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Osteoporosis (OP) is a common age-related disease characterized by a deterioration of bone mass and structure that predisposes patients to fragility fractures. Pharmaceutical therapies that promote anabolic bone formation in OP patients and OP-induced fracture are needed. We investigated whether a neutralizing antibody against Siglec-15 can simultaneously inhibit bone resorption and stimulate bone formation. We found that the multinucleation of osteoclasts was inhibited in SIGLEC-15 conditional knockout mice and mice undergoing Siglec-15 neutralizing antibody treatment. The secretion of platelet-derived growth factor-BB (PDGF-BB), the number of tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase-positive (TRAP+) mononuclear cells, and bone formation were significantly increased in the SIGLEC-15 conditional knockout mice and antibody-treated mice. The anabolic effect of the Siglec-15 neutralizing antibody on bone formation was blunted in mice with Pdgfb deleted in TRAP+ cells. These findings showed that the anabolic effect of the Siglec-15 neutralizing antibody was mediated by elevating PDGF-BB production of TRAP+ mononuclear cells. To test the therapeutic potential of the Siglec-15 neutralizing antibody, we injected the antibody in an ovariectomy-induced osteoporotic mouse model, which mimics postmenopausal osteoporosis in women, and in two fracture healing models because fracture is the most serious health consequence of osteoporosis. The Siglec-15 neutralizing antibody effectively reduced bone resorption and stimulated bone formation in estrogen deficiency-induced osteoporosis. Of note, the Siglec-15 neutralizing antibody promoted intramembranous and endochondral ossification at the damaged area of cortical bone in fracture healing mouse models. Thus, the Siglec-15 neutralizing antibody shows significant translational potential as a novel therapy for OP and bone fracture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advancement in learning and teaching methodology experimented with virtual reality (VR)-based presentation form to create immersive learning and training environment. The quality of such educational VR applications not only relies on the virtual model, but the 2D presentation materials such as text, diagrams and figures. However, manual designing or seeking these educational resources is both labor intensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we introduce a new automatic algorithm to detect and extract presentation slides in educational videos, which will provide abundant resources for creating slide-based immersive presentation environment. The proposed approach mainly involves five core components: shot boundary detection, training instances collection, shot classification, slide region detection and slide transition detection. We conducted comparison experiment to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results indicate that, in comparison with peer method, the proposed method improves the precision of slide detection from 81.6 to 92.6% and recall from 74.7 to 86.3% on average. With the detected slides, content analyzer can be employed to further extract reusable elements, which can be used for developing VR-based educational applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laser devices have received increasing attention in numerous computer-aided applications such as automatic control, 3D modeling and virtual reality. In this paper, aiming at people counting, we propose a novel people detection and tracking method based on the multipoint infrared laser, which can further facilitate intelligent scene modeling and analysis. In our method, a camera with the infrared lens filter is utilized to capture the monitored scene where an array of infrared spots is produced by the multipoint infrared laser. We build a spatial background model based on locations of spots. Pedestrians are detected by clustering of foreground spots. Then, our method tracks and counts the detected pedestrians via inferring the forward-backward motion consistency. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluation and comparison are conducted, and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves excellent performance in challenging scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]