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Danggui Shaoyao San (DSS), a traditional Chinese medicinal prescription, was widely used to reinforce earth to activate collaterals in ancient times. Recently, many clinical studies found that DSS had a renoprotection. In this study, we evaluated the effect of DSS on unilateral ureteral obstruction- (UUO-) induced renal fibrosis in rats and investigated the mechanisms underlying the effect. Sprague Dawley (SD) rats were randomized to UUO or Sham operation. After 1 day, the rats that underwent UUO were randomized to treatment for four experimental groups (n=10 each group): Sham, UUO only, UUO+ benazepril (Bena), and UUO+DSS. After 4 weeks, we demonstrated that DSS significantly suppressed UUO-induced renal hypertrophy by gravimetric. In addition, DSS obviously prevented UUO-induced disorder in renal structure and renal function by HE and biochemistry test. We also found that DSS abrogated UUO-induced renal fibrosis by Masson’s staining and collagen volume fraction (CVF) analysis; this is consistent with the western blot analysis that showed DSS abrogated the UUO-induced enhanced TGF-β1 and weakened BMP-7. Compared with the UUO only group, rats treated with DSS exhibited significant increase in vascular density, followed by decrease in hypoxia and HIF-1α protein level through western blot and immunofluorescence analysis. Furthermore, we also determined proteins of autophagy and DSS enhanced autophagy to prevent the damage-induced by UUO. Taken together, our findings demonstrated that DSS had a renoprotection effect in ameliorating renal fibrosis possibly via attenuating tissue hypoxia and regulating autophagy.

Active contour models have been extensively applied to image processing and computer vision. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive method combines the advantages of the SBGFRLS model and GAC model. It can segment images in presence of low contrast, noise, weak edge and intensity inhomogeneity. Firstly, a region term is introduced. It can be seen as the global information part of our model and it is available for images with low gray values. Secondly, Legendre polynomials are employed in the local statistical information part to approximate region intensity and then our model can deal with images with intensity inhomogeneity or weak edges. Thirdly, a correction term is selected to improve the performance of curve evolution. Synthetic and real images are tested and Dice similarity coefficients of different models are compared in this paper. Experiments show that our model can obtain better segmental results.

In this paper, a static electromagnetic field problem will be solved. The method to solve the problem is Finite Difference Method ( FDM ). The software MATLAB is the main environment used to finish the numerical computing. Finally, we found using Finite Difference Method to solve a static electromagnetic field problem is quite convenient. We also can draw the two-dimension and three-dimension graph of the distribution of the electromagnetic field. Furthermore, we discuss the advantages of using FDM to solve the problem, and the disadvantages still exist in this method.