Stool characteristics are of great value to assess diseases, but patients knew little. E-learning applied in health popularization and patient education is booming. In China, WeChat applets has ...advantages of abundant users, convenient access and low cost, which may be a great media in patient education on stool. This preliminary study aims to develop and evaluate a stool card WeChat applet. We collected stools images during 2020 to 2022 in the Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in the Second Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, constructed a stool card applet named the Doctor Friend Primary Screening Stool Card (DFPSSC) and evaluated it. Eligible participants were divided into the applet, traditional paper media and control group. We implement a series of tests to evaluate the effectiveness. 20 clinicians and participants using the DFPSSC completed a questionnaire to evaluate the usability. We developed the DFPSSC for an E-learning approach. Of 108 volunteers, 97 completed the DFPSSC learning. No significant pretest differences were found among the three groups (P = 0.303). Applet group had significantly higher posttest scores than pretest scores in intervention (P < 0.001, d = 1.68) and simulation (P = 0.006) test, and it had higher scores than other two group (P < 0.001). 63% participants and 59% clinicians strongly agree or agree to the usability of DFSSC. This preliminary study verified that the DFPSSC can effectively improve participants' knowledge of feces, making it an effective clinical tool for patient education and the avoidance of treatment delay.
Monitoring extent and severity is vital in the ulcerative colitis (UC) follow-up, however, current assessment is complex and low cost-effectiveness. We aimed to develop a routine blood-based clinical ...decision support tool, Jin's model, to investigate the extent and severity of UC. The multicentre retrospective cohort study recruited 975 adult UC inpatients and sub-grouped into training, internal validation and external validation set. Model was developed by logistics regression for the extent via Montreal classification and for the severity via Mayo score, Truelove and Witts score (TWS), Mayo endoscopic score (MES) and Degree of Ulcerative colitis Burden of Luminal Inflammation (DUBLIN) score. In Montreal classification, left-sided and extensive versus proctitis model achieved area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.78 and 0.81 retrospectively. For severity, Mayo score model, TWS model, MES model and DUBLIN score model achieved an AUROC of 0.81, 0.70, 0.74 and 0.70 retrospectively. The models also were evaluated with satisfactory calibration and clinical unity. Jin's model was free with open access at http://jinmodel.com:3000/ . Jin's model is a noninvasive, convenient, and efficient approach to assess the extent and severity of UC.
Background:
Small intestinal ischemia-reperfusion (IR) injury is a common intestinal disease with high morbidity and mortality. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been increasingly used in various ...intestinal diseases. This study aimed to evaluate the therapeutic effect of hair follicle MSCs (HFMSCs) on small intestinal IR injury.
Methods:
We divided Sprague–Dawley rats into three groups: the sham group, IR group and IR + HFMSCs group. A small intestinal IR injury rat model was established by clamping of the superior mesenteric artery (SMA) for 30 min and reperfusion for 2 h. HFMSCs were cultured
in vitro
and injected into the rats through the tail vein. Seven days after treatment, the intrinsic homing and differentiation characteristics of the HFMSCs were observed by immunofluorescence and immunohistochemical staining, and the paracrine mechanism of HFMSCs was assessed by Western blotting and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).
Results:
A small intestinal IR injury model was successfully established. HFMSCs could home to damaged sites, express proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) and intestinal stem cell (ISC) markers, and promote small intestinal ISC marker expression. The expression levels of angiopoietin-1 (ANG1), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and insulin growth factor-1 (IGF1) in the IR + HFMSCs group were higher than those in the IR group. HFMSCs could prevent IR-induced apoptosis by increasing B-cell lymphoma-2 (Bcl-2) expression and decreasing Bcl-2 homologous antagonist/killer (Bax) expression. Oxidative stress level detection showed that the malondialdehyde (MDA) content was decreased, while the superoxide dismutase (SOD) content was increased in the IR + HFMSCs group compared to the IR group. An elevated diamine oxidase (DAO) level reflected the potential protective effect of HFMSCs on the intestinal mucosal barrier.
Conclusion:
HFMSCs are beneficial to alleviate small intestinal IR injury through intrinsic homing to the small intestine and by differentiating into ISCs, via a paracrine mechanism to promote angiogenesis, reduce apoptosis, regulate the oxidative stress response, and protect intestinal mucosal function potentially. Therefore, this study suggests that HFMSCs serve as a new option for the treatment of small intestinal IR injury.
Bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells (BMSCs) have a protective effect against liver cirrhosis. Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) play crucial roles in the progression of liver cirrhosis. Therefore, it ...is aimed to clarify the lncRNA Kcnq1ot1 involved protective mechanism of BMSCs in liver cirrhosis. This study found that BMSCs treatment attenuates CCl4‐induced liver cirrhosis in mice. Additionally, the expression of lncRNA Kcnq1ot1 is upregulated in human and mouse liver cirrhosis tissues, in addition to TGF‐β1‐treated LX2 cells and JS1 cells. The expression of Kcnq1ot1 in liver cirrhosis is reversed with BMSCs treatment. The knockdown of Kcnq1ot1 alleviated liver cirrhosis both in vivo and in vitro. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) confirms that Kcnq1ot1 is mainly distributed in the cytoplasm of JS1 cells. It is predicted that miR‐374‐3p can directly bind with lncRNA Kcnq1ot1 and Fstl1, which is verified via luciferase activity assay. The inhibition of miR‐374‐3p or the overexpression of Fstl1 can attenuate the effect of Kcnq1ot1 knockdown. In addition, the transcription factor Creb3l1 is upregulated during JS1 cells activation. Moreover, Creb3l1 can directly bind to the Kcnq1ot1 promoter and positively regulate its transcription. In conclusion, BMSCs alleviate liver cirrhosis by modulating the Creb3l1/lncRNA Kcnq1ot1/miR‐374‐3p/Fstl1 signaling pathway.
BMSCs alleviate liver cirrhosis by modulating the Creb3l1/lncRNA Kcnq1ot1/miR–374–3p/Fstl1 signaling pathway. This research offers a novel theoretical framework for the use of BMSCs in the treatment of liver cirrhosis, with the potential to influence in future clinical diagnosis and therapy, which may promote the clinical application of BMSCs.
Researchers have shown that bone mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) can alleviate the progression of liver cirrhosis; however, it is unclear how exactly BMSCs function to cure liver disease. In this ...study, we used bioinformatics methods to assess differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in liver cirrhosis and found a significantly upregulated gene, Fstl1, in liver cirrhosis. In vivo and in vitro experiments showed that compared with those in the disease model group, the mRNA, and protein expression levels of Fstl1 were significantly reduced after BMSCs treatment, and the β-Catenin protein level was also significantly reduced after BMSCs treatment. Subsequently, we downregulated Fstl1 in activated hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) and found that Wnt and β-Catenin protein expression levels also decreased. Finally, we found that in BMSCs-treated activated HSCs, overexpression of Fstl1 reversed the inhibitory effect of BMSCs on the Wnt/β-Catenin signaling pathway to a certain extent. In summary, our results show that BMSCs can inhibit Wnt/β-Catenin signaling pathway activation by downregulating the protein expression level of Fstl1, thus alleviating cirrhosis. Therefore, targeted regulation of Fstl1 may provide a new therapeutic strategy for the progression of liver cirrhosis.
Background:
Ulcerative colitis (UC) is an intestinal inflammatory disease that is strongly associated with mitochondrial damage and dysfunction as well as mitophagy and lacks of satisfactory ...treatments. Hair follicle mesenchymal stem cell (HF-MSC)-derived exosomes owe benefit effectiveness on inflammatory therapies. Hypoxia-preconditioned HF-MSCs exhibit enhanced proliferation and migration abilities, and their exosomes exert stronger effects than normal exosomes. However, the therapeutic function of Hy-Exos in UC is unknown.
Methods:
The inflammation model was established with LPS-treated MODE-K cells, and the mouse UC model was established by dextran sulfate sodium (DSS) administration. The therapeutic effects of HF-MSC-derived exosomes (Exos) and hypoxia-preconditioned HF-MSC-derived exosomes (Hy-Exos) were compared
in vitro
and
in vivo
. Immunofluorescence staining and western blotting were used to explore the effects of Hy-Exos on mitochondrial function, mitochondrial fission and fusion and mitophagy. MiRNA sequencing analysis was applied to investigate the differences in components between Exos and Hy-Exos.
Results:
Hy-Exos had a better therapeutic effect on LPS-treated MODE-K cells and DSS-induced UC mice. Hy-Exos promoted colonic tight junction proteins expression, suppressed the oxidative stress response, and reduced UC-related inflammatory injury. Hy-Exos may exert these effects via miR-214-3p-mediated inhibition of the PI3K/AKT/mTOR signaling pathway, maintenance of mitochondrial dynamic stability, alleviation of mitochondrial dysfunction and enhancement of mitophagy.
Conclusion:
This study revealed a vital role for Hy-Exos in suppressing inflammatory progression in UC and suggested that miR-214-3p is a potential critical target for Hy-Exos in alleviating UC.
In this paper, we present a self-training method, named ST3D++, with a holistic pseudo label denoising pipeline for unsupervised domain adaptation on 3D object detection. ST3D++ aims at reducing ...noise in pseudo label generation as well as alleviating the negative impacts of noisy pseudo labels on model training. First, ST3D++ pre-trains the 3D object detector on the labeled source domain with random object scaling (ROS) which is designed to reduce target domain pseudo label noise arising from object scale bias of the source domain. Then, the detector is progressively improved through alternating between generating pseudo labels and training the object detector with pseudo-labeled target domain data. Here, we equip the pseudo label generation process with a hybrid quality-aware triplet memory to improve the quality and stability of generated pseudo labels. Meanwhile, in the model training stage, we propose a source data assisted training strategy and a curriculum data augmentation policy to effectively rectify noisy gradient directions and avoid model over-fitting to noisy pseudo labeled data. These specific designs enable the detector to be trained on meticulously refined pseudo labeled target data with denoised training signals, and thus effectively facilitate adapting an object detector to a target domain without requiring annotations. Finally, our method is assessed on four 3D benchmark datasets (i.e., Waymo, KITTI, Lyft, and nuScenes) for three common categories (i.e., car, pedestrian and bicycle). ST3D++ achieves state-of-the-art performance on all evaluated settings, outperforming the corresponding baseline by a large margin (e.g., 9.6% <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">\sim</tex-math> <mml:math><mml:mo>∼</mml:mo></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="qi-ieq1-3216606.gif"/> </inline-formula> 38.16% on Waymo <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">\rightarrow</tex-math> <mml:math><mml:mo>→</mml:mo></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="qi-ieq2-3216606.gif"/> </inline-formula> KITTI in terms of AP<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">_{\text{3D}}</tex-math> <mml:math><mml:msub><mml:mrow/><mml:mtext>3D</mml:mtext></mml:msub></mml:math><inline-graphic xlink:href="qi-ieq3-3216606.gif"/> </inline-formula>), and even surpasses the fully supervised oracle results on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark with target prior. Code is available at https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/ST3D .
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