Figure 8. a) PA signals intensity and b) PA images of BTA NPs with different concentrations (from 13.55 to 162.98 µg mL −1 ). 8 of 8) www.advancedsciencenews.com (

Purpose: To investigate the potential of computed tomography (CT) imaging features and texture analysis to differentiate between mass-forming pancreatitis (MFP) and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC).Materials and Methods: Thirty patients with pathologically proved MFP and 79 patients with PDAC were included in this study. Clinical data and CT imaging features of the two lesions were evaluated. Texture features were extracted from arterial and portal phase CT images using commercially available software (AnalysisKit). Multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to identify relevant CT imaging and texture parameters to discriminate MFP from PDAC. Receiver operating characteristic curves were performed to determine the diagnostic performance of predictions.Results: MFP showed a larger size compared to PDAC (p = 0.009). Cystic degeneration, pancreatic ductal dilatation, vascular invasion, and pancreatic sinistral portal hypertension were more frequent and duct penetrating sign was less frequent in PDAC compared to MFP. Arterial CT attenuation, arterial, and portal enhancement ratios of MFP were higher than PDAC (p < 0.05). In multivariate analysis, arterial CT attenuation and pancreatic duct penetrating sign were independent predictors. Texture features in arterial phase including SurfaceArea, Percentile40, InverseDifferenceMoment_angle90_offset4, LongRunEmphasis_angle45_offset4, and uniformity were independent predictors. Texture features in portal phase including LongRunEmphasis_angle135_offset7, VoxelValueSum, LongRunEmphasis_angle135_offset4, and GLCMEntropy_angle45_offset1 were independent predictors. Areas under the curve of imaging feature-based, texture feature-based in arterial and portal phases, and the combined models were 0.84, 0.96, 0.93, and 0.98, respectively.Conclusions: CT texture analysis demonstrates great potential to differentiate MFP from PDAC.

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A major problem in task-oriented conversational agents is the lack of support for the repair of conversational breakdowns. Prior studies have shown that current repair strategies for these kinds of errors are often ineffective due to: (1) the lack of transparency about the state of the system's understanding of the user's utterance; and (2) the system's limited capabilities to understand the user's verbal attempts to repair natural language understanding errors. This paper introduces SOVITE, a new multi-modal (speech plus direct manipulation) interface that helps users discover, identify the causes of, and recover from conversational breakdowns using the resources of existing mobile app GUIs for grounding. SOVITE displays the system's understanding of user intents using GUI screenshots, allows users to refer to third-party apps and their GUI screens in conversations as inputs for intent disambiguation, and enables users to repair breakdowns using direct manipulation on these screenshots. The results from a remote user study with 10 users using SOVITE in 7 scenarios suggested that SOVITE's approach is usable and effective.

Numerous studies employ multi-scale decomposition to improve the prediction performance of neural networks, but the grounds for selecting the decomposition algorithm are not explained, and the effects of decomposition algorithms on other performance of neural networks are also lacking further study. This paper studies the influence of commonly used multi-scale decomposition algorithms including EMD (Empirical Mode Decomposition), EEMD(Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition), CEEMDAN (Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise), VMD (Variational Mode Decomposition), WD (Wavelet Decomposition), and WPD (Wavelet Packet Decomposition) on the performance of Neural Networks. Decomposition algorithms are adopted to decompose traffic flow data into component signals, and then K-means is used to cluster component signals into volatility components, periodic components, and residual components. A Bi-directional LSTM (BiLSTM) neural network is adopted as the standard model for training and forecasting. Finally, three metrics, including prediction performance, robustness, and generalization performance are proposed to evaluate the influence of the multi-scale decomposition algorithm for neural networks comprehensively. By comparing the evaluation results of different hybrid models, this study provides some useful suggestions on proper multi-scale decomposition algorithm selection in short-time traffic flow prediction.

Honokiol (HK) is the main bioactive compound isolated from the bark of Magnolia officinalis. The present work is the first to report the pharmacokinetics and distribution of HK and its two metabolites of hydroxylated HK conjugated with glucuronic and sulfuric acid (M1) and HK monoglucuronide (M2) in plasma, liver, kidney and brain following oral administration of HK (40 mg/kg) to healthy Wistar rats. The results showed that only HK but not M1 or M2 was found in brain. Additionally, our work indicated that M2 not HK was the major compound in liver and plasma. The elimination of HK in liver, kidney and brain, and M2 in liver and kidney was more rapid than in plasma. The finding suggested that some of the pharmacological activity of HK might be generated by M2 but not HK.