Efficacy and safety of sirolimus early conversion protocol in liver transplant patients with hepatocellular carcinoma:A single-arm, multicenter, prospective study

Mammalian target of rapamycin(m TOR) inhibitor as an attractive drug target with promising antitumor effects has been widely investigated. High quality clinical trial has been conducted in liver transplant(LT) recipients in Western countries. However, the pertinent studies in Eastern world are paucity. Therefore, we designed a clinical trial to test whether sirolimus can improve recurrence-free survival(RFS) in hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC) patients beyond the Milan criteria after LT. This is an open-labeled, single-arm, prospective, multicenter, and real-world study aiming to evaluate the clinical outcomes of early switch to sirolimus-based regimens in HCC patients after LT. Patients with a histologically proven HCC and beyond the Milan criteria will be enrolled. The initial immunosuppressant regimens are center-specifc for the frst 4-6 weeks. The following regimens integrated sirolimus into the regimens as a combination therapy with reduced calcineurin inhibitors based on the condition of patients and centers. The study is planned for 4 years in total with a 2-year enrollment period and a 2-year follow-up. We predict that sirolimus conversion regimen will provide survival benefts for patients particular in the key indicator RFS as well as better quality of life. If the trial is conducted successfully, we will have a continued monitoring over a longer follow-up time to estimate indicator of overall survival. We hope that the outcome will provide better evidence for clinical decision-making and revising treatment guidelines based on Chinese population data.

Effects of supercritical CO_(2) on viscoelastic properties of shales

Laboratory uniaxial compression creep tests,with differential stress of 30 MPa hold for 3 h,were performed on Chang-7,Longmaxi(LMX)and Barnett shales to study the influence of SC-CO_(2)on short-term viscoelastic properties.To this end,the wet shale samples were treated with SC-CO_(2)with a pressure of30 MPa and a temperature of 110℃for 14 days.We analyzed the creep data using the fractional Maxwell model.To investigate microscopic structural alterations,the surface morphology of the same location,before and after SC-CO_(2)-water exposure,was examined by SEM images.Compared with dry shales,dynamic and static elastic moduli decreased by up to 25.02%and 55.83%,respectively,but the creep deformation increased by 200%for LMX and Chang-7 shales,and 500%for the Barnett shale treated by SC-CO_(2).Compared to dry sample,there is an increase in calculated fractional orders of 0.02,0.07,0.22 for SC-CO_(2)treated samples,indicating that SC-CO_(2)treatment is likely to enhance shale creep.SEM investigation confirmed physicochemical mechanisms responsible for the observed elastic damage and creep enhancement,including mineral dissolution and swelling caused by SC-CO_(2).This work would further improve our current understanding of the time-dependent deformation of shale under chemicalmechanical coupling effects during CO_(2)capture utilization and storage.

RCAnalyzer:visual analytics of rare categories in dynamic networks

A dynamic network refers to a graph structure whose nodes and/or links dynamically change over time.Existing visualization and analysis techniques focus mainly on summarizing and revealing the primary evolution patterns of the network structure.Little work focuses on detecting anomalous changing patterns in the dynamic network,the rare occurrence of which could damage the development of the entire structure.In this study,we introduce the first visual analysis system RCAnalyzer designed for detecting rare changes of sub-structures in a dynamic network.The proposed system employs a rare category detection algorithm to identify anomalous changing structures and visualize them in the context to help oracles examine the analysis results and label the data.In particular,a novel visualization is introduced,which represents the snapshots of a dynamic network in a series of connected triangular matrices.Hierarchical clustering and optimal tree cut are performed on each matrix to illustrate the detected rare change of nodes and links in the context of their surrounding structures.We evaluate our technique via a case study and a user study.The evaluation results verify the effectiveness of our system.

Structure, Electronic, and Mechanical Properties of Three Fully Hydrogenation h-BN:Theoretical Investigations

The structural, electronic, elastic, mechanical properties and stress-strain relationship of chair, boat, and stirrup conformers of fully hydrogenated h-BN(fh-BN) are investigated in this work using the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof(PBE) function in the frame of density functional theory. The achieved results for the lattice parameters and band gaps of three conformers in this research are in good accordance with other theoretical results. The band structures of three conformers show that the chair, boat, and stirrup are direct band gap with a band gaps of(3.12, 4.95, and4.95 e V), respectively. To regulate the band structures of fh-BN, we employ a hybrid functional of Heyd-ScuseriaErnzerhof(HSE06) calculations and the band gaps are 3.84(chair), 6.12(boat), and 6.18 e V(stirrup), respectively.The boat and stirrup fh-BN exhibits varying degrees of mechanical anisotropic properties with respect to the Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio, while the chair fh-BN exhibits the mechanical isotropic properties. Furthermore, tensile strains are applied in the armchair and zigzag directions related to tensile deformation of zigzag and armchair nanotubes,respectively. We find that the ultimate strains in zigzag and armchair deformations in stirrup conformer are 0.34 and0.25, respectively, larger than the strains of zigzag(0.29) and armchair(0.18) deformations in h-BN although h-BN can surstain a surface tension up to the maximum stresses higher than those of three conformers of fh-BN. Furthermore, the band gap energies in three conformers can be modulated effectively with the biaxial tensile strain.