Characterization of Laser-Resistant Port Wine Stain Blood Vessels Using In Vivo Reflectance Confocal Microscopy.

Background and objectivesPort wine stain (PWS) is a congenital vascular malformation of the human skin. Laser is the treatment of choice for PWS. Laser-resistant PWS is one crucial factor accounting for inadequate treatment outcome, which needs to be fully characterized. This study aims to quantitatively characterize the morphology of laser-resistant PWS blood vessels in the upper papillary dermis using in vivo reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM).Study design/materials and methodsA total of 42 PWS subjects receiving laser treatment from August 2016 through July 2018 were enrolled into this study. Thirty-three subjects had facial PWS; nine had extremity PWS. All subject's PWS received multiplex 585/1,064 nm laser treatment. RCM images were taken before and after treatment. The density, diameter, blood flow, and depth of PWS blood vessels were analyzed.ResultsWe found 44.4% PWS on the extremities (four out of nine subjects) were laser-resistant, which was significantly higher (P < 0.001) when compared with those PWS on the face (15.2%, 5 out of 33 subjects). The laser-resistant facial PWS blood vessels had significantly higher blood flow (1.35 ± 0.26 U vs. 0.89 ± 0.22 U, P < 0.001), larger blood vessel diameters (109.60 ± 18.24 µm vs. 84.36 ± 24.04 µm, P = 0.033) and were located deeper in the skin (106.01 ± 13.87 µm vs. 87.82 ± 12.57 µm, P < 0.001) in the skin when compared with laser-responsive PWS on the face. The average PWS blood vessel density (17.01 ± 4.63/mm2 vs. 16.61 ± 4.44/mm2 , P = 0.857) was not correlated to the laser resistance.ConclusionsLaser-resistant PWS blood vessels had significantly higher blood flow, larger diameters, and were located deeper in the skin. RCM can be a valuable tool for a prognostic evaluation on laser-resistant lesions before treatment, thereby providing guidance for tailored laser treatment protocols, which may improve the therapeutic outcome. The limitations for this study include relative small sample size and acquisitions of different blood vessels before and after 2 months of treatment. Lasers Surg. Med. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Genetic and clinical assessment of 2009 pandemic influenza in southern China

Introduction: South China has a proven role in the global epidemiology of previous influenza outbreaks due to its dual seasonal pattern. We present the virologic, genetic and clinical characterization of pandemic H1N1 influenza infection (pH1N1) in Shantou and Nanchang, cities in southern China, during the second wave of the 2009-2010 pandemic. Methodology: Nasopharyngeal swabs were collected from 165 individuals with influenza-like illness (ILI) who presented to the hospitals in Shantou and Nanchang. Laboratory diagnosis and characterization was performed by real-time PCR, virus isolation in embryonated chicken eggs, and sequencing. Results: pH1N1 activity was sustained in three different temporal patterns throughout the study period. The overall positivity rate of pH1N1 was 50% with major distribution among young adults between the ages of 13 and 30 years. High fever, cough, expectoration, chest pain, myalgia, nasal discharge and efficient viral replication were observed as major clinical markers whereas a substantial number of afebrile cases (17%) was also observed. Rate of hospitalization and disease severity (39%) and recovery (100%) were also high within the region. Furthermore, severe complications were likely to develop in young adults upon pH1N1 infection. Genetic characterization of the HA and NA genes of pH1N1 strains exhibited homogenous spread of pH1N1 strains with 99% identity with prototypic strains; however, minor unique mutations were also observed in the HA gene. Conclusion: The study illustrates the detailed characteristics of 2009 influenza pandemic in southern parts of China that might help to strategize preparedness for future pandemics and subsequent influenza seasons.</br

Research on Construction Method of Genetic Map for Rural Settlement Heritage of Ethnic Minorities in Guangxi, China

As the multicultural fusion area, Guangxi, China has twelve nationalities who live here for generations, including Han, Zhuang, Dong and Miao, etc. The cultural fusion among various ethnic groups is prominent, and has representative characteristics on multiculturalism and research value on rural heritage. As one of the carriers of culture, rural settlement heritage maintains the genetic characteristics of cultural “gene” in the process of inheritance. The laws are presented based on different expressions of material and non-material elements, and reflect the logic and order of the evolution of rural settlement heritage. Through the investigation of ethnic minority rural settlements in Liuzhou, Guangxi, this paper clarifies the construction logic of genetic map for rural settlement heritage. In addition, the excavation, identification, extraction of genetic elements and the construction of genetic map are carried out for representative rural heritage. Finally, this paper summarizes the research methods of rural settlement heritage genes in multicultural fusion areas of ethnic minorities. At the same time, it provides direction for the protection and sustainable development of rural settlement heritage, and guides the development of rural planning in some degree

PsyAttention: Psychological Attention Model for Personality Detection

Work on personality detection has tended to incorporate psychological features from different personality models, such as BigFive and MBTI. There are more than 900 psychological features, each of which is helpful for personality detection. However, when used in combination, the application of different calculation standards among these features may result in interference between features calculated using distinct systems, thereby introducing noise and reducing performance. This paper adapts different psychological models in the proposed PsyAttention for personality detection, which can effectively encode psychological features, reducing their number by 85%. In experiments on the BigFive and MBTI models, PysAttention achieved average accuracy of 65.66% and 86.30%, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art methods, indicating that it is effective at encoding psychological features

Expression of Wnt and Notch signaling pathways in inflammatory bowel disease treated with mesenchymal stem cell transplantation: evaluation in a rat model

INTRODUCTION: The purpose of this study was to investigate the expression of Wnt and Notch signaling pathway-related genes in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) treated with mesenchymal stem cell transplantation (MSCT). METHODS: TNBS (2,4,6-trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid) was used to establish IBD in a rat model. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) were transplanted via tail vein transfusion. Saline water was used in a control group. The expression of Wnt and Notch main signaling molecules was screened by gene chips and verified by quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction in the IBD rat model on day 14 and day 28 after transplantation. RESULTS: The IBD rat models were successfully established and MSCs were transplanted into those models. Genome-wide expression profile chips identified a total of 388 differentially expressive genes, of which 191 were upregulated and 197 were downregulated in the MSC-transplanted group in comparison with the IBD control group. Real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction results showed that the level of Olfm4 mRNA expression in the IBD group (2.54±0.20) was significantly increased compared with the MSCT group (1.39±0.54) and the normal group (1.62±0.25) (P <0.05). The Wnt3a mRNA was more highly expressed in IBD rats (2.92±0.94) and decreased in MSCT rats (0.17±0.63, P <0.05). The expression of GSK-3β mRNA was decreased in the setting of inflammation (0.65±0.04 versus 1.00±0.01 in normal group, P <0.05) but returned to normal levels after MSCT (0.81±0.17). The expression of β-catenin was observed to increase in IBD tissues (1.76±0.44) compared with normal tissues (1.00±0.01, P <0.05), but no difference was found in the MSCT group (1.12±0.36). Wnt11 declined at 14 days and returned to normal levels at 28 days in the IBD group; in comparison, a significantly lower expression was found in MSCT rats. There were no differences in the expression of Fzd3, c-myc, TCF4, and Wnt5a in inflammation, but all of those genes declined after MSCT treatment. CONCLUSIONS: The canonical Wnt and Notch signaling pathways are activated in IBD and may be suppressed by stem cell transplantation to differentiate into intestinal epithelium after MSCT. Moreover, the non-canonical Wnt signaling may be inhibited by canonical Wnt signaling in the setting of inflammation and may also be suppressed by MSCT

Combined Toxicity Evaluation of Ochratoxin A and Aflatoxin B1 on Kidney and Liver Injury, Immune Inflammation, and Gut Microbiota Alteration Through Pair-Feeding Pullet Model

Ochratoxin A (OTA) and aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) are often co-contaminated, but their synergistic toxicity in poultry is limitedly described. Furthermore, the traditional ad libitum feeding model may fail to distinguish the specific impact of mycotoxins on the biomarkers and the indirect effect of mildew on the palatability of feed. A pair-feeding model was introduced to investigate the specific effect and the indirect effect of the combined toxicity of OTA and AFB1, which were independent and dependent on feed intake, respectively. A total of 180 one-day-old pullets were randomly divided into 3 groups with 6 replicates, and each replicate contained 10 chicks. The control group (Group A) and the pair-feeding group (Group B) received the basal diet without mycotoxin contamination. Group C was administrated with OTA- and AFB1-contaminated feed (101.41 μg/kg of OTA + 20.10 μg/kg of AFB1). The scale of feeding in Group B matched with the feed intake of Group C. The trial lasted 42 days. Compared with the control group, co-contamination of OTA and AFB1 in feed could adversely affect the growth performance (average daily feed intake (ADFI), body weight (BW), average daily weight gain (ADG), feed conversion ratio (FCR), and shank length (SL)), decrease the relative weight of the spleen (p &lt; 0.01), and increase the relative weight of the kidney (p &lt; 0.01). Moreover, the reduction of feed intake could also adversely affect the growth performance (BW, ADG, and SL), but not as severely as mycotoxins do. Apart from that, OTA and AFB1 also activated the antioxidative and inflammation reactions of chicks, increasing the level of catalase (CAT), reactive oxygen species (ROS), and interleukin-8 (IL-8) while decreasing the level of IL-10 (p &lt; 0.01), which was weakly influenced by the feed intake reduction. In addition, OTA and AFB1 induced histopathological changes and apoptosis in the kidney and liver as well as stimulated the growth of pernicious bacteria to cause toxic effects. There were no histopathological changes and apoptosis in the kidney and liver of the pair-feeding group. The combined toxicity of OTA and AFB1 had more severe effects on pullets than merely reducing feed supply. However, the proper reduction of the feed intake could improve pullets’ physical health by enriching the bacteria Lactobacillus, Phascolarctobacterium, Bacteroides, Parabacteroides, and Barnesiella

Cementless long-stem fixation in periprosthetic clamshell fracture: a biomechanical investigation

ObjectiveTo investigate the biomechanical strength of cementless long-stem fixation for the treatment of periprosthetic clamshell fracture.MethodsEighteen Sawbones artificial femur models were used and divided into three groups. Group A had an intact medial wall. Group B, the proximal periprosthetic femoral medial wall was osteotomized to simulate periprosthetic clamshell fractures. Group C, following identical osteotomy to Group B, cerclage wiring was applied to fix the medial wall fracture fragment. After molding, the cementless long-stem were implanted in all models, which were then evaluated through axial compression tests, torsion tests, and axial failure tests. The axial stiffness, axial displacement, torsional stiffness, torque, and maximum failure load were recorded and statistically analyzed.ResultsIn the axial compression tests, no statistically significant differences were observed among Groups A, B, and C in terms of axial displacement, axial stiffness, or maximum failure load (the displacement greater than 3 mm). However, in the torsional tests, Group B showed significantly lower torsional stiffness or torque compared to Groups A and C (p &lt; 0.05). No significant differences in torsional stiffness or torque were detected between Groups A and C.ConclusionThe integrity of the femoral medial wall is crucial for femoral stem stability. In case of medial wall fracture, while cementless long-stem implantation can achieve satisfactory axial stability, its torsional stability remains inadequate. The application of supplemental cerclage wiring for medial wall fragment fixation provides reliable improvement in torsional stability of the stem

CDBA: a novel multi-branch feature fusion model for EEG-based emotion recognition

EEG-based emotion recognition through artificial intelligence is one of the major areas of biomedical and machine learning, which plays a key role in understanding brain activity and developing decision-making systems. However, the traditional EEG-based emotion recognition is a single feature input mode, which cannot obtain multiple feature information, and cannot meet the requirements of intelligent and high real-time brain computer interface. And because the EEG signal is nonlinear, the traditional methods of time domain or frequency domain are not suitable. In this paper, a CNN-DSC-Bi-LSTM-Attention (CDBA) model based on EEG signals for automatic emotion recognition is presented, which contains three feature-extracted channels. The normalized EEG signals are used as an input, the feature of which is extracted by multi-branching and then concatenated, and each channel feature weight is assigned through the attention mechanism layer. Finally, Softmax was used to classify EEG signals. To evaluate the performance of the proposed CDBA model, experiments were performed on SEED and DREAMER datasets, separately. The validation experimental results show that the proposed CDBA model is effective in classifying EEG emotions. For triple-category (positive, neutral and negative) and four-category (happiness, sadness, fear and neutrality), the classification accuracies were respectively 99.44% and 99.99% on SEED datasets. For five classification (Valence 1—Valence 5) on DREAMER datasets, the accuracy is 84.49%. To further verify and evaluate the model accuracy and credibility, the multi-classification experiments based on ten-fold cross-validation were conducted, the elevation indexes of which are all higher than other models. The results show that the multi-branch feature fusion deep learning model based on attention mechanism has strong fitting and generalization ability and can solve nonlinear modeling problems, so it is an effective emotion recognition method. Therefore, it is helpful to the diagnosis and treatment of nervous system diseases, and it is expected to be applied to emotion-based brain computer interface systems

Response to Pegylated Interferon Plus Ribavirin in Patients with Hepatitis C Virus Genotype 6a Infection from Guangdong and Guangxi Province of China

Aim. Our aim is to survey the treatment effect of PEG-IFN plus ribavirin in patients infected with HCV genotype 6a in Guangdong and Guangxi province of China and investigate best course of antiviral treatment for patients with HCV-6a infection. Methods. 515 eligible patients received subcutaneous 180 μg PEG-IFNα-2a or 1.5 μg/kg PEG-IFNα-2b once weekly plus oral ribavirin. Primary outcome was SVR by intention-to-treat analysis. Secondary outcome was RVR, cEVR, ETR, and relapse rate. Results. SVR in patients with HCV-6a infection treated for 48 weeks was comparable to that in patients with HCV-2/3 infection (80.9% versus 82.5%, p=0.812) and higher than that in patients with HCV-1b infection (80.9% versus 67.2%, p=0.014). ETR (98.9% versus 90.6%, p=0.016), virological response at month 3 of end-of- treatment (88.8% versus 76.6%, p=0.044), SVR (80.9% versus 65.6%, p=0.032), and virological response at month 12 of end-of-treatment (76.4% versus 60.9%, p=0.04) in patients with HCV-6a infection treated for 48 weeks were higher than those in patients with HCV-6a infection treated for 24 weeks. Conclusion. SVR in patients with HCV-6a treated for 48 weeks was comparable to that in patients with HCV-2/3 infection and higher than that in patients with HCV-1b infection; patients with HCV-6a infection treated for 48 weeks had a superior treatment response than patients treated for 24 weeks