Publications by authors named "Cheng Zhao"

Hypoxia disrupts multiple physiological processes, including metabolism, immunity, and reproduction in teleosts. The brain plays a critical role in adapting to environmental changes, regulating the endocrine system, and controlling reproduction. The present study investigated the sex-specific cerebral responses to chronic hypoxia through an integrated analysis of the transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome of yellow catfish.

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Background: In patients who underwent off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (OPCABG), females were reported to have lower rates of in-hospital mortality rate and postoperative atrial fibrillation than males. However, the association between gender and long-term prognosis following OPCABG is rarely reported.

Objective: This study aims to determine if women benefit more from OPCABG than men by comparing the difference in the risk of long-term all-cause mortality in patients with coronary chronic total occlusion (CTO).

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Background: Preliminary small-sample studies suggest that silent magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) has an advantage over time-of-flight MRA (TOF MRA) in the characterization of brain arteriovenous malformation (BAVM), but did not examine whether the imaging performance of silent MRA was affected by the intrinsic features of BAVM or common clinical factors. This study sought to compare silent MRA and TOF MRA in terms of the visualization and grading of BAVMs in various clinical settings.

Methods: In total, 85 participants (50 males, 35 females; mean age: 33.

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Background: Intimal sarcomas are rare tumors that typically affect the major vessels, such as the pulmonary artery and aorta, and are associated with a particularly poor prognosis. Intimal sarcomas found in the aorta are most commonly located in the abdominal section between the celiac artery and the iliac bifurcation. The descending aorta is involved in 30% of cases, while involvement of the ascending aorta is rare.

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Objective: To evaluate the predictive power of ultrasound-based radiomics models for benign thyroid nodules with a volume reduction rate (VRR) of < or ≥75% at 12 months after microwave ablation.

Methods: A retrospective study was conducted on 194 individuals with benign thyroid nodules who received ultrasound-guided microwave ablation between November 2019 and June 2023. The clinical and ultrasound features, including age, gender, volume, echogenicity, duration of ablation, and so on were analysed by t-test or chi-square test.

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High-throughput virtual screening (HTVS) has emerged as a pivotal strategy for identifying high-affinity peptides targeting functional proteins, which are crucial for diagnostic and therapeutic applications. In the HTVS of peptides, expanding the library capacity to enhance peptide sequence diversity, thereby screening out excellent affinity peptide candidates, remains a significant challenge. This study presents a design strategy that leverages directed mutation driven HTVS to evolve vast virtual libraries and screen peptides with ultrahigh affinities for various target proteins.

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  • Researchers developed a new deep learning model called STGF R-CNN to improve the detection of senescent cells, which are important for studying cell aging but often hard to identify due to their small size and similar appearances.* -
  • The STGF R-CNN combines a Faster R-CNN framework with a Swin Transformer and group normalization to enhance the model's performance and make it more efficient for clinical use.* -
  • Experimental results showed that this model achieved a high detection accuracy (mean Average Precision of 0.835) and significantly reduced assessment time from 12 hours to under 1 second, indicating its potential for applications like drug screening.*
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  • There is a lack of agreement on how to treat patients with severe atrial functional mitral regurgitation and heart failure, particularly those with long-standing atrial fibrillation; this study compares two treatment options: mitral valve repair plus the maze procedure versus catheter ablation.
  • The study involved 302 patients, assessing outcomes like mortality, atrial fibrillation recurrence, and heart failure readmissions, finding that surgical patients had fewer instances of these issues compared to those who underwent catheter ablation.
  • Despite surgical patients showing lower recurrence rates for atrial fibrillation and heart failure readmissions, no significant differences in long-term outcomes such as death or AF recurrence emerged when comparing the two groups, suggesting both methods can effectively reduce mitral
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Objective: Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is an autoimmune disease characterised by a loss of immune tolerance, affecting multiple organs and significantly impairing patients' health and quality of life. While hereditary elements are essential in the onset of SLE, external environmental influences are also significant. Currently, there are few predictive models for SLE that takes into account the impact of occupational and living environmental exposures.

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  • The study analyzed 7326 P. aeruginosa isolates from 2005-2023 in Zhejiang Province to track antibiotic resistance trends, focusing on how COVID-19 affected these patterns.
  • Key findings showed a significant rise in resistance to carbapenems, with imipenem resistance increasing from 6.8% to 48.2%, while resistance to aminoglycosides decreased notably during the same period.
  • The research highlighted the importance of adjusting antibiotic prescribing practices, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, to manage and combat emerging resistance trends effectively.
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As electric vehicles increase, they reduce greenhouse gas emissions but pose recycling challenges for their batteries. Economic and environmental impacts are significant concerns. This study proposes a dual optimization approach to develop a city-wide recycling network benefiting vehicle owners and recycling facilities.

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Background: Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs) are currently the first line of tumor immunotherapy for the treatment of a wide range of tumors. However, the main side effect of immune checkpoint inhibitors is that they cause immune-related adverse events (irAEs) in patients. The relationship between the occurrence of immune side effects in patients and efficacy is controversial.

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  • - The study examined CrAlSiN coatings with varying nitrogen content (42 to 54 at. %) and tested their microstructure and oxidation resistance at high temperatures (700 or 900 °C).
  • At lower nitrogen levels (42-45 at. %), the coatings displayed a hybrid amorphous/nanocrystalline structure, while higher nitrogen contents (above 52 at. %) resulted in a columnar structure dominated by Cr(Al)N.
  • The optimal nitrogen content of around 52 at. % provided the best oxidation resistance, characterized by a stable AlO-rich monolayer, while lower nitrogen coatings formed thicker CrO layers and showed elemental segregation after high-temperature exposure.
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  • - Stem cell-based embryo models are essential for studying early human development, but their effectiveness depends on how closely they mimic real embryos at the molecular, cellular, and structural levels.
  • - Researchers created a comprehensive reference dataset by integrating six existing datasets that track human development from the zygote stage to the gastrula stage, providing a benchmark for comparing human embryo models.
  • - Using an advanced analysis method called stabilized Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection, the new reference helps identify cell types in various embryo models, revealing potential misannotations without proper reference comparisons.
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Automatic and accurate classification of breast cancer in multimodal ultrasound images is crucial to improve patients' diagnosis and treatment effect and save medical resources. Methodologically, the fusion of multimodal ultrasound images often encounters challenges such as misalignment, limited utilization of complementary information, poor interpretability in feature fusion, and imbalances in sample categories. To solve these problems, we propose a feature alignment mutual attention fusion method (FAMF-Net), which consists of a region awareness alignment (RAA) block, a mutual attention fusion (MAF) block, and a reinforcement learning-based dynamic optimization strategy(RDO).

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Plant growth and development are characterized by systematic and continuous processes, each involving intricate metabolic coordination mechanisms. Mathematical models are essential tools for investigating plant growth and development, metabolic regulation networks, and growth patterns across different stages. These models offer insights into secondary metabolism patterns in plants and the roles of metabolites.

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  • The study investigates how the presence of an extra X chromosome in Klinefelter syndrome (KS) patients affects the development of fetal germ cells (FGCs), which are essential for fertility.
  • It finds that most KS FGCs are stuck at an early development stage, showing signs of pluripotency while lacking differentiation, and that the usual regulation of X-linked genes is disrupted.
  • The research highlights that interactions between Sertoli cells and FGCs interfere with the development process, but targeting the TGF-β pathway can improve FGC differentiation in KS.
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The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has triggered a protracted global pandemic from 2019 to 2022, and posed a significant threat to human health. One of the non-structural proteins 3CL of SARS-CoV-2 is considered as a validated target for the development of inhibitors against the virus. Disulfiram has been reported as a covalent inhibitor of 3CL; however, its structure lacks bonding site with active pockets of 3CL and its highly symmetric structure doesn't match well with the irregular cavity of the active center, limiting its therapeutic applications.

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Understanding the molecular circuitries that govern early embryogenesis is important, yet our knowledge of these in human preimplantation development remains limited. Small non-coding RNAs (sncRNAs) can regulate gene expression and thus impact blastocyst formation, however, the expression of specific biotypes and their dynamics during preimplantation development remains unknown. Here we identify the abundance of and kinetics of piRNA, rRNA, snoRNA, tRNA, and miRNA from embryonic day (E)3-7 and isolate specific miRNAs and snoRNAs of particular importance in blastocyst formation and pluripotency.

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  • - The multi-attention guided UNet (MAUNet) is proposed for improved segmentation of thyroid nodules, addressing challenges due to their varying sizes and positions using a multi-scale cross attention (MSCA) module for better feature extraction.
  • - A dual attention (DA) module enhances information sharing between the encoder and decoder in the UNet architecture, further refining segmentation results.
  • - Extensive tests on ultrasound images from 17 hospitals reveal that MAUNet achieves high Dice scores (around 0.9) and outperforms existing segmentation methods, demonstrating effective generalization across diverse datasets while maintaining patient privacy through federal learning.
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