Unique Solution of a Coupled Fractional Differential System Involving Integral Boundary Conditions from Economic Model

We study the existence and uniqueness of the positive solution for the fractional differential system involving the Riemann-Stieltjes integral boundary conditions , , , , , and , where , , and and are the standard Riemann-Liouville derivatives, and are functions of bounded variation, and and denote the Riemann-Stieltjes integral. Our results are based on a generalized fixed point theorem for weakly contractive mappings in partially ordered sets

Effect of bazedoxifene on expressions of VEGF, VEGFR2, COX-2 and inflammatory factors in a rat endometriosis model

Purpose: To study the effect of bazedoxifene on the expressions of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), soluble vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (sVEGFR2), cyclooxygenase synthase 2 (COX-2) and inflammatory factors in a rat endometriosis (EMS) model. Methods: Thirty rats (EMS) were divided into untreated control group, bazedoxifene group and celecoxib group (10 rats per group). Bazedoxifene and celecoxib were administered at doses of 3 and 25 mg/kg, respectively. Negative control rats served as control, and were given 0.9 % sodium chloride at a dose of 10 mL/kg. All treatments were given intragastrically for 21 days. Levels of VEGF, sVEGFR2 and COX-2 in uterine ectopic endometrium were assayed. Results: The levels of VEGF and sVEGFR2 in the serum and peritoneal fluid of the untreated control group were significantly higher than the corresponding control values, while VEGF and sVEGFR2 levels in the serum and peritoneal fluid of the bazedoxifene group were significantly lower than those in the untreated control group (p < 0.05). Bazedoxifene group had lower VEGFR2 and COX-2 levels than untreated control group (p < 0.05). Expression of COX-2 protein in the ectopic endometrium of celecoxib group was significantly lower than that in the untreated control group (p < 0.05). Conclusion: Bazedoxifene alleviates angiogenesis and inflammatory factors in serum and peritoneal fluid of EMS rats, inhibits the expression of sVEGFR2 and COX-2 in ectopic endometrium, and also inhibits the growth of ectopic endometrium. This finding may help to discover additional new drugs

On Anomaly-Free Dark Matter Models

We investigate the predictions of anomaly-free dark matter models for direct and indirect detection experiments. We focus on gauge theories where the existence of a fermionic dark matter candidate is predicted by anomaly cancellation, its mass is defined by the new symmetry breaking scale, and its stability is guaranteed by a remnant symmetry after the breaking of the gauge symmetry. We find an upper bound on the symmetry breaking scale by applying the relic density and perturbative constraints. The anomaly-free property of the theories allows us to perform a full study of the gamma lines from dark matter annihilation. We investigate the correlation between predictions for final radiation processes and gamma lines. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the latter can be distinguished from the continuum gamma ray spectrum.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures. v2: minor changes to the text, references added, version to appear in PR

Risk factors for the prognosis of pediatric medulloblastoma: a retrospective analysis of 40 cases

OBJECTIVES: In this study, we evaluated the association of molecular subtypes, clinical characteristics and pathological types with the prognosis of patients with medulloblastoma. METHODS: We analyzed forty patients with medulloblastoma who underwent surgical resection at our center between January 2004 and June 2014. Risk factors associated with survival, disease progression and recurrence were analyzed with a univariate Cox regression analysis, and the identified significant risk factors were further analyzed by Kaplan-Meier survival curves. RESULTS: Factors associated with overall survival included M stage (p=0.014), calcification (p=0.012), postoperative treatment, postoperative Karnofsky Performance Scale (KPS) score (p=0.015), and molecular subtype (p=0.005 for WNT and p=0.008 for SHH). Number of symptoms (p=0.029), M stage (p;2 and ≥M1 stage without postoperative radiotherapy. The risk of recurrence increased with advanced M stage. Protective factors for recurrence included M0 stage and a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. CONCLUSION: We identified the risk factors associated with survival, disease progression and recurrence of medulloblastoma patients. This information is helpful for understanding the prognostic factors related to medulloblastoma

Automatic Counterfactual Augmentation for Robust Text Classification Based on Word-Group Search

Despite large-scale pre-trained language models have achieved striking results for text classificaion, recent work has raised concerns about the challenge of shortcut learning. In general, a keyword is regarded as a shortcut if it creates a superficial association with the label, resulting in a false prediction. Conversely, shortcut learning can be mitigated if the model relies on robust causal features that help produce sound predictions. To this end, many studies have explored post-hoc interpretable methods to mine shortcuts and causal features for robustness and generalization. However, most existing methods focus only on single word in a sentence and lack consideration of word-group, leading to wrong causal features. To solve this problem, we propose a new Word-Group mining approach, which captures the causal effect of any keyword combination and orders the combinations that most affect the prediction. Our approach bases on effective post-hoc analysis and beam search, which ensures the mining effect and reduces the complexity. Then, we build a counterfactual augmentation method based on the multiple word-groups, and use an adaptive voting mechanism to learn the influence of different augmentated samples on the prediction results, so as to force the model to pay attention to effective causal features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by several tasks on 8 affective review datasets and 4 toxic language datasets, including cross-domain text classificaion, text attack and gender fairness test.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

A Survey Study on Consumer Perception of Mobile- Commerce Applications

AbstractMobile commerce (m-commerce) can have an important influence on business and society in the future. Hence, m- commerce developers and practitioners must understand consumers’ perception of m-commerce applications in order to better design and deliver m-commerce service. This paper studied Chinese consumers’ perception of m-commerce applications by using the survey methodology. Firstly, 44 mobile applications were adopted on the basis of related study work, and then the web-based questionnaire was employed for obtaining online Chinese consumers’ importance ratings with regard to each mobile application. The survey result is helpful for both academics and practitioners to better design innovative and satisfying m-commerce applications

Noninvasive assessment of the carotid and cerebrovascular atherosclerotic plaques by multidetector CT in type-2 diabetes mellitus patients with transient ischemic attack or stroke

BACKGROUND: The cerebrovasuclar artery disease as a common complication of type-2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) caused huge economic burden and lives threatening to patients. We evaluated the prevalence and morphology of carotid and cerebrovascular atherosclerotic plaques in T2DM patients with transient ischemic attack (TIA) or stroke using multidetector CT (MDCT). METHODS: 64-MDCT and dual-source CT (DSCT) angiographies were performed in 195 T2DM patients with TIA or stroke (mean age 65.7+/-12.8 years; 118 men) between January 2009 to August 2011. During the process, plaque type, its distribution, extensive and obstructive natures were determined for each segment derived from the patients. RESULTS: Atherosclerotic plaques were detected in 183 (93.8%) patients. A total of 1056 segments with plaque were identified, of which 450 (42.6%) were non-calcified, 192 (18.2%) were mixed and 414 (39.2%) calcified ones. Among them, 562 (53.2%) resulted in mild stenosis, 291 (27.6%) moderate stenosis, 170 (16.1%) severe stenosis and 33 (3.1%) occlusion. Non-calcified plaques contributed 91.8% to non-obstructive lumen narrowing, while mixed and calcified plaques contributed 89.0% and 65.0% respectively. CONCLUSIONS: MDCT angiography detected a high prevalence of plaques in T2DM patients with TIA or stroke. A relatively high proportion of plaques were non-calcified, as well as with non-obstructive stenosis. MDCT angiography might further enhance the detection and management of carotid and cerebrovascular atherosclerosis in T2DM patients with TIA and strok