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Type 1 diabetes mellitus is a lifelong disease with very high morbidity, and its medical expenses are also very alarming. It not only seriously threatens the health of patients, but also brings heavy financial burden to their families. It is necessary to seek effective and low-cost diabetes treatment therapies. Currently, the existing artificial pancreas (AP) systems emphasize only on the blood glucose (BG) control performance. This paper attempts to reduce both the economic cost and the computational burden while guaranteeing the control performance in a bi-hormonal AP system. Since economic model predictive control (EMPC) could improve the economic profit and event-triggered control could save computational resources, they are integrated and then the integrated method is applied to the bi-hormonal AP. The proposed method achieves the desired objective: 1) it guarantees the control performance, i.e., BG is maintained within 70-180mg/dL, and the average tracking error and BG risk index are small enough (21.23 and 1.59); 2) it significantly reduces the economic cost, where the total price of the hormone is reduced by 67.15% compared with the switching PID and 56.22% compared with the switching MPC; and 3) it substantially improves the computational efficiency, where the running time is reduced by 51.14% compared with the switching EMPC. It also performs well in robustness tests. Future studies will involve the clinical evaluation of the proposed scheme. INDEX TERMS Economic model predictive control, event-triggered control, artificial pancreas, economic cost, computational efficiency.

A high specific speed centrifugal pump is used in the situation of large flow and low head. Centrifugal pump parameters need to be optimized in order to raise its head and efficiency under off-design conditions. In this study, the orthogonal experiment design method is adopted to optimize the performance of centrifugal pump basing on three parameters, namely, blade outlet width b2, blade outlet angle β2 and blade wrap angle φ. First, the three-dimensional model of the centrifugal pump is established by CFturbo and SolidWorks. Then nine different schemes are designed by using orthogonal table, and numerical simulation is carried out in CFX15.0. The final optimized combination of parameters is b2 = 24 mm, β2 = 24°, φ = 112°. Under the design condition, the head and efficiency of the optimized centrifugal pump are appropriately improved, the increments of which are 0.74 m and 0.48%, respectively. However, the efficiency considerably increases at high flow rates, with an increase of 6.9% at 1.5 Qd. The anti-cavitation performance of the optimized centrifugal pump is also better than the original pump. The results in this paper can provide references for parameter selection (b2, β2, φ) in the centrifugal pump design.

Breast-conserving surgery (BCS) is the standard of care for early breast cancer patients, while the high ratio of reoperation is still a challenge due to inaccurate margin assessments. In patients with locally advanced or advanced breast cancer, radiotherapy is an important treatment for local control or improvement of quality of life. However, enhancing sensitization to radiotherapy is an unmet medical need. To solve the above clinical predicaments, a glutathione (GSH) exhausting virus-like silicon dioxide nanoprobe with Gd coating and folic acid (FA) modification is designed. After loading ICG in the mesopores, the VGd@ICG-FA probe efficiently targets tumor cells with high resolution, due to its virus-like morphology and folate acid anchoring. Especially, the fabricated nanoprobe enables the identification of tiny cancers and navigates precise surgery under NIR-II fluorescence imaging. Moreover, after the nanoprobes enter into the cytoplasm of cancer cells, tetrasulfide linkages in the silica framework are broken under the triggering of high GSH concentrations. In turn, the broken framework exhausts GSH to disrupt intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) homeostasis, and Gd produces more ROS under radiotherapy, further activating ferroptosis, and resulting in the enhancement of radiotherapy in breast cancer. Therefore, our nanoprobe exhibits tremendous potential as a NIR-II fluorescence imaging agent with no systematic side effects for precise cancer surgery and nanotherapeutics for boosting radiation sensitivity in future clinical translation of breast cancer.