•Amniotic membrane (AM) is an excellent natural candidate for wound healing.•Preparation and preservation of AM may negatively affect its biomechanical properties.•Optimization of an effective method ...is critical for a specific application of AM.•The effects of different methods on properties of AM are well discussed.
Human amniotic membrane (AM) has been widely used for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications. AM has many favorable characteristics such as high biocompatibility, antibacterial activity, anti-scarring property, immunomodulatory effects, anti-cancer behavior and contains several growth factors that make it an excellent natural candidate for wound healing. To date, various methods have been developed to prepare, preserve, cross-link and sterilize the AM. These methods remarkably affect the morphological, physico-chemical and biological properties of AM. Optimization of an effective and safe method for preparation and preservation of AM for a specific application is critical. In this review, the isolation, different methods of preparation, preservation, cross-linking and sterilization as well as their effects on properties of AM are well discussed. For each section, at least one effective and safe protocol is described in detail.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Various tone mapping operators have been proposed to convert the high dynamic range images to low dynamic ranges to improve visualization on low dynamic range displays. This paper presents a ...full‐reference objective quality assessment index to evaluate the perceived quality of tone‐mapped images. The proposed method seamlessly employs the multi‐scale structural fidelity, statistical naturalness, colourfulness and the multi‐scale free energy of the image to create a similarity score between a produced low dynamic range image and its high dynamic range image. The extensive experiments on three publicly available datasets using Spearman's rank‐order correlation coefficient, Kendall's rank‐order correlation coefficient and receiver operating characteristics analyses indicate the proposed tone‐mapped quality index is superior to recently proposed state‐of‐the‐art objective quality indices.
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FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Vasculogenic mimicry (VM) play an important role in breast cancer metastasis and anti- angiogenic drugs resistance. Hypoxia, the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), and cancer stem cells (CSCs) ...are known as essential factors for VM formation. Also, melatonin is an amino acid-derived hormone with many anti-tumor effects. Despite the antitumor effects of melatonin, its effect on VM formation in breast cancer has not been considered yet, so we investigated the effect of melatonin on VM formation through EMT process under hypoxia conditions in breast CSCs. The CSCs percentage and VM formation were determined in MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231, respectively. Also, analysis of HIF-1α expression under hypoxia in MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 cell lines was performed using Western blot. The effect of melatonin on the VM formation, invasion, and migration was also investigated. Moreover, the effect of melatonin on the expression EMT markers was evaluated. CD44+ CD24-phenotype as CSCs marker in MDA-MB-231 cell line, was 80.8%, while it was 11.1% in MCF-7 cell line. HIF-1α expression was up-regulated in the VM-positive breast cancer cell line MDA-MB-231, and consequently, affected the expression of the EMT markers E-cadherin, vimentin, snail, and MMP9. Melatonin had significant effect on EMT and formations of VM in breast CSCs. Melatonin could prevent the formation of VM by affecting the important molecules involved in the formation of VM structures and the EMT. Moreover, our data clearly showed that, melatonin represents molecule with significant anti-cancer activities that may potentially optimize the management of breast cancer through the overcoming drug resistance in anti-angiogenic drugs.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Introduction: This randomized controlled trial study aimed to find the benefits and possible side effects of brewed chicory leaf consumption in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) patients.
...Sixty NAFLD patients were randomly allocated into intervention and control groups and consumed brewed chicory leaf made from 15 g chicory leaf along with usual treatment or only the usual treatment, respectively. This study was planned for 12 weeks, but it was stopped in the sixth week due to unexpected side effects.
After 6 weeks, total bilirubin, ALT and AST in the intervention group were significantly reduced compared to the control group (p < 0.05). In the intervention group compared to the control group we observed a significant increase in number of red blood cells (0.16 ± 0.33 vs. −0.01 ± 0.27, p = 0.026), platelets (34.00 ± 45.55 vs. 7.96 ± 25.30, p = 0.014), hemoglobin (0.37 ± 0.84 vs. −0.09 ± 0.59, p = 0.018), fasting blood sugar (5.85 ± 8.47 vs. 0.29 ± 6.67, p = 0.017), total cholesterol (14.08 ± 20.80 vs. −1.30 ± 4.42, p = 0.001), low-density lipoprotein (15.36 ± 20.02 vs. −0.17 ± 6.70, p < 0.0001), and a significant decrease in the mean platelet volume (−3.03 ± 1.79 vs. 0.01 ± 0.62, p < 0.0001).
Consumption of brewed chicory leaf could have unexpected side effects on people with NAFLD. (IRCT20190819044565N2)
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Governments have developed and implemented various policies and interventions to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 vaccines are now being produced and distributed globally. This study ...investigated the role of good governance and government effectiveness indicators in the acquisition and administration of COVID-19 vaccines at the population level. Data on six World Bank good governance indicators for 172 countries for 2019 and machine-learning methods (K-Means Method and Principal Component Analysis) were used to cluster countries based on these indicators and COVID-19 vaccination rates. XGBoost was used to classify countries based on their vaccination status and identify the relative contribution of each governance indicator to the vaccination rollout in each country. Countries with the highest COVID-19 vaccination rates (e.g., Israel, United Arab Emirates, United States) also have higher effective governance indicators. Regulatory Quality is the most important indicator in predicting COVID-19 vaccination status in a country, followed by Voice and Accountability, and Government Effectiveness. Our findings suggest that coordinated global efforts led by the World Health Organization and wealthier nations may be necessary to assist in the supply and distribution of vaccines to those countries that have less effective governance.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
This study proposes an illumination-invariant face-recognition method called adaptive homomorphic eight local directional pattern (AH-ELDP). AH-ELDP first uses adaptive homomorphic filtering to ...reduce the influence of illumination from an input face image. It then applies an interpolative enhancement function to stretch the filtered image. Finally, it produces eight directional edge images using Kirsch compass masks and uses all the directional information to create an illumination-insensitive representation. The author's extensive experiments show that the AH-ELDP technique achieves the best face recognition accuracy of 99.45% for CMU-PIE face images, 96.67% for Yale B face images and 84.42% for Extended Yale B face images using one image per subject for training when compared to seven representative state-of-the-art techniques.
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FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
Background and objectivesMore than 93 million COVID-19 cases and more than 1 million COVID-19 deaths have been reported in the USA by August 2022. The disproportionate effect of the pandemic and its ...severe impact on vulnerable communities raised concerns. This research aimed to identify and rank Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) factors highly predictive of the spread of COVID-19 in the US South at the beginning of the pandemic.MethodsWe used Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) machine learning methodology and SVI data, and the number of COVID-19 cases across all counties in the US South to predict the number of positive cases within 30 days of a county’s first case.ResultsOur results showed that the percentage of mobile homes is the most important feature in predicting the increase in COVID-19. Also, population density per square mile, per capita income, percentage of housing in structures with 10+ units, percentage of people below poverty and percentage of people with no high school diploma are important predictors of COVID-19 community spread, respectively.ConclusionsSVI can help assess the vulnerability or resilience of communities to the spread of COVID-19 and can help identify communities at high risk of COVID-19 spread.
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