A Prospective Study of the Incidence of Retinopathy of Prematurity in China: Evaluation of Different Screening Criteria

To investigate the incidence of Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) in Beijing, North China, and to evaluate the effectiveness of different ROP screening criteria, we conducted a prospective cohort study in a single-neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). A total of 2997 premature infants with birth weight (BW) ≤ 2000 g and/or gestational age (GA) ≤ 34 weeks had completed ROP screening. ROP was diagnosed in 356 (11.9%) infants. The mean GA was 30.46 ± 1.98 weeks and the mean BW was 1477.35 ± 371.29 g. Of the 59 (2.0%) infants receiving treatment, the mean GA was 29.37 ± 2.10 weeks, and the mean BW was 1240.80 ± 330.71 g. The incidence of ROP declined from 14.7% in 2009 and 11.1% in 2010 to 9.5% in 2011. The United Kingdom (UK) criteria could reduce the screening number by 40.8%, and 3 infants with type I ROP needing treatment were missed, but none in 2011. The United States (US) criteria could reduce the screening number by 66.5%, and 10 infants with type I ROP needing treatment were missed, including one in 2011. So the UK criteria may be appropriate for screening of ROP in our NICU in 2011. Future multisite epidemiologic studies are required to establish suitable ROP screening criteria in China

U-SEANNet: A Simple, Efficient and Applied U-Shaped Network for Diagnosis of Nasal Diseases on Nasal Endoscopic Images

Numerous studies have affirmed that deep learning models can facilitate early diagnosis of lesions in endoscopic images. However, the lack of available datasets stymies advancements in research on nasal endoscopy, and existing models fail to strike a good trade-off between model diagnosis performance, model complexity and parameters size, rendering them unsuitable for real-world application. To bridge these gaps, we created the first large-scale nasal endoscopy dataset, named 7-NasalEID, comprising 11,352 images that contain six common nasal diseases and normal samples. Subsequently, we proposed U-SEANNet, an innovative U-shaped architecture, underpinned by depth-wise separable convolution. Moreover, to enhance its capacity for detecting nuanced discrepancies in input images, U-SEANNet employs the Global-Local Channel Feature Fusion module, enabling it to utilize salient channel features from both global and local contexts. To demonstrate U-SEANNet's potential, we benchmarked U-SEANNet against seventeen modern architectures through five-fold cross-validation. The experimental results show that U-SEANNet achieves a commendable accuracy of 93.58%. Notably, U-SEANNet's parameters size and GFLOPs are only 0.78M and 0.21, respectively. Our findings suggest U-SEANNet is the state-of-the-art model for nasal diseases diagnosis in endoscopic images.Comment: This manuscript has been submitted to ICASSP 202

NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF ICE MILLING LOADS ON PROPELLER BLADE WITH COHESIVE ELEMENT METHOD

In ice-infested waters, propellers of a polar ship are likely to be exposed to ice loads in different scenarios. Propeller milling with ice is one of the most dangerous cases for ice-propeller interaction. In this study, we try to simulate dynamic milling process of ice-propeller and reproduce resulting physical phenomena. Cohesive element method is used to model ice in the simulation. To simulate material properties of ice, an elastoplastic softening constitutive law is developed. Both crushing and fracture failures are included in the ice-propeller milling process. The ice loads in 6 Dofs acting on blades of a propeller are calculated in time domain. The average and standard deviations of simulated dominant ice loads are compared with those from model test. A good agreement is achieved. By varying propeller rotation speed, advance velocity and cutting depth on ice block, the sensitivity study has been carried out. The results show that dominant ice loads are affected much by the three parameters. It is shown that decreasing rotation speed, or increasing advance velocity and cutting depth may lead to higher ice loads. Care should be taken to avoid over-loading on propeller when operating in ice for polar ship

Guarding Embryo Development of Zebrafish by Shell Engineering: A Strategy to Shield Life from Ozone Depletion

Background: The reduced concentration of stratospheric ozone results in an increased flux of biologically damaging midultraviolet radiation (UVB, 280 to 320 nm) reaching earth surfaces. Environmentally relevant levels of UVB negatively impact various natural populations of marine organisms, which is ascribed to suppressed embryonic development by increased radiation. Methodology/Principal Findings: Inspired by strategies in the living systems generated by evolution, we induce an extra UVB-adsorbed coat on the chorion (eggshell surrounding embryo) of zebrafish, during the blastula period. Short and long UV exposure experiments show that the artificial mineral-shell reduces the UV radiation effectively and the enclosed embryos become more robust. In contrast, the uncoated embryos cannot survive under the enhanced UVB condition. Conclusions: We suggest that an engineered shell of functional materials onto biological units can be developed as a strategy to shield lives to counteract negative changes of global environment, or to provide extra protection for the living units in biological research

Similar operation template attack on RSA-CRT as a case study

A template attack, the most powerful side-channel attack methods, usually first builds the leakage profiles from a controlled profiling device, and then uses these profiles to recover the secret of the target device. It is based on the fact that the profiling device shares similar leakage characteristics with the target device. In this study, we focus on the similar operations in a single device and propose a new variant of the template attack, called the similar operation template attack (SOTA). SOTA builds the models on public variables (e.g., input/output) and recovers the values of the secret variables that leak similar to the public variables. SOTA’s advantage is that it can avoid the requirement of an additional profiling device. In this study, the proposed SOTA method is applied to a straightforward RSA-CRT implementation. Because the leakage is (almost) the same in similar operations, we reduce the security of RSA-CRT to a hidden multiplier problem (HMP) over GF(q), which can be solved byte-wise using our proposed heuristic algorithm. The effectiveness of our proposed method is verified as an entire prime recovery procedure in a practical leakage scenario

Linear stability for a free boundary problem modeling the growth of tumor cord with time delay

This paper was concerned with a free boundary problem modeling the growth of tumor cord with a time delay in cell proliferation, in which the cell location was incorporated, the domain was bounded in $\mathbb{R}^2$, and its boundary included two disjoint closed curves, one fixed and the other moving and a priori unknown. A parameter $\mu$ represents the aggressiveness of the tumor. We proved that there exists a unique radially symmetric stationary solution for sufficiently small time delay, and this stationary solution is linearly stable under the nonradially symmetric perturbations for any $\mu > 0$. Moreover, adding the time delay in the model leads to a larger stationary tumor. If the tumor aggressiveness parameter is bigger, the time delay has a greater effect on the size of the stationary tumor, but it has no effect on the stability of the stationary solution

An Optimization Approach for the Coordinated Low-Carbon Design of Product Family and Remanufactured Products

[EN] With increasingly stringent environmental regulations on emission standards, enterprises and investigators are looking for effective ways to decrease GHG emission from products. As an important method for reducing GHG emission of products, low-carbon product family design has attracted more and more attention. Existing research, related to low-carbon product family design, did not take into account remanufactured products. Nowadays, it is popular to launch remanufactured products for environmental benefit and meeting customer needs. On the one hand, the design of remanufactured products is influenced by product family design. On the other hand, the launch of remanufactured products may cannibalize the sale of new products. Thus, the design of remanufactured products should be considered together with the product family design for obtaining the maximum profit and reducing the GHG emission as soon as possible. The purpose of this paper is to present an optimization model to concurrently determine product family design, remanufactured products planning and remanufacturing parameters selection with consideration of the customer preference, the total profit of a company and the total GHG emission from production. A genetic algorithm is applied to solve the optimization problem. The proposed method can help decision-makers to simultaneously determine the design of a product family and remanufactured products with a better trade-off between profit and environmental impact. 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Genome-Wide Transcriptional Profiling of the Response of Staphylococcus aureus to Cryptotanshinone

Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) strains with multiple antibiotic resistances are increasingly widespread, and new agents are required for the treatment of S. aureus. Cryptotanshinone (CT), a major tanshinone of medicinal plant Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge, demonstrated effective in vitro antibacterial activity against all 21 S. aureus strains tested in this experiment. Affymetrix GeneChips were utilized to determine the global transcriptional response of S. aureus ATCC 25923 to treatment with subinhibitory concentrations of CT. Transcriptome profiling indicated that the antibacterial action of CT may be associated with its action as active oxygen radical generator; S. aureus undergoes an oxygen-limiting state upon exposure to CT