Detecting and phenotyping of aneuploid circulating tumor cells in patients with various malignancies

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) have been exclusively studied and served to assess the clinical outcomes of treatments and progression of cancer. Most CTC data have mainly been derived from distinct cohorts or selected tumor types. In the present study, a total of 594 blood samples from 479 cases with 19 different carcinomas and 30 healthy samples were collected and analyzed by Subtraction enrichment method combined with immunostaining-fluorescence in situ hybridization (iFISH). Non-hematopoietic cells with aneuploid chromosome 8 (more than 2 copies) were regarded as positive CTCs. The results showed that none of CTCs was found in all 30 healthy samples. The overall positive rate of CTCs was 89.0% in diagnosed cancer patients (ranging from 75.0% to 100.0%). Average number of 11, 5, 8 and 4 CTCs per 7.5 mL was observed in lung cancer, liver cancer, renal cancer and colorectal cancer, respectively. Among 19 different carcinomas, the total number of CTCs, tetraploid chromosome 8, polyploid chromosome 8, CTM (Circulating tumor microemboli) and large CTCs in patients with stage Ⅲ and Ⅳ were statistically higher than patients with stage Ⅰ and Ⅱ (P < 0.05). Furthermore, EpCAM expression was more frequently found in most CTCs than vimentin expression, confirming that these CTCs were of epithelial origin. In addition, small and large CTCs were also classified, and the expression of vimentin was mostly observed in small CTCs and CTM. Our results revealed that there are higher numbers of CTCs, tetraploid, polyploid and large CTCs in patients with stage Ⅲ and Ⅳ, indicating that the quantification of chromosome ploidy performed by SE-iFISH for CTCs might be a useful tool to predict and evaluate therapeutic efficacy as well as to monitoring disease progression

Modeling of the Rating of Perceived Exertion Based on Heart Rate Using Machine Learning Methods

Abstract Rating of perceived exertion (RPE) can serve as a more convenient and economical alternative to heart rate (HR) for exercise intensity control. This study aims to explore the influence of factors, such as indicators of demographic, anthropometric, body composition, cardiovascular function and basic exercise ability on the relationship between HR and RPE, and to develop the model predicting RPE from HR. 48 healthy participants were recruited to perform an incrementally 6-stage pedaling test. HR and RPE were collected during each stage. The influencing factors were identified with the forward selection method to train Gaussian Process regression (GPR), support vector machine (SVM) and linear regression models. Metrics of R2, adjusted R2 and RMSE were calculated to evaluate the performance of the models. The GPR model outperformed the SVM and linear regression models, and achieved an R2 of 0.95, adjusted R2 of 0.89 and RMSE of 0.52. Indicators of age, resting heart rate (RHR), Central arterial pressure (CAP), body fat rate (BFR) and body mass index (BMI) were identified as factors that best predicted the relationship between RPE and HR. It is possible to use GPR model to estimate RPE from HR accurately, after adjusting for age, RHR, CAP, BFR and BMI

Cardiac commitment driven by MyoD expression in pericardial stem cells

Cellular therapy holds immense promise to remuscularize the damaged myocardium but is practically hindered by limited allogeneic sources of cardiac-committed cells that engraft stably in the recipient heart after transplantation. Here, we demonstrate that the pericardial tissue harbors myogenic stem cells (pSCs) that are activated in response to inflammatory signaling after myocardial infarction (MI). The pSCs derived from the MI rats (MI-pSCs) show in vivo and in vitro cardiac commitment characterized by cardiac-specific Tnnt2 expression and formation of rhythmic contraction in culture. Bulk RNA-seq analysis reveals significant upregulation of a panel of genes related to cardiac/myogenic differentiation, paracrine factors, and extracellular matrix in the activated pSCs compared to the control pSCs (Sham-pSCs). Notably, we define MyoD as a key factor that governs the process of cardiac commitment, as siRNA-mediated MyoD gene silencing results in a significant reduction of myogenic potential. Injection of the cardiac-committed cells into the infarcted rat heart leads to long-term survival and stable engraftment in the recipient myocardium. Therefore, these findings point to pericardial myogenic progenitors as an attractive candidate for cardiac cell-based therapy to remuscularize the damaged myocardium

Effect of Eight-Month Exercise Intervention on Bone Outcomes of Young Opioid-Dependent Women

Objective: To evaluate the bone response to an 8 month aerobic gymnastics training program in young opioid-addicted women. Design: Randomized controlled trial (parallel design). Setting: Women’s Specific Drug Rehabilitation Center in China. Patients: One hundred and two young women with low bone quality and previous opioid addiction were divided into two groups: (a) the low bone quality intervention experimental group (n = 55; age: 30.3 ± 6.1) and (b) the low bone quality observed control group (observation group; n = 47; age: 29.0 ± 5.3). Interventions: The intervention group took aerobic gymnastics regularly for 80 min/d and 5 d/wk for 8 months and completed follow-up testing. Main Outcome Measures: Substance use history and other life habits affecting bone quality were assessed by questionnaire-based interviews. Bone quality (stiffness-index, T-score, Z-score) was examined with quantitative ultrasound. Anthropometric characteristics (body weight, fat-free mass, fat mass) were obtained by bioelectrical impedance analysis. Results: After the 8 month intervention, the stiffness index of bone quality increased significantly (before: 82 ± 6, after: 108 ± 14, p &lt; 0.05) in the experimental group. However, the bone quality did not change significantly in the controls (before: 79 ± 10, after: 77 ± 13, p &gt; 0.05). The bone change in the difference group was significant (experimental group: 31.7% vs observation group: -0.03%). Fat mass decreased in the experimental group (experimental group: before: 19.6 ± 3.7 kg, after: 18.8 ± 4.0 kg, p &lt; 0.05). Meanwhile, the change in fat-free mass was the determination of the change in bone quality in the experimental group. Conclusions: Our results suggested that aerobic gymnastics intervention can be an effective strategy for the prevention and treatment of drug-induced osteoporosis in detoxification addicts

Coreference Resolution Based on High-Dimensional Multi-Scale Information

Coreference resolution is a key task in Natural Language Processing. It is difficult to evaluate the similarity of long-span texts, which makes text-level encoding somewhat challenging. This paper first compares the impact of commonly used methods to improve the global information collection ability of the model on the BERT encoding performance. Based on this, a multi-scale context information module is designed to improve the applicability of the BERT encoding model under different text spans. In addition, improving linear separability through dimension expansion. Finally, cross-entropy loss is used as the loss function. After adding BERT and span BERT to the module designed in this article, F1 increased by 0.5% and 0.2%, respectively

Close evolutionary relationship between rice black-streaked dwarf virus and southern rice black-streaked dwarf virus based on analysis of their bicistronic RNAs

Abstract Background Rice black-streaked dwarf virus (RBSDV) and Southern rice black-streaked dwarf virus (SRBSDV) seriously interfered in the production of rice and maize in China. These two viruses are members of the genus Fijivirus in the family Reoviridae and can cause similar dwarf symptoms in rice. Although some studies have reported the phylogenetic analysis on RBSDV or SRBSDV, the evolutionary relationship between these viruses is scarce. Methods In this study, we analyzed the evolutionary relationships between RBSDV and SRBSDV based on the data from the analysis of codon usage, RNA recombination and phylogenetic relationship, selection pressure and genetic characteristics of the bicistronic RNAs (S5, S7 and S9). Results RBSDV and SRBSDV showed similar patterns of codon preference: open reading frames (ORFs) in S7 and S5 had with higher and lower codon usage bias, respectively. Some isolates from RBSDV and SRBSDV formed a clade in the phylogenetic tree of S7 and S9. In addition, some recombination events in S9 occurred between RBSDV and SRBSDV. Conclusions Our results suggest close evolutionary relationships between RBSDV and SRBSDV. Selection pressure, gene flow, and neutrality tests also supported the evolutionary relationships

Virulence changes in Vibrio parahaemolyticus during the freezing of Penaeus chinensis

Although Vibrio parahaemolyticus has become the most common pathogen in fresh and frozen seafood, its virulence changes have often been ignored during the processing of seafood. To investigate these potential risks, we used frozen Penaeus chinensis as examples, and the most virulent factors of V. parahaemolyticus, including amounts, VBNC status, toxins TDH and TRH, and virulence genes tdh and trh, were determined. Bacterial quantities were significantly reduced during drain and sprinkling phases, but caused by different factors. By SYTO9 and PI staining showed that washing was the main reason for the bacterial reduction at the drain phase, while the strain entering VBNC state was another reason at sprinkling phase. Their hemolysis toxicity, produced by TDH and TRH, became stronger after inoculation on shrimp, and could be detected throughout the process. Moreover, tdh and trh also exhibited trends similar to that of the hemolysis toxicity test. tdh was almost to a two-fold expression level during ice-glazing phase, while trh only express at a low level, less than half of the expression level before inoculation. These results demonstrated that the strains were not dead during freezing process, but became VBNC cells, which still produced and accumulated toxins, especially TDH, the most virulent factor

Detection of mild cognitive impairment based on attention mechanism and parallel dilated convolution

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a precursor to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, and an early diagnosis and intervention can delay its progression. However, the brain MRI images of MCI patients have small changes and blurry shapes. At the same time, MRI contains a large amount of redundant information, which leads to the poor performance of current MCI detection methods based on deep learning. This article proposes an MCI detection method that integrates the attention mechanism and parallel dilated convolution. By introducing an attention mechanism, it highlights the relevant information of the lesion area in the image, suppresses irrelevant areas, eliminates redundant information in MRI images, and improves the ability to mine detailed information. Parallel dilated convolution is used to obtain a larger receptive field without downsampling, thereby enhancing the ability to acquire contextual information and improving the accuracy of small target classification while maintaining detailed information on large-scale feature maps. Experimental results on the public dataset ADNI show that the detection accuracy of the method on MCI reaches 81.63%, which is approximately 6.8% higher than the basic model. The method is expected to be used in clinical practice in the future to provide earlier intervention and treatment for MCI patients, thereby improving their quality of life

Enantiospecific electrochemical rearrangement for the synthesis of hindered triazolopyridinone derivatives

Chiral and hindered triazolopyridinone derivatives are an underexplored area of chemical space mainly due to their challenging synthesis via classical methods. Here, the authors report an electrochemical rearrangement for the synthesis of triazolopyridinones using diverse, available alkyl carboxylic acids as starting materials