Follow-up study of gallbladder stones in 44 children.

BACKGROUND: Cholesterol stones affect a certain subpopulation of children. Concerns have been raised on the impact of gallbladder surgery on the growth of children and adolescents. AIM: To study the population characteristics, clinical features, treatment, and prognosis of gallstones in children. METHODS: The clinical data of 44 children with gallstones admitted to The First Affiliated Hospital of Naval Medical University from August 2009 to August 2021 were collected, the children were followed up by telephone to monitor their prognoses. The follow-up ended in August 2023. The shortest follow-up time was 2 years and 6 months, whereas the longest was 13 years and 11 months. The population characteristics, general clinical characteristics, and treatments were retrospectively analyzed. The children were divided according to whether they underwent surgical gallbladder removal into an operation group (n = 28) and a non-operation group (n = 16), The effects of surgical gallbladder resection on the growth and development of children were analyzed. RESULTS: The male-female ratio in the population was 6:5 and 84.09% of the children had onset in adolescence. Furthermore, 29.55% of the children were overweight or obese. The study identified 26 cases with metabolic abnormalities, 9 with hemolytic anemia, and 4 with choledochal cyst. Of the population, 68.18% had recurrent symptomatic cholecystolithiasis. Surgical treatment accounted for 63.64%, with laparoscopic cholecystectomy accounting for 71.43% of surgical treatment. No significant differences were observed in symptoms and complications between the surgery and non-surgery groups. Furthermore, no significant differences were found between the two groups in the attainment of genetic height target and the rightward shift of height curve during follow-up. CONCLUSION: The sex characteristics of gallstones in children were not observed. Most gallstones occurred in adolescents and rarely in young children. A considerable proportion of children have inborn causes, which are often concurrent with metabolic abnormalities and hemolytic anemia. Most children had recurrent symptomatic gallstones. Surgical treatment, especially laparoscopic cholecystectomy, is still the main treatment for gallstones in children. Surgical treatment did not affect the growth and development of children who underwent gallstone removal.

Advances in pixel driving technology for micro-LED displays.

Micro-LED displays have been recognized as the next-generation display technology. This review focuses on the pixel-driving technology of micro-LED displays. The performance of pixel driving on micro-LED displays is discussed in terms of brightness uniformity, driving speed, grayscale, and frame rate under various driving architectures. Since the memristors possess characteristics similar to those of biological synaptic neurons due to the ion migration mechanism, the neural network approach which combines the memristor arrays with the pixel driving circuit of micro-LEDs could promote the development of smart and efficient displays.

CircSLC8A1 Exacerbates Hypoxia-Induced Myocardial Injury via Interacting with MiR-214-5p to Upregulate TEAD1 Expression.

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) act as important regulators in myocardial infarction (MI). This study aimed to explore the regulatory mechanism of circRNA solute carrier family 8 member A1 antisense RNA 1 (circSLC8A1) in hypoxia-induced myocardial injury.Exosomes were isolated by ultracentrifugation and identified by microscopic observation or protein detection. Protein levels were examined by Western blot. CircSLC8A1, microRNA-214-5p (miR-214-5p), and TEA domain transcription factor 1 (TEAD1) levels were determined via quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Cell viability and apoptosis were analyzed by 3-(4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-y1)-2,5-diphenyl tetrazolium bromide (MTT) and flow cytometry, respectively. Inflammatory cytokines were measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Oxidative stress was assessed by reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, malondialdehyde (MDA) level, and superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity through the corresponding detection kits. Target analysis was performed by dual-luciferase reporter assay, RNA immunoprecipitation (RIP) assay, and pull-down assay.Exosomes released circSLC8A1 from hypoxic cardiomyocytes. Exosomal circSLC8A1 exacerbated hypoxia-induced repression of cell viability but promotion of cell apoptosis, inflammation, and oxidative stress. Knockdown of circSLC8A1 ameliorated hypoxia-mediated cell injury. CircSLC8A1 directly targeted miR-214-5p and miR-214-5p downregulation reverted the effects of si-circSLC8A1 on hypoxia-treated cardiomyocytes. TEAD1 was a target of miR-214-5p and circSLC8A1 upregulated TEAD1 level via targeting miR-214-5p. In addition, miR-214-5p inhibited hypoxia-caused cell injury by downregulating the expression of TEAD1.These results suggested that circSLC8A1 aggravated cell damages in hypoxia-treated cardiomyocytes by the regulation of TEAD1 via sponging miR-214-5p.

A Hierarchical Blockchain-Assisted Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks.

Through information sharing, vehicles can know the surrounding road condition information timely in Vehicular Adhoc Networks. To ensure the validity of these messages and the security of vehicles, the message authentication, privacy-preserving, and delay problems are three important issues. Although many conditional privacy-preserving authentication schemes have been proposed to ensure secure communication, there still exist some imperfections such as frequent interactions or unlinkability. From this, our paper proposes a novel hierarchical blockchain-assisted authentication scheme to solve these existing issues comprehensively. First, unlinkability is achieved by a dynamic key derivation algorithm. Second, the proposed scheme can reduce correlation processing delay, queuing delay, and deployment costs by adopting hierarchical Vehicle Fog Computing. Third, cross-region authentication is achieved by taking advantage of the properties of blockchain. In addition, we demonstrate our scheme can fulfill the security criteria of the Vehicular Adhoc Network by security analysis. Furthermore, the simulations are carried out to show its availability by using JAVA and NS-3. The findings reveal that the suggested method outperforms earlier schemes in terms of computation cost and communication cost. All in all, making the authentication scheme more efficient and concise is the focus of our future research.

Interactions between alloy elements and oxygen at the steel-liquid LBE interface determined from first-principles molecular dynamics simulations.

Lead bismuth eutectic (LBE) alloy shows high potential for application in advanced nuclear systems such as lead-alloy-cooled fast reactors. However, high-temperature LBE liquid is prone to corrode the reference containment material, typically made of steel, through a process known as liquid metal corrosion. In this work, an extensive set of first-principles calculations was performed to investigate the diffusion behavior of steel alloy elements and O in liquid LBE. The results showed Bi atoms diffusing a little bit faster than Pb atoms, and the Ni atoms in steel being most likely to dissolve into the LBE. Compared to Cr atoms, Fe atoms were calculated to diffuse more slowly, and Ni atoms more rapidly. In the presence of Al and/or Si, Al-O and Si-O pairs were calculated to be more stable than Fe-O/Cr-O pairs and to be inclined to form protective stable Al/Si related oxides. The Ni-O distance and pair formation energy in LBE indicated the Ni-O pair to be inclined to decompose over a period of time. We expect these data to be used as indispensable information for understanding the dissolution and oxidation corrosion behavior of steels in liquid LBE.