Pulmonary Kv channels are thought to play a crucial role in the regulation of cell proliferation and apoptosis. Previous studies have shown that fluoxetine upregulated the expression of Kv1.5 and ...prevented pulmonary arterial hypertension in monocrotaline-induced or hypoxia-induced rats and mice. The current study was designed to test how fluoxetine regulates Kv1.5 channels, subsequently promoting apoptosis in human PASMCs cultured in vitro.
Human PASMCs were incubated with low-serum DMEM, ET-1, and fluoxetine with and without ET-1 separately for 72 h. Then the proliferation, apoptosis, and expression of TRPC1 and Kv1.5 were detected.
In the ET-1 induced group, the upregulation of TRPC1 and down regulation of Kv1.5 enhanced proliferation and anti-apoptosis, which was reversed when treated with fluoxetine. The decreased expression of TRPC1 increased the expression of Kv1.5, subsequently inhibiting proliferation while promoting apoptosis.
The results from the present study suggested that fluoxetine protects against big endothelin-1 induced anti-apoptosis and rescues Kv1.5 channels in human pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cells, potentially by decreasing intracellular concentrations of Ca²⁺.
Automatic facial expression recognition from video sequence is an essential research area in the field of computer vision. In this paper, a novel method for recognition facial expressions is ...proposed, which includes two stages of facial expression feature extraction and facial expression recognition. Firstly, in order to exact robust facial expression features, we use Active Appearance Model (AAM) to extract the global texture feature and optical flow technique to characterize facial expression which is determined facial velocity information. Then, these two features are integrated and converted to visual words using “bag-of-words” models, and facial expression is represented by a number of visual words. Secondly, the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model are utilized to classify different facial expressions such as “anger”, “disgust”, “fear”, “happiness”, “neutral”, “sadness”, and “surprise”. The experimental results show that our proposed method not only performs stably and robustly and improves the recognition rate efficiently, but also needs the least dimension when achieves the highest recognition rate , which demonstrates that our proposed method is superior to others.
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) can cause irreversible vision loss leading to blindness. We aim to evaluate the efficacy and safety of intravitreal injections of 0.5 mg conbercept, a new ...anti–vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) drug, for treatment of AMD on a schedule more manageable for patients.
A prospective, double-masked, multicenter, sham-controlled, phase III randomized trial.
Patients: Patients with choroidal neovascularization (CNV) secondary to AMD were enrolled and randomized to the conbercept group or the sham control group. Intervention: The conbercept group received intravitreal injections of conbercept (0.5 mg) once monthly for the first 3 months, then once quarterly until month 12 (3 + Q3M). The sham group received first 3 monthly sham injections and then 3 monthly injections of conbercept (0.5 mg) followed by quarterly administrations until month 12. Main Outcome Measures: The primary endpoint was mean change from baseline in best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) at month 3.
A total of 114 patients (91.9%) from 9 sites in China completed the 12-month study. At the 3-month primary endpoint, the mean changes in BCVA from baseline were +9.20 letters in the conbercept group and +2.02 letters in the sham group, respectively (P < .001). At 12 months, the mean changes from baseline in BCVA letter score were +9.98 letters in the conbercept group and +8.81 letters in the sham group (P = .64). The most common ocular adverse events were associated with intravitreal injections, such as conjunctival hemorrhage, and increased intraocular pressure.
A conbercept dosing regimen of 3 initial monthly administrations followed by quarterly treatments is effective for treatment of AMD. In previous reports, other anti-VEGF agents were unable to maintain similar clinical benefits with the same regimen.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Human activity analysis and expressions recognition play a central role in pervasive health care. Expressions recognition is an active research field in computer vision. In this paper, the authors ...propose an approach for automatically recognizing the pain expression from video sequences, in which pain is categorized into four levels, including "no-pain", "slight pain", "moderate pain" and "severe pain". First of all, each frame in video sequences is represented as a "word" by extracting facial velocity information, which is used to charaterize pain expression. Then boosting fuzzy classification algorithm is used for pain expression recognition. The algorithm can automatically categorize and recognize the human pain expression which is contained in the video. Finally, they test the algorithm on a pain expression dataset built by ourselves. Experiment results show that the average recognition accuracy is over 91%, which validates its effectiveness. The results are significantly better than three state-of-the-art approaches for pain expression recognition on the same data.
In this article, the authors have used Adaboost to create MILBoost and propose a new MILBoost approach to automatically recognize the facial expression from video sequences by constructing the ...MILBoost methods. At first, they have determined facial velocity information using optical flow technique, which is used to charaterize facial expression. Then visual words based on facial velocity is used to represent facial expression using Bag of Words. Final MILBoost model is used for facial expression recognition, in order to improve the recognition accuracy, the class label information was used for the learning of the MILBoost model. Experiments were performed on a facial expression dataset built by themselves and evaluated the proposed method, the experiment results show that, the average recognition accuracy is over 89.2%, which validates its effectiveness.
We present results from fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of the transport of astrophysical relativistic jets in magnetized intergalactic medium. As opposed to magnetohydrodynamic ...simulations, the results show that a strong charge-separation electric field, induced by the different responses between jet electrons and ions to the magnetic fields, significantly enhances the energy exchange between different species of charged particles and electromagnetic fields, thus playing a key role in determining the collimation and shape of the jet spectral energy distribution (SED). It is found that when the magnetic field strength increases, the jet collimation also increases while the power-law slope of the jet SED decreases; this provides potential enlightenment on related astrophysical observations.
Amyloid-β (Aβ) is important in the etiology of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Removal of Aβ from the brain is a major strategy for the prevention and treatment of AD.
To clarify whether Aβ42 can be ...cleared by intestinal excretion and whether the gut microbiota (GM) can affect the excretory clearance of Aβ42 in the peripheral blood and intestines.
Male 8-month-old C57BL6 mice were maintained on either normal chow or received broad-spectrum antibiotics in their drinking water for one week. Sterile saline, fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC), or FITC-Aβ42 (fluorescein isothiocyanate-labeled amyloid-β42 peptides) was injected 1 h before sampling. Related changes of Aβ42 before and after injection were evaluated.
FITC-Aβ42 was injected into mice through the tail vein and could later be detected in feces. Furthermore, the fecal concentrations of FITC-Aβ42 were higher in mice that had been fed antibiotics to alter their GM than in normal mice. However, the FITC-Aβ42 concentrations in blood showed the opposite pattern.
Aβ42 can be excreted into the intestinal lumen and is regulated by the GM.
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