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Accumulating evidence suggests that hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is organized by liver cancer stem cells (LCSCs), which are a subset of cells with “stem-like” characteristics. Identification of the LCSCs is a fundamental and important problem in HCC research. LCSCs have been investigated by various stem cell biomarkers. There is still lack of consensus regarding the existence of a “global” marker for LCSCs in HCC. In this review article, we summarize the progress and prospects of putative biomarkers for LCSCs in the past decades, which is essential to develop future therapies targeting CSCs and to predict prognosis and curative effect of these therapies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensuring the synchronization of backscattered Raman light and improving the sampling rate are of great importance to improve the spatial resolution of a distributed Raman temperature measurement system. To keep the synchronization of the Anti-Stokes and Stokes light and improve the sampling rate, four effective methods are proposed in this paper. First, the asynchrony caused by the difference in the hardware is eliminated by attaching a fiber to the pigtail of APD, which detects the earlier arriving signal. Next, the data acquisition card chooses different sampling rates for the Anti-Stokes and Stokes light according to the velocity of propagation. Then, a new algorithm is adopted to decrease the difference in the fiber position between the Anti-Stokes and Stokes signals. Finally, the optical switch with different length of pigtails is applied to improve the sampling rate without upgrading the hardware of data acquisition card. By theoretical analysis and experimental simulation, the proposed measures in this paper can improve the spatial resolution effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Pearlitic transformation in an ultrafine-grained (UFG) hypereutectoid steel was investigated. The steel was a plain carbon steel containing 1.0 wt% C and very few other elements. The UFG samples were prepared by thermomechanical treatment, and an average grain size of approximately 1 μm was achieved. The pearlitic transformation was conducted by heating the UFG samples at 1023 K for different times and then cooling in air. A new pearlitic transformation phenomenon was observed: traditional lamellar pearlite can be observed only when the grain size increases to a dimension larger than approximately 4 μm, which is a critical value. When grain size is smaller than this value, the pearlitic transformation occurs in the form of divorced eutectoid, and the microstructure is the ferrite matrix with granular cementite. This research indicates that grain size has a great influence on pearlitic transformation by shortening the diffusion distance and increasing the diffusion rate of carbon atoms in the UFG steel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]