No abstract

BackgroundDigestive cancers are common malignancies worldwide, however there are few effective prognostic markers available. In this study we comprehensively investigated the prognostic significance of ZEB1 and ZEB2 in digestive cancers.MethodsElectronic databases were searched and studies met the selection criteria were included. Study information was recorded and quality assessment was performed according to the REMARK guideline. Hazard ratios and its corresponding 95% confidence intervals were extracted and pooled. Sensitivity analyses, subgroup analyses, cumulative meta-analyses and secondary analyses were also performed to increase the stability and reliability of our results.Results24 cohort studies were included in the study. High ZEB1 and ZEB2 levels predicted poor overall survival, meanwhile high ZEB2 levels predicted poor disease free survival for digestive cancer patients. From subgroup analyses we observed ZEB1 was found to be significantly associated with poor overall survival for patients with pancreatic cancer, gastric cancer and colorectal cancer, while ZEB2 was found to be significantly associated with poor overall survival for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma and gastric cancer. Furthermore, by conducting secondary analyses we confirmed both ZEB1 and ZEB2 played important roles in gastric cancer prediction. In addition, we found high ZEB1 and ZEB2 expression were significantly associated with depth of invasion, lymph node metastasis and TNM stage in digestive cancer patients.ConclusionsThe present study validated the prognostic value and clinicopathological association of ZEB1 and ZEB2 in digestive cancers, especially in gastric cancer.

No abstract

The limited energy in wireless sensor network has always been a key topic. Most previous studies usually regulate the network loading by periodically directing the data flow to different sinks in order to extend the overall life-time of network and enhance the network availability or data delivery. However, the time and place that an event occurred can not be estimated, thus regular information flow switching may not be able to balance the actual loading of network. Another, multiple paths to sinks for each node are established in the tolerance area defined by a pre-defined difference between the cost, i.e. hop counts away from sinks, of paths to different sinks such that each node in-between multiple sinks can distribute the forwarding burden among the paths to different sinks. Since sending data to a farther sink consumes much more overall energy of network, the gain of data delivery should be evaluated at the sacrifice of energy consumption. In this paper, a quantized model is proposed to evaluate the tradeoff between energy consumption and data delivery under non-uniformly events triggering in network. The tradeoff between network availability and energy consumption would be analyzed and the corresponding simulation results would be included.

A compact and position-addressable blue ray scanning microscope (BSM) based on a commercially available Blu-ray disk pickup head (PUH) is developed for cell imaging with high resolution and low cost. The BSM comprises two objective lenses with numerical apertures (NAs) of 0.85 and 0.6 for focusing blue and red laser beams, respectively, on the sample slide. The blue and red laser beams are co-located adjacent to each other and move synchronously. A specially designed sample slide is used with a sample area and an address-patterned area for sample holding and address recognition, respectively. The blue laser beam is focused on the sample area and is used for fluorescent excitation and image capturing, whereas the red laser beam is focused on the address-patterned area and is used for address recognition and dynamic focusing. The address-patterned area is divided into 310 sectors. The cell image of each sector of the sampling area has a corresponding address pattern. Fluorescence images of monkey-derived kidney epithelial cells and fibroblast cells in which the F-actin is stained with fluorophore phalloidin CF 405 are measured by the BSM, with results comparable to those measured by a Leica TCS CP2 confocal microscope. The cell image of an area of interest can be easily tracked based on the coded address, and a large-area sample image can be accurately reconstructed from the sector images.