Surgery in the COVID-19 pandemic: clinical characteristics and outcomesEditor COVID-19 disease (SARS-Cov-2 virus) has gripped the world for the last few months. We describe our clinical experience of surgically treating patients with COVID-19 at Wuhan Union Hospital in China, from 1 February to 5 April 2020. In total, 28 surgical patients with confirmed COVID-19 had surgery a median (interquartile range (i.q.r)) 2⋅5 (1⋅0 to 10⋅5) days after admission, with a median (i.q.r.) duration of surgery of 120⋅0 (60⋅0 to 180⋅0) min. Four patients had general anaesthesia and were transferred to the ICU postoperatively, 21 underwent spinal anaesthesia and three had local anaesthetic alone. Preoperative laboratory results (white cell and neutrophil count, D-dimers, prothrombin time, international normalized ratio and alanine aminotransferase) were significantly higher in the patients who underwent general compared with spinal anaesthesia (by more than 10 per cent; P < 0⋅05). One patient died, but no surgeons were infected with COVID-19 during the operations. Mortality in this study was 3⋅57 per cent, similar to others 1,2 . A recent report 3 encouraged minimal use of general anaesthesia in

The vibration signal of a bearing is closely related to its fault. The quality of the features extracted from the signal has a great impact on the accuracy of fault diagnosis. In this paper, a new method combining multi-scale autoencoder and generative adversarial network is proposed to extract the depth-sensitive features of the signal, and unite with the classifier for fault diagnosis. The autoencoder is used as the generator (i.e., the generator is composed of encoder and decoder), and the idea of confrontation and reconstruction is used for training. The better the training of the generator, the better the training of the encoder, which means that the extracted feature of the encoder (the output of the encoder) is better. Then take these features as new inputs, send them to the classifier for classification, and finally get the fault type. This method solves the problems of weak representation and over-reliance on professional knowledge of the traditional method for bearing fault diagnosis. Meanwhile, compared with most existing neural network models for fault diagnosis, it has higher accuracy， especially in difficult diagnosis tasks. To further verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, a bearing test rig is established, and the collected data are used for fault diagnosis to prove the superiority of the proposed method.

ABSTRACT. The temporal and spatial patterns of Smad and Yesassociated protein 1 (YAP1) expression were investigated in skeletal muscle (gastrocnemius muscle and extensor digitorum longus) at different growth stages (2 days old, 2 and 6 months old) in Hu sheep. Smads were differentially expressed in sheep skeletal muscle, with high expression in the gastrocnemius muscle and lower expression in the extensor digitorum longus. Expression of Smad2, Smad3, and Smad4 at the 2-day-old stage was significantly higher than at other stages (P < 0.05). The expression of Smad7 in 2-day-old sheep was lower than in 6-month-old sheep, with the lowest levels at 2 months. Smad expression was higher in males than in females at the 2-dayold stage, and expression in 2-and 6-month-old males was lower than that in 2-day-old females. Smad3 expression was higher in the 2-day-and 2-month-old males than in the females. There was a positive correlation (P < 0.01) between YAP1 and Smad2 expression in gastrocnemius muscle at the 2-month-old stage. YAP1 and Smad4/7 expression were positively correlated (P < 0.01) in extensor digitorum longus at the 2-day-old stage. YAP1 expression was negatively correlated with Smad7 in the extensor digitorum longus at 6 months. A significant difference between Smad2 and Smad3 (P < 0.01) expression in muscle was observed, consistent with Smad3 and Smad4 expression, indicating that these inhibit transforming growth factor-β signaling in the same way. There was a positive correlation (P < 0.01) between YAP1 and MSTN expression, suggesting that YAP1 participates in muscle growth in sheep.

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This paper describes our efforts in proposing a novel mechanism for the formation of the major degradant of clobetasol propionate under weakly acidic conditions through a comprehensive investigation. In the proposed mechanism, the key Favorskii intermediate plays a critical role. This variation of the original Favorskii rearrangement, which proceeds only under alkaline conditions, has not been reported before. This mechanism enriches the understanding of the degradation chemistry of corticosteroids containing the α-haloketone moiety on their 17-position.