Colorectal cancer subtyping and immune landscape analysis based on natural killer cell-related genes.

BACKGROUND AND STUDY AIMS: The prognosis of colorectal cancer (CRC) is related to natural killer (NK) cells, but the molecular subtype features of CRC based on NK cells are still unknown. This study aimed to identify NK cell-related molecular subtypes of CRC and analyze the survival status and immune landscape of patients with different subtypes. PATIENTS/MATERIAL AND METHODS: mRNA expression data, single nucleotide variant (SNV) data, and clinical information of CRC patients were obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were obtained through differential analysis, and the intersection was taken with NK cell-associated genes to obtain 103 NK cell-associated CRC DEGs (NCDEGs). Based on NCDEGs, CRC samples were divided into three clusters through unsupervised clustering analysis. Survival analysis, immune analysis, Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA), and tumor mutation burden (TMB) analysis were performed. Finally, NCDEG-related small-molecule drugs were screened using the CMap database. RESULTS: Survival analysis revealed that cluster2 had a lower survival rate than cluster1 and cluster3 (p < 0.05). Immune infiltration analysis found that the immune infiltration levels and immune checkpoint expression levels of cluster1_3 were substantially higher than those of cluster2, and the tumor purity was the opposite (p < 0.05). GSEA presented that cluster1_3 was significantly enriched in the chemokine signaling pathway, ECM receptor interaction, and antigen processing and presentation pathways (p < 0.05). The TMB of cluster1_3 was significantly higher than that of cluster2 (p < 0.05). Genes with the highest mutation rate in CRC were APC, TP53, TTN, and KRAS. Drug prediction results showed that small-molecule drugs that reverse the upregulation of NCDEGs, deoxycholic acid, dipivefrine, phenformin, and other drugs may improve the prognosis of CRC. CONCLUSION: NK cell-associated CRC subtypes can be used to evaluate the tumor characteristics of CRC patients and provide an important reference for CRC patients.

Interface Design of Head-Worn Display Application on Condition Monitoring in Aviation.

Head-worn displays (HWDs) as timely condition monitoring are increasingly used in aviation. However, interface design characteristics that mainly affect HWD use have not been fully investigated. The aim of this study was to examine the effects of several important interface design characteristics (i.e., the distance between calibration lines and the layouts of vertical and horizontal scale belts) on task performance and user preference between different conditions of display, i.e., HWD or head-up display (HUD). Thirty participants joined an experiment in which they performed flight tasks. In the experiment, the calibration lines' distance was set to three different levels (7, 9 and 11 mrad), and the scale belt layouts included horizontal and vertical scale belt layouts. The scale belts were set as follows: the original vertical scale belt width was set as L, and the horizontal scale belt height as H. The three layouts of the vertical calibration scale belt used were 3/4H, H and 3H/2. Three layouts of horizontal calibration scale belts were selected as 3L/4, L and 3L/2. The results indicated that participants did better with the HWD compared to the HUD. Both layouts of vertical and horizontal scale belts yielded significant effects on the users' task performance and preference. Users showed the best task performance while the vertical calibration scale belts were set as H and horizontal calibration scale belts were set as L, and users generally preferred interface design characteristics that could yield an optimal performance. These findings could facilitate the optimal design of usable head-worn-display technology.

Research on the Applicability of Touchscreens in Manned/Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Cooperative Missions.

The suitability of touchscreens for human-computer interaction in manned/unmanned aerial vehicle cooperative missions remains uncertain, especially in situations that are time-sensitive with variations in difficulty levels. The purpose of this study is to determine the feasibility of touchscreen applications in manned/unmanned aerial vehicle cooperative missions and the magnitude of the effects of time pressure and task difficulty. In contrast to previous studies, a combination of performance and perceptual load measures was used to divide errors into disposition errors, undetected errors, and miscalculation errors to explore specific error mechanisms, set up typical manned/unmanned aerial vehicle cooperative human-computer interaction tasks, and set up antecedent features for potential factors. Thirty subjects participated in an experiment that required the use of touchscreens or keyboards to perform a human-computer interaction task in a simulated manned/unmanned aerial vehicle cooperative mission. Experiments were set at three task difficulties: low, medium, and high, and were matched to a set time pressure or no time pressure for two seconds for low difficulty, three seconds for medium difficulty, and four seconds for high difficulty. The results showed that the touchscreens improved the participants' response speed at a time pressure of 2 s or less compared with the use of a general input device; however, the task error rate also increased significantly. The higher the task difficulty was, the worse the performance was and the greater the perceived workload of the participants. The application of touchscreens in dynamic environments subjected the participants to greater physical demands. The performance of participants using a keyboard was no better than that when touchscreens were used during the experiment. Moreover, touchscreens did not significantly improve participant performance. The results support the possibility of using touchscreens in manned/unmanned aerial vehicle cooperative missions.

Pilots' Fixation Patterns During Taxiing and the Effects of Visibility.

INTRODUCTION: Visual performance is important for safe and accurate taxiing operations. Visibility is associated with navigation errors during taxiing. The main objective of the present study was to investigate the effects of visibility on pilots' fixation patterns during taxiing. The interaction between visibility and flight experience was also examined.METHODS: Both experienced and less experienced pilots participated in the study. They were instructed to perform simulated taxiing tasks in two visibility conditions: clear day vs. low visibility. A mixed-model analysis of variance was performed to determine the main and interaction effects of 'visibility' and 'flight experience' on fixation data in each area of interest (AOI).RESULTS: The results showed that experienced pilots' fixation counts reduced on the electronic centralized aircraft monitoring (ECAM) area, but increased out the middle view (OTWM) and right view out of the window (OTWR) in low visibility than in clear day, while fixation counts among less experienced pilots increased on the primary flight display (PFD) and ECAM areas, but did not change significantly OTWM and OTWR in low visibility. Fixation duration increased by 59.8%, 9.8%, and 7.9% in ECAM, OTWL, and OTWR, respectively, in low visibility than in clear day.CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggest that pilots pay more attention and have higher perceptual load in the low visibility condition to maintain taxiing accuracy, and more experienced pilots make more visual efforts to extract information from AOIs outside the cockpit in the low visibility condition. These findings provide practical implications for safe and accurate taxiing operations.Zhang X, Qu X, Xue H, Liu J. Pilots' fixation patterns during taxiing and the effects of visibility. Aerosp Med Hum Perform. 2019; 90(6):546-552.

Effects of time of day and taxi route complexity on navigation errors: An experimental study.

This study aimed to evaluate the effects of time of day and taxi route complexity on navigation errors. Nine pilots participated in the experiment. Four testing conditions defined by time of day conditions (i.e., nighttime versus daytime) and taxi route complexity (i.e., more complex versus less complex) were examined. Participants were instructed to perform simulated taxiing tasks in each of the testing conditions. Navigation errors during taxiing were counted. In addition, eye movement measures can reflect pilots' attention allocation, situation awareness and mental workload that are closely related to the risk of navigation errors. Thus, eye movement measures including fixation rate, average fixation duration and average pupil area were also selected as dependent variables. We found that navigation errors were fewer at night compared to in daytime. This could be explained by the finding that pilots paid more attention to the environmental clues out of the window at night, inducing better situation awareness for accurate taxiing. More complex taxi route was found to be associated with more navigation errors, but participants' visual behaviors were consistent between route complexity conditions, indicating that pilots' visual operation strategies did not contribute to the increased number of navigation errors in the more complex taxi route condition.

Driving Anger, Aberrant Driving Behaviors, and Road Crash Risk: Testing of a Mediated Model.

With the dramatic increase in motorization, road traffic crashes have become the leading cause of death in China. To reduce the losses associated with road safety problems, it is important to understand the risk factors contributing to the high crash rate among Chinese drivers. This study investigated how driving anger and aberrant driving behaviors are related to crash risk by proposing and testing one mediated model. In this model, the effects of driving anger on road crash risk were mediated by aberrant driving behaviors. However, unlike previous studies, instead of using the overall scale scores, the subscales of driving anger and aberrant driving behaviors were used to establish the mediated model in this study. To test the validity of this model, an Internet-based questionnaire, which included various measures of driving anger, aberrant driving, and road crash history, was completed by a sample of 1974 Chinese drivers. The results showed that the model fitted the data very well and aberrant driving behaviors fully mediated the effects of driving anger on road crash risk. Findings from the present study are useful for the development of countermeasures to reduce road traffic crashes in China.

The association between sensation seeking and driving outcomes: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the association between sensation seeking (SS) and driving outcomes (including four aberrant driving behaviors, accident involvement and tickets received) through a systematic review and meta-analysis. Forty-four eligible studies, representing 48 individual trials, were identified from a systematic literature search of four electronic databases, and included in the meta-analysis. Overall, the meta-analysis results showed that SS yielded significant positive correlations with risky driving (pooled r = 0.24, p < 0.001), aggressive driving (pooled r = 0.23, p = 0.019), and errors (pooled r = 0.22, p = 0.016). SS was also positively correlated with accident involvement (pooled r = 0.08, p < 0.001) and tickets received (pooled r = 0.19, p < 0.001), though at weaker levels. The correlations could also be moderated by a number of study and sample characteristics, such as country of origin, publication year, age, gender, driving experience and type of SS measure. The findings help facilitate our understanding of the role of SS in aberrant driving behaviors and accident risk, and provide new insight into the design of evidence-based driving education and accident prevention interventions.