Short-term Study of Bushen Jiangu Decoction Combined with PVP in the Treatment of Elderly Patients with Osteoporotic Thoracolumbar Vertebral Compression Fracture

To investigate the clinical effects of Bushen Jiangu Decoction combined with percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP) in the treatment of elderly patients with osteoporotic thoracolumbar vertebral compression fracture (OVCF). Seventy-four elderly patients with OVCF were enrolled in our hospital and randomized by digital table method, 37 cases each. The control group received PVP treatment, and the observation group was treated with Bushen Jiangu Decoction on the basis of PVP treatment. Cobb angle, bone mineral density, Oswestry dysfunction index questionnaire (ODI) score, and visual analogue scale (VAS) were compared before and after treatment. After treatment, the Cobb angle of the observation group was smaller than that of the control group, and the bone density was higher than that of the control group (P<0.05). The ODI score of the observation group was lower than that of the control group after treatment (P<0.05); 1 month and 3 months after treatment, the VAS score of the 6-month observation group was lower than that of the control group (P<0.05). Bushen Jiangu Decoction combined with Western medicine in the treatment of elderly patients with OVCF can restore Cobb angle, increase bone density, reduce postoperative pain and improve thoracic and lumbar spine function

Oriole: Thwarting Privacy against Trustworthy Deep Learning Models

Deep Neural Networks have achieved unprecedented success in the field of face recognition such that any individual can crawl the data of others from the Internet without their explicit permission for the purpose of training high-precision face recognition models, creating a serious violation of privacy. Recently, a well-known system named Fawkes (published in USENIX Security 2020) claimed this privacy threat can be neutralized by uploading cloaked user images instead of their original images. In this paper, we present Oriole, a system that combines the advantages of data poisoning attacks and evasion attacks, to thwart the protection offered by Fawkes, by training the attacker face recognition model with multi-cloaked images generated by Oriole. Consequently, the face recognition accuracy of the attack model is maintained and the weaknesses of Fawkes are revealed. Experimental results show that our proposed Oriole system is able to effectively interfere with the performance of the Fawkes system to achieve promising attacking results. Our ablation study highlights multiple principal factors that affect the performance of the Oriole system, including the DSSIM perturbation budget, the ratio of leaked clean user images, and the numbers of multi-cloaks for each uncloaked image. We also identify and discuss at length the vulnerabilities of Fawkes. We hope that the new methodology presented in this paper will inform the security community of a need to design more robust privacy-preserving deep learning models

Maternal Betaine Supplementation Mitigates Maternal High Fat Diet-Induced NAFLD in Offspring Mice through Gut Microbiota

Maternal betaine supplementation has been proven to alleviate non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in offspring caused by maternal high-fat diet (MHFD). The gut–liver axis plays an important role in NAFLD pathogenesis. However, whether maternal betaine supplementation can alleviate NAFLD in offspring by the gut–liver axis is unknown. C57BL/6J mice were fed with high-fat diet for 4 weeks before mating, and supplemented with 1% betaine during pregnancy and lactation. After weaning, offspring mice were fed with standard diet to 10 weeks. Maternal betaine supplementation reduced hepatic triglyceride content and alleviated hepatic steatosis in offspring mice exposed to MHFD. Furthermore, the mRNA expression of PPARα, CPT1α and FATP2 was increased and TNFα was reduced by maternal betaine supplementation. Maternal betaine intake decreased the relative abundances of Proteobateria, Desulfovibrio and Ruminococcus, but increased the relative abundances of Bacteroides and Parabacteroides. Moreover, maternal betaine intake increased the concentrations of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), including acetic acid, butyric acid and valeric acid, in the feces. Gut microbiota and SCFAs were significantly correlated with hepatic triglyceride content and expression of the above genes. Maternal betaine intake had no effect on other gut microbiota-related metabolites (bile acid and trimethylamine-n-oxide). Altogether, maternal betaine supplementation ameliorated MHFD-induced NAFLD possibly through regulating gut microbiota and SCFAs in offspring mice