Search

Myopia can impact an individual's quality of life and induce multiple complications. In this study, we randomly divided guinea pigs into the normal control (NC) group, the lens-induced myopia (LIM) group, the normal control plus l-arginine injection (l-Arg) group, and the normal control plus saline injection (NaCl) group. The animals in each group received the relevant treatments. The results showed that myopia was deeper in the LIM and l-Arg groups compared with the NC and NaCl groups. Our experimental results suggest that the excessive supplement of l-Arg will induce myopia onset and a MEK-ERK cascade that stimulates the downstream nNOS-MMP2 and NRF2-KEAP1 signaling pathways, which is accompanied by inflammatory responses, fibrosis changes, and oxidative stress. After receiving excessive arginine supplements, the experimental individuals showed myopic shifts and a similar pathological state as the LIM group. In conclusion, the supplement of excessive arginine may be a danger factor for myopia onset.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the effect of quercetin (QUE) on scleral remodeling by inhibiting the PERK-EIF2α signaling pathway and to evaluate its potential role in slowing myopia., Methods: Lens-induced myopia (LIM) guinea pigs were obtained and treated with QUE. After 4 and 6 weeks of treatments, ocular biological measurements were conducted. Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining was used to observe the changes in scleral morphology and thickness, and Masson staining was used to examine scleral collagen fiber arrangement. Quantitative PCR (qPCR) and Western bolt were utilized to detect the mRNA and protein expression of PERK, EIF2α, MMP-2, TIMP-2, and collagen I in the scleral tissues. Calcium ion flow in each group was measured using noninvasive micro-test technology, and reactive oxygen species levels were detected by flow cytometry., Results: Compared with the LIM group, the ocular measurements showed that the refractive errors and axial length of the eyes were significantly reduced in the LIM + QUE group (P < 0.01). H&E and Masson staining showed that sclera in the LIM + QUE group was thickened, collagen was dense, and the fiber gap was reduced. In the LIM + QUE group, the expression levels of PERK, EIF2α, and MMP-2 were decreased, whereas the expression levels of TIMP-2 and collagen I were increased. Calcium release and reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the LIM + QUE group were decreased., Conclusions: Quercetin ameliorates scleral remodeling in myopic guinea pigs by inhibiting the PERK-EIF2α signaling pathway, thereby alleviating the progression of myopia. These findings provide new experimental evidence for the potential application of quercetin in myopia prevention and treatment.

This study aimed to establish a complete atlas of retinal cells in lens-induced myopia (LIM) and electroacupuncture (EA) intervention by single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and to explore the potential mechanism of EA in improving experimental myopia progression in guinea pigs. scRNA-seq is used to assess changes in individual cellular gene levels in the retina of LIM- and EA-treated guinea pigs. In addition, the role of EA in slowing myopia progression by improving retinal mitochondrial function is further investigated. scRNA-seq identified ten cell clusters in the retina of LIM and EA guinea pigs and mitochondrial respiratory chain-related genes in Cones and Muller-glia cells-Cytochrome oxidase subunit III (COX3), NADH dehydrogenase subunit 4 (ND4), and NADH dehydrogenase subunit 2 (ND2) are closely related to lens-induced myopia. A comprehensive atlas in the retina of LIM and EA guinea pigs at a single-cell level is established, and the positive role of EA in improving retinal mitochondrial function to slow the experimental myopia progression in guinea pigs is revealed., (© 2024 Wiley‐VCH GmbH.)

The occurrence and development of ophthalmic diseases are related to the dysfunction of eye tissues. Ubiquitin is an important form of protein post-translational modification, which plays an essential role in the occurrence and development of diseases through specific modification of target proteins. Ubiquitination governs a variety of intracellular signal transduction processes, including proteasome degradation, DNA damage repair, and cell cycle progression. Studies have found that ubiquitin can play a role in eye diseases such as cataracts, glaucoma, keratopathy, retinopathy, and eye tumors. In this paper, the role of protein ubiquitination in eye diseases was reviewed., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Myopia represents a significant public health concern worldwide, particularly affecting the ocular health of children and adolescents. The escalating prevalence of myopia in recent years underscores its urgency as a health issue among this demographic. Research indicates a profound connection between the onset of myopia, inflammatory processes and fibrosis. Individuals with inflammatory conditions like allergic conjunctivitis, choroiditis, systemic lupus erythematosus, and diabetes exhibit a heightened susceptibility to myopia. Conversely, myopic patients are at an increased risk of developing ocular inflammatory disorders, notably idiopathic multifocal choroiditis. We postulate that the expression of inflammatory markers, including NF-κB, TGF-β, IL-1β, IL-6, IL-8, and TNF-α, may contribute to the chronic inflammatory state observed in myopia. This paper highlights a substantial correlation between myopia and inflammation, suggesting the potential efficacy of anti-inflammatory agents in managing inflammation and slowing myopia progression., Competing Interests: Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interest exists., (© The author(s).)

In recent years, the prevalence of myopia has gradually increased, and it has become a significant global public health problem in the 21st century, posing a serious challenge to human eye health. Currently, it is confirmed that the development of myopia is attributed to the combined action of genes and environmental factors. Thus, elucidating the risk factors and pathogenesis of myopia is of great significance for the prevention and control of myopia. To elucidate the impact of gene-environment interaction on myopia, we used the Pubmed database to search for literature related to myopia. Search terms are as follows: myopia, genes, environmental factors, gene-environment interaction, and treatment. This paper reviews the effects of gene and environmental interaction on myopia., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2024 The Authors.)

Currently, researchers have mainly focused on the role of the tissues of the posterior segment of the eyes in the development of myopia. However, the ciliary body, an anterior ocular tissue that contracts to initiate the process of accommodation, may also play an important role in the progression of myopia due to the increased demand for near work. In the present study, we established a lens-induced myopia (LIM) animal model in guinea pigs and investigated the molecular changes in the ciliary body associated with the development of myopia based on RNA sequencing. As a result, 871 differentially expressed (DE) mRNAs and 19 DE lncRNAs were identified in the ciliary body between the LIM group and the normal control group. In addition, the lncRNA-mRNA co-expression analysis was performed to explore the target genes of lncRNAs, which were mainly enriched in the Rap1 signaling pathway, cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction, and complement and coagulation cascades pathways based on the functional enrichment analysis. Among the target genes of lncRNAs, three hub genes, including Ctnnb1, Pik3r1, and Itgb1, were found to be involved in the Rap1 signaling pathway. Interestingly, two crucial genes, Grk1 and Pde6a, which are mainly expressed in retinal photoreceptors, were enriched in visual perception in the ciliary body in functional analysis and were verified to be expressed in the ciliary body. These findings indicate the molecular pathogenetic role of the ciliary body in myopia and provide new insights into the underlying mechanism of myopia development. Further studies are needed to explore the specific contributions of these identified lncRNAs and mRNAs to the development of myopia., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Dysregulation of oxidative stress serves as a pivotal predisposing or exacerbating factor in the intricate development of numerous pathological processes and diseases. In recent years, substantial evidence has illuminated the crucial role of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in many fundamental cellular functions, including proliferation, inflammation, apoptosis, and gene expression. Notably, producing free radicals within ROS profoundly impacts a wide range of biomolecules, such as proteins and DNA, instigating cellular damage and impairing vital cellular functions. Consequently, oxidative stress emerges as a closely intertwined factor across diverse disease spectra. Remarkably, the pathogenesis of several eye diseases, including age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, and diabetic retinopathy, manifests an intrinsic association with oxidative stress. In this comprehensive review, we briefly summarize the recent progress in elucidating the intricate role of oxidative stress in the development of ophthalmic diseases, shedding light on potential therapeutic avenues and future research directions., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.)

Melanoma is an aggressive malignant tumor with a poor prognosis. Vemurafenib (PLX4032, vem) is applied to specifically treat BRAF V600E-mutated melanoma patients. However, prolonged usage of vem makes patients resistant to the drug and finally leads to clinical failure. We previously tested the combination regimen of tubulin inhibitor VERU-111 with vem, as well as USP14 selective inhibitor b-AP15 in combination with vem, both of which have showed profound therapeutic effects in overcoming vem resistance in vitro and in vivo. Most importantly, we discovered that vem-resistant melanoma cell lines highly expressed E3 ligase SKP2 and DUB enzyme USP14, and we have demonstrated that USP14 directly interacts and stabilizes SKP2, which contributes to vem resistance. These works give us a clue that USP14 might be a promising target to overcome vem resistance in melanoma. MitoCur-1 is a curcumin derivative, which was originally designed to specifically target tumor mitochondria inducing redox imbalance, thereby promoting tumor cell death. In this study, we have demonstrated that it can work as a novel USP14 inhibitor, and thus bears great potential in providing an anti-tumor effect and sensitizing vem-resistant cells by inducing ferroptosis in melanoma. Application of MitoCur-1 dramatically induces USP14 inhibition and inactivation of GPX4 enzyme, meanwhile, increases the depletion of GSH and decreases SLC7A11 expression level. As a result, ferrous iron-dependent lipid ROS accumulated in the cell, inducing ferroptosis, thus sensitizes the vem-resistant melanoma cell. Interestingly, overexpression of USP14 antagonized all the ferroptosis cascade events induced by MitoCur-1, therefore, we conclude that MitoCur-1 induces ferroptosis through inhibition of USP14. We believe that by inhibition of USP14, vem resistance can be reversed and will finally benefit melanoma patients in future., (© 2023 John Wiley & Sons A/S. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Background: An increasing number of systematic reviews (SRs) in the environmental field have been published in recent years as a result of the global concern about the health impacts of air pollution and temperature. However, no study has assessed and compared the methodological and reporting quality of SRs on the health effects of air pollutants and extreme temperatures. This study aims to assess and compare the methodological and reporting quality of SRs on the health effects of ambient air pollutants and extreme temperatures., Methods: PubMed, Embase, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), Cochrane Library, Web of Science, and Epistemonikos databases were searched. Two researchers screened the literature and extracted information independently. The methodological quality of the SRs was assessed through A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews 2 (AMSTAR 2). The reporting quality was assessed through Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA)., Results: We identified 405 SRs (286 for air pollution, 108 for temperature, and 11 for the synergistic effects). The methodological and reporting quality of the included SRs were suboptimal, with major deficiencies in protocol registration. The methodological quality of SRs of air pollutants was better than that of temperature, especially in terms of satisfactory explanations for any heterogeneity (69.6% v. 45.4%). The reporting quality of SRs of air pollution was better than temperature, however, adherence to the reporting of the assessment results of risk of bias in all SRs (53.5% v. 34.3%) was inadequate., Conclusions: Methodological and reporting quality of SRs on the health effect of air pollutants were higher than those of temperatures. However, deficiencies in protocol registration and the assessment of risk of bias remain an issue for both pollutants and temperatures. In addition, developing a risk-of-bias assessment tool applicable to the temperature field may improve the quality of SRs., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

The accurate estimation of a 3D human pose is of great importance in many fields, such as human-computer interaction, motion recognition and automatic driving. In view of the difficulty of obtaining 3D ground truth labels for a dataset of 3D pose estimation techniques, we take 2D images as the research object in this paper, and propose a self-supervised 3D pose estimation model called Pose ResNet. ResNet50 is used as the basic network for extract features. First, a convolutional block attention module (CBAM) was introduced to refine selection of significant pixels. Then, a waterfall atrous spatial pooling (WASP) module is used to capture multi-scale contextual information from the extracted features to increase the receptive field. Finally, the features are input into a deconvolution network to acquire the volume heat map, which is later processed by a soft argmax function to obtain the coordinates of the joints. In addition to the two learning strategies of transfer learning and synthetic occlusion, a self-supervised training method is also used in this model, in which the 3D labels are constructed by the epipolar geometry transformation to supervise the training of the network. Without the need for 3D ground truths for the dataset, accurate estimation of the 3D human pose can be realized from a single 2D image. The results show that the mean per joint position error (MPJPE) is 74.6 mm without the need for 3D ground truth labels. Compared with other approaches, the proposed method achieves better results., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

To address the dangerous driving behaviors prevalent among current car drivers, it is necessary to provide real-time, accurate warning and correction of driver's driving behaviors in a small, movable, and enclosed space. In this paper, we propose a method for detecting dangerous behaviors based on frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar (mm-DSF). The highly packaged millimeter-wave radar chip has good in-vehicle emotion recognition capability. The acquired millimeter-wave differential frequency signal is Fourier-transformed to obtain the intermediate frequency signal. The physiological decomposition of the local micro-Doppler feature spectrum of the target action is then used as the eigenvalue. Matrix signal intensity and clutter filtering are performed by analyzing the signal echo model of the input channel. The signal classification is based on the estimation and variety of the feature vectors of the target key actions using a modified and optimized level fusion method of the SlowFast dual-channel network. Nine typical risky driving behaviors were set up by the Dula Hazard Questionnaire and TEIQue-SF, and the accuracy of the classification results of the self-built dataset was analyzed to verify the high robustness of the method. The recognition accuracy of this method increased by 1.97% compared with the traditional method.

In recent years, neural network-based soft sensor technology has been widely used in industrial production processes and has excellent optimization, monitoring, and quality prediction performance. This paper proposes a horizontal data augmentation strategy to provide highly available data for subsequent prediction models, called the combined autoencoder data augmentation (CADA) strategy. This paper has developed a CADA-based convolutional neural network (CADA-CNN) soft sensor model and applied it to the process of industrial debutanizer and industrial steam volume. In terms of method validation, this paper compares the output data of the proposed CADA by the Spearman correlation coefficient to verify the strategy's feasibility. Then, the output data of the CADA strategy is fed into the artificial neural network (NN), support vector regression (SVR), and convolutional neural network (CNN) for comparison experiments. The final experimental results show that our proposed CADA-CNN model has lower prediction error and better prediction error distribution., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing financial interest., (© 2022 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society.)

The positioning of indoor electronic devices is an essential part of human-computer interaction, and the accuracy of positioning affects the level of user experience. Most existing methods for RF-based device localization choose to ignore or remove the impact of multipath effects. However, exploiting the multipath effect caused by the complex indoor environment helps to improve the model's localization accuracy. In response to this question, this paper proposes a multipath-assisted localization (MAL) model based on millimeter-wave radar to achieve the localization of indoor electronic devices. The model fully considers the help of the multipath effect when describing the characteristics of the reflected signal and precisely locates the target position by using the MAL area formed by the reflected signal. At the same time, for the situation where the radar in the traditional Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) mode cannot obtain the 3D spatial position information of the target, the advantage of the MAL model is that the 3D information of the target can be obtained after the mining process of the multipath effect. Furthermore, based on the original hardware, it can achieve a breakthrough in angular resolution. Experiments show that our proposed MAL model enables the millimeter-wave multipath positioning model to achieve a 3D positioning error within 15 cm.

Purpose: To investigate the intravitreal injection of conbercept as a treatment strategy for proliferative diabetic retinopathy (PDR) with or without center-involved diabetic macular edema (CI-DME) and evaluate its effect on the microvascular changes in the eyes., Methods: In this prospective study, 43 patients including 29 cases (56 eyes) in CI-DME with PDR patients, and 14 cases (26 eyes) in the non-center involving diabetic macular edema (NCI-DME) with PDR patients were involved in this study. The best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), central retinal thickness (CRT), foveolar avascular zone (FAZ), and macular capillary vessel density (VD) of the superficial retinal capillary plexus (SCP) and deep retinal capillary plexus (DCP) were assessed before and after conbercept treatments for 1, 3, or 6 months., Results: The BCVA was significantly increased after conbercept treatment in the eyes of CI-DME patients. After 6 months of treatment with the conbercept, microvascular density of the inferior area in SCP and the central fovea area in DCP increased significantly, regardless of the central fovea involvement. The effect of the conbercept treatment on the VD of NCI-DME was higher than that of CI-DME. Then, after 6 months of treatment, the CRT of patients with CI-DME and NCI-DME were decreased significantly., Conclusions: In this study, an intravitreal injection of conbercept significantly improved vision, alleviated macular edema in patients with DME. Conbercept treatment also altered the microvascular density in the retina., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Lin, Feng, Liu, Wang, Wang, Xie, Li, Guan, Ma, Liu and Zhou.)