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Most of the brain tumors are malignant with an extremely poor survival rate. Recent progress in identifying cancer stem cells (CSCs) within the brain tumors is starting to revolutionize our understanding in the imitation and progression of tumors as well as relapse and the development of therapeutic strategies. Suspension spheroid body culture paradigm is a routine method in enriching CSCs. While, it was reported recently that CSCs within the brain tumor may also be enriched through adherent monolayer culture with optimized properties. In the present study, 18 surgically resected brain tumors were used for analyzing the feasibility of adherent enrichment of CSCs. The results indicated that 50% of glioblastomas were able to generate adherent CSCs, which were uniformly positive for Sox2, CD133, GFAP and Nestin. However, adherent culture paradigm failed to yield CSCs in secondary brain tumors, including neurocytomas, ependymomas, germ cell tumors or low‑grade astrocytomas, which is most likely due to a lack of CD133+/Sox2+ cells within the original biopsies. Therefore, it was concluded that the adherent culture paradigm may serve as a reliable method in enriching brain CSCs, but this method is more suitable for enriching CD133+/Sox2+ CSCs in glioblastomas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jingfang granules (JF), one famous traditional Chinese formula in "She Sheng Zhong Miao Fang" written by Shi-Che Zhang during the Ming Dynasty era, has been widely used to prevent epidemic diseases in history and now was recommended for the treatment of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in China. However, the roles of JF against acute lung injury and its mechanisms remain unclear. Acute lung injury (ALI) and its progressive acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) are a continuum of lung inflammatory disease with high morbidity and mortality in clinic, especially in COVID-19 patients. The present study aims to investigate the effect of JF on ALI and clarify its underlying mechanisms for clinical application in COVID-19 control. Bleomycin-induced ALI mice were given oral gavage daily for seven days with or without Jingfang granules (2, 4 g/kg). The body weight, lung wet/dry weight ratios, lung appearance and tissue histopathology were evaluated. Quantitative real-time PCR, biochemical bronchoalveolar lavage fluids analysis was used to determine the gene expression of proinflammation factor and infiltrated inflammatory cells in lung. Immunofluorescence image and western blot were used to detect the markers of alveolar macrophages (AMs), endothelial cell apoptosis and changes of CD200-CD200R pathway. Firstly, histopathological analysis showed that JF significantly attenuated pulmonary injury and inflammatory response in ALI mice. Then, cytokine detection, inflammatory cells assay, and JNKs and p38 pathway analysis indicated that the recruitment and activation of alveolar macrophages was the main reason to cause ALI and JF could reverse this variation. Next, immunofluorescence staining and TUNEL assay showed that JF upregulated the expression of CD200 and suppressed the apoptosis of alveolar endothelial cells. Finally, double immunofluorescence staining of CD200 and CD11c indicated that the seriously damaged tissue had the lower CD200 while more AMs infiltration, which was confirmed by RT-PCR analysis of CD200/CD200R. Jingfang granules can protect lung from acu te injury and mitigate the recruitment and overactive AMs-induced inflammation via CD200-CD200R immunoregulatory signal axis, which will provide an experimental basis for Jingfang granules clinical applications in COVID-19. [Display omitted] • Traditional Chinese medicine Jingfang granules (JF) protects lung from acute injury. • JF upregulates the expression of CD200 and suppressed the apoptosis of alveolar endothelial cells. • JF mitigates the recruitment and overactive AMs-induced inflammation via CD200-CD200R immunoregulatory signal axis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A generalized ANN (gANN) estimator was proposed for estimating the ultrasound homodyned-K (HK) parameters. • A parallelized ultrasound HK imaging method based on the gANN estimator was proposed. • The gANN estimator did not need to be re-trained for varied sizes of test sets. • The gANN-based parallelized HK imaging performed well in assessing hepatic steatosis. • The gANN-based parallelized HK imaging was over 3 times faster than conventional ANN-based HK imaging. The homodyned-K (HK) distribution model is a generalized backscatter envelope statistical model for ultrasound tissue characterization, whose parameters are of physical meaning. To estimate the HK parameters is an inverse problem, and is quite complicated. Previously, we proposed an artificial neural network (ANN) estimator and an improved ANN (iANN) estimator for estimating the HK parameters, which are fast and flexible. However, a drawback of the conventional ANN and iANN estimators consists in that they use Monte Carlo simulations under known values of HK parameters to generate training samples, and thus the ANN and iANN models have to be re-trained when the size of the test sets (or of the envelope samples to be estimated) varies. In addition, conventional ultrasound HK imaging uses a sliding window technique, which is non-vectorized and does not support parallel computation, so HK image resolution is usually sacrificed to ensure a reasonable computation cost. To this end, we proposed a generalized ANN (gANN) estimator in this paper, which took the theoretical derivations of feature vectors for network training, and thus it is independent from the size of the test sets. Further, we proposed a parallelized HK imaging method that is based on the gANN estimator, which used a block-based parallel computation method, rather than the conventional sliding window technique. The gANN-based parallelized HK imaging method allowed a higher image resolution and a faster computation at the same time. Computer simulation experiments showed that the gANN estimator was generally comparable to the conventional ANN estimator in terms of HK parameter estimation performance. Clinical experiments of hepatic steatosis showed that the gANN-based parallelized HK imaging could be used to visually and quantitatively characterize hepatic steatosis, with similar performance to the conventional ANN-based HK imaging that used the sliding window technique, but the gANN-based parallelized HK imaging was over 3 times faster than the conventional ANN-based HK imaging. The parallelized computation method presented in this work can be easily extended to other quantitative ultrasound imaging applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some recent studies utilize node contact patterns to aid the design of routing protocol in Opportunistic Mobile Networks (OppNets). However, most existing studies only utilize one hop contact information to design routing protocol. In order to fully utilize nodes' collected contact information to improve the performance of data forwarding, in this paper we focus on exploiting node contact patterns from the multi-hop perspective. We first give the definition of opportunistic forwarding path, and propose a model to calculate the maximum data delivery probability along different opportunistic forwarding paths. Second, based on the maximum data delivery probability, we propose a novel approach to improve the performance of data forwarding in OppNets based on two forwarding metric. The proposed forwarding strategy first manages to forward data copies to nodes have higher centrality value at the global scope. Afterwards, maximum data delivery probability to the destination is evaluated, to ensure that data is carried and forwarded by relays with higher capability of contacting the destination. Finally, extensive real trace-driven simulations are conducted to compare the proposed routing protocol with other existing routing protocols in terms of delivery ratio and delivery cost. The simulation results show that our proposed routing protocol is close to Epidemic Routing in terms of delivery ratio but with significantly reduced delivery cost. Additionally, our proposed routing protocol outperforms Bubble Rap and Prophet in terms of delivery ratio, and the delivery cost of our proposed routing protocol is very close to that of Bubble Rap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims/Introduction To investigate the effect of telomere shortening and other predictive factors of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease ( NAFLD) in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients in a 6-year prospective cohort study. Materials and Methods A total of 70 type 2 diabetes mellitus (mean age 57.8 ± 6.7 years) patients without NAFLD were included in the study, and 64 of them were successfully followed up 6 years later, excluding four cases with significant alcohol consumption. NAFLD was diagnosed by the hepatorenal ratio obtained by a quantitative ultrasound method using NIH image analysis software. The 39 individuals that developed NAFLD were allocated to group A, and the 21 individuals that did not develop NAFLD were allocated to group B. Fluorescent real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction was used to measure telomere length. Results There was no significant difference between the two groups in baseline telomere length; however, at the end of the 6th year, telomere length had become shorter in group A compared with group B. There were significant differences between these two groups in baseline body mass index, waistline, systolic blood pressure, glycated hemoglobin and fasting C-peptide level. In addition, the estimated indices of baseline insulin resistance increased in group A. Fasting insulin level, body mass index, systolic blood pressure at baseline and the shortening of telomere length were independent risk factors of NAFLD in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients. Conclusions Telomere length became shorter in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients who developed NAFLD over the course of 6 years. Type 2 diabetes mellitus patients who developed NAFLD had more serious insulin resistance compared with those who did not develop NAFLD a long time ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asthma is a respiratory disease that can be exacerbated by certain environmental factors. Both formaldehyde (FA) and PM 2.5 , the most common indoor and outdoor air pollutants in mainland China, are closely associated with the onset and development of asthma. To date, however, there is very little report available on whether there is an exacerbating effect of combined exposure to FA and PM 2.5 at ambient concentrations. In this study, asthmatic mice were exposed to 1 mg/m3 FA, 1 mg/kg PM 2.5 , or a combination of 0.5 mg/m3 FA and 0.5 mg/kg PM 2.5 , respectively. Results demonstrated that both levels of oxidative stress and inflammation were significantly increased, accompanied by an obvious decline in lung function. Further, the initial activation of p38 MAPK and NF-κB that intensified the immune imbalance of asthmatic mice were found to be visibly mitigated following the administration of SB203580, a p38 MAPK inhibitor. Noteworthily, it was found that combined exposure to the two at ambient concentrations could significantly worsen asthma than exposure to each of the two alone at twice the ambient concentration. This suggests that combined exposure to formaldehyde and PM 2.5 at ambient concentrations may have a synergistic effect, thus causing more severe damage in asthmatic mice. In general, this work has revealed that the combined exposure to FA and PM 2.5 at ambient concentrations can synergistically aggravate asthma via the p38 MAPK pathway in mice. [Display omitted] • Combined exposure to FA and PM 2.5 synergistically exacerbates asthma symptoms. • p38 MAPK activation and immune imbalance are potential causes of asthma exacerbations. • SB203580 can alleviate the damage of FA and PM 2.5 in asthmatic mice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]