By combining the photorefractive spatial soliton waveguide of a Ce:SBN crystal with a coherent 4-f system we are able to manipulate the spatial frequencies of an input optical image to perform ...edge-enhancement and direct component enhancement operations. Theoretical analysis of this optical image processor is presented to interpret the experimental observations. This work provides an approach for optical image processing by using photorefractive spatial solitons.
•A coherent 4-f system with the spatial soliton waveguide as spatial frequency filter.•Manipulate the spatial frequencies of an input optical image.•Achieve edge-enhancement and direct component enhancement operations of an optical image.
Ginkgo biloba L. preparations (GBLPs) are a class of Chinese herbal medicine used in the adjuvant treatment of ischemic stroke (IS). Recently, several systematic reviews (SRs) and meta-analyses (MAs) ...of GBLPs for IS have been published.
This overview aims to assess the quality of related SRs and MAs.
PubMed, Embase, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, Chinese Biological Medicine, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang, and Chinese Science and Technology Journals databases were searched from their inception to December 31, 2022.
SRs and MAs of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that explored the efficacy of GBLPs for patients with IS were included.
Two independent reviewers extracted data and assessed the methodological quality, risk of bias (ROB), reporting quality, and credibility of evidence of the included SRs and MAs using A Measurement Tool to Assess Systematic Reviews 2 (AMSTAR 2), Risk of Bias in Systematic Reviews (ROBIS), the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA), and the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE), respectively. Additionally, descriptive analysis and data synthesis were conducted.
Twenty-nine SRs/MAs involving 119 outcomes were included in this review. The overall methodological quality of all SRs/MAs was critically low based on AMSTAR 2, and 28 had a high ROB based on the ROBIS. According to the PRISMA statement, the reporting items of the included SRs/MAs are relatively complete. The results based on GRADE showed that of the 119 outcomes, 8 were rated as moderate quality, 24 as low quality, and 87 as very low quality. Based on the data synthesis, GBLPs used in conjunction with conventional treatment were superior to conventional treatment alone for decreasing neurological function scores.
GBLPs can be considered a beneficial supplemental therapy for IS. However, because of the low quality of the existing evidence, high-quality RCTs and SRs/MAs are warranted to further evaluate the benefits of GBLPs for treating IS.
Please cite this article as: Meng TT, You YP, Li M, Guo JB, Song XB, Ding JY, Xie XL, Li AQ, Li SJ, Yin XJ, Wang P, Wang Z, Wang BL, He QY. Chinese herbal medicine Ginkgo biloba L. preparations for ischemic stroke: An overview of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. J Integr Med. 2024;22(2): 163–179.
Accumulated evidences have verified that cancer chemotherapy may increase the risk of osteoporosis and severely affected the life quality. Osteoclasts hyperactivation was commonly accepted as the ...major pathogenesis of osteoporosis. However, the role of osteoblasts dysfunction in osteoporosis was little investigated. Our previous study has confirmed that selenium-containing protein from selenium-enriched
(Se-SP) exhibited enhanced hepatoprotective potential through inhibiting oxidative damage. Herein, the protective effect of Se-SP against cisplatin-induced osteoblasts dysfunction in MC3T3-E1 mouse preosteoblast was investigated, and the underlying mechanism was evaluated. The results indicated that cisplatin dramatically decreased cell viability of preosteoblast by triggering mitochondria-mediated apoptosis pathway. Cisplatin treatment also caused mitochondrial dysfunction and reactive oxide species (ROS)-mediated oxidative damage. However, Se-SP pre-treatment effectively prevented MC3T3-E1 cells from cisplatin-induced mitochondrial dysfunction by balancing Bcl-2 family expression and regulating the opening of mitochondrial permeability transition pore (MPTP), attenuated cisplatin-induced oxidative damage through inhibiting the overproduction of ROS and superoxide anion, and eventually reversed cisplating-induced early and late apoptosis by inhibiting PARP cleavage and caspases activation. Our findings validated that Se-SP as a promising Se species could be a highly effective way in the chemoprevention and chemotherapy of oxidative damage-mediated bone diseases.
Objective: To discuss the effect and mechanism of miR-34 a on the proliferation, apoptosis and invasion of laryngeal carcinoma cells. Methods: The laryngeal squamous carcinoma Hep2 cells were ...transiently transfected with miR-34 a mimics and miR-34 a NC. The MTT, colony-forming assay, Hoechst staining and Annexin V-PI double staining flow cytometry were employed to detect the effect of miR-34 a on the viability and apoptosis of laryngeal squamous carcinoma Hep2 cells; Transwell assay to defect the effect of miR-34 a on the migration and invasion of laryngeal squamous carcinoma Hep2 cells; western blot and RTPCR assay to defect the effect of miR-34 a mimics on the expression of survivin and Ki-67 m RNA in laryngeal squamous carcinoma Hep2 cells. Results: Compared with miR-34 a NC group, the cell viability in miR-34 mimics group was significantly decreased(P<0.01), the cell apoptosis rate was significantly increased(P<0.01), the abilities of cell migration and invasion were significantly reduced(P<0.01) and the expression of survivin and Ki-67 m RNA was significantly decreased(P<0.01). Conclusions: The increased expression of miR-34 a can induce the apoptosis of Hep2 laryngeal carcinoma cells and inhibit the cell proliferation and invasion, which is related to the down-regulated expression of survivin and Ki-67.
How to determine layer number (N) of graphene materials is of primary importance for practical applications. In this work, with 532 nm and 633 nm excitation wavelengths, we used the methods of Raman ...intensity ratio to identify the layers (N ≤ 4) of ultrathin graphenes prepared by micro-mechanical exfoliation and chemical vapor deposition (CVD). We also analyzed the effects of excitation wavelength and sample preparation method on identification of N. The following results were obtained. The intensity ratio of G mode from graphenes and Si mode from substrate underneath graphenes (I(G)/IG(Si)) increases monotonically with the increase of N, which is affected not only by excitation wavelength but also by sample preparation method. However, the intensity ratio of Si mode from substrate underneath graphenes and Si mode from bare substrate (IG(Si)/I0(Si)) decreases monotonically with the increase of N, which is only affected by excitation wavelength but almost not affected by sample preparation method. By contrast, the IG(Si)/I0(Si) method using 532 nm laser is a good option for N identification of 1LG-4LG whether the sample preparation method is micro-mechanical exfoliation or CVD.
Hysteroscopy has widely been used for diagnosis of the uterine cavity; however, target biopsy has often been difficult in part to the inherent limitations of ancillary instruments. Lin's biopsy ...grasper was specifically designed to work in conjunction with a flexible hysteroscope to obtain intrauterine biopsy under transabdominal sonography. Herein, we share our clinical experience in the management of endometrial abnormalities with the use of Lin's biopsy grasper during office-based hysteroscopy.
From February 2006 to November 2016, the use of Lin's biopsy grasper for tissue biopsy was attempted on 126 cases. We retrospectively recorded and analyzed the patients' preoperative characteristics and biopsy outcomes to demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of Lin's biopsy grasper.
Out of the one hundred and twenty-six enrolled patients, satisfactory targeted biopsies were achieved; including high diagnostic rate (92.1%, with 116 cases confirmed histologically) and adequate tissue retrieval (77.8%, with 98 cases obtaining optimal specimen volume). All patients tolerated the procedure without analgesics or anesthesia.
Diagnostic flexible hysteroscopy combined with the use of Lin's biopsy grasper has proven to be an effective tool for intrauterine evaluation and obtaining tissue sample.
Hyperglycemia as the major hallmark of diabetic neuropathy severely limited its therapeutic efficiency. Evidences have revealed that selenium (Se) as an essential trace element could effectively ...reduce the risk of neurological diseases. In the present study, 3,3′-diselenodipropionic acid (DSePA), a derivative of selenocystine, was employed to investigate its protective effect against high glucose-induced neurotoxicity in PC12 cells and evaluate the underlying mechanism. The results suggested that high glucose showed significant cytotoxicity through launching mitochondria-mediated apoptosis in PC12 cells, accompanied by poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) cleavage, caspase activation, and mitochondrial dysfunction. Moreover, high glucose also triggered DNA damage and dysregulation of MAPKs and AKT pathways through reactive oxygen species (ROS) overproduction. p53 RNA interference partially suppressed high glucose-induced cytotoxicity and apoptosis, indicating the role of p53 in high glucose-induced signal. However, DSePA pretreatment effectively attenuated high glucose-induced cytotoxicity, inhibited the mitochondrial dysfunction through regulation of Bcl-2 family, and ultimately reversed high glucose-induced apoptotic cell death in PC12 cells. Attenuation of caspase activation, PARP cleavage, DNA damage, and ROS accumulation all confirmed its protective effects. Moreover, DSePA markedly alleviated the dysregulation of AKT and MAPKs pathways induced by high glucose. Our findings revealed that the strategy of using DSePA to antagonize high glucose-induced neurotoxicity may be a highly effective strategy in combating high glucose-mediated neurological diseases.
Prediction of protein subcellular localization is an important issue in computational biology because it provides important clues for the characterization of protein functions. Currently, much ...research has been dedicated to developing automatic prediction tools. Most, however, focus on mono-locational proteins, i.e., they assume that proteins exist in only one location. It should be noted that many proteins bear multi-locational characteristics and carry out crucial functions in biological processes. This work aims to develop a general pattern classifier for predicting multiple subcellular locations of proteins. We use an ensemble classifier, called the min-max modular support vector machine (M(3)-SVM), to solve protein subcellular multi-localization problems; and, propose a module decomposition method based on gene ontology (GO) semantic information for M(3)-SVM. The amino acid composition with secondary structure and solvent accessibility information is adopted to represent features of protein sequences. We apply our method to two multi-locational protein data sets. The M(3)-SVMs show higher accuracy and efficiency than traditional SVMs using the same feature vectors. And the GO decomposition also helps to improve prediction accuracy. Moreover, our method has a much higher rate of accuracy than existing subcellular localization predictors in predicting protein multi-localization.
Various studies have shown that the temporal information captured by conventional long-short-term memory (LSTM) networks is very useful for enhancing multimodal emotion recognition using ...encephalography (EEG) and other physiological signals. However, the dependency among multiple modalities and high-level temporal-feature learning using deeper LSTM networks is yet to be investigated. Thus, we propose a multimodal residual LSTM (MMResLSTM) network for emotion recognition. The MMResLSTM network shares the weights across the modalities in each LSTM layer to learn the correlation between the EEG and other physiological signals. It contains both the spatial shortcut paths provided by the residual network and temporal shortcut paths provided by LSTM for efficiently learning emotion-related high-level features. The proposed network was evaluated using a publicly available dataset for EEG-based emotion recognition, DEAP. The experimental results indicate that the proposed MMResLSTM network yielded a promising result, with a classification accuracy of 92.87% for arousal and 92.30% for valence.