Background/Aims: Acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF) is a catastrophic illness. Few studies investigated the prognostic value of vitamin D-binding protein (VDBP) for hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related ACLF (HBV-ACLF) resulted in conflicting results.Methods: Two prospective HBV-ACLF cohorts (n=287 and n=119) were enrolled to assess and validate the prognostic performance of VDBP.Results: VDBP levels in the non-survivors were significantly lower than in the survivors (<i>P</i><0.001). Multivariate Cox regression demonstrated that VDBP was an independent prognostic factor for HBV-ACLF. The VDBP level at admission gradually decreased as the number of failed organs increased (<i>P</i><0.001), and it was closely related to coagulation failure. The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUCs) of the Child-Pugh-VDBP and chronic liver failuresequential organ failure assessment (CLIF–SOFA)-VDBP scores were significantly higher than those of Child-Pugh (<i>P</i><0.001) and CLIF-SOFA (<i>P</i>=0.0013). The AUCs of model for end-stage liver disease (MELD)-VDBP were significantly higher than those of MELD (<i>P</i>= 0.0384) only in the case of cirrhotic HBV-ACLF patients. Similar results were validated using an external multicenter HBV-ACLF cohort. By longitudinal observation, the VDBP levels gradually increased in survivors (<i>P</i>=0.026) and gradually decreased in non-survivors (<i>P</i><0.001). Additionally, the VDBP levels were found to be significantly decreased in the deterioration group (<i>P</i>=0.012) and tended to be decreased in the fluctuation group (<i>P</i>=0.055). In contrast, they showed a significant increase in the improvement group (<i>P</i>=0.036).Conclusions: The VDBP was a promising prognostic biomarker for HBV-ACLF. Sequential measurement of circulating VDBP shows value for the monitoring of ACLF progression.
This paper considers transmitting a sequence of messages (a streaming source) over a packet erasure channel. In each time slot, the source constructs a packet based on the current and the previous messages and transmits the packet, which may be erased when the packet travels from the source to the destination. Every source message must be recovered perfectly at the destination subject to a fixed decoding delay. We assume that the channel loss model introduces either one burst erasure or multiple arbitrary erasures in any fixed-sized sliding window. Under this channel loss assumption, we fully characterize the maximum achievable rate by constructing streaming codes that achieve the optimal rate. In addition, our construction of optimal streaming codes implies the full characterization of the maximum achievable rate for convolutional codes with any given column distance, column span and decoding delay. Numerical results demonstrate that the optimal streaming codes outperform existing streaming codes of comparable complexity over some instances of the Gilbert-Elliott channel and the Fritchman channel.
The aim of the present study was to explore the effects of different dietary levels (0, 15, 30, 60, 120 mg/kg) of leonurine hydrochloride (LHy) supplementation on growth performance, immune response, antioxidant capacity, hematological parameters and serum lipid profiles in broiler chicks. A total of 600 1-day-old Ross × Ross male broilers were randomly allocated to five treatment groups consisting of eight pens of fifteen birds. The feeding programme included a starter diet until day 21 and a finisher diet from day 22 to day 42. The results indicate that LHy did not alter the growth performance of broilers (P > 0.05). Supplementation of the basal diet with LHy increased (linear, P < 0.05) relative spleen weights at d 21 and 42. In both 21- and 42-day-old chicks, dietary LHy supplementation linearly increased (P < 0.05) the serum immunoglobulin A (IgA) and M (IgM) concentrations, catalase (CAT), total superoxide dismutase (T-SOD), total antioxidant capacity (T-AOC) activities, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C) levels, while linearly (P < 0.05) decreased serum malondialdehyde (MDA) activity, red blood cell (RBC) count, hemoglobin, triglyceride (TC) levels and total cholesterol (CHOL) content. In addition dietary LHy supplementation linearly (P < 0.05) increased the GSH activity in 42-day-old broilers. Taken together, dietary LHy supplementation was able to promote immune function and antioxidant capacity, and decrease blood lipid levels in broilers.
This paper introduces a new phase-shifting control of a zero-voltage switching PWM full-bridge converter topology.The regulators type switching power supply which is with output of 75V/50A DC is developed.The design and calculation methods of parameters in the main circuit have been presented.Compared with traditional has the advantages of high efficiency,small volume,low weight and high reliability.
This paper studies low-latency streaming codes for the multi-hop network. The source is transmitting a sequence of messages (streaming messages) to a destination through a chain of relays where each hop is subject to packet erasures. Every source message has to be recovered perfectly at the destination within a delay constraint of $T$ time slots. In any sliding window of $T+1$ time slots, we assume no more than $N_j$ erasures introduced by the $j$'th hop channel. The capacity in case of a single relay (a three-node network) was derived by Fong [1], et al. While the converse derived for the three-node case can be extended to any number of nodes using a similar technique (analyzing the case where erasures on other links are consecutive), we demonstrate next that the achievable scheme, which suggested a clever symbol-wise decode and forward strategy, can not be straightforwardly extended without a loss in performance. The coding scheme for the three-node network, which was shown to achieve the upper bound, was ``state-independent'' (i.e., it does not depend on specific erasure pattern). While this is a very desirable property, in this paper, we suggest a ``state-dependent'' (i.e., a scheme which depends on specific erasure pattern) and show that it achieves the upper bound up to the size of an additional header. Since, as we show, the size of the header does not depend on the field size, the gap between the achievable rate and the upper bound decreases as the field size increases.
The problem of path planning in the field of robot navigation is now a major research hot spot. On the premise of ensuring that the robot can successfully navigate to the target point, the safety of the path also needs to be considered. In order to find a safer path, a safe pathfinding path planning method is proposed, which introduces two safety parameters that affect the path selection: hazard coefficient and movement coefficient. After defining two security parameters, design an appropriate reward function and use A2C algorithm and PPO algorithm to guide the robot to conduct reinforcement learning. The experiment will be conducted on a two-dimensional grid map containing various obstacles. By conducting comparative experiments, it is verified that the safety pathfinding method proposed in this paper is feasible and reasonable, and can enable the robot to choose a safer road instead of a faster road when planning the path.
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