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The present study aimed to investigate the association between the serum SIRT1 protein and the severity of spinal cord injury (SCI) as well as the neurological recovery in mice. In this study, the wild-type (WT), Mx1-Cre+ SIRT1loxP/loxP (Mx1), and LCK-Cre+SIRT1loxP/loxP (LCK) mice were subjected to sham surgery, mild, moderate, or severe SCI, respectively. The serum was collected at intervals of 12 h, 1 day (d), 3 d, 5 d, 7 d, 10 d, 14 d, and 21 d after the injury. The locomotor function of all the animals was assessed using the Basso mouse scale (BMS) and the serum SIRT1 proteins were analyzed using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The results demonstrated that about 7–10 d after SCI, the levels of SIRT1 protein in the serum correlated significantly with the severity of the injury and at 28 d post-injury, there was a distant neurological recovery (BMS score). The serum SIRT1 concentration in both the Mx1 and LCK mice in the sham group was significantly reduced compared to that in the WT mice, and there was a delayed increase in the serum SIRT1 levels after injury. These findings indicate that the SIRT1 concentrations in the serum of the SCI mice closely correlated with the acute severity and neurological outcome.

The differences between school leadership in China and in other countries, especially in Western countries, can be largely attributed to their different sources of school leadership knowledge and different external and internal institutional environment for school leadership. To understand how China’s school leadership unfolds in day-to-day practice and what knowledge underpins its leadership practice, it is essential to figure out the sources of China’s school leadership knowledge and to examine the educational administration system and the school leadership system of China.

As we examined in Chapter 1, the principal plays so important role in school leadership under the Principal Responsibility System that they are inevitably viewed by China’s educational policymakers as key to success in school development and improvement.

Introduction: The aim of the study was to investigate the role of the intra-operative three-dimensional imaging in the tibial plateau fractures with complex depressions. Material and methods: Thirty tibial plateau fracture patients with complex depression were treated with the use of intra-operative three-dimensional imaging (Arcadis 3D). The image quality as well as the clinical benefit was evaluated. Results: In total 74 plates were used in these 30 patients. Six Kirschner wires and 50 screws were used outside the plate as raft technique in 4 and 21 patients. The additional critical imaging information which was unachievable in plain fluoroscopy was gain in 12 patients. Four patients among these 12 patients were revised because of the depression. Two patients were revised due to the misplacement of screws. Conclusion: The intra-operative three-dimensional imaging (Arcadis) is necessary when the two-dimensional fluoroscopy was unsatisfactory in the depressed tibial plateau fracture.

In mobile ad hoc net work, transmitting a packet from source to destination needs cooperation among nodes. Since there may be selfish nodes in the network and these selfish nodes are reluctant to relay packets for other nodes in order to protect resources of their own, the performance of the whole network will be influenced. We propose a cooperative incentive mechanism based on game theory. When determining the utility function, we fully take into account the dependence between the nodes, cooperation capability as well as energy consumption. Simulation and analysis results show that our incentive mechanism can stimulate the cooperation among the nodes and improve the performance of network efficiently.

Almost all proposed routing protocols are based on minimum hops in mobile ad hoc network. But through the research on the real communication of wireless nodes, we find that sometimes the path which has the minimum hops from the source to the destination may not be the best path. Considered the remaining power and the node selfishness, we propose an improved AODV routing protocol, I-AODV in this paper. We use a new term, node status, regard the node status as a function of the remaining power and the fame and regard the node status as the basic condition for choosing the next hop in the new routing protocol.

In this paper, we present a tree-like blood vessels based on the region growing algorithm and level sets method for computing centerlines for both 2D and 3D shape analysis. Consider the tree-like vascular structure, we first use region growing technology to generate the shortest distance from the given root to all the pixels, ground on the distance can detect all the extreme nodes of branches automatically. Propagate wave-front from a point of skeleton line with the level sets, track the points of the largest curvature on the surface of the wave-front, through solute differential equations, the skeleton can be gained. The proposed method is computationally inexpensive, not only maintain the position exactly and the shape smoothly and connectedly, and less sensitive to boundary noise.

Skeleton has very important applications in objects expression, data compression, computer vision and animation. In the discrete space, the basic skeleton algorithms have two categories: one is thinning, the other is based on the distance transformation, in a high-dimensional space generated from the surface to form the ridge to create a skeleton. The skeleton which is based on the distance transform algorithm is accurate and smooth, but we must carefully check its continuity. Such a check of the continuity would be very difficult when the skeleton structure is complex. The biggest advantage of thinning algorithm is that it can ensure that the skeleton is in a row and keeps the main topology of the initial target, but the general position is not accurate. In this paper, combining thinning algorithms and level set model, a dynamic robust vascular skeleton extraction algorithm is proposed. First using thinning technology to generate initial skeleton in a row, and then based on the level set model, it will guide the initial framework to the correct position. In this paper, the skeleton extracted from our algorithm not only maintains the exact location and the smooth appearance in a row at the same time curbs the noise of the border with a good robustness.

Serious types of vascular diseases such as carotid stenosis, aneurysm and vascular malformation may lead to brain stroke, which are the third leading cause of death and the number one cause of disability. In the clinical practice of diagnosis and treatment of cerebral vascular diseases, how to do effective detection and description of the vascular structure of two-dimensional angiography sequence image that is blood vessel skeleton extraction has been a difficult study for a long time. This paper mainly discussed two-dimensional image of blood vessel skeleton extraction based on the level set method, first do the preprocessing to the DSA image, namely uses anti-concentration diffusion model for the effective enhancement and uses improved Otsu local threshold segmentation technology based on regional division for the image binarization, then vascular skeleton extraction based on GMM (Group marching method) with fast sweeping theory was actualized. Experiments show that our approach not only improved the time complexity, but also make a good extraction results.

Image inpainting is an important element in image restoration study, whose purpose is to restore the lost information automatically based on existing information. Image inpainting can be used to restore damaged images and videos, remove text and hidden errors on videos, and so on. Although the basic idea of the image inpainting is very simple, many of the image inpainting algorithms are very complex and difficult to achieve. In order to get a fast algorithm, this paper proposes a new algorithm based on 8-neighborhood fast sweeping method and improves the algorithm in details. By inpainting the same image using Bertalmio's method and our method, the experimental results verify that our algorithm is fast and feasibility.

School effectiveness and improvement has long been an important educational issue for researchers and practitioners worldwide. According to Levine and Lezotte (1990), school effectiveness is “the production of a desired result or outcome.” However, “school effectiveness is still a very vague concept, even though it is often used in the literature of school management and improvement” (Cheng, 1996, p. 7). The definition of school effectiveness may vary for individuals as well as for different countries. Relatively speaking, Mortimore has given a clearer meaning when he defines an effective school as “one in which students progress further than might be expected with respect to its intake” (Mortimore, 1998, p. 258). This definition suggests that an effective school should add value to the students’outcomes in comparison with other schools serving similar intakes (Sammons, 1999, p. 76). The author of this chapter agrees with Mortimore’s definition and believes that the most convincing fruits of school effectiveness and improvement practices should be the improvement of quality in disadvantaged schools.1 This point of view is not groundless but builds on China’s unique history in school effectiveness and improvement. Thus, this chapter begins with a brief historical review of school effectiveness and improvement practices in China and then presents the general context of China’s experiences. The second section of the chapter examines the role the Chinese government plays in promoting improvement in disadvantaged schools, by presenting and discussing the contribution of related initiatives and efforts at the system level. In the third section, the factors at the site level that contribute to improvement in disadvantaged school are identified, through studying a typical case of successful practice in improvement in disadvantaged schools. The fourth section provides researchers and practitioners in other countries with the implications and lessons drawn from China’s best practices in improvement in disadvantaged schools. Throughout this chapter, the author argues that the most valuable and convincing experiences of school effectiveness and improvement are not in traditional, high-performing