Plasmonics offer an exciting way to mediate the interaction between light and matter, allowing strong field enhancement and confinement, large absorption and scattering at resonance. However, simultaneous realization of ultra-narrow band perfect absorption and electromagnetic field enhancement is challenging due to the intrinsic high optical losses and radiative damping in metals. Here, we propose an all-metal plasmonic absorber with an absorption bandwidth less than 8 nm and polarization insensitive absorptivity exceeding 99%. Unlike traditional Metal-Dielectric-Metal configurations, we demonstrate that the narrowband perfect absorption and field enhancement are ascribed to the vertical gap plasmonic mode in the deep subwavelength scale, which has a high quality factor of 120 and mode volume of about 10−4 × (λres/n)3. Based on the coupled mode theory, we verify that the diluted field enhancement is proportional to the absorption, and thus perfect absorption is critical to maximum field enhancement. In addition, the proposed perfect absorber can be operated as a refractive index sensor with a sensitivity of 885 nm/RIU and figure of merit as high as 110. It provides a new design strategy for narrow band perfect absorption and local field enhancement, and has potential applications in biosensors, filters and nonlinear optics.

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This study investigated the tongue function and donor-site morbidity of patients with malignant tumors who had undergone immediate flap reconstruction surgery. Twenty-seven patients who had undergone immediate reconstruction after hemiglossectomy were observed. Twelve patients were reconstructed using the pedicled supraclavicular artery island flap (PSAIF) and 15 patients using the free radial forearm flap (FRFF). Flap survival, speech and swallowing function, and donor-site morbidity at the 6-month follow-up were evaluated. All the flaps were successfully transferred. No obvious complications were found in either the transferred flaps or donor regions. Age, sex, defect extent, speech and swallowing function were comparable between the 2 groups. Donor-site complications were less frequent with PSAIF reconstruction than FRFF reconstruction. The PSAIF is reliable and well suited for hemiglossectomy defect. It has few significant complications, and allows preservation of oral function.

IntroductionHead and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) represents approximately 6% of all cancers and about 500 000 cases are diagnosed every year.1 Over the past 20 years, diagnosis and management of HNSCC have improved through combined efforts in surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, but the overall 5-y survival rate for patients is still only 40-50%. 2 The high rate of recurrence of HSNCC and its significant metastatic potential after conventional therapy appear to be major contributing factors for restricted survival of HNSCC patients.3 Therefore, understanding the molecular cancer pathways of underlying HNSCC metastasis would help to improve the therapy of the disease.Discoidin domain receptor 2 (DDR2) is a receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) that can be activated by fibrillar collagens, 4-6 and implicated in several cancer cell behaviors, including VEGF expression, tumor angiogenesis, invasion, and metastasis. [7][8][9] Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are an important subset of downstream target genes of DDR2 signaling. 10,11 EMT plays an important role in the metastasis of HNSCC by facilitating primary tumor invasion through the basement membrane and migration through the tumor-associated stroma or extracellular matrix (ECM).12-14 It has been reported that DDR2 is a critical regulator of EMT.15 Though previous studies have investigated the function of DDR2 in some common tumors, there has not been functional characterization of the potential role of DDR2 in HNSCC. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to investigate this issue. Results DDR2 is highly expressed in high-grade HNSCCIn order to explore the role of DDR2 in HNSCC, we first compared its expression levels in non-cancerous and cancer tissues. The results of real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) showed that the mRNA expression level of DDR2 was much higher in all the tumor tissues than in their normal counterparts, and Keywords: DDR2, HNSCC, tumor metastasis, EMT, hypoxiaBackground: Discoidin domain receptor 2 (DDR2) is a unique receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) that is activated by fibrillar collagens. although DDR2 contributes to the metastasis of some tumors, its role in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (hNsCC) remains unknown. The aim of this study was to investigate the expression level, clinical and pathological significance, and biologic function of DDR2 in hNsCC.Methods: Real-time quantitative PCR, western blot, and immunohistochemical staining were employed to assess the expression levels of DDR2 in hNsCC specimens. adenovirus-mediated overexpression of DDR2 was used to evaluate its consequences on cell proliferation, invasion, migration, and the process of hypoxia-induced epithelial-mesenchymal transition (eMT). Then nude mouse xenograft and tail vein metastasis models were utilized to validate the in vitro results.Results: DDR2 was highly expressed in high grade hNsCC tissues and lowly expressed in low grade hNsCC tissues, but absent or rarely expressed in cancer-associated normal tissues. Both the frequency and expression intensit...

Short-term load forecasting is an important task for the planning and reliable operation of power grids. High-accuracy forecasting for individual customers helps to make arrangements for generation and reduce electricity costs. Artificial intelligent methods have been applied to short-term load forecasting in past research, but most did not consider electricity use characteristics, efficiency, and more influential factors. In this paper, a method for short-term load forecasting with multi-source data using gated recurrent unit neural networks is proposed. The load data of customers are preprocessed by clustering to reduce the interference of electricity use characteristics. The environmental factors including date, weather and temperature are quantified to extend the input of the whole network so that multi-source information is considered. Gated recurrent unit neural networks are used for extracting temporal features with simpler architecture and less convergence time in the hidden layers. The detailed results of the real-world experiments are shown by the forecasting curve and mean absolute percentage error to prove the availability and superiority of the proposed method compared to the current forecasting methods.

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Salivary adenoid cystic carcinoma (SACC) is a common type of salivary gland cancer. The poor long-term prognosis of patients with SACC is primarily due to local recurrence, distant metastasis and perineural invasion. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been identified as important post-transcriptional regulators, which are involved in various biological processes. The aim of the present study was to identify the miRNA expression profiles that are involved in the metastatic progression of SACC. Therefore, microarray technology was employed to identify miRNA expression profiles in an SACC cell line, ACC-2, and a highly metastatic SACC cell line, ACC-M, which was screened from ACC-2 by a combination of in vivo selection and cloning in vitro. Differences in miRNA expression were assessed by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assay. In addition, the potential target genes that are regulated by selected miRNAs were analyzed by various target prediction tools. The microarray data revealed that the levels of 38 miRNAs significantly differed between the ACC-M cells and the control ACC-2 cells. Six miRNAs (miR-4487, -4430, -486-3p, -5191, -3131 and -211-3p) were selected to validate the microarray data via qPCR. The expression of two miRNAs (miR-4487 and -4430) was significantly upregulated in the ACC-M cells, while the expression of two other miRNAs (miR-5191 and -3131) was significantly downregulated in the ACC-M cells. The potential target genes that were identified to be controlled by the six selected miRNAs were divided into four groups according to function, as follows: Apoptosis and proliferation (46 genes), cell cycle (30 genes), DNA damage and repair (24 genes) and signaling pathway (30 genes). The identification of microRNA expression profiles in highly metastatic SACC cells may provide an improved understanding of the mechanisms involved in metastatic progression, which would aid in the development of novel strategies for the treatment of SACC.