Progress in functional mechanisms and biomarkers of miRNA related to Kawasaki disease

Kawasaki disease is an acute febrile exanthema pediatric disease with systemic vasculitis as the main lesion, which is the most common cause of acquired heart disease in children. The etiology of the disease is not clear, and the pathogenesis remains to be explored. Some cases of Kawasaki disease are prone to misdiagnosis due to atypical clinical presentations, and patients who have not been effectively treated are at increased risk of coronary artery lesion. Therefore, timely diagnosis of Kawasaki disease and prediction of coronary artery lesion have great significance for early treatment and prognosis of Kawasaki disease. MiRNA plays an important role in various life processes of organisms, and dysregulation of miRNA is involved in the occurrence and development of many diseases. Current studies have shown that miRNA can assist in the diagnosis, prognosis assessment and large-scale population screening of diseases, and has potential clinical application prospects as a novel biomarker. Recent studies have found that miRNA is associated with the pathogenesis of Kawasaki disease, and expression dysregulation will lead to immune imbalance and vascular damage in patients with Kawasaki disease. Other studies have shown that circulating miRNA can be used as a potential biomarker of Kawasaki disease, mainly focusing on early diagnosis and efficacy prediction of Kawasaki disease. The current research is still at the exploratory stage, and more clinical studies are needed to verify the early diagnosis and prediction efficacy of miRNA related to Kawasaki disease. This article reviews the functional mechanism and biomarkers of miRNA in Kawasaki disease in recent years

OSCARS: An Outlier-Sensitive Content-Based Radiography Retrieval System

Improving the retrieval relevance on noisy datasets is an emerging need for the curation of a large-scale clean dataset in the medical domain. While existing methods can be applied for class-wise retrieval (aka. inter-class), they cannot distinguish the granularity of likeness within the same class (aka. intra-class). The problem is exacerbated on medical external datasets, where noisy samples of the same class are treated equally during training. Our goal is to identify both intra/inter-class similarities for fine-grained retrieval. To achieve this, we propose an Outlier-Sensitive Content-based rAdiologhy Retrieval System (OSCARS), consisting of two steps. First, we train an outlier detector on a clean internal dataset in an unsupervised manner. Then we use the trained detector to generate the anomaly scores on the external dataset, whose distribution will be used to bin intra-class variations. Second, we propose a quadruplet (a, p, nintra, ninter) sampling strategy, where intra-class negatives nintra are sampled from bins of the same class other than the bin anchor a belongs to, while niner are randomly sampled from inter-classes. We suggest a weighted metric learning objective to balance the intra and inter-class feature learning. We experimented on two representative public radiography datasets. Experiments show the effectiveness of our approach

Parapapillary βBM and γ zones played different roles in axial elongation among young adolescents using optical coherence tomography

Purpose: To evaluate the influencing factors of parapapillary BM and zones incidence in young adolescents and to explore their associations with axial length progression. Methods: In this prospective cohort study, 976 seventh-grade students from nine secondary schools in Beijing, China, were enrolled and followed up 1 year later. Parapapillary BM zone was defined as retinal pigment epithelium loss while Bruch\u27s membrane was present. Parapapillary zone was defined as the absence of retinal pigment epithelium and Bruch\u27s membrane. Logistic regression model was used to analyze the influencing factors of BM and zone incidence. A linear mixed model was used to analyze the associations between parapapillary zones and axial elongation. Results: Of the 976 participants, 139 (14.2%) had only BM zone, 398 (40.8%) had only zone, and 171 (17.5%) had both. At follow-up, the incidence of BM zone was 11.5% (76/659), and the incidence of zone was 9.7% (39/404). Optic disc tilt, thinner subfoveal choroid, and longer axial length at baseline showed a higher risk of zone incidence. The absence of zone at baseline showed a faster axial length progression. When the baseline axial length was 25 mm or longer, the BM zone was also related to the axial elongation. Conclusions: The zone was associated with axial length progression, and the BM zone was also associated with the axial length progression when the axial length exceeded 25 mm, which was consistent with the notion that excessive axial length growth not only is the extension of the eyeball but also has its own pathologic changes

C1ql4 regulates breast cancer cell stemness and epithelial-mesenchymal transition through PI3K/AKT/NF-κB signaling pathway

BackgroundThe stemness characteristic of breast cancer (BC) is a crucial factor underlying cancer recurrence and metastasis after operative therapy and chemoradiotherapy. Understanding the potential mechanism of breast cancer stem cells (BCSCs) may ameliorate the prognosis of patients.MethodsWe collected clinical specimens of BC patients for staining and statistical analysis to verify the expression status and clinical significance of complement C1q-like 4 (C1ql4). Western blot and qRT-PCR were employed to detect the expression of molecules. Flow cytometry was used to examine cell cycle, cell apoptosis and the portion of BCSCs. Wound healing and Transwell assays were used to detect cell metastasis. The effect of C1ql4 on breast cancer progression in vivo was examined in a nude mouse tumor bearing model.ResultsOur clinical analysis showed that C1ql4 was highly expressed in BC tissues and cell lines, and the high expression of C1ql4 was significantly corelated with the malignancy of BC patients. Moreover, we also found that C1ql4 was overexpressed in BCSCs. C1ql4 knockdown suppressed the BCSC and EMT properties, promoted cell cycle progression, enhanced BC cell apoptosis, and inhibited cell migration and invasion, whereas the C1ql4 overexpression exhibited the opposite effects. Mechanistically, C1ql4 promoted the activation and nuclear location of NF-κB and the expression of downstream factors TNF-α and IL-1β. Moreover, inhibition of PI3K/AKT signaling suppressed the C1ql4-induced stemness and EMT.ConclusionsOur findings suggest that C1ql4 promotes the BC cell stemness and EMT via modulating the PI3K/AKT/NF-κB signaling, and provides a promising target for BC treatment