A major issue so far for digital holography is the low lateral resolution. In order to improve the resolution, we deduce the point spread function of the most common and practical digital holographic ...microscopy system. Based on the derived formulas, the determinant factor of lateral resolution of the system is analyzed. The results show that the optimal resolution of this system is limited by the numerical aperture of microscope objective, and the resolution can be further deteriorated by the recording media parameters and recording distance. By decreasing the recording distance the resolution can be improved dramatically. In addition, by choosing large photosensitive area and small pixel size camera the resolution of the holographic microscopy system can be improved a little. Moreover, the highest resolution and the best image quality can be achieved by image-plane digital holography. Experiment results demonstrate the correctness of the theoretical analysis.
Organic heterojunctions have been extensively employed in the design of light-emitting diodes, photovoltaic devices, and thin-film field-effect transistors, which can be achieved by constructing a ...bilayer or a multi-layered thin-film deposition, or by blending two or more organic semiconductors with different charge-transport performances. Charge transfer excited states or exciplex may form on the heterointerfaces. Efficient light-emitting diodes have been demonstrated using exciplex emission. However, lasing or stimulated emission processes have not been observed with exciplex formation at organic heterojunctions. In this work, we demonstrate strong coherent interaction between photons and exciplex formation in the blends of poly-9,9′-dioctylfluorene-
co
-bis-
N
,
N
′-(4-butylphenyl)-bis-
N
,
N
′-phenyl-l,4-phenylenediamine (PFB) and poly-9,9′-dioctylfluorene-
co
-benzothiadiazole (F8BT), leading to transient stimulated exciplex emission. The responsible mechanisms involve plasmonic local-field enhancement and plasmonic feedback in a three-dimensional gold-nanoparticle matrix.
Stimulated exciplex emission in polymeric heterojunctions was induced by plasmonic local-field enhancement and optical feedback in a three-dimensional gold-nanoparticle matrix.
Bolometers for infrared detection by thermally induced resistance changes are indispensable components for extensive applications, in particular for security purposes. Microminiaturization is the ...direction of developing bolometers with a high performance and high resolution. However, the current micro-bolometers based on VOx are still subject to low responsivity and low response speed. Further development of high-performance micro-bolometers requires new designs of both materials and structures. Herein, we developed helical-shaped micro-bolometers based on the composites of vanadium dioxide (VO2) and carbon nanocoils (CNCs). It was shown that in the composite, the helical structure greatly enhanced the light absorption efficiency, the nanoscale diameter guaranteed small thermal capacitance, and the reversible phase transition of VO2 led to a large resistance change. More importantly, VO2/CNC bolometers showed a non-hysteretic response working in the phase-transition region. Due to the synergistic effect, the VO2/CNC bolometers had a very high temperature coefficient of resistance up to 35%/K, ultrahigh responsivity of 3.3 × 105 V W−1, a short response time lower than 2 ms, and a long lifetime of more than 1 000 000 cycles, all of which were superior to those of VOx-based bolometers. Our work reveals an inspiring strategy to prepare high-performance micro-bolometers, which will find potential applications in ultrasensitive thermal imaging and thermo-sensitive sensors.
Published data suggest that dietary-derived phenolics exert beneficial effects against hyperglycemia-mediated diseases, such as diabetes, through inhibiting the formation of advanced glycation ...endproducts (AGEs) and carbohydrate hydrolyzing enzyme activities. In the course of our investigation on the edible berry, Eugenia jambolana (known as Jamun), 21 phenolics (1-21) were isolated and identified from its seeds. Among these, one compound (1) is new and eleven compounds (3, 6, 9-13, 17, and 19-21) are being reported from E. jambolana for the first time. The anti-AGE activities of thirteen pure isolates (2-7, 9-12, 14, 15, and 20) were either comparable or superior to the synthetic anti-glycation agent, aminoguanidine, at three test concentrations (20, 50, and 100 μM) in the BSA-fructose assay. Most of these phenolics with anti-AGE activity exhibited potent free radical scavenging activity in the DPPH assay, and attenuated intracellular levels of LPS-induced reactive oxygen species in RAW264.7 macrophage. In addition, compounds 2-6, and 14 showed superior α-glucosidase inhibitory activity (IC50 = 5.0-21.2 μM) compared to the clinical α-glucosidase inhibitor, acarbose (IC50 = 289.9 μM). This is the first report of the anti-AGE effects of compounds 2-6 and 9-12, and α-glucosidase inhibitory activities of compounds 3-6, 9, 11 and 14. The current study supports the role of phenolics in the antidiabetic properties attributed to this edible berry, and warrants further animal studies to evaluate their potential as dietary agents for the prevention and/or therapy of hyperglycemia-mediated diseases.
To investigate the p53 and O
-methylguanine DNA methyltransferase (MGMT)5' upstream sequence gene promoter regions for single nucleotide polymorphisms and explore the p53 gene 5' upstream sequence ...consisting of two haplotypes to provide a genetic marker for the incidence of laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma.
We included 96 cases of laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma and 102 controls. We used SNaPshot micro-sequencing analysis of the MGMT promoter region for four single nucleotide polymorphisms and p53 gene 5' upstream sequence loci (rs1625649, rs2287499, rs2287498, rs228749) genotypes. We calculated and compared two groups for genotypic and allelic frequencies, applied HaploView4.2 for computing rs2287499, rs2287498, rs228749 values and haplotype frequencies and tested control loci and Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. All the experimental data were statistically evaluated using SPSS17.0. The Chi-square test was used for statistical analysis with p<0.05 indicating statistical significance.
5'Upstream single nucleotide polymorphisms rs1625649, rs2287499, rs2287498, rs228749 of p53 were polymorphic in both patient and control groups. There was no statistical significance in frequency distributions for the four loci genotypes when comparing patients and healthy controls (Chi-square values were 4.47, 0.98, 1.67, 4.68, respectively; p>0.05). However, allelic frequencies of the MGMT promoter region locus rs1625649 between patients and healthy control groups were statistically significantly different (chi-square value of 5.77; p<0.05). Differences between allelic frequencies for the p53 gene 5' upstream sequence loci rs2287499, rs2287498 and rs228749 between patients and the healthy control group were not statistically significant (Chi-square values were 1.11,1.56,3.36; p>0.05). Nor were those for the two haplotypes of rs2287499, rs2287498 and rs228749 between patients and the healthy control group were not statistically significant (Chi-square value 1.46, p>0.05).
MGMT gene polymorphism appears to be associated with the incidence of laryngeal cancer.
Vetiver grass (
Vetiveria zizanioides
L. Nash) has a great application potential to the phytoremediation of heavy metals pollution. However, few studies explored the bioavailability and distribution ...of different speciations of As and Sb in
V. zizanioides
. This study aimed to clarify the allocation and accumulation of two inorganic species arsenic (As(III) and As(V)) and antimony (Sb(III) and Sb(V)) in
V. zizanioides
, to understand the self-defense mechanisms of
V. zizanioides
to these metal(loids) elements. Thus, an experiment was conducted under greenhouse conditions to identify distribution of As and Sb in plant roots and shoots. Antioxidant enzymes (superoxide dismutase, SOD) and changes of subcellular structures were tested to evaluate metal(loids) tolerance capacities of
V. zizanioides
. This study demonstrated that
V. zizanioides
had higher capacity to accumulate Sb than As. For Sb absorption, Sb(III) content is significantly higher than Sb(V) in tissues of
V. zizanioides
under all concentration levels, despite the oxidation of Sb(III) on the nutrient solution surface. Additional Sb was mainly accumulated in plant roots due to Sb immobilization by transforming it into precipitates. As was more easily transferred to aerial tissues and had low accumulation rates, probably due to its restricted uptake rather than restricted transport. In many cases, two inorganic species of As and Sb showed almost same biotoxicity to
V. zizanioides
estimated from its biomass, SOD activity, and MDA content as well as functional groups. In summary, the results of this study provide new insights into understanding allocation, accumulation and phytotoxicity effects of arsenic and antimony in
V. zizanioides
.
Graphic abstract
Schematic diagram of distribution of and biochemical responses to As(III), As(V), Sb(III), and Sb(V) in tissue of V. zizanioides.
Hepatocellular Carcinoma (HCC) lacks effective anti-metastasis drugs. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) monomers have shown anti-proliferation activity in HCC, but few of them are specifically ...anti-metastasis. Therefore, further clarifying the indicators of HCC metastasis and screening TCM monomers based on the indicators, will effectively guide the development of novel anti-HCC drugs. The perinucleolar compartment (PNC), existing in the nuclear of tumor cells, is closely correlated with metastasis of several tumors. In this study, we found positive correlation between higher PNC prevalence and metastasis in HCC tissue of patients. The PNC prevalence was also positively correlated with the malignancy of HCC cell lines. On this premise, we established a PNC-based screening system for anti-metastasis TCM monomers and obtained Camptothecin (CPT), Evodiamine and Isoglycyrrhizin, the three most effective TCM monomers from a TCM monomer library to reduce the PNC prevalence in Huh7 cells. The anti-metastasis effect of these TCM monomers was positively correlated with their PNC inhibitor effect. Our data further revealed that CPT reduced metastasis of Huh7 cells possibly by inhibiting Epithelial-Mesenchymal Transition by upregulating the expression of ZO-1, E-cadherin and Claudin-1. The PNC-based screening system is effective and it may provide an effective technical platform for the development of anti-metastasis drugs.
Background The presence of symptom clusters is associated with poor treatment outcomes and decreased quality of life in patients with cancer, and holistic interventions for symptom clusters can ...improve the management efficiency. Numerous non-pharmacologic interventions are available for symptom clusters in patients with cancer, but there is disagreement as to which interventions is the most effective. Objective To explore and compare the effectiveness of different non-pharmacological interventions in reducing the severity of symptom clusters in cancer patients. Methods In September 2021, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) about non-pharmacological interventions in reducing the severity of symptom clusters in cancer patients were searched in SinoMed, CNKI, Wanfang Data, CQVIP, the Cochrane Library, PubMed, Web of Science and Wiley Online Library databases from inception to September 2021. Two researchers independently screened studies based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria, extracted data, and performe
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a disease of the immune system with a high rate of disability and there are a large amount of valuable disease diagnosis and treatment information in the clinical note of ...the electronic medical record. Artificial intelligence methods can be used to mine useful information in clinical notes effectively. This study aimed to develop an effective method to identify and classify medical entities in the clinical notes relating to RA and use the entity identification results in subsequent studies.
In this paper, we introduced the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT) pre-training model to enhance the semantic representation of word vectors. The generated word vectors were then inputted into the model, which is composed of traditional bidirectional long short-term memory neural networks and conditional random field machine learning algorithms for the named entity recognition of clinical notes to improve the model's effectiveness. The BERT method takes the combination of token embeddings, segment embeddings, and position embeddings as the model input and fine-tunes the model during training.
Compared with the traditional Word2vec word vector model, the performance of the BERT pre-training model to obtain a word vector as model input was significantly improved. The best F1-score of the named entity recognition task after training using many rheumatoid arthritis clinical notes was 0.936.
This paper confirms the effectiveness of using an advanced artificial intelligence method to carry out named entity recognition tasks on a corpus of a large number of clinical notes; this application is promising in the medical setting. Moreover, the extraction of results in this study provides a lot of basic data for subsequent tasks, including relation extraction, medical knowledge graph construction, and disease reasoning.
We embarked on a structural optimization campaign aimed at the discovery of novel anti-angiogenesis agents with previously reported imidazole kinase inhibitors as a lead compound. A library of 29 ...compounds was synthesized. Several title compounds exhibited selective inhibitory activities against vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (VEGFR-2) over epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) kinase; these compounds also displayed selective and potent antiproliferative activity against three cancer cell lines. The newly synthesized compounds were evaluated for anti-angiogenesis activity by chick chorioallantoic membrane (CAM) assay. Among them, 1-(2-(2-chlorophenyl)benzodoxazol-5-yl)-3-(4-(trifluoromethoxy)phenyl)urea (compound 5 n) showed the most potent anti-angiogenesis capacity, efficient cytotoxic activities (in vitro against human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC), H1975, A549, and HeLa cell lines, with respective IC
values of 8.46, 1.40, 7.61, and 0.28 μm), and an acceptable level of VEGFR-2 kinase inhibition (IC
=0.25 μm). Molecular docking analysis revealed 5 n to be a type II inhibitor of VEGFR-2 kinase. In general, these results indicate that these 6-arylurea-2-arylbenzoxazole/benzimidazole derivatives are promising inhibitors of VEGFR-2 kinase for potential development into anti-angiogenesis drugs.
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