Role of nerve signal transduction and neuroimmune crosstalk in mediating the analgesic effects of acupuncture for neuropathic pain

Neurogenic pain rises because of nervous system damage or dysfunction and is the most difficult to treat among other pathological pains. Acupuncture has been reported as a great treatment option for neurogenic pain owing to its unlimited advantages. However, previous studies on the analgesic effects of acupuncture for NP were scattered and did not form a whole. In this study, we first comprehensively review the relevant basic articles on acupuncture for NP published in the last 5 years and summarize the analgesic mechanisms of acupuncture in terms of nerve signaling, neuro-immune crosstalk, and metabolic and oxidative stress regulation. Acupuncture inhibits the upstream excitatory system and suppresses neuronal transmission efficiency by downregulating glutamate, NMDA receptors, P2XR, SP, CGRP, and other neurotransmitters and receptors in the spinal cord, as well as plasma channels such as TRPV1, HCN. It can also activate the downstream pain inhibitory pathway by upregulating opioid peptide (β-endorphin), MOR receptors, GABA and GABA receptors, bi-directional regulating 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) and its receptors (upregulate 5-HT 1A and downregulate 5-HT7R) and stimulating hypothalamic appetite-modifying neurons. Moreover, neuroinflammation in pain can be inhibited by acupuncture through inhibiting JAK2/STAT3, PI3K/mTOR pathways, down regulating chemokine receptor CX3CR1 on microglia and up regulating adenosine receptor A1Rs on astrocytes, inhibiting the activation of glia and reducing TNF-α and other inflammatory substances. Acupuncture also inhibits neuronal glucose metabolism by downregulating mPFC's GLUT-3 and promotes metabolic alterations of the brain, thus exerting an analgesic effect. In conclusion, the regulation of nerve signal transduction and neuroimmune crosstalk at the peripheral and central levels mediates the analgesic effects of acupuncture for neuropathic pain in an integrated manner. These findings provide a reliable basis for better clinical application of acupuncture in the management of neuropathic pain

Research on Named Entity Recognition Methods in Chinese Forest Disease Texts

Named entity recognition of forest diseases plays a key role in knowledge extraction in the field of forestry. The aim of this paper is to propose a named entity recognition method based on multi-feature embedding, a transformer encoder, a bi-gated recurrent unit (BiGRU), and conditional random fields (CRF). According to the characteristics of the forest disease corpus, several features are introduced here to improve the method’s accuracy. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of forest disease texts; carry out pre-processing, labeling, and extraction of multiple features; and construct forest disease texts. In the input representation layer, the method integrates multi-features, such as characters, radicals, word boundaries, and parts of speech. Then, implicit features (e.g., sentence context features) are captured through the transformer’s encoding layer. The obtained features are transmitted to the BiGRU layer for further deep feature extraction. Finally, the CRF model is used to learn constraints and output the optimal annotation of disease names, damage sites, and drug entities in the forest disease texts. The experimental results on the self-built data set of forest disease texts show that the precision of the proposed method for entity recognition reached more than 93%, indicating that it can effectively solve the task of named entity recognition in forest disease texts

Nano-carriers and their drug release

One of the hottest fields in biomedicine research is to encapsulate drugs and release them in particular organs by using nano-platform.Because nanoparticles can enter most cancer cells easily and accumulate inside the cells,drug-loaded nanoparticles with targeting modification can help to increase the drug concentration in lesion position,enhancing the drug effects and reducing the toxicity.In general,drug-loaded nanoparticles release drugs by diffusion or erosion.There are many ways to stimulate the release of drugs from nanoparticles,including pH,enzyme,light,magnetism,and ultrasound responses.This article reviews the principle and recent advances of drug-loaded nanoparticles

Viscoelastic Simulation of Stress and Warpage for Memory Chip 3D-Stacked Package

Three-dimensional-stacked packaging technology is widely used in memory chip packaging, which can greatly increase the utilization ratio of the packaging area. However, problems with the reliability of 3D-stacked packaging are also becoming more and more serious. In this paper, first, a dynamic mechanical analyzer is used to obtain the EMC viscoelasticity parameters. Then, the influence trend of different factors, such as EMC, die bond material and chip, on the performance of the memory chip 3D-stacked packaging under a fixed temperature cyclic loading condition is explored by the FE method

Deadbeat control for a single-phase cascaded H-bridge rectifier with voltage balancing modulation

The model predictive control (MPC) is a promising control method for cascaded H-bridge (CHB) rectifiers. One well-known MPC method is the finite-control-set MPC (FCS-MPC). However, three main issues arise in FCS-MPC: heavy computational burden, low steady-state performance, and time-consuming tuning work of weighting factor. Here, an alternative MPC method, deadbeat (DB) control with a capability of voltage balance, has been proposed for a single-phase CHB rectifier. The proposed method is based on the DB solution to obtain zero current error at the sampling instant and the use of a redundancy-based modulation strategy for voltage balance, leading to the ease of controller design and elimination of tuning work. The proposed method has been evaluated against FCS-MPC method on a single-phase three-cell CHB rectifier. The experimental results show that a reduced computational burden, an improved steady-state performance, and a comparable dynamic response can be achieved in the proposed method in comparison with FCS-MPC method.NRF (Natl Research Foundation, S’pore)Published versio