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PurposeThe purpose of this study was to investigate pain and radiological features of different types of first-episode demyelinating optic neuritis (ON).MethodsEighty-three patients presenting with first-episode aquaporin-4 (AQP4) antibody-associated ON (AQP4-ON; n = 28), myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG) antibody-associated ON (MOG-ON; n = 26) and idiopathic demyelinating optic neuritis (IDON, n = 29) were included in this retrospective case-control study. We assessed optic nerve lesions on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), acute pain associated with onset of optic neuritis and clinical characteristics of those ON patients with different serum autoantibody status.Results24 AQP4-ON patients (85.75%), 23 MOG-ON patients (88.5%) and 24 IDON patients (82.8%) suffered from ON-associated pain. MOG-ON had mostly retro-orbital pain; AQP4-ON and IDON had mostly neuropathic pain. In addition, pain was more severe in AQP4ON patients than in other ON patients. In MRI, bilateral involvement was more common in AQP4-ON than IDON (26.9 and 3.7%); radiological optic nerve head swelling was more common in MOG-ON than in AQP4-ON and IDON (68.0 vs. 23.1 vs. 25.9%). MRI lesion in peri-optic nerve sheath was more common in AQP4-ON (53.8 vs. 16.0 vs. 3.7%). In 70 patients with ON-associated pain, gadolinium enhancement of orbital optic nerve was most common in MOG-ON patients (82.4 vs. 55.0 vs. 33.3%, P = 0.018), and enhancement of optic chiasma was most common in AQP4-ON patients (40.0 vs. 5.9 vs. 6.7%, P = 0.015). Perineural and orbital enhancement was observed only in patients with MOG-ON (P < 0.001). The length of enhancement was longer in AQP4-ON patients than in MOG-ON and IDON patients.ConclusionPain is a common symptom in patients with all types of demyelinating ON. AQP4-ON is frequently associated with severe ON-associated pain and longitudinally extensive optic nerve inflammatory lesions. Intra-orbital and peri-optic inflammation were more frequently observed in patients with MOG-ON, which was closely related to optic disc swelling and retro-orbital pain provoked by eye movements.

Robotic-assisted platforms are expected to guarantee the accuracy of surgical operation and accelerate its learning curve. Iris tracking can guide the robotic manipulator during the operation. However, few researches focused on it during surgery. It is a big challenge due to the deformation of the iris and occlusion caused by instruments. A novel real-time iris tracking method based on a regression network are proposed to meet the speed and accuracy requirements of the ophthalmic robotic system. It utilizes the low-level visual features and high-level semantic meanings from different layers to capture the discriminative representation of the iris target. Then the bottleneck layers are added to improve computation efficiency. Furthermore, a multi-loss function is designed by jointly learning Absolute loss and Euclidean loss. Finally, the experimental results under the typical surgical scene demonstrate that iris tracker achieves an accuracy of 89.16% and a real-time speed of 134fps with GPU, which is suitable for the ophthalmic robotic system to perform real-time robotic manipulation.

Background: CLDN10, an important component of the tight junctions of epithelial cells, plays a crucial role in a variety of tumors. The effect of CLDN10 expression in gastric cancer, however, has yet to be elucidated.Methods: Differential expression of CLDN10 at the mRNA and protein levels was evaluated using Oncomine, ULCAN, HPA and TIMER2.0 databases. Real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was utilized to further verify the expression of CLDN10 in vitro. Correlations between CLDN10 expression and clinical outcomes of gastric cancer were explored by Kaplan-Meier Plotter. Gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) and protein-protein interaction (PPI) were performed via LinkedOmics and GeneMANIA. The correlations between CLDN10 expression and immune cell infiltration and somatic copy number alternations (SCNA) in gastric cancer were explored by TIMER2.0 and GEPIA2.0.Results: CLDN10 expression was lower in gastric cancer compared to adjacent normal tissues, and associated with better prognosis. CLDN10 also showed significant differences at different T stages, Lauren classification, treatments and HER2 status. PPI and GSEA analysis showed that CLDN10 might be involved in signal transmission, transmembrane transport and metabolism. In some major immune cells, low expression of CLDN10 was associated with increased levels of immune cell infiltration. In addition, it was found that different SCNA status in CLDN10 might affect the level of immune cell infiltration. Furthermore, the expression of CLDN10 was significantly associated with the expression of several immune cell markers, especially B cell markers, follicular helper T cell (Tfh) markers and T cell exhaustion markers.Conclusion: Down-regulated CLDN10 was associated with better overall survival (OS) in gastric cancer. And CLDN10 may serve as a potential prognostic biomarker and correlate to immune infiltration levels in gastric cancer.

Regulation of the environmental stress response and virulence of Shigella flexneri may involve multiple signaling pathways; however, these mechanisms are not well-defined. In bacteria, small regulatory RNAs (sRNAs) regulate bacterial growth, metabolism, virulence, and environmental stress response. Therefore, identifying novel functional sRNAs in S. flexneri could help elucidate pathogenic adaptations to host micro-environmental stresses and associated virulence. The aim of this study was to confirm the presence of an sRNA, Ssr54, in S. flexneri and to determine its functions and possible mechanism of action. Ssr54 was found to regulate tolerance and virulence under hyperosmotic pressure. Its expression was verified by qRT-PCR and Northern blotting, and its genomic position was confirmed by 5′-rapid amplification of cDNA ends. Ssr54 expression was significantly decreased (~ 80%) under hyperosmotic conditions (680 mM NaCl), and the survival rate of the Ssr54 deletion strain increased by 20% under these conditions. This suggested that Ssr54 has been selected to promote host survival under hyperosmotic conditions. Additionally, virulence assessment, including guinea pig Sereny test and competitive invasion assays in mouse lungs, revealed that Ssr54 deletion significantly decreased S. flexneri virulence. Two-dimensional gel analyses suggest that Ssr54 may modulate the expression of tolC, ompA, and treF genes, which may affect the virulence and survival of S. flexneri under osmotic pressures. Furthermore, treF expression has been shown to improve the survival of S. flexneri under osmotic pressures. These results suggest that Ssr54 has a broad range of action in S. flexneri response to hyperosmotic environmental stresses and in controlling its virulence to adapt to environmental stresses encountered during host infection.

In the present study, the changes in the retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness associated with Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy (LHON) were examined by Cirrus high definition-optical coherence tomography (OCT), and the correlation between the RNFL thickness and the best corrected visual acuity (BCVA) was evaluated. A cross-sectional study was performed. Sixty-eight eyes from patients with LHON and 30eyes from healthy individuals were scanned. Affected eyes were divided into 5groups according to disease duration: Group1, ≤3months; group2, 4-6months; group3, 7-9months; group4, 10-12months; and group 5, >12months. The RNFL thickness of the temporal, superior, nasal and inferior quad¬rants and the 360° average were compared between the LHON groups and the control group. The eyes in groups1 and2 were observed to have a thicker RNFL in the superior, nasal and inferior quadrants and a higher 360°-average RNFL thick¬ness compared with those of the control group (P<0.05), the RNFL was observed to be thinner in the temporal quadrant in groups1 and2. The eyes in groups3 and4 showed a thinner RNFL in the temporal (P=0.001), superior and inferior (both P<0.05) quadrants, and a lower 360°-average RNFL thickness as compared with controls (P=0.001). No significant correlation was identified between BCVA and RNFL thickness. RNFL thickness was observed to undergo a unique process from thickening to thinning in the patients with LHON. Changes in different quadrants occurred at different time periods and the BCVA was not found to be correlated with RNFL thickness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]