BACKGROUND Bone is a major site of metastasis in nasopharyngeal carcinoma(NPC).Recently,nuclear factor kappa-beta ligand(RANKL)inhibitors have garnered attention for their ability to inhibit osteoclast formation and bone resorption,as well as their potential to modulate immune functions and thereby enhance the efficacy of programmed cell death protein 1(PD-1)inhibitor therapy.CASE SUMMARY We present a case of a patient with NPC who developed sternal stalk metastasis and multiple bone metastases with soft tissue invasion following radical chemoradiotherapy and targeted therapy.Prior to chemotherapy,the patient experienced severe bone marrow suppression and opted out of further chemotherapy sessions.However,the patient received combination therapy,including RANKL inhibitors(denosumab)alongside PD-1,radiotherapy,and granulocyte-macrophage colonystimulating factor(PRaG)therapy(NCT05435768),and achieved 16 months of progression-free survival and more than 35 months of overall survival,without encountering any grade 2 or higher treatment-related adverse events.CONCLUSION Denosumab combined with PRaG therapy could be a new therapeutic approach for the second-line treatment in patients with bone metastases.
With the rise of image data and increased complexity of tasks in edge detection, conventional artificial intelligence techniques have been severely impacted. To be able to solve even greater problems of the future, learning algorithms must maintain high speed and accuracy through economical means. Traditional edge detection approaches cannot detect edges in images in a timely manner due to memory and computational time constraints. In this work, a novel parallelized ant colony optimization technique in a distributed framework provided by the Hadoop/Map-Reduce infrastructure is proposed to improve the edge detection capabilities. Moreover, a filtering technique is applied to reduce the noisy background of images to achieve significant improvement in the accuracy of edge detection. Close examinations of the implementation of the proposed algorithm are discussed and demonstrated through experiments. Results reveal high classification accuracy and significant improvements in speedup, scaleup and sizeup compared to the standard algorithms.
Adaptability and dynamicity are special properties of social insects derived from the decentralized behavior of the insects. Authors have come up with designs for software solution that can regulate traffic congestion in a network transportation environment. The effectiveness of various researches on traffic management has been verified through appropriate metrics. Most of the traffic management systems are centered on using sensors, visual monitoring and neural networks to check for available parking space with the aim of informing drivers beforehand to prevent traffic congestion. There has been limited research on solving ongoing traffic congestion in congestion prone areas like car park with any of the common methods mentioned. This study focus however is on a motor park, as a highly congested area when it comes to traffic. The car park has two entrance gate and three exit gates which is divided into three Isle of parking lot where cars can park. An ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO) was developed as an effective management system for controlling navigation and vehicular traffic congestion problems when cars exit a motor park. The ACO based on the nature and movement of the natural ants, simulates the movement of cars out of the car park through their nearest choice exit. A car park simulation was also used for the mathematical computation of the pheromone. The system was implemented using SIMD because of its dual parallelization ability. The result showed about 95% increase on the number of vehicles that left the motor park in one second. A clear indication that pheromones are large determinants of the shortest route to take as cars followed the closest exit to them. Future researchers may consider monitoring a centralized tally system for cars coming into the park through a censored gate being.
Genus Microcystis is the most common dominant species of bloom-forming cyanobacteria.Growth and colony formation are critical processes for the occurrence of Microcystis blooms.To identify allelochemicals that can inhibit the growth and colony formation of Microcystis,Microcystis aeruginosa was cultivated and treated with various concentrations of gramine,catechol,berberine,and sanguinarine in laboratory.Results indicate that the growth,colony formation,and extracellular polysaccharides(EPS)content of Microcystis were significantly inhibited when treated with gramine,catechol,and berberine in appropriate concentrations at high iron level(6.8 mg/L).Microcystis growth was inhibited and colony formation and EPS content were promoted when treated with sanguinarine at high iron level.These findings suggest that cyanobacterial blooms can be controlled by regulating the input of gramine,catechol,and berberine.Furthermore,this study revealed that plant allelochemicals could affect the growth and morphology of algae in aquatic ecological restoration,which may be potentially important for improving water quality.
Bumblebees play an important ecological economic role as pollinators in natureand agriculture.For reasons of biosecurity,many countries promote the cultivation of na-tive bumblebee species for crop pollination instead of importing“alien”species.In SouthChina,a few bumblebee species are considered useful in this way,particularly,Bombusatripes,Bombus bicoloratus and Bombus breviceps.However,whether they are suitablefor artificial rearing and forming healthy colonies for pollination,remains unknown.Inthis project,queens from the 3 native species of Guizhou Province were collected andcolonies were started under standardized conditions.The colonies were scored based on19 parameters,including the stage of colony development,number and weight of off-spring,and diet consumed.The data revealed that B.breviceps had the best performance,produced more workers and consumed the smallest diet.Next,we performed 16S rDNAsequencing of the bacterial communities found in the guts of offspring workers,and thena correlation analysis between colony performance and gut bacteria was conducted.Here,B.breviceps showed the highest diversity in gut bacterial composition,dominated by thebacteria Gilliamella,Snodgrassella,Enterobacter,and Lactobacillus Firm5.The higherthe abundance of Snodgrassella,the better the performance of the colony in the founda-tion stage,and later Lactobacillus Firm5,Apibacter and Bifidobacterium were beneficialduring the stages of rapid growth and colony decline.Although we do not understand allof the interactions yet,these correlations explain why B.breviceps demonstrated bettercolony performance.Our data provide valuable information for breeding local Bombusspecies and will contribute to developing strong colonies for crop pollination.
Lei HanZhi-Min ChangChang-Shi RenXiang-Sheng ChenGuy SmaggheYi-Ge YuanJian-Kun Long