Adhesion to pharyngeal epithelium and modulation of immune response: Lactobacillus salivarius AR809, a potential probiotic strain isolated from the human oral cavity

Microbiome modulators such as probiotics are known to modulate oral diseases. Very few probiotics are commercially available for use in the oral cavity. In this context, we selected human-origin Lactobacillus salivarius AR809 as a promising oropharyngeal probiotic and characterized its functional and immunomodulatory properties. Results demonstrated that AR809 could efficiently adhere to pharyngeal epithelial FaDu cells, antagonize Staphylococcus aureus, adapt to the oral environment, and modulate host innate immunity by inducing potentially protective effects. Particularly, AR809 diminished proinflammatory activity by enhancing the production of IL10 and inhibiting the expression of tumor necrosis factor-α, IL1B, inducible nitric oxide synthase, and RELA. Finally, we observed that AR809 grew efficiently when cultured in milk, suggesting that the preparation of a fermented milk product containing AR809 could be a practical way to administer this probiotic to humans. In conclusion, AR809 has high potential to adhere to the pharyngeal mucosa and could be applied in novel milk-based probiotic fermented food products.     

胆总管结石介入治疗疗效分析

【摘要】 目的 探讨多种介入技术联合治疗胆总管结石的技巧性处理和临床疗效。方法 回顾性分析36例胆总管结石行经皮经肝穿刺肝内胆管多种介入技术联合治疗患者的临床资料。所有患者术前均依据CT或MRI影像检查，选取最佳穿刺路径行胆管造影，再次明确结石位置、数目及大小。依据结石的大小从而选取相应大小的碎石网篮及球囊碎石，球囊扩张十二指肠乳头，用球囊推石入肠，结石取净后常规放置胆道内外引流管2周。结果 35例手术成功，成功率97.2%，32例1次成功取石，3例行2次手术成功取石。术中无严重并发症发生；术后早期并发症:2例高淀粉酶血症，2例胆汁性腹膜炎，3例少量血性胆汁，无胆道穿孔发生。结论 技巧性应用多种介入技术治疗胆总管结石手术成功率高，风险低，并发症少，是一种有效的治疗方法。

     

Comparative study on quality characteristics of pickled and fermented sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis) meat in retort cooking

Sturgeon (Acipenser sinensis) meat has not been fully utilised due to quality defects which were raised by Chinese sturgeon processing industry. This study was aimed to develop a high-quality sturgeon meat product and the effect of fermentation on qualities was studied. Results showed that fermentation with Saccharomyces cerevisiae could enhance ‘mushroom’, ‘fruity’ and ‘chocolate’ flavour by 1-octen-3-ol, ethyl acetate and 3-methyl-butanal; and enrich flavour through mild lipid oxidation and hydrolysis. In addition, fermentation could give an attractive colour with higher a*, b* and L* value. Texture properties were also improved with higher hardness, springiness, gumminess and chewiness. Higher free amino acids, TCA-soluble peptides and taste score in fermented sturgeon meat indicated better flavour and taste. The organoleptic evaluation suggested an overall satisfactory of wine-aroma sturgeon meat by fermentation with S. cerevisiae.     

Effect of ground ginger on dough and biscuit characteristics and acrylamide content

Food Science and Biotechnology - Effect of different contents of ground ginger [0%, 1%, 3%, 5%, and 7% (w/w)] on flour quality, dough and biscuit characteristic and acrylamide content were...     

Selfie retoucher: subject-oriented self-portrait enhancement

Sharing self-portraits starts trending nowadays with the boom of social networks and the rise of smartphones. However, limited by the hardware capabilities, self-portraits taken by the front cameras of portable media devices usually face quality problems such as an incomplete field of view and poor lighting style. In our paper, we introduce a selfie retoucher which enhances a self-portrait with the help of N supporting photos that share the same scene and similar shooting time. With the extra information brought by the supporting photos, a lager field of view and a better lighting style can be achieved. To accomplish this, we propose a novel subject-oriented self-portrait enhancement method with a cascaded illumination unification and photos registration framework. Based on the correspondences extracted from the input 1+N photos, our method estimates and updates the illumination and registration coefficients in a cascaded manner. Moreover, a subject-oriented enhancement algorithm is proposed to enhance the face of the photographer in the self-portrait. We adopt a face-specific illumination correction process over the self-portrait to further improve the visual quality of the subject. After the enhancement, we globally fuse the aligned photos by a Markov Random Field based optimization method. During the fusion, a body map is additionally derived from the subject for guidance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high-quality results in this novel application scenario.

     

An improved fitting method for subgroup parameters based on the heterogeneous cells

An accurate subgroup parameters fitting method, where background cross sections obtained based on heterogeneous cells are used to fit the subgroup level and subgroup weight, is proposed in this paper. Due to the dependence of background cross section on the subgroup level, the calculation of the subgroup parameters is a nonlinear problem, which causes the iteration between fitting subgroup parameters and updating background cross sections. The cubic spline interpolation method is used to update the background cross sections to avoid frequently solving fixed source equations. In the fitting process, the negative subgroup parameters are often obtained, and the accuracy of the subgroup parameters is very sensitive to the iterative initial values of subgroup levels. To avoid these problems, additional constraints ensuring positive subgroup parameters and guaranteeing numerical stability are added to the optimization function. Penalty function method is used to convert the optimization problem with constraints into the one without constraints, making the problem easy to be solved. The proposed method is tested against the problems of pin cell, pressurized water reactor assemblies and plate-type assembly. The numerical results show that the self-shielded cross sections calculated by the proposed method agree well with those by Monte Carlo code.     

Space Efficient Quantization for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have shown outstanding performance in the fields of computer vision, natural language processing, and complex system analysis. With the improvement of performance with deeper layers, DCNNs incur higher computational complexity and larger storage requirement, making it extremely difficult to deploy DCNNs on resource-limited embedded systems (such as mobile devices or Internet of Things devices). Network quantization efficiently reduces storage space required by DCNNs. However, the performance of DCNNs often drops rapidly as the quantization bit reduces. In this article, we propose a space efficient quantization scheme which uses eight or less bits to represent the original 32-bit weights. We adopt singular value decomposition (SVD) method to decrease the parameter size of fully-connected layers for further compression. Additionally, we propose a weight clipping method based on dynamic boundary to improve the performance when using lower precision. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve up to approximately 14x compression while preserving almost the same accuracy compared with the full-precision models. The proposed weight clipping method can also significantly improve the performance of DCNNs when lower precision is required.

     

英东油田成藏条件及勘探开发关键技术

英东油田是柴达木盆地单个油藏储量规模最大、丰度最高、物性最好、开发效益最佳的整装油气田。通过对英东油田的地质再认识，对成藏条件及技术难题进行了攻关研究。研究结果表明：英雄岭地区位于柴西地区茫崖生烃凹陷，油源条件丰富，新近系油砂山组以宽缓的三角洲前缘-滨浅湖沉积为主，砂、泥岩纵向交替出现，砂体分布广泛且物性较好，泥岩为主要盖层，与古近系优质烃源岩形成一套完整的下生上储式生-储-盖组合；英东地区的大型滑脱断层沟通了古近系优质烃源岩和中、浅层构造圈闭，使早期聚集的油气藏发生调整，同时后期形成的油气持续运聚，深、浅层断裂形成"接力式"输导，在浅层晚期形成的构造圈闭中聚集成藏；中、浅层断层具备良好的侧向封堵性能，有利于油气的保存。针对英东地区复杂的地形地貌和油藏特征，形成了复杂山地三维地震采集处理解释一体化技术，为落实油气勘探目标奠定了基础。针对英东油田含油气井段长、流体识别难度大等问题，建立了长井段多油气水系统油藏开发模式、多条件约束复杂断块地质建模技术。通过明确英东油田的成藏机理，攻克工程复杂关键技术，为实现英东油田的高效开发和增储上产提供了重要的地质理论支撑和技术保障。     

Influence of nickel on secondary hardening of a modified AISI H13 hot work die steel

This paper focuses on the effects of nickel on secondary hardening of a modified H13 hot work die steel. Both the non‐nickel steel and the nickel‐added steel get a secondary hardening peak at 520 °C, and the secondary hardening peak trends to increase in the nickel‐added steel. On the basis of scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope observation, the rise of the secondary hardening peak is in connection with the precipitation of M₃C type carbides. More strip‐shaped and needle‐shaped M₃C type carbides precipitated from matrix. By means of internal friction, the result suggests that nickel does not affect the position of the Snoek‐Kê‐Köster peak, but the height of Snoek‐Kê‐Köster peak of the nickel‐added steel is higher, which indicates nickel enhances the interaction between dislocations and interstitial atoms, promoting the precipitation of carbides.     

Polymer Template Synthesis of Flexible BaTiO3 Crystal Nanofibers

BaTiO₃ crystals are attractive materials due to their high dielectric properties, but they are brittle and inelastic ceramics, which limits their broader applications in emerging fields, such as flexible electronics. A scalable strategy for the fabrication of ultra‐flexible crystalline BaTiO₃ nanofiber (NF) films by a sol–gel electrospinning method, followed by a brief calcination, is reported. It facilitates the formation of perovskite BaTiO₃ crystals with intricate grain boundaries at a low temperatures by growing them within polymer NF templates. The ceramic films have a polymer‐like softness of 50 mN, a large Young's modulus of 61 MPa, and an elastic strain of 0.9%. Moreover, they have a low density of 28 mg cm^?3 and demonstrate superior softness without fracture after deformation. Piezoelectric sensors fabricated based on these films exhibit a high sensitivity of 80 ms with an output voltage of 1.05 V at a pressure of 100 kPa. This approach allows for the large‐scale fabrication of flexible BaTiO₃ crystal NF films.