Objectives
Scavenger receptor class A, member 3 (Scara3) was involved in adipogenesis. However, the effect of Scara3 on the switch between osteogenesis and adipogenesis of bone marrow mesenchymal ...stem cells (BMSCs) remains elusive.
Materials and Methods
The correlations between SCARA3 with the osteogenic‐related were analysed based on the GTEx database. The effects of Scara3 on osteogenic or adipogenic differentiation of BMSCs were evaluated by qPCR, Western blot (WB) and cell staining. The mechanisms of Scara3 regulating Foxo1 and autophagy were validated by co‐expression analysis, WB and immunofluorescence. In vivo, Scara3 adeno‐associated virus was injected into intra‐bone marrow of the aged mice and ovariectomized (OVX) mice whose phenotypes were confirmed by micro‐CT, calcein double labelling and immunochemistry (HE and OCN staining).
Results
SCARA3 was positively correlated with osteogenic‐related genes. Scara3 expression gradually decreased during adipogenesis but increased during osteogenesis. Moreover, the deletion of Scara3 favoured adipogenesis over osteogenesis, whereas overexpression of Scara3 significantly enhanced the osteogenesis at the expense of adipogenesis. Mechanistically, Scara3 controlled the cell fate by promoting Foxo1 expression and autophagy flux. In vivo, Scara3 promoted bone formation and reduced bone marrow fat accumulation in OVX mice. In the aged mice, Scara3 overexpression alleviated bone loss as well.
Conclusions
This study suggested that Scara3 regulated the switch between adipocyte and osteoblast differentiation, which represented a potential therapeutic target for bone loss and osteoporosis.
Aberrant autophagy caused the pathogenesis of osteoporosis, partially associated with the increase of osteogenic differentiation and decrease of adipogenic differentiation in BMSCs. However, Scara3 can promote the Foxo1 expression and autophagy flux, thus alleviate the bone loss and bone marrow adipose tissue accumulation.
Although acupuncture has been used in clinical practice for thousands of years, it remains a controversial treatment option to help alleviate pain in cancer patients. In this study, we analyzed ...published material on randomized trials of acupuncture from MEDLINE published up until July 31, 2018, to assess its effects on pain experienced by cancer patients. Revman 5.0 software was used to conduct meta-analysis with pain score as the index. The results of nine randomized controlled trials involving 592 patients were analyzed and showed that acupuncture can relieve the pain caused by aromatase inhibitors. Weighted mean difference of worst pain and pain severity was -3.03, 95% CI (-3.90,-2.16) and -2.69, 95% CI (-4.08,-1.30), respectively (P<0.01). This led us to conclude that acupuncture has pain relieving effects against pain caused by aromatase inhibitors.
Aims/Introduction
The predictive value of admission hyperglycemia in the long‐term prognosis of acute myocardial infarction patients is still controversial. We aimed to investigate this value based ...on the diabetes status.
Materials and Methods
We carried out a multicenter, retrospective study of 1,288 acute myocardial infarction patients enrolled in 11 hospitals between March 2014 and June 2019 in Chengdu, China. The patients were classified into those with diabetes and those without diabetes, each was further divided into: hyperglycemia and non‐hyperglycemia subgroups, according to the optimal cut‐off value of the blood glucose to predict all‐cause mortality during follow up. The end‐points were all‐cause death and major adverse cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events, including all‐cause death, non‐fatal myocardial infarction, vessel revascularization and non‐fatal stroke.
Results
In the follow‐up period of 15 months, we observed 210 (16.3%), 6 (0.5%), 57 (4.4%) and 34 (2.6%) cases of death, non‐fatal myocardial infarction, revascularization and non‐fatal stroke, respectively. The optimal cut‐off values of admission blood glucose for patients with diabetes and patients without diabetes to predict all‐cause mortality during follow up were 14.80 and 6.77 mmol/L, respectively. We divided patients with diabetes (n = 331) into hyperglycemia (n = 92) and non‐hyperglycemia (n = 239), and patients without diabetes (n = 897) into hyperglycemia (n = 425) and non‐hyperglycemia (n = 472). The cumulative rates of all‐cause death and major adverse cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events among the patients in each hyperglycemia group was higher than that in the corresponding non‐hyperglycemia group (P < 0.001). In patients without diabetes, admission hyperglycemia was an independent predictor of all‐cause mortality and major adverse cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events.
Conclusion
Admission hyperglycemia was an independent predictor for long‐term prognosis in acute myocardial infarction patients without diabetes.
The prognostic value of admission hyperglycemia on long‐term prognosis remains elusive, especially in acute myocardial infarction patients with diabetes. Regarding acute myocardial infarction patients, there has been no accurate threshold of admission hyperglycemia to predict mortality. Therefore, in our study, we used different cut‐off values in patients with and without diabetes to discuss their predictive value in the long‐term prognosis of acute myocardial infarction patients.
Perceptual anomalies in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been attributed to an imbalance in weighting incoming sensory evidence with prior knowledge when interpreting sensory ...information. Here, we show that sensory encoding and how it adapts to changing stimulus statistics during feedback also characteristically differs between neurotypical and ASD groups. In a visual orientation estimation task, we extracted the accuracy of sensory encoding from psychophysical data by using an information theoretic measure. Initially, sensory representations in both groups reflected the statistics of visual orientations in natural scenes, but encoding capacity was overall lower in the ASD group. Exposure to an artificial (i.e., uniform) distribution of visual orientations coupled with performance feedback altered the sensory representations of the neurotypical group toward the novel experimental statistics, while also increasing their total encoding capacity. In contrast, neither total encoding capacity nor its allocation significantly changed in the ASD group. Across both groups, the degree of adaptation was correlated with participants' initial encoding capacity. These findings highlight substantial deficits in sensory encoding-independent from and potentially in addition to deficits in decoding-in individuals with ASD.
We introduce a practical general-purpose neural appearance filtering pipeline for physically-based rendering. We tackle the previously difficult challenge of aggregating visibility across many levels ...of detail from local information only, without relying on learning visibility for the entire scene. The high adaptivity of neural representations allows us to retain geometric correlations along rays and thus avoid light leaks. Common approaches to prefiltering decompose the appearance of a scene into volumetric representations with physically-motivated parameters, where the inflexibility of the fitted models limits rendering accuracy. We avoid assumptions on particular types of geometry or materials, bypassing any special-case decompositions. Instead, we directly learn a compressed representation of the intra-voxel light transport. For such high-dimensional functions, neural networks have proven to be useful representations. To satisfy the opposing constraints of prefiltered appearance and correlation-preserving point-to-point visibility, we use two small independent networks on a sparse multi-level voxel grid. Each network requires 10--20 minutes of training to learn the appearance of an asset across levels of detail. Our method achieves 70--95% compression ratios and around 25% of quality improvements over previous work. We reach interactive to real-time framerates, depending on the level of detail.
In Computer Graphics, the two main approaches to rendering and visibility involve ray tracing and rasterization. However, a limitation of both approaches is that they essentially use point sampling. ...This is the source of noise and aliasing, and also leads to significant difficulties for differentiable rendering. In this work, we present a new rendering method, which we call vectorization, that computes 2D point-to-region integrals analytically, thus eliminating point sampling in the 2D integration domain such as for pixel footprints and area lights. Our vectorization revisits the concept of beam tracing, and handles the hidden surface removal problem robustly and accurately. That is, for each intersecting triangle inserted into the viewport of a beam in an arbitrary order, we are able to maintain all the visible regions formed by intersections and occlusions, thanks to our Visibility Bounding Volume Hierarchy structure. As a result, our vectorization produces perfectly anti-aliased visibility, accurate and analytic shading and shadows, and most important, fast and noise-free gradients with Automatic Differentiation or Finite Differences that directly enables differentiable rendering without any changes to our rendering pipeline. Our results are inherently high-quality and noise-free, and our gradients are one to two orders of magnitude faster than those computed with existing differentiable rendering methods.
Abstract The High Altitude Detection of Astronomical Radiation (HADAR) is a novel wide-field Cherenkov Telescope. It is designed for gamma-ray astronomy in the energy range of 10 GeV to 100 TeV, with ...gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) being one of its primary research focuses. To assess its complementary capabilities, this study first presents the Crab sensitivity of HADAR. Then, to compare the sensitivity of GRBs, the observation time for all experiments is standardized to 100 s. To clearly demonstrate HADAR’s advantages, we estimate its observational results with a 221009A-like GRB. The study found that HADAR is capable of more comprehensively recording the bending and absorption of self-Compton radiation, which is expected to fill observational gaps in space- and ground-based experiments. We anticipate that this facility will ensure a large statistical GRB sample and advance our understanding of GRBs.
Sperm DNA damage is recognized as an important biomarker of male infertility. To investigate this, sperm DNA damage was assessed by the sperm chromatin dispersion （SCD） test in semen and motile ...spermatozoa harvested by combined density gradient centrifugation （DGC） and swim-up in 161 couples undergoing in vitro fertilization （IVF）. Semen analysis and sperm DNA damage results were compared between couples who did or did not achieve pregnancy. The sperm DNA damage level was significantly different between the two groups （P 〈 0.05） and was negatively correlated with IVF outcomes. Logistic regression analysis confirmed that it was an independent predictor for achieving clinical pregnancy. The effects of different levels of sperm DNA damage on IVF outcomes were also compared. There were significant differences in day 3 embryo quality, blastocyst formation rate, and implantation and pregnancy rates （P 〈 0.05）, but not in the basic fertilization rate between the two groups. Thus, sperm DNA damage as measured by the SCD appears useful for predicting the clinical pregnancy rate following IVF.
In this article, we propose SpongeCake: A layered BSDF model where each layer is a volumetric scattering medium, defined using microflake or other phase functions. We omit any reflecting and ...refracting interfaces between the layers. The first advantage of this formulation is that an exact and analytic solution for single scattering, regardless of the number of volumetric layers, can be derived. We propose to approximate multiple scattering by an additional single-scattering lobe with modified parameters and a Lambertian lobe. We use a parameter mapping neural network to find the parameters of the newly added lobes to closely approximate the multiple scattering effect. Despite the absence of layer interfaces, we demonstrate that many common material effects can be achieved with layers of SGGX microflake and other volumes with appropriate parameters. A normal mapping effect can also be achieved through mapping of microflake orientations, which avoids artifacts common in standard normal maps. Thanks to the analytical formulation, our model is very fast to evaluate and sample. Through various parameter settings, our model is able to handle many types of materials, like plastics, wood, cloth, and so on, opening a number of practical applications.
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