Image processing via convolutional neural network (CNN) has been developed rapidly for remote sensing technology. Moreover, techniques for accurately extracting building footprints from remote sensed ...images have attracted considerable interest owing to their wide variety of common applications, including monitoring natural disasters and urban development. Extraction of building footprints can be performed easily by semantic segmentation using U-Net-like CNN architectures. However, obtaining precise boundaries of segmentation masks remains challenging due to various impediments surrounding target objects. In this study, we propose a method to elaborate edges of buildings detected in remote sensed images to enhance the boundaries of segmentation masks. The proposed method adopts holistically nested edge detection (HED) , which extracts edge features at an encoder of a given architecture. In the proposed boundary enhancement (BE) module , an extracted edge and segmentation mask are combined, sharing mutual information. To enable the proposed method efficiently to adapt to a wide variety of conditions, we design a distinctive approach adopting a HED unit and BE module, which is applicable to various semantic segmentation networks containing encoder-decoder structures. Experiments were conducted on five different datasets (DeepGlobe, Urban3D, WHU high-resolution (HR), low-resolution (LR), and Massachusetts). The results demonstrate that our proposed approaches improved on the performance of prior methods for extracting building footprints. Comparative experiments were conducted on various backbone architectures including U-Net, ResUNet++, TernausNet, and U-shape spatial pyramid pooling (USPP) to ensure the effectiveness of the proposed method. Based on various evaluation metrics and qualitative analysis, our results show that the proposed method achieved improved performance compared with prior methods for all datasets and backbone networks.
Enzymes are the most proficient catalysts, offering much more competitive processes compared to chemical catalysts. The number of industrial applications for enzymes has exploded in recent years, ...mainly owing to advances in protein engineering technology and environmental and economic necessities. Herein, we review recent progress in enzyme biocatalysis, and discuss the trends and strategies that are leading to broader industrial enzyme applications. The challenges and opportunities in developing biocatalytic processes are also discussed.
Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19), which started in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 and declared a worldwide pandemic on March 11, 2020, is a novel infectious disease that causes respiratory illness ...and death. Pediatric COVID-19 accounts for a small percentage of patients and is often milder than that in adults; however, it can progress to severe disease in some cases. Even neonates can suffer from COVID-19, and children may spread the disease in the community. This review summarizes what is currently known about COVID-19 in children and adolescents.
In this study, phosphoric acid was used to attach anions to the weak interlayer structure of sericite, one of the clay minerals composed of a tetrahedral structure of silicate, to increase the ...adsorption capacity of cations. Natural sericite beads (NSB) and activated sericite beads with phosphoric acid (PSB) were prepared as beads in order to increase reusability and facilitate the separation of adsorbates and adsorbents. Using this, lead (Pb(II)) removal efficiency from an aqueous solution was comparatively analyzed. The pHpzc was 6.43 in NSB but lowered to 3.96 in PSB, confirming that more acidic functional groups were attached to the PSB surface. According to FT-IR analysis, P=O, P-O-C, P=OOH and P-O-P bonds appeared on the surface of the PSB adsorbent, and the peaks of carboxyl groups and OH-groups were large and broad. The maximum adsorption capacity of Langmuir was 52.08 mg/g for NSB and 163.93 mg/g for PSB. The adsorption process was close to physical adsorption for NSB and chemical adsorption for PSB, and both adsorbents were endothermic reactions in nature in that the higher the temperature, the higher the adsorption efficiency. The adsorption mechanism of Pb(II) to PSB was achieved by ion exchange, electrostatic interaction, hydrogen bonding, and complexation. The adsorption of Pb(II) using PSB was not significantly affected by the adsorption of competing ions and showed a high adsorption efficiency of 94% in reuse up to 6 times. This confirms the favorable feasibility of removing Pb(II) from industrial wastewater using PSB.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been the most important global issue since December 2019. Although the clinical course of COVID-19 is known to be milder in children than in adults, associated ...hospitalizations among children have increased since the emergence of contagious severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variants and the achievement of a high vaccination rate in adults. Considering these global and domestic situations, we believe that risk stratification in children with COVID-19 is urgently needed for decision making regarding hospitalization priority in children infected with SARS-CoV-2 and vaccination priority against COVID-19.
This systematic review and meta-analysis was performed by comprehensively searching the PubMed, EMBASE, Scopus and KoreaMed databases through August 25, 2021. The criteria for enrollment were "severe COVID-19" as poor outcomes (intensive care unit admission, invasive mechanical ventilation, and/or death) and underlying comorbidities before SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Among 872 screened studies, 17 articles were included in the systematic review, and 10 articles were included in the meta-analysis. Neonate (risk ratio RR, 2.69; 95% confidence interval CI, 1.83-3.97), prematurity in young infants (RR, 2.00; 95% CI, 1.63-2.46), obesity (RR, 1.43; 95% CI, 1.24-1.64), diabetes (RR, 2.26; 95% CI, 1.95-2.62), chronic lung disease (RR, 2.62; 95% CI, 1.71-4.00), heart disease (RR, 1.82; 95% CI, 1.58-2.09), neurologic disease (RR, 1.18; 95% CI, 1.05-1.33), and immunocompromised status (RR, 1.44; 95% CI, 1.01-2.04) were significant risk factors for severe COVID-19 in children. In the subgroup analysis, age younger than 3 months (RR, 0.26; 95% CI, 0.11-0.66), asthma (RR, 1.08; 95% CI, 0.98-1.20), and neurodevelopmental disorders (RR, 0.88; 95% CI, 0.75-1.04) were not risk factors for severe COVID-19.
Children with comorbidities such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, chronic lung diseases other than asthma, seizure disorders, and an immunocompromised status had a high prevalence of severe COVID-19. Neonate and premature infants had a high risk of severe COVID-19. Defining the high-risk group for severe COVID-19 could help to guide hospital admission and priority for vaccination against SARS-CoV-2.
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are clinically useful due to their capacity for self-renewal, their immunomodulatory properties and tissue regenerative potential. These cells can be isolated from ...various tissues and exhibit different potential for clinical applications according to their origin, and thus comparative studies on MSCs from different tissues are essential. In this study, we investigated the immunophenotype, proliferative potential, multilineage differentiation and immunomodulatory capacity of MSCs derived from different tissue sources, namely bone marrow, adipose tissue, the placenta and umbilical cord blood. The gene expression profiles of stemness-related genes octamer-binding transcription factor 4 (OCT4), sex determining region Y-box (SOX)2, MYC, Krüppel-like factor 4 (KLF4), NANOG, LIN28 and REX1 and lineage‑related and differentiation stage-related genes B4GALNT1 (GM2/GS2 synthase), inhibin, beta A (INHBA), distal-less homeobox 5 (DLX5), runt-related transcription factor 2 (RUNX2), proliferator‑activated receptor gamma (PPARG), CCAAT/enhancer-binding protein alpha (C/EBPA), bone morphogenetic protein 7 (BMP7) and SOX9 were compared using RT-PCR. No significant differences in growth rate, colony-forming efficiency and immunophenotype were observed. Our results demonstrated that MSCs derived from bone marrow and adipose tissue shared not only in vitro tri-lineage differentiation potential, but also gene expression profiles. While there was considerable inter-donor variation in DLX5 expression between MSCs derived from different tissues, its expression appears to be associated with the osteogenic potential of MSCs. Bone marrow-derived MSCs (BM-MSCs) significantly inhibited allogeneic T cell proliferation possibly via the high levels of the immunosuppressive cytokines, IL10 and TGFB1. Although MSCs derived from different tissues and fibroblasts share many characteristics, some of the marker genes, such as B4GALNT1 and DLX5 may be useful for the characterization of MSCs derived from different tissue sources. Collectively, our results suggest that, based on their tri-lineage differentiation potential and immunomodulatory effects, BM-MSCs and adipose tissue-derived MSCs (A-MSCs) represent the optimal stem cell source for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have emerged as a promising means for treating degenerative or incurable diseases. Recent studies have shown that microvesicles (MVs) from MSCs (MSC-MVs) contribute to ...recovery of damaged tissues in animal disease models. Here, we profiled the MSC-MV proteome to investigate their therapeutic effects. LC-MS/MS analysis of MSC-MVs identified 730 MV proteins. The MSC-MV proteome included five positive and two variable known markers of MSCs, but no negative marker, as well as 43 surface receptors and signaling molecules controlling self-renewal and differentiation of MSCs. Functional enrichment analysis showed that cellular processes represented by the MSC-MV proteins include cell proliferation, adhesion, migration, and morphogenesis. Integration of MSC's self-renewal and differentiation-related genes and the proteome of MSC-conditioned media (MSC-CM) with the MSC-MV proteome revealed potential MV protein candidates that can be associated with the therapeutic effects of MSC-MVs: (1) surface receptors (PDGFRB, EGFR, and PLAUR); (2) signaling molecules (RRAS/NRAS, MAPK1, GNA13/GNG12, CDC42, and VAV2); (3) cell adhesion (FN1, EZR, IQGAP1, CD47, integrins, and LGALS1/LGALS3); and (4) MSC-associated antigens (CD9, CD63, CD81, CD109, CD151, CD248, and CD276). Therefore, the MSC-MV proteome provides a comprehensive basis for understanding the potential of MSC-MVs to affect tissue repair and regeneration.
In weakly supervised object localization (WSOL), objects are localized using image-level labels only. Most previous WSOL methods erase the most discriminative region using a fixed threshold to cover ...the entire region of the object, or they use random selection between attention and erasing. However, these methods have several limitations. First, the previous erasing method does not guarantee the erasing of adjacent pixels in the most discriminative region. Because adjacent pixels have similar information, this property may decrease the effect of the erasing. Next, random selection does not ensure the consistent use of attention and erasing, and it can be less effective to utilize both of them. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new sequential block, namely, a spatial attention branch followed by a refinement branch. Initially, the spatial attention branch generates a feature map with enhanced spatial information. Subsequently, the refinement branch helps the network capture the entire area of the object using attention and erasing modules. The attention module enhances the positional information by considering the spatial relationships. The erasing module erases all values within the specified region using various erasing sizes to increase the erasing effect. Finally, to make full use of the advantages of attention and erasing, these modules are combined through element-wise addition. Using such approaches, the proposed method achieves a state-of-the-art localization performance on the CUB-200-2011 and ILSVRC 2012 datasets. Furthermore, the proposed block requires only lightweight trainable parameters, demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed approach.
•We propose a novel block that both attention and erasing coexist.•Randomly choose the size of erasing to be more effective erasing.•A simple and effective combination of attention and erasing
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