Consistency Regularization for Generalizable Source-free Domain Adaptation

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a well-trained source model to an unlabelled target domain without accessing the source dataset, making it applicable in a variety of real-world scenarios. Existing SFDA methods ONLY assess their adapted models on the target training set, neglecting the data from unseen but identically distributed testing sets. This oversight leads to overfitting issues and constrains the model's generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a consistency regularization framework to develop a more generalizable SFDA method, which simultaneously boosts model performance on both target training and testing datasets. Our method leverages soft pseudo-labels generated from weakly augmented images to supervise strongly augmented images, facilitating the model training process and enhancing the generalization ability of the adapted model. To leverage more potentially useful supervision, we present a sampling-based pseudo-label selection strategy, taking samples with severer domain shift into consideration. Moreover, global-oriented calibration methods are introduced to exploit global class distribution and feature cluster information, further improving the adaptation process. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several SFDA benchmarks, and exhibits robustness on unseen testing datasets.Comment: Accepted by ICCV 2023 worksho

OrdinalCLIP: Learning Rank Prompts for Language-Guided Ordinal Regression

This paper presents a language-powered paradigm for ordinal regression. Existing methods usually treat each rank as a category and employ a set of weights to learn these concepts. These methods are easy to overfit and usually attain unsatisfactory performance as the learned concepts are mainly derived from the training set. Recent large pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have shown impressive performance on various visual tasks. In this paper, we propose to learn the rank concepts from the rich semantic CLIP latent space. Specifically, we reformulate this task as an image-language matching problem with a contrastive objective, which regards labels as text and obtains a language prototype from a text encoder for each rank. While prompt engineering for CLIP is extremely time-consuming, we propose OrdinalCLIP, a differentiable prompting method for adapting CLIP for ordinal regression. OrdinalCLIP consists of learnable context tokens and learnable rank embeddings; The learnable rank embeddings are constructed by explicitly modeling numerical continuity, resulting in well-ordered, compact language prototypes in the CLIP space. Once learned, we can only save the language prototypes and discard the huge language model, resulting in zero additional computational overhead compared with the linear head counterpart. Experimental results show that our paradigm achieves competitive performance in general ordinal regression tasks, and gains improvements in few-shot and distribution shift settings for age estimation. The code is available at https://github.com/xk-huang/OrdinalCLIP.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS2022. Code is available at https://github.com/xk-huang/OrdinalCLI

NSUN2‐Mediated m5C Methylation and METTL3/METTL14‐Mediated m6A Methylation Cooperatively Enhance p21 Translation

N6‐methyladenosine (m6A) and m5C methylation are two major types of RNA methylation, but the impact of joint modifications on the same mRNA is unknown. Here, we show that in p21 3′UTR, NSUN2 catalyzes m5C modification and METTL3/METTL14 catalyzes m6A modification. Interestingly, methylation at m6A by METTL3/METTL14 facilitates the methylation of m5C by NSUN2, and vice versa. NSUN2‐mediated m5C and METTL3/METTL14‐mediated m6A methylation synergistically enhance p21 expression at the translational level, leading to elevated expression of p21 in oxidative stress‐induced cellular senescence. Our findings on p21 mRNA methylation and expression reveal that joint m6A and m5C modification of the same RNA may influence each other, coordinately affecting protein expression patterns. J. Cell. Biochem. 118: 2587–2598, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.In p21 3’UTR,NSUN2 catalyzes m5C modification and METTL3/METTL14 catalyzes m6A modification. Methylation at m6A by METTL3/METTL14 facilitates the methylation of m5C by NSUN2, and vice versa. NSUN2‐mediated m5C and METTL3/METTL14‐mediated m6A methylation synergistically enhance p21 expression at the translational level, leading to elevated expression of p21 in oxidative stress‐induced cellular senescence.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137760/1/jcb25957.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137760/2/jcb25957_am.pd

Inhibitory Effects of Various Ratios of Polysaccharides/Alkaloids from Rhizome of Coptis chinensis Franch on α-Glucosidase

Purpose: To investigate the inhibitory effects of various ratios of polysaccharides/ alkaloids from the rhizome of Coptis chinensis Franch (RCC) on α-glucosidase.Methods: The polysaccharides (PSD) and alkaloids (ALK) from RCC were prepared using the water extraction and alcohol precipitation method and Reinecke’s salt precipitation method, respectively. Subsequently, the α glucosidase inhibitory effects of PSD, ALK, and PSD/ALK at various ratios were evaluated spectrophotometrically in vitro.Results: With a half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) value of 171.67 μg/mL, ALK showed higher α-glucosidase inhibitory activity than PSD (IC50 = 296.89 μg/mL). In addition, the polysaccharides/alkaloids (PSD/ALK) at the ratio of 3:1 exhibited stronger α-glucosidase inhibitory activity (IC50 = 160.9 μg/mL) than PSD, ALK and PSD/ALK at ratios of 1:3 (IC50 = 394.78 μg/mL), 1:2 (IC50 = 185.18 μg/mL), 1:1 (IC50 = 350.51 μg/mL), and 2:1 (IC50 = 229.16 μg/mL).Conclusion: The results obtained suggest that PSD/ALK (3:1) possesses the strongest α-glucosidase inhibitory effect and may be considered as a candidate agent in future anti-diabetes drug development.Keywords: Coptis chinensis, Polysaccharides, Alkaloids, α-Glucosidase, Antidiabeti

Quality evaluation of cortex berberidis from different geographical origins by simultaneous high performance liquid chromatography combined with statistical methods

Purpose: To develop an effective method for evaluating the quality of Cortex berberidis from different geographical origins.Methods: A simple, precise and accurate high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) method was first developed for simultaneous quantification of four active alkaloids (magnoflorine, jatrorrhizine, palmatine, and berberine) in Cortex berberidis obtained from Qinghai, Tibet and Sichuan Provinces of China. Method validation was performed in terms of precision, repeatability, stability, accuracy, and linearity. Besides, partial least squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) were applied to study the quality variations of Cortex berberidis from various geographical origins.Results: The proposed HPLC method showed good linearity, precision, repeatability, and accuracy. The four alkaloids were detected in all samples of Cortex berberidis. Among them, magnoflorine (36.46 - 87.30 mg/g) consistently showed the highest amounts in all the samples, followed by berberine (16.00 - 37.50 mg/g). The content varied in the range of 0.66 - 4.57 mg/g for palmatine and 1.53 - 16.26 mg/g for jatrorrhizine, respectively. The total content of the four alkaloids ranged from 67.62 to 114.79 mg/g. Moreover, the results obtained by the PLS-DA and ANOVA showed that magnoflorine level and the total content of these four alkaloids in Qinghai and Tibet samples were significantly higher (p < 0.01) than those in Sichuan samples.Conclusion: Quantification of multi-ingredients by HPLC combined with statistical methods provide an effective approach for achieving origin discrimination and quality evaluation of Cortex berberidis. The quality of Cortex berberidis closely correlates to the geographical origin of the samples, with Cortex berberidis samples from Qinghai and Tibet exhibiting superior qualities to those from Sichuan.Keywords: Tibetan medicine, Cortex berberidis, Origin discrimination, Quality evaluation, Magnoflorine, Palmatine, Berberine, Jatrorrhizin

Prognostic value of vitamin D in patients with pneumonia: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Purpose: To investigate the prognostic role of vitamin D in pneumonia patients  through meta-analysis.Methods: PubMed and Embase were systematically searched for relevant studies that assessed the impact of vitamin D on the risk of adverse outcomes among patients with pneumonia. Risk ratios (RR) with 95 % confidence intervals (95 % CI) were pooled using meta-analysis. Q-test and I2 statistics were used to evaluate between-study heterogeneity.Results: Six studies were finally included in the meta-analysis. The results of meta-analysis of these studies indicated that low vitamin D status was associated with higher risk of mortality among pneumonia patients (RR = 2.59, 95 % CI = 1.32-5.08; p = 0.005). Results from meta-analysis of studies with adjusted estimates suggest that low vitamin D status was independently associated with higher risk of mortality among pneumonia patients (RR = 3.15, 95 % CI 1.54-6.44, p = 0.002). There was no significant risk of bias in the meta-analysis.Conclusion: This study demonstrates that low vitamin D level is associated with a higher risk of adverse outcomes in patients with pneumonia.Keywords: Pneumonia, Vitamin D, Prognosis, Meta-analysis, Systematic revie

AlphaPose: Whole-Body Regional Multi-Person Pose Estimation and Tracking in Real-Time

Accurate whole-body multi-person pose estimation and tracking is an important yet challenging topic in computer vision. To capture the subtle actions of humans for complex behavior analysis, whole-body pose estimation including the face, body, hand and foot is essential over conventional body-only pose estimation. In this paper, we present AlphaPose, a system that can perform accurate whole-body pose estimation and tracking jointly while running in realtime. To this end, we propose several new techniques: Symmetric Integral Keypoint Regression (SIKR) for fast and fine localization, Parametric Pose Non-Maximum-Suppression (P-NMS) for eliminating redundant human detections and Pose Aware Identity Embedding for jointly pose estimation and tracking. During training, we resort to Part-Guided Proposal Generator (PGPG) and multi-domain knowledge distillation to further improve the accuracy. Our method is able to localize whole-body keypoints accurately and tracks humans simultaneously given inaccurate bounding boxes and redundant detections. We show a significant improvement over current state-of-the-art methods in both speed and accuracy on COCO-wholebody, COCO, PoseTrack, and our proposed Halpe-FullBody pose estimation dataset. Our model, source codes and dataset are made publicly available at https://github.com/MVIG-SJTU/AlphaPose.Comment: Documents for AlphaPose, accepted to TPAM

In vitro evaluation of anticancer nanomedicines based on doxorubicin and amphiphilic Y-shaped copolymers

Four monomethoxy poly(ethylene glycol)-poly(L-lactide-co-glycolide)2 (mPEG-P( LA-co-GA)2) copolymers were synthesized by ring-opening polymerization of L-lactide and glycolide with double hydroxyl functionalized mPEG (mPEG-(OH)2) as macroinitiator and stannous octoate as catalyst. The copolymers self-assembled into nanoscale micellar/vesicular aggregations in phosphate buffer at pH 7.4. Doxorubicin (DOX), an anthracycline anticancer drug, was loaded into the micellar/vesicular nanoparticles, yielding micellar/vesicular nanomedicines. The in vitro release behaviors could be adjusted by content of hydrophobic polyester and pH of the release medium. In vitro cell experiments showed that the intracellular DOX release could be adjusted by content of P(LA-co-GA), and the nanomedicines displayed effective proliferation inhibition against Henrietta Lacks’s cells with different culture times. Hemolysis tests indicated that the copolymers were hemocompatible, and the presence of copolymers could reduce the hemolysis ratio of DOX significantly. These results suggested that the novel anticancer nanomedicines based on DOX and amphiphilic Y-shaped copolymers were attractive candidates as tumor tissular and intracellular targeting drug delivery systems in vivo, with enhanced stability during circulation and accelerated drug release at the target sites

Alternative splicing and trans-splicing events revealed by analysis of the Bombyx mori transcriptome

Alternative splicing and trans-splicing events have not been systematically studied in the silkworm Bombyx mori. Here, the silkworm transcriptome was analyzed by RNA-seq. We identified 320 novel genes, modified 1140 gene models, and found thousands of alternative splicing and 58 trans-splicing events. Studies of three SR proteins show that both their alternative splicing patterns and mRNA products are conserved from insect to human, and one isoform of Srsf6 with a retained intron is expressed sex-specifically in silkworm gonads. Trans-splicing of mod(mdg4) in silkworm was experimentally confirmed. We identified integrations from a common 5′-gene with 46 newly identified alternative 3′-exons that are located on both DNA strands over a 500-kb region. Other trans-splicing events in B. mori were predicted by bioinformatic analysis, in which 12 events were confirmed by RT-PCR, six events were further validated by chimeric SNPs, and two events were confirmed by allele-specific RT-PCR in F 1 hybrids from distinct silkworm lines of JS and L10, indicating that trans-splicing is more widespread in insects than previously thought. Analysis of the B. mori transcriptome by RNA-seq provides valuable information of regulatory alternative splicing events. The conservation of splicing events across species and newly identified trans-splicing events suggest that B. mori is a good model for future studies. Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Copyrigh