Interleukin-6 in cardiac surgery

Background and Purpose: Interleukin (IL)-6 is a multi-functional pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokine, and it has been a reliable biomarker of cardiac function status and myocardial damage. However, the characteristics of IL-6 expressions in the cardiac surgical patients have not been comprehensively described. The purpose of this review is to present the current knowledge on the role of IL-6 in the field of cardiac surgery.Materials and Methods: Medical literature of IL-6 in cardiac surgical disorders of recent 3 decades were carefully collected as studying materials, and comprehensively reviewed and analyzed.Results: Plasma IL-6 was significantly elevated 1 hour and peaked 3-6 hours after the start of cardiopulmonary bypass with a gradual decrease constant maintenance thereafter. No significant differences were found between patients with biological and mechanical heart valve replacements between on-poump and off-pump coronary artery bypass, or between cyanotic and acyanotic congental heart patients. The elevation of IL-6 was higher in mitral valve replacement than in coronary artery bypass grafting patients and in non-heart transplantation than heart transplantation patients. Il-6 was involved in the pathogenesis of pulmonary artery hypertension and infective endocarditis, and predicted adverse cardiac events, such as coronary graft occlusion, aortic dissection progression, and cardiac myxoma recurrence.Conclusions: In cardiac surgical patients, the expression of IL-6 reflects the inflammatory situation of the patients and also predicts their prognosis. The higher elevation of IL-6 in mitral valve replacement and in non-heart transplantation might be attributed to cardiotomy suction, and to lack of sterioid use. Early administrations with steroid, α2-adrenergic agonists, incretin hormones, or ischemic conditioning could reduce the inflammatory response and prevent from pertinent postoperative complications. Anesthetic agents and technique of choices may also reduce immune reactions and lower circulating cytokines. Extracorporeal IL-6 removal facilities have been successfully applied in clinical practice. The potential alternative therapies with IL-6 antibodies might be further developed and used in such patients for preventing myocardial apoptotic processes.</p

Synergistic Effects between Phosphorylation of Phospholamban and Troponin I Promote Relaxation at Higher Heart Rate

We hypothesized that the extent of frequency-dependent acceleration of relaxation (FDAR) would be less than that of isoproterenol-(ISO-)dependent acceleration of relaxation (IDAR) at the same increment of heart rates, and ISO may improve FDAR. Cardiac function and phosphorylation of PLB and cTnI were compared in pacing, ISO treatment, and combined pacing and ISO treatment in isolated working heart. The increase in cardiac output and the degree of relaxation was less in pacing than in ISO treatment at the same increment of heart rates. The increasing stimulation frequency induced more significant relaxant effect in ISO perfusion than that in physiological salt perfusion. The pacing only phosphorylated PLB at Thr17, but ISO induced phosphorylation of cTnI and PLB at Ser16 and Thr17. Those results suggest that the synergistic effects of PLB and cTnI induce higher degree of relaxation which makes a sufficient diastolic filling of the ventricle at higher heart rate

Nucleotide-level prediction of CircRNA-protein binding based on fully convolutional neural network

Introduction: CircRNA-protein binding plays a critical role in complex biological activity and disease. Various deep learning-based algorithms have been proposed to identify CircRNA-protein binding sites. These methods predict whether the CircRNA sequence includes protein binding sites from the sequence level, and primarily concentrate on analysing the sequence specificity of CircRNA-protein binding. For model performance, these methods are unsatisfactory in accurately predicting motif sites that have special functions in gene expression.Methods: In this study, based on the deep learning models that implement pixel-level binary classification prediction in computer vision, we viewed the CircRNA-protein binding sites prediction as a nucleotide-level binary classification task, and use a fully convolutional neural networks to identify CircRNA-protein binding motif sites (CPBFCN).Results: CPBFCN provides a new path to predict CircRNA motifs. Based on the MEME tool, the existing CircRNA-related and protein-related database, we analysed the motif functions discovered by CPBFCN. We also investigated the correlation between CircRNA sponge and motif distribution. Furthermore, by comparing the motif distribution with different input sequence lengths, we found that some motifs in the flanking sequences of CircRNA-protein binding region may contribute to CircRNA-protein binding.Conclusion: This study contributes to identify circRNA-protein binding and provides help in understanding the role of circRNA-protein binding in gene expression regulation

Semi-Supervised Video Salient Object Detection Using Pseudo-Labels

Deep learning-based video salient object detection has recently achieved great success with its performance significantly outperforming any other unsupervised methods. However, existing data-driven approaches heavily rely on a large quantity of pixel-wise annotated video frames to deliver such promising results. In this paper, we address the semi-supervised video salient object detection task using pseudo-labels. Specifically, we present an effective video saliency detector that consists of a spatial refinement network and a spatiotemporal module. Based on the same refinement network and motion information in terms of optical flow, we further propose a novel method for generating pixel-level pseudo-labels from sparsely annotated frames. By utilizing the generated pseudo-labels together with a part of manual annotations, our video saliency detector learns spatial and temporal cues for both contrast inference and coherence enhancement, thus producing accurate saliency maps. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed semi-supervised method even greatly outperforms all the state-of-the-art fully supervised methods across three public benchmarks of VOS, DAVIS, and FBMS.Comment: ICCV2019, code is available at https://github.com/Kinpzz/RCRNet-Pytorc

Polymorphisms and a Haplotype in Heparanase Gene Associations with the Progression and Prognosis of Gastric Cancer in a Northern Chinese Population

Background: Human heparanase plays an important role in cancer development and single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the heparanase gene (HPSE) have been shown to be correlated with gastric cancer. The present study examined the associations between individual SNPs or haplotypes in HPSE and susceptibility, clinicopathological parameters and prognosis of gastric cancer in a large sample of the Han population in northern China. Methodology/Principal Findings: Genomic DNA was extracted from formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded normal gastric tissue samples from 404 patients and from blood from 404 healthy controls. Six SNPs were genotyped by matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry. A chi-square (x2) test and unconditional logistic regression were used to analyze the risk of gastric cancer; a Log-rank test and Cox proportional hazards model were used to produce survival analysis and a Kaplan-Meier method was used to map survival curves. The mean genotyping success rates were more than 99 % in both groups. Haplotype CA in the block composed of rs11099592 and rs4693608 had a greater distribution in the group of Borrmann types 3 and 4 (P = 0.037), the group of a greater number of lymph node metastases (N3 vs N0 group, P = 0.046), and moreover was correlated to poor survival (CG vs CA: HR = 0.645, 95%CI: 0.421–0.989, P = 0.044). In addition, genotypes rs4693608 AA and rs4364254 TT were associated with poor survival (P = 0.030, HR = 1.527, 95%CI: 1.042–2.238 for rs4693608 AA; P = 0.013, HR = 1.546, 95%CI: 1.096–2.181 for rs4364254 TT). There were n