Assessment of carotid atherosclerotic disease using three-dimensional cardiovascular magnetic resonance vessel wall imaging: comparison with digital subtraction angiography.

BACKGROUND:A three-dimensional (3D) cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) vessel wall imaging (VWI) technique based on 3D T1 weighted (T1w) Sampling Perfection with Application-optimized Contrast using different flip angle Evolutions (SPACE) has recently been used as a promising CMR imaging modality for evaluating extra-cranial and intra-cranial vessel walls. However, this technique is yet to be validated against the current diagnostic imaging standard. We therefore aimed to evaluate the diagnostic performance of 3D CMR VWI in characterizing carotid disease using intra-arterial digital subtraction angiography (DSA) as a reference. METHODS:Consecutive patients with at least unilateral > 50% carotid stenosis on ultrasound were scheduled to undergo interventional therapy were invited to participate. The following metrics were measured using 3D CMR VWI and DSA: lumen diameter of the common carotid artery (CCA) and segments C1-C7, stenosis diameter, reference diameter, lesion length, stenosis degree, and ulceration. We assessed the diagnostic sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 3D CMR VWI, and used Cohen's kappa, the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and Bland-Altman analyses to assess the diagnostic agreement between 3D CMR VWI and DSA. RESULTS:The ICC (all ICCs ≥0.96) and Bland-Altman plots indicated excellent inter-reader agreement in all individual morphologic measurements by 3D CMR VWI. Excellent agreement in all individual morphologic measurements were also found between 3D CMR VWI and DSA. In addition, 3D CMR VWI had high sensitivity (98.4, 97.4, 80.0, 100.0%), specificity (100.0, 94.5, 99.1, 98.0%), and Cohen's kappa (0.99, 0.89, 0.84, 0.96) for detecting stenosis > 50%, stenosis > 70%, ulceration, and total occlusion, respectively, using DSA as the standard. The AUC of 3D CMR VWI for predicting stenosis > 50 and > 70% were 0.998 and 0.999, respectively. CONCLUSIONS:The 3D CMR VWI technique enables accurate diagnosis and luminal feature assessment of carotid artery atherosclerosis, suggesting that this imaging modality may be useful for routine imaging workups and provide comprehensive information for both the vessel wall and lumen

Unsupervised Discovery of Parts, Structure, and Dynamics

Humans easily recognize object parts and their hierarchical structure by watching how they move; they can then predict how each part moves in the future. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation that simultaneously learns a hierarchical, disentangled object representation and a dynamics model for object parts from unlabeled videos. Our Parts, Structure, and Dynamics (PSD) model learns to, first, recognize the object parts via a layered image representation; second, predict hierarchy via a structural descriptor that composes low-level concepts into a hierarchical structure; and third, model the system dynamics by predicting the future. Experiments on multiple real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our PSD model works well on all three tasks: segmenting object parts, building their hierarchical structure, and capturing their motion distributions.Comment: ICLR 2019. The first two authors contributed equally to this wor

Atherosclerosis T1-weighted characterization (CATCH): evaluation of the accuracy for identifying intraplaque hemorrhage with histological validation in carotid and coronary artery specimens

Background: Coronary high intensity plaques (CHIPs) detected using cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) coronary atherosclerosis T1-weighted characterization with integrated anatomical reference (CATCH) have been shown to be positively associated with high-risk morphology observed on intracoronary optical coherence tomography (OCT). This study sought to validate whether CHIPs detected on CATCH indicate the presence of intraplaque hemorrhage (IPH) through ex vivo imaging of carotid and coronary plaque specimens, with histopathology as the standard reference. Methods: Ten patients scheduled to undergo carotid endarterectomy underwent CMR with the conventional T1-weighted (T1w) sequence. Eleven carotid atherosclerotic plaques removed at carotid endarterectomy and six coronary artery endarterectomy specimens removed from patients undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) were scanned ex vivo using both the conventional T1w sequence and CATCH. Both in vivo and ex vivo images were examined for the presence of IPH. The sensitivity, specificity, and Cohen Kappa (k) value of each scan were calculated using matched histological sections as the reference. k value between each scan in the discrimination of IPH was also computed. Results: A total of 236 in vivo locations, 328 ex vivo and matching histology locations were included for the analysis. Sensitivity, specificity, and k value were 76.7%, 95.3%, and 0.75 for in vivo T1w imaging, 77.2%, 97.4%, and 0.78 for ex vivo T1w imaging, and 95.0%, 92.1%, and 0.84 for ex vivo CATCH, respectively. Moderate agreement was reached between in vivo T1w imaging, ex vivo T1w imaging, and ex vivo CATCH for the detection of IPH: between in vivo T1w imaging and ex vivo CATCH (k = 0.68), between ex vivo T1w imaging and ex vivo CATCH (k = 0.74), between in vivo T1w imaging and ex vivo T1w imaging (k = 0.83). None of the coronary artery plaque locations showed IPH. Conclusion: This study demonstrated that carotid CHIPs detected by CATCH can be used to assess for IPH, a high-risk plaque feature

Synthesis, Biological Evaluation and Mechanism Studies of Deoxytylophorinine and Its Derivatives as Potential Anticancer Agents

Previous studies indicated that (+)-13a-(S)-Deoxytylophorinine (1) showed profound anti-cancer activities both in vitro and in vivo and could penetrate the blood brain barrier to distribute well in brain tissues. CNS toxicity, one of the main factors to hinder the development of phenanthroindolizidines, was not obviously found in 1. Based on its fascinating activities, thirty-four derivatives were designed, synthesized; their cytotoxic activities in vitro were tested to discover more excellent anticancer agents. Considering the distinctive mechanism of 1 and interesting SAR of deoxytylophorinine and its derivatives, the specific impacts of these compounds on cellular progress as cell signaling transduction pathways and cell cycle were proceeded with seven representative compounds. 1 as well as three most potent compounds, 9, 32, 33, and three less active compounds, 12, 16, 35, were selected to proform this study to have a relatively deep view of cancer cell growth-inhibitory characteristics. It was found that the expressions of phospho-Akt, Akt, phospho-ERK, and ERK in A549 cells were greater down-regulated by the potent compounds than by the less active compounds in the Western blot analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report describing phenanthroindolizidines alkaloids display influence on the crucial cell signaling proteins, ERK. Moreover, the expressions of cyclin A, cyclin D1 and CDK2 proteins depressed more dramatically when the cells were treated with 1, 9, 32, and 33. Then, these four excellent compounds were subjected to flow cytometric analysis, and an increase in S-phase was observed in A549 cells. Since the molecular level assay results of Western blot for phospho-Akt, Akt, phospho-ERK, ERK, and cyclins were relevant to the potency of compounds in cellular level, we speculated that this series of compounds exhibit anticancer activities through blocking PI3K and MAPK signaling transduction pathways and interfering with the cell cycle progression

The Oncogenic Role of KLF7 in Colon Adenocarcinoma and Therapeutic Perspectives

Colon adenocarcinoma, a highly prevalent and aggressive form of colorectal cancer, necessitates a comprehensive understanding of its molecular mechanisms to identify potential therapeutic targets. The Krüppel-like factor 7 (KLF7), a transcription factor, has been associated with various malignancies, yet its specific role in colon adenocarcinoma remains largely unexplored. Here, we aimed to determine the expression and functional significance of KLF7 in colon adenocarcinoma. Our findings revealed a significant upregulation of KLF7 expression in colon adenocarcinoma tissues compared to adjacent normal tissues. Moreover, elevated KLF7 expression correlated with advanced tumor stage, lymph node metastasis, and poor overall survival in colon adenocarcinoma patients. Functional assays demonstrated that silencing KLF7 resulted in reduced cell proliferation, migration, and invasion, indicating its involvement in promoting tumor growth and metastasis. Additionally, we identified potential downstream targets of KLF7, including genes associated with cell cycle regulation and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. These results underscore the tumor-promoting role of KLF7 in colon adenocarcinoma, positioning it as a potential prognostic biomarker and therapeutic target for this aggressive disease

2chADCNN: A Template Matching Network for Season-Changing UAV Aerial Images and Satellite Imagery

Visual navigation based on image matching has become one of the most important research fields for UAVs to achieve autonomous navigation, because of its low cost, strong anti-jamming ability, and high performance. Currently, numerous positioning and navigation methods based on visual information have been proposed for UAV navigation. However, the appearance, shape, color, and texture of objects can change significantly due to different lighting conditions, shadows, and surface coverage during different seasons, such as vegetation cover in summer or ice and snow cover in winter. These changes pose greater challenges for feature-based image matching methods. This encouraged us to overcome the limitations of previous works, which did not consider significant seasonal changes such as snow-covered UAV aerial images, by proposing an image matching method using season-changing UAV aerial images and satellite imagery. Following the pipeline of a two-channel deep convolutional neural network, we first pre-scaled the UAV aerial images, ensuring that the UAV aerial images and satellite imagery had the same ground sampling distance. Then, we introduced attention mechanisms to provide additional supervision for both low-level local features and high-level global features, resulting in a new season-specific feature representation. The similarity between image patches was calculated using a similarity measurement layer composed of two fully connected layers. Subsequently, we conducted template matching to estimate the UAV matching position with the highest similarity. Finally, we validated our proposed method on both synthetic and real UAV aerial image datasets, and conducted direct comparisons with previous popular works. The experimental results demonstrated that our method achieved the highest matching accuracy on multi-temporal and multi-season images

The analysis of activities of vitamin K-dependent coagulation factors, protein C and protein S in patients on warfarin therapy

Objective: To investigate the effects of warfarin anticoagulant therapy on vitamin K dependent clotting factors and down-regulation of protein C and protein S activities in anticoagulant system, as well as the effects of changes in above indic on anticoagulant balance. Methods: A total of 57 patients with pulmonary embolism or deep venous thrombosis treated with warfarin anticoagulant therapy in our hospital from January 2018 to March 2020 were enrolled, and activities of coagulation factors FⅡ, FⅦ, FⅨ, FⅩ, PC and PS were detected. International standardized ratio(INR) wasgrouped by quartile and the differences in the activity levels of coagulant and anticoagulant factors, protein C and protein S activities between 4 groups were compared. Results: There were statistically significant differences in the activity levels of each factor between different INR quartile groups (FⅡ, FⅦ, FⅩ: P<0.000 1; PC: P<0.001; FⅨ P<0.05). However, there was no significant difference in PS activity among different INR quartile groups(INR: 1.32-5.85), and INR level was negatively correlated with the activity of FⅡ, FⅦ, FⅨ, FⅩ, PC and PS (r was -0.678 7, -0.692 6, -0.376 7, -0.595 4, -0.466 6, and -0.212 2 respectively). The ratio of coagulation factor activity to anticoagulant protein activity decreased with the increase of INR. Conclusions: Although warfarin also interferes with carboxylation of vitamin K dependent clotting factors and anticoagulant proteins PC and PS, and decreasing their activity, clotting factors are affected more significantly

Time-Resolved Four-Channel Jones Matrix Measurement of Birefringent Materials Using an Ultrafast Laser

A method for ultrafast time-resolved four-channel Jones matrix measurement of birefringent materials using an ultrafast laser is investigated. This facilitated the acquisition of a four-channel angular multiplexing hologram in a single shot. The Jones matrix information of a birefringent sample was retrieved from the spatial spectrum of a hologram. The feasibility of this approach was established by measuring the Jones matrix of starch granules in microfluidic chips and the complex amplitude distribution and phase delay distribution of liquid crystal cell at different voltages. Moreover, when the picosecond laser was switched to a femtosecond laser, ultrafast measurements were possible provided that the time interval between two detection pulses was larger than the pulse width

Semi-Preparative Separation of 10 Caffeoylquinic Acid Derivatives Using High Speed Counter-Current Chromatogaphy Combined with Semi-Preparative HPLC from the Roots of Burdock (Arctium lappa L.)

Burdock roots are healthy dietary supplements and a kind of famous traditional Chinese medicine, which contains large amounts of caffeoylquinic acid derivatives. However, little research has been reported on the preparative separation of these compounds from burdock roots. In the present study, a combinative method of HSCCC and semi-preparative HPLC was developed for the semi-preparative separation of caffeoylquinic acid derivatives from the burdock roots. The ethyl acetate extract of burdock roots was first fractionated by MCI macroporous resin chromatography and give three fractions (Fr. 1–3) from the elution of 40% methanol. Then, these three fractions (120 mg) were separately subjected to HSCCC for purification with the solvent system composed of petroleum ether-ethyl acetate-methanol-water at different volume ratios, and the mixtures were further purified by semi-preparative HPLC. As a result, a total of eight known caffeoylquinic acid derivatives including 3-O-caffeoylquinic acid (32.7 mg, 95.7%), 1,5-O- dicaffeoylquinic acid (4.3 mg, 97.2%), 3-O-caffeoylquinic acid methyl ester (12.1 mg, 93.2%), 1,3-O-dicaffeoylquinic acid (42.9 mg, 91.1%), 1,5-O-dicaffeoyl-3-O-(4-maloyl)-quinic acid (4.3 mg, 84.5%), 4,5-O-dicaffeoylquinic acid (5.3 mg, 95.5%), 1,5-O-dicaffeoyl-3-O-succinylquinic acid (8.7 mg, 93.4%), and 1,5-O-dicaffeoyl-4-O-succinylquinic acid (1.7 mg, 91.8%), and two new compounds were obtained. The new compounds were 1,4-O-dicaffeoyl-3-succinyl methyl ester quinic acid (14.6 mg, 96.1%) and 1,5-O-dicaffeoyl-3-O-succinyl methyl ester quinic acid (3.1 mg, 92.6%), respectively. The research indicated that the combination of HSCCC and semi-preparative HPLC is a highly efficient approach for preparative separation of the instability and bioactive caffeoylquinic acid derivatives from natural products

Effect of High-Hydrostatic-Pressure Treatment on the Physicochemical Properties of Kafirin

The kafirin derived from Jin Nuo 3 sorghum underwent a high-hydrostatic-pressure (HHP) treatment of 100, 300, and 600 MPa for 10 min to investigate alterations in its physicochemical attributes. The findings exhibited a reduction in protein solubility, declining from 83% to 62%, consequent to the application of the HHP treatment. However, this treatment did not lead to subunit-specific aggregation. The absorption intensity of UV light diminished, and the peak fluorescence absorption wavelength exhibited a shift from 342 nm to 344 nm, indicating an increased polarity within the amino acid microenvironment. In an aqueous solution, the specific surface area expanded from 294.2 m2/kg to 304.5 m2/kg, while the average particle-size value in a 70% ethanol solution rose to 26.3 nm. Conversely, the zeta-potential value decreased from 3.4 mV to 1.3 mV, suggesting a propensity for aggregation in ethanol solutions. A notable rise in the intermolecular β-sheet content to 21.06% was observed, along with a shift in the peak denaturation temperature from 76.33 °C to 86.33 °C. Additionally, the content of disulfide bonds increased to 14.5 μmol/g. Collectively, the application of the HHP treatment not only enhanced the thermal stability but also induced a more ordered secondary structure within the kafirin