“Integrated” Solution and Engineering Application of Assembled Cable-Stayed Pedestrian Landscape Overbridge

The construction of modern cities emphasizes the nature and harmony among the “people”, “things” and “environment”, reflecting the harmony and unity of the formal beauty, functional beauty and surrounding environment of architecture. Based on the introduction of the design concept of the assembled pedestrian overbridge, through the Jianhua Building Materials Group’s frst “pre-fabricated low-rise tower-stayed pedestrian landscape overbridge” project in China, this paper proposes a solution that can improve the landscape design of the overbridge and reduce the construction complexity of the overbridge, the assembly product supply and the construction process “integration” under the premise of ensuring the safety and stability of the pedestrian overbridge, whose prefabricated production and assembly construction, shortening the construction period, reducing energy consumption, reducing pollution, and obtaining good social comprehensive benefts

Unlocking the Power of Open Set : A New Perspective for Open-Set Noisy Label Learning

Learning from noisy data has attracted much attention, where most methods focus on closed-set label noise. However, a more common scenario in the real world is the presence of both open-set and closed-set noise. Existing methods typically identify and handle these two types of label noise separately by designing a specific strategy for each type. However, in many real-world scenarios, it would be challenging to identify open-set examples, especially when the dataset has been severely corrupted. Unlike the previous works, we explore how models behave when faced with open-set examples, and find that \emph{a part of open-set examples gradually get integrated into certain known classes}, which is beneficial for the separation among known classes. Motivated by the phenomenon, we propose a novel two-step contrastive learning method CECL (Class Expansion Contrastive Learning) which aims to deal with both types of label noise by exploiting the useful information of open-set examples. Specifically, we incorporate some open-set examples into closed-set classes to enhance performance while treating others as delimiters to improve representative ability. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets with diverse label noise demonstrate the effectiveness of CECL

Effects of aging and macrophages on mice stem Leydig cell proliferation and differentiation in vitro

BackgroundTestosterone plays a critical role in maintaining reproductive functions and well-beings of the males. Adult testicular Leydig cells (LCs) produce testosterone and are generated from stem Leydig cells (SLCs) during puberty through adulthood. In addition, macrophages are critical in the SLC regulatory niche for normal testicular function. Age-related reduction in serum testosterone contributes to a number of metabolic and quality-of-life changes in males, as well as age-related changes in immunological functions. How aging and testicular macrophages may affect SLC function is still unclear.MethodsSLCs and macrophages were purified from adult and aged mice via FACS using CD51 as a marker protein. The sorted cells were first characterized and then co-cultured in vitro to examine how aging and macrophages may affect SLC proliferation and differentiation. To elucidate specific aging effects on both cell types, co-culture of sorted SLCs and macrophages were also carried out across two ages.ResultsCD51+ (weakly positive) and CD51++ (strongly positive) cells expressed typical SLC and macrophage markers, respectively. However, with aging, both cell types increased expression of multiple cytokine genes, such as IL-1b, IL-6 and IL-8. Moreover, old CD51+ SLCs reduced their proliferation and differentiation, with a more significant reduction in differentiation (2X) than proliferation (30%). Age matched CD51++ macrophages inhibited CD51+ SLC development, with a more significant reduction in old cells (60%) than young (40%). Crossed-age co-culture experiments indicated that the age of CD51+ SLCs plays a more significant role in determining age-related inhibitory effects. In LC lineage formation, CD51+ SLC had both reduced LC lineage markers and increased myoid cell lineage markers, suggesting an age-related lineage shift for SLCs.ConclusionThe results suggest that aging affected both SLC function and their regulatory niche cell, macrophages

Radiotherapy-Mediated Immunomodulation and Anti-Tumor Abscopal Effect Combining Immune Checkpoint Blockade

Radiotherapy (RT) is a conventional method for clinical treatment of local tumors, which can induce tumor-specific immune response and cause the shrinkage of primary tumor and distal metastases via mediating tumor infiltration of CD8+ T cells. Ionizing radiation (IR) induced tumor regression outside the radiation field is termed as abscopal effect. However, due to the mobilization of immunosuppressive signals by IR, the activated CD8+T cells are not sufficient to maintain a long-term positive feedback to make the tumors regress completely. Eventually, the “hot” tumors gradually turn to “cold”. With the advent of emerging immunotherapy, the combination of immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) and local RT has produced welcome changes in stubborn metastases, especially anti-PD-1/PD-L1 and anti-CTLA-4 which have been approved in clinical cancer treatment. However, the detailed mechanism of the abscopal effect induced by combined therapy is still unclear. Therefore, how to formulate a therapeutic schedule to maximize the efficacy should be took into consideration according to specific circumstance. This paper reviewed the recent research progresses in immunomodulatory effects of local radiotherapy on the tumor microenvironment, as well as the unique advantage for abscopal effect when combined with ICB, with a view to exploring the potential application value of radioimmunotherapy in clinic

A micromechanical model of multi-scale nano-reinforced composites

Nano-reinforced composites have a wide range of useful applications thanks to their exceptional all-encompassing characteristics. Understanding the micromechanical model and the reinforcing process in nano-composites is crucial for a quantitative assessment of the reinforcement impact of nano-fillers and performance optimization. The original micromechanical model for common composite materials is no longer applicable since mechanical modeling of composite materials takes into consideration variables like multi-scale, multi-phase, and multi-morphology. The multi-scale parameter equivalent modeling theory of nano-reinforced composites is examined in this work. It is suggested to use a generalized modified Halpin-Tsai micromechanical model, which may accommodate any reinforcement form, size, or orientation, after theoretical and experimental comparison and verification. A tiny sample of the nano-reinforced composite material's mechanical tensile characteristics was examined, and its microscopic

Study of the Optical Properties of Multi-Particle Phosphors by the FDTD and Ray Tracing Combined Method

It is well known that the optical properties of multi-particle phosphor are crucial to the light performance of white light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Note that the optical properties including scattering or absorption properties for a single particle are easy to be calculated. However, due to the large computation considering the complicated re-scattering and re-absorption, it is difficult to calculate the scattering behaviors of the multi-particles. A common method to reduce the computation, which can cause unknown deviations, is to replace the multi-particle scattering properties by using the average scattering data of single particles. In this work, a cluster of multi-phosphor particles are directly simulated by the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The total scattering data of the cluster was processed as a bulk scattering parameter and imported to the Monte-Carlo ray-tracing (RT) method to realize a large-scale multi-particle scattering calculation. A polynomial mathematical model was built according to the multi-particle scattering data. An experiment was carried out for verifying the accuracy of the method in this work. The mean absolute percentages of the previous method are 1.68, 2.06, and 1.22 times larger than the multi-particle method compared with the experimental curves, respectively

Interannual variation in lake areas over 50 km² on the Tibetan Plateau from 1986 to 2020 based on remote sensing big data

ABSTRACTLake distribution on the Tibetan Plateau (TP) is extensive, and lake area changes are key indicators of the TP's climate change response. Many multisource remote sensing big data for the TP, particularly optical images, are unusable due to cloud cover. Therefore, an improved isobath interpolation-based lake area extraction method is proposed and applied to obtain annual average lake areas (≥ 50 km²) on the TP from 1986 to 2020 using remote sensing big data. The lake area result accuracy was verified using existing lake area and level datasets, yielding correlation coefficients of ∼0.9. The change points and segmented trends of each lake's interannual area sequence were obtained. The relationships between lake area and climatic variables were investigated. The positive accumulation of the total precipitation minus total evaporation explains the overall lake area expansion trend after 1995. The exorheic lake interannual area is related to precipitation more than that of endorheic lakes, but endorheic lake area changes are stronger. The shrinking of lakes on the southern TP may not be climate-driven but probably attributed to lake bottom leakage. We explore detailed interannual variation characteristics of lake areas on the TP and provide reference data for studying lake responses to climate change

GDF15 Contributes to Radioresistance by Mediating the EMT and Stemness of Breast Cancer Cells

Radiotherapy is one of the conventional methods for the clinical treatment of breast cancer. However, radioresistance has an adverse effect on the prognosis of breast cancer patients after radiotherapy. In this study, using bioinformatic analysis of GSE59732 and GSE59733 datasets in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database together with the prognosis database of breast cancer patients after radiotherapy, the GDF15 gene was screened out to be related to the poor prognosis of breast cancer after radiotherapy. Compared with radiosensitive parental breast cancer cells, breast cancer cells with acquired radioresistance exhibited a high level of GDF15 expression and enhanced epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) properties of migration and invasion, as well as obvious stem-like traits, including the increases of mammosphere formation ability, the proportion of stem cells (CD44+ CD24− cells), and the expressions of stem cell-related markers (SOX2, NANOG). Moreover, knockdown of GDF15 sensitized the radioresistance cells to irradiation and significantly inhibited their EMT and stem-like traits, indicating that GDF15 promoted the radioresistance of breast cancer by enhancing the properties of EMT and stemness. Conclusively, GDF15 may be applicable as a novel prognosis-related biomarker and a potential therapeutic target for breast cancer radiotherapy

Prognostic Value of the Average Lung CT Number in Patients with Acute Paraquat Poisoning

Objective. The chest computed tomography (CT) examination is an important clinical examination in the diagnosis and monitoring of paraquat- (PQ-) induced lung injury. The aim of this study was to explore the prognostic value of the average lung CT number acquired by quantitative CT techniques in patients with acute paraquat poisoning in the early stages of the disease. Methods. 46 patients who suffered from acute PQ poisoning in the emergency department of the Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital from January 2015 to June 2020 were enrolled in the present study. The patients were divided into survival group (n = 21) and nonsurvival group (n = 25). Clinical data were collected from subjects who met the inclusion criteria, including general information, personal disease history, and laboratory test indicators. The average lung CT numbers of each patient were obtained by quantitative CT techniques. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis was conducted to assess the prognostic value of average lung CT number in patients with acute paraquat poisoning. Results. The average CT numbers of the middle-lung, lower-lung, and whole lung fields in the nonsurvival group were significantly higher than those of the survival group (p<0.0001). However, the upper-lung field was not significantly different between the two groups (p=0.7765). The AUCs of different levels ranged from 0.554 to 0.977, among which the lower-lung field presented the largest AUC of 0.977 (95% CI: 0.943∼1; cut-off value: −702Hu; sensitivity 96%; specificity, 90.5%; YI: 0.865), followed by the whole lung field 0.914 (95% CI: 0.830∼0.999; cut-off value: −727Hu; sensitivity 76%; specificity, 95.2%; YI: 0.712) and the middle-lung field 0.87 (95% CI: 0.768∼0.971; cut-off value: −779Hu; sensitivity 80%; specificity, 85.7%; YI: 0.657). Conclusion. The present study indicated that the average lung CT number could be used to evaluate the relationship between the severity of PQ-induced lung injury and prognosis, especially in the lower-lung field. However, further research is needed to draw a clear conclusion