Search

Acupuncture treatment (AT) of depressive insomnia by traditional Chinese medicine has the advantages of fewer side effects, quicker results, and lower prices compared to medication and psychological and cognitive therapy. Clinicians often select multiple acupoints, such as Bai Hui (GV20), San Yin Jiao (SP6), and Shen Men (HT7), for combined treatment in a single AT session to improve sleep quality. Since the ancient literature on AT often only records the general order of acupoints, there needs to be more discussion on the influence of the multiple acupoint sequence on the priority of efficacy for a specific disease. At the same time, determining the ranking of acupoints in-patient treatment in clinical practice is mainly dependent on the treatment experience of practitioners, and there is no transparent quantitative model or evaluation method for generating credible acupoint sequences from a small and limited scale of cases. Therefore, it is essential to explore the optimization of the order of multiple acupoints in treating depressive insomnia by Traditional Chinese Medicine acupuncture both for the symptom relief of depressive insomnia patients and for the efficient use of national health care resources. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning-based method for optimizing the acupoint sequence for depressive insomnia AT to address these issues. This paper provides a post-AT EEG signal prediction model with related interpretable models to construct a reinforcement learning framework to represent the state transfer of the AT environment and a quantitative EEG signal-based AT efficacy model to represent the reward function. Finally, 30 patients with depressive insomnia were recruited to collect EEG signals during AT for depressive insomnia, and the case data were used to quantify the efficacy of AT and to model the post-AT EEG signal prediction. The above two models were applied to optimize the acupoint sequence based on reinforcement learning. Satisfactory results were obtained, verifying the effectiveness and feasibility of the method proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The photovoltaic performances of n-i-p or inverted p-i-n BaSi2 homojunction solar cells are limited by the parasitic high light absorption of n-BaSi2 or p-BaSi2 window layer. In this work, diverse electron transport materials (ETMs) and hole transport materials (HTMs) are employed instead of BaSi2 as window layers to promote the performances of BaSi2 solar cells, and the effects of different ETMs and HTMs were simulated and comprehensively studied. For n-ETM/i-BaSi2/p-BaSi2 solar cells, the solar cell with ZnO exhibits the highest efficiency of 28.21%. As increasing the thicknesses of ETM layer from 5 nm to 100 nm, the efficiency for n-BaSi2/i-BaSi2/p-BaSi2 solar cell decreases seriously from 24.52% to 15.99%, while the solar cells with wide band gap ETMs including SnO2, TiO2 and ZnO show neglectable change in performances. The performances n-ETM/i-BaSi2/p-BaSi2 solar cells are affected by donor like defects more than acceptor like defects in i-BaSi2. For p-HTM/i-BaSi2/n-BaSi2 solar cells, employing Cu2O, CuI, CuSCN or NiO as HTM layer produces evident valence band discrepancies at HTM/i-BaSi2 interfaces. Heavy doping in HTM layer is necessary desired to overcome the energy band barriers. As increasing the thicknesses of HTM layer from 5 nm to 100 nm, the efficiency for p-BaSi2/i-BaSi2/n-BaSi2 solar cell also decreases from 24.52% to 15.99%, while the solar cells with wide band gap HTMs including CuI, CuSCN and NiO show neglectable change, and the efficiency for p-Cu2O/i-BaSi2/n-BaSi2 solar cells decreases slightly from 25.86% to 24.88%. The performances of p-HTM/i-BaSi2/n-BaSi2 solar cells are affected by acceptor like defects more than donor like defects in i-BaSi2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2 is causing the severe acute pneumonia (COVID-19) and rapid spread nationally and internationally, resulting in a major global health emergency. Chinese governments and scientists have implemented a series of rigorous measures and scientific research to prevent and control the SARS-CoV-2 infection. However, there is still no specific antiviral drug or vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. It has been proven that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) exerts an important role in the prevention and treatment of the COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 during the outbreak. Although the therapeutic effects of these TCM formulas are attractive, the molecular mechanism of action has not been fully elucidated. An emerging strategy of systems pharmacology has been proposed to be a promising method to interpret drug action in complex biological systems and quickly screen out the bioactive compounds from TCM to treat treatment of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, in this study, the epidemiology, TCM therapy, and the systems pharmacology-based method for TCM are reviewed for COVID-19 to provide a perspective for the prevention and treatment of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Further efforts should be made to reduce disease burden and improve the ability to design antiviral drugs and vaccines, which will benefit the health care system, economic development and even social stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citri Reticulatae Pericarpium (CRP), also known as Chenpi in Chinese, is the dry mature peel of Citrus reticulata Blanco or its cultivated varieties. CRP as the health-care food and dietary supplement has been widely used in various diseases. However, the potential pharmacological mechanisms of CRP to predict and treat various diseases have not yet been fully elucidated. A systems pharmacology-based approach is developed by integrating absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion screening, multiple target fishing, network pharmacology, as well as pathway analysis to comprehensively dissect the potential mechanism of CRP for therapy of various diseases. The results showed that 39 bioactive components and 121 potential protein targets were identified from CRP. The 121 targets are closely related to various diseases of the cardiovascular system, respiratory system, gastrointestinal system, etc. These targets are further mapped to compound-target, target-disease, and target-pathway networks to clarify the therapeutic mechanism of CRP at the system level. The current study sheds light on a promising way for promoting the discovery of new botanical drugs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]