682 research outputs found
Study of the adsorption of Co(II) on the chitosan-hydroxyapatite
The adsorption of cobalt ions (Co2+) from aqueous solution onto chitosan-hydroxyapatite composite is investigated in this study. The effects of adsorption time, initial concentration, temperature, and pH are studied in details. Kinetics and thermodynamics of the adsorption of Co2+ onto the chitosan-hydroxyapatite are also investigated and the adsorption kinetics is found to follow the pseudo-second-order model with an activation energy (Ea) of 10.73 kJ/mol. Thermodynamic studies indicates that the adsorption follows the Langmuir adsorption equation. The value of entropy change (∆Sө) and enthalpy change (∆Hө) are found to be 83.50 and 18.09 kJ/mol, respectively. The Gibbs free energy change (∆Gө) is found to be negative at all fives temperatures, demonstrating that the adsorption process is spontaneous and endothermic.
Drug release rate and anti-microbial effect of controlled-diffusion biopolymer membranes
In this study, a series of fibrous membranes made from cellulose acetate (CA) and polyester urethane (PEU) by co-electrospining or blend-electrospining were evaluated for drug release kinetics, in vitro anti-microbial activity and in vivo would healing performance when used as wound dressings. To stop common clinical infections, an antibacterial agent, Polyhexamethylene Biguanide (PHMB) was incorporated into e-spun fibres. The presence of CA in the wound healing membrane was found to improve hydrophilicity and permeability to air and moisture. The in vivo tests indicated that the addition of PHMB and CA considerably improved the wound healing efficiency. CA fibres became slightly swollen upon contacting with the wound exudates. It can not only speed up the liquid evaporation but also create a moisture environment for wound recovery. The drug release dynamics of membranes was controlled by the structure of membranes and component rations within membranes. The lower ration of CA:PEU retained the sound mechanical properties of membranes, and also reduced the boost release effectively and slowed down diffusion of antibacterial agent during in vitro tests. The controlled-diffusion membranes exert long-term anti-infective effect
Noise-resilient approach for deep tomographic imaging
We propose a noise-resilient deep reconstruction algorithm for X-ray
tomography. Our approach shows strong noise resilience without obtaining noisy
training examples. The advantages of our framework may further enable
low-photon tomographic imaging.Comment: 2022 CLEO (the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics) conference
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Contrastive Transformer Learning with Proximity Data Generation for Text-Based Person Search
Given a descriptive text query, text-based person search (TBPS) aims to
retrieve the best-matched target person from an image gallery. Such a
cross-modal retrieval task is quite challenging due to significant modality
gap, fine-grained differences and insufficiency of annotated data. To better
align the two modalities, most existing works focus on introducing
sophisticated network structures and auxiliary tasks, which are complex and
hard to implement. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective dual
Transformer model for text-based person search. By exploiting a hardness-aware
contrastive learning strategy, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance
without any special design for local feature alignment or side information.
Moreover, we propose a proximity data generation (PDG) module to automatically
produce more diverse data for cross-modal training. The PDG module first
introduces an automatic generation algorithm based on a text-to-image diffusion
model, which generates new text-image pair samples in the proximity space of
original ones. Then it combines approximate text generation and feature-level
mixup during training to further strengthen the data diversity. The PDG module
can largely guarantee the reasonability of the generated samples that are
directly used for training without any human inspection for noise rejection. It
improves the performance of our model significantly, providing a feasible
solution to the data insufficiency problem faced by such fine-grained
visual-linguistic tasks. Extensive experiments on two popular datasets of the
TBPS task (i.e., CUHK-PEDES and ICFG-PEDES) show that the proposed approach
outperforms state-of-the-art approaches evidently, e.g., improving by 3.88%,
4.02%, 2.92% in terms of Top1, Top5, Top10 on CUHK-PEDES. The codes will be
available at https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/PersonSearch-CTLGComment: Accepted by IEEE T-CSV
Tissue factor pathway inhibitor-2 induced hepatocellular carcinoma cell differentiation
AbstractTo investigate the effect of over-expression of tissue factor pathway inhibitor-2 (TFPI-2) on the differentiation of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells (Hep3B and HepG2). The TFPI-2 recombinant adenovirus (pAd-TFPI-2) was constructed using the pAdeasy-1 vector system. Transfected by pAd-TFPI-2, the cell proliferation of HCC cells was evaluated by CCK-8 assay, flow cytometry was used to detect cell apoptosis and CD133 expression. Real-time PCR and Western blot were used to detect the expression levels of markers of hepatocellular cancer stem cells (CSC) and hepatocytes. The over-expression of TFPI-2 significantly suppressed cell proliferation, induced apoptosis, and dramatically decreased the percentage of CD133 cells, which was considered as CSC in HCC. Real-time PCR and Western blot showed that the expression of markers of CSC in Hep3BcellsandHepG2 cells infected with pAd-TFPI-2 was markedly lower than those of the control group (P<0.05), while the expression of markers of hepatocytes was significantly increased (P<0.05). Hence, TFPI-2 could induce the differentiation of hepatocellular carcinoma cells into hepatocytes, and is expected to serve as a novel way for the treatment of HCC
Polyneuropathy as Novel Initial Manifestation in a Case of “Nonsecretory” POEMS Syndrome with Sjögren’s Syndrome
POEMS syndrome (polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, monoclonal gammopathy, and skin changes) is a paraneoplastic syndrome driven by plasma cell dyscrasias. We report a patient with novel initial manifestation of polyneuropathy, which was considered due to Sjögren’s syndrome but with poor response to methylprednisolone (120 mg/d) and intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIg). Further investigation by imaging tests and following biopsy eventually confirmed the diagnosis of POEMS syndrome secondary to solitary plasmocytoma. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of POEMS syndrome with Sjögren’s syndrome occurring in the absence of a peripheral monoclonal gammopathy, highlighting the diagnostic challenges posed by this disease and reviewing the diagnostic role of (18) F-FDG PET/CT in POEMS syndrome
Electron correlations and superconductivity in LaNiO under pressure tuning
Motivated by the recent discovery of superconductivity in LaNiO
under pressure, we discuss the basic ingredients of a model that captures its
microscopic physics under pressure tuning. We anchor our description in terms
of the spectroscopic evidence of strong correlations in this system. In a
bilayer Hubbard model including the Ni and orbitals, we
show the ground state of the model crosses over from a low-spin state
to a high-spin state. In the high-spin state, the two and the
bonding orbitals are all close to half-filling, which promotes a strong
orbital selectivity in a broad crossover regime of the phase diagram pertinent
to the system. Based on these results, we construct an effective multiorbital
- model to describe the superconductivity of the system, and find the
leading pairing channel to be an intraorbital spin singlet with a competition
between the extended -wave and symmetries. Our results
highlight the role of strong multiorbital correlation effects in driving the
superconductivity of LaNiO.Comment: 5.5+4 pages, 4+3 figures, 2 tables, updated version with supplemental
materia
Characterization of protein-protein interactions between the nucleocapsid protein and membrane protein of the avian infectious bronchitis virus
Avian infectious bronchitis virus (IBV) is one of the major viral respiratory diseases of chickens. Better understanding of the molecular mechanism of viral pathogenesis may contribute significantly to the development of prophylactic, therapeutic and diagnostic reagents as well as help in infection control. Avian IBV belongs to the Coronaviridaes and is similar to the other known coronaviruses. Previous studies have indicated that protein–protein interactions between nucleocapsid (N) and the membrane (M) proteins in coronavirus are related to coronavirus viral assembly. However, cases of IBV are seldom reported. In this study, yeast two-hybrid and co-immunoprecipitation techniques were applied to investigate possible interactions between IBV N and M proteins. We found that interaction of the N and M proteins took place in vivo and the residues 168 – 225 of the M protein and the residues 150 - 210 of the N protein were determined to be involved in their interaction. These results may provide some useful information on the molecular mechanism of IBV’s N and M proteins, which will facilitate therapeutic strategies aiming at the disruption of the association between membrane and nucleocapsid proteins and indicate a new drug target for IBV.Key words: Co-immunoprecipitation, membrane protein, nucleocapsid protein, protein-protein interaction, yeast two-hybrid
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