149 research outputs found
Hypothermia treatment ameliorated cyclin-dependent kinase 5-mediated inflammation in ischemic stroke and improved outcomes in ischemic stroke patients
OBJECTIVES: The inflammatory response is a key mechanism of neuronal damage and loss during acute ischemic stroke. Hypothermia has shown promise as a treatment for ischemic stroke. In this study, we investigated the molecular signaling pathways in ischemic stroke after hypothermia treatment. METHODS: Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (CDK5) was overexpressed or silenced in cultured cells. Nuclear transcription factor-kB (NF-kB) activity was assessed by measurement of the luciferase reporter gene. An ischemic stroke model was established in Sprague–Dawley (SD) rats using the suture-occluded method. Animals were assigned to three groups: sham operation control, ischemic stroke, and ischemic stroke + hypothermia treatment groups. Interleukin 1b (IL-1b) levels in the culture supernatant and blood samples were assessed by ELISA. Protein expression was measured by Western blotting. RESULTS: In HEK293 cells and primary cortical neuronal cultures exposed to hypothermia, CDK5 overexpression was associated with increased IL-1b, caspase 1, and NF-kB levels. In both a murine model of stroke and in patients, increased IL-1b levels were observed after stroke, and hypothermia treatment was associated with lower IL-1b levels. Furthermore, hypothermia-treated patients showed significant improvement in neurophysiological functional outcome. CONCLUSIONS: Overall, hypothermia offers clinical benefit, most likely through its effects on the inflammatory response
Unsupervised Multi-view Pedestrian Detection
With the prosperity of the video surveillance, multiple cameras have been
applied to accurately locate pedestrians in a specific area. However, previous
methods rely on the human-labeled annotations in every video frame and camera
view, leading to heavier burden than necessary camera calibration and
synchronization. Therefore, we propose in this paper an Unsupervised Multi-view
Pedestrian Detection approach (UMPD) to eliminate the need of annotations to
learn a multi-view pedestrian detector via 2D-3D mapping. 1) Firstly,
Semantic-aware Iterative Segmentation (SIS) is proposed to extract unsupervised
representations of multi-view images, which are converted into 2D pedestrian
masks as pseudo labels, via our proposed iterative PCA and zero-shot semantic
classes from vision-language models. 2) Secondly, we propose Geometry-aware
Volume-based Detector (GVD) to end-to-end encode multi-view 2D images into a 3D
volume to predict voxel-wise density and color via 2D-to-3D geometric
projection, trained by 3D-to-2D rendering losses with SIS pseudo labels. 3)
Thirdly, for better detection results, i.e., the 3D density projected on
Birds-Eye-View from GVD, we propose Vertical-aware BEV Regularization (VBR) to
constraint them to be vertical like the natural pedestrian poses. Extensive
experiments on popular multi-view pedestrian detection benchmarks Wildtrack,
Terrace, and MultiviewX, show that our proposed UMPD approach, as the first
fully-unsupervised method to our best knowledge, performs competitively to the
previous state-of-the-art supervised techniques. Code will be available
MUI-TARE: Multi-Agent Cooperative Exploration with Unknown Initial Position
Multi-agent exploration of a bounded 3D environment with unknown initial
positions of agents is a challenging problem. It requires quickly exploring the
environments as well as robustly merging the sub-maps built by the agents. We
take the view that the existing approaches are either aggressive or
conservative: Aggressive strategies merge two sub-maps built by different
agents together when overlap is detected, which can lead to incorrect merging
due to the false-positive detection of the overlap and is thus not robust.
Conservative strategies direct one agent to revisit an excessive amount of the
historical trajectory of another agent for verification before merging, which
can lower the exploration efficiency due to the repeated exploration of the
same space. To intelligently balance the robustness of sub-map merging and
exploration efficiency, we develop a new approach for lidar-based multi-agent
exploration, which can direct one agent to repeat another agent's trajectory in
an \emph{adaptive} manner based on the quality indicator of the sub-map merging
process. Additionally, our approach extends the recent single-agent
hierarchical exploration strategy to multiple agents in a \emph{cooperative}
manner by planning for agents with merged sub-maps together to further improve
exploration efficiency. Our experiments show that our approach is up to 50\%
more efficient than the baselines on average while merging sub-maps robustly.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, Submitted to IEEE RA
Is the reputation of Eucalyptus plantations for using more water than Pinus plantations justified?
The effect of Eucalyptus plantations on water balance is thought to be more severe than for commercial alternatives such as Pinus species. Although this perception is firmly entrenched, even in the scientific community, only four direct comparisons of the effect on the water balance of a Eucalyptus species and a commercial alternative have been published. One of these, from South Africa, showed that Eucalyptus grandis caused a larger and more rapid reduction in streamflow than Pinus patula. The other three, one in South Australia and two in Chile, did not find any significant difference between the annual evapotranspiration of E. globulus and P. radiata after canopy closure. While direct comparisons are few, there are at least 57 published estimates of annual evapotranspiration of either the Eucalyptus or Pinus species. This paper presents a meta-analysis of these published data. Zhang et al. (2004) fitted a relationship between the vegetation evaporation efficiency and the climate wetness index to published data from catchment studies and proposed this approach for comparing land uses. We fitted this model to the published data for Eucalyptus and Pinus and found that the single parameter of this model did not differ significantly between the two genera (p = 0.48). This was also the case for all parameters of an exponential relationship between evapotranspiration and rainfall (p = 0.589) and a linear relationship between the vegetation evaporation index and rainfall (p = 0.155). These results provide strong evidence that, for a given climate wetness index, the two genera have similar annual water use. The residuals compared to the model of Zhang et al. (2004) were significantly correlated with soil depth for Eucalyptus, but this was not the case for Pinus. For Eucalyptus, the model overestimates the vegetation evaporation efficiency on deep soils and underestimates the vegetation evaporation efficiency on shallow soils
Is the reputation of Eucalyptus plantations for using more water than Pinus plantations justified?
The effect of Eucalyptus plantations on water balance is thought to be more severe than for commercial alternatives such as Pinus species. Although this perception is firmly entrenched, even in the scientific community, only four direct comparisons of the effect on the water balance of a Eucalyptus species and a commercial alternative have been published. One of these, from South Africa, showed that Eucalyptus grandis caused a larger and more rapid reduction in streamflow than Pinus patula. The other three, one in South Australia and two in Chile, did not find any significant difference between the annual evapotranspiration of E. globulus and P. radiata after canopy closure. While direct comparisons are few, there are at least 57 published estimates of annual evapotranspiration of either a Eucalyptus or Pinus species. This paper presents a meta-analysis of these published data. Zhang et al. (2004) fitted a relationship between the crop factor and the climate wetness index to published data from catchment studies and proposed this approach for comparing land uses. We fitted the same model to the published data for Eucalyptus and Pinus and found that the single parameter of this model did not differ significantly between the two genera (p=0.48). This implies that for a given climate wetness index the two genera have similar annual water use. The residuals compared to this model were significantly correlated with soil depth for Eucalyptus, but this was not the case for Pinus. For Eucalyptus the model overestimates the crop factor on deep soils and underestimates the crop factor on shallow soils.</p
Accelerating In-Browser Deep Learning Inference on Diverse Edge Clients through Just-in-Time Kernel Optimizations
Web applications are increasingly becoming the primary platform for AI
service delivery, making in-browser deep learning (DL) inference more
prominent. However, current in-browser inference systems fail to effectively
utilize advanced web programming techniques and customize kernels for various
client devices, leading to suboptimal performance.
To address the issues, this paper presents the first in-browser inference
system, nn-JIT.web, which enables just-in-time (JIT) auto-generation of
optimized kernels for both CPUs and GPUs during inference. The system achieves
this by using two novel web programming techniques that can significantly
reduce kernel generation time, compared to other tensor compilers such as TVM,
while maintaining or even improving performance. The first technique,
Tensor-Web Compiling Co-Design, lowers compiling costs by unifying tensor and
web compiling and eliminating redundant and ineffective compiling passes. The
second technique, Web-Specific Lite Kernel Optimization Space Design, reduces
kernel tuning costs by focusing on web programming requirements and efficient
hardware resource utilization, limiting the optimization space to only dozens.
nn-JIT.web is evaluated for modern transformer models on a range of client
devices, including the mainstream CPUs and GPUs from ARM, Intel, AMD and
Nvidia. Results show that nn-JIT.web can achieve up to 8.2x faster within 30
seconds compared to the baselines across various models
Stratification of risk based on immune signatures and prediction of the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors in prostate cancer
Prostate adenocarcinoma (PRAD) is a major threat to male health worldwide with a
high mortality rate. New therapeutic strategies for the treatment of this
malignant disease are of tremendous significance. Much attention has been paid to
the involvement of immune cells in the prevention and treatment of cancer as well
as how their regulatory systems contribute to effective cancer treatment. In this
study, we constructed prognostic immune profiles based on The Cancer Genome Atlas
(TCGA)-PRAD data sets and tested their predictive power on total and internal
data sets. Then, we looked at how the lymphocyte of tumor invasion varied between
the high-risk group and the low-risk group. Five immune-related genes made up the
immune marker, which was an independent predictive factor in patients with PRAD.
Patients in the low-risk score group had a higher rate of overall survival and a
stronger infiltration of immune cells in the tumor microenvironment, which was
highly related to clinical outcomes but required prospective validation
Four Simple Biomimetic Mineralization Methods to Improve the Thermostability and Immunogenicity of Virus-like Particles as a Vaccine against Foot-and-Mouth Disease.
peer reviewedThe need for a cold chain system during storage and transport substantially increases the cost of vaccines. Virus-like particles (VLPs) are among the best countermeasures against foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV). However, VLPs are composed of pure proteins, and thus, are susceptible to heat. To address this problem, four simple biomimetic mineralization methods with the use of calcium phosphate were developed to improve heat tolerance via biomineralization. The results showed that biomineralization can significantly improve the heat resistance of VLPs. The biomineralized VLPs can be stored at low as 25 °C for eight days, and 37 °C for four days. Animal experiments showed that biomineralization had no effect on the immunogenicity of VLPs or the expression of specific antibodies (Abs) and neutralizing Abs. Even after heat treatment at 37 °C for four days, the biomineralized VLPs remained immunogenic and produced highly specific and neutralizing Abs with a high rate of protection. These results suggest that these biomineralization approaches can promote the thermal stability of VLPs against and significantly reduce dependence on cold storage and delivery systems
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