Purpose Our goal was to identify circulating miRNA levels that could distinguish patients with low-stage pancreatic cancer from healthy and disease controls Experimental Design We measured 735 miRNAs in pancreatic cancer case and control sera by QRTPCR using TaqMan® MicroRNA Arrays. After array analysis, we selected 18 miRNA candidates for validation in an independent set of cases and control samples. Results Of the significantly elevated circulating microRNAs in patients with pancreatic cancer compared to controls, miR-1290 had the best diagnostic performance: receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis on miR-1290 serum level yielded curve areas (AUC) of 0.96 (95% CI: 0.91-1.00), 0.81 (0.71-0.91), 0.80 (0.67-0.93), for subjects with pancreatic cancer (n=41) relative to healthy controls (n=19), subjects with chronic pancreatitis (n=35), and pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (n=18), respectively. Serum miR-1290 levels were also significantly higher than healthy controls among patients with intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasm (IPMN)(n=20) (AUC=0.76, 0.61-0.91). Serum miR-1290 levels distinguished patients with low-stage pancreatic cancer from controls better than CA19-9 levels, and like CA19-9, higher miR-1290 levels predicted poorer outcome among patients undergoing pancreaticoduodenectomy. Greater numbers of miR-1290 transcripts were detected by FISH in primary pancreatic cancer and IPMN than normal pancreatic duct cells. MiR-1290 influenced in vitro pancreatic cancer cell proliferation and invasive ability. Several other circulating miRNAs distinguished sera of patients with pancreatic cancer from those of healthy controls with AUCs >0.7, including miR-24, miR-134, miR-146a, miR-378, miR-484, miR-628-3p, and miR-1825. Conclusions: The detection of elevated circulating miR-1290 has the potential to improve the early detection of pancreatic cancer.

In this paper, we propose closed-form precoding schemes with optimal performance for constructive interference (CI) exploitation in the multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) downlink. We first consider an optimization where we maximize the distance between the constructive region and the detection thresholds. The cases of both strict and non-strict phase rotation are considered and can further be formulated as convex optimization problems. For optimization with strict phase rotation, we mathematically derive the optimal beamforming structure with Lagrangian and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. By formulating its dual problem, the optimization problem is further shown to be equivalent to a quadratic programming (QP) over a simplex, which can be solved more efficiently. We then extend our analysis to the case of non-strict phase rotation, where it is mathematically shown that a Kdimensional optimization for non-strict phase rotation is equivalent to a 2K-dimensional optimization for strict phase rotation in terms of the problem formulation. The connection with the conventional zero-forcing (ZF) precoding is also discussed. Based on the above analysis, we further propose an iterative closedform scheme to obtain the optimal beamforming matrix, where within each iteration a closed-form solution can be obtained. Numerical results validate our analysis and the optimality of the proposed iterative scheme, and further show that the proposed closed-form scheme is more efficient than the conventional QP algorithms with interior-point methods, which motivates the use of CI beamforming in practical wireless systems.

The exploration of highly efficient electrocatalysts for both oxygen and hydrogen generation via water splitting is receiving considerable attention in recent decades. Up till now, Pt-based catalysts still exhibit the best hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) performance and Ir/Ru-based oxides are identified as the benchmark for oxygen evolution reaction (OER). However, the high cost and rarity of these materials extremely hinder their large-scale applications. This paper describes the construction of the ultrathin defect-enriched 3D Se-(NiCo)S /(OH) nanosheets for overall water splitting through a facile Se-induced hydrothermal treatment. Via Se-induced fabrication, highly efficient Se-(NiCo)S /(OH) nanosheets are successfully fabricated through morphology optimization, defect engineering, and electronic structure tailoring. The as-prepared hybrids exhibit relatively low overpotentials of 155 and 103 mV at the current density of 10 mA cm for OER and HER, respectively. Moreover, an overall water-splitting device delivers a current density of 10 mA cm for ≈66 h without obvious degradation.