Phase I Trial of Escalating-dose Cisplatin with 5-fluorouracil and Concurrent Radiotherapy in Chinese Patients with Esophageal Cancer

We defined the maximum-tolerated dose (MTD) of chemoradiotherapy (cisplatin (CDDP) with 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and concurrent chemoradiotherapy) for Chinese patients with esophageal cancer. Twenty-one previously untreated patients with primary esophageal cancer were entered into this study. Escalating doses of CDDP with 5-FU were administered in a modified Fibonacci sequence, with concurrent conventional fractionation radiotherapy (CFR) of 60 Gy or 50 Gy. The starting doses were CDDP 37.5 mg/m2 on day 1, and 5-FU 500 mg/m2 on days 1-5, respectively. The regimen was repeated 4 times every 28 days. If no dose-limiting toxicity (DLT) was observed, the next dose level was applied. The procedures were repeated until DLT appeared. The MTD was declared to be 1 dose level below the level at which DLT appeared. DLT was grade 3 radiation-induced esophagitis at a dose level of CDDP 60 mg/m2 with 5-FU 700 mg/m2 and concurrent 60 Gy CFR. MTD was defined as CDDP 52.5 mg/m2 with 5-FU 700 mg/m2 and concurrent 50 Gy CFR. The MTD of CDDP with 5-FU and in concurrent chemoradiotherapy for Chinese patients with esophageal cancer is CDDP 52.5 mg/m2 on day 1 and 5FU 700 mg/m2 on days 1-5, repeated 4 times every 28 days, and concurrent 50 Gy CFR. Further evaluation of this regimen in a prospective phase II trial is ongoing.</p

Phase Separation and Magnetic Order in K-doped Iron Selenide Superconductor

Alkali-doped iron selenide is the latest member of high Tc superconductor family, and its peculiar characters have immediately attracted extensive attention. We prepared high-quality potassium-doped iron selenide (KxFe2-ySe2) thin films by molecular beam epitaxy and unambiguously demonstrated the existence of phase separation, which is currently under debate, in this material using scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. The stoichiometric superconducting phase KFe2Se2 contains no iron vacancies, while the insulating phase has a \surd5\times\surd5 vacancy order. The iron vacancies are shown always destructive to superconductivity in KFe2Se2. Our study on the subgap bound states induced by the iron vacancies further reveals a magnetically-related bipartite order in the superconducting phase. These findings not only solve the existing controversies in the atomic and electronic structures in KxFe2-ySe2, but also provide valuable information on understanding the superconductivity and its interplay with magnetism in iron-based superconductors

cis-Diammine(glycolato-κ2 O 1,O 2)platinum(II)

The reaction of cis-[Pt(NO3)2(NH3)2] and sodium glycolate yielded the title compound, [Pt(C2H2O3)(NH3)2]. The PtII atom, coordinated by two N atoms of ammine and two O atoms of the carboxyl­ate and oxido groups of the glycolate ligand, is in a square-planar environment. In the crystal structure, mol­ecules are connected by inter­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds, forming a three-dimensional network

Aligning visual prototypes with BERT embeddings for few-shot learning

International audienceFew-shot learning (FSL) is the task of learning to recognize previously unseen categories of images from a small number of training examples. This is a challenging task, as the available examples may not be enough to unambiguously determine which visual features are most characteristic of the considered categories. To alleviate this issue, we propose a method that additionally takes into account the names of the image classes. While the use of class names has already been explored in previous work, our approach differs in two key aspects. First, while previous work has aimed to directly predict visual prototypes from word embeddings, we found that better results can be obtained by treating visual and text-based prototypes separately. Second, we propose a simple strategy for learning class name embeddings using the BERT language model, which we found to substantially outperform the GloVe vectors that were used in previous work. We furthermore propose a strategy for dealing with the high dimensionality of these vectors, inspired by models for aligning cross-lingual word embeddings. We provide experiments on miniImageNet, CUB and tieredImageNet, showing that our approach consistently improves the state-of-the-art in metric-based FSL

Few-shot image classification with multi-facet prototypes

The aim of few-shot learning (FSL) is to learn how to recognize image categories from a small number of training examples. A central challenge is that the available training examples are normally insufficient to determine which visual features are most characteristic of the considered categories. To address this challenge, we organise these visual features into facets, which intuitively group features of the same kind (e.g. features that are relevant to shape, colour, or texture). This is motivated from the assumption that (i) the importance of each facet differs from category to category and (ii) it is possible to predict facet importance from a pre-trained embedding of the category names. In particular, we propose an adaptive similarity measure, relying on predicted facet importance weights for a given set of categories. This measure can be used in combination with a wide array of existing metric-based methods

Assessment of changes in lipid profile and related enzymes in children with asthma

Purpose: To investigate the influence of the lipid profile and related parameters on the development of asthma in children aged 10 to 15 years.Methods: Peripheral blood samples were collected from a group diagnosed with asthma as well as from a healthy control group. The lipid profile parameters measured were total cholesterol (TC), triglycerides (TG), low-density lipoprotein (LDL), very-low-density lipoprotein (VLDL), high-density lipoprotein (HDL), serum total antioxidant capacity (TAC), reduced glutathione (GSH), and malondialdehyde (MDA), and the activities of lecithin–cholesterol acyltransferase (LCAT) and cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP).Results: TC, TG, LDL, and VLDL levels were significantly (p ≤ 0.05) higher in the asthma group compared with the controls, while HDL level was lower. Total TAC and GSH were lower in the asthma group, while MDA level, and LCAT and CETP activities were higher.Conclusion: There is a link between an elevated lipid profile and increased antioxidant capacity in asthmatic children

Genomewide association study of leprosy.

BACKGROUND: The narrow host range of Mycobacterium leprae and the fact that it is refractory to growth in culture has limited research on and the biologic understanding of leprosy. Host genetic factors are thought to influence susceptibility to infection as well as disease progression. METHODS: We performed a two-stage genomewide association study by genotyping 706 patients and 1225 controls using the Human610-Quad BeadChip (Illumina). We then tested three independent replication sets for an association between the presence of leprosy and 93 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that were most strongly associated with the disease in the genomewide association study. Together, these replication sets comprised 3254 patients and 5955 controls. We also carried out tests of heterogeneity of the associations (or lack thereof) between these 93 SNPs and disease, stratified according to clinical subtype (multibacillary vs. paucibacillary). RESULTS: We observed a significant association (P<1.00x10(-10)) between SNPs in the genes CCDC122, C13orf31, NOD2, TNFSF15, HLA-DR, and RIPK2 and a trend toward an association (P=5.10x10(-5)) with a SNP in LRRK2. The associations between the SNPs in C13orf31, LRRK2, NOD2, and RIPK2 and multibacillary leprosy were stronger than the associations between these SNPs and paucibacillary leprosy. CONCLUSIONS: Variants of genes in the NOD2-mediated signaling pathway (which regulates the innate immune response) are associated with susceptibility to infection with M. leprae

Constraints on the cosmological parameters with three-parameter correlation of Gamma-ray bursts

As one of the most energetic and brightest events, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) can be treated as a promising probe of the high-redshift universe. Similar to type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), GRBs with same physical origin could be treated as standard candles. We select GRB samples with the same physical origin, which are divided into two groups. One group is consisted of 31 GRBs with a plateau phase feature of a constant luminosity followed by a decay index of about -2 in the X-ray afterglow light curves, and the other has 50 GRBs with a shallow decay phase in the optical light curves. For the selected GRB samples, we confirm that there is a tight correlation between the plateau luminosity $L_0$, the end time of plateau $t_b$ and the isotropic energy release $E_{\gamma,iso}$. We also find that the $L_0-t_b-E_{\gamma,iso}$ correlation is insensitive to the cosmological parameters and no valid limitations on the cosmological parameters can be obtained using this correlation. We explore a new three-parameter correlation $L_0$, $t_b$, and the spectral peak energy in the rest frame $E_{p,i}$ ($L_0-t_b-E_{p,i}$), and find that this correlation can be used as a standard candle to constrain the cosmological parameters. By employing the optical sample only, we find the constraints of $\Omega_m = 0.697_{-0.278}^{+0.402}(1\sigma)$ for a flat $\Lambda$CDM model. For the non-flat $\Lambda$CDM model, the best-fitting results are $\Omega_m = 0.713_{-0.278}^{+0.346}$, $\Omega_{\Lambda} = 0.981_{-0.580}^{+0.379}(1\sigma)$. For the combination of the X-ray and optical smaples, we find $\Omega_m = 0.313_{-0.125}^{+0.179}(1\sigma)$ for a flat $\Lambda$CDM model, and $\Omega_m = 0.344_{-0.112}^{+0.176}$, $\Omega_{\Lambda} = 0.770_{-0.416}^{+0.366}(1\sigma)$ for a non-flat $\Lambda$CDM model.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, 13 pages, 9 figures and 2 table