Huangqi Injection (a Traditional Chinese Patent Medicine) for Chronic Heart Failure: A Systematic Review

Chronic heart failure (CHF) is a global public health problem. Therefore, novel and effective drugs that show few side-effects are needed. Early literature studies indicated that Huangqi injection is one of the most commonly used traditional Chinese patent medicines for CHF in China. As a large number of clinical studies has been carried out and published, it is essential to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of Huangqi injection. Therefore, we carried out this systematic review under the support of the framework of the Joint Sino-Italian Laboratory (JoSIL).To evaluate the efficacy and safety of Huangqi injection for CHF according to the available scientific knowledge.An extensive search including PubMed, EMBASE, CBM, the Cochrane Library and Chinese literature databases was performed up to July 2008. Clinical trials regarding Huangqi injection for the treatment of CHF were searched for, irrespective of languages. The quality of each trial was assessed according to the Cochrane Reviewers' Handbook 5.0, and RevMan 5.0 provided by the Cochrane Collaboration and STATA 9.2 were used for data analysis.After selection of 1,205 articles, 62 RCTs and quasi-RCTs conducted in China and published in Chinese journals were included in the review. The methodological quality of the trials was low. In most trials inclusion and exclusion criteria were not specified. Furthermore, only one study evaluated the outcomes for drug efficacy after an adequate period of time. For these reasons and because of the different baseline characteristics we did not conduct a meta-analysis.Although available studies are not adequate to draw a conclusion on the efficacy and safety of Huangqi injection (a traditional Chinese patent medicine), we hope that our work could provide useful experience on further studies on Huangqi injections. The overall level of TCM clinical research needs to be improved so that the efficacy of TCM can be evaluated by the international community and possibly some TCM can enter into the international market

Scattering Characterization of Obliquely Oriented Buildings from PolSAR Data Using Eigenvalue-Related Model

Scattering characterization of obliquely oriented buildings (OOBs) from polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) data is challenging since the general double-bounce scattering does not support their dominant scattering mechanism. In this paper, a physical scattering model combining the eigenvalues of coherency matrix is proposed to characterize the scattering of OOBs. The coherency matrix is first operated by eigenvalue decomposition and a refined OOB descriptor is presented based on these eigenvalues. Considering the actual proportions of co-polarization and cross-polarization components, the descriptor is then adopted to modify the matrix elements of the well-known cross scattering model, thus introducing the OOB scattering model. Finally, strategies of model parameter solution are designed and the involved decomposition is complete accordingly. The proposed method is tested on spaceborne and airborne PolSAR data and the results confirm its effectiveness, which clearly call for further research and application

A Hierarchical Extension of General Four-Component Scattering Power Decomposition

The overestimation of volume scattering (OVS) is an intrinsic drawback in model-based polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) target decomposition. It severely impacts the accuracy measurement of scattering power and leads to scattering mechanism ambiguity. In this paper, a hierarchical extended general four-component scattering power decomposition method (G4U) is presented. The conventional G4U is first proposed by Singh et al. and it has advantages in full use of information and volume scattering characterization. However, the OVS still exists in the G4U and it causes a scattering mechanism ambiguity in some oriented urban areas. In the proposed method, matrix rotations by the orientation angle and the helix angle are applied. Afterwards, the transformed coherency matrix is applied to the four-component decomposition scheme with two refined models. Moreover, the branch condition applied in the G4U is substituted by the ratio of correlation coefficient (RCC), which is used as a criterion for hierarchically implementing the decomposition. The performance of this approach is demonstrated and evaluated with the Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (AIRSAR), Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR), Radarsat-2, and the Advanced Land Observing Satellite (ALOS) Phased Array type L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) fully polarimetric data over different test sites. Comparison studies are carried out and demonstrated that the proposed method exhibits promising improvements in the OVS and scattering mechanism characterization

Influence of SiC/Epoxy Coating on Surface Charging Phenomenon at DC Voltage - Part II: Charge Dissipation

In this paper, the dissipation of pre-deposited surface charges on the SiC/epoxy coated insulator is investigated. Similarly to Part I of this study, the analysis is carried out for the system of a pair of finger-shaped metallic electrodes placed on flat material samples and different types of material pre-charging are considered. Specifically, two cases based on different types of electrode-sample contacts (Case 1 and 2, similar to Part I) are examined as well as surface charging by external corona (Case 3). It is shown that surface charge dissipation in Cases 1 and 2 takes place in two stages whereas three stages in the charge decay process are identified in Case 3. It is shown that the rate of charge dissipation is strongly affected by the increase of the content of SiC filler in the coating material. The experimental results obtained for different Cases are compared and are discussed by employing results of the calculations of the electric field in the experimental setups and surface conductivities and surface trap characteristics obtained in Part I

The Autophagy Cargo Receptor SQSTM1 Inhibits Infectious Bursal Disease Virus Infection through Selective Autophagic Degradation of Double-Stranded Viral RNA

Selective autophagy mediates the degradation of cytoplasmic cargos, such as damaged organelles, invading pathogens, and protein aggregates. However, whether it targets double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) of intracellular pathogens is still largely unknown. Here, we show that selective autophagy regulates the degradation of the infectious bursal disease virus (IBDV) dsRNA genome. The amount of dsRNA decreased greatly in cells that overexpressed the autophagy-required protein VPS34 or autophagy cargo receptor SQSTM1, while it increased significantly in SQSTM1 or VPS34 knockout cells or by treating wild-type cells with the autophagy inhibitor chloroquine or wortmannin. Confocal microscopy and structured illumination microscopy showed SQSTM1 colocalized with dsRNA during IBDV infection. A pull-down assay further confirmed the direct binding of SQSTM1 to dsRNA through amino acid sites R139 and K141. Overexpression of SQSTM1 inhibited the replication of IBDV, while knockout of SQSTM1 promoted IBDV replication. Therefore, our findings reveal the role of SQSTM1 in clearing viral dsRNA through selective autophagy, highlighting the antiviral role of autophagy in the removal of the viral genome

Influence of SiC/Epoxy Coating on Surface Charging Phenomenon at DC Voltage - Part I: Charge Accumulation

Surface charge accumulation on SiC/epoxy coatings with different contents of SiC filler, 3, 5, 7, 10 wt%, is investigated using flat samples of epoxy substrate. In the experiments, a pair of finger-shaped electrodes was attached to the samples surface using direct pressing and conductive adhesive providing two different types of contacts and, respectively, surface charging methods. The electrodes were energized by applying DC voltage for various time intervals and resulted surface charge distributions between the electrodes were measured. It was found that depending on the contact type, charging duration and filler content, different patterns of homo- or hetero-charge appeared on the material surface. Physical reasons for the observed effects are analyzed based on the calculated electric field distributions in the experimental setup, results of the auxiliary tests on material charging in a limited air volume and surface trap energy distributions measured utilizing the isothermal surface potential decay (ISPD) method. Application of SiC/epoxy coating for controlling surface charge accumulation is discussed