The Efficacy of Risk Factor Modification Compared to NAD Repletion in Diastolic Heart Failure.

Heart failure (HF) with left ventricular diastolic dysfunction is a growing global concern. This study evaluated myocardial oxidized nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) levels in human systolic and diastolic HF and in a murine model of HF with preserved ejection fraction, exploring NAD repletion as therapy. We quantified myocardial NAD and nicotinamide phosphoribosyltransferase levels, assessing restoration with nicotinamide riboside (NR).

IronForge: An Open, Secure, Fair, Decentralized Federated Learning.

Federated learning (FL) offers an effective learning architecture to protect data privacy in a distributed manner. However, the inevitable network asynchrony, overdependence on a central coordinator, and lack of an open and fair incentive mechanism collectively hinder FL's further development. We propose IronForge, a new generation of FL framework, that features a directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based structure, where nodes represent uploaded models, and referencing relationships between models form the DAG that guides the aggregation process.

Doubly Constrained Waveform Optimization for Integrated Sensing and Communications.

This paper investigates threshold-constrained joint waveform optimization for an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system. Unlike existing studies, we employ mutual information (MI) and sum rate (SR) as sensing and communication metrics, respectively, and optimize the waveform under constraints to both metrics simultaneously. This provides significant flexibility in meeting system performance.

Novel Graph Topology Learning for Spatio-Temporal Analysis of COVID-19 Spread.

This article presents a new graph-learning technique to accurately infer the graph structure of COVID-19 data, helping to reveal the correlation of pandemic dynamics among different countries and identify influential countries for pandemic response analysis. The new technique estimates the graph Laplacian of the COVID-19 data by first deriving analytically its precise eigenvectors, also known as graph Fourier transform (GFT) basis. Given the eigenvectors, the eigenvalues of the graph Laplacian are readily estimated using convex optimization.

Unified Fine-Grained Access Control for Personal Health Records in Cloud Computing.

Attribute-based encryption has been a promising encryption technology to secure personal health records (PHRs) sharing in cloud computing. PHRs consist of the patient data often collected from various sources including hospitals and general practice centres. Different patients' access policies have a common access sub-policy.

Gene-gene interaction of GJB2, SOD2, and CAT on occupational noise-induced hearing loss in Chinese Han population.

The effects of genetic factors on the noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) are still unclear. In the present study, eight single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) included rs1227049 and rs3802711 (CDH23), rs1695 (GSTP1), rs137852540 (GJB2), rs2289274 (PMCA2), rs4880 (SOD2), rs7943316, and rs769214 within CAT that might associated with NIHL were further validated in Chinese workers. The results showed that the carriers of the T allele (AT+TT) of rs7943316 and A allele (GA+AA) of rs769214, were significantly associated with an increased risk of NIHL compared to those with AA genotype (P<0.

Effect of hybrid circle reservoir injected with wavelet-neurons on performance of echo state network.

The Echo State Network (ESN) has attracted wide attention for its superior performance in chaos time-series prediction. However, the complicated ESN topologies and the random reservoirs are difficult to implement in practice. We propose a hybrid circle reservoir (HCR) ESN architecture that comprises the following features: (1) built with low complexity circle reservoir; (2) partly injected with wavelet-neurons; (3) uses fixed connection weights in both input matrix and dynamic reservoir matrix.

[Advances in the study of inhibitors of kinases and nuclear factors for treating allergic asthma].

Currently, about 300 million people worldwide are affected by asthma. Most of these sufferers inhale immunosuppressants (ie corticosteroids) and beta-adrenergic receptor agonists for their asthma treatment. However, about 5%-10% of patients of asthma have poor response to such treatment.

The chemical and oxidation characteristics of semi-dry flue gas desulfurization ash from a steel factory.

Some samples of semi-dry flue gas desulfurization (FGD) ash were taken from sinter gas of a steel factory. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) analyses were employed to identify the samples in order to investigate their physical and chemical characteristics. The results show that semi-dry FGD ash from a steel factory is stable under atmospheric conditions.