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BackgroundSubacute thyroiditis (SAT) is the most prevalent self-limiting thyroid disease that causes pain, accounting for about 5% of all clinical thyroid disorders. Numerous clinically noteworthy results have been published in this area over the last 20 years. However, no article has comprehensively assessed the relevant literature yet. We conducted a bibliometric analysis of SAT to provide light on the dynamic nature of scientific advancement and aid researchers in gaining a global perspective while examining research core themes and hotspots.MethodsSAT-related articles and reviews from 2001 to 2022 were retrieved from the Science Citation Index-Expanded of Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). We analyzed current research trends and hotspots in this area using CiteSpace and Vosviewer.ResultsA total of 568 studies associated with SAT research were published in 282 academic journals by 2,473 authors in 900 institutions from 61 countries/regions. The United States was a crucial link in inter-country/region collaboration and was the most frequently involved country in international cooperation. The University of Missouri System was the top organization, and Braley-Mullen H. was the most productive researcher. Thyroid published the most papers, with 36 publications. The most co-cited article was “Clinical features and outcome of subacute thyroiditis in an incidence cohort: Olmsted County, Minnesota, study” (by Fatourechi V., 2003). The clustered network and timeline view of keywords showed that the prevalence, diagnosis, and treatment of SAT were the research core themes during the past 20 years. Analysis of keyword bursts indicated that the clinical characteristic and the influence of COVID-19 on SAT appeared to be the current research hotspots.ConclusionThis bibliometric analysis conducted a thorough review of the SAT research. The clinical characteristics and the genetic background of SAT under the influence of COVID-19 are current research hotspots. However, there is still a need for further study and global collaboration. Our findings can aid researchers in understanding the current status of SAT research and immediately pinpoint new directions for further investigation.

Graph-cuts optimization is prevalent in vision and graphics problems. It is thus of great practical importance to parallelize the graph-cuts optimization using today's ubiquitous multi-core machines. However, the current best serial algorithm by Boykov and Kolmogorov [4] (called the BK algorithm) still has the superior empirical performance. It is non-trivial to parallelize as expensive synchronization overhead easily offsets the advantage of parallelism.In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive bottom-up approach to parallelize the BK algorithm. We first uniformly partition the graph into a number of regularly-shaped disjoint subgraphs and process them in parallel, then we incrementally merge the subgraphs in an adaptive way to obtain the global optimum. The new algorithm has three benefits: 1) it is more cache-friendly within smaller subgraphs; 2) it keeps balanced workloads among computing cores; 3) it causes little overhead and is adaptable to the number of available cores. Extensive experiments in common applications such as 2D/3D image segmentations and 3D surface fitting demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. 978-1-4244-6985-7/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE

Inflammation is the primary pathological process of myocardial ischemia/reperfusion injury (MI/RI). 7-Hydroxyflavone (HF), a natural flavonoid with a variety of bioactivities, plays a crucial role in various biological processes. However, its cardioprotective effects and the underlying mechanisms of MI/RI have not been investigated. This study aimed to explore whether pretreatment with HF could attenuate MI/RI-induced inflammation in rats and investigate its potential mechanisms. The results showed that pretreatment with HF could significantly improve the anatomic data and electrocardiograph parameters, reduce the myocardial infarct size, decrease markers of myocardial injury (aspartate transaminase, creatine kinase, lactate dehydrogenase, and cardiac troponin I), inhibit inflammatory cytokines (IL-1β, IL-6, and TNF-α), suppress oxidative stress, and recover the architecture of the cardiomyocytes. The cardioprotective effect of HF was connected with the regulation of the MAPK/NF-κB signaling pathway. What is more, molecular docking was carried out to prove that HF could be stably combined with p38, ERK1/2, JNK, and NF-κB. In summary, this is a novel study demonstrating the cardioprotective effects of HF against MI/RI in vivo. Consequently, these results demonstrate that HF can be considered a promising potential therapy for MI/RI.

Horizontal wells with multi-stage fracturing have been proved to be an efficient technology to exploit thin-interbed reservoirs. However, problems were encountered during multi-stage fracturing of horizontal wells in the Silurian reservoir in Ta-zhong Oilfield, western China. This paper mainly discussed the causes of these problems and the optimized completion and fracturing designs to avoid these problems. Ta-zhong Silurian reservoir is a thin-interbed, low-permeability reservoir with buried depth from 4000 to 4500m. The sand distribution is heterogeneous both vertically and horizontally. A horizontal well in this reservoir was fractured twice using two different multistage fracturing technologies, firstly hydraulic jetting fracturing and then packer-segregated fracturing. Abnormal pumping pressure and difficulties to add proppants were encountered in both of the two operations. The causes to these failures will be analyzed comprehensively, based on which an optimized multi-stage fracturing design of this well will be proposed through numerical modeling and analysis. According to the analysis, defective completion and fracturing design is the main cause of the failures experienced in the two operations. The ill-considered jetting parameters caused the difficulties of fracture propagation and proppant placement during the hydraulic jetting fracturing treatment, whereas inappropriate perforating intervals led to simultaneous initiation of multiple fractures in each stage during the packer-segregated fracturing treatment. These fractures interfered with each other and led to great near-wellbore pressure losses and fracture reorientation, and then resulted in abnormally high pumping pressure and challenges of proppant placement. Several changes to avoid these problems are proposed and incorporated in a new multi-stage fracturing design. The jetting parameters, fracture spacing, fracture geometries as well as perforation parameters are all optimized by numerical modeling in the new design of well A and other horizontal wells in Ta-zhong Silurian reservoir, which is expected to avoid the above-mentioned problems and obtain better results. Nowadays, horizontal wells with multi-stage fracturing are a common-used technology in tight thin-interbed formations. However, the design of segregated completion and multi-stage fracturing is still a challenge for such formations. This paper introduced the lessons learned from a failure case and proposed an optimized completion and fracturing design, therefore provided a good reference for completion design of the wells in Ta-zhong Silurian reservoir as well as similar reservoirs in the world.