1,423 research outputs found
Toll-like receptor 2 -196 to -174 del polymorphism influences the susceptibility of Han Chinese people to Alzheimer's disease
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Toll-like receptor 2 (<it>TLR2</it>) represents a reasonable functional and positional candidate gene for Alzheimer's disease (AD) as it is located under the linkage region of AD on chromosome 4q, and functionally is involved in the microglia-mediated inflammatory response and amyloid-β clearance. The -196 to -174 del polymorphism affects the <it>TLR2 </it>gene and alters its promoter activity.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We recruited 800 unrelated Northern Han Chinese individuals comprising 400 late-onset AD (LOAD) patients and 400 healthy controls matched for gender and age. The -196 to -174 del polymorphism in the <it>TLR2 </it>gene was genotyped using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>There were significant differences in genotype (P = 0.026) and allele (P = 0.009) frequencies of the -196 to -174 del polymorphism between LOAD patients and controls. The del allele was associated with an increased risk of LOAD (OR = 1.31, 95% CI = 1.07-1.60, Power = 84.9%). When these data were stratified by apolipoprotein E (<it>ApoE</it>) ε4 status, the observed association was confined to <it>ApoE </it>ε4 non-carriers. Logistic regression analysis suggested an association of LOAD with the polymorphism in a recessive model (OR = 1.64, 95% CI = 1.13-2.39, Bonferroni corrected P = 0.03).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our data suggest that the -196 to -174 del/del genotype of <it>TLR2 </it>may increase risk of LOAD in a Northern Han Chinese population.</p
1,4-Bis(imidazol-1-yl)benzene–terephthalic acid (1/1)
In the title compound, C12H10N4·C8H6O4, 1,4-bis(imidazol-1-yl)benzene and terephthalic acid molecules are joined via strong O—H⋯N hydrogen bonds to form infinite zigzag chains. Both molecules are located on crystallographic inversion centers. The O—H⋯N hydrogen-bonded chains are assembled into two-dimensional layers through weak C—H⋯O and strong π–π stacking interactions [centroid–centroid distance = 3.818 (2) Å], leading to the formation of a three-dimensional supramolecular structure
A Simple Temporal Information Matching Mechanism for Entity Alignment Between Temporal Knowledge Graphs
Entity alignment (EA) aims to find entities in different knowledge graphs
(KGs) that refer to the same object in the real world. Recent studies
incorporate temporal information to augment the representations of KGs. The
existing methods for EA between temporal KGs (TKGs) utilize a time-aware
attention mechanism to incorporate relational and temporal information into
entity embeddings. The approaches outperform the previous methods by using
temporal information. However, we believe that it is not necessary to learn the
embeddings of temporal information in KGs since most TKGs have uniform temporal
representations. Therefore, we propose a simple graph neural network (GNN)
model combined with a temporal information matching mechanism, which achieves
better performance with less time and fewer parameters. Furthermore, since
alignment seeds are difficult to label in real-world applications, we also
propose a method to generate unsupervised alignment seeds via the temporal
information of TKG. Extensive experiments on public datasets indicate that our
supervised method significantly outperforms the previous methods and the
unsupervised one has competitive performance.Comment: Accepted by COLING 202
Status of pediatric echocardiography clinical trials: a cross-sectional study of registered trials in ClinicalTrials.gov
BackgroundThe objective of this study is to analyze the characteristics of pediatric echocardiography clinical trials registered in ClinicalTrials.gov.MethodsA data set including pediatric echocardiography clinical trials was downloaded from ClinicalTrials.gov until May 13, 2022. We searched the PubMed, Medline, Google Scholar, and Embase databases to extract publication data. Pediatric echocardiography trial characteristics, application areas, and publication status were described. The secondary objectives were to evaluate factors associated with trial publication.ResultsWe identified 410 pediatric echocardiography reporting definite age, of which 246 were interventional and 146 were observational. Drug interventions were the most commonly studied (32.9%). The most applied area of pediatric echocardiography was congenital heart disease, followed by hemodynamics of preterm or neonatal infants, cardiomyopathy, inflammatory heart disease, pulmonary hypertension, and cardio-oncology. According to the primary completion data, 54.9% of the trials were completed before August 2020. 34.2% of the trials had been published within 24 months. Union countries and quadruple masking were more likely to be published.ConclusionEchocardiography is rapidly evolving in pediatric clinical applications, including anatomic imaging and functional imaging. Novel speckle tracking techniques have also been pivotal in the assessment of cancer therapeutics-related cardiac dysfunction. A small number of clinical trials in pediatric echocardiography are published in a timely fashion. Concerted efforts are needed to promote trial transparency
Strategies for Searching Video Content with Text Queries or Video Examples
The large number of user-generated videos uploaded on to the Internet
everyday has led to many commercial video search engines, which mainly rely on
text metadata for search. However, metadata is often lacking for user-generated
videos, thus these videos are unsearchable by current search engines.
Therefore, content-based video retrieval (CBVR) tackles this metadata-scarcity
problem by directly analyzing the visual and audio streams of each video. CBVR
encompasses multiple research topics, including low-level feature design,
feature fusion, semantic detector training and video search/reranking. We
present novel strategies in these topics to enhance CBVR in both accuracy and
speed under different query inputs, including pure textual queries and query by
video examples. Our proposed strategies have been incorporated into our
submission for the TRECVID 2014 Multimedia Event Detection evaluation, where
our system outperformed other submissions in both text queries and video
example queries, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed
approaches
S3: Social-network Simulation System with Large Language Model-Empowered Agents
Social network simulation plays a crucial role in addressing various
challenges within social science. It offers extensive applications such as
state prediction, phenomena explanation, and policy-making support, among
others. In this work, we harness the formidable human-like capabilities
exhibited by large language models (LLMs) in sensing, reasoning, and behaving,
and utilize these qualities to construct the S system (short for
ocial network imulation ystem). Adhering to
the widely employed agent-based simulation paradigm, we employ prompt
engineering and prompt tuning techniques to ensure that the agent's behavior
closely emulates that of a genuine human within the social network.
Specifically, we simulate three pivotal aspects: emotion, attitude, and
interaction behaviors. By endowing the agent in the system with the ability to
perceive the informational environment and emulate human actions, we observe
the emergence of population-level phenomena, including the propagation of
information, attitudes, and emotions. We conduct an evaluation encompassing two
levels of simulation, employing real-world social network data. Encouragingly,
the results demonstrate promising accuracy. This work represents an initial
step in the realm of social network simulation empowered by LLM-based agents.
We anticipate that our endeavors will serve as a source of inspiration for the
development of simulation systems within, but not limited to, social science
Thermomechanical property of rice kernels studied by DMA
The thermomechanical property of the rice kernels was investigated using a dynamic mechanical analyzer (DMA). The length change of rice kernels with a loaded constant force along the major axis direction was detected during temperature scanning. The thermomechanical transition occurred in rice kernels when heated. The transition temperatures were determined as 47°C, 50°C and 56°C for the medium-grain rice with the moisture contents of 18.1%, 16.0% and 12.5% (wet basis), respectively. Length change of the rice kernels increased with the increase of the temperature and moisture content. Among the four rice varieties investigated, the results showed that the thermomechanical property was not significantly affected by variety
Method of determining cosmological parameter ranges with samples of candles with an intrinsic distribution
In this paper, the effect of the intrinsic distribution of cosmological
candles is investigated. We find that, in the case of a narrow distribution,
the deviation of the observed modulus of sources from the expected central
value could be estimated within a ceratin range. We thus introduce a lower and
upper limits of , and , to
estimate cosmological parameters by applying the conventional minimizing method. We apply this method to a gamma-ray burst (GRB) sample as well as
to a combined sample including this GRB sample and an SN Ia sample. Our
analysis shows that: a) in the case of assuming an intrinsic distribution of
candles of the GRB sample, the effect of the distribution is obvious and should
not be neglected; b) taking into account this effect would lead to a poorer
constraint of the cosmological parameter ranges. The analysis suggests that in
the attempt of constraining the cosmological model with current GRB samples,
the results tend to be worse than what previously thought if the mentioned
intrinsic distribution does exist.Comment: 6 pages,4 figures,1 tables.Data updated. Main conclusion unchange
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