The Difference in Perceptual Anticipation Between Professional Tennis Athletes and Second-Grade Athletes Before Batting

To investigate the differences in cognitive processing of perceptual anticipation of tennis players at different levels before batting by the event-related potential (ERP) technique, we used the skilled-expert paradigm. We compared the cognitive and neural mechanisms of professional tennis athletes and second-grade athletes relating to their perceptual anticipation of the batting line at different time points [the time point of the ball landing (T0), and the 80 ms before batting time point (T1)]. The results showed that, regardless of the T0 or T1 time point, professional tennis athletes had shorter anticipation times and higher correct batting line rates than second-grade athletes. The ERP results demonstrated that compared with second-grade athletes, professional tennis athletes induced smaller N1 amplitudes and larger P2 amplitudes in early perceptual anticipation, and induced smaller N2 and larger P3 amplitudes in late perceptual anticipation. These studies suggest that, regardless of whether they are in an early or late stage, tennis professional athletes are faster and more accurate in respect of their perceptual anticipation of tennis lines than second-grade athletes are. This is possible since the relevant neural network of the former is more easily activated and faster. The prefrontal cortex may be a critical area of the brain for perceptual anticipation in tennis

Elevated Levels of Cerebrospinal Fluid and Plasma Interleukin-37 in Patients with Guillain-Barré Syndrome

Aims. Interleukin-37 (IL-37) is an anti-inflammatory cytokine. This study aims to investigate the concentrations of plasma and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) IL-37 in patients with Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS). Methods. The levels of plasma and CSF IL-37, IL-17A, IFN-γ, and TNF-α in 25 GBS patients and 20 healthy controls (HC) were determined by enzyme-linked immunoabsorbent assay and flow cytometric bead array assay, respectively. The values of clinical parameters in the patients were also measured. Results. The concentrations of plasma IL-37, IL-17A, IFN-γ, and TNF-α and CSF IL-37 and IL-17A in patients at the acute phase of GBS were significantly higher than those in the HC. The levels of plasma IL-37, IL-17A, IFN-γ, and TNF-α were positively correlated in those patients, and the levels of CSF IL-37 and IL-17A as well as the levels of plasma TNF-α were correlated positively with the GBS disability scale scores (GDSs) in those patients. Treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin significantly reduced the levels of plasma IL-37, IL-17A, IFN-γ, and TNF-α in the drug-responding patients. Conclusions. Our findings indicate higher levels of plasma and CSF IL-37 and IL-17A and other proinflammatory cytokines in patients with GBS

Histological Evaluation of Corneal Scar Formation in Pseudophakic Bullous Keratopathy

PURPOSE: To evaluate histological changes in the corneal stroma in pseudophakic bullous keratopathy. METHODS: Twenty-eight patients (28 eyes) with pseudophakic bullous keratopathy underwent therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty at Shandong Eye Institute between January 2006 and November 2011. The patients were divided into two groups according to the duration of bullous keratopathy (<1.0 year group or >1.0 year group), and three buttons from enucleated eyes with choroidal melanoma served as a control. In vivo confocal microscopy examination, hematoxylin-eosin, Masson's trichrome stain and Van Gieson staining were used for microscopic examination. The histological evaluation and scoring of the buttons for morphological changes, including the degree of stromal scars, neovascularization and inflammatory cells within the corneal buttons, were compared. To study the underlying mechanism, connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) and TGF-β immunohistochemistry were performed. RESULTS: Confocal microscopy examination and histological evaluation and scoring of the buttons showed that compared with the <1.0 year group, stromal scars, neovascularization and inflammatory cells were more severe in the >1.0 year group (P<0.05). There was an increase in CTGF- and TGF-β1-positive stromal cells in the >1.0 year group. CONCLUSIONS: During the progression of pseudophakic bullous keratopathy, stromal scars occurred more often in the patients that had a longer duration of disease. Cytokines such as CTGF and TGF-β1 may play a role in this pathological process and deserve further investigation

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

The development of robotics courses for young children under vector space model.

Robotics education is important in training children's thinking, practical, and innovation abilities. It is significant to stimulate children's interest in learning and improve their learning quality. The existing research has not paid attention to the application of robotics education in children. It is necessary to stimulate children's interest in learning. This paper will take senior kindergarten students as the research object. It analyzes the application of the Vector Space Model (VSM) in robotics course development. The research and development of children's robotics courses incorporating Artificial Intelligence technology are based on the survey results of robotics courses offered by 38 kindergartens in Baoji City. An automatic document classification system based on VSM is designed to assist in compiling robotics teaching textbooks. Finally, the system performance is tested. The results show that about 24% of kindergartens offer robotics courses, and 76% do not. Besides, 70.14% of teachers support the establishment of children's robotics courses. The classification effect of the VSM system is better than that of Chinese documents. This system performs better than the automatic document classification system based on Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency. Its classification accuracy, recall, and F1 value are all above 85%. The development of the robotics course provides a better teaching environment for teaching young children about AI and robots. The robotics education discussed in this paper is a hot spot in the current curriculum reform and is of great significance to the development and innovation in early childhood education

Optically Active Chiral DNA–Silica Hybrid Free-Standing Films

Chiral DNA–silica hybrid free-standing films (CDSFs) with antipodal handedness were fabricated via the self-assembly of DNA and a silica source in the presence of a costructure-directing agent. The scattering-based optical activity (OA) of these films across the entire visible spectrum coming from the chiral DNA supermolecular structure can easily be tuned to various narrow-band OAs by changing the absorption bands of the backgrounds or by introducing colorful chromophore molecules into the films. These films provide an extremely facile strategy for achieving OA of targeted wavelengths, which may facilitate the design of optical instruments

A Hybrid Semantic Similarity Measuring Approach For Annotating Wsdl Documents With Ontology Concepts

Semantic annotation of legacy Web Services is one of the fast and efficient ways to implement Semantic Web Service paradigm. Semantic similarity between concepts in WSDL (Web Services Description Language) document and ontology concepts is the backbone of semantic annotation of legacy Web Services. The overwhelming majority of previous works focused mainly on semantic similarity of concepts in a specific domain ontology. However, the concepts used in Web Services are often from multiple sources or different domain ontologies. This makes traditional approaches no longer applicable. To address this, we propose a hybrid measuring approach to measure semantic similarity between concepts in WSDL documents and concepts in OWL (Ontology Web Language) files. The proposed approach mainly consists of two parts: lexical-level similarity measuring and structural-level similarity measuring. Specially, we fusion adopt three commonly used approaches, i.e., edge-based, feature-based, and information content-based semantic similarity measuring approaches. Specifically, we map the above mentioned three approaches to three proposed internal features, i.e., depth, width, and density, in the abstract tree structure when measuring structural-level similarity. We conduct experimental comparisons, and the results show that the proposed approach provides better accuracy. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be applied in any user defined Web Services description documents in theory with a wider range of application

Elevated Levels of Cerebrospinal Fluid and Plasma Interleukin-37 in Patients with Guillain-Barré Syndrome

Aims. Interleukin-37 (IL-37) is an anti-inflammatory cytokine. This study aims to investigate the concentrations of plasma and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) IL-37 in patients with Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS). Methods. The levels of plasma and CSF IL-37, IL-17A, IFN-γ, and TNF-α in 25 GBS patients and 20 healthy controls (HC) were determined by enzyme-linked immunoabsorbent assay and flow cytometric bead array assay, respectively. The values of clinical parameters in the patients were also measured. Results. The concentrations of plasma IL-37, IL-17A, IFN-γ, and TNF-α and CSF IL-37 and IL-17A in patients at the acute phase of GBS were significantly higher than those in the HC. The levels of plasma IL-37, IL-17A, IFN-γ, and TNF-α were positively correlated in those patients, and the levels of CSF IL-37 and IL-17A as well as the levels of plasma TNF-α were correlated positively with the GBS disability scale scores (GDSs) in those patients. Treatment with intravenous immunoglobulin significantly reduced the levels of plasma IL-37, IL-17A, IFN-γ, and TNF-α in the drug-responding patients. Conclusions. Our findings indicate higher levels of plasma and CSF IL-37 and IL-17A and other proinflammatory cytokines in patients with GBS