Neuroprotective effects of gamma-glutamylcysteine ethyl ester on an in vivo moderate traumatic brain injury-mediated model and in vitro in cortical astrocytes and neurons

Neurodegeneration is the loss of neuronal structures or functions, while neuroprotection is the delay or prevention of neurodegeneration. In traumatic brain injury (TBI), neurodegeneration can occur as the result of oxidative stress, the imbalance of oxidants and antioxidants levels; therefore, antioxidant approaches can be effective therapeutic methods for neuroprotection by attenuating oxidative stress. Glutathione (GSH), a naturally occurring antioxidant, plays an important role in the maintenance of intracellular redox homeostasis by scavenging reactive oxygen species (ROS) and reactive nitrogen species (RNS). In this thesis, we attempted to evaluate the abilities of a GSH precursor, gamma-glutamylcysteine ethyl ester (GCEE), to prevent neurodegeneration by combating intracellular oxidative stress in neurons and astrocytes. For in vivo experiments, controlled cortical impact (CCI) was performed on Wistar rats to simulate moderate TBI, and GCEE (150 mg/kg) or saline was administrated 30 min or 60 min after the brain injury. Fluoro Jade-B (FJB), an ionic fluorescein derivate, was adapted to selectively stain the degenerating neurons on the brain tissues, and FJB-positive neurons were quantified. Administration of GCEE (150 mg/kg) post- injury decreased the number of FJB positive neurons that were significantly increased in saline treated groups. Next, the protective roles of GCEE in vitro in rat primary cortical astrocytes were investigated using various concentrations of tert-butyl hydroperoxide (tBHP) in order to induce oxidative stress and further toxicity. Cell viability was measured by MTT (3-[4,5-dimethylthiazol-2-yl]-2,5 diphenyl tetrazolium bromide) assay. The status of oxidative stress was determined by measuring intracellular ROS levels through dichlorofluorescein (DCF) assay. GCEE restored cell viability that was significantly decreased in untreated cells by decreasing oxidative stress. Lastly, the antioxidant properties of GCEE in neurons and astrocytes were investigated in a time-dependent manner. GCEE was able to immediately attenuate intracellular oxidative stress both in neurons and astrocytes. Such decreased oxidative stress was progressively increased in neurons, whereas decreased oxidative stress remained in astrocytes. Overall, our current findings suggest the protective roles of GCEE in both neurons and astrocytes may contribute to the potential therapeutic effects on oxidative stress-associated neurodegeneration following traumatic brain injury

Exploring the effects of contextual factors on home lighting experience

Background Although lighting increasingly penetrates our everyday life due to technology advancement, little is known about how people interact with lighting and how contextual factors impact on the experience. Thus, this study attempted to reveal how two contextual factors (the level of concentration required for pleasant lighting use and social interaction) could influence the manipulation of lighting parameters, particularly focusing on the major factors of lighting such as illuminance, color temperature, and hue. Methods To understand of the interaction between contextual factors and lighting variables, an experiment was conducted. 10 singles and 10 couples had to manipulate lighting variables such as intensity and colorin five everyday situations for pleasant lighting experience. Results The result of the experiment showed that illuminance, color temperature and hue are influenced by the degree of concentration, but only partially influenced by social factors. The findings could provide a better understanding of manipulating lighting variables in terms of use context with design practitioners. Conclusions The overall findings of the study indicate that illuminance, color temperature, and hue are significantly dependent upon the level of concentration required in at-home lighting use, and also have only a partial dependence on social effect. This implies that although we assumed that people have their personal lighting preferences, their preferences can be largely dependent on the degree of concentration required for at-home pleasant lighting use. Hence, there are common patterns among people in manipulating lighting parameters, which are less dependent on personal differences. © Archives of Design Researc

Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation for Wildfire Detection

Recently, both the frequency and intensity of wildfires have increased worldwide, primarily due to climate change. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol for wildfire detection, leveraging semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for object detection, accompanied by a corresponding dataset designed for use by both academics and industries. Our dataset encompasses 30 times more diverse labeled scenes for the current largest benchmark wildfire dataset, HPWREN, and introduces a new labeling policy for wildfire detection. Inspired by CoordConv, we propose a robust baseline, Location-Aware Object Detection for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (LADA), utilizing a teacher-student based framework capable of extracting translational variance features characteristic of wildfires. With only using 1% target domain labeled data, our framework significantly outperforms our source-only baseline by a notable margin of 3.8% in mean Average Precision on the HPWREN wildfire dataset. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/BloomBerry/LADA.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 22 table

The Effects of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation on the Cognitive and Behavioral Changes After Electrode Implantation Surgery in Rats

Postoperative delirium can lead to increased morbidity and mortality, and may even be a potentially life-threatening clinical syndrome. However, the neural mechanism underlying this condition has not been fully understood and there is little knowledge regarding potential preventive strategies. To date, investigation of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) for the relief of symptoms caused by neuropsychiatric disorders and the enhancement of cognitive performance has led to promising results. In this study, we demonstrated that tDCS has a possible effect on the fast recovery from delirium in rats after microelectrode implant surgery, as demonstrated by postoperative behavior and neurophysiology compared with sham stimulation. This is the first study to describe the possible effects of tDCS for the fast recovery from delirium based on the study of both electroencephalography and behavioral changes. Postoperative rats showed decreased attention, which is the core symptom of delirium. However, anodal tDCS over the right frontal area immediately after surgery exhibited positive effects on acute attentional deficit. It was found that relative power of theta was lower in the tDCS group than in the sham group after surgery, suggesting that the decrease might be the underlying reason for the positive effects of tDCS. Connectivity analysis revealed that tDCS could modulate effective connectivity and synchronization of brain activity among different brain areas, including the frontal cortex, parietal cortex, and thalamus. It was concluded that anodal tDCS on the right frontal regions may have the potential to help patients recover quickly from delirium

Latent Sensitization in a Mouse Model of Ocular Neuropathic Pain

Purpose: Chronic ocular pain is poorly understood and difficult to manage. We developed a murine model of corneal surface injury (CSI)–induced chronic ocular neuropathic pain. The study focuses on changes in corneal nerve morphology and associated short- and long-term pain-like behavior after CSI. Methods: CSI was induced in mice by local application of an alkali solution (0.75 N NaOH). Corneal nerve architecture, morphology, density, and length were studied. Eye-wiping was evaluated before and after CSI in response to hypertonic saline (2 M NaCl). Naltrexone (NTX) or Naloxone-methiodide (NLX-me), opioid receptor antagonists, were given subcutaneously (s.c., 3 mg/kg) or topically (eye drop, 100 μM), and then an eye-wiping test was performed. Results: CSI caused partial corneal deinnervation followed by gradual reinnervation. Regenerated nerves displayed increased tortuosity, beading, and branching. CSI enhanced hypertonic saline-induced eye-wiping behavior compared to baseline or sham-injury (P \u3c 0.01). This hypersensitivity peaked at 10 days and subsided 14 days after CSI. Administration of NTX, or NLX-me, a selective peripheral opioid antagonist, reinstated eye-wiping behavior in the injury group, but not in the sham groups (P \u3c 0.05). Conclusions: This study introduces a model of chronic ocular pain and corneal neuropathy following CSI. CSI induces central and peripheral opioid receptor-dependent latent sensitization (LS) that is unmasked by systemic or topical administration of opioid antagonists. Translational Relevance: This model of chronic ocular pain establishes LS as a new inhibitory mechanism in the oculotrigeminal system and may be used for potential diagnostic and therapeutic interventions for ocular neuropathy

Transciphering Framework for Approximate Homomorphic Encryption (Full Version)

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is a promising cryptographic primitive that enables computation over encrypted data, with a variety of applications including medical, genomic, and financial tasks. In Asiacrypt 2017, Cheon et al. proposed the CKKS scheme to efficiently support approximate computation over encrypted data of real numbers. HE schemes including CKKS, nevertheless, still suffer from slow encryption speed and large ciphertext expansion compared to symmetric cryptography. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid framework, dubbed RtF (Real-to-Finite-field) framework, that supports CKKS. The main idea behind this construction is to combine the CKKS and the FV homomorphic encryption schemes, and use a stream cipher using modular arithmetic in between. As a result, real numbers can be encrypted without significant ciphertext expansion or computational overload on the client side. As an instantiation of the stream cipher in our framework, we propose a new HE-friendly cipher, dubbed HERA, and extensively analyze its security and efficiency. The main feature of HERA is that it uses a simple randomized key schedule. Compared to recent HE-friendly ciphers such as FLIP and Rasta using randomized linear layers, HERA requires a smaller number of random bits. For this reason, HERA significantly outperforms existing HE-friendly ciphers on both the client and the server sides. With the RtF transciphering framework combined with HERA at the 128-bit security level, we achieve small ciphertext expansion ratio with a range of 1.23 to 1.54, which is at least 23 times smaller than using (symmetric) CKKS-only, assuming the same precision bits and the same level of ciphertexts at the end of the framework. We also achieve 1.6 $\mu$s and 21.7 MB/s for latency and throughput on the client side, which are 9085 times and 17.8 times faster than the CKKS-only environment, respectively