Lead poisoning in a 6-month-old infant: a case report

BackgroundLead is a toxic element of the environment that leads to major complications once it enters the blood stream, affecting multiple organs and systems of the body.MethodsWe present a case of a 6-month-old female infant diagnosed with lead poisoning after presenting for routine child health care. The child's mother denied that the infant had a history of exposure to lead-containing substances. After a month of calcium supplementation, the patient's blood lead level remained elevated. We then tested the blood lead level of the mother and father. The results showed that the blood lead level of the mother was 77.0 μg/L and that of the father was 36.9 μg/L. The high blood lead level of the mother attracted our attention. We found that the mother had been using an external traditional Chinese medicine, Hu Wang Fen, which contains lead. After the mother's discontinuation of use of the traditional medicine, the child was treated with symptomatic treatment and chelation therapy. Subsequently, the patient's blood lead level decreased significantly.ResultsLead toxicity can be a life-threatening problem because of its potential for severe complications. In children, there is no safe blood lead level, and the toxic effects of lead can be prevented by the awareness and avoidance of traditional Chinese medicines that may contain lead.ConclusionEven though the diagnosis of lead poisoning remains difficult in children, it must be taken into consideration by the clinician when treating a child using traditional Chinese medicines

PanoVOS: Bridging Non-panoramic and Panoramic Views with Transformer for Video Segmentation

Panoramic videos contain richer spatial information and have attracted tremendous amounts of attention due to their exceptional experience in some fields such as autonomous driving and virtual reality. However, existing datasets for video segmentation only focus on conventional planar images. To address the challenge, in this paper, we present a panoramic video dataset, PanoVOS. The dataset provides 150 videos with high video resolutions and diverse motions. To quantify the domain gap between 2D planar videos and panoramic videos, we evaluate 15 off-the-shelf video object segmentation (VOS) models on PanoVOS. Through error analysis, we found that all of them fail to tackle pixel-level content discontinues of panoramic videos. Thus, we present a Panoramic Space Consistency Transformer (PSCFormer), which can effectively utilize the semantic boundary information of the previous frame for pixel-level matching with the current frame. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with the previous SOTA models, our PSCFormer network exhibits a great advantage in terms of segmentation results under the panoramic setting. Our dataset poses new challenges in panoramic VOS and we hope that our PanoVOS can advance the development of panoramic segmentation/tracking

Boosting the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks with Global Momentum Initialization

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which attach human invisible perturbations to benign inputs. Simultaneously, adversarial examples exhibit transferability under different models, which makes practical black-box attacks feasible. However, existing methods are still incapable of achieving desired transfer attack performance. In this work, from the perspective of gradient optimization and consistency, we analyze and discover the gradient elimination phenomenon as well as the local momentum optimum dilemma. To tackle these issues, we propose Global Momentum Initialization (GI) to suppress gradient elimination and help search for the global optimum. Specifically, we perform gradient pre-convergence before the attack and carry out a global search during the pre-convergence stage. Our method can be easily combined with almost all existing transfer methods, and we improve the success rate of transfer attacks significantly by an average of 6.4% under various advanced defense mechanisms compared to state-of-the-art methods. Eventually, we achieve an attack success rate of 95.4%, fully illustrating the insecurity of existing defense mechanisms

1H NMR-Based Metabolomics Reveals Refined-Huang-Lian-Jie-Du-Decoction (BBG) as a Potential Ischemic Stroke Treatment Drug With Efficacy and a Favorable Therapeutic Window

Huang-Lian-Jie-Du-Decoction (HLJDD) is a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) used to treat ischemic stroke. However, the complexity of its chemical composition makes quality control difficult. Berberine, baicalin, and geniposide are the three main ingredients in HLJDD. Here, a formula of BBG comprised of berberine, baicalin, and geniposide, known as Refined-Huang-Lian-Jie-Du-Decoction, was investigated for its efficacy, therapeutic window, and mechanisms of action. BBG was assessed on two major types of ischemic stroke, cerebral ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury, and continuous ischemia injury, respectively. BBG showed efficacy comparable to HLJDD in the treatment of cerebral I/R injury within 5 h after injury initiation but did poorly in treating continuous ischemia injury. BBG exhibited neuroprotective effects on cerebral I/R injury by regaining the balance in energy metabolism, oxidative stress, amino acid metabolism, inflammation, and nucleic acid metabolism. These results suggested that BBG could be a good alternative to HLJDD, with high efficacy and a long therapeutic window, which shows great potential for drug development to treat stroke

Airport pavement performance evaluation of pavement fog seal based on optimized test technology

Fog seal technology is widely used in airport asphalt pavement. The research on the performance and application of fog seal material is basically at the level of modified emulsified asphalt. The fog seal test method in the existing specification has defects. Three kinds of fog seal materials with different substrates were selected in this paper. Based on the characteristics of fog seal treatment and the relevant specifications of fog seal and airport pavement. Wet Track Abrasion Test (WTAT), Cantabro test, Water seepage test, and Pendulum instrument tester pavement friction coefficient test were improved. Test the pavement performance of different types of fog seals. The results show that the mass loss of material C was less than 10% after 200 and 400 cycles of wear. The improvement effect of material C on raveling resistance and impermeability was far better than that of materials A and B. The improvement of material C on the raveling resistance of the mixture could reach 50%. The immediate improvement effect on the impermeability was nearly 100%. The skid resistance performance of the three fog seal materials decreased after treatment. The decrease in material C was more significant than in materials A and B. In constructing material C, the dose of emery should be appropriately increased. It was advisable to not be less than 0.35 kg/m2. The fog seal layer improves pavement performance. It has reference significance for using fog seal technology to treat early airport pavement diseases

3% diquafosol sodium eye drops in Chinese patients with dry eye: a phase IV study

IntroductionThe efficacy and safety of 3% diquafosol sodium eye drops in Chinese patients with dry eye in the real-world setting remains unclear.Methods3099 patients with dry eye symptoms were screened according to Asia Dry Eye Society latest recommendation. Among them, 3000 patients were enrolled for a phase IV study. We followed up with multiple clinical characteristics including corneal fluorescein staining, tear break up time, Schirmer’s tests, visual acuity, intraocular pressure, and others. The follow ups were performed at baseline, 2 weeks and 4 weeks after treatment.ResultsBased on the results of corneal fluorescein staining and tear break up time, all age and gender subgroups exhibited obvious alleviation of the symptoms among the patients with dry eye, and the data in elderly group showed the most significant alleviation. All the adverse drug reactions (ADRs, 6.17%) were recorded, among which 6% local ocular ADRs were included. Meanwhile, mild ADRs (91.8%) accounted for the most. Most of the ADRs (89.75%) got a quick and full recovery, with an average time at 15.6 days. 1.37% of patients dropped out of the study due to ADRs.DiscussionThe use of 3% diquafosol sodium eye drop is effective and safe in the treatment of dry eye, with a low incidence of ADRs showing mild symptoms. This trial was registered at Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ID: ChiCTR1900021999 (Registration Date: 19/03/2019)

Activation and overexpression of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor contribute to cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas: an immunohistochemical study

Abstract Background In vitro studies showed that the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) contributed to the development of cutaneous squamous cell carcinomas, but supporting clinical data are lacking. Methods Immunohistochemical analysis was used to detect the expression of AHR, CYP1A1, EGFR, and Ki-67 in 10 actinic keratosis (AK) cases, 10 Bowen disease (BD) cases, 20 cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) cases and 20 normal skin samples. H-scores were used to assess the immunoreactivity. Results Weak positive AHR immunoreactivity was found in all normal skin samples, while strong positive AHR immunoreactivity was found in atypical squamous proliferation (AK, BD and cSCC) cases. H-scores and the rate of strong immunostaining of the atypical squamous proliferation cases were higher than those of normal controls (p  0.05). The H-score of AHR was positively correlated with EGFR expression (r = 0.54, p < 0.01) in atypical squamous proliferation cases but was not correlated with CYP1A1 (r = − 0.17, p = 0.295) and Ki-67 (r = − 0.48, p = 0.222) expression. Conclusion AHR plays a vital role in cSCC pathogenesis. The overexpression and activation of AHR are involved in the early development of skin cancers. AHR expression correlates with EGFR expression and may influence cell proliferation. AHR is a valuable therapeutic target for skin cancers