The double-branching rate reflects the particular structure of pairwise selection interactions of the coupled Wright-Fisher diffusion. Moreover, in the special case of two loci, two alleles, with selection and parent independent mutation, the stationary density for the coupled Wright-Fisher diffusion and the transition rates of the dual process are obtained in an explicit form.Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) leads to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a worldwide epidemic disease affecting increasing number of patients. Although the virus primarily targets respiratory system, cardiovascular involvement has been reported in accumulating studies. In this review, we first describe the cardiac disorders in human with various types of CoV infection, and in animals infected with coronavirus. Particularly, we will focus on the association of cardiovascular disorders upon SARS-CoV-2 infection, and prognostic cardiac biomarkers in COVID-19. Besides, we will discuss the possible mechanisms underlying cardiac injury resulted from SARS-CoV-2 infection including direct myocardial injury caused by viral infection, reduced level of ACE2, and inflammatory response during infection. Improved understandings of cardiac disorders associated with COVID-19 might predict clinical outcome and provide insights into more rational treatment responses in clinical practice.The sliding motion along the boundaries of discontinuous regions has been actively studied in B-spline free-form deformation framework. This study focusses on the sliding motion for a velocity field-based 3D+t registration. The discontinuity of the tangent direction guides the deformation of the object region, and a separate control of two regions provides a better registration accuracy. The sliding motion under the velocity field-based transformation is conducted under the [Formula see text]-Rényi entropy estimator using a minimum spanning tree (MST) topology. Moreover, a new topology changing method of the MST is proposed. The topology change is performed as follows inserting random noise, constructing the MST, and removing random noise while preserving a local connection consistency of the MST. This random noise process (RNP) prevents the [Formula see text]-Rényi entropy-based registration from degrading in sliding motion, because the RNP creates a small disturbance around special locations. Experiments were performed using two publicly available datasets the DIR-Lab dataset, which consists of 4D pulmonary computed tomography (CT) images, and a benchmarking framework dataset for cardiac 3D ultrasound. For the 4D pulmonary CT images, RNP produced a significantly improved result for the original MST with sliding motion (p less then 0.05). For the cardiac 3D ultrasound dataset, only a discontinuity-based registration indicated activity of the RNP. In contrast, the single MST without sliding motion did not show any improvement. These experiments proved the effectiveness of the RNP for sliding motion.Automatic computerized segmentation of fetal head from ultrasound images and head circumference (HC) biometric measurement is still challenging, due to the inherent characteristics of fetal ultrasound images at different semesters of pregnancy. In this paper, we proposed a new deep learning method for automatic fetal ultrasound image segmentation and HC biometry deeply supervised attention-gated (DAG) V-Net, which incorporated the attention mechanism and deep supervision strategy into V-Net models. In addition, multi-scale loss function was introduced for deep supervision. The training set of the HC18 Challenge was expanded with data augmentation to train the DAG V-Net deep learning models. The trained models were used to automatically segment fetal head from two-dimensional ultrasound images, followed by morphological processing, edge detection, and ellipse fitting. The fitted ellipses were then used for HC biometric measurement. The proposed DAG V-Net method was evaluated on the testing set of HC18 (n = 355), in terms of four performance indices Dice similarity coefficient (DSC), Hausdorff distance (HD), HC difference (DF), and HC absolute difference (ADF). Experimental results showed that DAG V-Net had a DSC of 97.93%, a DF of 0.09 ± 2.45 mm, an AD of 1.77 ± 1.69 mm, and an HD of 1.29 ± 0.79 mm. The proposed DAG V-Net method ranks fifth among the participants in the HC18 Challenge. By incorporating the attention mechanism and deep supervision, the proposed method yielded better segmentation performance than conventional U-Net and V-Net methods.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/hydroxychloroquine-sulfate.html  Compared with published state-of-the-art methods, the proposed DAG V-Net had better or comparable segmentation performance. The proposed DAG V-Net may be used as a new method for fetal ultrasound image segmentation and HC biometry. The code of DAG V-Net will be made available publicly on https//github.com/xiaojinmao-code/ .This study compared the temporal and geographic trends of cancer in China with a specific focus on the long-term exposure to soil cadmium (Cd) pollution. The geographic information system (GIS; kriging interpolation method) was used to detect the Cd contained in the soil from the Dabaoshan area, Guangdong Province. The standard rate ratio (SRR) was calculated to describe the relationship between Cd exposure and cancer mortality risk using the low-exposure group as a reference. Eight hundred six cancer deaths (533 male and 273 female) in the total population of 972,970 were identified, and the age-standardized rate (world) was 145.64 per 100,000. Significant dose-response relationships were found using the low-exposure group as the reference group. The Cd soil levels were positively associated with the cancer mortality risk in the community population, particularly for all cancers (SRR = 3.27; 95% CI = 2.42-4.55), esophageal cancer (SRR = 5.42; 95% CI = 1.07-30.56), stomach cancer (SRR = 5.99; 95% CI = 2.00-18.66), liver cancer (SRR = 4.45; 95% CI = 2.16-10.34), and lung cancer (SRR = 2.86; 95% CI = 1.62-5.31) for the total population. Additionally, similar results were obtained when using the 2000 China standard population. Cd exposure significantly affected the standardized mortality rates (China) by age group for all cancers, esophageal cancer, stomach cancer, liver cancer, and lung cancer in the total population, particularly in the age groups of 35-54, 55-74, and ≥ 75 years, respectively. Cd soil level is likely positively associated with increased cancer mortality of all cancer types and esophageal, stomach, liver, and lung cancers but not for other specific categories of cancer.