Stage IV malignant transformation of mature cystic teratoma palliatively treated with concurrent chemoradiotherapy:A case report

BACKGROUND Malignant transformation(MT)of mature cystic teratoma(MCT)has a poor prognosis,especially in advanced cases.Concurrent chemoradiotherapy(CCRT)has an inhibitory effect on MT.CASE SUMMARY Herein,we present a case in which CCRT had a reduction effect preoperatively.A 73-year-old woman with pyelonephritis was referred to our hospital.Computed tomography revealed right hydronephrosis and a 6-cm pelvic mass.Endoscopic ultrasound-guided fine-needle biopsy(EUS-FNB)revealed squamous cell carci-noma.The patient was diagnosed with MT of MCT.Due to her poor general con-dition and renal malfunction,we selected CCRT,expecting fewer adverse effects.After CCRT,her performance status improved,and the tumor size was reduced;surgery was performed.Five months postoperatively,the patient developed dis-semination and lymph node metastases.Palliative chemotherapy was ineffective.She died 18 months after treatment initiation.CONCLUSION EUS-FNB was useful in the diagnosis of MT of MCT;CCRT suppressed the disea-se and improved quality of life.

Nested Transaction Concurrency Control in Parallel Real-Time Dat-abases

An integrated method for concurrency control in parallel real-time databases has been proposed in this paper. The nested transaction model has been investigated to offer more atomic execution units and finer grained control within in a transaction. Based on the classical nested locking protocol and the speculative concurrency control approach, a two-shadow adaptive concurrency control protocol, which combines the Sacrifice based Optimistic Concurrency Control (OPT-Sacrifice) and High Priority two-phase locking (HP2PL) algorithms together to support both optimistic and pessimistic shadow of each sub-transaction, has been proposed to increase the likelihood of successful timely commitment and to avoid unnecessary replication overload.

An Efficient Secure Real-Time Concurrency Control Protocol

Secure real-time databases must simultaneously satisfy two requirements in guaranteeing data security and minimizing the missing deadlines ratio of transactions. However, these two requirements can conflict with each other and achieve one requirement is to sacrifice the other. This paper presents a secure real-time concurrency control protocol based on optimistic method. The concurrency control protocol incorporates security constraints in a real-time optimistic concurrency control protocol and makes a suitable tradeoff between security and real-time requirements by introducing secure influence factor and real-time influence factor. The experimental results show the concurrency control protocol achieves data security without degrading real-time perform ance significantly.

The Prevalence of Sexual Partner Concurrency Is Not Correlated with Markers of Poverty or Gender Inequality: An Ecological Analysis

High rates of overlapping sexual relationships (concurrency) are believed to be important in the generation of generalized HIV epidemics in sub-Saharan Africa. Different authors favor socioeconomic, gender-equity or cultural explanations for the high concurrency rates in this region. We performed linear regression to analyze the association between the point-prevalence of concurrency in 15 - 49 years old males and various indicators of socioeconomic status and gender-equity using data from 11 countries surveyed in 1989/1990. We found no meaningful association between concurrency and the various markers of socioeconomic status and gender-equity. This analysis supports the findings of other studies that high concurrency rates in sub-Saharan Africa could be reduced without having to address socioeconomic and gender-equity factors.

Validation concurrency control protocol in parallel real-time database systems

In parallel real-time database systems, concurrency control protocols must satisfy time constraints as well as the integrity constraints. The authors present a validation concurrency control(VCC) protocol, which can enhance the performance of real-time concurrency control mechanism by reducing the number of transactions that might miss their deadlines, and compare the performance of validation concurrency control protocol with that of HP2PL(High priority two phase locking) protocol and OCC-TI-WAIT-50(Optimistic concurrency control-time interval-wait-50) protocol under shared-disk architecture by simulation. The simulation results reveal that the protocol the author presented can effectively reduce the number of transactions restarting which might miss their deadlines and performs better than HP2PL and OCC-TI-WAIT-50. It works well when arrival rate of transaction is lesser than threshold. However, due to resource contention the percentage of missing deadline increases sharply when arrival rate is greater than the threshold.

Concurrency: a system design approach to environmental manag-ement and sustainability

The lessons of history indicate that mismanagement of natural resources and the environment often leads to potentially adverse consequences. The increasing interest in economic development, particularly in the developing countries of the world coupled with increasing population pressures and the globalization of economic activity is placing noticeable stresses on the ultimate sustainability of both human and environmental systems. Sustainable development is not a new concept. It has been an area of concern for different elements of society for some time. Yet efforts to understand the implications of sustainable development have not, until recently, been formalized. We have focused singularly on economic development and environmental quality as if they were mutually exclusive. This paper focuses on the concept of concurrency as both a conceptual framework and practicable method of understanding and implementing the ecology and economy of sustainability.

Study on Agent Based Methods for Concurrency Control in CSCW

Concurrency control is a critical technology and one of the problems in CSCW systems. With the development of agent based technology, it has also been applied to research and development of CSCW systems. An Agent based method for concurrency control in CSCW is explored in this paper. This new way is achieved by making use of the thoughts of AOP (Agent Oriented Programming) to improve traditional locking method, on the basis of researching characteristics and functional requirements of concurrency control in CSCW, and analyzing various usually used concurrency control methods. All amendments to locking method are done on the basis of the analysis of limitations brought by locking. In this paper, a new algorithm supporting queue of locking request for Agent based concurrency control is also presented. All above aspects are discussed in some detail in this paper.

Weak Serializable Concurrency Control in Distributed Real-Time Database Systems

Most of the proposed concurrency control protocols for real time database systems are based on serializability theorem. Owing to the unique characteristics of real time database applications and the importance of satisfying the timing constraints of transactions, serializability is too strong as a correctness criterion and not suitable for real time databases in most cases. On the other hand, relaxed serializability including epsilon serializability and similarity serializability can allow more real time transactions to satisfy their timing constraints, but database consistency may be sacrificed to some extent. We thus propose the use of weak serializability(WSR) that is more relaxed than conflicting serializability while database consistency is maintained. In this paper, we first formally define the new notion of correctness called weak serializability. After the necessary and sufficient conditions for weak serializability are shown, corresponding concurrency control protocol WDHP(weak serializable distributed high priority protocol) is outlined for distributed real time databases, where a new lock mode called mask lock mode is proposed for simplifying the condition of global consistency. Finally, through a series of simulation studies, it is shown that using the new concurrency control protocol the performance of distributed real time databases can be greatly improved.

The Prevalence of Syphilis Is Associated with the Prevalence of Male Point-Concurrency: An Ecological Analysis

Objective: The prevalence of syphilis differs considerably between different populations and indi-vidual level risk factors such as number of sex partners seem unable to completely explain these differences. The effect of network level factors, such as the prevalence of partner concurrency, on syphilis prevalence has not hitherto been investigated. Study design: Linear regression was per-formed to assess the relationship between the prevalence of male concurrency and prevalence of syphilis in each of 11 countries for which we could obtain comparable data. The data for concur-rency prevalence was taken from the WHO/Global Programme on AIDS (GPA) sexual behavioural surveys. Syphilis prevalence rates were obtained from antenatal syphilis serology surveys done in the same countries. In addition, we used linear regression to assess if there was a relationship between syphilis and concurrency prevalence of various racial and ethnic groups within the United States and South Africa. Results: In the international study, we found a strong relationship between the prevalence of male concurrency and syphilis prevalence (r = 0.79, P = 0.003). In the subnational studies, the relationship between concurrency and syphilis prevalence was positive in all cases but was only statistically significant so in the case of South Africa’s racial groups (r = 0.98, P = 0.01). Conclusions: The findings of an ecological-level association between syphilis and partner concurrency need to be replicated but suggest that efforts directed towards decreasing partner concurrency may reduce syphilis prevalence.

Anthropogenic Influence on Decadal Changes in Concurrent Hot and Dry Events over China around the Mid-1990s

The frequency and duration of observed concurrent hot and dry events(HDEs) over China during the growing season(April–September) exhibit significant decadal changes across the mid-1990s. These changes are characterized by increases in HDE frequency and duration over most of China, with relatively large increases over southeastern China(SEC), northern China(NC), and northeastern China(NEC). The frequency of HDEs averaged over China in the present day(PD,1994–2011) is double that in the early period(EP, 1964–81);the duration of HDEs increases by 60%. Climate experiments with the Met Office Unified Model(MetUM-GOML2) are used to estimate the contributions of anthropogenic forcing to HDE decadal changes over China. Anthropogenic forcing changes can explain 60%–70% of the observed decadal changes,suggesting an important anthropogenic influence on HDE changes over China across the mid-1990s. Single-forcing experiments indicate that the increase in greenhouse gas(GHG) concentrations dominates the simulated decadal changes,increasing the frequency and duration of HDEs throughout China. The change in anthropogenic aerosol(AA) emissions significantly decreases the frequency and duration of HDEs over SEC and NC, but the magnitude of the decrease is much smaller than the increase induced by GHGs. The changes in HDEs in response to anthropogenic forcing are mainly due to the response of climatological mean surface air temperatures. The contributions from changes in variability and changes in climatological mean soil moisture and evapotranspiration are relatively small. The physical processes associated with the response of HDEs to GHG and AA changes are also revealed.

Remaining Time Prediction for Business Processes with Concurrency Based on Log Representation

Remaining time prediction of business processes plays an important role in resource scheduling and plan making.The structural features of single process instance and the concurrent running of multiple process instances are the main factors that affect the accuracy of the remaining time prediction.Existing prediction methods does not take full advantage of these two aspects into consideration.To address this issue,a new prediction method based on trace representation is proposed.More specifically,we first associate the prefix set generated by the event log to different states of the transition system,and encode the structural features of the prefixes in the state.Then,an annotation containing the feature representation for the prefix and the corresponding remaining time are added to each state to obtain an extended transition system.Next,states in the extended transition system are partitioned by the different lengths of the states,which considers concurrency among multiple process instances.Finally,the long short-term memory(LSTM)deep recurrent neural networks are applied to each partition for predicting the remaining time of new running instances.By extensive experimental evaluation using synthetic event logs and reallife event logs,we show that the proposed method outperforms existing baseline methods.

Similarity based mixed transaction concurrency control protocol

Due to the various performance requirements and data access restrictions of different types of real-time transactions, concurrency control protocols which had been designed for the systems with single type of transactions are not sufficient for mixed real-time database systems (MRTDBS), where different types of real-time transactions coexist in the systems concurrently. In this paper, a new concurrency control protocol MRTT_CC for mixed real-time transactions is proposed. The new strategy integrates with different concurrency control protocols to meet the deadline requirements of different types of real-time transactions. The data similarity concept is also explored in the new protocol to reduce the blocking time of soft real-time transactions, which increases their chances to meet the deadlines. Simulation experiments show that the new protocol has gained good performance.

Quasi serializable concurrency control in mobile broadcast environments

The problem of maintaining data consistency in mobile broadcast environments is researched. Quasi serializability is formally defined and analyzed at first. It was shown that quasi serializability is less stringent than serializability when database consistency is maintained for transactions. Then, corresponding concurrency control protocol that supports both update transactions and read-only transactions is outlined for mobile broadcast environments. Finally, the simulation results confirmed that the proposed protocol could improve the response time significantly.

Weak Serializable Concurrency Control in Real-time Broadcast Environments

Given the asymmetric communication capabilities in mobile real-time environments, traditional serializability-based approaches are too restrictive, unnecessary, and impractical. The new notion of correctness called weak serializability is given. After the necessary and sufficient conditions for weak serializability are shown, corresponding concurrency control protocol based on this criterion is outlined for real-time broadcast environments. The simulation results confirmed that the proposed techniques help mobile transactions to meet their deadlines and improve query response time.

Quasi Serializable Concurrency Control in Distributed Real-Time Database Systems

This paper formally defines and analyses the new notion of correctness called quasi serializability, and then outlines corresponding concurrency control protocol QDHP for distributed real-time databases. Finally, through a series of simulation studies, it shows that using the new concurrency control protocol the performance of distributed real-time databases can be much improved.

Survival benefit of concurrent chemoradiotherapy for advanced ampulla of Vater cancer

BACKGROUND Currently,there is no standard adjuvant therapy for patients with resected ampulla of Vater(AoV)cancer.AIM To evaluate the effectiveness of adjuvant concurrent chemoradiotherapy(CCRT)in patients with advanced AoV cancer who underwent curative resection.METHODS This single-centered,retrospective study included 29 patients with advanced AoV cancer who underwent pancreaticoduodenectomy between 2006 and 2018.The impact of CCRT on advanced AoV cancer was analyzed.RESULTS The 1-,3-,and 5-yr recurrence-free survival(RFS)rates for patients with advanced AoV cancer were 82.8%,48.3%,and 40.8%,respectively,and the overall survival(OS)rates were 89.7%,62.1%,and 51.7%,respectively.Lymphovas-cular invasion was found to be a significant risk factor for RFS and OS in patients with advanced AoV cancer in the univariate analysis,whereas T stage and lymph node metastasis were significantly associated with OS in the multivariate analysis.Compared to the patients who did not receive adjuvant CCRT,those who received adjuvant CCRT did not show statistically significant improvements in the RFS and OS,although they had a significantly lower average age and significantly higher platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio.CONCLUSION Adjuvant CCRT did not improve survival outcomes in patients with advanced AoV cancer.These findings contribute to existing knowledge on the effectiveness of CCRT in this patient population and provide important insights for clinical decision-making.

基于k-体分划的D-concurrence多体纠缠测度

对于有限维多体量子系统中的态,D-concurrence是一个重要的纠缠测度,在过去的十年中被深入探索。将D-concurrence的概念推广到k-体分划的多体量子系统,它可以度量多体量子态在k-体分划下的非经典纠缠性,并证明了纠缠测度的一些必要性质,包括在k-可分态下纠缠测度为0,在局部酉操作下不变,在局部操作和经典通信(LOCC)下不增。

Programmed cell death 1 inhibitor sintilimab plus concurrent chemoradiotherapy for locally advanced pancreatic adenocarcinoma

BACKGROUND Pancreatic adenocarcinoma,a malignancy that arises in the cells of the pancreas,is a devastating disease with unclear etiology and often poor prognosis.Locally advanced pancreatic cancer,a stage where the tumor has grown significantly but has not yet spread to distant organs,presents unique challenges in treatment.This article aims to discuss the current strategies,challenges,and future directions in the management of locally advanced pancreatic adenocarcinoma(LAPC).AIM To investigate the feasibility and efficacy of programmed cell death 1(PD-1)inhibitor sintilimab plus concurrent chemoradiotherapy for LAPC.METHODS Eligible patients had LAPC,an Eastern cooperative oncology group performance status of 0 or 1,adequate organ and marrow functions,and no prior anticancer therapy.In the observation group,participants received intravenous sintilimab 200 mg once every 3 wk,and received concurrent chemoradiotherapy(concurrent conventional fractionated radiotherapy with doses planning target volume 50.4 Gy and gross tumor volume 60 Gy in 28 fractions and oral S-140 mg/m2 twice daily on days 1-14 of a 21-d cycle and intravenous gemcitabine 1000 mg/m2 on days 1 and 8 of a 21-d cycle for eight cycles until disease progression,death,or unacceptable toxicity).In the control group,participants only received concurrent chemoradiotherapy.From April 2020 to November 2021,64 participants were finally enrolled with 34 in the observation group and 30 in the control group.RESULTS Thirty-four patients completed the scheduled course of chemoradiotherapy,while 32(94.1%)received sintilimab plus concurrent chemoradiotherapy with 2 patients discontinuing sintilimab in the observation group.Thirty patients completed the scheduled course of chemoradiotherapy in the control group.Based on the Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors guidelines,the analysis of the observation group revealed that a partial response was observed in 11 patients(32.4%),stable disease was evident in 19 patients(55.9%),and 4 patients(11.8%)experienced progressive disease;a partial response was observed in 6(20.0%)patients,stable disease in 18(60%),and progressive disease in 6(20%)in the control group.The major toxic effects were leukopenia and nausea.The incidence of severe adverse events(AEs)(grade 3 or 4)was 26.5%(9/34)in the observation group and 23.3%(7/30)in the control group.There were no treatment-related deaths.The observation group demonstrated a significantly longer median overall survival(22.1 mo compared to 15.8 mo)(P<0.05)and progression-free survival(12.2 mo vs 10.1 mo)(P<0.05)in comparison to the control group.The occurrence of severe AEs did not exhibit a statistically significant difference between the observation group and the control group(P>0.05).CONCLUSION Sintilimab plus concurrent chemoradiotherapy was effective and safe for LAPC patients,and warrants further investigation.

A solution for concurrency control and long transaction management in SDBMS

The problem of long transactions is a significant problem in spatial database. The checkout mechanism and multi version mechanism are two kind methods of solving the problem of long transactions. In this paper, we present a Shallow Version Management mechanism to realize multi version mechanism in spatial database. And we introduced a increment storage and dynamic version views building method to improve efficiency of storing and consulting. We also illuminate how to resolve the problem of long transaction concurrency control in spatial database by using multi version mechanism. At the end of this paper, we introduce some required means to version management in spatial database, like converge, compress and delete.

一种基于Concurrent Apla语言的共享内存并发分布式算法2层验证方法

形式化验证共享内存并发分布式算法已成为当前极具挑战性的问题之一,尤其是在云计算、多核、无线传感器网络、分布式数据库、区块链环境下.该文基于研究团队在形式化规约语言和方法、算法形式推导和验证方面的已有工作,以自定义泛型抽象顺序设计语言Apla为基础,进一步研究并提出简明、高抽象用于并发分布式计算的Concurrent Apla语言,使其既支持顺序算法的验证又能有效地验证并发分布式算法.在依赖-卫式推理的基础上,提出一种新颖的2层并发分布式算法形式化验证方法,其中系统层用于处理并发级验证,而组件层用于处理顺序级验证.最后,通过2个实例验证了该方法的有效性和可行性.