Objective This study aims to explore the indicators for severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) in young patients between the ages of 18 and 40 years. Methods This retrospective cohort study included 65 consecutively admitted patients with COVID‐19 who were between 18 and 40 years old in Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University in Wuhan, China. Among them, 53 were moderate cases, and 12 were severe or critical cases. Epidemiological, clinical, and laboratory characteristics and treatment data were collected. A multivariate logistic regression analysis was implemented to explore risk factors. Results The patients with severe/critical cases had obviously higher BMI (average 29.23 vs. 22.79 kg/m2) and lower liver computed tomography value (average 50.00 vs. 65.00 mU) than the group of moderate cases. The patients with severe/critical cases had higher fasting glucose, alanine aminotransferase, aspartate aminotransferase, and creatinine compared with patients with moderate cases (all P < 0.01). More severe/critical cases (58.33% vs. 1.92%) had positive urine protein levels. The severe/critical cases also experienced a significant process of serum albumin decline. Logistic regression analysis showed that male sex, high BMI (especially obesity), elevated fasting blood glucose, and urinary protein positivity were all risk factors for young patients with severe COVID‐19. Conclusions Obesity is an important predictor of COVID‐19 severity in young patients. The main mechanism is related to damage of the liver and kidney.

Metasurfaces have shown great potential to reshape the wavefront of electromagnetic (EM) waves, but transmissive meta-devices face challenges of low-efficiency and/or fabrication complexities. Here, an alternative approach to realize high-efficiency transmission-mode meta-devices to control EM wavefronts, based on hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM) waveguides supporting tailored spoof surface plasmons (SSPs) on their side walls, is proposed. By manipulating the dispersions of SSPs through adjusting the HMM geometrical parameters, the phases of EM waves passing through such waveguides, which enables the design of meta-devices with desired transmission-phase profiles for particular wave-manipulation applications, can be controlled. Microwave experiments are implemented to demonstrate two wave-control effects based on the mechanism, that is, beam-deflection and focusing, and a maximum conversion efficiency of 42.9% is achieved for the anomalous refracted beam. By scaling down the HMM meta-devices, the proposal herein is applicable to optical frequencies and in principle promises significantly raised conversion efficiencies. The scheme herein can offer a higher effective refractive index and more tunable dispersion without using high-index dielectric materials, and thus can serve as an effective and robust approach to make high-efficiency transmissive meta-devices with diversified functionalities.approach to the extreme control of EM waves, leading to a variety of intriguing phenomena and applications that are unattainable with natural materials such as negative refraction, [4] super-resolution imaging, [5] and invisibility cloaking. [6] As the 2D equivalent of metamaterials, metasurfaces have shown great promises to control EM waves by locally modulating the phase, amplitude and/or polarization of the scattered field. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13] Distinct from traditional photonic devices (e.g., lenses) that rely on propagation phases accumulated inside the device to shape the wavefront, metasurfaces utilize the interfacial phase discontinuities introduced by subwavelength-sized planar resonators to locally control the amplitude and phase of scattered waves and thus to reshape the wavefront of EM waves. Many fascinating wave-manipulation effects were discovered based on metasurfaces, such as light bending, [7,11,13] unidirectional surface plasmon coupling, [8,14] invisibility cloaks, [6,15] flat lenses, [9,16] holography, [17,18] and generation of vortex beam. [7,19] Transmissive metasurfaces are particularly useful in practice, but the working efficiencies of single-layer plasmonic metasurfaces are typically low. For example, a single-layer Pancharatnam-Berry (PB) metasurface, working for circularly polarized (CP) light, cannot exhibit an efficiency higher than 25%, due to

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Quantitative DTI at 3.0T MRI shows a significant association with GS in the evaluation of tumor aggressiveness in peripheral zone PCa, which may be useful to ensure concordance of biopsy results and therefore make the appropriate decision in the management of patients with PCa.

G e nit ou r i n a r y I m ag i ng • O r ig i n a l Re s e a rc h AJR 2015; 205:70-76 0361-803X/15/2051-70 OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this prospective study was to assess the clinical utility of generalized autocalibrating partial parallel acquisition (GRAPPA)-accelerated readoutsegmented echo-planar imaging (rs-EPI) DWI and compare it with standard single-shot EPI ( ss-EPI) DWI in visualization of the prostate during 3-T MRI.SUBJECTS AND METHODS. One hundred sixteen consecutively registered patients (mean age, 63.5 years; range 24-93 years) underwent 3-T MRI that included rs-EPI DWI and standard ss-EPI DWI with identical FOVs, slices, acceleration factors, b values, and image postprocessing procedure. The datasets were independently evaluated by two blinded radiologists. Images were evaluated for sharpness, anatomic distortion, imaging contrast, lesion conspicuity, detailed anatomic visualization, and overall image quality on a 5-point Likert scale (1, nondiagnostic; 5, excellent).RESULTS. The kappa values were 0.73 for image sharpness, 0.71 for anatomic distortion, 0.54 for imaging contrast, 0.56 for lesion conspicuity, 0.61 for detailed anatomic visualization, and 0.63 for overall image quality (all p < 0.05), indicating moderate to substantial agreement between the two observers. The mean Likert scores for standard ss-EPI and rs-EPI were as follows: image sharpness, 2.9 and 4.6; distortion level, 2.8 and 4.4; contrast, 3.1 and 3.8; lesion conspicuity, 3.0 and 4.0; structure, 3.1 and 4.2; and overall image quality, 3.1 and 4.2. The rs-EPI DWI sequence was associated with significantly better image quality and fewer susceptibility artifacts than was ss-EPI (all p < 0.05). The rs-EPI sequence was considered better overall in 90% of cases.CONCLUSION. The technique of rs-EPI DWI combined with GRAPPA enables robust prostate imaging with high image quality and may provide great benefit in routine clinical practice. Li et al. DWI of Prostate Genitourinary Imaging Original Research Downloaded from www.ajronline.org by NYU Langone Med Ctr-Sch of Med on 07/02/15 from IP address 128.122.253.228. Copyright ARRS. For personal use only; all rights reserved AJR:205, July 2015

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Persistent high-risk HPV infection is the main cause of cervical cancer. The HPV oncogene E7 plays an important role in HPV carcinogenesis. Currently, HPV vaccines do not offer an effective treatment for women who already present with cervical disease, and recommended periodical cervical screenings are difficult to perform in countries and areas lacking medical resources. Our aim was to develop nanoparticles (NPs) based on poly (β-amino ester) (PBAE) and HPV16 E7-targeting CRISPR/short hairpin RNA (shRNA) to reduce the levels of HPV16 E7 as a preliminary form of a drug to treat HPV infection and its related cervical malignancy. Our NPs showed low toxicity in cells and mouse organs. By reducing the expression of HPV16 E7, our NPs could inhibit the growth of cervical cancer cells and xenograft tumors in nude mice, and they could reverse the malignant cervical epithelium phenotype in HPV16 transgenic mice. The performance of NPs containing shRNA is better than that of NPs containing CRISPR. HPV-targeting NPs consisting of PBAE and CRISPR/shRNA could potentially be developed as drugs to treat HPV infection and HPV-related cervical malignancy.