Cytotoxic chemotherapy is commonly used to treat advanced Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC). However, its efficacy in distant metastatic MCC patients is unclear, in part because most prior reports aggregated these patients with those receiving adjuvant chemotherapy and combined chemoradiation for whom prognosis and outcomes may differ. In this retrospective study, we analyzed detailed records from 62 patients with distant metastatic MCC treated with cytotoxic chemotherapy. Efficacy outcomes including response rate (RR), durability of response (DOR), progression‐free survival (PFS), and overall survival (OS) were evaluated. In this cohort, platinum plus etoposide was the most commonly used first‐line regimen (69%). RR to first‐line chemotherapy was 55% (34/62) with complete responses (CR) in 13% (8/62) and partial responses (PR) in 42% (26/62) while 6% (4/62) had stable disease and 39% (24/62) had progressive disease. Median PFS was 94 days and median OS was 9.5 months from start of chemotherapy. Among responding patients (n = 34), median PFS was 168 days and median DOR was 85 days. Among 30 of the 62 patients who received second‐line chemotherapy, RR was 23% (7/30; 1 CR, 6 PR), median PFS was 61 days, and median DOR was 101 days. In summary, first‐line chemotherapy is associated with a high RR in metastatic MCC, but responses are typically not durable, and the median PFS is only 3 months. These results suggest rapid emergence of chemoresistance in MCC tumors, and may serve as a useful comparator for immunotherapies currently being explored for metastatic MCC.

CO 2 /CH 4 in our samples ACB-2 and 5 have been measured at 298 and 348 K and different compositions, corresponding to the pre-and postcombustion conditions for CO 2 capture. The Dual-Site Langmuir-Freundlich (DSLF) model-based ideal-adsorbed solution theory (IAST) was also used to solve the selectivity of CO 2 over N 2 and CH 4 . The selectivities of ACBs for CO 2 /CH 4 are in the range of 2-2.5, while they remain in the range of 6.0-8.0 for CO 2 /N 2 at T ¼ 298 K. In summary, this work presents a new type of adsorbent-ACBs, which are not only good candidates for CO 2 and CH 4 storage but also for the capture of carbon dioxide in pre-and postcombustion processes. *S BET is the BET surface area and S Langmuir is the Langmuir surface area. V t , V DA , and V meso are the total pore volume, micro-pore volume, and meso-pore volume, respectively.

The postures of wheelchair users can reveal their sitting habit, mood, and even predict health risks such as pressure ulcers or lower back pain. Mining the hidden information of the postures can reveal their wellness and general health conditions. In this paper, a cushion-based posture recognition system is used to process pressure sensor signals for the detection of user’s posture in the wheelchair. The proposed posture detection method is composed of three main steps: data level classification for posture detection, backward selection of sensor configuration, and recognition results compared with previous literature. Five supervised classification techniques—Decision Tree (J48), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Naive Bayes, and k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN)—are compared in terms of classification accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measure. Results indicate that the J48 classifier provides the highest accuracy compared to other techniques. The backward selection method was used to determine the best sensor deployment configuration of the wheelchair. Several kinds of pressure sensor deployments are compared and our new method of deployment is shown to better detect postures of the wheelchair users. Performance analysis also took into account the Body Mass Index (BMI), useful for evaluating the robustness of the method across individual physical differences. Results show that our proposed sensor deployment is effective, achieving 99.47% posture recognition accuracy. Our proposed method is very competitive for posture recognition and robust in comparison with other former research. Accurate posture detection represents a fundamental basic block to develop several applications, including fatigue estimation and activity level assessment.

Photocatalytic water splitting is a promising method which uses the sunlight to directly generate hydrogen from water in meeting the requirement of energy consumption. Inspired by the experimental realization of...