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Innovative approaches for treatment of osteosarcoma
No full textOsteosarcoma (OS) is the most common primary malignant bone tumor, which usually occurs in children and adolescents. It is generally a high-grade malignancy presenting with extreme metastases to the lungs or other bones. The etiology of the disease is multifaceted and still remains obscure. A combination of surgery and chemotherapy has played a major role in the treatment of OS over the past three decades, and consequently, the overall survival rates for the disease have remained unchanged. Therefore, there is an urgent need to employ new comprehensive analyses and technologies to develop significantly more informative classification systems, with the aim of developing more effective and less toxic therapies for OS patients. This review discusses the existing knowledge of OS therapy and potential methods to develop novel therapeutic agents for the disease
Influence of various composted organic amendments and their rates of application on nitrogen mineralization and soil productivity using chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa L. var. Chinensis) as an indicator crop
Get PDFThere is a diversity of locally available nitrogen (N)-rich organic materials in Samoa. However, none of them was evaluated for their N supplying capacity after composting in Samoan Inceptisols for vegetable cultivation. Thus, N-releasing capacity of five composted organic amendments (OAs) namely macuna, gliricidia, erythrina, lawn grass and giant taro, and their two application rates (10 and 20 t ha−1) were assessed through a laboratory incubation and a crop response study using Chinese cabbage as a test crop. Among the OAs, composted mucuna was characterized by a higher total N (2.91%), organic C (63.6%) and NO3−N content (341 mg N kg−1). A significant difference in N mineralization was observed among the OAs as well as application rates. The highest N mineralization was recorded in composted mucuna followed by gliricidia, erythrina, lawn grass, and giant taro. A crop response study also showed a similar trend. Mucuna treatment had the highest biomass yield and N uptake followed by gliricidia, erythrina, lawn grass, and giant taro. Leguminous composted OAs @ 20 t ha−1 performed substantially better in all the plant growth and yield parameters, and N uptake compared to 10 t ha−1 that was not the case for non-leguminous OAs. Thus, non-leguminous OAs should be applied at 10 t ha−1. All the composted leguminous OAs showed promising results while mucuna was the best in both the application rates. Therefore, mucuna can be promoted to supply N for crop cultivation in Samoa, other Pacific Islands and tropical countries where N fertilizer is costly and not easily available
Macro- and microplastic accumulation in soil after 32 years of plastic film mulching
No full textPlastic film mulch (PFM) is a double-edged-sword agricultural technology, which greatly improves global agricultural production but can also cause severe plastic pollution of the environment. Here, we characterized and quantified the amount of macro- and micro-plastics accumulated after 32 years of continuous plastic mulch film use in an agricultural field. An interactive field trial was established in 1987, where the effect of plastic mulching and N fertilization on maize yield was investigated. We assessed the abundance and type of macroplastics (>5 mm) at 0–20 cm soil depth and microplastic (<5 mm) at 0–100 cm depth. In the PFM plot, we found about 10 times more macroplastic particles in the fertilized plots than in the non-fertilized plots (6796 vs 653 pieces/m2), and the amount of film microplastics was about twice as abundant in the fertilized plots than in the non-fertilized plots (3.7 × 106 vs 2.2 × 106 particles/kg soil). These differences can be explained by entanglement of plastics with plant roots and stems, which made it more difficult to remove plastic film after harvest. Macroplastics consisted mainly of films, while microplastics consisted of films, fibers, and granules, with the films being identified as polyethylene originating from the plastic mulch films. Plastic mulch films contributed 33%–56% to the total microplastics in 0–100 cm depth. The total number of microplastics in the topsoil (0–10 cm) ranged as 7183–10,586 particles/kg, with an average of 8885 particles/kg. In the deep subsoil (80–100 cm) the plastic concentration ranged as 2268–3529 particles/kg, with an average of 2899 particles/kg. Long-term use of plastic mulch films caused considerable pollution of not only surface, but also subsurface soil. Migration of plastic to deeper soil layers makes removal and remediation more difficult, implying that the plastic pollution legacy will remain in soil for centuries
Trends and burden of diabetes in pregnancy among Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal mothers in Western Australia, 1998–2015
Get PDFBackground
Diabetes in pregnancy (DIP), which includes pre-gestational and gestational diabetes, is more prevalent among Aboriginal women. DIP and its adverse neonatal outcomes are associated with diabetes and cardiovascular disease in the offspring. This study investigated the impact of DIP on trends of large for gestational age (LGA) in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations, and added to the limited evidence on temporal trends of DIP burden in these populations.
Methods
We conducted a retrospective cohort study that included all births in Western Australia between 1998 and 2015 using linked population health datasets. Time trends of age-standardised and crude rates of pre-gestational and gestational diabetes were estimated in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal mothers. Mixed-effects multivariable logistic regression was used to estimate the association between DIP and population LGA trends over time.
Results
Over the study period, there were 526,319 births in Western Australia, of which 6.4% were to Aboriginal mothers. The age-standardised annual rates of pre-gestational diabetes among Aboriginal mothers rose from 4.3% in 1998 to 5.4% in 2015 and remained below 1% in non-Aboriginal women. The comparable rates for gestational diabetes increased from 6.7 to 11.5% over the study period in Aboriginal women, and from 3.5 to 10.2% among non-Aboriginal mothers. LGA rates in Aboriginal babies remained high with inconsistent and no improvement in pregnancies complicated by gestational diabetes and pre-gestational diabetes, respectively. Regression analyses showed that DIP explained a large part of the increasing LGA rates over time in Aboriginal babies.
Conclusions
There has been a substantial increase in the burden of pre-gestational diabetes (Aboriginal women) and gestational diabetes (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) in recent decades. DIP appears to substantially contribute to increasing trends in LGA among Aboriginal babies
Patterns of recurrent preterm birth in Western Australia: A 36‐year state‐wide population‐based study
No full textBackground
It is known that a previous preterm birth increases the risk of a subsequent preterm birth, but a limited number of studies have examined this beyond two consecutive pregnancies.
Aims
This study aimed to assess the risk and patterns of (recurrent) preterm birth up to the fourth pregnancy.
Materials and Methods
We used Western Australian routinely linked population health datasets to identify women who had two or more consecutive singleton births (≥20 weeks gestation) from 1980 to 2015. A log-binomial model was used to calculate risk ratios (RRs) and 95% confidence interval (CIs) for preterm birth risk in the third and fourth deliveries by the combined outcomes of previous pregnancies.
Results
We analysed 255 435 women with 651 726 births. About 7% of women had a preterm birth in the first delivery, and the rate of continuous preterm birth recurrence was 22.9% (second), 44.9% (third) and 58.5% (fourth) deliveries. The risk of preterm birth at the third delivery was highest for women with two prior indicated preterm births (RR 12.5, 95% CI: 11.3, 13.9) and for those whose first pregnancy was 32–36 weeks gestation, and second pregnancy was less than 32 weeks gestation (RR 11.8, 95% CI: 10.3, 13.5). There were similar findings for the second and fourth deliveries.
Conclusions
Our findings demonstrate that women with any prior preterm birth were at greater risk of preterm birth in subsequent pregnancies compared with women with only term births, and the risk increased with shorter gestational length, and the number of previous preterm deliveries, especially sequential ones
The Second International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE-2): New exploration in a poorly understood ocean basin (volume 4)
No full textThe development of this special issue was supported by SCOR (Scientific Committee for Oceanic Research) via direct funding to the IIOE-2 and indirect funding through the IMBeR (Integrated Marine Biosphere Research) regional program SIBER (Sustained Indian Ocean Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research). This special issue was also supported indirectly by the IOC (Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO), and the governments of India and Western Australia, through the IIOE-2 Joint..
Erratum to “Progressive conditional GAN-based augmentation for 3D object recognition” [Neurocomputing 460 (2021) 20–30]
No full textThe publisher regrets “Table 1, Table 2 and Table 3 should be inserted in Section 4.3”.
The publisher would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused
Analysis and variants of Broad Learning System
No full textThe broad learning system (BLS) is designed based on the technology of compressed sensing and pseudo-inverse theory, and consists of feature nodes and enhancement nodes, has been proposed recently. Compared with the popular deep learning structures, such as deep neural networks, BLS has the ability of rapid incremental learning and can remodel the system without the usual tedious retraining process. However, given that BLS is still in its infancy, it still needs analysis, improvements, and verification. In this article, we first analyze the principle of fast incremental learning ability of BLS in depth. Second, in order to provide an in-depth analysis of the BLS structure, according to the novel structure design concept of deep neural networks, we present four brand-new BLS variant networks and their incremental realizations. Third, based on our analysis of the effect of feature nodes and enhancement nodes, a new BLS structure with a semantic feature extraction layer has been proposed, which is called SFEBLS. The experimental results show that SFEBLS and its variants can increase the accuracy rate on the NORB dataset 6.18%, Fashion-MNIST dataset by 3.15%, ORL data by 5.00%, street view house number dataset by 12.88%, and CIFAR-10 dataset by 18.42%, respectively, and the four brand-new BLS variant networks also obviously outperform the original BLS
H.264 and H.265 video traffic modeling using neural networks
No full textAs video has become the dominant type of traffic over wired and wireless networks, the efficient transmission of video streams is of paramount importance. Hence, especially for wireless networks, the optimum utilization of the available bandwidth while preserving the users’ Quality of Service and Quality of Experience requirements is crucial. Towards this goal, the accurate prediction of upcoming video frame sizes can play a significant role. This work focuses on achieving such an accurate prediction for videos encoded with H.264 and H.265, which are the major state-of-the-art standards based on their current market share. Unlike previous studies, we use single-step and multi-step approaches to capture the long-range dependence and short-range dependence properties of variable bit rate video traces through neural networks-based modeling. We evaluate the accuracy of Long Short Term Memory, Convolutional Neural Networks and Sequence-to-Sequence models and compare them with existing approaches. Our models show significantly higher accuracy for a variety of videos. We also provide a case study on how our model can be used for traffic policing purposes
Developing a food waste biorefinery: Lactic acid extraction using anionic resin and impacts on downstream biogas production
No full textCoupling lactic acid (LA) production with food waste (FW) anaerobic digestion (AD) can facilitate the next generation biorefinery to increase revenue and economic viability of FW AD. For this, LA should be effectively extracted from complex fermentation broths with minimal adverse effects on subsequent AD to maximise economic benefit. This study evaluated LA recovery by adsorption using a polymeric resin (BA765), not previously tested for LA, to explore adsorption capacity and kinetics. Furthermore, biochemical methane potential (BMP) tests were utilised to assess the effect of LA extraction on subsequent AD by measuring biogas production from the solid and liquid extraction residues. Optimal adsorption conditions yielded a maximum capacity of 0.21 gLA·g−1resin from pure solutions at pH 2–4, which was insensitive to temperature. However, real mixed fermentation broth impurities reduced LA uptake by 37%. BMP tests showed that the solid and liquid extraction residues had significant methane potential, with only a 21% reduction in overall methane yield compared to the raw fermentation broth prior to LA extraction. LA production outweighed the loss in methane energy in terms of relative value and indicated a FW biorefinery concept could be commercially attractive and technically feasible