Comparison of the clinical characteristics in parents and their children in a series of family clustered Mycoplasma pneumoniae infections.

BACKGROUND: Mycoplasma pneumoniae infections have increased in China recently, causing some evidence of familial clustering. The purpose of this study was to compare the clinical features of parents and children in cases of familial clustering of Mycoplasma pneumoniae infection. METHODS: A retrospective analysis was performed on the cases of familial clustering of Mycoplasma pneumoniae infection, and the clinical characteristics of parents and children were compared. RESULTS: We identified 63 families, of these, 57 (65.5%) adults and 65 (94.2%) children required hospitalization. Fifty-seven adults (mean age 35.1 ± 4.6 years, 80.7% female) and 55 children (mean age 6.3 ± 3.9 years, 54.5% female) were included in the analysis. The incidence of mycoplasma infection in adults had increased gradually over the past year, while the rate in children had spiked sharply since June 2023. The clinical symptoms were similar in the two groups, mainly fever and cough. The peak temperature of children was higher than that of adults (39.1 ± 0.7℃ vs 38.6 ± 0.7℃, p = 0.004). Elevated lactate dehydrogenase was more common in children than in adults (77.8% vs 11.3%, p < 0.001). Bronchial pneumonia and bilateral involvement were more common in children, while adults usually had unilateral involvement. Three (60%) adults and 21 (52.5%) children were macrolide-resistant Mycoplasma pneumoniae infected. Children were more likely to be co-infected (65.5% vs 22.8%, p < .001). Macrolides were used in most children and quinolones were used in most adults. Ten (18.2%) children were diagnosed with severe Mycoplasma pneumoniae pneumonia, whereas all adults had mild disease. Children had a significantly longer fever duration than adults ((5.6 ± 2.2) days vs (4.1 ± 2.2) days, p = 0.002). No patient required mechanical ventilation or died. CONCLUSIONS: Mycoplasma pneumoniae infection shows a familial clustering epidemic trend at the turn of summer and autumn, with different clinical characteristics between parents and children.

Attention-Guided Image Captioning through Word Information.

Image captioning generates written descriptions of an image. In recent image captioning research, attention regions seldom cover all objects, and generated captions may lack the details of objects and may remain far from reality. In this paper, we propose a word guided attention (WGA) method for image captioning. First, WGA extracts word information using the embedded word and memory cell by applying transformation and multiplication. Then, WGA applies word information to the attention results and obtains the attended feature vectors via elementwise multiplication. Finally, we apply WGA with the words from different time steps to obtain previous word guided attention (PW) and current word attention (CW) in the decoder. Experiments on the MSCOCO dataset show that our proposed WGA can achieve competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods, with PW results of a 39.1 Bilingual Evaluation Understudy score (BLEU-4) and a 127.6 Consensus-Based Image Description Evaluation score (CIDEr-D); and CW results of a 39.1 BLEU-4 score and a 127.2 CIDER-D score on a Karpathy test split.

Highly Stretchable and Flexible Graphene/ITO Hybrid Transparent Electrode.

The flexible hybrid transparent electrode was prepared by a two-step process: graphene film was firstly grown on Cu foil by modified thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and then transferred onto indium tin oxide (ITO) electrode on the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrate. The quality of the graphene is characterized by various analytic techniques, including the AFM, SEM, TEM, and Raman spectroscopy. The gradient flux was found to be beneficial to decrease defect. The thickness, morphology, light transmittance, and electromechanical properties of three conductive electrodes were investigated and compared. The outcomes show that the hybrid electrode could resist mechanical force and the results are better than original ITO electrode. It may be a potential trend to apply the graphene to other conducts in the flexible transparent conductive field.