Rectal hemangiopericytoma in a 37-year-old woman: a case report and review of the literature

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Introduction</p> <p>Hemangiopericytoma is an uncommon perivascular tumor. Rectal Hemangiopericytomas are extremely rare. To the best of our knowledge, only two cases have been reported in the literature.</p> <p>Case presentation</p> <p>We report the case of a 37-year-old Asian woman with an Hemangiopericytoma rising from the anterior wall of her rectum. Abdominopelvic computed tomography showed a 7.4 cm solid mass between her uterus and her rectum. Heterogeneous gradual enhancement after intravenous injection of contrast material was noted with several tortuous vessels around her tumor. Intra-operative findings indicated a capsule and well-circumscribed solid tumor connecting with the anterior wall of her rectum by a small pedicle. With immunohistochemical stains, her tumor cells reacted positive for Bcl-2, CD34, and ki67 and negative for CD10, CD117, S100, and Desmin. Follow-up computed tomography scans have shown no tumor recurrence or metastasis signs.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Rectal Hemangiopericytoma is a rare tumor with non-specific imaging findings. Hemangiopericytomas should be included in the differential list when a massive tumor with heterogeneously gradual enhancement in the regions of the rectum is encountered.</p

NeuralPCI: Spatio-temporal Neural Field for 3D Point Cloud Multi-frame Non-linear Interpolation

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in focus on the interpolation task of computer vision. Despite the tremendous advancement of video interpolation, point cloud interpolation remains insufficiently explored. Meanwhile, the existence of numerous nonlinear large motions in real-world scenarios makes the point cloud interpolation task more challenging. In light of these issues, we present NeuralPCI: an end-to-end 4D spatio-temporal Neural field for 3D Point Cloud Interpolation, which implicitly integrates multi-frame information to handle nonlinear large motions for both indoor and outdoor scenarios. Furthermore, we construct a new multi-frame point cloud interpolation dataset called NL-Drive for large nonlinear motions in autonomous driving scenes to better demonstrate the superiority of our method. Ultimately, NeuralPCI achieves state-of-the-art performance on both DHB (Dynamic Human Bodies) and NL-Drive datasets. Beyond the interpolation task, our method can be naturally extended to point cloud extrapolation, morphing, and auto-labeling, which indicates its substantial potential in other domains. Codes are available at https://github.com/ispc-lab/NeuralPCI.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2023. Project Page: https://dyfcalid.github.io/NeuralPC

Effect of Scrophularia ningpoensis extract on diabetes in rats

Purpose: To investigate the effect of Scrophularia ningpoensis extract (SNE) on streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats.Methods: SNE was obtained by steeping the dried Scrophularia ningpoensis in water at 60 oC three times, each for 1 h, before first drying in an oven at 100 oC and then freeze-drying the last extract thus obtained. Diabetic rats were prepared by a single intraperitoneal injection of a freshly prepared solution of streptozotocin (50 mg/kg). The rats were randomly divided into 6 groups of ten rats each: negative control group, control group, reference group (glibenclamide1 mg/kgbody weight) as well as SNE groups, (50, 100 and 200 mg/kg). Blood glucose and plasma insulin levels were evaluated in order to determine antihyperglycemic effect. Oxidative stress was evaluated in liver and kidney by antioxidant markers, viz, lipid peroxidation (LPO), superoxide dismutase (SOD), reduced glutathione (GSH), glutathione peroxidase (GPx) and catalase (CAT); blood serum levels of creatinine and urea were determined in both diabetic control and treated rats.Results: Compared with diabetic rats, oral administration of SNE at a concentration of 200 mg/kg daily for 30 days showed a significant decrease in fasting blood glucose to 120.21 ± 3.37 mg/dL (p &lt; 0.05) and increased insulin level to 13.31 ± 0.67 uU/mL (p &lt; 0.05). Furthermore, it significantly reduced biochemical parameters (serum creatinine, 0.86 ± 0.24 mg/dL, p &lt; 0.05) and serum urea (41.86 ± 1.59 mg/dL, p &lt; 0.05).Conclusion: The results suggest that SNE may effectively normalize impaired antioxidant status in streptozotocin-induced diabetes in a dose-dependent manner. SNE has a protective effect against lipid peroxidation by scavenging free radicals and is thus capable of reducing the risk of diabetic complications.Keywords: Scrophularia ningpoensis, Diabetic, Antihyperglycemic, Antioxidant Oxidative stress, Fasting blood glucos

Urban Radiance Field Representation with Deformable Neural Mesh Primitives

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have achieved great success in the past few years. However, most current methods still require intensive resources due to ray marching-based rendering. To construct urban-level radiance fields efficiently, we design Deformable Neural Mesh Primitive~(DNMP), and propose to parameterize the entire scene with such primitives. The DNMP is a flexible and compact neural variant of classic mesh representation, which enjoys both the efficiency of rasterization-based rendering and the powerful neural representation capability for photo-realistic image synthesis. Specifically, a DNMP consists of a set of connected deformable mesh vertices with paired vertex features to parameterize the geometry and radiance information of a local area. To constrain the degree of freedom for optimization and lower the storage budgets, we enforce the shape of each primitive to be decoded from a relatively low-dimensional latent space. The rendering colors are decoded from the vertex features (interpolated with rasterization) by a view-dependent MLP. The DNMP provides a new paradigm for urban-level scene representation with appealing properties: $(1)$ High-quality rendering. Our method achieves leading performance for novel view synthesis in urban scenarios. $(2)$ Low computational costs. Our representation enables fast rendering (2.07ms/1k pixels) and low peak memory usage (110MB/1k pixels). We also present a lightweight version that can run 33$\times$ faster than vanilla NeRFs, and comparable to the highly-optimized Instant-NGP (0.61 vs 0.71ms/1k pixels). Project page: \href{https://dnmp.github.io/}{https://dnmp.github.io/}.Comment: Accepted to ICCV202

Traditional Chinese Medicine Zheng in the Era of Evidence-Based Medicine: A Literature Analysis

Zheng, which is also called a syndrome or pattern, is the basic unit and a key concept of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) theory. Zheng can be considered a further stratification of patients when it is integrated with biomedical diagnoses in clinical practice to achieve higher efficacies. In an era of evidence-based medicine, confronted with the vast and increasing volume of TCM data, there is an urgent need to explore these resources effectively using techniques of knowledge discovery in databases. The application of effective data mining in the analysis of multiple extensively integrated databases can supply new information about TCM Zheng research. In this paper, we screened the published literature on TCM Zheng-related studies in the SinoMed and PubMed databases with a novel data mining approach to obtain an overview of the Zheng research landscape in the hope of contributing to a better understanding of TCM Zheng in the era of evidence-based medicine. In our results, contrast was found in Zheng in different studies, and several determinants of Zheng were identified. The data described in this paper can be used to assess Zheng research studies based on the title and certain characteristics of the abstract. These findings will benefit modern TCM Zheng-related studies and guide future Zheng study efforts

Molecular Dynamic Simulation to Explore the Molecular Basis of Btk-PH Domain Interaction with Ins(1,3,4,5)P4

Bruton’s tyrosine kinase contains a pleckstrin homology domain, and it specifically binds inositol 1,3,4,5-tetrakisphosphate (Ins(1,3,4,5)P4), which is involved in the maturation of B cells. In this paper, we studied 12 systems including the wild type and 11 mutants, K12R, S14F, K19E, R28C/H, E41K, L11P, F25S, Y40N, and K12R-R28C/H, to investigate any change in the ligand binding site of each mutant. Molecular dynamics simulations combined with the method of molecular mechanics/Poisson-Boltzmann solvent-accessible surface area have been applied to the twelve systems, and reasonable mutant structures and their binding free energies have been obtained as criteria in the final classification. As a result, five structures, K12R, K19E, R28C/H, and E41K mutants, were classified as “functional mutations,” whereas L11P, S14F, F25S, and Y40N were grouped into “folding mutations.” This rigorous study of the binding affinity of each of the mutants and their classification provides some new insights into the biological function of the Btk-PH domain and related mutation-causing diseases

Anatomic and functional evaluation of the lymphatics and lymph nodes in diagnosis of lymphatic circulation disorders with contrast magnetic resonance lymphangiography

ObjectivesOwing to its structural and anatomic characteristics, imaging of the lymphatic system has been difficult. The conventional diagnostic method of radionuclide-based imaging has the disadvantage of poor resolution. Recent work has shown that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can depict lymphatic channels in patients with lymphedema. This study evaluated the anatomic and functional images of contrast MR lymphangiography in the diagnosis of limb lymphatic circulation disorders.MethodsThe study enrolled 27 patients with primary lymphedema. Four patients had bilateral disease, and 23 had unilateral disease. Contrast-enhanced lymphangiography was performed with a 3.0-T MR unit after the intracutaneous injection of gadobenate dimeglumine into the interdigital webs of the dorsal foot. The kinetics of enhanced lymph flow within the lymphatic system were calculated using the formula [speed in cm = total length of visualized lymph vessel in cm/inspection time in minutes] and by comparing dynamic nodal enhancement and time-signal intensity curves between edematous and contralateral limbs. Morphologic abnormalities of the lymphatic system were also evaluated.ResultsExamination of the MRIs after injection of the contrast agent showed enhanced lymphatic channels consistently visualized in all clinical lymphedematous limbs and in five contralateral limbs of unilateral lymphedema patients. The speed of flow within the lymphatics of lymphedematous limbs was 0.3 to 1.48 cm/min. Contrast enhancement in inguinal nodes of edematous limbs was significantly less than that of contralateral limbs (P < .01). Dynamic measurement of contrast enhancement showed a remarkable lowering of peak time (P < .01) and peak enhancement (P < .01), and a delay in outflow in inguinal nodes of affected limbs compared with that of control limbs. Postcontrast MRI also depicted varied distribution patterns of lymphatics and abnormal lymph flow pathways within lymph nodes in the limbs with lymphatic circulation disorders.ConclusionContrast MR lymphangiography with gadobenate dimeglumine is capable of visualizing the precise anatomy of lymphatic vessels and lymph nodes in lymphedematous limbs. It also provides information concerning the functional status of lymph flow transport in the lymphatic vessels and lymph nodes of these limbs

Identification of H-2d Restricted T Cell Epitope of Foot-and-mouth Disease Virus Structural Protein VP1

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is a highly contagious and devastating disease affecting livestock that causes significant financial losses. Therefore, safer and more effective vaccines are required against Foot-and-mouth disease virus(FMDV). The purpose of this study is to screen and identify an H-2d restricted T cell epitope from the virus structural protein VP1, which is present with FMD. We therefore provide a method and basis for studying a specific FMDV T cell epitope.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>A codon-optimized expression method was adopted for effective expression of VP1 protein in colon bacillus. We used foot-and-mouth disease standard positive serum was used for Western blot detection of its immunogenicity. The VP1 protein was used for immunizing BALB/c mice, and spleen lymphocytes were isolated. Then, a common in vitro training stimulus was conducted for potential H-2Dd, H-2Kd and H-2Ld restricted T cell epitope on VP1 proteins that were predicted and synthesized by using a bioinformatics method. The H-2Kd restricted T cell epitope pK1 (AYHKGPFTRL) and the H-2Dd restricted T cell epitope pD7 (GFIMDRFVKI) were identified using lymphocyte proliferation assays and IFN-γ ELISPOT experiments.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The results of this study lay foundation for studying the FMDV immune process, vaccine development, among other things. These results also showed that, to identify viral T cell epitopes, the combined application of bioinformatics and molecular biology methods is effective.</p