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Suaeda glauca, a halophyte in the Amaranthaceae family, exhibits remarkable resilience to high salt and alkali stresses despite the absence of salt glands or vesicles in its leaves. While there is growing pharmacological interest in S. glauca, research on its secondary metabolites remains limited. In this study, chemical constituents of the aerial parts of S. glauca were identified using 1D- and 2D-NMR experiments, and its biological activity concerning hair loss was newly reported. Eight compounds, including alkaloids (1~3), flavonoids (4~6), and phenolics (7 and 8), were isolated. The compounds, except the flavonoids, were isolated for the first time from S. glauca. In the HPLC chromatogram, quercetin-3-O-β-d-glucoside, kaempferol-3-O-β-d-glucoside, and kaempferol were identified as major constituents in the extract of S. glauca. Additionally, the therapeutic potential of the extract of S. glauca and the isolated compounds 1~8 on the expressions of VEGF and IGF-1, as well as the regulation of Wnt/β-catenin signaling, were evaluated in human follicle dermal papilla cells (HFDPCs) and human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). Among the eight compounds, compound 4 was the most potent in terms of increasing the expression of VEGF and IGF-1 and the regulation of Wnt/β-catenin. These findings suggest that S. glauca extract and its compounds are potential new candidates for preventing or treating hair loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the potential of cloud-free virtual optical imagery generated using synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) images and conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs) for early crop mapping, which requires cloud-free optical imagery at the optimal date for classification. A two-stage CGAN approach, including representation and generation stages, is presented to generate virtual Sentinel-2 spectral bands using all available information from Sentinel-1 SAR and Sentinel-2 optical images. The dual-polarization-based radar vegetation index and all available multi-spectral bands of Sentinel-2 imagery are particularly considered for feature extraction in the representation stage. A crop classification experiment using Sentinel-1 and -2 images in Illinois, USA, demonstrated that the use of all available scattering and spectral features achieved the best prediction performance for all spectral bands, including visible, near-infrared, red-edge, and shortwave infrared bands, compared with the cases that only used dual-polarization backscattering coefficients and partial input spectral bands. Early crop mapping with an image time series, including the virtual Sentinel-2 image, yielded satisfactory classification accuracy comparable to the case of using an actual time-series image set, regardless of the different combinations of spectral bands. Therefore, the generation of virtual optical images using the proposed model can be effectively applied to early crop mapping when the availability of cloud-free optical images is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a simple yet effective pipeline for absolute three-dimensional (3D) human pose estimation from two-dimensional (2D) joint keypoints, namely, the 2D-to-3D human pose lifting problem. Our method comprises two simple baseline networks, a 3D conversion function, and a correction network. The former two networks predict the root distance and the root-relative joint distance simultaneously. Given the input and predicted distances, the 3D conversion function recovers the absolute 3D pose, and the correction network reduces 3D pose noise caused by input uncertainties. Furthermore, to cope with input noise implicitly, we adopt a Siamese architecture that enforces the consistency of features between two training inputs, i.e., ground truth 2D joint keypoints and detected 2D joint keypoints. Finally, we experimentally validate the advantages of the proposed method and demonstrate its competitive performance over state-of-the-art absolute 2D-to-3D pose-lifting methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this randomized controlled clinical trial was to assess the short-term clinical effectiveness of sealer-based root canal obturation using calcium-silicate-based sealer (CSBS) and epoxy-resin-based sealer (ERBS). A total of eighty patients (eighty teeth) were enrolled and seventy-two patients (seventy-two teeth) were randomly assigned into four different sealer groups: AH Plus (AH, Dentsply Sirona), ADseal (AD, Meta Biomed), CeraSeal (CS, Meta Biomed), or EndoSeal TCS (ES, Maruchi). At the first visit, root canal treatment was performed using ProTaper. Next, the NiTi file system and passive ultrasonic irritation was applied with 2.5% NaOCl. At the second visit, the teeth were obturated with a sealer-based obturation technique using the assigned sealer. The quality of filling obturation was evaluated with postoperative radiographs in terms of the presence of voids and sealer extrusion. The patients were recalled at 1-week, 1-month, and 3-month intervals, and pain levels were measured using visual analog scales (VAS), and clinical examination performed with percussion and palpation. Radiographs were also taken. The results were statistically compared by using the χ2 test or Fisher exact test. Among the 80 teeth included, 72 teeth received allocated intervention and 71 teeth were included in the analysis (98.6% recall). There was no significant difference among the sealers in void and sealer extrusion (p > 0.05). Postoperative pain was not indicated prominently regardless of the type of sealer. For a 3-month follow-up period, all cases were maintained successfully except for one case from AD. According to the findings, there was no significant difference between CSBS and ERBS in terms of postoperative pain or the healing process, and the variation in filling quality appears to be linked to the properties of each product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interfacial electronic structures of a bilayer of fullerene (C60) and zinc phthalocyanine (ZnPc) grown on vanadium pentoxide (V2O5) thin films deposited using radio frequency sputtering under various conditions were studied using X-ray and ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy. The energy difference between the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) level of the ZnPc layer and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) level of the C60 layer was determined and compared with that grown on an indium tin oxide (ITO) substrate. The energy difference of a heterojunction on all V2O5 was found to be 1.3~1.4 eV, while that on ITO was 1.1 eV. This difference could be due to the higher binding energy of the HOMO of ZnPc on V2O5 than that on ITO regardless of work functions of the substrates. We also determined the complete energy level diagrams of C60/ZnPc on V2O5 and ITO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present two algorithms for aligning two colored point clouds. The two algorithms are designed to minimize a probabilistic cost based on the color-supported soft matching of points in a point cloud to their K-closest points in the other point cloud. The first algorithm, like prior iterative closest point algorithms, refines the pose parameters to minimize the cost. Assuming that the point clouds are obtained from RGB-depth images, our second algorithm regards the measured depth values as variables and minimizes the cost to obtain refined depth values. Experiments with our synthetic dataset show that our pose refinement algorithm gives better results compared to the existing algorithms. Our depth refinement algorithm is shown to achieve more accurate alignments from the outputs of the pose refinement step. Our algorithms are applied to a real-world dataset, providing accurate and visually improved results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interfacial electronic structures of a bilayer of fullerene (C 60 ) and zinc phthalocyanine (ZnPc) grown on vanadium pentoxide (V₂O₅) thin films deposited using radio frequency sputtering under various conditions were studied using X-ray and ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscopy. The energy difference between the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) level of the ZnPc layer and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) level of the C 60 layer was determined and compared with that grown on an indium tin oxide (ITO) substrate. The energy difference of a heterojunction on all V₂O₅ was found to be 1.3~1.4 eV, while that on ITO was 1.1 eV. This difference could be due to the higher binding energy of the HOMO of ZnPc on V₂O₅ than that on ITO regardless of work functions of the substrates. We also determined the complete energy level diagrams of C 60 /ZnPc on V₂O₅ and ITO., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest.