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Background: Fungal keratitis is a serious blinding eye disease. Traditional drugs used to treat fungal keratitis commonly have the disadvantages of low bioavailability, poor dispersion, and limited permeability. Purpose: To develop a new drug for the treatment of fungal keratitis with improved bioavailability, dispersion, and permeability. Methods: ZIF-8 was formed by zinc ions and 2-methylimidazole linked by coordination bonds and characterized by SEM, XRD, and Zeta potential. The safety of ZIF-8 on HCEC cells and RAW 264.7 cells was detected by CCK-8. Safety evaluation of ZIF-8 on mice corneal epithelium was conducted using the Driaze corneal toxicity test. The effects of ZIF-8 on fungal growth, biofilm formation, and hyphae structure were detected by MIC, crystal violet staining, PI testing, calcofluor white staining, and SEM. The anti-inflammatory effects of ZIF-8 on RAW 246.7 cells were evaluated by qPCR and Elisa. Clinical score, CFU, HE staining, and immunofluorescence were conducted to verify the therapeutic effect of ZIF-8 on C57BL/6 female mice with fungal keratitis. Elisa confirmed the regulatory effect of ZlF-8 on protein expression of TNF-{\alpha} and IL-6 in the cornea of mice. Results: In vitro, ZIF-8 showed outstanding antifungal effects, including inhibiting the growth of Aspergillus fumigatus, restraining the formation of biofilm, and destroying cell membranes. In vivo, treatment with ZIF-8 reduced corneal fungal load and mitigated neutrophil infiltration in fungal keratitis, which effectively reduced the severity of keratitis in mice and alleviated the infiltration of inflammatory factors in the mouse cornea. In addition, ZIF-8 reduces the inflammatory response by downregulating the expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines TNF-{\alpha}, IL-6, and IL-1\b{eta} after Aspergillus fumigatus infection in vivo and in vitro., Comment: 28 pages, 1 scheme, 8 figures. This work has been submitted to the international journal of nanomedicine for possible publication

Topological phononic crystals (PCs) offer a novel approach to control the behavior of acoustic or elastic waves. In this paper, we design the gradient PC structures with coupled interfaces to realize topological rainbow trapping and broadband acoustic energy harvesting. Based on the geometric symmetry of PC unit cells, we construct the coupled topological interfaces by amalgamating two PCs with distinct topological phases. Also, the gradient modulation of structural parameters along the coupled interfaces is employed for the generation of rainbow trapping. Subsequently, a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) film is mounted along the coupled interfaces of the gradient PC structures, facilitating the conversion of acoustic energy into electrical energy. The numerical and experimental results show that the acoustic waves at different frequencies stop and are amplified at different positions of the coupled interfaces. Compared with the harvester in a bare structure, the topological PC energy harvester significantly enhances the output power at different excited frequencies. In the experiments, the maximum amplification ratio of the output power reaches 91. Besides, it is demonstrated that the topological rainbow trapping of acoustic waves exhibits robustness against random structural disorders. Notably, the coupled interfaces have broadband and multi-mode features, which are promising for other applications such as selective filtering and sensing enhancement.

We propose a theoretical scheme for dipole exchange-induced grating (DEIG) based on a hybrid system consisting of ultra-cold Rubidium ($^{87}$Rb) atomic ensemble and movable Rydberg spin atoms. The optical response of the grating appears as a superposition of three- and four-level configurations, similar to the cooperative optical nonlinear effect caused by the dipole blockade effect. However, such Rydberg atomic grating uniquely responds to the spatial positions of spin atoms, offering a novel approach to dynamically control electromagnetically induced gratings (EIG) except for input probe intensity.

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is a common cardiac arrhythmia. Many AF patients experience complications such as stroke and other cardiovascular issues. Early detection of AF is crucial. Existing algorithms can only distinguish ``AF rhythm in AF patients'' from ``sinus rhythm in normal individuals'' . However, AF patients do not always exhibit AF rhythm, posing a challenge for diagnosis when the AF rhythm is absent. To address this, this paper proposes a novel artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to distinguish ``sinus rhythm in AF patients'' and ``sinus rhythm in normal individuals'' in beat-level. We introduce beat-level risk interpreters, trend risk interpreters, addressing the interpretability issues of deep learning models and the difficulty in explaining AF risk trends. Additionally, the beat-level information fusion decision is presented to enhance model accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the average AUC for single beats used as testing data from CPSC 2021 dataset is 0.7314. By employing 150 beats for information fusion decision algorithm, the average AUC can reach 0.7591. Compared to previous segment-level algorithms, we utilized beats as input, reducing data dimensionality and making the model more lightweight, facilitating deployment on portable medical devices. Furthermore, we draw new and interesting findings through average beat analysis and subgroup analysis, considering varying risk levels.

We propose a theoretical scheme in a cold Rubidium-87 ($^{87}$Rb) atomic ensemble with a non-Hermitian optical structure, in which a lopsided optical diffraction grating can be realized just with the combination of single spatially periodic modulation and loop-phase.~Parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetric and parity-time antisymmetric ($\mathcal{APT}$) modulation can be switched by adjusting different relative phases of the applied beams. Both $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry and $\mathcal{PT}$ antisymmetry in our system are robust to the amplitudes of coupling fields, which allows optical response to be modulated precisely without symmetry breaking. Our scheme shows some nontrivial optical properties, such as lopsided diffraction, single-order diffraction, asymmetric Dammam-like diffraction, etc. Our work will benefit the development of versatile non-Hermitian/asymmetric optical devices.