Altered Resting-State Functional Activity in Medication-Naive Patients With First-Episode Major Depression Disorder vs. Healthy Control: A Quantitative Meta-Analysis

Background: There is an urgent need for a meta-analysis that characterizes the brain states of major depression disorder (MDD) patients and potentially provides reliable biomarkers, because heterogeneity in the results of resting-state functional neuroimaging has been observed between studies, with some patients not showing the consistent changes, or even opposite patterns. Thus, we evaluated consistent regional brain activity alterations in medication-naive patients with first-episode unipolar MDD and compared the results with those in healthy controls (HCs).Methods: A systematic database search was conducted (in PubMed, Ovid, and Web of Knowledge) between January 1984 and July 2016 to select resting-state functional activity studies with a voxel-wise analysis in MDD. We used anisotropic effect size-signed differential mapping to perform a whole-brain meta-analysis, comparing functional alterations between first-episode medication-naive unipolar MDD patients and HCs by integrating the studies. In addition, subgroup meta-analysis was conducted to control for the MRI analysis method. Moreover, the meta-regression analyses were performed to examine the potential effects of mean age, education duration, illness duration, and severity of depressive symptoms.Results: A total of 12 studies were included, comparing 313 MDD patients with 283 HCs. The pooled and subgroup meta-analysis found that the MDD patients showed hyperactivity in the left parahippocampal gyrus, left supplementary motor area, left amygdala, left hippocampus, and left middle frontal gyrus (MFG; orbital part), and hypoactivity in the left lingual gyrus, left middle occipital gyrus, right cuneus cortex, right MFG (orbital part), and left cerebellum. In the meta-regression analyses, the mean illness duration was positively associated with hyper-activation in the left parahippocampal gyrus and hypoactivation in the hemispheric lobule IV/V of the left cerebellum.Conclusions: This meta-analysis indicated that MDD patients had significant and robust resting-state brain activity alteration in amygdala, left hippocampus and other regions, which implicated this finding in the pathophysiology of cognitive and emotional impairment in MDD patients

A Typology Of Online Window Shopping Consumers

Consumer online shopping behaviors are well attended in the IS and marketing literature. Yet, there is another group of individuals who spend a lot of time online but do not purchase anything. This online window shopping phenomenon is intriguing to both scholars and marketers yet it is less studied and little understood. Questions such as what the online window shopping consumers do during their visits, how to differentiate their activities and how to design marketing strategies to stimulate them to buy are all essential and beg for investigation. To address this gap, we propose a typology of online window shopping consumers based on the Consumer Information Processing Model, then empirically validate and refine the typology using a set of clickstream data. The final typology contains four main types of online window shopper consumers: 1) promotion finders, 2) social & hedonic experience seekers, 3) information gatherers, and 4) learners & novices. This study extends consumer online behavior research in both e-commerce and social commerce by focusing on the specific group of consumers who only do online window shopping. Besides theoretical contributions, the findings also provide marketers and businesses with valuable references for designing targeted marketing strategies or promotional activities for online window shopping consumers

Two Case Histories of Alkali Liquid Method to Reinforce Collapsible Loess Deposit

Presented in this paper is the summary of two case histories using alkali liquid method to reinforce collapsible Loess ground. One is the ground treatment of administration building which was not in a position of normal service because of the unequal settlement of the ground caused by collapsibility; the other is the ground improvement of the office building of a hospital before construction. The test to examine reinforcing effects is held one month after ground stabilization. It is learned from the test results that the soil compressibility characteristics within the treated aera has been changed from high grade to medium grade or tow grade, and the collapsibility of loess within the treated area has been eliminated. The method of alkali liquid to improve ground has many advantages, namely, simple in construction, with obvious effects, and no vibration or contamination to be caused

Coronavirus and COVID-19: The latest news and views from the scientific community about the new coronavirus and COVID-19.

Introduction: Coronavirus is a family of viruses that cause respiratory infections. The new coronavirus agent was discovered on 12/31/19 after cases registered in China. It causes the disease called coronavirus (COVID-19). The first human coronaviruses were isolated for the first time in 1937. However, it was in 1965 that the virus was described as coronavirus, due to the profile under microscopy, looking like a crown. Objectives: This article aims to bring the most current medical literature on the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Methodology: The publications with the greatest impact factor in  February and March 2020 were searched in Nature, Elservie, JAMA and Wiley. Results: More than 200 articles on COVID-19 were found and 20 articles were selected with the highest number of citations on Google Scholar. Conclusion: Until March 2020, there is no really effective treatment against COVID-19, but many medications are being tested and with very promising results. The concern with the economy is also an extremely relevant factor at this moment.Introduction: Coronavirus is a family of viruses that cause respiratory infections. The new coronavirus agent was discovered on 12/31/19 after cases registered in China. It causes the disease called coronavirus (COVID-19). The first human coronaviruses were isolated for the first time in 1937. However, it was in 1965 that the virus was described as coronavirus, due to the profile under microscopy, looking like a crown. Objectives: This article aims to bring the most current medical literature on the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). Methodology: The publications with the greatest impact factor in  February and March 2020 were searched in Nature, Elservie, JAMA and Wiley. Results: More than 200 articles on COVID-19 were found and 20 articles were selected with the highest number of citations on Google Scholar. Conclusion: Until March 2020, there is no really effective treatment against COVID-19, but many medications are being tested and with very promising results. The concern with the economy is also an extremely relevant factor at this moment

Quad-Net: Quad-domain Network for CT Metal Artifact Reduction

Metal implants and other high-density objects in patients introduce severe streaking artifacts in CT images, compromising image quality and diagnostic performance. Although various methods were developed for CT metal artifact reduction over the past decades, including the latest dual-domain deep networks, remaining metal artifacts are still clinically challenging in many cases. Here we extend the state-of-the-art dual-domain deep network approach into a quad-domain counterpart so that all the features in the sinogram, image, and their corresponding Fourier domains are synergized to eliminate metal artifacts optimally without compromising structural subtleties. Our proposed quad-domain network for MAR, referred to as Quad-Net, takes little additional computational cost since the Fourier transform is highly efficient, and works across the four receptive fields to learn both global and local features as well as their relations. Specifically, we first design a Sinogram-Fourier Restoration Network (SFR-Net) in the sinogram domain and its Fourier space to faithfully inpaint metal-corrupted traces. Then, we couple SFR-Net with an Image-Fourier Refinement Network (IFR-Net) which takes both an image and its Fourier spectrum to improve a CT image reconstructed from the SFR-Net output using cross-domain contextual information. Quad-Net is trained on clinical datasets to minimize a composite loss function. Quad-Net does not require precise metal masks, which is of great importance in clinical practice. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of Quad-Net over the state-of-the-art MAR methods quantitatively, visually, and statistically. The Quad-Net code is publicly available at https://github.com/longzilicart/Quad-Net

CLCI-Net: Cross-Level fusion and Context Inference Networks for Lesion Segmentation of Chronic Stroke

Segmenting stroke lesions from T1-weighted MR images is of great value for large-scale stroke rehabilitation neuroimaging analyses. Nevertheless, there are great challenges with this task, such as large range of stroke lesion scales and the tissue intensity similarity. The famous encoder-decoder convolutional neural network, which although has made great achievements in medical image segmentation areas, may fail to address these challenges due to the insufficient uses of multi-scale features and context information. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Cross-Level fusion and Context Inference Network (CLCI-Net) for the chronic stroke lesion segmentation from T1-weighted MR images. Specifically, a Cross-Level feature Fusion (CLF) strategy was developed to make full use of different scale features across different levels; Extending Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) with CLF, we have enriched multi-scale features to handle the different lesion sizes; In addition, convolutional long short-term memory (ConvLSTM) is employed to infer context information and thus capture fine structures to address the intensity similarity issue. The proposed approach was evaluated on an open-source dataset, the Anatomical Tracings of Lesions After Stroke (ATLAS) with the results showing that our network outperforms five state-of-the-art methods. We make our code and models available at https://github.com/YH0517/CLCI_Net

The value of diffusion kurtosis imaging, diffusion weighted imaging and 18F-FDG PET for differentiating benign and malignant solitary pulmonary lesions and predicting pathological grading

ObjectiveTo explore the value of PET/MRI, including diffusion kurtosis imaging (DKI), diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) and positron emission tomography (PET), for distinguishing between benign and malignant solitary pulmonary lesions (SPLs) and predicting the histopathological grading of malignant SPLs.Material and methodsChest PET, DKI and DWI scans of 73 patients with SPL were performed by PET/MRI. The apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC), mean diffusivity (MD), mean kurtosis (MK), maximum standard uptake value (SUVmax), metabolic total volume (MTV) and total lesion glycolysis (TLG) were calculated. Student’s t test or the Mann–Whitney U test was used to analyze the differences in parameters between groups. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves were used to evaluate the diagnostic efficacy. Logistic regression analysis was used to evaluate independent predictors.ResultsThe MK and SUVmax were significantly higher, and the MD and ADC were significantly lower in the malignant group (0.59 ± 0.13, 10.25 ± 4.20, 2.27 ± 0.51[×10-3 mm2/s] and 1.35 ± 0.33 [×10-3 mm2/s]) compared to the benign group (0.47 ± 0.08, 5.49 ± 4.05, 2.85 ± 0.60 [×10-3 mm2/s] and 1.67 ± 0.33 [×10-3 mm2/s]). The MD and ADC were significantly lower, and the MTV and TLG were significantly higher in the high-grade malignant SPLs group (2.11 ± 0.51 [×10-3 mm2/s], 1.35 ± 0.33 [×10-3 mm2/s], 35.87 ± 42.24 and 119.58 ± 163.65) than in the non-high-grade malignant SPLs group (2.46 ± 0.46 [×10-3 mm2/s], 1.67 ± 0.33[×10-3 mm2/s], 20.17 ± 32.34 and 114.20 ± 178.68). In the identification of benign and malignant SPLs, the SUVmax and MK were independent predictors, the AUCs of the combination of SUVmax and MK, SUVmax, MK, MD, and ADC were 0.875, 0.787, 0.848, 0.769, and 0.822, respectively. In the identification of high-grade and non-high-grade malignant SPLs, the AUCs of MD, ADC, MTV, and TLG were 0.729, 0.680, 0.693, and 0.711, respectively.ConclusionDWI, DKI, and PET in PET/MRI are all effective methods to distinguish benign from malignant SPLs, and are also helpful in evaluating the pathological grading of malignant SPLs

Differential Expression of MicroRNA-19b Promotes Proliferation of Cancer Stem Cells by Regulating the TSC1/mTOR Signaling Pathway in Multiple Myeloma

Background/Aims: MiR-19b has been reported to be involved in several malignancies, but its role in multiple myeloma (MM) is still unknown. The objective of this study was to explore the biological mechanism of miR-19b in the progression of MM. Methods: First, we performed real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and Western blot to study the expression of miR-19b, tuberous sclerosis 1 (TSC1), and caspase-3 in different groups. MTT assay was performed to explore the effect of miR-19b on survival and apoptosis of cancer stem cells (CSCs). Computation analysis and luciferase assay were utilized to confirm the interaction between miR-19b and TSC1. Results: A total of 38 participants comprising 20 subjects with MM and 18 healthy subjects as normal controls were enrolled in our study. Real-time PCR showed dramatic upregulation of miR-19b, but TSC1 was evidently suppressed in the MM group. MiR-19b overexpression substantially promoted clonogenicity and cell viability, and further inhibited apoptosis of CSCs in vitro. Furthermore, miR-19b overexpression downregulated the expression of caspase-3, which induced apoptosis. Using in silico analysis, we identified that TSC1 might be a direct downstream target of miR-19b, and this was further confirmed by luciferase assay showing that miR-19b apparently reduced the luciferase activity of wild-type TSC1 3´-UTR, but not that of mutant TSC1 3´-UTR. There was also evident decrease in TSC1 mRNA and protein in CSCs following introduction of miR-19b. Interestingly, reintroduction of TSC1 abolished the miR-19b-induced proliferation promotion and apoptosis inhibition in CSCs. Conclusion: These findings collectively suggest that miR-19b promotes cell survival and suppresses apoptosis of MM CSCs via targeting TSC1 directly, indicating that miR-19b may serve as a potential and novel therapeutic target of MM based on miRNA expression