Role of Osteopontin in Spinal Pathologies - a systematic review

Objective: Worldwide, spinal diseases are an increasingly prevalent health problem. Deeper knowledge about the pathophysiology of this complex group of diseases could improve current prevention strategies and treatment options. Osteopontin (OPN) is a multifunctional protein with great interest among the scientific community. The aim of this revision is to appraise the role of osteopontin and its expression in different spinal pathologies. Methods: A systematic literature review search was conducted on PubMed and Scopus databases for published studies until 6th October 2020, concerning the role of osteopontin in spinal pathologies. Results: Among the 674 studies retrieved, 79 were selected for further analysis. A correlation between the expression of OPN and the presence or clinical severity of 8 different spinal pathologies of diverse etiologies was found and analized in this review. Conclusion: OPN appears to have a broad spectrum of functions in spinal pathologies, mainly as an inflammatory cytokine or as a bone metabolism regulator. In the future, OPN might be a potential target for development of novel therapies or work as a prognostic tool in the onset and progression of spinal diseases.Worldwide, spinal diseases are an increasingly prevalent health problem. Deeper knowledge about the pathophysiology of this complex group of diseases could improve current prevention strategies and treatment options. Osteopontin (OPN) is a multifunctional protein with great interest among the scientific community as it possesses diversified functions which can be therapeutically targeted. In this research we appraised the role of osteopontin and its expression in different spinal pathologies. Thus, a systematic literature review search for published studies concerning the role of osteopontin in spinal pathologies was conducted. An interesting correlation between the expression of OPN and the presence or clinical severity of 8 different spinal pathologies of diverse etiologies was found and analyzed in this review, demonstrating the involvement of this molecule in these diseases. Its levels correlated with the course and outcome in theses diseases. OPN appears to have a broad spectrum of functions in spinal pathologies, including inflammatory and immune response, neural response to injury, abnormal tissue mineralization, osteogenic differentiation, bone metabolism, organ fibrosis and wound healing. Therefore, in the future, OPN might be a potential target for development of novel therapies or work as a prognostic tool in the onset and progression of spinal diseases

Practical Block-wise Neural Network Architecture Generation

Convolutional neural networks have gained a remarkable success in computer vision. However, most usable network architectures are hand-crafted and usually require expertise and elaborate design. In this paper, we provide a block-wise network generation pipeline called BlockQNN which automatically builds high-performance networks using the Q-Learning paradigm with epsilon-greedy exploration strategy. The optimal network block is constructed by the learning agent which is trained sequentially to choose component layers. We stack the block to construct the whole auto-generated network. To accelerate the generation process, we also propose a distributed asynchronous framework and an early stop strategy. The block-wise generation brings unique advantages: (1) it performs competitive results in comparison to the hand-crafted state-of-the-art networks on image classification, additionally, the best network generated by BlockQNN achieves 3.54% top-1 error rate on CIFAR-10 which beats all existing auto-generate networks. (2) in the meanwhile, it offers tremendous reduction of the search space in designing networks which only spends 3 days with 32 GPUs, and (3) moreover, it has strong generalizability that the network built on CIFAR also performs well on a larger-scale ImageNet dataset.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 201