205 research outputs found
Anti-inflammatory effects of Neurotoxin-Nna, a peptide separated from the venom of Naja naja atra
BACKGROUND: Neurotoxin-Nna (NT), an analgesic peptide separated from the venom of Naja naja atra, has reported to have an exceptional specificity to block transmission of the nerve impulse by binding to the α- subunit of the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor in the membrane. However, little information is available on the anti-inflammatory effects of NT. Therefore, the anti-inflammatory activity of Neurotoxin-Nna was investigated in this study. METHODS: The anti-inflammatory effects of NT were evaluated by measuring its influence on several crucial factors in inflammatory pathways, including total antioxidant activity, antinociceptive effects in vivo, nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB), polymorphonuclear cells (PMN), inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), adhesion molecule (ICAM-1) and tactile hyperalgesia. RESULTS: NT treatment decreased the levels of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) and interleukin 1 beta (IL-1β). NT treatment decreased the total antioxidant status (TAOS) and reduced CFA-induced tactile hyperalgesia in a dose-dependent manner. NT significantly inhibited regulation of NF-kappaB activation and the production of IL-1β, TNF-α, iNOS and CAM-1. Moreover, NT suppressed infiltration of PMN. CONCLUSIONS: Our results showed that NT reduced CFA-induced tactile hyperalgesia through inhibition inflammatory pathways in experimental inflammatory rats
GPA-3D: Geometry-aware Prototype Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds
LiDAR-based 3D detection has made great progress in recent years. However,
the performance of 3D detectors is considerably limited when deployed in unseen
environments, owing to the severe domain gap problem. Existing domain adaptive
3D detection methods do not adequately consider the problem of the
distributional discrepancy in feature space, thereby hindering generalization
of detectors across domains. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised
domain adaptive \textbf{3D} detection framework, namely \textbf{G}eometry-aware
\textbf{P}rototype \textbf{A}lignment (\textbf{GPA-3D}), which explicitly
leverages the intrinsic geometric relationship from point cloud objects to
reduce the feature discrepancy, thus facilitating cross-domain transferring.
Specifically, GPA-3D assigns a series of tailored and learnable prototypes to
point cloud objects with distinct geometric structures. Each prototype aligns
BEV (bird's-eye-view) features derived from corresponding point cloud objects
on source and target domains, reducing the distributional discrepancy and
achieving better adaptation. The evaluation results obtained on various
benchmarks, including Waymo, nuScenes and KITTI, demonstrate the superiority of
our GPA-3D over the state-of-the-art approaches for different adaptation
scenarios. The MindSpore version code will be publicly available at
\url{https://github.com/Liz66666/GPA3D}.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 202
Effect of passive finger exercises on grip strength and the ability to perform activities of daily living for older people with dementia: a 12-week randomized controlled trial
Background: Dementia adds burden to society. As it is not curable, physical exercise activities are optimal to improve the physical strength and quality-of-life of people with dementia.
Aim: Design, implementation, and examination of a set of passive finger exercises and their effects on improving grip strength and activities of daily living (ADL) for older people with dementia.
Methods: Forty older people with dementia were recruited and randomly allocated into an experimental group and a control group, each with 20 people. The control group received routine nursing care. In addition to this, the experimental group received 25-minutes of passive finger exercises every day for 12 weeks. The health outcomes measured were grip strength and ADL, before and after the intervention. Grip strength was assessed by electrical hand muscle dynamometer. ADL were assessed with Barthel index.
Results: Although there was no effect on grip strength, passive finger exercises led to significant improvements in urinary control, defecation function, and overall ADL in comparison with the control group.
Implications for practice: Passive finger exercises can be integrated into physical exercise programs for older people with dementia to improve their urinary control, defecation function, and ADL
Gastrointestinal Bioaccessibility and Colonic Fermentation of Fucoxanthin from the Extract of the Microalga Nitzschia laevis
The extract of microalga Nitzschia laevis (NLE) is considered a source of dietary fucoxanthin, a carotenoid possessing a variety of health benefits. In the present study, the bioaccessibility and deacetylation of fucoxanthin were studied by simulated in vitro gastrointestinal digestion and colonic batch fermentation. In the gastric phase, higher fucoxanthin loss was observed at pH 3 compared to pH 4 and 5. Lipases are crucial for the deacetylation of fucoxanthin into fucoxanthinol. Fucoxanthinol production decreased significantly in the order: pure fucoxanthin (25.3%) > NLE (21.3%) > fucoxanthin-containing emulsion (11.74%). More than 32.7% of fucoxanthin and fucoxanthinol was bioaccessible after gastrointestinal digestion of NLE. During colon fermentation of NLE, a higher loss of fucoxanthin and changes of short-chain fatty acid production were observed but no fucoxanthinol was detected. Altogether, we provided novel insights on the fucoxanthin fate along the human digestion tract and showed the potential of NLE as a promising source of fucoxanthin.</p
Giant photoinduced lattice distortion in oxygen-vacancy ordered SrCoO2.5 thin films
Despite of the tremendous efforts spent on the oxygen vacancy migration in
determining the property optimization of oxygen-vacancy enrichment transition
metal oxides, few has focused on their dynamic behaviors non-equilibrium
states. In this work, we performed multi-timescale ultrafast X-ray diffraction
measurements by using picosecond synchrotron X-ray pulses and femtosecond
table-top X-ray pulses to monitor the structural dynamics in the oxygen-vacancy
ordered SrCoO2.5 thin films. A giant photoinduced strain ({\Delta}c/c > 1%) was
observed, whose distinct correlation with the pump photon energy indicates a
non-thermal origin of the photoinduced strain. The sub-picosecond resolution
X-ray diffraction reveals the formation and propagation of the coherent
acoustic phonons inside the film. We also simulate the effect of photoexcited
electron-hole pairs and the resulting lattice changes using the Density
Function Theory method to obtain further insight on the microscopic mechanism
of the measured photostriction effect. Comparable photostrictive responses and
the strong dependence on excitation wavelength are predicted, revealing a
bonding to anti-bonding charge transfer or high spin to intermediate spin
crossover induced lattice expansion in the oxygen-vacancy films.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, support materia
CARE: A Large Scale CT Image Dataset and Clinical Applicable Benchmark Model for Rectal Cancer Segmentation
Rectal cancer segmentation of CT image plays a crucial role in timely
clinical diagnosis, radiotherapy treatment, and follow-up. Although current
segmentation methods have shown promise in delineating cancerous tissues, they
still encounter challenges in achieving high segmentation precision. These
obstacles arise from the intricate anatomical structures of the rectum and the
difficulties in performing differential diagnosis of rectal cancer.
Additionally, a major obstacle is the lack of a large-scale, finely annotated
CT image dataset for rectal cancer segmentation. To address these issues, this
work introduces a novel large scale rectal cancer CT image dataset CARE with
pixel-level annotations for both normal and cancerous rectum, which serves as a
valuable resource for algorithm research and clinical application development.
Moreover, we propose a novel medical cancer lesion segmentation benchmark model
named U-SAM. The model is specifically designed to tackle the challenges posed
by the intricate anatomical structures of abdominal organs by incorporating
prompt information. U-SAM contains three key components: promptable information
(e.g., points) to aid in target area localization, a convolution module for
capturing low-level lesion details, and skip-connections to preserve and
recover spatial information during the encoding-decoding process. To evaluate
the effectiveness of U-SAM, we systematically compare its performance with
several popular segmentation methods on the CARE dataset. The generalization of
the model is further verified on the WORD dataset. Extensive experiments
demonstrate that the proposed U-SAM outperforms state-of-the-art methods on
these two datasets. These experiments can serve as the baseline for future
research and clinical application development.Comment: 8 page
New treatment methods for myocardial infarction
For a long time, cardiovascular clinicians have focused their research on coronary atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease and acute myocardial infarction due to their high morbidity, high mortality, high disability rate, and limited treatment options. Despite the continuous optimization of the therapeutic methods and pharmacological therapies for myocardial ischemia–reperfusion, the incidence rate of heart failure continues to increase year by year. This situation is speculated to be caused by the current therapies, such as reperfusion therapy after ischemic injury, drugs, rehabilitation, and other traditional treatments, that do not directly target the infarcted myocardium. Consequently, these therapies cannot fundamentally solve the problems of myocardial pathological remodeling and the reduction of cardiac function after myocardial infarction, allowing for the progression of heart failure after myocardial infarction. Coupled with the decline in mortality caused by acute myocardial infarction in recent years, this combination leads to an increase in the incidence of heart failure. As a new promising therapy rising at the beginning of the twenty-first century, cardiac regenerative medicine provides a new choice and hope for the recovery of cardiac function and the prevention and treatment of heart failure after myocardial infarction. In the past two decades, regeneration engineering researchers have explored and summarized the elements, such as cells, scaffolds, and cytokines, required for myocardial regeneration from all aspects and various levels day and night, paving the way for our later scholars to carry out relevant research and also putting forward the current problems and directions for us. Here, we describe the advantages and challenges of cardiac tissue engineering, a contemporary innovative therapy after myocardial infarction, to provide a reference for clinical treatment
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