Map kinase phosphatase 2 regulates macrophage-adipocyte interaction

PLoS ONE103e012075

Comparison of the effects of Tripterygii totorum and sulfasalazine on rheumatoid arthritis: A retrospective cohort study

Purpose: To compare, in a retrospective study, the effects and safety profiles of Tripterygii totorum and sulfasalazine in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) following 24 weeks of treatment. Methods: RA patients (n = 164) who were treated with Tripterygii totorum or sulfasalazine from August 2012 to February 2016 were included in this study. The major end-point was ≥ 20 % improvement as per American College of Rheumatology (ACR) criterion (ACR 20 response) after 24 weeks. Moreover, ACR 50 and ACR 70 responses were studied. The safety parameters investigated comprised of adverse events, vital signs, as well as hematological and biochemical indices (blood counts, electrolyte levels, and kidney and liver function). Results: At 24 weeks, ACR 20 response was 57.32 % in patients on Tripterygii totorum, while the corresponding value in patients on sulfasalazine was 39.02 % (p = 0.02). In the Tripterygii totorum group, ACR 50 response was 41.46 %, while ACR 70 response was 29.27 %. In sulfasalazine group, ACR 50 response was identified in 26.83 % of the patients, while ACR 70 response was seen in 21.95 % of patients. Adverse events were greater in the Tripterygii totorum group than in sulfasalazine group. Conclusion: These results suggest that Tripterygii Totorum significantly mitigates RA, with a tolerable safety profile. However, there is need for long-term or controlled trials to ascertain the therapeutic potential of Tripterygii totorum in RA. Keywords: Traditional Chinese medicine, Tripterygii totorum, Sulfasalazine, Rheumatoid arthriti

Parametric Reshaping of Portraits in Videos

Sharing short personalized videos to various social media networks has become quite popular in recent years. This raises the need for digital retouching of portraits in videos. However, applying portrait image editing directly on portrait video frames cannot generate smooth and stable video sequences. To this end, we present a robust and easy-to-use parametric method to reshape the portrait in a video to produce smooth retouched results. Given an input portrait video, our method consists of two main stages: stabilized face reconstruction, and continuous video reshaping. In the first stage, we start by estimating face rigid pose transformations across video frames. Then we jointly optimize multiple frames to reconstruct an accurate face identity, followed by recovering face expressions over the entire video. In the second stage, we first reshape the reconstructed 3D face using a parametric reshaping model reflecting the weight change of the face, and then utilize the reshaped 3D face to guide the warping of video frames. We develop a novel signed distance function based dense mapping method for the warping between face contours before and after reshaping, resulting in stable warped video frames with minimum distortions. In addition, we use the 3D structure of the face to correct the dense mapping to achieve temporal consistency. We generate the final result by minimizing the background distortion through optimizing a content-aware warping mesh. Extensive experiments show that our method is able to create visually pleasing results by adjusting a simple reshaping parameter, which facilitates portrait video editing for social media and visual effects