Morphological Parameters Associated with Ruptured Posterior Communicating Aneurysms

The rupture risk of unruptured intracranial aneurysms is known to be dependent on the size of the aneurysm. However, the association of morphological characteristics with ruptured aneurysms has not been established in a systematic and location specific manner for the most common aneurysm locations. We evaluated posterior communicating artery (PCoA) aneurysms for morphological parameters associated with aneurysm rupture in that location. CT angiograms were evaluated to generate 3-D models of the aneurysms and surrounding vasculature. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to evaluate morphological parameters including aneurysm volume, aspect ratio, size ratio, distance to ICA bifurcation, aneurysm angle, vessel angles, flow angles, and vessel-to-vessel angles. From 2005–2012, 148 PCoA aneurysms were treated in a single institution. Preoperative CTAs from 63 patients (40 ruptured, 23 unruptured) were available and analyzed. Multivariate logistic regression revealed that smaller volume (p = 0.011), larger aneurysm neck diameter (0.048), and shorter ICA bifurcation to aneurysm distance (p = 0.005) were the most strongly associated with aneurysm rupture after adjusting for all other clinical and morphological variables. Multivariate subgroup analysis for patients with visualized PCoA demonstrated that larger neck diameter (p = 0.018) and shorter ICA bifurcation to aneurysm distance (p = 0.011) were significantly associated with rupture. Intracerebral hemorrhage was associated with smaller volume, larger maximum height, and smaller aneurysm angle, in addition to lateral projection, male sex, and lack of hypertension. We found that shorter ICA bifurcation to aneurysm distance is significantly associated with PCoA aneurysm rupture. This is a new physically intuitive parameter that can be measured easily and therefore be readily applied in clinical practice to aid in the evaluation of patients with PCoA aneurysms.     

The Impact of Insurance Status on the Outcomes after Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage

Investigation into the association of insurance status with the outcomes of patients undergoing neurosurgical intervention has been limited: this is the first nationwide study to analyze the impact of primary payer on the outcomes of patients with aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage who underwent endovascular coiling or microsurgical clipping. The Nationwide Inpatient Sample (2001–2010) was utilized to identify patients; those with both an ICD-9 diagnosis codes for subarachnoid hemorrhage and a procedure code for aneurysm repair (either via an endovascular or surgical approach) were included. Hierarchical multivariate regression analyses were utilized to evaluate the impact of primary payer on in-hospital mortality, hospital discharge disposition, and length of hospital stay with hospital as the random effects variable. Models were adjusted for patient age, sex, race, comorbidities, socioeconomic status, hospital region, location (urban versus rural), and teaching status, procedural volume, year of admission, and the proportion of patients who underwent ventriculostomy. Subsequent models were also adjusted for time to aneurysm repair and time to ventriculostomy; subgroup analyses evaluated for those who underwent endovascular and surgical procedures separately. 15,557 hospitalizations were included. In the initial model, the adjusted odds of in-hospital mortality were higher for Medicare (OR 1.23, p<0.001), Medicaid (OR 1.23, p<0.001), and uninsured patients (OR 1.49, p<0.001) compared to those with private insurance. After also adjusting for timing of intervention, Medicaid and uninsured patients had a reduced odds of non-routine discharge (OR 0.75, p<0.001 and OR 0.42, p<0.001) despite longer hospital stays (by 8.35 days, p<0.001 and 2.45 days, p = 0.005). Variations in outcomes by primary payer–including in-hospital post-procedural mortality–were more pronounced for patients of all insurance types who underwent microsurgical clipping. The observed differences by primary payer are likely multifactorial, attributable to varied socioeconomic factors and the complexities of the American healthcare delivery system.     

Human Pluripotent Stem Cells Have a Novel Mismatch Repair-dependent Damage Response

Human pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) are presumed to have robust DNA repair pathways to ensure genome stability. PSCs likely need to protect against mutations that would otherwise be propagated throughout all tissues of the developing embryo. How these cells respond to genotoxic stress has only recently begun to be investigated. Although PSCs appear to respond to certain forms of damage more efficiently than somatic cells, some DNA damage response pathways such as the replication stress response may be lacking. Not all DNA repair pathways, including the DNA mismatch repair (MMR) pathway, have been well characterized in PSCs to date. MMR maintains genomic stability by repairing DNA polymerase errors. MMR is also involved in the induction of cell cycle arrest and apoptosis in response to certain exogenous DNA-damaging agents. Here, we examined MMR function in PSCs. We have demonstrated that PSCs contain a robust MMR pathway and are highly sensitive to DNA alkylation damage in an MMR-dependent manner. Interestingly, the nature of this alkylation response differs from that previously reported in somatic cell types. In somatic cells, a permanent G₂/M cell cycle arrest is induced in the second cell cycle after DNA damage. The PSCs, however, directly undergo apoptosis in the first cell cycle. This response reveals that PSCs rely on apoptotic cell death as an important defense to avoid mutation accumulation. Our results also suggest an alternative molecular mechanism by which the MMR pathway can induce a response to DNA damage that may have implications for tumorigenesis.     

LncRNA TP73-AS1 enhances the malignant properties of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma by increasing MMP14 expression through miRNA -200a sponging

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is an invasive and aggressive cancer that remains a major threat to human health across the globe. Despite advances in cancer treatments and diagnosis, the prognosis of PDAC patients remains poor. New and more effective PDAC therapies are therefore urgently required. In this study, we identified a novel host factor, namely the LncRNA TP73-AS1, as overexpressed in PDAC tissues compared to adjacent healthy tissue samples. The overexpression of TP-73-AS1 was found to correlate with both PDAC stage and lymph node metastasis. To reveal its role in PDCA, we targeted TP73-AS1 using LnRNA inhibitors in a range of pancreatic cancer (PC) cell lines. We found that the inhibition of TP73-AS1 led to a loss of MMP14 expression in PC cells and significantly inhibited their migratory and invasive capacity. No effects of TP73-AS1 on cell survival or proliferation were observed. Mechanistically, we found that TP73-AS1 suppressed the expression of the known oncogenic miR-200a. Taken together, these data highlight the prognostic potential of TP73-AS1 for PC patients and highlight it as a potential anti-PDAC therapeutic target.     

Use HypE to Hide Association Rules by Adding Items

During business collaboration, partners may benefit through sharing data. People may use data mining tools to discover useful relationships from shared data. However, some relationships are sensitive to the data owners and they hope to conceal them before sharing. In this paper, we address this problem in forms of association rule hiding. A hiding method based on evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) is proposed, which performs the hiding task by selectively inserting items into the database to decrease the confidence of sensitive rules below specified thresholds. The side effects generated during the hiding process are taken as optimization goals to be minimized. HypE, a recently proposed EMO algorithm, is utilized to identify promising transactions for modification to minimize side effects. Results on real datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively perform sanitization with fewer damages to the non-sensitive knowledge in most cases.     

(Ni-Sn-M_xO_y)/Pb改性复合电极电解合成L-半胱氨酸的反应

在（Ｎｉ－Ｓｎ）／Ｐｂ合金修饰电极中添加某些金属氧化物进行改性，用于电解合成Ｌ－半胱氨酸反应。结果证明，添加ＷＯ３后电极反应活性大大加强，反应同期转化率有较大提高，选择性也有所提高，添加稀土金属氧化物能有效降低反应阴极过电位，使反应选择性有所提高，但是电极稳定性还有待改善。     

Phrasal Paraphrase Based Question Reformulation for Archived Question Retrieval

Lexical gap in cQA search, resulted by the variability of languages, has been recognized as an important and widespread phenomenon. To address the problem, this paper presents a question reformulation scheme to enhance the question retrieval model by fully exploring the intelligence of paraphrase in phrase-level. It compensates for the existing paraphrasing research in a suitable granularity, which either falls into fine-grained lexical-level or coarse-grained sentence-level. Given a question in natural language, our scheme first detects the involved key-phrases by jointly integrating the corpus-dependent knowledge and question-aware cues. Next, it automatically extracts the paraphrases for each identified key-phrase utilizing multiple online translation engines, and then selects the most relevant reformulations from a large group of question rewrites, which is formed by full permutation and combination of the generated paraphrases. Extensive evaluations on a real world data set demonstrate that our model is able to characterize the complex questions and achieves promising performance as compared to the state-of-the-art methods.     

Influences of temporal independence of data on modelling species distributions

Modelling species distributions has been widely used to understand present and future potential distributions of species, and can provide adaptation and mitigation information as references for conservation and management under climate change. However, various methods of data splitting to develop and validate functions of the models do not get enough attention, which may mislead the interpretation of predicted results. We used the Taiwanese endemic birds to test the influences of temporal independence of datasets on model performance and prediction. Training and testing data were considered to be independent if they were collected during different survey periods (1993–2004 and 2009–2010). The results indicated no significant differences of six model performance measures (AUC, kappa, TSS, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity) among the combinations of training and testing datasets. Both species- and grid cell-based assessments differed significantly between predictions by the annual and pooled training data. We also found an average of 85.8% similarity for species presences and absences in different survey periods. The remaining dissimilarity was mostly caused by species observed in the late survey period but not in the early one. The method of data splitting, yielding training and testing data, is critical for resulting model species distributions. Even if similar model performance exists, different methods can lead to different species distributional maps. More attention needs to be given to this issue, especially when amplifying these models to project species distributions in a changing world.     

Prevalence of Post-Stroke Cognitive Impairment in China: A Community-Based,Cross-Sectional Study

International hospital-based studies have indicated a high risk of cognitive impairment after stroke, evidence from community-based studies in China is scarce. To determine the prevalence of post-stroke cognitive impairment (PSCI) and its subtypes in stroke survivors residing in selected rural and urban Chinese communities, we conducted a community-based, cross-sectional study in 599 patients accounting for 48% of all stroke survivors registered in the 4 communities, who had suffered confirmed strokes and had undergone cognitive assessments via the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE), and Hachinski Ischemia Scale (HIS). Detection of PSCI was based on scores in these neuropsychological scales. Factors potentially impacting on occurrence of PSCI were explored by comparing demographic characteristics, stroke features, and cardiovascular risk factors between patients with and without PSCI. The overall prevalence of PSCI was 80.97% (95%CI: 77.82%-84.11%), while that of non-dementia PSCI (PSCI-ND) and post-stroke vascular dementia (PSD) was 48.91% (95%CI: 44.91%-52.92%) and 32.05% (95%CI: 28.32%-35.79%), respectively. Prior stroke and complications during the acute phase were independent risk factors for PSCI. The risk of recurrent stroke survivors having PSCI was 2.7 times higher than for first-episode survivors, and it was 3 times higher for those with complications during the acute phase than for those without. The higher prevalence of PSCI in this study compared with previous Chinese studies was possibly due to the combined effects of including rural stroke survivors, a longer period from stroke onset, and different assessment methods. There is an urgent need to recognize and prevent PSCI in stroke patients, especially those with recurrent stroke and complications during the acute phase.