Pravastatin Attenuates Acute Radiation-Induced Enteropathy and Improves Epithelial Cell Function

Background and Aim: Radiation-induced enteropathy is frequently observed after radiation therapy for abdominal and pelvic cancer or occurs secondary to accidental radiation exposure. The acute effects of irradiation on the intestine might be attributed to inhibition of mitosis in the crypts, as the loss of proliferative functions impairs development of the small intestinal epithelium and its barrier function. Especially, oxidative damage to intestinal epithelial cells is a key event in the initiation and progression of radiation-induced enteropathy. Pravastatin is widely used clinically to lower serum cholesterol levels and has been reported to have anti-inflammatory effects on endothelial cells. Here, we investigated the therapeutic effects of pravastatin on damaged epithelial cells after radiation-induced enteritis using in vitro and in vivo systems.Materials and Methods: To evaluate the effects of pravastatin on intestinal epithelial cells, we analyzed proliferation and senescence, oxidative damage, and inflammatory cytokine expression in an irradiated human intestinal epithelial cell line (InEpC). In addition, to investigate the therapeutic effects of pravastatin in mice, we performed histological analysis, bacterial translocation assays, and intestinal permeability assays, and also assessed inflammatory cytokine expression, using a radiation-induced enteropathy model.Results: Histological damage such as shortening of villi length and impaired intestinal crypt function was observed in whole abdominal-irradiated mice. However, damage was attenuated in pravastatin-treated animals, in which normalization of intestinal epithelial cell differentiation was also observed. Using in vitro and in vivo systems, we also showed that pravastatin improves the proliferative properties of intestinal epithelial cells and decreases radiation-induced oxidative damage to the intestine. In addition, pravastatin inhibited levels of epithelial-derived inflammatory cytokines including IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α in irradiated InEpC cells. We also determined that pravastatin could rescue intestinal barrier dysfunction via anti-inflammatory effects using the mouse model.Conclusion: Pravastatin has a therapeutic effect on intestinal lesions and attenuates radiation-induced epithelial damage by suppressing oxidative stress and the inflammatory response

Memory Model for Morphological Semantics of Visual Stimuli Using Sparse Distributed Representation

Recent achievements on CNN (convolutional neural networks) and DNN (deep neural networks) researches provide a lot of practical applications on computer vision area. However, these approaches require construction of huge size of training data for learning process. This paper tries to find a way for continual learning which does not require prior high-cost training data construction by imitating a biological memory model. We employ SDR (sparse distributed representation) for information processing and semantic memory model, which is known as a representation model of firing patterns on neurons in neocortex area. This paper proposes a novel memory model to reflect remembrance of morphological semantics of visual input stimuli. The proposed memory model considers both memory process and recall process separately. First, memory process converts input visual stimuli to sparse distributed representation, and in this process, morphological semantic of input visual stimuli can be preserved. Next, recall process can be considered by comparing sparse distributed representation of new input visual stimulus and remembered sparse distributed representations. Superposition of sparse distributed representation is used to measure similarities. Experimental results using 10,000 images in MNIST (Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology) and Fashion-MNIST data sets show that the sparse distributed representation of the proposed model efficiently keeps morphological semantic of the input visual stimuli

Extensible Hierarchical Method of Detecting Interactive Actions for Video Understanding

For video understanding, namely analyzing who did what in a video, actions along with objects are primary elements. Most studies on actions have handled recognition problems for a well‐trimmed video and focused on enhancing their classification performance. However, action detection, including localization as well as recognition, is required because, in general, actions intersect in time and space. In addition, most studies have not considered extensibility for a newly added action that has been previously trained. Therefore, proposed in this paper is an extensible hierarchical method for detecting generic actions, which combine object movements and spatial relations between two objects, and inherited actions, which are determined by the related objects through an ontology and rule based methodology. The hierarchical design of the method enables it to detect any interactive actions based on the spatial relations between two objects. The method using object information achieves an F‐measure of 90.27%. Moreover, this paper describes the extensibility of the method for a new action contained in a video from a video domain that is different from the dataset used

Particle Swarm Optimization Using Adaptive Boundary Correction for Human Activity Recognition

As a kind of personal lifelog data, activity data have been considered as one of the most compelling information to understand the user's habits and to calibrate diagnoses. In this paper, we proposed a robust algorithm to sampling rates for human activity recognition, which identifies a user's activity using accelerations from a triaxial accelerometer in a smartphone. Although a high sampling rate is required for high accuracy, it is not desirable for actual smartphone usage, battery consumption, or storage occupancy. Activity recognitions with well-known algorithms, including MLP, C4.5, or SVM, suffer from a loss of accuracy when a sampling rate of accelerometers decreases. Thus, we start from particle swarm optimization (PSO), which has relatively better tolerance to declines in sampling rates, and we propose PSO with an adaptive boundary correction (ABC) approach. PSO with ABC is tolerant of various sampling rate in that it identifies all data by adjusting the classification boundaries of each activity. The experimental results show that PSO with ABC has better tolerance to changes of sampling rates of an accelerometer than PSO without ABC and other methods. In particular, PSO with ABC is 6%, 25%, and 35% better than PSO without ABC for sitting, standing, and walking, respectively, at a sampling period of 32 seconds. PSO with ABC is the only algo-rithm that guarantees at least 80% accuracy for every activity at a sampling period of smaller than or equal to 8 seconds. © 2014 KSII.

Photobiomodulation Enhances the Angiogenic Effect of Mesenchymal Stem Cells to Mitigate Radiation-Induced Enteropathy

Radiation-induced enteropathy remains a major complication after accidental or therapeutic exposure to ionizing radiation. Recent evidence suggests that intestinal microvascular damage significantly affects the development of radiation enteropathy. Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) therapy is a promising tool to regenerate various tissues, including skin and intestine. Further, photobiomodulation (PBM), or low-level light therapy, can accelerate wound healing, especially by stimulating angiogenesis, and stem cells are particularly susceptible to PBM. Here, we explored the effect of PBM on the therapeutic potential of MSCs for the management of radiation enteropathy. In vitro, using human umbilical cord blood-derived MSCs, PBM increased proliferation and self-renewal. Intriguingly, the conditioned medium from MSCs treated with PBM attenuated irradiation-induced apoptosis and impaired tube formation in vascular endothelial cells, and these protective effects were associated with the upregulation of several angiogenic factors. In a mouse model of radiation-induced enteropathy, treatment with PBM-preconditioned MSCs alleviated mucosal destruction, improved crypt cell proliferation and epithelial barrier functions, and significantly attenuated the loss of microvascular endothelial cells in the irradiated intestinal mucosa. This treatment also significantly increased angiogenesis in the lamina propria. Together, we suggest that PBM enhances the angiogenic potential of MSCs, leading to improved therapeutic efficacy for the treatment of radiation-induced enteropathy