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OBJECTIVE: Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a highly prevalent form of liver cancer diagnosed annually in 600,000 people worldwide. A common treatment is transarterial chemoembolization (TACE), which interrupts the blood supply of oxygen and nutrients to the tumor mass. The need for repeat TACE treatments may be assessed in the weeks after therapy with contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) imaging. Although the spatial resolution of traditional CEUS has been restricted by the diffraction limit of ultrasound (US), this physical barrier has been overcome by a recent innovation known as super-resolution US (SRUS) imaging. In short, SRUS enhances the visible details of smaller microvascular structures on the 10 to 100 μm scale, which unlocks a host of new clinical opportunities for US. METHODS: In this study, a rat model of orthotopic HCC is introduced and TACE treatment response (to a doxorubicin-lipiodol emulsion) is assessed using longitudinal SRUS and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) performed at 0, 7 and 14 d. Animals were euthanized at 14 d for histological analysis of excised tumor tissue and determination of TACE response, that is, control, partial response or complete response. CEUS imaging was performed using a pre-clinical US system (Vevo 3100, FUJIFILM VisualSonics Inc.) equipped with an MX201 linear array transducer. After administration of a microbubble contrast agent (Definity, Lantheus Medical Imaging), a series of CEUS images were collected at each tissue cross-section as the transducer was mechanically stepped at 100 μm increments. SRUS images were formed at each spatial position, and a microvascular density metric was calculated. Microscale computed tomography (microCT, OI/CT, MILabs) was used to confirm TACE procedure success, and tumor size was monitored using a small animal MRI system (BioSpec 3T, Bruker Corp.). RESULTS: Although there were no differences at baseline (p > 0.15), both microvascular density levels and tumor size measures from the complete responder cases at 14 d were considerably lower and smaller, respectively, than those in the partial responder or control group animals. Histological analysis revealed tumor-to-necrosis levels of 8.4%, 51.1% and 100%, for the control, partial responder and complete responder groups, respectively (p < 0.005). CONCLUSION: SRUS imaging is a promising modality for assessing early changes in microvascular networks in response to tissue perfusion-altering interventions such as TACE treatment of HCC.

Background: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by amyloid-β peptide (Aβ) deposition. Aβ accumulation induces oxidative stress, leading to mitochondrial dysfunction, apoptosis, and so forth. Octadecaneuropeptide (ODN), a diazepam-binding inhibitor (DBI)-derived peptide, has been reported to have antioxidant properties. However, it is unclear whether ODN has neuroprotective effects in AD. Objective: To profile the potential effects of ODN on AD. Methods: We established a mouse model of AD via microinjection of Aβ in the lateral ventricle. Utilizing a combination of western blotting assays, electrophysiological recordings, and behavioral tests, we investigated the neuroprotective effects of ODN on AD. Results: DBI expression was decreased in AD model mice and cells. Meanwhile, ODN decreased Aβ generation by downregulating amyloidogenic AβPP processing in HEK-293 cells stably expressing human Swedish mutant APP695 and BACE1 (2EB2). Moreover, ODN could inhibit Aβ-induced oxidative stress in primary cultured cells and mice, as reflected by a dramatic increase in antioxidants and a decrease in pro-oxidants. We also found that ODN could reduce oxidative stress-induced apoptosis by restoring mitochondrial membrane potential, intracellular Ca2+ and cleaved caspase-3 levels in Aβ-treated primary cultured cells and mice. More importantly, intracerebroventricular injection of ODN attenuated cognitive impairments as well as long-term potentiation in Aβ-treated mice. Conclusion: These results suggest that ODN may exert a potent neuroprotective effect against Aβ-induced neurotoxicity and memory decline via its antioxidant effects, indicating that ODN may be a potential therapeutic agent for AD.

Three-dimensional (3D) information is vital for providing detailed features of the physical world, which is used in numerous applications such as industrial inspection, automatic navigation and identity authentication. However, the implementations of 3D imagers always rely on bulky optics. Metasurfaces, as the next-generation optics, shows flexible modulation abilities and excellent performance combined with computer vision algorithm. Here, we demonstrate an active 3D positioning and imaging method with large field of view (FOV) by single fringe projection based on metasurface and solve the accurate and robust calibration problem with the depth uncertainty of 4 μm. With a compact metasurface projector, the demonstrated method can achieve submillimeter positioning accuracy under the FOV of 88°, offering robust and fast 3D reconstruction of the texture-less scene due to the modulation characteristic of the fringe. Such scheme may accelerate prosperous engineering applications with the continued growth of flat-optics manufacturing process by using metadevices.

Single-label facial expression recognition (FER), which aims to classify single expression for facial images, usually suffers from the label noisy and incomplete problem, where manual annotations for partial training images exist wrong or incomplete labels, resulting in performance decline. Although prior work has attempted to leverage external sources or manual annotations to handle this problem, it usually requires extra costs. This article explores a simple yet effective three-phase paradigm (“warm-up,” “selection,” and “relabeling”) for FER task. First, the warm-up phase attempts to build an initial recognition network based on noisy samples for discriminative feature extractions and facial expression predictions. Then, the second selection phase defines several rules to choose high confident samples according to prediction scores, and the third relabeling phase assigns two potential labels to those samples for network updating according to a composite two-label loss. Compared with the previous studies, the three-phase learning could effectively correct noisy labels in the ground truth without extra information and automatically assign two potential labels to single-label samples without manual annotations. As a result, the label information is purified and supplemented with few cost, yielding significant performance improvement. Extensive experiments are conducted on three datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that our approach is robust to noisy training samples and outperforms several state-of-the-art methods.

Tunable mode converter is a key component of channel switching and routing for optical communication system by adopting mode-division multiplexing. Traditional mode converter hardly implements high-order mode conversion and dynamic tunability simultaneously. In this study, we design a tunable mode converter filled with liquid crystal, which can convert fundamental mode into multiple high-order modes (TE0, TE1, and TE2) with a good performance and low intrinsic loss. For this multiple-objective task, we propose an inverse design framework based on the adjoint method. To experimentally prove our design, a tunable mode converter filled with air or water and a mode demultiplexer are fabricated to implement dynamic routing. The experimental results agree well with the simulation and reveal the crosstalk only around −7 dB. With its performance and efficiency, our proposed design flow can be a powerful tool for multifunction device design.

To elucidate the clinical profile of sporadic fatal insomnia (sFI), assess the similarities and differences between sFI and fatal familial insomnia (FFI), and evaluate the influence of ethnicity on the phenotype of sFI patients.The data of sFI and FFI patients was retrieved from our case series and through literature review. The clinical and diagnostic features of sFI and FFI were compared, as were the phenotypes of Asian and Caucasian sFI patients.We identified 44 sFI and 157 FFI cases. The prevalence of sleep-related, neuropsychiatric and autonomic symptoms among the sFI patients were 65.9%, 100.0% and 43.2% respectively. Compared to FFI, sFI exhibited longer disease duration and a higher proportion of neuropsychiatric symptoms, while FFI was characterized by a higher incidence of sleep-related and autonomic symptoms in the early stages of the disease or throughout its course. In addition, a higher proportion of the sFI patients showed hyperintensity on MRI and PSWCs on EEG compared to the FFI patients, especially those presenting with pathological changes associated with MM2-cortical type sCJD. The Asian sFI patients had a higher proportion of males and positivity for CSF 14-3-3 protein, and fewer sleep-related symptoms compared to Caucasian sFI patients. The age of onset and duration of sFI differed between ethnic groups, but failed to reach statistical significance.Despite its similarities to FFI, sFI is characterized by longer disease duration, higher proportion of neuropsychiatric symptoms and hyperintensity on MRI, along with differences in the clinical characteristics based on ethnicity.

A [Si4S10] supertetrahedra containing infrared nonlinear optical material, Rb2CdSi4S10, with a wide band gap (4.23 eV), high LIDT (5 × AgGaS2), and moderate SHG response (0.6 × AgGaS2) is designed and fabricated using a flux method.

Generating 2D diffraction orders with uniform or tailored intensity distribution is highly desired for various applications including depth perception, parallel laser fabrication and optical tweezer. However, previous strategies lack the abilities to tailor multiple parameters of output light in different diffraction orders simultaneously. While such ability plays an important role in achieving various different functionalities parallelly. Here, we demonstrate a method for encoding arbitrary phase profiles to different diffraction orders with controllable polarization states by applying double-phase method into elaborately designed metasurface. Sixteen independent holograms that generated by GS algorithm are successfully encoded into 4 × 4 uniformly distributed diffraction orders. Hence, the predefined holographic images can be observed at the Fourier plane. Meanwhile, the corresponding polarization states of different orders are manipulated according to their Fourier coefficients. For verifying the polarization state of each holographic image, we calculate the Stokes parameter of each order from measured intensity distributions in the experiment. The proposed method provides an effective way to tailor multiple properties of output diffraction orders. Meanwhile, it may promote the realization of achieving various functionalities parallelly such as spectral-polarization imaging or phase-polarization detection and enhance the capabilities of optical communication systems.

l-methionine sulfoxide (Met(O)–OH) as a CPA for cell cryopreservation.

RuCu NFs was synthesized by a facile solvothermal method, showing outstanding HER activity with the low overpotential of 55 mV at 10 mA cm−2.

Anisotropic and super-strong conductive hydrogels were prepared by mechanical stretching combined with the Hofmeister effect. Anisotropic hydrogels exhibit anisotropic mechanical and electrochemical properties.

In this work, we propose hairpin probe-mediated exponential amplification reaction (HEAR) strategy that combines DNA strand displacement with “who triggers, who gets generated” mode, providing single-base discrimination and reduced background signal.

OBJECTIVES—: H-scan ultrasound (US) imaging is a novel tissue characterization technique to detect apoptosis-induced changes in cancer cells after the initiation of effective drug treatment. The objective of the proposed research was to assess the sensitivity of 3-dimensional (3D) H-scan US technique for monitoring the response of breast cancer-bearing animals to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and correlate results to diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) measurements of programmed cancer cell death. METHODS—: Experimental studies used female mice (N = 18) implanted with human breast cancer cells. Animals underwent H-scan US and DW-MRI imaging on days 0, 1, 3, 7, and 10. After imaging at day 0, breast tumor-bearing nude mice were treated biweekly with an apoptosis-inducing drug. Texture analysis of H-scan US images explored spatial relationships between local US scattering. At day 10, H-scan measurements were compared with DW-MRI-derived apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) values and histological findings. RESULTS—: H-scan US imaging of low and high dose cisplatin-treated cancer-bearing animals revealed changes in image intensity suggesting a progressive decrease in aggregate US scatterer size that was not observed in control animals. Longitudinal trends discovered in H-scan US result matched with texture analysis and DW-MRI (P < .01). Further, analysis of the H-scan US image intensity and corresponding DW-MRI-derived ADC values revealed a strong linear correlation (R(2) = .93, P < .001). These changes were due to cancer cell apoptotic activity and consider as early detectable biomarker during treatment. CONCLUSIONS—: The 3D H-scan technique holds promise for assisting clinicians in monitoring the early response of breast cancer tumor to neoadjuvant chemotherapy and adding value to traditional diagnostic ultrasound examinations.

Elderly patients in immunosuppressive status may have an increased occurrence of illness and risk of poor prognosis. It is a generally overlooked population that we should pay more attention to their risk factors of sickness and mortality.Eight hundred and nine patients who were diagnosed with bloodstream infection in immunosuppressive states during accepting treatment in our hospital were selected from 2015 to 2019.The demographic data, underlying diseases, comorbidity, inducement, complications, pathogen sources, etiologies, and the antibiotics therapy were analyzed between ages 65 years groups and ages 65 years groups.The clinical characteristics of totally 809 immunosuppressed people diagnosed with bloodstream infection were analyzed, and among those people about 371 were ages 65 years. By univariate logistic regression analysis and multivariate logistic regression analysis, we found that hypertension (OR: 2.864, 95% CI 2.024-4.051, P 0.0001), cerebral Infarction (OR: 4.687, 95% CI 2.056-10.686, P 0.0001), coronary heart disease (OR: 1.942, 95% CI 1.168-3.230, P = 0.011), acute pancreatitis (OR: 3.964, 95% CI 2.059-7.632, P 0.0001), infective endocarditis (OR: 6.846, 95% CI 1.828-25.644, P = 0.004), aortic dissection (OR: 9.131, 95% CI 3.190-26.085, P 0.0001), chemotherapy (OR: 3.462, 95% CI 1.815-6.603, P 0.0001), transplant status (OR: 20.031, 95% CI 4.193-95.697, P 0.0001), and respiratory tract infection (OR: 2.096, 95% CI 1.269-3.461, P = 0.004) were significantly different between ages 65 years groups and ages 65 years groups.Hypertension, cerebral Infarction, coronary heart disease, acute pancreatitis, infective endocarditis, aortic dissection, chemotherapy, transplant status, and pathogen source of respiratory tract were the independent risk factors of ages 65 years in immunosuppressed patients, which would have the benefit to discriminate the prognostic factors in immunosuppressive elderly people with bloodstream infection.

The response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) is highly correlated with survival in breast cancer (BC) patients. The early prediction of the response to NAC could facilitate treatment adjustments on a patient-by-patient basis, which would improve patient outcomes and survival. Conventional techniques used for detecting circulating microRNAs (miRNAs), which act as biomarkers for the early prediction of NAC efficacy in BC patients, are associated with limitations such as low sensitivity and specificity. We designed a highly sensitive graphene oxide (GO)-based qRT-PCR method for detecting miRNAs associated with the chemotherapeutic response in BC patients. The results showed that miRNA levels at both the baseline and end of the first NAC cycle could help distinguish NAC responders from NAC nonresponders; BC patients with lower plasma miRNA levels were more likely to achieve pathological complete remission. Thus, GO-based qRT-PCR could facilitate early prediction of NAC efficacy in BC patients.

We have previously revealed the high enrichment of NTRK fusion in mismatch repair deficient (dMMR) CRCs. Optimized diagnostic approaches are urgently needed to identify dMMR CRCs that could benefit from TRK inhibitor therapy. A consecutive cohort of 240 surgically resected dMMR CRCs from 2015 to 2021 was collected for pan-TRK immunohistochemistry (IHC) using pan-TRK clone EPR17341 (VENTANA). We analyzed the sensitivity and specificity of pan-TRK IHC with sequential DNA/RNA-based Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) as the reference method and further explored IHC staining patterns and their correlation with fusion variants in dMMR CRCs. Of 240 dMMR CRCs, 15 (6.2%) were stained positive for pan-TRK IHC, and the sensitivity and specificity were both 100%. Five staining patterns were revealed, which correlated with fusion variants. Diffuse and strong positivity in membrane and cytoplasm were detected in all 6 cases with TPM3-NTRK1 fusions (6/15, 40%). Weak granular cytoplasmic staining, including diffuse or focal positivity, was found in 6 NTRK3 fusions (3 ETV6-NTRK3 and 3 EML4-NTRK3) (6/15, 40%). Diffuse and strong nuclear positivity was noticed in 2 LMNA-NTRK1 fusions (2/15, 13.3%). Intense granular cytoplasmic staining was observed in the only case with PLEKHA6-NTRK1 fusion (1/15, 6.7%). Interestingly, pan-TRK positivity was observed in one case with precursor lesions in both precancerous and cancerous regions, whereas MLH1 loss was restricted to the cancerous region. In summary, an optimized multi-step algorithm using pan-TRK IHC as a screening method was proposed to identify CRC patients harboring NTRK fusions.

Yulian Gao,1,&ast; Hongxia Lin,1,&ast; Yumin Xu,2,&ast; Yijin Yao,1,&ast; Dake Shi,1 Junjie Li,1 Haixing Zhu,1 Hanssa Dwarka Summah,3 Lei Ni,1 Yun Feng1 1Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Ruijin Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 2Department of Hospital Infection Management, Department of Infectious Diseases, Ruijin Hospital, School of Medicine, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China; 3Department of Respiratory, Poudre D’Or Chest Hospital, Rivière du Rempart, Mauritius&ast;These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Yun Feng; Lei Ni, Email fy01057@163.com; nilei625@139.comPurpose: Carbapenem-resistant Gram-negative bacteria bloodstream infection (CRGNB-BSI) has gradually become a major threat worldwide due to its treatment difficulty and high mortality. This study aimed to determine the risk factors for CRGNB-BSI in immunosuppressed patients.Patients and Methods: A total of 427 immunosuppressed patients with CRGNB-BSI were retrospectively investigated from 2015 to 2021. Both univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were applied to evaluate independent risk factors for CRGNB-BSI.Results: The most common etiology was Klebsiella Pneumoniae (50.59%; 216/427), while the Acinetobacillus baumannii infection was associated with the highest mortality (58.25%) among all etiologies. The 60-day mortality of immunosuppressed patients with CRGNB-BSI was 52.48% (224/427). Procalcitonin (PCT) > 0.5 μg/L (OR = 2.32, 95% CI: 1.28– 4.19, P = 0.005) and age > 55 years (OR = 2.06, 95% CI: 1.17– 3.64, P = 0.012) were found to be predictors of 60-day mortality of CRGNB-BSI, and tigecycline regimen (OR = 3.20, 95% CI: 1.81– 5.67, P < 0.001) was associated with higher mortality. Multivariate analysis also revealed that patients who developed acute kidney injury (AKI) (OR = 2.19, 95% CI: 1.11– 4.30, P = 0.023), gastrointestinal bleeding (OR = 3.18, 95% CI: 1.10– 9.16, P = 0.032), multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS) (OR = 12.11, 95% CI: 2.61– 56.19, P = 0.001), and septic shock (OR = 3.24, 95% CI: 1.77– 5.94, P < 0.001) showed worse outcomes. The risk factors were also significantly associated with mortality in the different subgroups.Conclusion: This study demonstrated that PCT > 0.5 μg/L, age > 55 years, and the tigecycline regimen were significantly associated with higher 60-day mortality among immunosuppressed patients with CRGNB- BSI. Patients developing MODS, septic shock, or AKI had worse clinical outcomes.&#x2003Keywords: bloodstream infection, carbapenem-resistant, immunosuppressed patients, subgroups, prognosis

It is of great significance to quickly detect underwater cracks as they can seriously threaten the safety of underwater structures. Research to date has mainly focused on the detection of above-water-level cracks and hasn’t considered the large scale cracks. In this paper, a large-scale underwater crack examination method is proposed based on image stitching and segmentation. In addition, a purpose of this paper is to design a new convolution method to segment underwater images. An improved As-Projective-As-Possible (APAP) algorithm was designed to extract and stitch keyframes from videos. The graph convolutional neural network (GCN) was used to segment the stitched image. The GCN’s m-IOU is 24.02% higher than Fully convolutional networks (FCN), proving that GCN has great potential of application in image segmentation and underwater image processing. The result shows that the improved APAP algorithm and GCN can adapt to complex underwater environments and perform well in different study areas.