Plugs

RATIONALE: Chest computed tomography -scans (CTs) are essential to diagnose and monitor bronchiectasis (BE). To date, little quantitative data is available about the nature and extent of structural lung abnormalities (SLA) on CTs of BE patients. OBJECTIVES: to investigate SLA on CTs of patients with bronchiectasis and the relationship of SLAs to clinical features using the European Bronchiectasis Registry (EMBARC) Methods: CTs from BE patients included in the EMBARC registry were analyzed using the validated Bronchiectasis Scoring Technique for CT (BEST-CT)...

AIM: The aim of the current study is to evaluate the effect of calcium phophosilicate-based bioceramic "Totalfill bioceramic putty" and white mineral trioxide aggregate (WMTA) as the coronal plug on discoloration after revascularization of necrotic immature permanent anterior teeth. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This study was conducted on (48) necrotic young permanent central incisors in children ranging from 8 to 14 years old, that were randomly allocated to either Totalfill bioceramic (Group I = 24) or WMTA (Group II = 24) as the coronal plug...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can provide rich and detailed high-contrast information of soft tissues, while the scanning of MRI is time-consuming. To accelerate MR imaging, a variety of Transformer-based single image super-resolution methods are proposed in recent years, achieving promising results thanks to their superior capability of capturing long-range dependencies. Nevertheless, most existing works prioritize the design of transformer attention blocks to capture global information...

A total of 20 endophytic fungi were isolated (ZSEFL1-ZSEFL20) from Ziziphus spina-christi (L.) Desf. (Nabq) leaves. Four isolates A2/ZSEFL2, Alternaria alternata , D/ZSEFL14, Aspergillus niger , E/ZSEFL15, Epicoccum nigrum , and S/ZSEFL19, Penicillium crustosum were found to show the most promising antimicrobial activities either in plug or disc diffusion screening assays against Gram-positive, Gram-negative bacteria and pathogenic fungi. Antimicrobial activity was tested against Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC 27853, Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 29213, Serratia marcescens ATCC 14764, Klebsiella pneumonia e ATCC 700603, Candida albicans ATCC 10231, and Fusarium oxysporum ATCC417...

Tumor spheroids are now intensively investigated toward preclinical and clinical applications, necessitating the establishment of accessible and cost-effective methods for routine operations. Without losing the advantage of organ-chip technologies, we developed a rocking system for facile formation and culture of tumor spheroids in hydrogel microwells of a suspended membrane under microfluidic conditions. While the rocking is controlled with a step motor, the microfluidic device is made of two plastic plates, allowing plugging directly syringe tubes with Luer connectors...

Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have been previously researched in ankylosing spondylitis (AS). Nevertheless, there are few studies of lncRNAs and mRNAs associated with the pathogenesis of AS. Differentially expressed lncRNAs (DElncRNAs) and mRNAs (DEmRNAs) between AS and normal samples were assessed using the R limma package. DOSE packages and 'clusterProfiler' were exploited for gene enrichment analysis. The functional association of proteins and protein interactions was assessed using the STRING database...

Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) is nowadays the mainstay of Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning (USRL). However, PLMs are sensitive to the frequency information of words from their pre-training corpora, resulting in anisotropic embedding space, where the embeddings of high-frequency words are clustered but those of low-frequency words disperse sparsely. This anisotropic phenomenon results in two problems of similarity bias and information bias, lowering the quality of sentence embeddings. To solve the problems, we fine-tune PLMs by leveraging the frequency information of words and propose a novel USRL framework, namely Sentence Representation Learning with Frequency-induced Adversarial tuning and Incomplete sentence filtering (Slt-fai)...

Scatter plots are popular for displaying 2D data, but in practice, many data sets have more than two dimensions. For the analysis of such multivariate data, it is often necessary to switch between scatter plots of different dimension pairs, e.g., in a scatter plot matrix (SPLOM). Alternative approaches include a "grand tour" for an overview of the entire data set or creating artificial axes from dimensionality reduction (DR). A cross-cutting concern in all techniques is the ability of viewers to find correspondence between data points in different views...

If patient anatomy or disease does not allow for a traditional or partial cholecystectomy, an omental pedicle plug may be a viable option to limit the risk of postoperative uncontrolled bile leak from the cystic duct and to control patient symptoms.

Here, we propose a sandwich-like Si-doping scheme (undoped/Si-doped/undoped) in Al0.6 Ga0.4 N quantum barriers (QBs) to simultaneously promote the optoelectronic performances and reliability of deep ultraviolet light-emitting diodes (DUV-LEDs). Through experimental and numerical analyses, in the case of DUV-LEDs with conventional uniform Si-doping QB structure, severe operation-induced reliability degradation, including the increase of reverse leakage current (IR) and reduction of light output power (LOP), will offset the enhancement of optoelectronic performances as the Si-doping levels increase to an extent, which hinders further development of DUV-LEDs...

INTRODUCTION: Despite modern fixation techniques, spinopelvic fixation failure (SPFF) after adult spinal deformity (ASD) surgery ranges from 4.5 to 38.0%, with approximately 50% requiring reoperation. Compared to other well-studied complications after ASD surgery, less is known about the incidence and predictors of SPFF. AIMS/OBJECTIVES: Given the high rates of SPFF and reoperation needed to treat it, the purpose of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to report the incidence and failure mechanisms of SPF after ASD surgery...

The alcohol extraction of P. sibiricum has exhibited significant inhibitory effects on the production of free radicals and the proliferation of non-small-cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC) A549 cells. Despite the diverse components found in alcohol extraction of P. sibiricum and its multiple targets, the active components and associated targets remain largely unidentified. Hence, there is a need for additional investigation into the pharmacodynamic elements and mechanisms of action. This study aimed to analyze and identify the components responsible for the anti-tumor activity of alcohol extraction from P...

The synergy of long-range dependencies from transformers and local representations of image content from convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has led to advanced architectures and increased performance for various medical image analysis tasks due to their complementary benefits. However, compared with CNNs, transformers require considerably more training data, due to a larger number of parameters and an absence of inductive bias. The need for increasingly large datasets continues to be problematic, particularly in the context of medical imaging, where both annotation efforts and data protection result in limited data availability...

INTRODUCTION: Lichen planopilaris (LPP) and discoid lupus erythematosus (DLE) are primary scarring alopecias that pose diagnostic challenges clinically, where trichoscopy features may provide benefit in delineating these two cicatricial alopecia, and also helps in assessing the evolution and therapeutic response. To date, there are few reviews on dermoscopic findings in differentiating these two alopecias. METHODS: A systematic literature review was conducted using the PubMed and Google Scholar databases...

California leads the United States in peach (Prunus persica L.) production, with approximately 505,000 tons produced in 2021 and valued at $378.3 million (California Agriculture Statistics Review, 2021-2022). During the spring and summer of 2023, twig and branch dieback were observed in three peach orchards (cvs. Late Ross and Starn) in San Joaquin County, California. Wood cankers and discoloration also occurred in branches, generally initiating at pruning wounds. Approximately 8 symptomatic twigs or branches per orchard were collected to proceed with the isolation of necrotic tissues on acidified potato dextrose agar (APDA)...

BACKGROUND: Nursing students are prone to sleep problems that affect their core self-evaluations. However, little attention has been paid to the specific roles of emotion regulation (including cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) and resilience in this process. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to explore 1) the direct effect of sleep problems on core self-evaluations among nursing students; 2) the chain-mediating effect of cognitive reappraisal and resilience on the relationship between sleep problems and core self-evaluations; 3) the moderating effect of expressive suppression on the direct relationship between sleep problems and core self-evaluations; and 4) the moderating effect of expressive suppression on the indirect relationship between sleep problems affecting core self-evaluations through resilience...

In this paper, ordinary Portland cement, ultrafine cement, polyurethane, and epoxy resin were selected as typical grouting materials. Grouting simulation tests were first conducted to prepare the grouted concrete crack sample. The effect of concrete crack parameters (i.e., crack aperture and roughness), grout water-cement ratio, and grouting pressure on the water-plugging performance of different grouting materials was explored through the impermeability test. The microstructure of grouted concrete cracks was analyzed by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and computed tomography (CT), and the difference in water-plugging performance of different grouting materials was explained at the micro level...

It is thought that geopolymers are easy to carbonate, especially when they are cured in ambient temperatures. Matrix gel's composition and microstructure, and new products of geopolymers (GPs) after carbonation were investigated in this study on the basis of XRD and SEM-EDS measurements and ternary diagram analysis, which were prepared from low-lime fly ash (FA) and ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS) alone or a blend, as a precursor. The specimens were hardened in a 20 °C environment with alkali activator solution (S/N = 1...

With the vigorous development of the petroleum industry, improving the efficiency of oil and gas exploitation has become an important issue. Temperature-sensitive materials show great potential for application in the development and production of oil and gas fields due to their unique temperature-responsive properties. This paper reviews the application of temperature-sensitive materials in oil and gas drilling and introduces the characteristics of three types of temperature-sensitive materials: N-substituted acrylamide polymers, amphiphilic block copolymers, and peptides...

Vascular plugs are an evolving family of vessel occluders providing a single-device embolization system for large, high-flow arteries. Nitinol mesh plugs and polytetrafluoroethylene membrane plugs are available in different configurations and sizes to occlude arteries from 3 to 20 mm in diameter. Possible applications during complex endovascular aortic procedures are aortic branch embolization to prevent endoleak or to gain an adequate landing zone, directional branch occlusion, and false lumen embolization in aortic dissection...