Screening of herbal extracts binding with vascular endothelial growth factor by applying HerboChip platform.

BACKGROUND: Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been hailed as a rich source of medicine, but many types of herbs and their functions still need to be rapidly discovered and elucidated. HerboChip, a target-based drug screening platform, is an array of different fractions deriving from herbal extracts. This study was designed to identify effective components from TCM that interact with vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) as a target using HerboChip. METHODS: Selected TCMs that are traditionally used as remedies for cancer prevention and wound healing were determined and extracted with 50% ethanol. Biotinylated-VEGF was hybridized with over 500 chips coated with different HPLC-separated fractions from TCM extracts and straptavidin-Cy5 was applied to identify plant extracts containing VEGF-binding fractions. Cytotoxicity of selected herbal extracts and their activities on VEGF-mediated angiogenic functions were evaluated. RESULTS: Over 500 chips were screened within a week, and ten positive hits were identified. The interaction of the identified herbal extracts with VEGF was confirmed in cultured endothelial cells. The identified herbs promoted or inhibited VEGF-mediated cell proliferation, migration and tube formation. Results from western blotting analysis demonstrated the identified herbal extracts significantly affected VEGF-triggered phosphorylations of eNOS, Akt and Erk. Five TCMs demonstrated potentiating activities on the VEGF response and five TCMs revealed suppressive activities. CONCLUSIONS: The current results demonstrated the applicability of the HerboChip platform and systematically elucidated the activity of selected TCMs on angiogenesis and its related signal transduction mechanisms.

A bibliometric analysis of research on organizational resilience.

Organizational resilience is a key concept in the study of sustainable corporate growth and indicates an organization's capacity to recover from adversity. It plays a crucial role in responding to uncertain crises. In recent years, academic interest in organizational resilience has increasingly gained prominence. This research uses CiteSpace and VOSviewer to provide a thorough visual analysis of pertinent international literature based on 342 pieces of closely linked literature about organizational resilience. The findings suggest that organizational resilience research is currently experiencing a development phase. Within this field, there is a substantial number of scholars involved, with the most prolific among them including Aleksic Aleksandar, Prayag Girish, and Griffiths Andrew. The networks of collaboration among these authors, nevertheless, are very scattered. Co-citation network research reveals the academics with the biggest sway in the field. Organizational resilience, conservation of resources theory, crisis management, corporate social responsibility, and emergency management are identified as research hotspots within the keyword co-citation network. Furthermore, to determine which countries and regions are the most influential, this study has created a cooperative network among them. China, the United States, and England are the top three nations with articles published. Not only are the highly cited journals respected in the management sector, but they also showcase noteworthy research accomplishments within the field. The purpose of this study is to investigate potential avenues for future research and offer helpful sources for choosing research subjects and developing theoretical frameworks in this area. The analysis is highly valuable as a reference for research on organizational resilience in different settings in the future.

Applying Image Recognition and Tracking Methods for Fish Physiology Detection Based on a Visual Sensor.

The proportion of pet keeping has increased significantly. According to the survey results of Business Next, the proportion of Taiwan families keeping pets was 70% in 2020. Among them, the total number of fish pets was close to 33% of the overall pet proportion. Therefore, aquarium pets have become indispensable companions for families. At present, many studies have discussed intelligent aquarium systems. Through image recognition based on visual sensors, we may be able to detect and interpret the physiological status of the fish according to their physiological appearance. In this way, it can help to notify the owner as soon as possible to treat the fish or isolate them individually, so as to avoid the spread of infection. However, most aquarium pets are kept in groups. Traditional image recognition technologies often fail to recognize each fish's physiological states precisely because of fish swimming behaviors, such as grouping swimming, shading with each other, flipping over, and so on. In view of this, this paper tries to address such problems and then proposes a practical scheme, which includes three phases. Specifically, the first phase tries to enhance the image recognition model for small features based on the prioritizing rules, thus improving the instant recognition capability. Then, the second phase exploits a designed fish-ID tracking mechanism and analyzes the physiological state of the same fish-ID through coherent frames, which can avoid temporal misidentification. Finally, the third phase leverages a fish-ID correction mechanism, which can detect and correct their IDs periodically and dynamically to avoid tracking confusion, and thus potentially improve the recognition accuracy. According to the experiment results, it was verified that our scheme has better recognition performance. The best accuracy and correctness ratio can reach up to 94.9% and 92.67%, which are improved at least 8.41% and 26.95%, respectively, as compared with the existing schemes.

Applying Machine Learning Technologies Based on Historical Activity Features for Multi-Resident Activity Recognition.

Due to the aging population, home care for the elderly has become very important. Currently, there are many studies focusing on the deployment of various sensors in the house to recognize the home activities of the elderly, especially for the elderly living alone. Through these, we can detect the home situation of the single person and ensure his/her living safety. However, the living environment of the elderly includes, not only the person living alone, but also multiple people living together. By applying the traditional methods for a multi-resident environment, the "individual" activities of each person could not be accurately identified. This resulted in an inability to distinguish which person was involved in what activities, and thus, failed to provide personal care. Therefore, this research tries to investigate how to recognize home activities in multi-resident living environments, in order to accurately distinguish the association between residents and home activities. Specifically, we propose to use the special characteristics of historical activity of residents in a multi-person environment, including activity interaction, activity frequency, activity period length, and residential behaviors, and then apply a suite of machine learning methods to train and test. Five traditional models of supervised learning and two deep learning methods are explored to tackle this problem. Through the experiments with real datasets, the proposed methods were found to achieve higher precision, recall and accuracy with less training time. The best accuracy can reach up to 91% and 95%, by J48DT, and LSTM, respectively, in different living environments.

Dynamic Set Planning for Coordinated Multi-Point in B4G/5G Networks.

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) is an important technique in B4G/5G networks. With CoMP, multiple base stations can be clustered to compose a cooperating set to improve system throughput, especially for the users in cell edges. Existed studies have discussed how to mitigate overloading scenarios and enhance system throughput with CoMP statically. However, static cooperation fixes the set size and neglects the fast-changing of B4G/5G networks. Thus, this paper provides a full study of off-peak hours and overloading scenarios. During off-peak hours, we propose to reduce BSs' transmission power and use the free radio resource to save energy while guaranteeing users' QoS. In addition, if large-scale activities happen with crowds gathering or in peak hours, we dynamically compose the cooperating set based on instant traffic requests to adjust base stations' BSs' transmission power; thus, the system will efficiently offload the traffic to the member cells which have available radio resources in the cooperating set. Experimental results show that the proposed schemes enhance system throughput, radio resource utilization, and energy efficiency, compared to other existing schemes.

Dimethyloxaloylglycine-stimulated human bone marrow mesenchymal stem cell-derived exosomes enhance bone regeneration through angiogenesis by targeting the AKT/mTOR pathway.

BACKGROUND: Mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)-derived exosomes have been recognized as new candidate agents for treating critical-sized bone defects; they promote angiogenesis and may be an alternative to cell therapy. In this study, we evaluated whether exosomes derived from bone marrow-derived MSCs (BMSCs) preconditioned with a low dose of dimethyloxaloylglycine (DMOG), DMOG-MSC-Exos, exert superior proangiogenic activity in bone regeneration and the underlying mechanisms involved. METHODS: To investigate the effects of these exosomes, scratch wound healing, cell proliferation, and tube formation assays were performed in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). To test the effects in vivo, a critical-sized calvarial defect rat model was established. Eight weeks after the procedure, histological/histomorphometrical analysis was performed to measure bone regeneration, and micro-computerized tomography was used to measure bone regeneration and neovascularization. RESULTS: DMOG-MSC-Exos activated the AKT/mTOR pathway to stimulate angiogenesis in HUVECs. This contributed to bone regeneration and angiogenesis in the critical-sized calvarial defect rat model in vivo. CONCLUSIONS: Low doses of DMOG trigger exosomes to exert enhanced proangiogenic activity in cell-free therapeutic applications.

Smart Interactive Education System Based on Wearable Devices.

Due to the popularity of smart devices, traditional one-way teaching methods might not deeply attract school students' attention, especially for the junior high school students, elementary school students, or even younger students, which is a critical issue for educators. Therefore, we develop an intelligent interactive education system, which leverages wearable devices (smart watches) to accurately capture hand gestures of school students and respond instantly to teachers so as to increase the interaction and attraction of school students in class. In addition, through multiple physical information of school students from the smart watch, it can find out the crux points of the learning process according to the deep data analysis. In this way, it can provide teachers to make instant adjustments and suggest school students to achieve multi-learning and innovative thinking. The system is mainly composed of three components: (1) smart interactive watch; (2) teacher-side smart application (App); and (3) cloud-based analysis system. Specifically, the smart interactive watch is responsible for detecting the physical information and interaction results of school students, and then giving feedback to the teachers. The teacher-side app will provide real-time learning suggestions to adjust the teaching pace to avoid learning disability. The cloud-based analysis system provides intelligent learning advices, academic performance prediction and anomaly learning detection. Through field trials, our system has been verified that can potentially enhance teaching and learning processes for both educators and school students.

Adaptive SSVEP-based BCI system with frequency and pulse duty-cycle stimuli tuning design.

This study aims to design a steady state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) based brain-computer interface (BCI) system with only three electrodes. It is known that low frequency flickering induces more intensive SSVEP, but might cause users feel uncomfortable and easily tired. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel middle/high frequency flickering stimulus. However, users show different SSVEP responses when gazing at the same stimuli. It is improper to design fixed frequency flickering stimuli for all users. This study firstly proposes a strategy to adjust the stimuli frequency for each user that could cause better SSVEP. Moreover, to further enhance the SSVEP, this study incorporates flickering duty-cycle for stimuli design, which has been discussed less for SSVEP-based BCI systems. The proposed system consists of two modes, flicker frequency/duty-cycle selection mode and application mode. The flicker frequency/duty-cycle selection mode obtains two best frequencies between 24 and 36 Hz with their related optimal duty-cycle. Then the system goes into the application mode to control the devices. A new fact that has been found is that the optimal flicker frequency and duty-cycle do not vary with time. It means once the optical flicker frequency and duty-cycle is determined the first time, flicker frequency/duty-cycle selection mode does not need to operate the next time. Furthermore, the phase coding technology is used to extend the one command/one frequency to multi command/one frequency. Experimental results show the proposed system has good performance with average accuracy 95% and average command transfer interval 4.4925 s per command.

[A study on blood flow measurement by diffuse correlation spectroscopy].

Blood flow plays an important role in clinical diagnosis and treatment, and noninvasive measurement of blood flow is the expectation of both doctors and patients. In the present work, the authors employed near-infrared diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS) method to measure blood flow noninvasively. The relationship between speckle intensity fluctuations of the scattering light and moving blood cells in tissue was theoretically analyzed. A theoretical model and blood flow measurement system were built. Blood flow was derived by calculating the electric field temporal autocorrelation function of speckle on tissue surface. Forearm blood flow was measured in healthy human subject during cuff inflation and deflation. Experimental results show that noninvasive blood flow measurement by this system is feasible. The results also suggest that this approach can provide blood flow information throughout the whole depth profile of the tissue.