Determining precise multi-satellite orbits and geodetic parameters using satellite laser ranging (SLR) observations of spherical laser geodetic satellites is essential for high-accuracy geodetic scientific applications. Weekly multi-satellite combined solutions for satellite orbits, station coordinates and earth rotation parameters (ERPs) using SLR observations from LAGEOS, Etalon and newly launched LARES-2 satellites are achieved using a self-developed software function based on a new processing strategy. We present an in-depth accuracy analysis of the satellite orbits and geodetic parameters determined from the combined solution of LAGEOS-Etalon and LAGEOS-Etalon-LARES-2, in which the impact of two years of LARES-2 SLR observations is mainly studied. The root mean square (RMS) value of post-fit residuals is 0.81 cm for LARES-2, which is comparable to or slightly smaller than that of the LAGEOS and Etalon satellites. The statistics of the differences in overlapping orbit and external orbit comparison are performed for orbit accuracy assessment. For LAGEOS and Etalon, the results of overlapping orbit and external orbit comparison present similar conclusions. The mean of the RMS values of orbit difference for LAGEOS is about 3 cm in the three-dimensional (3D) direction, and less than 1 cm in the radial (R) direction. The mean RMS value of orbit difference for Etalon is about 15 cm in the 3D direction, and less than 3 cm in the R direction. The inclusion of LARES-2 SLR observations can slightly improve the orbit accuracy of Etalon. For LARES-2, the mean RMS values of overlapping orbit difference are 1.79 cm and 0.29 cm in the 3D and R directions, respectively, which are smaller than those for LAGEOS. Moreover, the stability and accuracy of the estimated station coordinates and ERPs are improved after adding LARES-2 SLR observations to multi-satellite combined solutions.

Kinematic Precise Orbit Determination (POD) for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites plays a pivotal role in numerous scientific and engineering missions. For the improvement of kinematic orbit precision and the enhancement of service ability of BeiDou global navigation Satellite system (BDS3), we propose a single-receiver ambiguity resolution method, which constrains the undifferenced ambiguities in kinematic POD to the fixed ambiguities from the reduced-dynamic model, and then fixes the wide-lane (WL) and narrow-lane (NL) ambiguities by the single-difference method. Based on the BDS3 observations from T2-A/B and T4-A/B satellites, the contribution of single-receiver ambiguity resolution to the BDS3-based kinematic POD is evaluated. The results indicate that the poor accuracy of Ionosphere-Free (IF) combined ambiguities, estimated directly by the BDS3-based kinematic POD, hinders ambiguity fixing. When adding the prior ambiguity constraints, the integer feature of single-difference ambiguities can be recovered and the average fixing rates of both single-difference WL and NL ambiguities, which are obtained by using the satellite phase bias products from Wuhan University (WHU) and Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES), all exceed 80%. Choosing the ambiguity-fixed reduced-dynamic orbit derived from GPS data as a reference, the three-Dimensional (3D) Root Mean Square (RMS) values of orbit comparison show that the accuracy of BDS3-based kinematic orbits is improved from 6-8 cm to 2.5-3.0 cm when ambiguities are fixed, which is as good as that of the reduced-dynamic orbits. Using the GPS-based solution estimated by the precise relative orbit determination as a benchmark, the baseline comparison demonstrates that the precision of the BDS3-based kinematic baselines is improved by over 47% when fixing ambiguities. (c) 2025 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.

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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects an estimated 1%-2% of children worldwide, but its specific etiology remains unclear. In recent years, the gut microbiome's role in ASD pathogenesis has garnered increasing attention. However, the exact relationship between microbiota and ASD-such as which microbial species significantly impact disease onset and progression-remains unresolved, and effective methods to measure microbial interactions are still lacking. In this study, we introduce an innovative stiffness network analysis (SNA) method to quantify changes in microbial network structure and identify disease-specific microbial bacteria theoretically. The SNA method was applied to reanalyze eight ASD gut microbiome data sets, encompassing 898 ASD samples and 467 healthy control (HC) samples from 16S-rRNA sequencing data. Key findings include the following: (i) an "allies" biomarker subgroup consisting of Bacteroides plebeius, Sutterella, Lachnospira, and Prevotella copri was identified; (ii) a profile monitoring score of 0.72 for the biomarker subgroup, indicating significant relationship changes between HC and ASD states, and (iii) a P/N ratio of biomarker subgroup in ASD-associated gut bacteria that was three times higher than that of HC microbiomes. Additionally, we discuss the non-monotonic relationship alterations within microbial sub-communities in the ASD gut microbiome.IMPORTANCEIt is crucial to assess alterations in network structure in different biological states in order to promote health. The stiffness network allows for the exploration of species interactions and the measurement of resilience in complex microbial networks. The objective of this study was to develop a stiffness network analysis (SNA) method for evaluating the contribution of microbial bacteria in differentiating disease samples from healthy control samples by examining changes in network stiffness parameters. Furthermore, the SNA method was employed on both simulated and real autism spectrum disorder gut microbiome data sets to identify potential microbial biomarker subgroups, with a particular focus on the relationship alterations within microbial networks.

Streptococcus agalactiae (Group B Streptococcus, GBS) has been the leading cause of infections in newborns. Rapid and accurate diagnosis of GBS in pregnant women is a deterministic strategy to prevent newborn infection. Conventional detection methods based on nucleic acid amplification assay have been applied in GBS diagnosis in central laboratories, with demonstrated high sensitivity. However, their heavy dependence on instrumentation and trained technicians forms remarkable obstacles to GBS detection in wide scenarios, including self-testing, and bedside-/community-screening. Furthermore, the structures of GBS bring about extra challenges to the nucleic acid extraction and purification. Novel GBS diagnosis platforms integrating sample processing, amplification, and read-out, are highly desired in clinical. Here, we report a portable, integrated microfluidics that enables rapid extraction of DNA from sampling swabs (<10 min), power-free DNA amplification (<30 min), and simple read-out in GBS detection. The platform works without an external pump, achieving rapid and highly efficient DNA extraction from clinical samples, with a significantly reduced time from 6 h to less than 50 min. Systematic clinical tests based on 47 patient samples validated the high performance of the platform, highlighted with a low limit of detection (LOD, 10(3) copies/ml), high sensitivity (100%), and specificity (100%). Head-tohead comparisons showed that the device improved the LOD by an order of magnitude than the traditional PCR method, showing a simple yet powerful POCT platform for home-/community-based testing towards GBS (and other pathogens) prevention in remote areas.

Background Congenital heart disease (CHDs) is the major cause of mortality from birth defects, affecting up to 1% of live births worldwide. However, the relationship between aluminum (Al) and iron (Fe) levels and the risk of CHDs has yielded inconsistent results. Methods We conducted a pair-matched case–control study that included 97 CHDs and 194 non-CHDs to investigate the association and interaction between Al/Fe exposure and the risk of CHDs in a birth cohort study in Lanzhou, China. Results Higher concentrations of cord blood Al were associated with a greater risk of total CHDs (aOR = 2.826, 95% CI [1.009–7.266]) and isolated CHDs (aOR = 10.713, 95% CI [1.017–112.851]) compared to the lowest Al level. Both in maternal blood and cord blood, a significant dose-effect was observed between Al level and total CHDs (Ptrend < 0.05), but a similar pattern was not observed for Fe. High Al in addition to high Fe appeared to elicit a stronger association with CHDs than both lowest tertile of Al and Fe level in umbilical cord blood, particularly for multiple CHDs, septal defects and patent ductus arteriosus. Conclusions Our study suggests that exposure to Al during pregnancy (≥2,408 μg/L) is significantly associated with an increased risk of CHDs in offspring, especially septal defects, and that high levels of Al and Fe are strongly correlated with fetal heart development. Further research is needed to understand the underlying mechanisms.

The existing face forgery algorithms have achieved remarkable progress in how to generate reasonable facial images and can even successfully deceive human beings. Considering public security, face forgery detection is of vital importance, making it essential to design face forgery detection algorithms to detect forgery images over the Internet. Despite the great success achieved by the existing Deepfake detection algorithms, they usually failed to achieve satisfactory Deepfake detection performance when deployed to handle the forgery videos in practice. One significant reason is compression. The videos over the Internet are inevitably compressed considering the transmission efficiency. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a generic, simple yet effective “bleaching” pre-processing module based on the generative model and the high-level feature representations to produce a bleached image, which shares a similar appearance with the compressed images. The bleached images with recovered information can be identified accurately by the optimized Deepfake detection models without retraining. The proposed method has utilized a redesigned feature representation, which serves as a navigator to effectively and sufficiently alter the feature distribution in the high-dimensional space to remedy the difference between real facial images and forgery counterparts. Thus, the proposed method can successfully avoid misclassification. Comprehensive and extensive experiments are carried out on four low-quality Faceforensics++ datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in recovering the information loss caused by the compression artifacts across various backbones and compression.

OBJECTIVE:To analyze the association between maternal dietary zinc levels at different stages and preterm birth. METHODS:The subjects were from the 2010-2012 birth cohort of Maternal and Child Health Hospital of Gansu Province, and a total of 10 179 pregnant women were included in the final study. Dietary information before and during pregnancy was collected through semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire, and daily zinc intake in each period was estimated according to the frequency of consumption and portion size of food items using the Chinese Standard Tables of Food Consumption. Logistic regression was used to analyze the OR value of preterm birth under different maternal dietary zinc levels. RESULTS:The detection rate of preterm birth was 10.0%, of which 81.8% were moderate preterm, 18.3% were very preterm, 33.2% were medically indicated preterm and 66.8% were spontaneous preterm birth. After adjusting for general conditions such as maternal age, education level, and history of preterm birth, compared with the group with the highest zinc intake before and during pregnancy, those with low zinc intake before or during pregnancy had a significantly higher risk of moderate, very, and spontaneous preterm birth. After further controlled of folic acid and fiber intake during pregnancy, compared with the group with the highest zinc intake before and during pregnancy, the risk of very preterm birth(OR=2.04, 95%CI 1.07-3.90) and spontaneous preterm birth(OR=1.38, 95%CI 1.01-1.88) was significantly increased in those with the lowest zinc intake during the third trimester. For pregnant women aged≥30 years(OR=1.55, 95%CI 1.12-2.13) and normal or less normal weight gain during pregnancy(OR=1.51, 95%CI 1.15-1.97), insufficient zinc intake was significantly associated with preterm birth. CONCLUSION:Maternal low dietary zinc intake during the third trimester was associated with very premature and spontaneous preterm birth.

Abstract Aims: The early diagnosis of kidney injury in type 2 diabetes (T2DM) is important to prevent the long-term damaging effects of kidney loss and is decisive for patient outcomes. This study was designed to investigate Sirtuin2 (SIRT2) expression and evaluate the performance of SIRT2 in T2DM patients. Methods: A total of 163 T2DM patients were divided into three groups according to their urinary albumin/creatinine ratio (UACR): normal to mildly increased (A1 group, UACR < 30 mg/g, n = 58), moderately increased (A2 group, UACR 30-300 mg/g, n = 52), and severely increased (A3 group, UACR > 300 mg/g, n = 53), with healthy individuals (NC group, n = 40) as controls. SIRT2 levels in serum and urine were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Immunoturbidimetry was employed to detect biomarkers of kidney injury such as urinary albumin, α1-microglobulin, β2-microglobulin, and retinol-binding protein. After urinary creatinine correction, they were expressed as USCR, UACR, UαCR, UβCR, and URCR, respectively. Results: We found USCR levels in the A3 group were highest than those in NC and A1 groups, and USCR levels above the median level were linked to higher levels of UACR, UαCR, UβCR, and URCR. However, no significant difference existed in serum SIRT2 level among all groups. Spearman correlation analysis revealed that USCR was positively correlated with UACR, UαCR, UβCR, and URCR and was negatively linked to eGFR. ROC curve demonstrated that USCR had high sensitivity or specificity for distinguishing glomerular and tubular injury in T2DM patients. Logistic ordered multi-classification regression analysis confirmed that USCR remained a risk factor for severity of albuminuria in T2DM patients after adjustment for confounding factors. Conclusion: Urinary SIRT2 is not only an effective indicator for glomerular and tubular injury in T2DM patients but also an important risk factor for severity of albuminuria.

Background: Identifying molecular residual disease (MRD) with tailored tumor-informed ctDNA based next-generation sequencing (NGS) assays after curative surgery could facilitate the individualized management of resected CRC patients. Here, we investigated the clinical utility of tumor-informed ctDNA mutation analysis using a novel Patient-specific pROgnostic and Potential tHErapeutic marker Tracking (PROPHET) approach for accessing MRD in resected CRC patients. Using the same set of baseline and post-operative blood samples, we compared the performance of PROPHET assay with tumor-naïve fixed panel for detecting MRD and predicting recurrence in resected CRC patients. Methods: The prospective study recruited 42 patients diagnosed with stage I-III CRC from May 2019 to Jun 2020 at the First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University. Tumor tissue samples were collected at surgery. Blood samples collected before surgery (baseline), 8-day post-operative time point before any adjuvant therapy were analyzed. The detection and quantification of ctDNA for MRD assessment was investigated using PROPHET, a personalized, tumor-informed ctDNA assay designed to track up to 50 top-ranked patient-specific somatic variants based on whole-exome sequencing (WES) of the tumor tissue and matched white blood cells (WBCs). Tumor- naïve fixed assay was performed using targeted NGS panel, containing 41 gastrointestinal cancer-related genes. Results: Baseline ctDNA status was detected in 95.23% (40/42) of the patients with PROPHET assay, and 69.05% (29/42) of the patients with fixed panel. Of 42 patients included in the analysis, 1, 25, and 16 patients had pathological stages I, II, and III CRC with baseline ctDNA detected in 100% (1/1), 92% (23/25), 100% (16/16) patients with PROPHET assay, and 100% (1/1), 64% (16/25), 75% (12/16) patients with fixed panel. Post-operative ctDNA-positive status with PROPHET assay was associated with 3-year DFS, compared with ctDNA-negative group (hazard ratio [HR], 16.57, 95% confidence interval [CI]:3.01-91.36, p=0.014). 15% (6/40) patients were identified to be MRD- positive and 83.33% (5/6) patients eventually relapsed at 3-years follow-up. Although fixed panel also showed high performance in predicting relapse HR, 4.48, 95% CI:1.9-10.9; p< 0.001, 27.5% (11/40) patients were identified to be MRD-positive and only 45.45% (5/11) patients eventually relapsed. 3-year prognostication with PROPHET assay at 8-day post-operation yielded higher positive predictive value (83.33% vs 45.45%), negative predictive value (91.18% vs 89.66%), and specificity (96.88% vs 81.25%) as compared with tumor-naïve fixed panel. Conclusion: Patient-specific PROPHET assay based on unique somatic mutation profiles detects patients with high-risk of recurrence, which achieved higher specificity than tumor-naïve fixed panel. Citation Format: Jian Zhou, Jian Yang, Zixiang Zhang, Ye Li, Bin Yi, Yuchen Tang, Dechun Li, Xiaozhe Li, Di Peng, XI Li, Yang Wang, Haiyan Li, Bing Li, Chenyang Wang, Pengfei Zhu, Longfei Chen, Shuailai Wu, Shuai Fang, Chenxi Li, Fujun Qiu, Shannon Chuai, Zhihong Zhang. Patient-specific tumor-informed circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) analysis for postoperative monitoring of patients with stages I-III colorectal cancer (CRC) [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 5917.

Objectives To investigate the independent and collective effects of maternal folic acid supplementation or dietary folate intake on the risk of low birth weight (LBW), and to further comprehensively examine the joint associations of folic acid supplementation and dietary folate intake with LBW by various clinical subtypes. Design Participants were recruited from Gansu Provincial Maternity and Child Care Hospital. A standardized and structured questionnaire was distributed to collect demographic factors, reproductive and medical history, occupational and residential history, physical activity, and diet. Data on pregnancy-related complications and birth outcomes were extracted from medical records. Unconditional logistic regression models were used to estimate the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI) for single and joint associations of folic acid supplementation and dietary folate intake with LBW. Setting A birth cohort data analysis using the 2010–2012 Gansu Provincial Maternity and Child Care Hospital in Lanzhou, China. Participants In total, 9,231 pregnant women and their children were enrolled in the study. Results Compared with non-users, folic acid supplementation was associated with a reduced risk of LBW (OR: 0.80, 95% CI: 0.66–0.97), and the reduced risk was mainly seen for term-LBW (OR: 0.59, 95% CI: 0.41–0.85), and multiparous-LBW (OR: 0.72, 95% CI: 0.54–0.94). There were no significant associations between dietary folate intake and LBW, and there was no interaction between folic acid supplement and dietary folate intake on LBW. Conclusions Our study results indicated that folic acid supplementation was associated with a reduced risk of LBW, and there was no interaction between folic acid supplements and dietary folate intake on LBW.