Macrophages are known to play an important role in hepatocyte mediated liver regeneration by secreting inflammatory mediators. However, there is little information available on the role of resident ...macrophages in oval cell mediated liver regeneration. In the present study we aimed to investigate the role of macrophages in oval cell expansion induced by 2-acetylaminofluorene/partial hepatectomy (2-AAF/PH) in rats.
We depleted macrophages in the liver of 2-AAF/PH treated rats by injecting liposome encapsulated clodronate 48 hours before PH. Regeneration of remnant liver mass, as well as proliferation and differentiation of oval cells were measured. We found that macrophage-depleted rats suffered higher mortality and liver transaminase levels. We also showed that depletion of macrophages yielded a significant decrease of EPCAM and PCK positive oval cells in immunohistochemical stained liver sections 9 days after PH. Meanwhile, oval cell differentiation was also attenuated as a result of macrophage depletion, as large foci of small basophilic hepatocytes were observed by day 9 following hepatectomy in control rats whereas they were almost absent in macrophage depleted rats. Accordingly, real-time polymerase chain reaction analysis showed lower expression of albumin mRNA in macrophage depleted livers. Then we assessed whether macrophage depletion may affect hepatic production of stimulating cytokines for liver regeneration. We showed that macrophage-depletion significantly inhibited hepatic expression of tumor necrosis factor-α and interleukin-6, along with a lack of signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 phosphorylation during the early period following hepatectomy.
These data indicate that macrophages play an important role in oval cell mediated liver regeneration in the 2-AAF/PH model.
Purpose
Liver tumor segmentation is a crucial prerequisite for computer‐aided diagnosis of liver tumors. In the clinical diagnosis of liver tumors, radiologists usually examine multiphase CT images ...as these images provide abundant and complementary information of tumors. However, most known automatic segmentation methods extract tumor features from CT images merely of a single phase, in which valuable multiphase information is ignored. Therefore, it is highly demanded to develop a method effectively incorporating multiphase information for automatic and accurate liver tumor segmentation.
Methods
In this paper, we propose a phase attention residual network (PA‐ResSeg) to model multiphase features for accurate liver tumor segmentation. A phase attention (PA) is newly proposed to additionally exploit the images of arterial (ART) phase to facilitate the segmentation of portal venous (PV) phase. The PA block consists of an intraphase attention (intra‐PA) module and an interphase attention (inter‐PA) module to capture channel‐wise self‐dependencies and cross‐phase interdependencies, respectively. Thus, it enables the network to learn more representative multiphase features by refining the PV features according to the channel dependencies and recalibrating the ART features based on the learned interdependencies between phases. We propose a PA‐based multiscale fusion (MSF) architecture to embed the PA blocks in the network at multiple levels along the encoding path to fuse multiscale features from multiphase images. Moreover, a 3D boundary‐enhanced loss (BE‐loss) is proposed for training to make the network more sensitive to boundaries.
Results
To evaluate the performance of our proposed PA‐ResSeg, we conducted experiments on a multiphase CT dataset of focal liver lesions (MPCT‐FLLs). Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method by achieving a dice per case (DPC) of 0.7787, a dice global (DG) of 0.8682, a volumetric overlap error (VOE) of 0.3328, and a relative volume difference (RVD) of 0.0443 on the MPCT‐FLLs. Furthermore, to validate the effectiveness and robustness of PA‐ResSeg, we conducted extra experiments on another multiphase liver tumor dataset and obtained a DPC of 0.8290, a DG of 0.9132, a VOE of 0.2637, and a RVD of 0.0163. The proposed method shows its robustness and generalization capability in different datasets and different backbones.
Conclusions
The study demonstrates that our method can effectively model information from multiphase CT images to segment liver tumors and outperforms other state‐of‐the‐art methods. The PA‐based MSF method can learn more representative multiphase features at multiple scales and thereby improve the segmentation performance. Besides, the proposed 3D BE‐loss is conducive to tumor boundary segmentation by enforcing the network focus on boundary regions and marginal slices. Experimental results evaluated by quantitative metrics demonstrate the superiority of our PA‐ResSeg over the best‐known methods.
The impact of low-pressure plasma treatment on the properties of long-grain brown rice was investigated, and the process of quick cooking brown rice was developed. The microstructure of the brown ...rice surface and the cooking, textural, and pasting properties of plasma-treated brown rice were determined. Indica brown rice was treated for 30 min at voltage settings of 1, 2, and 3 kV. The plasma treatment resulted in the etching of the brown rice surface, which allowed water to be easily absorbed by the rice kernel during soaking. After plasma treatment, the cooking time, elongation ratio, width expansion ratio, water absorption, and cooking loss of brown rice were all reduced. Plasma treatment caused a significant decrease in peak viscosity and breakdown. In addition, the decreases in enthalpy and crystallinity, measured by differential scanning calorimeter and X-ray diffractometer, showed that the starch structure of brown rice was influenced by low-pressure plasma. Thus, low-pressure plasma is a novel processing technology to modify and reduce the cooking time of brown rice.
► The first study that the application of plasma in modifying brown rice. ► Explore the effect of plasma in the properties of brown rice. ► Plasma treatment provides brown rice a better textural ...quality.
A novel processing technology is developed to modify brown rice in a more selective way with the help of low-pressure plasma. The microstructure of the brown rice surface and the cooking, textural and iodine-staining properties of plasma treated brown rice are determined. The plasma treatment results in an etching of brown rice surface, which allows water to be easily absorbed by the rice kernel during soaking. After plasma treatment, the cooking time of brown rice is reduced, and the cooked brown rice has a soft texture and is easier to chew. In addition, the increment of the iodine-stained area indicates that the kernel structure of brown rice is substantially affected by plasma. Thus, plasma treatment can be used to improve the cooking properties and the quality of brown rice.
Abstract Reactive oxygen species is the main contributor to photodynamic therapy. The results of this study show that a nitrogen-doped graphene quantum dot, serving as a photosensitizer, was capable ...of generating a higher amount of reactive oxygen species than a nitrogen-free graphene quantum dot in photodynamic therapy when photoexcited for only 3 min of 670 nm laser exposure (0.1 W cm-2 ), indicating highly improved antimicrobial effects. In addition, we found that higher nitrogen-bonding compositions of graphene quantum dots more efficiently performed photodynamic therapy actions than did the lower compositions that underwent identical treatments. Furthermore, the intrinsically emitted luminescence from nitrogen-doped graphene quantum dots and high photostability simultaneously enabled it to act as a promising contrast probe for tracking and localizing bacteria in biomedical imaging. Thus, the dual modality of nitrogen-doped graphene quantum dots presents possibilities for future clinical applications, and in particular multidrug resistant bacteria.
Carbon fiber reinforced polymers (CFRP) have been increasingly used in aircraft structures. However, their relatively low electrical conductivity leads to the vulnerability to lightning strike. ...Herein, the carbon nanotube buckypaper-based coatings composed of conductive buckypaper and insulating adhesives were developed to protect the CFRP laminates. Their influence on the lightning strike protection (LSP) effectiveness was systematically studied and the possible mechanisms were discussed. It was demonstrated that the conductive layer of buckypaper could facilitate the lightning current to the ground and dissipate the energy. Moreover, a relatively thick insulating adhesive could hinder the transfer of the lightning current through the thickness direction to CFRP laminates, thus further enhance the LSP effectiveness. An optimized LSP coating developed in this work was composed of a ∼70μm thick buckypaper and a ∼200μm thick boron nitride modified epoxy insulating adhesive, which resulted in a weight reduction up to 30% compared to the commercial Cu LSP coating, and could sustain the simulated lightning strike with peak current up to 100kA.
•The novel application of plasma in enhancing germination of brown rice.•Low-pressure plasma increases GABA accumulation during germination.•Low-pressure plasma increases antioxidant activity of ...germinated brown rice.
Brown rice was exposed to low-pressure plasma ranging from 1 to 3kV for 10min. Treatment of brown rice in low-pressure plasma increases the germination percentage, seedling length, and water uptake in laboratory germination tests. Of the various treatments, 3-kV plasma exposure for 10min yielded the best results. In germinating brown rice, α-amylase activity was significantly higher in treated groups than in controls. The higher enzyme activity in plasma-treated brown rice likely triggers the rapid germination and earlier vigor of the seedlings. Low-pressure plasma also increased gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) levels from ∼19 to ∼28mg/100g. In addition, a marked increase in the antioxidant activity of brown rice was observed with plasma treatments compared to controls. The main finding of this study indicates that low-pressure plasma is effective at enhancing the growth and GABA accumulation of germinated brown rice, which can supply high nutrition to consumer.
Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is a serious disease and has a high recurrence rate after surgery. Recently, many machine learning methods have been proposed for recurrence prediction. The methods ...using gene expression data achieve high accuracy rates but expensive. While, the radiomics features using computer tomography (CT) image is a cost-effective method, but their accuracy is not competitive. In this paper, we propose a genotype-guided radiomics method (GGR) for obtaining high prediction accuracy at a low cost. We used a public radiogenomics dataset of NSCLC, which includes CT images and gene expression data. Our proposed method is two steps method that uses two models. The first model is a gene estimation model, which is used to estimate the gene expression from radiomics features and deep features extracted from CT images. The second model is used to predict the recurrence using the estimated gene. The proposed GGR method is designed based on hybrid features which is the fusion of handcrafted- and deep learning-based features. The experiments demonstrated that the prediction accuracy can be improved significantly from 78.61% (existing radiomics method) and 79.09% (ResNet50) to 83.28% by the proposed GGR.
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