288 research outputs found
Elucidating a fresh perspective on the interplay between exosomes and rheumatoid arthritis
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease characterized by chronic synovitis and the destruction of bones and joints. Exosomes are nanoscale lipid membrane vesicles originating from multivesicular bodies and are used as a vital means of intercellular communication. Both exosomes and the microbial community are essential in RA pathogenesis. Multiple types of exosomes from different origins have been demonstrated to have effects on various immune cells through distinct mechanisms in RA, which depend on the specific cargo carried by the exosomes. Tens of thousands of microorganisms exist in the human intestinal system. Microorganisms exert various physiological and pathological effects on the host directly or through their metabolites. Gut microbe-derived exosomes are being studied in the field of liver disease; however, information on their role in the context of RA is still limited. Gut microbe-derived exosomes may enhance autoimmunity by altering intestinal permeability and transporting cargo to the extraintestinal system. Therefore, we performed a comprehensive literature review on the latest progress on exosomes in RA and provided an outlook on the potential role of microbe-derived exosomes as emerging players in clinical and translational research on RA. This review aimed to provide a theoretical basis for developing new clinical targets for RA therapy
Integrated Face Analytics Networks through Cross-Dataset Hybrid Training
Face analytics benefits many multimedia applications. It consists of a number
of tasks, such as facial emotion recognition and face parsing, and most
existing approaches generally treat these tasks independently, which limits
their deployment in real scenarios. In this paper we propose an integrated Face
Analytics Network (iFAN), which is able to perform multiple tasks jointly for
face analytics with a novel carefully designed network architecture to fully
facilitate the informative interaction among different tasks. The proposed
integrated network explicitly models the interactions between tasks so that the
correlations between tasks can be fully exploited for performance boost. In
addition, to solve the bottleneck of the absence of datasets with comprehensive
training data for various tasks, we propose a novel cross-dataset hybrid
training strategy. It allows "plug-in and play" of multiple datasets annotated
for different tasks without the requirement of a fully labeled common dataset
for all the tasks. We experimentally show that the proposed iFAN achieves
state-of-the-art performance on multiple face analytics tasks using a single
integrated model. Specifically, iFAN achieves an overall F-score of 91.15% on
the Helen dataset for face parsing, a normalized mean error of 5.81% on the
MTFL dataset for facial landmark localization and an accuracy of 45.73% on the
BNU dataset for emotion recognition with a single model.Comment: 10 page
Predator-prey survival pressure is sufficient to evolve swarming behaviors
The comprehension of how local interactions arise in global collective
behavior is of utmost importance in both biological and physical research.
Traditional agent-based models often rely on static rules that fail to capture
the dynamic strategies of the biological world. Reinforcement learning has been
proposed as a solution, but most previous methods adopt handcrafted reward
functions that implicitly or explicitly encourage the emergence of swarming
behaviors. In this study, we propose a minimal predator-prey coevolution
framework based on mixed cooperative-competitive multiagent reinforcement
learning, and adopt a reward function that is solely based on the fundamental
survival pressure, that is, prey receive a reward of if caught by
predators while predators receive a reward of . Surprisingly, our analysis
of this approach reveals an unexpectedly rich diversity of emergent behaviors
for both prey and predators, including flocking and swirling behaviors for
prey, as well as dispersion tactics, confusion, and marginal predation
phenomena for predators. Overall, our study provides novel insights into the
collective behavior of organisms and highlights the potential applications in
swarm robotics
Unveiling advanced mechanisms of inhalable drug aerosol dynamics using computational fluid dynamics and discrete element method
Capsule-based dry powder inhalers (DPIs) are widely used to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) by delivering active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) via inhalation into human respiratory systems. Previous research has shown that the actuation flow rate, aerodynamic particle size distribution (APSD), and particle shape of lactose carriers are factors that can influence the particle deposition patterns in human respiratory systems. Understanding the dynamics of APIs transport in DPIs and airways can provide significant value for the design optimization of DPIs and particle shapes to enhance the delivery of APIs to the designated lung sites, i.e., small airways. Thus, it is necessary to investigate how to modulate the above-mentioned factors to increase the delivery efficacy to small airways and enhance the therapeutic effect to treat COPD. Compared with in vitro and in vivo methods, computational fluid-particle dynamics (CFPD) models allow researchers to study the transport dynamics of inhalable therapeutic dry powders in both DPI and human respiratory systems. However, existing CFPD models neglect particle-particle interactions, and most existing airway models lack peripheral lung airway and neglect the airway deformation kinematics. Such deficiencies can lead to inaccurate predictions of particle transport and deposition. This study developed a one-way coupled computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and discrete element method (DEM) model to simulate the particle-particle and particle-device interactions, and the transport of API-carrier dry powder mixtures with different shapes of carriers in a DPI flow channel. The influence of actuation flow rate (30 to 90 L/min) and particle shape (aspect ratio equals 1, 5, and 10) on lactose carrier dynamics in a representative DPI, i.e., SpirivaTM HandihalerTM, has been investigated. Subsequently, an elastic truncated whole-lung model has also been developed to predict particle transport and deposition from mouth to alveoli, with disease-specific airway deformation kinematics. Numerical results indicate that 90 L/min actuation flow rate generates the highest delivery efficiency of Handihaler, as approximately 26% API reaches the deep lung region. The elastic truncated whole-lung modeling results show that noticeable differences of predictions between static and elastic lung models can be found, which demonstrates the necessity to model airway deformation kinematics in virtual lung models
STRUKTUR KOMUNITAS ECHINODERMATA DI PERAIRAN PANTAI GAPANG, DESA IBOIH, KECAMATAN SUKAKARYA, SABANG
Banda Ace
A Bearing-Angle Approach for Unknown Target Motion Analysis Based on Visual Measurements
Vision-based estimation of the motion of a moving target is usually
formulated as a bearing-only estimation problem where the visual measurement is
modeled as a bearing vector. Although the bearing-only approach has been
studied for decades, a fundamental limitation of this approach is that it
requires extra lateral motion of the observer to enhance the target's
observability. Unfortunately, the extra lateral motion conflicts with the
desired motion of the observer in many tasks. It is well-known that, once a
target has been detected in an image, a bounding box that surrounds the target
can be obtained. Surprisingly, this common visual measurement especially its
size information has not been well explored up to now. In this paper, we
propose a new bearing-angle approach to estimate the motion of a target by
modeling its image bounding box as bearing-angle measurements. Both theoretical
analysis and experimental results show that this approach can significantly
enhance the observability without relying on additional lateral motion of the
observer. The benefit of the bearing-angle approach comes with no additional
cost because a bounding box is a standard output of object detection
algorithms. The approach simply exploits the information that has not been
fully exploited in the past. No additional sensing devices or special detection
algorithms are required
HumanSD: A Native Skeleton-Guided Diffusion Model for Human Image Generation
Controllable human image generation (HIG) has numerous real-life
applications. State-of-the-art solutions, such as ControlNet and T2I-Adapter,
introduce an additional learnable branch on top of the frozen pre-trained
stable diffusion (SD) model, which can enforce various conditions, including
skeleton guidance of HIG. While such a plug-and-play approach is appealing, the
inevitable and uncertain conflicts between the original images produced from
the frozen SD branch and the given condition incur significant challenges for
the learnable branch, which essentially conducts image feature editing for
condition enforcement. In this work, we propose a native skeleton-guided
diffusion model for controllable HIG called HumanSD. Instead of performing
image editing with dual-branch diffusion, we fine-tune the original SD model
using a novel heatmap-guided denoising loss. This strategy effectively and
efficiently strengthens the given skeleton condition during model training
while mitigating the catastrophic forgetting effects. HumanSD is fine-tuned on
the assembly of three large-scale human-centric datasets with text-image-pose
information, two of which are established in this work. As shown in Figure 1,
HumanSD outperforms ControlNet in terms of accurate pose control and image
quality, particularly when the given skeleton guidance is sophisticated
From 2D Images to 3D Model:Weakly Supervised Multi-View Face Reconstruction with Deep Fusion
We consider the problem of Multi-view 3D Face Reconstruction (MVR) with
weakly supervised learning that leverages a limited number of 2D face images
(e.g. 3) to generate a high-quality 3D face model with very light annotation.
Despite their encouraging performance, present MVR methods simply concatenate
multi-view image features and pay less attention to critical areas (e.g. eye,
brow, nose and mouth). To this end, we propose a novel model called Deep Fusion
MVR (DF-MVR) and design a multi-view encoding to a single decoding framework
with skip connections, able to extract, integrate, and compensate deep features
with attention from multi-view images. In addition, we develop a multi-view
face parse network to learn, identify, and emphasize the critical common face
area. Finally, though our model is trained with a few 2D images, it can
reconstruct an accurate 3D model even if one single 2D image is input. We
conduct extensive experiments to evaluate various multi-view 3D face
reconstruction methods. Our proposed model attains superior performance,
leading to 11.4% RMSE improvement over the existing best weakly supervised
MVRs. Source codes are available in the supplementary materials
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