Observation on the Curative Effect of Yiyuan Pingchuan Decoction Combined with Ultra-Low Frequency Combined with Physiological Frequency Electrical Stimulation on Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in Stable Stage

Objective: To observe the clinical efficacy of Yiyuan Pingchuan Decoction combined with ultra-low frequency combined with physiological frequency electrical stimulation on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in stable phase. Method: 89 patients were randomly divided into control group (44 cases)and observation group (45 cases). The control group was treated with conventional western medicine, while the observation group was treated with ultra-low frequency combined with physiological frequency electrical stimulation and Yiyuan Pingchuan Decoction on the basis of the control group. The 6-minute walking score (6MWT), SGRQ score, Borg fatigue score, lung function, and clinical efficacy after 30 days were observed at day 15 and day 30, respectively. Results: The 6MWT, SGRQ score, Borg fatigue score and lung function were improved more significantly in observation group than those in control group (p<0.05). The total effective rate of observation group (91.1%) was significantly higher than that of control group (79.5%) (p<0.05). Conclusion: Yiyuan Pinghuan Decoction combined with ultra-low frequency combined physiological frequency electrical stimulation can significantly improve the 6MWT, SGRQ score, Borg fatigue score and lung function of patients with stable chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, improve clinical efficacy, and then improve the quality of life of patients, so as to improve the clinical prognosis of patients

A multifunctional photoacoustic/fluorescence dual-mode-imaging gold-based theranostic nanoformulation without external laser limitations

Theranostics is a new type of biomedical technology that organically combines the diagnosis and therapy of diseases. Among molecular imaging techniques, the integration of photoacoustic (PA) and fluorescence (FL) imaging modes with high sensitivity and imaging depth provides precise diagnostic outcomes. Gold nanorods (Au NRs) are well-known contrast agents for PA imaging and photothermal therapy. However, their high toxicity, poor biocompatibility, rapid clearance, and the need for an external laser source limit their application. Therefore, modification of Au NRs with carbon-based nanomaterials (CBNs) is done to obtain a multifunctional dual-mode gold-based nanoformulation (mdGC), which preforms dual-mode imaging of PA and FL. The results show that mdGC promotes tumor cell apoptosis and exhibits good antitumor performance through the mitochondria-mediated apoptotic pathway by increasing the production of intracellular reactive oxygen species, reducing mitochondrial membrane potential, and regulating the expression of apoptosis-related genes. The targeting rate of mdGC to tumor tissue is up to 20.71 ± 1.94% ID g-1; the tumor growth inhibition rate is as high as 80.44% without external laser sources. In general, mdGC is a potential multifunctional diagnostic and therapy integrated nanoformulation.J.Z., X.Y., and C.L. contributed equally to this study. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (81922037, 11575107, 21371115, and 22003038), the Shanghai UniversityUniversal Medical Imaging Diagnostic Research Foundation (19H00100), and Shanghai Biomedical Science and Technology Support Project (19441903600)

Universal Sketch Perceptual Grouping

In this work we aim to develop a universal sketch grouper. That is, a grouper that can be applied to sketches of any category in any domain to group constituent strokes/segments into semantically meaningful object parts. The first obstacle to this goal is the lack of large-scale datasets with grouping annotation. To overcome this, we contribute the largest sketch perceptual grouping (SPG) dataset to date, consisting of 20, 000 unique sketches evenly distributed over 25 object categories. Furthermore, we propose a novel deep universal perceptual grouping model. The model is learned with both generative and discriminative losses. The generative losses improve the generalisation ability of the model to unseen object categories and datasets. The discriminative losses include a local grouping loss and a novel global grouping loss to enforce global grouping consistency. We show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art groupers. Further, we show that our grouper is useful for a number of sketch analysis tasks including sketch synthesis and fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR). © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018

Differential gene expression between wild-type and Gulo-deficient mice supplied with vitamin C

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that hepatic vitamin C (VC) levels in VC deficient mice rescued with high doses of VC supplements still do not reach the optimal levels present in wild-type mice. For this, we used a mouse scurvy model (sfx) in which the L-gulonolactone oxidase gene (Gulo) is deleted. Six age- (6 weeks old) and gender- (female) matched wild-type (WT) and sfx mice (rescued by administering 500 mg of VC/L) were used as the control (WT) and treatment (MT) groups (n = 3 for each group), respectively. Total hepatic RNA was used in triplicate microarray assays for each group. EDGE software was used to identify differentially expressed genes and transcriptomic analysis was used to assess the potential genetic regulation of Gulo gene expression. Hepatic VC concentrations in MT mice were significantly lower than in WT mice, even though there were no morphological differences between the two groups. In MT mice, 269 differentially expressed transcripts were detected (≥ twice the difference between MT and WT mice), including 107 up-regulated and 162 down-regulated genes. These differentially expressed genes included stress-related and exclusively/predominantly hepatocyte genes. Transcriptomic analysis identified a major locus on chromosome 18 that regulates Gulo expression. Since three relevant oxidative genes are located within the critical region of this locus we suspect that they are involved in the down-regulation of oxidative activity in sfx mice