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Previous studies reported the oral administration ofNaja naja atravenom (NNAV) reduced adriamycin-induced chronic kidney damage. This study investigated the effects of intragastric administrated cardiotoxin fromNaja naja atravenom on chronic kidney disease in rats. Wistar rats were injected with adriamycin (ADR; 6 mg/kg body weight) via the tail vein to induce chronic kidney disease. The cardiotoxin was administrated daily by intragastric injection at doses of 45, 90, and 180 μg/kg body weight until the end of the protocol. The rats were placed in metabolic cages for 24 hours to collect urine, for determination of proteinuria, once a week. After 6 weeks, the rats were sacrificed to determine serum profiles relevant to chronic kidney disease, including albumin, total cholesterol, phosphorus, blood urea nitrogen, and serum creatinine. Kidney histology was examined with hematoxylin and eosin, periodic acid-Schiff, and Masson’s trichrome staining. The levels of kidney podocin were analyzed by Western blot analysis and immunofluorescence. We found that cardiotoxin reduced proteinuria and can improve biological parameters in the adriamycin-induced kidney disease model. Cardiotoxin also reduced adriamycin-induced kidney pathology, suggesting that cardiotoxin is an active component of NNAV for ameliorating adriamycin-induced kidney damage and may have a potential therapeutic value on chronic kidney disease.

To suppress the fluctuation effect due to laser power instability and terahertz radiation fluctuation, a homomorphic filtering method is proposed to process the terahertz images obtained from a pulsed terahertz raster scanning imaging system. The physical model of homomorphic filtering for terahertz imaging is established. The mathematical expressions are given with the specific physical meaning in accordance with the imaging principle. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, a homomorphic filtering experiment based on two raw terahertz images selected from the literature using a continuous-wave (CW) terahertz source is also performed. The effect of the method is compared with those described in the literature, and the advantages of homomorphic filtering are discussed. The pulsed- and CW-terahertz image processing results both show that in addition to suppressing the fluctuation effect, the method can also enhance target imaging.

We present a high-resolution (HR) reconstruction model and algorithms for terahertz imaging, taking advantage of super-resolution methodology and algorithms. The algorithms used include projection onto a convex sets approach, iterative backprojection approach, Lucy–Richardson iteration, and 2D wavelet decomposition reconstruction. Using the first two HR reconstruction methods, we successfully obtain HR terahertz images with improved definition and lower noise from four low-resolution (LR) 22×24 terahertz images taken from our homemade THz–TDS system at the same experimental conditions with 1.0 mm pixel. Using the last two HR reconstruction methods, we transform one relatively LR terahertz image to a HR terahertz image with decreased noise. This indicates potential application of HR reconstruction methods in terahertz imaging with pulsed and continuous wave terahertz sources.

Objective To observe the therapeutic effect of Leyin (Open image in new window, LY) in treating psoriasis maculata (PM) and its effects on cellular immunity and vaginal epithelial cell mitosis in experimental mice.

This paper studies the calculation of active earth pressure of retaining structure under the condition of earthquake. By comparing with the Rankine theory and Coulomb theory, we get a very good result. The analytical solutions of the previous works are for single homogeneous isotropic filling .but in this paper, the calculation formula and method are suitable for the calculating of active earth pressure of retaining wall which is for different multilayer nature filling. In this paper, the conclusion is the same with the conclusion of literature before, namely the point position of passive earth pressure is lower than the position of Rankine theory and Coulomb theory, which should also be noticed.

As we known, features of speech signal not only reflect the identity information, but also contain the semantical information. In this paper, we describe a novel neural network ensemble architecture based on the finding that the diphthong and multi-vowel in Chinese can approximately be considered as the complex of mono- vowel and transitional part in the standpoint of short-term analysis. Several neural networks are trained, each for the eigenspace of one mono-vowel, and their results are combined by another combinational neural network. The architecture can effectively improve the recognition accuracy by eliminating the disturbance of semantical information. Experimental results show that the recognition accuracy of our proposed approach is higher than conventional methods such as a single neural network and other proposed ensemble structures.