Triterpenoid saponins from Cortex Albiziae

Cortex Albiziae, the dried stem bark of a leguminous plant, Albizia julibrissin Durazz, was specified in Chinese Pharmacopoeia (1995 edit.) as a traditional Chinese medicine to be used.to relieve melancholia and uneasiness of body and mind, to invigorate the circulation of blood and subside a swelling. In a course of our quality assessment of traditional Chinese medicines, the n-BuOH soluble part of 95% EtOH extracts from the stem barks of Albizia julibrissin was subjected to a series of solvent treatment and chromatographic separations, including Rp-HPLC methods, giving rise to 28 pentacyclic triterpenoid saponins. Based on chemical methods and spectroscopic evidences, the structures of saponins were identified, which included six pairs of diastereoisomers, five pairs of position isomers, and 26 of them were new compounds. All the saponins are trisdesmosidic saponins, which are composed of an acacic acid moiety, 7-9 monosaccharide moieties, 1-2 monoterpenic acid moieties, and exhibited their molecular ion peaks around m/z 2000. Their carbon-13 signals and most of proton signals were assigned based on 1D and 2D NMR experiments. The proton and carbon signals of several known saponins were revised and reassigned. The spectroscopic properties related to these saponins were analyzed and summarized. The cytotoxic activity and other activities of these saponins and their analogues were discussed also.この論文は国立情報学研究所の学術雑誌公開支援事業により電子化されまし

Temperature Matrix-Based Data Placement Optimization in Edge Computing Environment

The scale of data shows an explosive growth trend, with wide use of cloud storage. However, there are challenges such as network latency and energy consumption. The emergence of edge computing brings data close to the edge of the network, making it a good supplement to cloud computing. The spatiotemporal characteristics of data have been largely ignored in studies of data placement and storage optimization. To this end, a temperature matrix-based data placement method using an improved Hungarian algorithm (TEMPLIH) is proposed in this work. A temperature matrix is used to reflect the influence of data characteristics on its placement. A data replica matrix selection algorithm based on temperature matrix (RSA-TM) is proposed to meet latency requirements. Then, an improved Hungarian algorithm based on replica matrix (IHA-RM) is proposed, which satisfies the balance among the multiple goals of latency, cost, and load balancing. Compared with other data placement strategies, experiments show that the proposed method can effectively reduce the cost of data placement while meeting user access latency requirements and maintaining a reasonable load balance between edge servers. Further improvement is discussed and the idea of regional value is proposed

SEED-Data-Edit Technical Report: A Hybrid Dataset for Instructional Image Editing

In this technical report, we introduce SEED-Data-Edit: a unique hybrid dataset for instruction-guided image editing, which aims to facilitate image manipulation using open-form language. SEED-Data-Edit is composed of three distinct types of data: (1) High-quality editing data produced by an automated pipeline, ensuring a substantial volume of diverse image editing pairs. (2) Real-world scenario data collected from the internet, which captures the intricacies of user intentions for promoting the practical application of image editing in the real world. (3) High-precision multi-turn editing data annotated by humans, which involves multiple rounds of edits for simulating iterative editing processes. The combination of these diverse data sources makes SEED-Data-Edit a comprehensive and versatile dataset for training language-guided image editing model. We fine-tune a pretrained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that unifies comprehension and generation with SEED-Data-Edit. The instruction tuned model demonstrates promising results, indicating the potential and effectiveness of SEED-Data-Edit in advancing the field of instructional image editing. The datasets are released in https://huggingface.co/datasets/AILab-CVC/SEED-Data-Edit.Comment: Technical Report; Dataset released in https://huggingface.co/datasets/AILab-CVC/SEED-Data-Edi

Temozolomide and Pazopanib Combined with FOLFOX Regressed a Primary Colorectal Cancer in a Patient-derived Orthotopic Xenograft Mouse Model.

PurposeThe goal of the present study was to determine the efficacy of temozolomide (TEM) and pazopanib (PAZ) combined with FOLFOX (oxaliplatin, leucovorin and 5-fluorouracil) on a colorectal cancer patient-derived orthotopic xenograft (PDOX) mouse model.Materials and methodsA colorectal cancer tumor from a patient previously established in non-transgenic nude mice was implanted subcutaneously in transgenic green fluorescence protein (GFP)-expressing nude mice in order to label the tumor stromal cells with GFP. Then labeled tumors were orthotopically implanted into the cecum of nude mice. Mice were randomized into four groups: Group 1, untreated control; group 2, TEM + PAZ; group 3, FOLFOX; group 4, TEM + PAZ plus FOLFOX. Tumor width, length, and mouse body weight were measured weekly. The Fluor Vivo imaging System was used to image the GFP-lableled tumor stromal cells in vivo. H&E staining and immunohistochemical staining were used for histological analysis.ResultsAll three treatments inhibited tumor growth as compared to the untreated control group. The combination of TEM + PAZ + FOLFOX regressed tumor growth significantly more effectively than TEM + PAZ or FOLFOX. Only the combination of TEM + PAZ + FOLFOX group caused a decrease in body weight. PAZ suppressed lymph vessels density in the colorectal cancer PDOX mouse model suggesting inhibition of lymphangiogenesis.ConclusionOur results suggest that the combination of TEM + PAZ + FOLFOX has clinical potential for colorectal cancer patient

Fairness and Diversity in Recommender Systems: A Survey

Recommender systems are effective tools for mitigating information overload and have seen extensive applications across various domains. However, the single focus on utility goals proves to be inadequate in addressing real-world concerns, leading to increasing attention to fairness-aware and diversity-aware recommender systems. While most existing studies explore fairness and diversity independently, we identify strong connections between these two domains. In this survey, we first discuss each of them individually and then dive into their connections. Additionally, motivated by the concepts of user-level and item-level fairness, we broaden the understanding of diversity to encompass not only the item level but also the user level. With this expanded perspective on user and item-level diversity, we re-interpret fairness studies from the viewpoint of diversity. This fresh perspective enhances our understanding of fairness-related work and paves the way for potential future research directions. Papers discussed in this survey along with public code links are available at https://github.com/YuyingZhao/Awesome-Fairness-and-Diversity-Papers-in-Recommender-Systems

Leveraging Opposite Gender Interaction Ratio as a Path towards Fairness in Online Dating Recommendations Based on User Sexual Orientation

Online dating platforms have gained widespread popularity as a means for individuals to seek potential romantic relationships. While recommender systems have been designed to improve the user experience in dating platforms by providing personalized recommendations, increasing concerns about fairness have encouraged the development of fairness-aware recommender systems from various perspectives (e.g., gender and race). However, sexual orientation, which plays a significant role in finding a satisfying relationship, is under-investigated. To fill this crucial gap, we propose a novel metric, Opposite Gender Interaction Ratio (OGIR), as a way to investigate potential unfairness for users with varying preferences towards the opposite gender. We empirically analyze a real online dating dataset and observe existing recommender algorithms could suffer from group unfairness according to OGIR. We further investigate the potential causes for such gaps in recommendation quality, which lead to the challenges of group quantity imbalance and group calibration imbalance. Ultimately, we propose a fair recommender system based on re-weighting and re-ranking strategies to respectively mitigate these associated imbalance challenges. Experimental results demonstrate both strategies improve fairness while their combination achieves the best performance towards maintaining model utility while improving fairness.Comment: Accepted by AAAI 202

An MRI Study of Symptomatic Adhesive Capsulitis

Background: Appilication of MR imaging to diagnose Adhesive Capsulitis (AC) has previously been described. However, there is insufficient information available for the MRI analysis of AC. This study is to describe and evaluate the pathomorphology of the shoulder in Asian patients with AC compared to healthy volunteers. Methodology/Principal Findings: 60 Asian patients with clinically diagnosed AC and 60 healthy volunteers without frozen shoulder underwent MRI of the shoulder joint. All subjects who were age- and sex-matched control ones underwent routine MRI scans of the affected shoulder, including axial, oblique coronal, oblique sagittal T1WI SE and coronal oblique T2WI FSE sequences. Significant abnormal findings were observed on MRI, especially at the rotator cuff interval. The coracohumeral ligament (CHL), articular capsule thickness in the rotator cuff interval as well as the fat space under coracoid process were evaluated. MRI showed that patients with adhesive capsulitis had a significantly thickened coracohumeral ligament and articular capsule in the rotator cuff interval compared to the control subjects (4.2 vs. 2.4 mm, 7.2 vs. 4.4 mm; p<0.05). Partial or complete obliteration of the subcoracoid fat triangle was significantly more frequent in patients with adhesive capsulitis compared with control subjects (73% vs. 13%, 26% vs. 1.6%; p<0.001). Synovitis-like abnormality around the long biceps tendon was significantly more common in patients with adhesive capsulitis than in control subjects. With regards to the inter-observer variability, two MR radiologists had an excellent kappa value of 0.86. Conclusions/Significance: MRI can be used to show characteristic findings in diagnosing AC. Thickening of the CHL and the capsule at the rotator cuff interval and complete obliteration of the fat triangle under the coracoid process have been shown to be the most characteristic MR findings seen with AC

Effect of Different Drying Methods on Physicochemical Properties and Antioxidant Activities of Postharvest Okra Pods

Effects of hot-air drying (HD) and microwave drying (MD) methods on the physicochemical properties and antioxidant activities of postharvest okra was investigated. The weight loss rate and the contents of vitamin C, chlorophyll a, protein, soluble pectin as well as antioxidant activities of okra pods were determined. The results showed that HD and MD methods had significant influences on the physicochemical properties and antioxidant activities. The weight loss rate of okra treated by HD method was 87.45%, and it was 75.04% treated by MD. Both of them presented lower contents of chlorophyll a with a ranges of 0.33 ± 0.01 mg/g and 0.23 ± 0.02 mg/g. The protein contents of the HD was 16.38 ± 0.49%, and 9.16 ± 0.11% for MD method. The soluble pectin contents were 29.1 ± 0.76 mg/g and 28.26 ± 0.57 mg/g for HD and MD methods, respectively. It indicated that the nutrients in okra pods are susceptible to thermal processing, and the high temperature will significantly reduce the nutritional value. The specific conditions for different thermal processes should be studied and optimization