Background-Multiple B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) fragments circulate in patients with heart failure (HF) but the types and relative quantities, particularly in relation to bioactive BNP 1-32, remain poorly defined. The purpose of the study was to relate clinically available BNP values with quantitative information on the concentration of pre-secretion and post-processed fragments of BNP detected by mass spectrometry. Methods and Results-Seventy Class I-IV patients were prospectively enrolled with blood drawn into tubes containing a preservative to protect against BNP degradation.

Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) are promising biomarkers for cancer detection. However, multiethnic and multicentric studies of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) are lacking. We recruited 221 NSCLC patients, 161 controls and 56 benign nodules from both China and America. Initial miRNA screening was performed using the TaqMan Low Density Array followed by confirming individually by RT-qPCR in Chinese cohorts. Finally, we performed a blind trial from an American cohort to validate our findings. RT-qPCR confirmed that miR-483-5p, miR-193a-3p, miR-25, miR-214 and miR-7 were significantly elevated in patients compared to controls. The areas under the curve (AUCs) of the ROC curve of this five-serum miRNA panel were 0.976 (95% CI, 0.939–1.0; P < 0.0001) and 0.823 (95% CI, 0.75–0.896; P < 0.0001) for the two confirmation sets, respectively. In the blind trial, the panel correctly classified 95% NSCLC cases and 84% controls from the American cohort. Most importantly, the panel was capable of distinguishing NSCLC from benign nodules with an AUC of 0.979 (95% CI, 0.959–1.0) in the American cohort and allowed correct prediction of 86% and 95% stage I–II tumors in the Chinese and American cohorts, respectively. This serum miRNA panel holds the potential for diagnosing ethnically diverse NSCLC patients.

No abstract

In conventional cognitive radio (CR), the users in secondary network (SN) can only access the idle spectrum when users in primary network (PN) are absent. This novel strategy provides higher spectrum efficiency when detecting the presence of the PN. Hence, spectrum utilization of the traditional scheme can be further improved as exploiting application of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). As combination of CR and NOMA, such CR-NOMA has been proposed to improve spectrum efficiency to adapt to requirements in 5G communications. In this study, the relaying scheme is employed in the SN of the proposed CR-NOMA and the relay is allowed to energy harvesting (EH) from the secondary transmitter to serve signal forwarding to distant secondary users. With this regard, the complex model of EH-assisted CR-NOMA is explored in outage behavior and throughput performance as awareness on imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver. As most important results, the exact closed-form of the exact outage probability is derived for each NOMA destination by assuming that the channel coefficients among considered links follow Rayleigh distribution. Furthermore, performance gap between two NOMA users can be controlled by various parameters such as transmit power, energy harvesting coefficients and levels of imperfect SIC. Simulation results verify our analytical results. INDEX TERMS Energy harvesting, imperfect SIC, NOMA, outage probability, underlay cognitive radio.

This study considers the outage and throughput performance of downlink in the secondary network of cognitive radio assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. Both orthogonal multiple access (OMA) mode and NOMA mode are investigated with respect to status of decoding operation of each user. Depending on the transmit signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the primary source and interference constraint from the primary network, the closed-form expressions of the outage probability for two users are obtained and compared in terms of performance. To obtain further insights, an asymptotic analysis of the outage probability in the high SNR regime is presented. Optimal throughput also provides insight in the computation of the power allocation factor. Furthermore, power allocation factor, target rates, and transmit SNR are evaluated to obtain reasonable outage performance. Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to confirm the analytical results.

In this paper, we investigate the performance of a secondary network in a cognitive radio network employing a non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme to form a CR-NOMA system serving many destination users. In the secondary network of our proposed system, a device-to-device (D2D) scheme is deployed to further provide the signal transmission at a close distance of NOMA users in downlink, and such performance is evaluated under the situation of interference reception from the primary network. An outage performance gap exists among these NOMA users since different power allocation factors are assigned to the different destinations. Unlike existing NOMA schemes that consider fixed power allocation factors, which are not optimal in terms of outage performance, our proposed paradigm exhibits optimal outage in the scenario of D2D transmission. In particular, the outage performances in two kinds of schemes in term of existence of D2D link are further achieved. Simulation results validate the analytical expressions, and show the advantage of each scheme in the proposed CR-NOMA system based on outage performance and throughput.

The expression of H-2K and H-2D antigens of the major histocompatability complex was examined in different tissues of mice sharing the H-2k haplotype. Mouse H-2Kk and H-2Dk alloantigens are cell-surface glycoproteins that are heterogeneous with respect to size and charge, and they can be distinguished from each other by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis of immunoprecipitates. Hepatocytes, lymphocytes, and macrophages of mice contain a set of H-2k alloantigens that also are distinguishable among the different cell types. The total set of either H-2D or H-2K glycoproteins differs in charge among each of these cell types but not in molecular weight. The difference in charge appears to be due to differences in extent of sialylation among the entire set of alloantigens expressed by each cell type. The extent of sialylation is highest in liver, relative to lymphocytes and macrophages. Precursors for the H-2 glycoproteins were identified in pulse-chase experiments with [ 3sS] methionine and by electrophoretic analyses of immunoprecipitates in twodimensional polyacrylamide gels. The precursor forms of these glycoproteins can be distinguished from the mature forms mainly by differences in content of sialic acid residues. The H-2K and H-2D glycoproteins in the C3H mouse with the H-2k haplotype appear to be regulated in a type of coordinate manner. They are always expressed at a constant ratio of 1:2

No abstract