Within tissue exposed to the systemic immune system, lymphocytes and fibroblasts act against biomaterials via the development of a fibrous capsule, known as the foreign body reaction (FBR). Inspired ...by the natural tolerance that the uterine cavity has to foreign bodies, our study explores the role of microenvironment across classical (subcutaneous) and immune privileged (uterine) tissues in the development of the FBR. As a model biomaterial, we used electrospun fibers loaded with sclerosing agents to provoke scar tissue growth. Additionally, we integrated these materials onto an intrauterine device as a platform for intrauterine biomaterial studies. Polyester materials in vitro achieved drug release up to 10 days, greater pro-inflammatory and pro-healing cytokine expression, and the addition of gelatin enabled greater fibroblast attachment. We observed the materials that induced the greatest FBR in the mouse, had no effect when inserted at the utero-tubal junction of non-human primates. These results suggest that the FBR varies across different tissue microenvironments, and a dampened fibrotic response exists in the uterine cavity, possibly due to immune privilege. Further study of immune privileged tissue factors on biomaterials could broaden our understanding of the FBR and inform new methods for achieving biocompatibility in vivo.
Display omitted
•Biomaterials examined for FBR across subcutaneous and uterine environments.•Polyester fibers can achieve physicochemically diverse drug release up to 10 days.•Polyester fibers induce higher pro-inflammatory and pro-healing cytokine expression.•PLGA/PCL/Gel/SN initiated the greatest FBR subcutaneously in mice.•Targeted fiber/IUD did not initiate scar tissue growth in a uterine NHP model.
Platinum group metal-free electrocatalysts are an important class of materials for the sustainable energy economy and significant effort has been made toward developing platinum group metal-free ...catalysts to replace their costly Pt counterparts in fuel cell electric vehicles. The progress made in activity over the last decade is reviewed, along with synthesis strategies for more controlled active site formation and performance gains achieved through electrode engineering. The increased focus on durability, the growing understanding of degradation mechanisms, and the need for standard performance and accelerated stress test protocols are discussed.
The purpose of this study was to identify the hub genes and biological pathways of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) through bioinformatics analysis and potential new therapeutic targets. In this study, ...three datasets were downloaded from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), and differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between NPC and normal tissues were analyzed using the GEO2R online tool. Volcano and heat maps of the DEGs were visualized using the hiplot database. Gene ontology (GO) and the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analyses of the upregulated and downregulated DEGs were performed using the DAVID database. Finally, we established a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network using the STRING database and showed the differential expression of hub genes between the normal and tumor tissues. In all, 109,371,221 upregulated DEGs and 139,226,520 downregulated DEGs were obtained in datasets GSE40290, GSE61218, and GSE53819, respectively, and 18 common differential genes, named co-DEGs, were screened in the three datasets. The most abundant biological GO terms of the co-DEGs were inflammatory response et al. The KEGG pathway enrichment analysis showed that co-DEGs mainly participated in the interleukin (IL)-17 signaling pathway et al. Finally, we identified four hub genes using PPI analysis and observed that three of them were highly expressed in tumor tissues. In this study, the hub genes of NPC, such as PTGS2, and pathways such as IL-17 signaling, were identified through bioinformatics analysis, which may be potential new therapeutic targets for NPC.
► Coughing velocity was found to be 15.3m/s for male and 10.6m/s for female. ► The angle of coughed air was around 38° for male and 32° for female. ► Height of test subject and his/her cough speed ...was linearly correlated.
Increasing concerns about the spread of airborne pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and novel swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) have attracted public attention to bioaerosols and protection against them. The airborne pathogens are likely to be expelled from coughing or speaking, so the physical data of the exhaled particles plays a key role in analyzing the pathway of airborne viruses. The objective of this study was to analyze the initial velocity and the angle of the exhaled airflow from coughing and speaking of 17 males and 9 females using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and acrylic indoor chamber. The results showed that the average initial coughing velocity was 15.3m/s for the males and 10.6m/s for the females, while the average initial speaking velocity was 4.07m/s and 2.31m/s respectively. The angle of the exhaled air from coughing was around 38° for the males and 32° for the females, while that of the exhaled air from speaking was around 49° and 78° respectively. Also, the linear relation between the tested subject’s height and their coughing and speaking velocity was shown in this study.
With the emergence of problems on environmental pollutions, lithium batteries have attracted considerable attention as an efficient and nature-friendly alternative energy storage device owing to ...their advantages, such as high power density, low self-discharge rate, and long life cycle. They are widely used in numerous applications, from everyday items, such as smartphones, wireless vacuum cleaners, and wireless power tools, to transportation means, such as electric vehicles and bicycles. In this paper, the state of charge (SOC) of each cell of the lithium battery pack was estimated in real time using two types of neural networks: Multi-layer Neural Network (MNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). To determine the difference in the SOC estimation performance under various conditions, the input values were compared using 2, 6, and 8 input values, and the difference according to the use of temperature variable data was compared, and finally, the MNN and LSTM. The differences were compared. Real-time SOC was estimated using the method with the lowest error rate.
Objective
To determine age-related risk factors for chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS) with asthma.
Methods
Data were obtained from a national survey of non-hospitalized civilians conducted by the Korean ...Center for Disease Control and Prevention. CRS diagnosis was based on the guidelines of the European Position Paper on Rhinosinusitis and Nasal Polyps 2020. Asthma was judged based on whether the patient had been diagnosed with asthma in the past. Of the 45,811 survey participants, 26,335 were included in the cross-sectional study. Participants included in the study were divided into the control, CRS, and CRS with asthma groups. Age-related risk factors were analyzed in patients aged < 60 or > 60 years. Univariate logistic analyses were performed to evaluate the relationship between groups. Risk factors included age, sex, household income, residence, education level, occupation, and body mass index (BMI).
Results
Education level (Odds Ratio OR: 0.342, P = .0003), BMI (OR: 1.09, P = .0082), and total IgE (TIgE) levels (OR: 5.582, P = .003) were significantly different between the control and the CRS with asthma group. Education level (OR: 0.478, P = .0016) and TIgE levels (OR: 4, P = .0218) were significantly different between the CRS and CRS with asthma groups under 60 years of age. BMI (OR: 1.087, P = .0443; OR: 1.104, P = .0224) showed a significant difference between all three groups with age > 60 years.
Conclusion
Progression to CRS with asthma is influenced by education level, occupation, and TIgE levels in patients under 60 years of age. BMI was the only influencing factor associated with the progression to CRS with asthma in those aged > 60 years.
(HP) infection is positively associated with metabolic syndrome (MS). However, the long-term effects of eradication therapy on MS and sex differences have not been thoroughly studied. We aimed to ...investigate the long-term effects of HP eradication on MS and sex differences.
This study included 2,267 subjects who visited a tertiary referral center between May 2003 and May 2019. HP was diagnosed by histology, a
organism test, and culture, and the subjects were prospectively followed up. The participants were categorized into three groups: HP uninfected, HP infected but non-eradicated, and HP eradicated. The baseline characteristics and changes in metabolic parameters after HP eradication were compared over a 5-year follow-up period.
Among 1,521 subjects, there was no difference in baseline metabolic parameters between the HP-uninfected (n=509) and HP-infected (n=1,012) groups, regardless of sex. Analysis of the metabolic parameters during follow-up among HP-uninfected (n=509), HP-non-eradicated (n=346), and HP-eradicated (n=666) groups showed that high-density lipoprotein (HDL) and the body mass index (BMI) increased after eradication, with a significant difference at 1-year of follow-up. In females, HDL increased after eradication (p=0.023), and the BMI increased after eradication in male subjects (p=0.010). After propensity score matching, the HDL change in female remained significant, but the statistical significance of the change in BMI in the male group became marginally significant (p=0.089).
HP eradication affected metabolic parameters differently depending on sex. HDL significantly increased only in females over time, especially at 1-year of follow-up. In contrast, BMI showed an increasing tendency over time in males, especially at the 1-year follow-up.
Microservice architecture has emerged as a powerful paradigm for cloud computing due to its high efficiency in infrastructure management as well as its capability of largescale user service. A cloud ...provider requires flexible resource management to meet the continually changing demands, such as auto-scaling and provisioning. A common approach used in both commercial and open-source computing platforms is workload-based automatic scaling, which expands instances by increasing the number of incoming requests. Concurrency is a request-based policy that has recently been proposed in the evolving microservice framework; in this policy, the algorithm can expand its resources to the maximum number of configured requests to be processed in parallel per instance. However, it has proven difficult to identify the concurrency configuration that provides the best possible service quality, as various factors can affect the throughput and latency based on the workloads and complexity of the infrastructure characteristics. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the applicability of an artificial intelligence approach to request-based auto-scaling in the microservice framework. Our results showed that the proposed model could learn an effective expansion policy within a limited number of pods, thereby showing an improved performance over the underlying auto expansion configuration.
Network function virtualization based service chaining has recently received significant attention. In cloud environment, virtual machine typically be scheduled to load balancing among computing ...nodes. Therefore, the relation between virtual machines is not considered when it is scheduled. However, the location of virtual machines be able to affects network performance for intra virtual machines. Video/image processing and transmission are key processes for cloud-based over-the-top content provider. In this paper, we propose a pseudo service chaining mechanism for efficiently allocating computing nodes in a service chain to guarantee quality of services. The mechanism defines a pseudo service chain to reduce the network overhead which mainly causes performance degradation and places highly correlated virtual machines on the nearest computing node. The performance of proposed mechanism was evaluated on real cloud testbed.
Spontaneous arterial bleeding is uncommon, and a mediastinal hematoma caused by spontaneous rupture of the internal thoracic artery has not been reported previously. Patients with liver cirrhosis or ...heavy alcohol consumption have a higher risk of hemorrhage than those without cirrhosis or excessive alcohol consumption. We present the case of a 39-year-old female with a history of alcoholic liver cirrhosis, who presented with a large mediastinal hematoma attributable to spontaneous rupture of the internal thoracic artery.
PDF
