BACKGROUND Diabetes mellitus (DM) is associated with higher incidence and poorer prognosis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The influence of DM on patient survival in different HCC stages is not known. METHODS A prospective dataset of 3,182 HCC patients was collected between 2002 and 2014. Patients were divided into three groups according to BCLC stages (BCLC stage 0 and stage A, BCLC stage...

The heart is the first functioning organ in the embryo and provides blood flow during cardiac morphogenesis from a muscle-wrapped tube a few cells thick to the four-chambered pump. We described the hemodynamics of the chick embryo from stage 12 (50 hours of a 21-day incubation) to stage 29 (6 days), during which the embryo weight increased 120-fold. We measured ventricular, embryo and extraembr...

Stochastic optimization problems provide a means to model uncertainty in the input data where the uncertainty is modeled by a probability distribution over the possible realizations of the data. We consider the well-studied paradigm of stochastic recourse models, in which the realized input is revealed through a series of stages and one can take decisions in each stage in response to the new in...

Flow and scour around a vertical cylinder exposed to current are investigated by using a three-dimensional numerical model based on incompressible Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. The model incorporates (i) k-ω turbulence closure, (ii) vortex-shedding processes, (iii) sediment transport (both bed and suspended load), as well as (iv) bed morphology. The influence of vortex shedding and...

Cable-stayed bridges are extremely elegant and very effective structures and they are also architectural landmarks. The combination of multiple simple systems allows for a structure where the role of each of its components is well defined. When a cable-stayed bridge is chosen, the initial design phase is of utmost importance. The characteristics of the structure and whether if it is mainly cons...

Problems with understanding concepts, so called misconceptions, have been investigated and reported in a number of studies regarding object-oriented programming [4], [3]. In a first programming course using an object-oriented language, it is of great importance that students get a good understanding of central concepts like object and class at an early stage of their education. We have, with a ...

Most works on open quantum systems generally focus on the reduced physical system by tracing out the environment degrees of freedom. Here we show that the qubit distributions with the environment are essential for a thorough analysis, and demonstrate that the way that quantum correlations are distributed in a quantum register is constrained by the way in which each subsystem gets correlated wit...

We explored how character order information is encoded in isolated word processing or Chinese sentence reading in 2 experiments using a masked priming paradigm and a gaze-contingent display-change paradigm. The results showed that response latencies in the lexical decision task and reading times on the target word region were longer in the unrelated condition (the prime or the preview was unrel...

We apply a model-independent, agnostic approach to the collider phenomenology of supersymmetry, in which all mass parameters are taken as free inputs at the weak scale. We consider the gauginos, Higgsinos, and the first two generations of sleptons and squarks, and analyze all possible mass hierarchies among them (4×8!=161,280 in total) in which the lightest superpartner is neutral, leading to m...