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Mathematical morphology operations are widely used in image processing such as defect analysis in semiconductor manufacturing and medical image analysis. These data-intensive applications have high requirements during hardware implementation that are challenging for conventional hardware platforms such as central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). Computation-in-memory (CIM) provides a possible solution for highly efficient morphology operations. In this study, we demonstrate the application of morphology operation with a novel memristor-based auto-detection architecture and demonstrate non-neuromorphic computation on a multi-array-based memristor system. Pixel-by-pixel logic computations with low parallelism are converted to parallel operations using memristors. Moreover, hardware-implemented computer-integrated manufacturing was used to experimentally demonstrate typical defect detection tasks in integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing and medical image analysis. In addition, we developed a new implementation scheme employing a four-layer network to realize small-object detection with high parallelism. The system benchmark based on the hardware measurement results showed significant improvement in the energy efficiency by approximately 358 times and 32 times more than when a CPU and GPU were employed, respectively, exhibiting the advantage of the proposed memristor-based morphology operation.

Aerobic exercise mitigates oxidative stress and apoptosis caused by myocardial infarction (MI) even though the precise mechanisms remain completely elusive. In this study, we investigated the potential mechanisms of aerobic exercise in ameliorating the cardiac function of mice with MI. In vivo, MI was induced by left anterior descending (LAD) coronary artery ligation in wild-type mice, alcat1 knockout, and fgf21 knockout mice. The mice were exercised under a moderate-intensity protocol for 6 weeks at one week later post-MI. In vitro, H9C2 cells were treated with lentiviral vector carrying alcat1 gene, recombinant human FGF21 (rhFGF21), PI3K inhibitor, and H2O2 to explore the potential mechanisms. Our results showed that aerobic exercise significantly increased the FGF21 expression and decreased the ALCAT1 expression in the hearts of mice with MI. fgf21 knockout weakened the inhibitory effects of aerobic exercise on oxidative stress, endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress, and apoptosis in mice with MI. Both/either alcat1 knockout and/or aerobic exercise improved cardiac function by inhibiting oxidative stress and apoptosis in the MI heart. rhFGF21 inhibited both H2O2 and overexpression of ALCAT1-induced oxidative stress and apoptosis by activating the PI3K/AKT pathway in H9C2 cells. In conclusion, our results showed that aerobic exercise alleviated oxidative stress and apoptosis by activating the FGF21/FGFR1/PI3K/AKT pathway or inhibiting the hyperexpression of ALCAT1, which ultimately improved the cardiac function in MI mice.

The prevalence of diabetes has increased rapidly throughout the world in recent years. Currently, approximately 463 million people are living with diabetes, and the number has tripled over the last two decades. Here, we describe the global epidemiology of diabetes in 2019 and forecast the trends to 2030 and 2045 in China, India, USA, and the globally. The gut microbiota plays a major role in metabolic diseases, especially diabetes. In this review, we describe the interaction between diabetes and gut microbiota in three aspects: probiotics, antidiabetic medication, and diet. Recent findings indicate that probiotics, antidiabetic medications, or dietary interventions treat diabetes by shifting the gut microbiome, particularly by raising beneficial bacteria and reducing harmful bacteria. We conclude that targeting the gut microbiota is becoming a novel therapeutic strategy for diabetes.

Human detection in crowded scenes is one of the research components of crowd safety problem analysis, such as emergency warning and security monitoring platforms. Although the existing anchor‐free methods have fast inference speed, they are not suitable for object detection in crowded scenes due to the model's inability to predict the well‐fined object detection bounding boxes. This work proposes an end‐to‐end anchor‐free network, Multi‐dimensional Weighted Cross‐Attention Network (MANet), which can perform real‐time human detection in crowded scenes. Specifically, the Double‐flow Weighted Feature Cascade Module (DW‐FCM) is used in the extractor to highlight the contribution of features at different levels. The Triplet Cross Attention Module (TCAM) is used in the detector head to enhance the association dependence of multi‐dimension features, further strengthening human boundary features' discrimination ability at a fine‐grained level. Moreover, the strategy of Adaptively Opposite Thrust Mapping (AOTM) ground‐truth annotation is proposed to achieve bias correction of erroneous mappings and reduce the iterations of useless learning of the network. These strategies effectively alleviate the defect that the existing anchor‐free network cannot correctly distinguish and locate the individual human in crowded scenes. Compared with the anchor‐based detection method, there is no need to set anchor parameters manually, and the detection speed can satisfy the real‐time application. Finally, through extensive comparative experiments on CrowdHuman and WIDER FACE datasets, the results demonstrate that the improved strategy achieves the state‐of‐the‐art result in the anchor‐free methods.

To construct models for predicting reintervention after thoracic endovascular aortic repair (TEVAR) of Stanford type B aortic dissection (TBAD). A total of 192 TBAD patients who underwent TEVAR were included; 68 (35.4%) had indications for reintervention. Clinical characteristics, aorta characteristics on pre- and postoperative computed tomography angiography, and aorta characteristics on immediate postoperative aortic digital subtraction angiography were collected. The least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression was applied to identify the risk factors for reintervention. Eight classifiers were used for modeling. The models were trained on 100 train-validation random splits with a ratio of 2:1. The performance was evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic curve. Seven predictors of reintervention were identified, including maximum false lumen diameter, aortic diameter measured at the level of approximately 15 mm distal to the left subclavian artery, aortic diameter measured at the level of the diaphragm, false lumen diameter measured at the level of the celiac artery, number of bare-metal and covered stents, number of bare-metal stents, and residual perfusion of the false lumen. Logistic regression (LR) yielded the highest performance, with an area under the curve of 0.802. A nomogram built for clinical use showed good calibration. The cutoff value for dividing patients into low- and high-risk subgroups was 0.413. Kaplan-Meier curves showed that the overall survival of high-risk patients was significantly shorter than that of low-risk patients (both p < 0.05). Our nomogram could predict the reintervention after TEVAR in patients with TBAD, which may facilitate patient selection and surveillance strategies. • Seven risk factors of reintervention after TEVAR of TBAD were identified for modeling. • Logistic regression performed best in predicting reintervention with an AUC of 0.802. • Patients with a high risk of reintervention had shorter OS than those with a low risk.

Fasudil has the potential to prevent liver fibrosis by activating natural killer cells and inhibiting the proliferation of hepatic stellate cells. Fasudil may be a promising clinical therapeutic drug for the prevention and treatment of liver fibrosis.

This study investigates the attributes that influence tourists from different cultures by analyzing a big data set of online reviews. The findings highlight the differences between Chinese-speaking...

OBJECTIVE To identify left ventricular (LV) myocardial mechanics predictors of LV outflow tract obstruction (LVOTO) in patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM). METHODS Thirty-nine adults with HCM and 21 controls underwent cardiovascular magnetic resonance. The feature tracking (FT) analysis results of HCM patients with and without LVOTO and controls were compared. RESULTS Global radial strain measured on the short-axis slice (GRS-SAX) (odds ratio [OR], 1.09; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.02-1.15; P < 0.01), global longitudinal strain measured on the long-axis slice (GLS-LAX) (OR, 1.81; 95% CI, 1.21-2.73; P < 0.01) and GRS measured on the long-axis slice (GRS-LAX) (OR, 1.07; 95% CI, 1.01-1.13; P = 0.02) were independent predictors of LVOTO. The combination of GRS-SAX plus GLS-LAX and GRS-LAX showed great discriminatory power for identifying LVOTO with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve value of 0.91 (95% CI: 0.81-1.00). CONCLUSIONS In adult HCM patients, GRS-SAX, GLS-LAX, and GRS-LAX were independent predictors of LVOTO. The combination of GRS-SAX plus GLS-LAX and GRS-LAX showed great discriminatory power for identifying LVOTO.

Identifying tiny objects from extremely low-resolution (LR) unmanned-aerial-vehicle-based remote sensing images is generally considered as a very challenging task, because of very limited information in the object areas. In recent years, there have been very limited attempts to approach this problem. These attempts intend to deal with LR image classification by enhancing either the poor image quality or image representations. In this article, we argue that the performance improvement in LR image classification is affected by the inconsistency of the information loss and learning priority on low-frequency (LF) components and high-frequency (HF) components. To address this LF–HF inconsistency problem, we propose a dual-stream representation learning generative adversarial network ( DRL -GAN). The core idea is to produce enhanced image representations optimal for LR recognition by simultaneously recovering the missing information in LF and HF components, respectively, under the guidance of high-resolution (HR) images. We evaluate the performance of DRL -GAN on the challenging task of LR image classification. A comparison of the experimental results on the LR benchmark, namely HRSC and CIFAR-10, and our newly collected ‘WIDER-SHIP’ dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our DRL -GAN, which significantly improves the classification performance, with up to 10% gain on average.

Organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) are one of the promising candidates for next generation electronics due to their solution processability and good performance superior to amorphous Si devices. Patterning the organic layer is necessary in practical applications to prevent cross talk between different devices. Here, we reported a novel solution processed, high-resolution patterning method named as stencil mask defined doctor blade printing to fabricate regularly patterned organic single crystal arrays. The size of one pattern is around 30 μm, which is smaller than the droplet diameter of conventional inkjet printing. The OFETs based on organic single crystal patterns exhibit extremely low off-state current and high on/off current ratio close to 1010 as well as good device uniformity. The low off-state current demonstrates the potential of the OFET array for low-power or high-performance optical sensing applications. In addition, the short channel OFET array exhibits good frequency response operating at 20 kHz. This work provides an effective patterning strategy to realize solution processed large-area, high-resolution organic single crystal arrays.

Highlights • The secretion of skeletal muscle FSTL1 was stimulated by dynamic resistance exercise. • FSTL1 from skeletal muscle supplemented the insufficiency of cardiac FSTL1, which promoted myocardial angiogenesis and protected the heart from myocardial infarction. • Exogenous FSTL1 improved the proliferation and the small tubes formation ability of HUVECs. • FSTL1-DIP2A regulated angiogenesis mainly through the Smad2/3 but was not affected by TGFβR1. • FSTL1, DIP2A, Smad2/3, and fstl1 gene transcription formed a regulation mode of feedback loop., Purpose The aim of this study was to investigate the potential of dynamic resistance exercise to generate skeletal muscle-derived follistatin like-1 (FSTL1), which may induce cardioprotection in rats following myocardial infarction (MI) by inducing angiogenesis. Methods Male, adult Sprague-Dawley rats were randomly divided into 5 groups (n = 12 in each group): sham group (S), sedentary MI group (MI), MI + resistance exercise group (MR), MI + adeno-associated virus (AAV)–FSTL1 injection group (MA), and MI + AAV–FSTL1 injection + resistance exercise group (MAR). The AAV–FSTL1 vector was prepared by molecular biology methods and injected into the anterior tibialis muscle. The MI model was established by ligation of the left anterior descending coronary artery. Rats in the MR and MAR groups underwent 4 weeks of dynamic resistance exercise training using a weighted climbing-up ladder. Heart function was evaluated by hemodynamic measures. Collagen volume fraction of myocardium was observed and analyzed by Masson's staining. Human umbilical vein vessel endothelial cells culture and recombinant human FSTL1 protein or transforming growth factor-β receptor 1 (TGFβR1) inhibitor treatment were used to elucidate the molecular signaling mechanism of FSTL1. Angiogenesis, cell proliferation, and disco interacting protein 2 homolog A (DIP2A) location were observed by immunofluorescence staining. The expression of FSTL1, DIP2A, and the activation of signaling pathways were detected by Western blotting. Angiogenesis of endothelial cells was observed by tubule experiment. One-way analysis of variance and Student's t test were used for statistical analysis. Results Resistance exercise stimulated the secretion of skeletal muscle FSTL1, which promoted myocardial angiogenesis, inhibited pathological remodeling, and protected cardiac function in MI rats. Exercise facilitated skeletal muscle FSTL1 to play a role in protecting the heart. Exogenous FSTL1 promoted the human umbilical vein vessel endothelial cells proliferation and up-regulated the expression of DIP2A, while TGFβR1 inhibitor intervention down-regulated the phosphorylation level of Smad2/3 and the expression of vascular endothelial growth factor-A, which was not conducive to angiogenesis. FSTL1 bound to the receptor, DIP2A, to regulate angiogenesis mainly through the Smad2/3 signaling pathway. FSTL1–DIP2A directly activated Smad2/3 and was not affected by TGFβR1. Conclusion Dynamic resistance exercise stimulates the expression of skeletal muscle-derived FSTL1, which could supplement the insufficiency of cardiac FSTL1 and promote cardiac rehabilitation through the DIP2A–Smad2/3 signaling pathway in MI rats., Graphical Abstract Image, graphical abstract

With the emerging concepts of smart cities and intelligent transportation systems, accurate traffic sensing and prediction have become critically important to support urban management and traffic control. In recent years, the rapid uptake of the Internet of Vehicles and the rising pervasiveness of mobile services have produced unprecedented amounts of data to serve traffic sensing and prediction applications. However, it is significantly challenging to fulfill the computation demands by the big traffic data with ever-increasing complexity and diversity. Deep learning, with its powerful capabilities in representation learning and multi-level abstractions, has recently become the most effective approach in many intelligent sensing systems. In this paper, we present an up-to-date literature review on the most advanced research works in deep learning for intelligent traffic sensing and prediction.

Small object detection in crowded scene aims to find those tiny targets with very limited resolution from crowded scenes. Due to very little information available on tiny objects, it is often not suitable to detect them merely based on the information presented inside their bounding boxes, resulting low accuracy. In this paper, we propose to exploit the semantic similarity among all predicted objects’ candidates to boost the performance of detectors when handling tiny objects. For this purpose, we construct a pairwise constraint to depict such semantic similarity and propose a new framework based on Discriminative Learning and Graph-Cut techniques. Experiments conducted on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate the improvement over the state-of-the-art approaches gained by applying this idea.

Background: Aggressive juvenile-onset recurrent respiratory papillomatosis (JORRP) threatens patient lives if not receives immediate surgical intervene. Even with surgical intervene, complete remission of this disease is not approachable. Therefore, understanding the factors relevant to disease severity and prognosis will do help to the treatment strategy and health management of this disease. Objective: This study aimed to explore the clinic, laboratory and socioeconomic characteristics of patients and evaluate the risk factors for aggressive JORRP. Methods: The information of clinical and socioeconomic status of the patients was reviewed and its association with disease severity was analyzed. Papilloma from JORRP patients undergone surgeries was used to determine HPV subtypes by real-time PCR. The profiles of mRNA expression in the papilloma were assessed using microarray. Results: Age at diagnosis and socioeconomic status were shown to associate with the severity of JORRP. There was no differential severity considering different HPV subtype. The mRNA expression of nucleotide binding oligomerization domain receptor protein 3 (NLRP3) and Gasdermin B (GSDMB) was reduced in papillomas. Conclusions: A younger age at diagnosis and low socioeconomic status were associated with the severity of JORRP. mRNA expression of NLRP3 and GSDMB in the papillomas of JORRP patients was significantly reduced.Abbreviation: JORRP: Juvenile-onset recurrent respiratory papillomatosis; RRP: Recurrent respiratory papillomatosis; OSAS: Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome; NLRP3: Nucleotide binding oligomerization domain receptor protein 3; GSDMB: Gasdermin B. Abbreviation: JORRP: Juvenile-onset recurrent respiratory papillomatosis; RRP: Recurrent respiratory papillomatosis; OSAS: Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome; NLRP3: Nucleotide binding oligomerization domain receptor protein 3; GSDMB: Gasdermin B.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a highly malignant tumor associated with a poor prognosis, and the molecular mechanisms remain poorly understood. KIAA1522 expression is upregulated in various types of tumor tissue; however, its function remains unknown in HCC. Bioinformatics analysis was undertaken using Oncomine, OncoLnc and other databases, in order to determine KIAA1522 expression in HCC and to analyze its association with postoperative prognosis. Reverse transcription-quantitative PCR was performed to detect KIAA1522 mRNA expression in primary HCC and adjacent normal tissues, while KIAA1522 protein expression was assessed via immunohistochemical staining. KIAA1522 expression and clinicopathological characteristics of primary HCC were evaluated, and their association with patient prognosis was analyzed. The Oncomine database results indicated that KIAA1522 expression in HCC and normal liver tissues was significantly different. RT-qPCR analysis demonstrated that KIAA1522 mRNA expression was significantly higher in HCC tissues compared with that in adjacent normal tissues. Immunohistochemical analysis indicated that expression rate of KIAA1522 protein was significantly higher in primary HCC tissues compared with that in normal liver tissues. The OncoLnc database results demonstrated that KIAA1522 expression was significantly associated with short-term survival. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis indicated that high KIAA1522 protein expression was significantly associated with short-term survival for patients with HCC. Multivariate Cox regression analysis demonstrated that tumor size, Tumor-Node-Metastasis stage and high KIAA1522 protein expression were independent predictors of a poor prognosis in patients with primary HCC. Furthermore, high KIAA1522 expression was significantly associated with postoperative survival time in primary HCC, and thus may be a potential molecular marker for prognosis in patients with this cancer type.

This study aims to investigate the co-combustion mechanism of coal and corn residue on a fixed-bed reactor at low temperature, the decomposition characteristics were studied by advanced vacuum ultraviolet photoionization mass spectrometry (PI−TOFMS). The mass spectra and evolution profiles of combustion products (from 300 to 800 °C) were measured. As reaction temperature increased, the relative ion intensities of typical combustion products were investigated, and the difference with previous pyrolysis study was also discussed. The results reveal that cellulose and lignin in corn residue is faster to react than hemicellulose. Coal has an influence on the lignin rather than cellulose and hemicellulose of corn residue in blend. Coal has no effect on the production of furfuryl alcohol obtained from coal-corn residue blend. The current study on the co-combustion mechanism is beneficial to optimize the product distribution and improve combustion efficiency.

Electrohydrodynamic inkjet (E-jet) printing is a promising technology to fabricate high-performance organic electronic devices due to its high resolution, low-cost and drop-on-demand characteristics. Here, we fabricate top-contact OFETs by using E-jet printed source/drain electrodes. The printed resolution could be smaller than 5 μm on an organic semiconductor. A printable Ag ink consisting of the F4-TCNQ additive greatly improves the charge injection of the OFET, and thus the OFETs show comparable performance with thermally evaporated electrodes. The printing and doping of top electrodes can be realized in one step, which is essential to realize fully printed organic devices. The E-jet printing demonstrates its potential in high-resolution, high-performance OFET applications.

Aim: Patients with ischemic stroke (IS), transient ischemic attack (TIA), and/or peripheral artery disease (PAD) represent a population with an increased risk of coronary artery disease. Prognostic risk assessment to identify those with the highest risk that may benefit from more intensified treatment remains challenging. To explore the feasibility and capability of machine learning (ML) to predict long-term adverse cardiac-related prognosis in patients with IS, TIA, and/or PAD.Methods: We analyzed 636 consecutive patients with a history of IS, TIA, and/or PAD. All patients underwent a coronary CT angiography (CCTA) scan. Thirty-five clinical data and 34 CCTA metrics underwent automated feature selection for ML model boosting. The clinical outcome included all-cause mortality (ACM) and major adverse cardiac events (MACE) (ACM, unstable angina requiring hospitalization, non-fatal myocardial infarction (MI), and revascularization 90 days after the index CCTA).Results: During the follow-up of 3.9 ± 1.6 years, 21 patients had unstable angina requiring hospitalization, eight had a MI, 23 had revascularization and 13 deaths. ML demonstrated a significant higher area-under-curve compared with the modified Duke index (MDI), segment stenosis score (SSS), segment involvement score (SIS), and Framingham risk score (FRS) for the prediction of ACM (ML:0.92 vs. MDI:0.66, SSS:0.68, SIS:0.67, FRS:0.51, all P < 0.001) and MACE (ML:0.84 vs. MDI:0.82, SSS:0.76, SIS:0.73, FRS:0.53, all P < 0.05).Conclusion: Among the patients with IS, TIA, and/or PAD, ML demonstrated a better capability of predicting ACM and MCAE than clinical scores and CCTA metrics.

This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) and explore the association between free sugars intake and EDS. In this cross-sectional study, a total of 1517 middle school students (808 boys and 707 girls) aged 12~14 years were recruited. The study was conducted in Changsha city, China. Adolescents completed an online questionnaire, including the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), sleep characteristics, a 12-item Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ), and other self-reported information. The ESS score ≥ ten was defined as EDS. The anthropometric indices, including height, weight, and waist circumference, were measured and recorded by uniformly trained assistants. Statistical analyses included the Chi-square test and binary logistic regression model. The mean ESS score and free sugars consumption were 6.8 ± 3.9 points and 53.1 ± 44.7 g/d, respectively. The prevalence of EDS among adolescents was 22.5%, and more girls than boys had EDS (26.1% vs. 19.4%, p &lt, 0.05). An exceeded free sugars intake was positively associated with EDS, with the adjusted Odds Ratio (OR) with its 95% Confident Interval (95% CI) of 1.366 (1.060~1.761, p &lt, 0.05). EDS and excessive consumption of free sugars are commonly found among Chinese adolescents. Further studies are needed to confirm whether free sugars restriction can be meaningful to improve daytime drowsiness in those with EDS.

Highlights • There are estimated 1.93 million new CRC cases diagnosed, and 0.94 million CRC caused deaths in 2020 worldwide. • The global new CRC cases is predicted to reach 3.2 million in 2040. • China and the United States have the highest estimated number of new CRC cases in the next 20 years. • The number of new CRC cases is increased from 0.56 million (2020) to 0.91 million (2040) in China. • The number of new CRC cases is increased from 0.16 million (2020) to 0.21 million (2040) in the United States., As the third most common malignancy and the second most deadly cancer, colorectal cancer (CRC) induces estimated 1.9 million incidence cases and 0.9 million deaths worldwide in 2020. The incidence of CRC is higher in highly developed countries, and it is increasing in middle- and low-income countries due to westernization. Moreover, a rising incidence of early-onset CRC is also emerging. The large number of CRC cases poses a growing global public health challenge. Raising awareness of CRC is important to promote healthy lifestyle choices, novel strategies for CRC management, and implementation of global screening programs, which are critical to reducing CRC morbidity and mortality in the future. CRC is a heterogeneous disease, and its subtype affiliation influences prognosis and therapeutic response. An accurate CRC subtype classification system is of great significance for basic research and clinical outcome. Here, we present the global epidemiology of CRC in 2020 and projections for 2040, review the major CRC subtypes to better understand CRC molecular basis, and summarize current risk factors, prevention, and screening strategies for CRC., Graphical abstract Image, graphical abstract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) mainly caused pneumonia and pulmonary fibrosis through upper respiratory tract infection, which resulted in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and multiorgan damage of cardiovascular, nervous, digestive, and genitourinary systems. Although the virus test turned negative after the patient recovered, the damage to multiorgan which caused by SARS-CoV-2 may irreversible. Therefore, the health status of the recovered patients has gradually become the focus of people's attention. Whether coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients can receive exercise rehabilitation training after discharge? and what's the basis? We try to analyze and answer these questions, will provide some ideas about the patients to develop a reasonable and effective exercise rehabilitation program.

There is a lack of evidence to show prevalence of laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR) and the association between LPR and dietary factors. Adolescents consume the most amount of free sugars among the Chinese population. We conducted this study to investigate the prevalence of LPR in Chinese adolescents and explore the association between free sugars consumption and LPR. A cross-sectional study was conducted on 1517 middle school students in Hunan, China. An online questionnaire was applied to collect data on the condition of LPR, consumption of free sugars and other self-reported covariates. Height, weight and waist circumference were collected by anthropometric measurements. Logistic regression was applied to assess the association between LPR and free sugars consumption. The mean and standard deviation of free sugars consumption was 53.14 ± 44.75 (g/d). The prevalence of LPR was 8.11%. A positive association was observed between LPR and higher free sugars consumption after adjusted multiple covariates, with adjusted odds ratio (95% confident interval) of 1.656 (1.125–2.438). The prevalence of LPR among Chinese adolescents was high. Further analytic studies with strict design are required to test the association between LPR and free sugar consumption. Systematic strategies and policies should to be developed to reduce the intake of free sugars in order to prevent LPR.

Background Immunologic dysfunction is one of the most important mechanisms underlying the initiation and development of Juvenile-onset Recurrent Respiratory Papillomatosis (JORRP). The study aimed to explore whether HPV-specific T-cell response was impaired in JORRP patients. Methods A total of 46 JORRP patients and 93 age- and sex- matched healthy controls were enrolled. The plasma concentrations of various cytokines were measured using the Luminex. The cytokine mRNA profiles of PBMCs were quantified with the real-time PCR. The T-cell subsets, HPV-specific T-cell activation, proliferation, apoptosis and expression of replicative senescent T-cell markers CD57 were measured with the flow cytometry. The cytokine secretion of HPV-specific T cells was assessed by the ELISPOT. Results JORRP patients had a Th2-biased cytokine profile correlated with disease severity in the JORRP peripheral system. JORRP patients had an increased percentage of memory T cells and a reduced percentage of naive T cells in circulation. Upon HPV6/11 antigens stimulation, T cells from JORRP patients exhibited a greater activation profile as judged by a higher CD25 and CD69 expression. Of note, JORRP patients presented with a greater number of IL-10- and IL-4-secreting HPV6/11 antigen responding cells than that of IFN-γ and TNF-α secreting responders in the ELISPOT experiment. Furthermore, in response to HPV6/11 antigen stimulation, JORRP patients showed a reduced level of cell proliferation, an increased level of apoptosis and higher percentage of the differentiated T cells expressing the replicative senescent cell marker CD57. Conclusions Impaired HPV-specific T-cell responses could be partly responsible for JORRP development.

Healthy diet is essential to type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) prevention for women with previous gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM). To evaluate the effect of a lifestyle intervention program on diet quality for rural women who were previously diagnosed with GDM, we conducted a randomized controlled study in two counties located in south-central China. A total of 404 eligible women were allocated into an intervention group and control group. Participants in the intervention group received 6-month lifestyle intervention including six group seminars and eight telephone consultations. Dietary data were collected at baseline and 18 months via a 24 h dietary recall, and dietary quality was measured by two indicators, Chinese Healthy Eating Score (CHEI) and Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women (MDD-W). Baseline CHEI scores (54.4 vs. 53.5, p = 0.305) and the proportions of participants who met MDD-W (73.8% vs. 74.5%, p = 0.904) were comparable between the two groups. The intervention group achieved a higher CHEI score (62.2 vs. 58.9, p = 0.001) and higher MDD-W proportion (90.6% vs. 81.2%, p = 0.023) at 18 months. Lifestyle intervention was associated with the change of CHEI (p = 0.049) but not with MDD-W (p = 0.212). In conclusion, compared with usual care, lifestyle intervention resulted in greater improvement of dietary quality among rural women with previous GDM.

BACKGROUND Renal epithelioid angiomyolipoma (EAML) is a rare and potentially malignant mesenchymal lesion mainly composed of epithelioid cells. Although some case reports or small case series have been published, the computed tomography (CT) manifestations and radiologic-pathologic correlation depending on different epithelioid component percentages have not been studied before. OBJECTIVE To investigate the CT manifestation and radiologic-pathologic correlation between renal EAML and angiomyolipoma (AML) with epithelioid component. METHODS The clinicopathologic and imaging data of 53 patients with an original diagnosis of EAML or AML with epithelioid component were retrospectively collected from three hospitals. All tissue specimens were re-sectioned and re-observed under the microscope. Samples were divided into an EAML group (≥ 80% epithelioid component, n = 25) and AML with epithelioid component group (5% ≤ epithelioid component

This study aimed to develop non-invasive machine learning classifiers for predicting post–Glenn shunt patients with low and high risks of a mean pulmonary arterial pressure (mPAP) > 15 mmHg based on preoperative cardiac computed tomography (CT). This retrospective study included 96 patients with functional single ventricle who underwent a bidirectional Glenn procedure between November 1, 2009, and July, 31, 2017. All patients underwent post-procedure CT, followed by cardiac catheterization. Overall, 23 morphologic parameters were manually extracted from cardiac CT images for each patient. The Mann-Whitney U or chi-square test was applied to select the most significant predictors. Six machine learning algorithms including logistic regression, Naive Bayes, random forest (RF), linear discriminant analysis, support vector machine, and K-nearest neighbor were used for modeling. These algorithms were independently trained on 100 train-validation random splits with a 3:1 ratio. Their average performance was evaluated by area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. Seven CT morphologic parameters were selected for modeling. RF obtained the best performance, with mean AUC of 0.840 (confidence interval [CI] 0.832–0.850) and 0.787 (95% CI 0.780–0.794); sensitivity of 0.815 (95% CI 0.797–0.833) and 0.778 (95% CI 0.767–0.788), specificity of 0.766 (95% CI 0.748–0.785) and 0.746 (95% CI 0.735–0.757); and accuracy of 0.782 (95% CI 0.771–0.793) and 0.756 (95% CI 0.748–0.764) in the training and validation cohorts, respectively. The CT-based RF model demonstrates a good performance in the prediction of mPAP, which may reduce the need for right heart catheterization in post–Glenn shunt patients with suspected mPAP > 15 mmHg. • Twenty-three candidate descriptors were manually extracted from cardiac computed tomography images, and seven of them were selected for subsequent modeling. • The random forest model presents the best predictive performance for pulmonary pressure among all methods. • The computed tomography–based machine learning model could predict post–Glenn shunt pulmonary pressure non-invasively.

Activation of the apelin receptor, or APJ, by apelin is considered a therapeutic avenue for cardiovascular disease, including heart failure. Recently, a novel endogenous ligand for APJ named Elabela (ELA) has been discovered and is known to possess anti-heart failure activity in animal models. However, the short in vivo half-life of ELA constrains its clinical potential. To extend its half-life in vivo, we attempted to make IgG-Fc-ELA fusion proteins. We found that Fc-ELA-32 fusion proteins are cleaved during protein production, whereas Fc-ELA-21 fusion proteins are expressed intact, so we focused our studies on the latter. The Fc-ELA-21 fusion protein retained its functionality in vitro and had a half-life of approximately 44 h in circulation in mice after subcutaneous injection. Daily injection of the fusion protein in MI rats for 4 weeks significantly mitigated heart dysfunction with respect to hemodynamics. At the cellular and tissue levels, treatment of Fc-ELA-21 fusion protein significantly increased angiogenesis, promoted cardiomyocyte proliferation and reduced apoptosis and heart fibrosis near the infarct area. In comparison, ELA-21 had a half-life of 13 min and showed no significant cardioprotective activities. These data suggest that Fc-ELA-21 may be a potential therapeutic for heart failure.

The aim of this study was to investigate whether skeletal muscle-derived follistatin-like 1 (FSTL1) reaches the heart and exerts the angiogenetic function in rats suffering myocardial infarctions (MI) after exercise intervention. Forty-eight male adult Sprague–Dawley rats were randomly divided into four groups. MI was provoked by ligation of left anterior descending coronary artery. MI rats underwent adeno-associated virus injection of FST1 in tibialis anterior muscle and 4 weeks of resistance exercise via a tail-suspended incremental weight-climbing method (0–75% body weight, daily load increased by 10%; 1 h/day, 5 day/w). Heart function was evaluated by hemodynamics including LVSP, LVEDP and ± dP/dt max; the cross-sectional area of muscle cells and myocardium fibrosis were analyzed by DiI and Masson’s staining, respectively; the FSTL1 expression, endothelial cell proliferation and angiogenesis were visualized by immunofluorescence staining; and protein expression was quantified by Western blotting. Resistance exercise reverted MI-induced skeletal muscle atrophy, increased muscle FSTL1 expression and stimulated skeletal muscle derived FSTL1 entering into the MI heart via blood circulation. The overexpression of skeletal muscle FSTL1 improved myocardial endothelial cell proliferation, increased small vessel density in the fibrotic border, inhibited myocardial fibrosis and improved heart function in the MI rats after the exercise intervention. Meanwhile, DIP2A-PI3K-Akt-mTOR, Erk1/2 and TGFβ-Smad2/3 pathways were activated in the myocardium. Resistance exercise stimulates skeletal muscle derived FSTL1 to reach the myocardium which makes a positive contribution to cardioprotection in MI rat.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have outperformed most state-of-the-art methods in object detection. However, CNNs suffer the difficulty of detecting objects with rotation, because the dataset used to train the CCNs often does not contain sufficient samples with various angles of orientation. In this paper, we propose a novel data-augmentation approach to handle samples with rotation, which utilizes the distribution of the object's orientation without the time-consuming process of rotating the sample images. Firstly, we present an orientation descriptor, named as “principal-axis orientation’’, to describe the orientation of the object's principal axis in an image and estimate the distribution of objects' principal-axis orientations (PODs) of the whole dataset. Secondly, we define a similarity metric to calculate the POD similarity between the training set and an additional dataset, which is built by randomly selecting images from the benchmark ImageNet ILSVRC2012 dataset. Finally, we optimize a cost function to obtain an optimal rotation angle, which indicates the highest POD similarity between the two aforementioned data sets. In order to evaluate our data augmentation method for object detection, experiments, conducted on the benchmark PASCAL VOC2007 dataset, show that with the training set augmented using our method, the average precision (AP) of the Faster RCNN in the TV-monitor is improved by 7.5%. In addition, our experimental results also demonstrate that new samples generated by random rotation are more likely to result in poor performance of object detection.

Radiation-induced lung injury (RILI) is a potentially fatal and dose-limiting complication of thoracic cancer radiotherapy. However, effective therapeutic agents for this condition are limited. Here, we describe a novel strategy to exert additive effects of a non-erythropoietic EPO derivative (ARA290), along with a free radical scavenger, superoxide dismutase (SOD), using a bioengineered nanoreactor (SOD@ARA290-HBc). ARA290-chimeric nanoreactor makes SOD present in a confined reaction space by encapsulation into its interior to heighten stability against denaturing stimuli. In a RILI mouse model, intratracheal administration of SOD@ARA290-HBc was shown to significantly ameliorate acute radiation pneumonitis and pulmonary fibrosis. Our investigations revealed that SOD@ARA290-HBc performs its radioprotective effects by protecting against radiation induced alveolar epithelial cell apoptosis and ferroptosis, suppressing oxidative stress, inhibiting inflammation and by modulating the infiltrated macrophage phenotype, or through a combination of these mechanisms. In conclusion, SOD@ARA29-HBc is a potential therapeutic agent for RILI, and given its multifaceted roles, it may be further developed as a translational nanomedicine for other related disorders.

Public Wi-Fi hotspots are essential in most venues and carry over 50% of last-mile Internet traffic for mobile users. Venue owners and mobile advertisers are employing various technologies to promote Wi-Fi monetization via broadcasting advertisements to users. In this paper, we study Wi-Fi advertisement scheduling by considering the communication constraints of Wi-Fi hotspots and the users’ tolerance for viewing advertisements. We build a tripartite Wi-Fi advertising model with venues, advertisers and mobile users, and then formulate the Wi-Fi advertisement scheduling process as an optimization problem to maximize users’ overall interest value. The formulated problem is a complex mixed integer programming problem. We prove that its objective function is a monotone submodular function subject to a knapsack constraint and a partition matroid constraint, respectively. On this basis, we propose a novel greedy swap algorithm to solve the advertisement scheduling problem with an approximation guarantee of $\frac{{1 - {e^{ - 2}}}}{2}$ to the optimal solution. Extensive simulation results validate the superiority of the proposed algorithm which obtains the highest user interests towards all displayed Wi-Fi advertisements, thereby enhancing the potential revenues for both venues and advertisers.

Myocardial infarction is the major cause of death in cardiovascular disease. In vitro and in vivo models are used to find the exercise mode which has the most significant effect on myocardial irisin/FNDC5 expression and illuminate the cardioprotective role and mechanisms of exercise-activated myocardial irisin/FNDC5-PINK1/Parkin-mediated mitophagy in myocardial infarction. The results indicated that expression of irisin/FNDC5 in myocardium could be up-regulated by different types of exercise and skeletal muscle electrical stimulation, which then promotes mitophagy and improves cardiac function and the effect of resistance exercise. Resistance exercise can improve cardiac function by activating the irisin/FNDC5-PINK1/Parkin-LC3/P62 pathway, regulating mitophagy and inhibiting oxidative stress. OPA1 may play an important role in the improvement of cardiac function and mitophagy pathway in myocardial infarction mice by irisin-mediated resistance exercise. Resistance exercise is expected to become an effective therapeutic way to promote myocardial infarction rehabilitation.

(1) Background: Whether early supplementation of probiotics to improve intestinal flora can effectively prevent eczema remains a controversial issue. We aimed to investigate the effect of a mixed strain of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium on eczema in infants under three years old at present; (2) Methods: We searched the databases of PubMed, Web of Science, and Cochrane Library, as well as National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), WeiPu (VIP), and WanFang Data (WanFang) for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of probiotics in the prevention of eczema in infants without language restriction. The main outcome was eczema incidence, while adverse events during the intervention constituted the secondary outcome. The random-/fixed-effects model was utilized to calculate the combined relative risk (RR) and 95% confidence interval (CI). The methodological quality of the study was evaluated using the Cochrane “bias risk” tool. According to the initial intervention time, subgroup analysis was carried out, follow-up time, family history, etc.; (3) Results: Nine articles were selected (2093 infants). The Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium mixed strain could prevent eczema in infants under three years of age compared to the placebo (RR = 0.60; I2 = 67%; p < 0.001). Subgroup analysis revealed that the mixture of two probiotic strains had preventive effects on both infants with positive (RR = 0.53; I2 = 52%; p < 0.001) and negative (RR = 0.69; I2 = 62%; p = 0.02) family history; The follow-up time for ≤12 months (RR = 0.65; I2 = 12%; p = 0.01) and 12–24 months (RR = 0.60; I2 = 79%; p = 0.003), daily dose of probiotics ≤ 1 × 109 and > 1 × 109 colony forming units all can be effective (p < 0.01); Compared with the intervention of infants alone (RR = 0.63; I2 = 63%; p = 0.29), the effect of probiotics mixture at the beginning of pregnancy was more significant (RR = 0.59; I2 = 71%; p < 0.001); Except for the mixture of Lactobacillus rhamnosusGG (LGG) and Bifidobacterium longum (B. longum) (p = 0.18), other subgroups of intervention group can play a preventive effect (p < 0.05); (4) Conclusions: The mixed strain of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacterium can effectively reduce the incidence of eczema in infants under three years old. However, further research is needed to fully understand the exact mechanism of their effect on infant eczema.

This study aims to explore the association between restrained eating, body image, and dietary intake among Chinese college students. This cross-sectional study included 1301 college students at two universities in Hunan Province. Electronic questionnaires were used to collect information including students’ demographic characteristics, restrained eating, perception of body weight, body satisfaction, and dietary intake. Anthropometric measurements were collected to calculate body mass index (BMI). The prevalence of high restrained eating was 52.8%. Students who were dissatisfied with their bodies or overestimated their body weight showed a higher tendency toward high restrained eating (p &lt, 0.05). Students with high restrained eating tended to eat fruits and eggs more frequently, while the frequency of eating domestic animals and poultry, sugar-sweetened beverages, and fast food were the opposite. Moreover, high restrained eating was a risk factor for low dietary diversity (odds ratio (OR) = 1.384, 95% confidence interval: 1.002~1.912). The high incidence of restrained eating among Chinese college students and its energy-restricted diets that may lead to possible health implications require attention. Further studies are needed to investigate the characteristics of college students’ restrained eating to tailor appropriate interventions for forming positive body images and promoting healthy eating behaviors, thus, improving dietary quality.

RRAM-based computing-in-memory (CIM) chips have shown great potentials to accelerate deep neural networks on edge devices by reducing data transfer between the memory and the computing unit. However, due to the non-ideal characteristics of RRAM, the accuracy of the neural network on the RRAM chip is usually lower than the software. Here we propose an on-chip layer-wise training (LWT) method to alleviate the adverse effect of RRAM imperfections and improve the accuracy of the chip. Using a locally validated dataset, LWT can reduce the communication between the edge and the cloud, which benefits personalized data privacy. The simulation results on the CIFAR-10 dataset show that the LWT method can improve the accuracy of VGG-16 and ResNet-18 by more than 5% and 10%, respectively, with only 25% operations and 35% buffer compared with the back-propagation method. Moreover, the pipe-LWT method is presented to improve the throughput by three times further.

The mechanism of the characteristic intermittent hypoxia (IH) of obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) on monocyte remain unclear. Our study found that OSAS children had a significantly upregulated expression in circulating proinflammatory cytokines IL-6 and IL-12, and endothelial injury markers VEGF and ICAM1. Association analysis revealed that the plasma TNFα, IL-1β, IL-6, IL-10 and IL-12 concentration were negatively associated with the minimal SpO2, a negative index for disease severity. OSAS monocytes presented an inflammatory phenotype with higher mRNA levels of inflammatory cytokines. Importantly, we noted a significant decrease in T-cell immunoglobulin and mucin domain (Tim)-3 expression in OSAS monocytes with the increase of the plasma proinflammatory cytokines. In vitro assay demonstrated that IH induced THP-1 cell overactivation via NF-κB dependent pathway was inhibited by the Tim-3 signal. Our results indicated that activation of monocyte inflammatory responses is closely related to OSAS-induced IH, and negatively mediated by a Tim-3 signaling pathway.

This study aims to explore associations between emotional eating, depression and laryngopharyngeal reflux among college students in Hunan Province. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted among 1301 students at two universities in Hunan. Electronic questionnaires were used to collect information about the students&rsquo, emotional eating, depressive symptoms, laryngopharyngeal reflux and sociodemographic characteristics. Anthropometric measurements were collected to obtain body mass index (BMI). Results: High emotional eating was reported by 52.7% of students. The prevalence of depressive symptoms was 18.6% and that of laryngopharyngeal reflux symptoms 8.1%. Both emotional eating and depressive symptoms were associated with laryngopharyngeal reflux symptoms (AOR = 3.822, 95% CI 2.126&ndash, 6.871 vs. AOR = 4.093, 95% CI 2.516&ndash, 6.661). Conclusion: The prevalence of emotional eating and depressive symptoms among Chinese college students should be pay more attention in the future. Emotional eating and depressive symptoms were positively associated with laryngopharyngeal symptoms. The characteristics of emotional eating require further study so that effective interventions to promote laryngopharyngeal health among college students may be formulated.

The incidence of obesity and colorectal cancer (CRC) has risen rapidly in recent decades. More than 650 million obese and 2 billion overweight individuals are currently living in the world. CRC is the third most common cancer. Obesity is regarded as one of the key environmental risk factors for the pathogenesis of CRC. In the present review, we mainly focus on the epidemiology of obesity and CRC in the world, the United States, and China. We also summarize the molecular mechanisms linking obesity to CRC in different aspects, including nutriology, adipokines and hormones, inflammation, gut microbiota, and bile acids. The unmet medical needs for obesity-related CRC are still remarkable. Understanding the molecular basis of these associations will help develop novel therapeutic targets and approaches for the treatment of obesity-related CRC.

Aerobic exercise involves in ameliorating kidney injury, but the underlying mechanisms are not fully clarified. In this study, we elucidated the potential mechanisms of aerobic exercise in ameliorating kidney injury following myocardial infarction (MI). In vivo, wildtype and alcat1 knockout mice were used to establish the MI model, and subjected to six-week moderate-intensity aerobic exercise. In vitro, Normal Rat Kidney (NRK) cells treated with H2O2 and recombinant human Irisin (rhIrisin) were used for exploring potential mechanisms. Our results showed that Irisin expression was up-regulated by aerobic exercise in kidneys after MI, while ALCAT1 was reduced. In alcat1 knockout mice, we found that ALCAT1 involved in the progressions of oxidative stress and apoptosis in impaired kidney tissues of MI mice, but aerobic exercise reversed these changes. Furthermore, in vitro, we observed that Irisin inhibited both H2O2-treatment or overexpression of alcat1-induced oxidative stress and apoptosis in NRK cells, partially via AMPK-Sirt1-PGC-1α pathway. These findings reveal that aerobic exercise participates in alleviating the levels of oxidative stress and apoptosis in impaired kidney tissues following MI, partially via activating FNDC5/Irisin-AMPK-Sirt1-PGC-1α signaling pathway and inhibiting ALCAT1 expression.

Two-dimensional (2D) materials and van der Waals heterostructures have attracted tremendous attention because of their appealing electronic, mechanical, and optoelectronic properties, which offer the possibility to extend the range of functionalities for diverse potential applications. Here, we fabricate a novel multiterminal device with dual-gate based on 2D material van der Waals heterostructures. Such a multiterminal device exhibited excellent nonvolatile multilevel resistance switching performance controlled by the source-drain voltage and back-gate voltage. Based on these features, heterosynaptic plasticity, in which the synaptic weight can be tuned by another modulatory interneuron, has been mimicked. A tunable analogue weight update (both on/off ratio and update nonlinearity) of synapse with high speed (50 ns) and low energy (∼7.3 fJ) programming has been achieved. These results demonstrate the great potential of the artificial synapse based on van der Waals heterostructures for neuromorphic computing.

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs), members of the nuclear hormone receptor family, attract wide attention as promising therapeutic targets for the treatment of multiple diseases, and their target selective ligands were also intensively developed for pharmacological agents such as the approved drugs fibrates and thiazolidinediones (TZDs). Despite their potent pharmacological activities, PPARs are reported to be involved in agent- and pollutant-induced multiple organ toxicity or protective effects against toxicity. A better understanding of the protective and the detrimental role of PPARs will help to preserve efficacy of the PPAR modulators but diminish adverse effects. The present review summarizes and critiques current findings related to PPAR-mediated types of toxicity and protective effects against toxicity for a systematic understanding of PPARs in toxicology and applied pharmacology.

Clustering analysis is a data analysis technique, it groups a set of data points into multiple clusters with similar data points. However, clustering of high dimensional data is still a difficult task. In order to facilitate this task, people usually use hypergraphs to represent the complex relationships between high dimensional data. In this paper, the hypergraph is used to improve the representation of the complex high dimensional data, and a multi-stage hierarchical clustering method based on hypergraph partition and Chameleon algorithm is proposed. The proposed method constructs a hypergraph in the shared-nearest-neighbor (SNN) graph from the dataset and then employs a hypergraph partitioning method hMETIS to obtain a series of subgraphs, finally those subgraphs are merged to get the final clusters. Experiments show that the proposed method is better than Chameleon algorithm and the other four clustering methods when applied on four UCI datasets.

The image processing has witnessed remarkable progress in image denoising. Nevertheless, restoring the visual quality of the image remains a great challenge. Existing methods might fail to obtain the denoised images with high visual quality since they ignore the potential connection with the high-level feature and result in over-smoothing results. Aiming to research whether high-level feature could influence the performance of denoising task, we propose an end-to-end multi-module neural network architecture, which introduces the combination of the high-level and low-level feature in the training process, for image denoising. In order to guide model preserve structural information efficiently, we introduce a hybrid loss, which is designed to restore details from both pixel and feature space. The experimental results show our method improves the visual quality of images and performs well compared with state-of-the-art methods on three benchmarks.

Road Traffic Accidents (RTAs) are currently the leading causes of traffic congestion, human death, health problems, environmental pollution, and economic losses. Investigation of the characteristics and patterns of RTAs is one of the high-priority issues in traffic safety analysis. This paper presents our work on mining RTAs using association rule based methods. A case study is conducted using UK traffic accident data from 2005 to 2017. We performed Apriori algorithm on the data set and then explored the rules with high lift and high support respectively. The results show that RTAs have strong correlation with environmental characteristics, speed limit, and location. With the network visualization, we can explain in details the association rules and obtain more understandable insights into the results. The promising outcomes will undoubtedly reduce traffic accident effectively and assist traffic safety department for decision making.

Various stimuli have been applied to harvest complete cell sheets, including temperature, magnetic, pH, and electrical stimuli. Cell sheet technology is a convenient and efficient approach with beneficial effects for tissue regeneration and cell therapy. Lights of different wavelengths, such as ultraviolet (UV), visible light, and near infrared ray (NIR) light, were confirmed to aid in fabricating a cell sheet. Changes in the wettability, potential, or water content of the culturing surfaces that occur under light illumination induce conformational changes in the adhesive proteins or collagens, which then leads to cell sheet detachment. However, the current approaches face several limitations, as few standards for safe light illumination have been proposed to date, and require a careful control of the wavelength, power, and irradiation time. Future studies should aim at generating new materials for culturing and releasing cell sheets rapidly and effectively.

Introduction Renal ischemia/reperfusion injury (IRI) is the most common cause of acute kidney injury (AKI), and patients with AKI have a high rate of mortality. Apelin is a therapeutic candidate for treatment of IRI and Elabela (ELA) is a recently discovered hormone that also activates the apelin receptor (APJ). We examined the use of ELA as a preventive treatment for IRI using in vitro and in vivo models. Methods Male mice were subjected to renal IRI, with or without administration of a stabilized form of ELA (Fc-ELA-21) for 4 days. Renal tubular lesions were measured using H&E staining, reactive oxygen species (ROS) were measured using a dihydroethidium stain assay, and renal cell apoptosis was measured using the TUNEL assay and flow cytometry. Immortalized human proximal tubular epithelial (HK-2) cells were pretreated with or without LY294002 and/or ELA-32, maintained at normoxic or hypoxic conditions, and then returned to normal culture conditions to mimic IRI. Cell apoptosis was determined using the TUNEL assay and cell proliferation was determined using the MTT assay. The levels of Akt, p-Akt, ERK1/2, p- ERK1/2, Bcl-2, Bax, caspase-3 and cleaved caspase-3 were measured using western blotting. Results Fc-ELA-21 administration reduced renal tissue damage, ROS production, and apoptosis in mice that had renal IRI. ELA-32 reduced HK-2 cell apoptosis and restored the proliferation of cells subjected to IRI. Akt phosphorylation had a role in the anti-apoptotic effect of ELA. Conclusion This study of in vitro and in vivo models of IRI indicated that the preventive and anti-apoptotic effects of ELA were mediated via the PI3K/Akt signaling pathway.

Solution-printed organic single-crystalline films hold great potential for achieving low-cost manufacturing of large-area and flexible electronics. For practical applications, organic field-effect transistor arrays must exhibit high performance and small device-to-device variation. However, scalable fabrication of highly aligned organic crystalline arrays is rather difficult due to the lack of control over the crystallographic orientation, crystal uniformity, and thickness. Here, a facile solution-printing method to fabricate centimeter-sized highly aligned organic crystalline arrays with a thickness of a few molecular layers is reported. In this study, the solution shearing technique is used to produce large-area, organic highly crystalline thin films. Water-soluble ink is printed on the hydrophobic surface of organic crystalline films, to selectively protect it, followed by etching. It is shown that the addition of a surfactant dramatically changes the fluid drying dynamics and increases the contact line friction of the aqueous solution to the underlying nonwetting organic crystalline film. As a result, centimeter-scale highly aligned organic crystalline arrays are successfully prepared on different substrates. The devices based on organic crystalline arrays show good performance and uniformity. This study demonstrates that solution printing is close to industrial application and also expands its applicability to various printed flexible electronics.

There is the deviation on the understanding of acupuncture “safety” in healthcare research and the development of international standards. How to interpret and contextualize the “safety” is the point to break through it. In the aspects of contextual elements and stakeholders, using the literature reviews and theoretic approach, the concept of “safety” is attempted to be specified and the differences between health care research and international standard development to be discussed. The article aims to outline the general conceptual framework of “safety”. Consequently, an approach is explored to the term-based analysis in acupuncture international standard development.