Abstract:Objective: We aim to describe the environment iodine concentration in salt, water and soil along Zhejiang Province coast in the China foreland. It will be helpful for us to judge whether this area is insufficient in iodine and universal iodized salt is necessary or not. Methods: We collected iodized salt samples, drinking water samples (tap water in the towns, and well water or spring water in the villages), water samples from different sources (ditches, lakes, rivers) and soil samples through random sampling in June, 2005. Salt, water and soil iodine was detected by arsenic-cerium redox method. Statistical analysis was expressed as mean±SEM by Windows SPSS 13.0. Results: (1) The iodine concentration in salt was 27.9±4.33 mg/kg (n=108). (2) Seventy-five water samples were collected. The water iodine value was 0.6~84.8 µg/L (mean of 11.66 µg/L). The watershed along the Qiantang River has significantly higher iodine content than the water in Lin'an in mountain area (P<0.01). The iodine content and mean iodine content of tap water, well or spring water and natural water sources were 4.30±2.43 µg/L (n=34), 23.59±27.74 µg/L (n=19) and 12.72±10.72 µg/L (n=22) respectively. This indicated that among environmental water sources, the ditch iodine content was the highest with river water iodine being the lowest (P<0.01). (3) Soil iodine value was 0.11~2.93 mg/kg (mean of 1.32 mg/kg). Though there was no statistical difference of soil iodine in different districts (P=0.131), soil iodine content correlated positively with water iodine content. Conclusion: Iodine concentration in salt accords with national policy of adding iodine in salt. Foreland has more iodine in water than mountain area. The data reflected that water and soil iodine in foreland area was not high, which suggests universal iodized salt should be necessary. Environment iodine has relatively close association with pollution.

Coronary angioplasty and stents implantation are widely used surgical techniques for restoring blood flow to the coronary arteries; it is done by mechanically widening the narrowed or blocked segments of the artery to alleviate myocardial ischemia. Although the use of bare metal stents (BMS) in most procedures of myocardial revascularization were effective in reversing acute vessel closures, whilst lowering risks of coronary complications, at the same time, stenting procedures were frequently plagued with neointimal hyperplasia and in-stent restenosis 1 post-surgery, as a result of excessive vascular healing in response to stent-related injuries. More recently, drug-eluting stents (DES) were introduced as a safer, more effective alternative to BMS, with statistically superior performance and

Background: Cardiac amyloidosis has poor prognosis, high mortality and is often misdiagnosed as hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, leading to delayed diagnosis. Objective: Machine learning combined speckle tracking echocardiography was proposed to automate differentiating two conditions.Methods: A total of 74 patients with pathologically confirmed cardiac amyloidosis and 64 patients of hypertrophic cardiomyopathy were enrolled from June 2015 to November 2018. Machine learning models utilizing traditional and advanced algorithms were established and determined the most significant predictors. The performance was evaluated by receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC) and area under the curve (AUC). Results: With clinical and echocardiography data, all models showed great discriminative performance (AUC > 0.9). Compared with logistic regression (AUC=0.91), machine learning such as support vector machine (AUC=0.95, P=0.477), random forest (AUC= 0.97, P=0.301) and gradient boosting machine (AUC= 0.98, P=0.230) demonstrated varying degrees of improvement of predicting cardiac amyloidosis. With speckle tracking echocardiography, the predictive performance of the voting model was similar to that of LightGBM (AUC were 0.86 for both), while the AUC of XGBoost was slightly lower (AUC=0.84). In 5-fold cross validation, the voting model was more robust globally and superior to the single model in some test sets. Conclusions: Data-driven machine learning had shown admirable performance in differentiating two conditions and could automatically integrate abundant variables to identify the most discriminating predictors without making preassumptions. In the era of big data, automated machine learning will help to better identify patients with cardiac amyloidosis, and to timely and effectively intervene, thus improving the outcome.