Network perspective

Probabilistic latent variable models (PLVMs), such as probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA), are widely employed in process monitoring and fault detection of industrial processes. This article proposes a novel deep PPCA (DePPCA) model, which has the advantages of both probabilistic modeling and deep learning. The construction of DePPCA includes a greedy layer-wise pretraining phase and a unified end-to-end fine-tuning phase. The former establishes a hierarchical deep structure based on cascading multiple layers of the PPCA module to extract high-level features...

Acupuncture, a traditional Chinese therapy, is gaining attention for its impact on the brain. While existing electroencephalogram and functional magnetic resonance image research has made significant contributions, this paper utilizes stereo-electroencephalography data for a comprehensive exploration of neurophysiological effects. Employing a multi-scale approach, channel-level analysis reveals notable $\delta $-band activity changes during acupuncture. At the brain region level, acupuncture modulated connectivity between the paracentral lobule and the precentral gyrus...

BACKGROUND: Migration has challenged society. Most people who move do so for economic reasons, but others move for more tragic reasons. The proportion of female migrants was slightly higher than that of male migrants, partly due to the longer life expectancy of women and the higher demand for female migrants in care-related Jobs. The process may affect migrants' health, particularly in countries where healthcare is associated with high economic costs or insurance availability. A global systematic review of qualitative studies with meta-synthesis was conducted...

BACKGROUND: The prevalence of breastfeeding is less common among adolescent mothers than adult mothers. These mothers experience various issues during breastfeeding. The present study aimed to explore the normative needs of adolescent mothers during breastfeeding from health care providers' perspective. METHODS: This qualitative content analysis study was conducted from October 2022 until June 2023. 14 health care providers who had worked in the field of breast milk were purposefully selected with maximum variation...

As a crucial component of the cerebral cholinergic system and the Papez circuit in the basal forebrain, dysfunction of the nucleus basalis of Meynert (NBM) is associated with various neurodegenerative disorders. However, no drugs, including existing cholinesterase inhibitors, have been shown to reverse this dysfunction. Due to advancements in neuromodulation technology, researchers are exploring the use of deep brain stimulation (DBS) therapy targeting the NBM (NBM-DBS) to treat mental and neurological disorders as well as the related mechanisms...

AIMS: To estimate the cost-effectiveness of a treatment-pathway initiated with bimekizumab, a monoclonal IgG1 antibody that selectively inhibits interleukin (IL)-17F in addition to IL-17A, in patients with axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) compared with IL-17A inhibitors, ixekizumab, and secukinumab, from the National Health Service (NHS) of Scotland perspective. METHODS: The axSpA treatment-pathway was modeled using a one-year decision tree followed by a lifetime Markov model...

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease with a significant clinical, economic, and human burden. The JAK1 Atopic Dermatitis Efficacy and Safety (JADE) program's Phase 3 trials demonstrated that as a treatment for moderate-to-severe AD in adults with previous exposure to immunotherapy, abrocitinib showed superior efficacy and safety compared with standard of care (SoC), consisting of topical corticosteroids. This study assessed the cost-effectiveness of abrocitinib with SoC versus SoC alone for this patient population in Japan from a societal perspective...

BACKGROUND: The Taliban takeover in August 2021 ended a decades-long conflict in Afghanistan. Yet, along with improved security, there have been collateral changes, such as the exacerbation of the economic crisis and brain drain. Although these changes have altered the lives of Afghans in many ways, it is unclear whether they have affected access to care. This study aimed to analyse Afghans' access to care and how this access has changed after August 2021. METHODS: The study relied on the collaboration with the non-governmental organisation EMERGENCY, running a network of three hospitals and 41 First Aid Posts in 10 Afghan provinces...

BACKGROUND: Clinical practicums are a core component of baccalaureate nursing education. Following the coronavirus pandemic, there have been extensive changes in the workforce environment that may potentially affect nursing students' experience and readiness for clinical practicums. METHODS: A qualitative study was conducted to explore final-year nursing students' experiences and readiness for their final clinical practicum before becoming a registered nurse. A purposive sample of 24 final-year baccalaureate nursing students was included in this study...

BACKGROUND: The pituitary directly regulates the reproductive process through follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH). Transcriptomic research on the pituitaries of ewes with different FecB (fecundity Booroola) genotypes has shown that some key genes and lncRNAs play an important role in pituitary function and sheep fecundity. Our previous study found that ewes with FecB + + genotypes (without FecB mutation) still had individuals with more than one offspring per birth...

The phenomenon of semantic satiation, which refers to the loss of meaning of a word or phrase after being repeated many times, is a well-known psychological phenomenon. However, the microscopic neural computational principles responsible for these mechanisms remain unknown. In this study, we use a deep learning model of continuous coupled neural networks to investigate the mechanism underlying semantic satiation and precisely describe this process with neuronal components. Our results suggest that, from a mesoscopic perspective, semantic satiation may be a bottom-up process...

Plant species like the Venus flytrap possess unique abilities to intelligently respond to various external stimuli, ensuring successful prey capture. Their nerve-devoided structure provides valuable insights for exploring natural intelligence and constructing intelligent systems solely from materials, but limited knowledge is currently available and the engineering realization of such concept remains a significant challenge. Drawing upon the flytrap's action potential resulting from ion diffusion, we propose a signal accumulation/attenuation model and a corresponding liquid metal-based logic module, which operates on the basis of the shape change of liquid metal within a sodium hydroxide buffer solution...

Feminist perspectives on care have demonstrated how capitalism undervalues care work. The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted this further, as systems of production and social reproduction became destabilized globally. In many countries, the formal pandemic response fell short of attending to the daily, fundamental care needs of people living through the crisis, especially those compromised by the socio-economic effects of the pandemic. These needs were often attended to at the community level. This article explores a community-led network of care, known as CANs, that emerged in response to the pandemic in Cape Town...

Federated recommender systems (FRSs), with their improved privacy-preserving advantages to jointly train recommendation models from numerous devices while keeping user data distributed, have been widely explored in modern recommender systems (RSs). However, conventional FRSs require transmitting the entire model between the server and clients, which brings a huge carbon footprint for cost-conscious cross-device learning tasks. While several efforts have been dedicated to improving the efficiency of FRSs, it's suboptimal to treat the whole model as the objective of compact design...

Cancer-related deadly diseases affect both developed and underdeveloped nations worldwide. Effective network learning is crucial to more reliably identify and categorize breast carcinoma in vast and unbalanced image datasets. The absence of early cancer symptoms makes the early identification process challenging. Therefore, from the perspectives of diagnosis, prevention, and therapy, cancer continues to be among the healthcare concerns that numerous researchers work to advance. It is highly essential to design an innovative breast cancer detection model by considering the complications presented in the classical techniques...

Fermentation is the key process required for developing the characteristic properties of cigar tobacco leaves, complex microorganisms are involved in this process. However, the microbial fermentation mechanisms during the fermentation process have not been well-characterized. This study investigated the dynamic changes in conventional chemical composition, flavor compounds, and bacterial community during the fermentation of cigar tobacco leaves from Hainan and Sichuan provinces in China, as well as the potential roles of bacteria...

The chemokine receptor CXCR4 is a critical target for the treatment of several cancer types and HIV-1 infections. While orthosteric and allosteric modulators have been developed targeting its extracellular or transmembrane regions, the intramembrane region of CXCR4 may also include allosteric binding sites suitable for the development of allosteric drugs. To investigate this, we apply the Gaussian Network Model (GNM) to the monomeric and dimeric forms of CXCR4 to identify residues essential for its local and global motions located in the hinge regions of the protein...

Functional gradient (FG) analysis represents an increasingly popular methodological perspective for investigating brain hierarchical organization but whether and how network hierarchy changes concomitant with functional connectivity alterations in multiple sclerosis (MS) has remained elusive. Here, we analyzed FG components to uncover possible alterations in cortical hierarchy using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) data acquired in 122 MS patients and 97 healthy control (HC) subjects. Cortical hierarchy was assessed by deriving regional FG scores from rs-fMRI connectivity matrices using a functional parcellation of the cerebral cortex...

Low-cost air pollution sensors, offering hyper-local characterization of pollutant concentrations, are becoming increasingly prevalent in environmental and public health research. However, low-cost air pollution data can be noisy, biased by environmental conditions, and usually need to be field-calibrated by collocating low-cost sensors with reference-grade instruments. We show, theoretically and empirically, that the common procedure of regression-based calibration using collocated data systematically underestimates high air pollution concentrations, which are critical to diagnose from a health perspective...

This study challenges the conventional psycholinguistic view that the distinction between nouns and verbs is pivotal in understanding language impairments in neurological disorders. Traditional views link frontal brain region damage with verb processing deficits and posterior temporoparietal damage with noun difficulties. However, this perspective is contested by findings from patients with Alzheimer's disease (pwAD), who show impairments in both word classes despite their typical temporoparietal atrophy. Notably, pwAD tend to use semantically lighter verbs in their speech than healthy individuals...