General point clouds have been increasingly investigated for different tasks, and recently Transformerbased networks are proposed for point cloud analysis. However, there are barely related works for medical point clouds, which are important for disease detection and treatment. In this work, we propose an attention-based model specifically for medical point clouds, namely 3D medical point Transformer (3DMedPT), to examine the complex biological structures. By augmenting contextual information and summarizing local responses at query, our attention module can capture both local context and global content feature interactions. However, the insufficient training samples of medical data may lead to poor feature learning, so we apply position embeddings to learn accurate local geometry and Multi-Graph Reasoning (MGR) to examine global knowledge propagation over channel graphs to enrich feature representations. Experiments conducted on IntrA dataset proves the superiority of 3DMedPT, where we achieve the best classification and segmentation results. Furthermore, the promising generalization ability of our method is validated on general 3D point cloud benchmarks: ModelNet40 and ShapeNetPart. Code 1 is released.

This study aims to analyze the expression level and correlation of miR-182-5p and its target gene PAPPA in coronary atherosclerosis (CAD).Real time PCR, ELISA, and Western blotting methods were used to detect the expression levels. Dualluciferase reporter gene assays were used to analyze the interaction between the 3'-UTR of PAPPA and miR-182-5p.The expression level of miR-182-5p in CAD was significantly lower than that in normal population, while the content of serum PAPPA was significantly increased, and the expression level of miR-182-5p was negatively correlated with the PAPPA content. The expression level of miR-182-5p decreased, while the expression level of PAPPA increased significantly in the ox-LDL treated HA-VSMC cells. Researchers found that PAPPA could promote the activation of IGF signaling pathway in HA-VSMC cells treated by ox-LDL, further activate NF-kB, PI3K/AKT and ERK signaling pathway, and promote cell proliferation. However, miR-182-5p could inhibit the expression of PAPPA, block the activation of IGF signal pathway, and inhibit the proliferation of HA-VSMC cells induced by ox-LDL. miR-182-5p had a targeted action site in the 3'-UTR of PAPPA by bioinformatics prediction. The analysis of luciferase reporter gene further confirmed that miR-182-5p could target the 3'-UTR of PAPPA to inhibit its expression.miR-182-5p demonstrated a protective effect on atherosclerosis and may be a potential therapeutic target for atherosclerosis.

The present work investigates the influence of Ni content on the microstructure evolution of Al 0.5 CoCrFeNi x high-entropy alloys followed by the study on their corrosion behavior in acid and alkaline solutions, respectively. The microscopic characterization demonstrates that the transformation from a BCC single-phase to a triple-phase (BCC + FCC + B2) structure occurs with the increase of Ni content. The corrosion behavior of Al 0.5 CoCrFeNi x high-entropy alloys was evaluated by electrochemical measurements coupled with morphology analysis. It is found that the corrosion on Al 0.5 CoCrFeNi 0 high-entropy alloy in both acid and alkaline media

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Background The diverse manifestations of tuberculosis (TB) in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients can cause difficulty in diagnosis, delayed treatment, even death. Therefore, this study investigated the clinical characteristics and the risk factors for mortality in CKD patients with TB. Methods This retrospective study included 167 patients diagnosed with active TB at two tertiary medical centers in Chongqing within six years. Clinical characteristics and outcomes of anti-TB treatment in patients with and without CKD were collected, and the predictive mortality values of variables were analyzed. Results Of the 167 patients, 66.7% (44/66) hemodialysis (HD), 41.1% (21/51) pre-HD, and 32.0% (16/50) non-CKD patients had extrapulmonary TB. The pleura and lymph node were the common sites in CKD patients. Clinical presentations of cough and hemoptysis in CKD patients were less common than those in non-CKD patients, 13.7% (16/117) of CKD patients even not having any clinical symptoms. The positive rates of tuberculin skin test, TB-polymerase chain reaction and acid-fast bacilli in sputum in HD patients were lower than those in pre-HD and non-CKD patients ( p <0.05). CKD patients were more prone to gastrointestinal and neurological side effects during anti-TB treatment. The mortality rates of non-CKD, pre-HD and HD patients was 6.1%, 31.9% and 37.3%, respectively. Multivariate Cox analysis revealed that age≥40 years (HR: 5.871; p =0.019), hypoalbuminemia (HR:2.879; p =0.004), CKD stage 4–5 (HR:4.719; p =0.018) and HD (HR:6.13; p =0.005) were associated with mortality. Discussion CKD patients with TB have atypical clinical manifestations and high mortality. Age, hypoalbuminemia, CKD stage 4–5, and HD were independent predictors of mortality.