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Fibrosis is a common pathological feature of organ diseases resulting from excessive production of extracellular matrix, which accounts for significant morbidity and mortality. However, there is currently no effective treatment targeting fibrogenesis. Recently, metabolic alterations are increasingly considered as essential factors underlying fibrogenesis, and especially research on metabolic regulation of amino acids is flourishing. Among them, branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) are the most abundant essential amino acids, including leucine, isoleucine and valine, which play significant roles in the substance and energy metabolism and their regulation. Dysregulation of BCAAs metabolism has been proven to contribute to numerous diseases. In this review, we summarize the metabolic regulation of fibrosis and the changes in BCAAs metabolism secondary to fibrosis. We also review the effects and mechanisms of the BCAAs intervention, and its therapeutic targeting in hepatic, renal and cardiac fibrosis, with a focus on the fibrosis in liver and associated hepatocellular carcinoma.

In this paper, performance drop detector is designed for formative assessment using Bayesian network. Assessment items' difficulty and discrimination are determined by logistic regression to improve detector's performance. Students' result on assessment are predicted by Bayesian network with assessment items as nodes. The probability that the student may fail is calculated based on the properties of nodes for each path, the threshold probability is set as 0.9 to improve the accarucy for the prediction. The precision and recall of the prediction depends on number of layers of the network, the assessment item's difficulty and discrimination. With our sample, the precision of the prediction can be as high as 0.94 (recall 0.30).

Liver fibrosis is a major disease that is primarily caused by hepatitis virus infections, toxins, and alcohol abuse. Diagnosing and staging liver fibrosis are critical in guiding the treatment of chronic liver diseases, according to several international and Chinese guidelines. Liver biopsy is the gold standard for diagnosing and staging liver fibrosis, but it is invasive and suffers from several limitations. Consequently, much research has focused on the search for a noninvasive serum biomarker of fibrosis. In this study, we determined that Chitinase 3-like 1 (CHI3L1) is an abundantly expressed liver gene whose expression is highly enriched in the liver. We then compared serum levels of CHI3L1 among patients with various stages of liver fibrosis, as determined by liver biopsies, and found that the CHI3L1 levels were able to differentiate early stages of liver fibrosis (S0-S2) from late stages of liver fibrosis (S3-S4). We further showed that CHI3L1 is a good marker of substantial fibrosis, with areas under the ROC curves (AUCs) of 0.94 for substantial (S2, S3, S4) fibrosis and 0.96 for advanced (S3, S4) fibrosis. Finally, we showed that CHI3L1 is superior to hyaluronic acid (HA), type III procollagen (PCIII), laminin (LN), and type IV collagen (CIV), which are also serum biomarkers of liver fibrosis, in identifying advanced liver fibrosis in patients with HBV-related liver fibrosis in China.

Due to the development of information technology, physics 3D animation multimedia has been introduced to physics teaching process. In order to match the modernization of physics teaching, new digital teaching platform for physics has been developed up by our group. The digital platform contains two individual parts. One is development system platform which can be used to generate physics 3D animation, and the other is presentation system platform which has been designed to present physics 3D animation. The new digital teaching platform is an open and efficient system and it can communicate with 3DMAX and Matlab program. The digital platform enriched college physics teaching resource and it has been employed to 18 university of China since 2009. Statistics showed that it can stir up students' interesting and it is convenient for physics teachers to explain physics concept. Furthermore, digital platform is easy to use and convenient to control teaching process physics teachers.