4,583 research outputs found
Silicon nitride metalenses for unpolarized high-NA visible imaging
As one of nanoscale planar structures, metasurface has shown excellent
superiorities on manipulating light intensity, phase and/or polarization with
specially designed nanoposts pattern. It allows to miniature a bulky optical
lens into the chip-size metalens with wavelength-order thickness, playing an
unprecedented role in visible imaging systems (e.g. ultrawide-angle lens and
telephoto). However, a CMOS-compatible metalens has yet to be achieved in the
visible region due to the limitation on material properties such as
transmission and compatibility. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a divergent
metalens based on silicon nitride platform with large numerical aperture
(NA~0.98) and high transmission (~0.8) for unpolarized visible light,
fabricated by a 695-nm-thick hexagonal silicon nitride array with a minimum
space of 42 nm between adjacent nanoposts. Nearly diffraction-limit virtual
focus spots are achieved within the visible region. Such metalens enables to
shrink objects into a micro-scale size field of view as small as a single-mode
fiber core. Furthermore, a macroscopic metalens with 1-cm-diameter is also
realized including over half billion nanoposts, showing a potential application
of wide viewing-angle functionality. Thanks to the high-transmission and
CMOS-compatibility of silicon nitride, our findings may open a new door for the
miniaturization of optical lenses in the fields of optical fibers,
microendoscopes, smart phones, aerial cameras, beam shaping, and other
integrated on-chip devices.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figure
Predicting miRNA-disease associations based on multi-view information fusion
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) play an important role in various biological processes and their abnormal expression could lead to the occurrence of diseases. Exploring the potential relationships between miRNAs and diseases can contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of complex diseases. The increasing databases storing miRNA and disease information provide opportunities to develop computational methods for discovering unobserved disease-related miRNAs, but there are still some challenges in how to effectively learn and fuse information from multi-source data. In this study, we propose a multi-view information fusion based method for miRNA-disease association (MDA)prediction, named MVIFMDA. Firstly, multiple heterogeneous networks are constructed by combining the known MDAs and different similarities of miRNAs and diseases based on multi-source information. Secondly, the topology features of miRNAs and diseases are obtained by using the graph convolutional network to each heterogeneous network view, respectively. Moreover, we design the attention strategy at the topology representation level to adaptively fuse representations including different structural information. Meanwhile, we learn the attribute representations of miRNAs and diseases from their similarity attribute views with convolutional neural networks, respectively. Finally, the complicated associations between miRNAs and diseases are reconstructed by applying a bilinear decoder to the combined features, which combine topology and attribute representations. Experimental results on the public dataset demonstrate that our proposed model consistently outperforms baseline methods. The case studies further show the ability of the MVIFMDA model for inferring underlying associations between miRNAs and diseases
Mesenchymal stem cells improve mouse non-heart-beating liver graft survival by inhibiting Kupffer cell apoptosis via TLR4-ERK1/2-Fas/FasL-caspase3 pathway regulation
Abstract Background Liver transplantation is the optimal treatment option for end-stage liver disease, but organ shortages dramatically restrict its application. Donation after cardiac death (DCD) is an alternative approach that may expand the donor pool, but it faces challenges such as graft dysfunction, early graft loss, and cholangiopathy. Moreover, DCD liver grafts are no longer eligible for transplantation after their warm ischaemic time exceeds 30 min. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have been proposed as a promising therapy for treatment of certain liver diseases, but the role of MSCs in DCD liver graft function remains elusive. Methods In this study, we established an arterialized mouse non-heart-beating (NHB) liver transplantation model, and compared survival rates, cytokine and chemokine expression, histology, and the results of in vitro co-culture experiments in animals with or without MSC infusion. Results MSCs markedly ameliorated NHB liver graft injury and improved survival post-transplantation. Additionally, MSCs suppressed Kupffer cell apoptosis, Th1/Th17 immune responses, chemokine expression, and inflammatory cell infiltration. In vitro, PGE2 secreted by MSCs inhibited Kupffer cell apoptosis via TLR4-ERK1/2-caspase3 pathway regulation. Conclusion Our study uncovers a protective role for MSCs and elucidates the underlying immunomodulatory mechanism in an NHB liver transplantation model. Our results suggest that MSCs are uniquely positioned for use in future clinical studies owing to their ability to protect DCD liver grafts, particularly in patients for whom DCD organs are not an option according to current criteria
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