Thyroid dysfunction and risk of different types of dementia: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: The impact of thyroid function on the risk of various types of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VD), remains unclear. This meta-analysis investigates the association between thyroid dysfunction and the risk of these dementia types, aiming to inform strategies for dementia prevention.

Methods: A comprehensive search was conducted in PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library for studies published up to February 2023, focusing on the risk of thyroid dysfunction in dementia.

Maternal smoking, consumption of alcohol, and caffeinated beverages during pregnancy and the risk of childhood brain tumors: a meta-analysis of observational studies.

Background: We conducted this meta-analysis to investigate the potential association between maternal smoking, alcohol and caffeinated beverages consumption during pregnancy and the risk of childhood brain tumors (CBTs).

Methods: A thorough search was carried out on PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and China National Knowledge Internet to identify pertinent articles. Fixed or random effects model was applied to meta-analyze the data.

Low-count PET image reconstruction based on truncated inverse radon layer and U-shaped network.

Positron emission tomography (PET) is a functional imaging widely used in various applications such as tumour detection. PET image reconstruction is an ill-posed inverse problem, and the model-based iterative reconstruction methods commonly used in clinical practice have disadvantages such as long time consumption and low signal-to-noise ratio, especially at low doses.In this study, we propose a deep learning-based reconstruction method that is capable of reconstructing images directly from low-count sinograms.

A simulation study of 1D U-Net-based inter-crystal scatter event recovery of PET detectors.

To achieve high spatial resolution of reconstructed images in positron emission tomography (PET), the size of the scintillation crystal element is set small in current PET systems, which greatly increases the inter-crystal scattering (ICS) frequency. The ICS is a type of Compton scattering of the gamma photons from one crystal element to its neighborhood element, which obscures the determination of the first interaction position. In this study, we propose a 1D U-Net convolutional neural network to predict the first interaction position, which provides a universal way to efficiently solve the ICS recovery problem.

Multisource single-cell data integration by MAW barycenter for Gaussian mixture models.

One key challenge encountered in single-cell data clustering is to combine clustering results of data sets acquired from multiple sources. We propose to represent the clustering result of each data set by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and produce an integrated result based on the notion of Wasserstein barycenter. However, the precise barycenter of GMMs, a distribution on the same sample space, is computationally infeasible to solve.

ARBEE: Towards Automated Recognition of Bodily Expression of Emotion in the Wild.

Humans are arguably innately prepared to comprehend others' emotional expressions from subtle body movements. If robots or computers can be empowered with this capability, a number of robotic applications become possible. Automatically recognizing human bodily expression in unconstrained situations, however, is daunting given the incomplete understanding of the relationship between emotional expressions and body movements.

Probabilistic Multigraph Modeling for Improving the Quality of Crowdsourced Affective Data.

We proposed a probabilistic approach to joint modeling of participants' and humans' in crowdsourced affective studies. Reliability measures how likely a subject will respond to a question seriously; and regularity measures how often a human will agree with other seriously-entered responses coming from a targeted population. Crowdsourcing-based studies or experiments, which rely on human self-reported affect, pose additional challenges as compared with typical crowdsourcing studies that attempt to acquire labels of objects.

Aggregated Wasserstein Distance and State Registration for Hidden Markov Models.

We propose a framework, named Aggregated Wasserstein, for computing a dissimilarity measure or distance between two Hidden Markov Models with state conditional distributions being Gaussian. For such HMMs, the marginal distribution at any time position follows a Gaussian mixture distribution, a fact exploited to softly match, aka register, the states in two HMMs. We refer to such HMMs as HMM.

Leveraging Long and Short-Term Information in Content-Aware Movie Recommendation via Adversarial Training.

Movie recommendation systems provide users with ranked lists of movies based on individual's preferences and constraints. Two types of models are commonly used to generate ranking results: 1) long-term models and 2) session-based models. The long-term-based models represent the interactions between users and movies that are supposed to change slowly across time, while the session-based models encode the information of users' interests and changing dynamics of movies' attributes in short terms.

Expression of Toll-like Receptor 2 and Toll-like Receptor 4 in Tuberculous Pleural Effusion.

Background: Toll-like receptor-2 (TLR2) and Toll-like receptor-4 (TLR4) have been reported to play a crucial role in tuberculosis, however, little is known about their expression in tuberculous pleuritis.

Objective: The goal of this work is to explore the expressions of TLR2 and TLR4 in tuberculous pleuritis and their predominant expressions on cells.

Methods: Levels of soluble TLR2 and TLR4 by enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in 58 patients with tuberculous pleural effusion (PE) and 43 patients with malignant PE were determined.

Phenotypic and molecular characteristics of carbapenem-non-susceptible Enterobacteriaceae from a teaching hospital in Wenzhou, southern China.

Carbapenem resistance in Enterobacteriaceae is increasing and has become a matter of great concern. The aim of this study was to characterize carbapenem-non-susceptible Enterobacteriaceae from a teaching hospital. A total of 49 carbapenem-non-susceptible Enterobacteriaceae clinical isolates recovered in 2007-2010 from the First Affiliated Hospital of Wenzhou Medical College were analyzed by antimicrobial susceptibility testing.

Observation of delay enhancement in an ion-doped crystal.

We report the investigation of the reduction of the group velocity propagation resulting from the steep change of the refractive index by the coherent population oscillation in an erbium ion-doped optical fiber. We study fully the influences of the ion density and the temperature on the fractional and time delay. We find that the fractional delay can be decreased at high or low temperature.