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An abstract of the conference paper "Myocardial perfusion MRI with SW-CG-HYPR: A comparison to conventional SR-Turbo-FLASH and x-ray angiography in patients with suspected coronary artery disease," by Heng Ma and colleagues is presented.

An abstract of the paper "Adenosine-induced stress myocardial perfusion MRI using SW-CG-HYPR with whole left ventricular coverage: comparison of results with X-ray angiography in patients with suspected CAD," by Heng Ma and colleagues, from the 2011 SCMR/Euro CMR Joint Scientific Sessions, held in Nice, France, from February 3-6, 2011, is presented.

β-arrestins are pleiotropic molecules that mediate signal desensitization, G-protein-independent signaling, scaffolding of signaling molecules, and chemotaxis. Protease-activated-receptor-2 (PAR-2), a Gαq-coupled receptor, which has been proposed as a therapeutic target for inflammation and cancer, requires the scaffolding function of 13-arrestins for chemotaxis. We have hypothesized that PAR-2 can trigger specific responses by differential activation of two pathways, one through classic Gαq/Ca2+ signaling and one through β-arrestins, and we hypothesized that the latter involved scaffolding of proteins involved in cell migration. Here, we demonstrate that: a) PAR-2 promotes β-arrestin-dependent dephosphorylation and activation of the actin filament severing protein (cofilin) independent of Gαq/Ca2+ signaling; b) PAR-2-evoked cofilin dephosphorylation requires both the activity of a recently identified cofilin-specific phosphatase (chronophin) and inhibition of L1MK activity and c) β-arrestins bind to both LIMK and chronophin and colocalize with them in lamellipodia, suggesting 13-arrestins may spatially regulate their activities. These findings identify a novel target of 13-arrestin-dependent scaffolding and reveal that many PAR-2-induced processes may be independent of G-protein coupling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An abstract of the conference paper "Myocardial perfusion MRI using SW-CG-HYPR for the detection of coronary artery disease," by Jun Yang and colleagues is presented.

Abstract A fluorescent porous organic polymer (FPOP) with strong fluorescence and tunable emission colors, was synthesized through a simple cost-effective method via Scholl coupling reaction. Experiments proved the stability and excellent detection and adsorption ability, and microporous nature of the material. Luminescence of FPOP was quenched when addition of nitroaromatic compounds. The properties along with large-scale and low-cost preparation make these FPOP potential candidates for fluorescence detection of nitroaromatic compounds. Additionally, FPOP shows higher adsorption capacity and rate than other reported adsorbents, and has the possibility of being an effective adsorbent for industrial usage. Moreover, a fluorescent test paper was further developed and is found to be sensitive to 10–8 M level, complete with a rapid response time and visual detection. This newly developed strategy may open up an avenue for exploring porous polymers, particularly those with a strong fluorescence, for the large-scale fabrication of FPOP for various advanced applications.

[Display omitted] • Au-Au and Au-S bond distances, KS orbital energy levels, and absorption spectra of three Au 42 (SR) 26 isomers were analyzed. • The structural decomposition of the Au cores into eight Au 4 elementary blocks and the total structures into several rings were correlated to the isomeric mechanism of the three isomers based on the GUM and ring model. • The paper provides a detailed understanding of structure–property correlations. In this paper, we present the geometric and electronic structure analyses of three Au 42 (SR) 26 isomers based on a combination of grand unified model (GUM), ring model, superatom network model, and density functional theory calculations. Structural decompositions, Au–Au and Au–S distances, Wiberg bond orders, density of states, composition of the frontier orbitals, and origin of the optical absorption spectra are presented and discussed in detail. The structural decomposition of the Au cores of the three isomers into eight tetrahedral Au 4 elementary blocks based on GUM shows that the isomeric mechanism of the three isomers can be ascribed to core and complex isomerism. Inspection of Au–Au and Au–S distances reveals the key role of the aurophilic interactions in the stability of the three Au 42 (SR) 26 isomers. Furthermore, by analyzing the composition of the frontier orbitals, the origin of the optical absorption spectra of the three isomers is attributed to the sp → sp transition. Overall, the geometric and electronic structure analyses of the three Au 42 (SR) 26 isomers illustrate the inherent structure–property correlations among these isomers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

β-Arrestins are pleiotropic molecules that mediate signal desensitization, G-protein-independent signaling, scaffolding of signaling molecules, and chemotaxis. Protease-activated receptor-2 (PAR-2), a Gαq/11-coupled receptor, which has been proposed as a therapeutic target for inflammation and cancer, requires the scaffolding function of β-arrestins for chemotaxis. We hypothesized that PAR-2 can trigger specific responses by differential activation of two pathways, one through classic Gaq/Ca2+ signaling and one through β-arrestins, and we proposed that the latter involves scaffolding of proteins involved in cell migration and actin assembly. Here we demonstrate the following. (a) PAR-2 promotes β-arrestin-dependent dephosphorylation and activation of the actin filament-severing protein (cofilin) independently of Gaq/Ca2+ signaling. (b) PAR-2-evoked cofilin dephosphorylation requires both the activity of a recently identified cofilin-specific phosphatase (chronophin) and inhibition of LIM kinase (LIMK) activity. (c) β-Arrestins can interact with cofilin, LIMK, and chronophin and colocalize with them in membrane protrusions, suggesting that β-arrestins may spatially regulate their activities. These findings identify cofilin as a novel target of β-arrestin-dependent scaffolding and suggest that many PAR-2-induced processes may be independent of Gαq11 protein coupling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A general foundation of fooling a neural network without knowing the details (i.e., black-box attack) is the attack transferability of adversarial examples across different models. Many works have been devoted to enhancing the task-specific transferability of adversarial examples, whereas the cross-task transferability is nearly out of the research scope. In this paper, to enhance the above two types of transferability of adversarial examples, we are the first to regard the transferability issue as a heterogeneous domain generalisation problem, which can be addressed by a general pipeline based on the domain-invariant feature extractor pre-trained on ImageNet. Specifically, we propose a distance metric attack (DMA) method that aims to increase the latent layer distance between the adversarial example and the benign example along the opposite direction guided by the cross-entropy loss. With the help of a simple loss, DMA can effectively enhance the domain-invariant transferability (for both the task-specific case and the cross-task case) of the adversarial examples. Additionally, DMA can be used to measure the robustness of the latent layers in a deep model. We empirically find that the models with similar structures have consistent robustness at depth-similar layers, which reveals that model robustness is closely related to model structure. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation demonstrate that DMA can improve the success rate of black-box attack by more than 10% on the task-specific attack and by more than 5% on cross-task attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To investigate the current practice of extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECPR) for Chinese cardiac arrest patients after the publication of 2015 American Heart Association guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Methods: A questionnaire was distributed to healthcare providers of emergency departments (EDs) and/or Intensive Care Units (ICUs) across 52 hospitals in China from August to November 2016. Data collection ended in February 2017. The questionnaire included three parts: (1) characteristics of the departments and the respondents; (2) knowledge about ECPR; (3) practice of ECPR in cardiac arrest patients (case volume, inclusion/exclusion criteria, ECPR procedure). The characteristics of the departments/hospitals were only answered by the head of the department. Results: A total of 1 952 (86.8%) respondents fulfilled the survey. Only 2.5% of the respondents from 3 of 52 hospitals performed ECPR. Among the three hospitals, the case number of ECPR were ≤5 per year and none of them had written ECPR procedures. Only one hospital had formal inclusion/exclusion criteria. The inclusion criteria included age between 18 to 60 years, suspected cardiogenic cardiac arrest, beginning of cardiopulmonary resuscitation 10 min. The top three reasons for the nonuse of ECPR were unknown fields (31.2%), potential ECMO-related side effects (26.9%) and cost (18.7%). Conclusions: ECPR for cardiac arrest patients are not well understood by healthcare providers in the emergency department or ICUs and its application is still in the early stage in China. Educational training and other interventions are needed to promote the clinical practice.

The proteolytic activity of Furin responsible for processing full length Notch-1 (p300) plays a critical role in Notch signaling. The amplitude and duration of Notch activity can be regulated at various points in the pathway, but there has been no report regarding regulation of the Notch-1-Furin interaction, despite its importance. In the present study, we found that the Notch-1-Furin interaction is regulated by the non-receptor tyrosine kinase, c-Src. c-Src and Notch-1 are physically associated, and this association is responsible for Notch-1 processing and activation. We also found that growth factor TGF-α, an EGFR ligand, and PDGF-BB, a PDGFR ligand, induce the Notch-1-Furin interaction mediated by c-Src. Our results support three new and provocative conclusions: (1) The association between Notch-1 and Furin is a well-regulated process; (2) Extracellular growth factor signals regulate this interaction, which is mediated by c-Src; (3) There is cross-talk between the plasma growth factor receptor-c-Src and Notch pathways. Co-localization of Notch-1 and c-Src was confirmed in xenograft tumor tissues and in the tissues of pancreatic cancer patients. Our findings have implications for the mechanism by which the Notch and growth factor receptor-c-Src signaling pathways regulate carcinogenesis and cancer cell growth.

Background: Phosphodiesterase 7 (PDE7) plays a role in neurological function. Increased expression and activity of PDE7 has been detected in several central nervous system diseases. However, the role of PDE7 in regulating stress levels remains unclear. Thus, this study aimed to determine whether and how PDE7 involved in the stress-induced behavioral and neuron morphological changes., Methods: The single prolonged stress (SPS) was used to build a stress exposure model in C57BL/6 J mice and detected PDE7 activity in hippocampus, amygdala, prefrontal cortex and striatum. Next, three doses (0.2, 1, and 5 mg/kg) of the PDE7 inhibitor BRL-50481 were intraperitoneally administered for 10 days, then behavioral, biochemical, and morphological tests were conducted., Results: PDE7 activity in hippocampus of mice significantly increased at all times after SPS. BRL-50481 significantly attenuated SPS induced anxiety-like behavior and fear response in both context and cue. In addition, BRL-50481 increased the levels of key molecules in the cAMP signaling pathway which were impaired by SPS. Immunofluorescent staining and Sholl analysis demonstrated that BRL-50481 also restored the nucleus/cytoplasm ratio of hippocampal neurons and improved neuronal plasticity. These effects of BRL-50481 were partially blocked by the TrkB inhibitor ANA-12., Conclusion: PDE7 inhibitors attenuate stress-induced behavioral changes by protecting the neuron cytoarchitecture and the neuronal plasticity in hippocampus, which is mediated at least partly through the activation of BDNF/TrkB signaling pathway. These results proved that PDE7 is a potential target for treating stress-induced behavioral and physiological abnormalities., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision., (Copyright © 2024 Dong, Wei, Zong, Wang, Ma, Zhao, Lin, Zhang, Lan, Zhang and Zhang.)

Objective: To explore the effect of dietary modification-assisted multimodal therapy in the prevention and treatment of chronic prostatitis., Methods: A total of 132 cases of chronic prostatitis treated in the Outpatient Department of our hospital were randomly divided into an observation group (n = 68) and a control group (n = 64), the former following the Mediterranean dietary pattern, the latter adhering to their own dietary habits, and meanwhile both receiving lifestyle guidance, psychological counseling, symptomatic medication and physiotherapy according to their specific symptoms. The patients were followed up for 4 weeks, therapeutic effects were observed and comparisons were made between the two groups in the NIH-CPSI scores before and after treatment., Results: Compared with the baseline, the quality of life (QOL) scores, pain and urination discomfort scores and total NIH-CPSI scores were significantly decreased in both the observation and the control groups after treatment (P < 0.05), even more decreased in the former than in the latter, but with no statistically significant difference between the two (P > 0.05). The rate of therapeutic effectiveness was higher in the observation group than in the control (87.1% vs 79.7%, but showed no statistically significant difference between the two groups (P > 0.05)., Conclusion: Multimodal therapy is suitable for the management of different clinical manifestations of individual patients, while dietary habits vary from person to person as well as from region to region. Therefore, scientific dietary modification for the prevention and treatment of CP/CPPS needs further exploration.

Grammatical complexity has received extensive attention in second language acquisition. Although computational tools have been developed to analyze grammatical complexity, most relevant studies investigated this construct in the context of English as a second language. In response to an increasing number of L2 Chinese learners, it is important to extend the investigation of grammatical complexity in L2 Chinese. To promote relevant research, we evaluated the new computational tool, Stanza , on its accuracy of part-of-speech tagging for L2 Chinese writing. We particularly focused on eight grammatical features closely related to L2 Chinese development. Then, we reported the precisions, recalls, and F-scores for the individual grammatical features and offered a qualitative analysis of systematic tagging errors. In terms of the precision, three features have high rates, over 90% (i.e., ba and bei markers, classifiers, - de as noun modifier marker). For recall, four features have high rates, over 90% (i.e., aspect markers, ba and bei markers, classifiers, - de as noun modifier marker). Overall, based on the F-scores, Stanza has a good tagging performance on ba and bei markers, classifiers, and - de as a noun modifier marker. This evaluation provides research implications for scholars who plan to use this computational tool to study L2 Chinese development in second language acquisition or applied linguistics in general., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Lan, Pan, Sun and Lu.)

Since the 1990s, grammatical complexity has received substantial research attention in applied linguistics (Bulté and Housen, 2014). The representation of grammatical complexity has expanded in L2 writing with the application of diverse measures in empirical studies in the recent three decades (1991-2020). In response to this situation, we found it important to revisit grammatical complexity, and an exploratory factor analysis was applied to explore latent dimensions (i.e., factors) of grammatical complexity in L2 writing. We analyzed Lu's (2011) 14 grammatical complexity measures in the L2 corpus of the British Academic Written English Corpus. We then proposed a four-factor model with "clausal subordination," "phrasal construction", "global length unit" and "others." The four factors generally align with the types of grammatical complexity proposed in Lu (2011), but differences on six measures are also found. Noteworthy points were discussed to interpret the reasons behind the differences. Research implications are provided to show further research directions., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2022 Lan, Li and Zhang.)

Objective: This study aimed to explore the influence of gratitude on the meaning of life of college students and the mediating effect of family function and peer relationships. Methods: A total of 1,049 college students (mean age: 18.59 ± 0.96 years) were investigated by gratitude scale, family function scale, peer relationship questionnaire, and meaning of life scale. Results: (1) Gratitude was positively correlated with meaning existence ( r = 0.39, P < 0.05), meaning seeking ( r = 0.23, P < 0.05), and peer relationship ( r = 0.32, P < 0.05); meanwhile, it is also positively correlated with family function ( r = 0.34, P < 0.05); (2) family function partially mediates the relationship between gratitude and meaning of life. Similarly, peer relationship partially mediates the relationship between gratitude and meaning of life. Conclusion: The mediating model showed that grateful individuals can better sense the meaning of life by perceiving good family function and good peer relationships., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Zhang, Ye, Fu and Zhang.)