Understanding bacterial biofilms: From definition to treatment strategies

Bacterial biofilms are complex microbial communities encased in extracellular polymeric substances. Their formation is a multi-step process. Biofilms are a significant problem in treating bacterial infections and are one of the main reasons for the persistence of infections. They can exhibit increased resistance to classical antibiotics and cause disease through device-related and non-device (tissue) -associated infections, posing a severe threat to global health issues. Therefore, early detection and search for new and alternative treatments are essential for treating and suppressing biofilm-associated infections. In this paper, we systematically reviewed the formation of bacterial biofilms, associated infections, detection methods, and potential treatment strategies, aiming to provide researchers with the latest progress in the detection and treatment of bacterial biofilms

Self-appearance-aided Differential Evolution for Motion Transfer

Image animation transfers the motion of a driving video to a static object in a source image, while keeping the source identity unchanged. Great progress has been made in unsupervised motion transfer recently, where no labelled data or ground truth domain priors are needed. However, current unsupervised approaches still struggle when there are large motion or viewpoint discrepancies between the source and driving images. In this paper, we introduce three measures that we found to be effective for overcoming such large viewpoint changes. Firstly, to achieve more fine-grained motion deformation fields, we propose to apply Neural-ODEs for parametrizing the evolution dynamics of the motion transfer from source to driving. Secondly, to handle occlusions caused by large viewpoint and motion changes, we take advantage of the appearance flow obtained from the source image itself ("self-appearance"), which essentially "borrows" similar structures from other regions of an image to inpaint missing regions. Finally, our framework is also able to leverage the information from additional reference views which help to drive the source identity in spite of varying motion state. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts by a significant margin (~40%), across six benchmarks varying from human faces, human bodies to robots and cartoon characters. Model generality analysis indicates that our approach generalises the best across different object categories as well.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

A Unified Model for Tracking and Image-Video Detection Has More Power

Objection detection (OD) has been one of the most fundamental tasks in computer vision. Recent developments in deep learning have pushed the performance of image OD to new heights by learning-based, data-driven approaches. On the other hand, video OD remains less explored, mostly due to much more expensive data annotation needs. At the same time, multi-object tracking (MOT) which requires reasoning about track identities and spatio-temporal trajectories, shares similar spirits with video OD. However, most MOT datasets are class-specific (e.g., person-annotated only), which constrains a model's flexibility to perform tracking on other objects. We propose TrIVD (Tracking and Image-Video Detection), the first framework that unifies image OD, video OD, and MOT within one end-to-end model. To handle the discrepancies and semantic overlaps across datasets, TrIVD formulates detection/tracking as grounding and reasons about object categories via visual-text alignments. The unified formulation enables cross-dataset, multi-task training, and thus equips TrIVD with the ability to leverage frame-level features, video-level spatio-temporal relations, as well as track identity associations. With such joint training, we can now extend the knowledge from OD data, that comes with much richer object category annotations, to MOT and achieve zero-shot tracking capability. Experiments demonstrate that TrIVD achieves state-of-the-art performances across all image/video OD and MOT tasks.Comment: (13 pages, 4 figures

Mammalian Rif1 contributes to replication stress survival and homology-directed repair

Multifunctional protein Rif1 accumulates at stalled replication forks to facilitate DNA repair during S phase

Thermal Performance of Micro Hotplates with Novel Shapes Based on Single-Layer SiO2 Suspended Film

In this paper, two kinds of suspended micro hotplate with novel shapes of multibeam structure and reticular structure are designed. These designs have a reliable mechanical strength, so they can be designed and fabricated on single-layer SiO2 suspended film through a simplified process. Single-layer suspended film helps to reduce power consumption. Based on the new film shapes, different resistance heaters with various widths and thicknesses are designed. Then, the temperature uniformity and power consumption of different micro hotplates are compared to study the effect of these variables and obtain the one with the optimal thermal performance. We report the simulations of temperature uniformity and give the corresponding infrared images in measurement. The experimental temperature differences are larger than those of the simulation. Experimental results show that the lowest power consumption and the minimum temperature difference are 43 mW and 50 °C, respectively, when the highest temperature on the suspended platform (240 × 240 μm2) is 450 °C. Compared to the traditional four-beam micro hotplate, temperature non-uniformity is reduced by about 30–50%

Age-Related Changes in the Regenerative Potential of Adipose-Derived Stem Cells Isolated from the Prominent Fat Pads in Human Lower Eyelids.

The existence of multipotent adipose-derived stem cells isolated from human orbital fat (OF) tissue has shown great therapeutic potential in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. But the use of stem cells for therapeutic applications is influenced by their proliferative and differentiation potentials, which may be affected by the age of the donor. So far there is little knowledge about the effects of donor age on the biological properties of human orbital adipose-derived stem cells (OASCs). The intraorbital fat protrusion in the lower eyelids occurs as an aging process, and the protruded fat is routinely removed during aesthetic surgeries. Based on the ease of OF harvest and the availability of OASCs, we investigated in this study the relationship between age and the differentiation and proliferation potentials of human OASCs. Human orbital adipose samples were harvested from young (with normal lower eyelid appearance) and old donors (having protruded fat pads in the lower eyelids). The morphological properties of orbital adipocytes were assessed and the fat cell size displayed a decreasing trend with advancing age. OASCs were isolated from the fat samples, expanded in vitro and cultured under appropriate inducive conditions. Compared to the young cells, although no difference was found in the cell yield and phenotype expression, aged OASCs showed fewer progenitor cell numbers, reduced proliferative rates, increased senescent features and decreased differentiation potentials towards adipogenic, osteogenic and chondrogenic lineages. Our data suggested that using autologous OASCs from elderly patients for potential therapeutic purposes might be restricted

DataSheet_1_Preoperative low muscle mass and malnutrition affect the clinical prognosis of locally advanced gastric cancer patients undergoing radical surgery.zip

BackgroundGastric cancer is a common and highly aggressive malignant tumor of the gastrointestinal tract that poses a serious threat to human life and health. As the clinical symptoms of early gastric carcinoma are not obvious, many patients are diagnosed in the middle or late stages. With the advancement of medical technology, gastrectomy has become a safer surgical procedure, but it still has a high recurrence and mortality rate after surgery. The prognosis of gastric cancer patients after surgery is not only related to tumor-related factors (i.e., tumor stage) but the patient’s nutritional status. This study aimed to investigate the effect of preoperative muscle mass combined with the prognostic nutritional index (PNI) on clinical prognosis in locally advanced gastric carcinoma.MethodsThe clinical data of 136 patients with locally advanced gastric carcinoma diagnosed by pathology and undergoing radical gastrectomy were retrospectively reviewed. To analyze the influencing factors of preoperative low muscle mass and its correlation with the prognostic nutritional index. Patients with both low muscle mass and low PNI (≤46.55) were assigned a score of 2, and those with only one or neither of these abnormalities were assigned a score of 1 or 0, respectively, according to the new prognostic score (PNIS). The relationship between PNIS and clinicopathological characteristics was analyzed. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to identify risk factors for overall survival (OS).ResultsLow muscle mass was associated with a lower PNI (P ConclusionsThe combination of muscle mass and the PNI score system can be used to predict the survival outcome of patients with locally advanced gastric cancer.</p