Machine Learning-Based Prediction of Intraoperative Red Blood Cell Transfusion in Aortic Valve Replacement Surgery.

BACKGROUND: Blood shortage is a global challenge, impacting elective surgeries with high bleeding risk. Predicting intraoperative blood use, optimizing resource allocation, and ensuring safe elective surgery are vital. This study targets identifying key bleeding risk factors in Aortic Valve Replacement (AVR) through machine learning. METHODS: Data from 702 AVR patients were split into 70% training and 30% test sets. Thirteen models predicted RBC transfusion. SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) analyzed risk factors. RESULTS: Logistic Regression excelled, with Area Under Curve (AUC) 0.872 and 81.0% accuracy on the test set. Notably, female gender, Hemoglobin (HGB) < 131.91 g/L, Hematocrit (HCT) < 0.41L/L, weight < 59.49 kg, age > 54.47 year, Mean Corpuscular Hemoglobin (MCH) < 29.15 pg, Total Protein (TP) > 69.7 g/L, FIB > 2.61 g/L, height < 160 cm, and type of operation is Surgical Aortic Valve Replacement (SAVR) were significant RBC transfusion predictors. CONCLUSIONS: The study's model accurately forecasts AVR-related RBC transfusions. This informs presurgery blood preparations, reducing resource waste and aiding clinicians in optimizing patient care.

Significantly improve film formability of acetylated xylans by structure optimization and solvent screening.

Acetylated xylans have great potential in fabricating functional film and coating materials, which need a good solubility/dispersibility and film formability in an easily evaporable solvent. However, the changes of film formability with degree of substitution by acetyls (DSAc) in different solvent systems for xylans have not been extensively studied, which limit the application of acetylated xylans in film materials. In this study, acetylated xylans with DSAc of 0-2 were prepared and the effects of acetyl groups on solubility/dispersibility, crystallinity and film formability of xylans in water and chloroform solvent systems were investigated. Due to the change of polarity, xylans with DSAc of 0-0.62 are only soluble in water solvents, while xylans with DSAc of 1.13-2 are only soluble in chloroform/ethanol (70/30 v/v) organic solvents. We have found that the film formability of acetylated xylans is highly related to their solubility and crystallization. Film formable xylans all had good solubility in the cast solvents. However, although with good solubility, xylans with DSAc of 0-0.3 and DSAc of 1.76-2 cannot form intact films, which is due to the forming of xylan hydrate crystals and xylan diacetate crystals. With the increase of DSAc, the mechanical property of xylan film increases initially at low DSAc and decreases at high DSAc. This study provides theoretical basis for applying xylans and their derivatives in advanced functional film and coating materials with great biocompatibility and biodegradability.

Neuromechanics-Based Neural Feedback Controller for Planar Arm Reaching Movements.

Based on the principles of neuromechanics, human arm movements result from the dynamic interaction between the nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems. To develop an effective neural feedback controller for neuro-rehabilitation training, it is important to consider both the effects of muscles and skeletons. In this study, we designed a neuromechanics-based neural feedback controller for arm reaching movements. To achieve this, we first constructed a musculoskeletal arm model based on the actual biomechanical structure of the human arm. Subsequently, a hybrid neural feedback controller was developed that mimics the multifunctional areas of the human arm. The performance of this controller was then validated through numerical simulation experiments. The simulation results demonstrated a bell-shaped movement trajectory, consistent with the natural motion of human arm movements. Furthermore, the experiment testing the tracking ability of the controller revealed real-time errors within one millimeter, with the tensile force generated by the controller's muscles being stable and maintained at a low value, thereby avoiding the issue of muscle strain that can occur due to excessive excitation during the neurorehabilitation process.

Zhijing powder manages blood pressure by regulating PI3K/AKT signal pathway in hypertensive rats.

Background: Zhijing Powder (ZJP) is a traditional Chinese medicine containing two kinds of Chinese medicine. Those studies analyze the molecular mechanism of ZJP in treating hypertension through network pharmacology, combined with animal experiments. Methods: First, the effective ingredients and potential targets of the drug were obtained through drug databases, while the targets of disease obtained through disease target databases. The potential targets, cellular bioanalysis and signaling pathways were found in some platforms by analyzing collected targets. Further experiments were conducted to verify the effect and mechanism of drugs on cold and high salt in an induced-hypertension rat model. Results: There are 17 effective components of centipedes and 10 of scorpions, with 464 drug targets obtained after screening. A total of 1263 hypertension targets were obtained after screening and integration, resulting in a protein-protein interaction network (PPI) with 145 points and 1310 edges. Gene ontology (GO) analysis shows that blood circulation regulation and activation of G protein-coupled receptors are mainly biological processes. The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis shows that neuroactive ligand-receptor interaction, calcium signaling pathways, PI3K-AKT signaling pathways are the most abundant gene-enriched pathway. Animal experiments indicated that ZJP can reduce blood pressure (BP), affect expression of the PI3K-AKT signaling pathway, and improve oxidative stress in the body. Conclusion: ZJP ameliorates oxidative stress and reduces BP in hypertensive rats caused by cold stimuli and high salt, revealing its effect on the expression of the PI3K/AKT signaling pathway in the rat aorta.

PLA2G2A Phospholipase Promotes Fatty Acid Synthesis and Energy Metabolism in Pancreatic Cancer Cells with K-ras Mutation.

Oncogenic K-ras is often activated in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) due to frequent mutation (>90%), which drives multiple cellular processes, including alterations in lipid metabolism associated with a malignant phenotype. However, the role and mechanism of the altered lipid metabolism in K-ras-driven cancer remains poorly understood. In this study, using human pancreatic epithelial cells harboring inducible K-rasG12D (HPNE/K-rasG12D) and pancreatic cancer cell lines, we found that the expression of phospholipase A2 group IIA (PLA2G2A) was upregulated by oncogenic K-ras. The elevated expression of PLA2G2A was also observed in pancreatic cancer tissues and was correlated with poor survival of PDAC patients. Abrogation of PLA2G2A by siRNA or by pharmacological inhibition using tanshinone I significantly increased lipid peroxidation, reduced fatty acid synthase (FASN) expression, and impaired mitochondrial function manifested by a decrease in mitochondrial transmembrane potential and a reduction in ATP production, leading to the inhibition of cancer cell proliferation. Our study suggests that high expression of PLA2G2A induced by oncogenic K-ras promotes cancer cell survival, likely by reducing lipid peroxidation through its ability to facilitate the removal of polyunsaturated fatty acids from lipid membranes by enhancing the de novo fatty acid synthesis and energy metabolism to support cancer cell proliferation. As such, PLA2G2A might function as a downstream mediator of K-ras and could be a potential therapeutic target.

Effect of Al Addition on Grain Refinement and Phase Transformation of the Mg-Gd-Y-Zn-Mn Alloy Containing LPSO Phase.

The effect of 0−1.0 at.% Al additions on grain refinement and phase transformation of the Mg-2.0Gd-1.2Y-0.5Zn-0.2Mn (at.%) alloy containing a long period stacking ordered (LPSO) phase was investigated in this work. The addition of Al promoted the formation of the Al2RE phase in the Mg-2.0Gd-1.2Y-0.5Zn-0.2Mn (at.%) alloy, and the dominant secondary phases in the as-cast Mg-2.0Gd-1.2Y-0.5Zn-0.2Mn-1.0Al (at.%) alloy were the Mg3RE phase, LPSO phase, and Al2RE phase. With increased Al addition, the area fraction of the Al2RE phase increased monotonously, while the area fraction of LPSO phase and Mg3RE phase decreased gradually. The orientation relationship between the Al2RE phase and the α-Mg matrix was determined to be <112>Al2RE//<112¯0>α-Mg, {101}Al2RE//{101¯0}α-Mg, which was not affected by Zn and Mn concentrations in the Al2RE phase. Since the Al2RE particles with a size more than 6 µm located at the center of grains could act as nucleants for α-Mg grains, the average grain size of the as-cast alloys decreased from 276 µm to 49 µm after 1.0% Al addition. The effect of the Al addition on the grain refinement of the Mg-2.0Gd-1.2Y-0.5Zn-0.2Mn alloy was comparable to that of the Zr refined counterpart.

Interaction between RAS gene and lipid metabolism in cancer.

The gene is frequently mutated and abnormally activated in many cancers，and plays an important role in cancer development. Metabolic reprogramming occurs in malignant tumors，which can be one of the key targets for anti-tumor therapy. gene can regulate lipid metabolism through AKT-mTORC1 single axis or multiple pathways，such as lipid synthesis pathways and degradation pathways. Similarly，lipid metabolism can also modify and activate RAS protein and its downstream signaling pathways. This article overviews the current research progress on the interaction between lipid metabolism and ，to provide insight in therapeutic strategies of lipid metabolism for -driven tumors.

Composite hexagonal pentamode acoustic metamaterials with tailored properties.

Acoustic metamaterials are artificial materials which can manipulate and control acoustic waves in way that may not exist in nature. Pentamode metamaterials, as one kind of metamaterials, have solid structures but behaves like fluid. One application is in building acoustic cloaks. In this paper, composite pentamode metamaterials with hexagonal unit cells are proposed. The phononic band structures of the unit cell show that there are band gaps within which only compressional modes exist. With variation of structures, highly anisotropic properties can be obtained. The influences of geometric dimensions and materials on the effective properties are analyzed. The composite structures introduce more degrees-of-freedom to tailor the effective properties.

Intelligent Impulse Finder: A boosting multi-kernel learning network using raw data for mechanical fault identification in big data era.

Nowadays, most intelligent diagnosis methods focus on fault classification and the discriminative knowledge is unknown due to the 'black box' characteristic. However, impulse responses in vibration signals, which is important sign to determine whether mechanical equipment is faulty, are rarely studied under intelligent methods since their recognition is both difficult and time-consuming, especially mixed with noise. Aiming at these problems, a novel impulse recognition method was proposed to capture them from raw mechanical data. Firstly, a single-kernel convolutional neural network is proposed as weak classifier to learn discriminative information from raw data. Then, a coarse-to-fine search is proposed to locate position of impulse response. Finally, the boosting algorithm is used to ensemble several proposed weak classifiers for final output. Vibration signals of bearings with two different faults are utilized to validate the proposed model. The results prove that the proposed approach obtain higher accuracy compared with traditional Laplace wavelet method. Moreover, the extracted kernel functions reveal new knowledge about characteristics of impulse responses, which significantly differs from traditional hypothesis and sheds a light on improvement of relevant approaches.

Highly Durable and Flexible Paper Electrode with a Dual Fiber Matrix Structure for High-Performance Supercapacitors.

Paper-based electrodes are of special interest for the industry due to their degradability, low cost, ion accessibility, and flexibility. However, the poor dispersibility and stability of loading conductive fillers, for example, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), limit their applications. In this study, bacterial cellulose (BC) was embedded within the cellulosic fiber matrix to prepare a paper substrate with a dual fiber matrix structure. BC with its unique nanoporous surface structure assisted the adsorbing, dispersing, and stabilizing of CNTs; cellulosic fibers reduced the cost, enhanced the ion accessibility, and improved the rigidity of the material. The prepared paper electrodes exhibited a high conductivity up to 5.9 × 10-1 S/cm and an extraordinary durability under high bending strain; it can be rolled into a 2 mm radius 800 times while maintaining the conductivity almost constant. The paper electrode had a gravimetric capacitance up to 77.5 F/g, which remained more than 98% after 15,000 charge/discharge cycles. This study suggests that this paper electrode has potential applications in supercapacitors with high performance and durability.

The Effect of Y/Er and Zn Addition on the Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Mg-11Li Alloy.

Although body-centered cubic (BCC) structural magnesium-lithium (Mg-Li) alloys have lower density and better formability than common hexagonal close-packed (HCP) Mg alloys, their applications remain limited due to their low strength. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of Y/Er and Zn addition on the microstructure and tensile properties of Mg-11Li alloy with a BCC structural matrix by comparing Mg-11Li, Mg-11Li-4Y-2Er-2Zn, and Mg-11Li-8Y-4Er-4Zn (wt %) alloys. The results indicate that the addition of Y/Er and Zn at a ratio of 3:1 cannot promote the formation of long-period stacking ordered structure in Mg-11Li alloy such as that in Mg-Y-Er-Zn alloys and the dominant intermetallic phases formed are BCC Mg24RE5 and face-centered cubic (FCC) Mg3RE2Zn3 phases. With an increase of the content of Y/Er and Zn in an as-cast alloy, the fraction of intermetallic particles increases and the grain size decreases. The addition of Y/Er, as well as Zn, dramatically promotes the refinement of dynamic recrystallization (DRX) during extrusion. The initial intermetallic phases induced by Y/Er and Zn addition are broken into relatively fine particles during extrusion, and this contributes to refining the dynamic recrystallized (DRXed) grains mainly by the particle stimulated nucleation mechanism. The as-extruded Mg-11Li-4Y-2Er-2Zn and Mg-11Li-8Y-4Er-4Zn alloys exhibit much higher tensile strength as compared with as-extruded Mg-11Li alloy, which is mainly ascribed to the refined DRXed grains and numerous dispersed intermetallic phase particles. It is suggested that further refinement of intermetallic particles in these extruded Mg-11Li-based alloys may lead to higher quality alloy materials with low density and excellent mechanical properties.

A Highly Efficient and Durable Fluorescent Paper Produced from Bacterial Cellulose/Eu Complex and Cellulosic Fibers.

The general method of producing fluorescent paper by coating fluorescent substances onto paper base faces the problems of low efficiency and poor durability. Bacterial cellulose (BC) with its nanoporous structure can be used to stabilize fluorescent particles. In this study, we used a novel method to produce fluorescent paper by first making Eu/BC complex and then processing the complex and cellulosic fibers into composite paper sheets. For this composting method, BC can form very stable BC/Eu complex due to its nanoporous structure, while the plant-based cellulosic fibers reduce the cost and provide stiffness to the materials. The fluorescent paper demonstrated a great fluorescent property and efficiency. The ultraviolet absorbance or the fluorescent intensity of the Eu-BC fluorescent paper increased with the increase of Eu-BC content but remained little changed after Eu-BC content was higher than 5%. After folding 200 times, the fluorescence intensity of fluorescent paper decreased by only 0.7%, which suggested that the Eu-BC fluorescent paper has great stability and durability.

Revealing the Inhibitory Effect of Ginseng on Mitochondrial Respiration through Synaptosomal Proteomics.

Ginseng, the active ingredients of which are ginsenosides, is the most popular herbal medicine and has potential merit in the treatment of cerebral disorders. To better understand the function of Ginseng in the cerebral system, we examined changes in the protein expression profiles of synaptosomes extracted from the cerebral cortical and hippocampal tissues of rats administered a high or low dose of Ginseng for 2 weeks. More than 5000 proteins belonging to synaptosomes were simultaneously identified and quantitated by an approach combining tandem mass tags with 2D liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Regarding differentially expressed proteins, downregulated proteins were much more highly induced than upregulators in the cerebral cortical and hippocampal synaptosomes, regardless of the dose of Ginseng. Bioinformatic analysis indicated the majority of the altered proteins to be located in the mitochondria, directly or indirectly affecting mitochondrial oxidative respiration. Further functional experiments using the substrate-uncoupler inhibitor titration approach confirmed that three representative ginsenosides were able to inhibit oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria. Our results demonstrate that Ginseng can regulate the function of mitochondria and alter the energy metabolism of cells, which may be useful for the treatment of central nervous disorders.

[Effect of Acupoint Application Therapy of Summer Treatment for Winter Diseases on Nerve-Endocrine-Immune Network System in Patient with Non-Acute Attack Asthma].

Objective To observe the effect of acupoint application therapy in summer to treat winter diseases (abbreviated as AATSTWD) on nerve-endocrine-immune network system in patients with non-acute attack asthma, and to study possible mechanisms. Methods Fifty healthy volunteers were re- cruited as the normal control group and 50 patients with non-acute attack asthma were recruited as the asthma group. Patients in the normal control group received no intervention. Those in the control group were treated with acupoint application therapy on hot days (applied on the first day of three dog days, 3 times in total). Blood samples were tested before treatment and after 3 times of application. The contents of serum immunoglobulin E (IgE) , interleukin-4 (IL-4) , plasma substance P (SP) , and vasoactive intes- tinal peptide (VIP) were detected using radioimmunoassay. Contents of immunoglobulin A and G (IgA, IgG) were tested by immunoturbidimetry. Content of interferon-y (INF-y) were tested by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay. Results Compared with the normal control group, serum contents of IgA, igG, IFN-y, and plasma VIP decreased, contents of IgE, IL-4, and SP significantly increased in the asthma group before treatment (P <0. 05). Compared with before treatment in the same group, serum contents of IgA, IgG, VIP, and IFN-y increased, and contents of IgE, IL-4, and SP decreased in the asthma group after treatment (P <0. 05). Conclusion Acupoint application therapy in summer to treat winter diseases method could prevent and treat bronchial asthma possibly through improving immune function, control- ling the release of cytokines , and regulating neurotransmitters.

An enhanced data visualization method for diesel engine malfunction classification using multi-sensor signals.

The various multi-sensor signal features from a diesel engine constitute a complex high-dimensional dataset. The non-linear dimensionality reduction method, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), provides an effective way to implement data visualization for complex high-dimensional data. However, irrelevant features can deteriorate the performance of data visualization, and thus, should be eliminated a priori. This paper proposes a feature subset score based t-SNE (FSS-t-SNE) data visualization method to deal with the high-dimensional data that are collected from multi-sensor signals. In this method, the optimal feature subset is constructed by a feature subset score criterion. Then the high-dimensional data are visualized in 2-dimension space. According to the UCI dataset test, FSS-t-SNE can effectively improve the classification accuracy. An experiment was performed with a large power marine diesel engine to validate the proposed method for diesel engine malfunction classification. Multi-sensor signals were collected by a cylinder vibration sensor and a cylinder pressure sensor. Compared with other conventional data visualization methods, the proposed method shows good visualization performance and high classification accuracy in multi-malfunction classification of a diesel engine.

[Optimization of solid-phase extraction for enrichment of toxic organic compounds in water samples].

A concentration method for enrichment of toxic organic compounds in water samples has been developed based on combined solid-phase extraction (SPE) to reduce impurities and improve recoveries of target compounds. This SPE method was evaluated in every stage to identify the source of impurities. Based on the analysis of Waters Oasis HLB without water samples, the eluent of SPE sorbent after dichloromethane and acetone contributed 85% of impurities during SPE process. In order to reduce the impurities from SPE sorbent, soxhlet extraction of dichloromethane followed by acetone and lastly methanol was applied to the sorbents for 24 hours and the results had proven that impurities were reduced significantly. In addition to soxhlet extraction, six types of prevalent SPE sorbents were used to absorb 40 target compounds, the lgK(ow) values of which were within the range of 1.46 and 8.1, and recovery rates were compared. It was noticed and confirmed that Waters Oasis HLB had shown the best recovery results for most of the common testing samples among all three styrenedivinylbenzene (SDB) polymer sorbents, which were 77% on average. Furthermore, Waters SepPak AC-2 provided good recovery results for pesticides among three types of activated carbon sorbents and the average recovery rates reached 74%. Therefore, Waters Oasis HLB and Waters SepPak AC-2 were combined to obtain a better recovery and the average recovery rate for the tested 40 compounds of this new SPE method was 87%.

[Spatial and temporal distribution of trace elements in surface water in the Xilin River Basin].

In order to better understand the hydrological process in Xilin River Basin, 248 water samples were collected in 13 sections (10 were at the mainstream and 3 were at the three tributaries) over the Xilin River during 2006-2008 and thereafter analyzed by high resolution inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) for 20 trace elements. The temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of trace elements were obtained. The results showed that the average concentration values of trace elements were 0. 1-10 microg x L(-1). Most of those values were at the concentration ranges of precipitation and groundwater and very close to the values of groundwater, indicating that the surface water was recharged by precipitation and groundwater especially by groundwater. The variation of concentration of trace elements in surface water was not strong at the temporal scale. Usually, the concentration values of trace elements were higher in April and May than those in July and August while those values were a bit lower in 2007 than in 2006 and 2008. Most of the trace element concentrations showed a upward trend from upstream to downstream. The enrichment of trace elements was contributed to the recharge of tributaries and groundwater, the evaporation of the stream water.