Search

Hyaluronic acid (HA) is a mucopolysaccharide alternately linked by glucuronic acid and n‐acetylglucosamine, which is usually used as a moisturizer in cosmetics. In this study, HA derivative (FA‐HA) was prepared by modifying sodium hyaluronate with ferulic acid (FA). The chemical and morphological structure of FA‐HA were characterized by UV, FTIR, 1H‐NMR, DLS and TEM. The results showed that FA was grafted onto HA chains via ester bonds and self‐assembled into nanoparticles in aqueous solution. The introduction of FA endowed the nanoparticles with antioxidant function. The FRAP value of 10 mg/mL FA‐HA was 1.985 mM, and the clearance rate of O2−, DPPH+ and ABTS+ could reach 83.13%, 88.86% and 99.48% respectively. Moreover, FA‐HA can be used as Pickering emulsifiers to stabilize the emulsion. The results showed that the size of emulsion droplets decreased as the concentration of FA‐HA increased. When the mass ratio of oil to water was 7/3, the emulsion droplets were the smallest. The addition of sodium chloride will increase the size of emulsion droplets, destroying the stability of the emulsion. In addition, FA‐HA was also universal and was capable of emulsifying alkanes, esters, and natural oils, which was expected to be applied in the cosmetics and food fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In recent years, the use of deep learning for medical image segmentation has become a popular trend, but its development also faces some challenges. Firstly, due to the specialized nature of medical data, precise annotation is time‐consuming and labor‐intensive. Training neural networks effectively with limited labeled data is a significant challenge in medical image analysis. Secondly, convolutional neural networks commonly used for medical image segmentation research often focus on local features in images. However, the recognition of complex anatomical structures or irregular lesions often requires the assistance of both local and global information, which has led to a bottleneck in its development. Addressing these two issues, in this paper, we propose a novel network architecture. Methods: We integrate a shift window mechanism to learn more comprehensive semantic information and employ a semi‐supervised learning strategy by incorporating a flexible amount of unlabeled data. Specifically, a typical U‐shaped encoder‐decoder structure is applied to obtain rich feature maps. Each encoder is designed as a dual‐branch structure, containing Swin modules equipped with windows of different size to capture features of multiple scales. To effectively utilize unlabeled data, a level set function is introduced to establish consistency between the function regression and pixel classification. Results: We conducted experiments on the COVID‐19 CT dataset and DRIVE dataset and compared our approach with various semi‐supervised and fully supervised learning models. On the COVID‐19 CT dataset, we achieved a segmentation accuracy of up to 74.56%. Our segmentation accuracy on the DRIVE dataset was 79.79%. Conclusions: The results demonstrate the outstanding performance of our method on several commonly used evaluation metrics. The high segmentation accuracy of our model demonstrates that utilizing Swin modules with different window sizes can enhance the feature extraction capability of the model, and the level set function can enable semi‐supervised models to more effectively utilize unlabeled data. This provides meaningful insights for the application of deep learning in medical image segmentation. Our code will be released once the manuscript is accepted for publication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe high hydrophilicity of titanium dioxide (TiO2) caused by surface hydroxyl groups limited their application in Pickering emulsions. Inspired by the structure and function of mussel adhesion protein, polydopamine-modified TiO2 (PDA-TiO2) was successfully prepared in this study. The effect of modified conditions on emulsifying capacity of Pickering emulsions stabilized by PDA-TiO2 were investigated, including pH, material ratio, reaction time, and temperature. The morphology and structure properties of modified TiO2 were characterized by SEM, TEM, FTIR, UV, TG, XPS, and XRD. The results suggested that PDA were successfully bonded to the TiO2 surface, which might improve the hydrophilicity of TiO2. PDA-TiO2 could stabilized Pickering emulsion with more uniform emulsified drops when m(TiO2)/m(DA) was 1/0.1, the reaction pH was 8.5, the reaction time was 3 h, and the reaction temperature was 50 °C. In addition, the introduction of polydopamine effectively improved the sun protection ability of TiO2. Compared to traditional sunscreen emulsion, Pickering emulsion stabilized by polydopamine-modified TiO2 could increase the sunscreen value by 55%, which broadened its application in cosmetic and other fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In order to improve survival outcomes in resectable non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), strategies for neoadjuvant therapy need to be revisited. We evaluated and compared the efficacy of different neoadjuvant therapeutic modalities in a real‐world setting. Methods: A total of 258 patients with clinical stage IIA to IIIB NSCLC was included. All the patients underwent surgical resection after one to four cycles of neoadjuvant treatment consisting of chemotherapy (83), immunotherapy (23), and immunotherapy plus chemotherapy (152). Results: The radiologic response rate in the combined immunochemotherapy group was 67.8%, higher than that of 48.2% in the chemotherapy group and 4.3% in the immunotherapy group (p < 0.001). An improved major pathological response (MPR) was also achieved in the combined therapy group compared with the chemotherapy group and the immunotherapy group (53.9% vs. 10.8% vs. 8.7%, p < 0.001). Patients in the combined therapy group had a significant trend toward longer disease‐free survival than those in the chemotherapy alone group (3‐year disease‐free survival [DFS] of 68.79% vs. 50.81%; hazard ratio [HR] for progression or death, 0.477; p = 0.003). Multivariate Cox analysis identified radical surgery (HR, 0.328; p = 0.033), ypN0–1 stage (HR, 0.591; p = 0.038) and MPR result (HR, 0.362; p = 0.007) to be independent prognostic factors for DFS. Conclusions: Neoadjuvant treatment with a combination of immunotherapy plus chemotherapy appears to achieve higher radiological and pathological responses than monotherapy for IIA‐IIIB NSCLC. Log‐rank analysis showed that a better outcome could be expected in patients with the addition of immunotherapy to neoadjuvant chemotherapy if compared with patients with chemotherapy alone in terms of DFS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of optical clock, the stability and system uncertainty of optical clocks has reached a 1.0e–18 level. Optical clocks will likely constitute the next generation of time-frequency standards for redefining the SI second. Because time and frequency transfer services that rely on satellite systems are not always reliable and currently available technologies are insufficient for comparing the next generation of frequency standards, high-precision time and transfer techniques are strongly desired. Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) is one of the space geodetic techniques that measure the arrival time delays between multiple stations utilizing radio signals from distant celestial radio sources. Not only can VLBI obtain the angle position measurement of the radio source with sub-millisecond accuracy and the station coordinate measurement with millimeter accuracy, but also, it can provide high-precision information regarding inter-station atomic clock differences. Therefore, it is theoretically feasible to use the VLBI technology to do the remote time transfer. Because of this characteristic of VLBI technology, VLBI has significant application potential in the field of remote time transfer. To confirm the suitability of VLBI to time-frequency transfer for future practical applications, the results of VLBI and GPS common view time transfer were compared using a Kunming-Urumqi baseline. The performance characteristics of time transfer based on VLBI are then analyzed. Experimental results show that VLBI technology can accurately measure the variation of clock differences between stations as same as the GPS common view time comparison technology. It briefly describes the challenges of future VLBI technology for practical applications of time transfer.