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High-dose chemotherapy and/or radiation given before an allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation severely damage thymic epithelial cells (TECs), resulting in poor post-transplant immune recovery. IL-22 mediates recovery of TECs via a proregenerative effect, but the precise mechanism by which this occurs is unknown. In this study, we found IL-22 improved thymus recovery after damage from irradiation in association with increased number of TECs. This effect was blocked by ruxolitinib, a JAK1/JAK2 inhibitor. IL-22 increased the number of TECs via a Stat3-dependent signaling in the mTEC1 murine thymic epithelial cell line. This, in turn, upregulated transcription of myeloid cell leukemia sequence 1 (Mcl1), resulting in increased number of TECs. Similar effects were seen in irradiated mice given IL-22. Defects in IL-22 resulted in delayed thymus recovery in irradiated mice and had an impact on levels of thymus function-related genes such as Foxn1, Aire, and Kgf. In mice, post-transplant use of IL-22 improved repair of TECs, increased the numbers of thymus T cells, increased the intrathymic levels of Aire, and increased the proportion of natural regulatory T cells, resulting in decreased severity of chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Our data highlight the critical role of the IL-22/Stat3/Mcl-1 pathway in the regeneration of TECs after damage from irradiation in mice and highlight circumstances where normalizing thymus T cell function with IL-22 decreases GVHD after allotransplants., (Copyright © 2019 American Society for Transplantation and Cellular Therapy. All rights reserved.)

During the past years, atomic force microscopy (AFM) has matured to an indispensable tool to characterize nanomaterials in colloid and interface science. For imaging, a sharp probe mounted near to the end of a cantilever scans over the sample surface providing a high resolution three-dimensional topographic image. In addition, the AFM tip can be used as a force sensor to detect local properties like adhesion, stiffness, charge etc. After the invention of the colloidal probe technique it has also become a major method to measure surface forces. In this review, we highlight the advances in the application of AFM in the field of mineral flotation, such as mineral morphology imaging, water at mineral surface, reagent adsorption, inter-particle force, and bubble-particle interaction. In the coming years, the complementary characterization of chemical composition such as using infrared spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy for AFM topography imaging and the synchronous measurement of the force and distance involving deformable bubble as a force sensor will further assist the fundamental understanding of flotation mechanism., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Intracoronary optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a new invasive imaging system which produces high-resolution images of coronary arteries. Preliminary data suggests that the atherosclerotic disease can be detected from the intracoronary OCT images. However, manual assessment of the intracoronary OCT images is time-consuming and subjective. In this work, we present an automatic atherosclerotic disease detection system on intracoronary OCT images. In the system, a preprocessing scheme is first applied to remove speckle noise and artifacts caused by catheter. Intensity, Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG), and Local Binary Patterns (LBP) are then extracted to represent the OCT image. Finally a linear SVM classifier is employed to detect the unhealthy subject. Four-fold cross-validation process is conducted to evaluate the proposed system; and a dataset with 200 images from healthy subjects and 200 images from unhealthy subjects is built to evaluate the system. The mean accuracy is 0.90 and standard deviation is 0.0427, which indicates that the proposed system is accurate and stable.