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Background Currently, no universally accepted standardized VTE risk assessment model (RAM) is specifically designed for critically ill patients. Although the ICU-venous thromboembolism (ICU-VTE) RAM was initially developed in 2020, it lacks prospective external validation. Objectives To evaluate the predictive performance of the ICU-VTE RAM in terms of VTE occurrence in mixed medical-surgical ICU patients. Methods We prospectively enrolled adult patients in the ICU. The ICU-VTE score and Caprini or Padua score were calculated at admission, and the incidence of in-hospital VTE was investigated. The performance of the ICU-VTE RAM was evaluated and compared with that of Caprini or Padua RAM using the receiver operating curve. Results We included 269 patients (median age: 70 years; 62.5% male). Eighty-three (30.9%) patients experienced inpatient VTE. The AUC of the ICU-VTE RAM was 0.743 (95% CI, 0.682-0.804, P

Digital technology is an important driving force for agricultural modernization in China. Developing modern agriculture in China's southwest mountainous areas using digital technologies is crucial for rural revitalization and common prosperity and is an inevitable requirement for realizing Chinese path to modernization. This study expounds the concept connotation and operation logic of digital agriculture in southwest mountainous areas. Based on public statistics and field survey data, it analyzes the current status of digital agriculture development in southwest mountainous areas from the aspects of coordination of relevant subjects, infrastructure construction, production and sales link application, and population structure, and further clarifies the practical difficulties faced by the development. Furthermore, the study suggests that we should improve the multi-party cooperation mechanism, strengthen the construction of digital infrastructure, broaden the application scenarios of digital agriculture, and promote digital personnel training in rural areas, thus to deepen the development of digital agriculture in the southwest mountainous areas.

Mice are the most commonly used model animals for itch research and for development of anti-itch drugs. Most laboratories manually quantify mouse scratching behavior to assess itch intensity. This process is labor-intensive and limits large-scale genetic or drug screenings. In this study, we developed a new system, Scratch-AID (Automatic Itch Detection), which could automatically identify and quantify mouse scratching behavior with high accuracy. Our system included a custom-designed videotaping box to ensure high-quality and replicable mouse behavior recording and a convolutional recurrent neural network trained with frame-labeled mouse scratching behavior videos, induced by nape injection of chloroquine. The best trained network achieved 97.6% recall and 96.9% precision on previously unseen test videos. Remarkably, Scratch-AID could reliably identify scratching behavior in other major mouse itch models, including the acute cheek model, the histaminergic model, and a chronic itch model. Moreover, our system detected significant differences in scratching behavior between control and mice treated with an anti-itch drug. Taken together, we have established a novel deep learning-based system that could replace manual quantification for mouse scratching behavior in different itch models and for drug screening.

The activation of the monocyte-macrophage system and the damage to the renal and pancreatic tissue are common complications in patients with diabetes induced by hyper-glycemia. This study aimed to evaluate the effect and mechanism of butyrate (NaB), a metabolite of intestinal flora, on inhibiting the inflammatory response of human monocyte-macrophages (THP-1 cells) induced by high glucose and the damage of pancreatic and renal tissue in diabetic mice. The results showed that high concentration glucose significantly up-regulated the expressions of IL-1β, TNF-α, and NLRP3 in THP-1 cells and mouse spleen, and that NaB could inhibit the overexpression of those genes. The abundance of Beclin-1, LC3B and reactive oxygen species (ROS) in THP-1 cells is increased due to the high glucose concentration, and NaB can inhibit the genes responsible for upregulating the expression. In diabetic mice, vacuolar degeneration of renal tubules was observed. Then we observed that some of the epithelial cells of the renal tubules were exfoliated and some formed tubules. NaB could alleviate these pathological lesions, but NaB cannot alleviate pancreatic injury. Our results indicated that NaB could be used for the prevention and adjuvant treatment of diabetic kidney injury.