. We analyse a method of separating Earth- and satellite-originated radio frequency interference (RFI). It is found that the RFI level at frequencies lower than a few MHz is smaller than the receiver noise floor.Comment: Accepted for publication in Experimental Astronomy; 22 pages, 11 figure

A phase 1 dose-escalation study of the poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase inhibitor senaparib in Australian patients with advanced solid tumors

Background: Senaparib is a novel, selective poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase-1/2 inhibitor with strong antitumor activity in preclinical studies. This first-in-human, phase 1, dose-escalation study examined the safety and preliminary efficacy of senaparib in patients with advanced solid tumors. Methods: Patients with advanced solid tumors were enrolled from three centers in Australia, using a conventional 3 + 3 design. Dose-escalation cohorts continued until the maximum tolerated dose or a recommended phase 2 dose was determined. Patients received one dose of oral senaparib and, if no dose-limiting toxicity occurred within 7 days, they received senaparib once daily in 3-week cycles. The primary end points were safety and tolerability. Results: Thirty-nine patients were enrolled at 10 dose levels ranging from 2 to 150 mg. No dose-limiting toxicities were observed in any cohort. Most treatment-emergent adverse events were grade 1–2 (91%). Seven patients (17.9%) reported hematologic treatment-emergent adverse events. Treatment-related adverse events occurred in eight patients (20.5%), and the most frequent was nausea (7.7%). Two deaths were reported after the end of study treatment, one of which was considered a complication from senaparib-related bone marrow failure. Pharmacokinetic analysis indicated that senaparib the accumulation index was 1.06–1.67, and absorption saturation was 80–150 mg daily. In 22 patients with evaluable disease, the overall response rate was 13.6%, and the disease control rate was 81.8%. The overall response rate was 33.3% for the BRCA mutation-positive subgroup and 6.3% for the nonmutated subgroup. Conclusions: Senaparib was well tolerated in Australian patients with advanced solid tumors, with encouraging signals of antitumor activity. The recommended phase 2 dose for senaparib was determined to be 100 mg daily. ClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT03507543

Search for light dark matter from atmosphere in PandaX-4T

We report a search for light dark matter produced through the cascading decay of $\eta$ mesons, which are created as a result of inelastic collisions between cosmic rays and Earth's atmosphere. We introduce a new and general framework, publicly accessible, designed to address boosted dark matter specifically, with which a full and dedicated simulation including both elastic and quasi-elastic processes of Earth attenuation effect on the dark matter particles arriving at the detector is performed. In the PandaX-4T commissioning data of 0.63 tonne$\cdot$year exposure, no significant excess over background is observed. The first constraints on the interaction between light dark matter generated in the atmosphere and nucleus through a light scalar mediator are obtained. The lowest excluded cross-section is set at $5.9 \times 10^{-37}{\rm cm^2}$ for dark matter mass of $0.1$ MeV$/c^2$ and mediator mass of 300 MeV$/c^2$. The lowest upper limit of $\eta$ to dark matter decay branching ratio is $1.6 \times 10^{-7}$