Bibliometric Analysis of Brain Stimulation Technologies in Sleep Disorders.

BACKGROUND Sleep disorders are a common disease faced by people today and can lead to fatigue, lack of concentration, impaired memory, and even death. In recent years, the development of brain stimulation techniques has provided a new perspective for the treatment of sleep disorders. However, there is a lack of bibliometric analyses related to sleep disorders and brain stimulation techniques. Therefore, this study analyzed the application status and trend of brain stimulation technology in sleep disorder research. MATERIAL AND METHODS Articles and reviews published between 1999 and 2023 were retrieved from the Web of Science. CiteSpace was used to visually analyze the publications, countries, institutions, journals, authors, references, and keywords. RESULTS A total of 459 publications were obtained. The number of studies was shown to be on a general upward trend. The country with the largest number of publications was the United States; UDICE-French Research Universities had the highest number of publications; Neurology had the highest citation frequency; 90% of the top 10 references cited were from Journal Citation Reports Q1; Brigo was the author with the highest number of publications; and the most frequent keywords were "transcranial magnetic stimulation", "deep brain stimulation", and "Parkinson disease". CONCLUSIONS Our study used CiteSpace software to analyze 459 studies published since 1999 on brain stimulation techniques for the treatment of sleep disorders, revealing research trends and the current state of the field. Our results will help researchers to understand the existing research quickly and provide direction for future research.

FUS-Mediated CircFGFR1 Accelerates the Development of Papillary Thyroid Carcinoma by Stabilizing FGFR1 Protein.

Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) is the most prevalent type of thyroid cancer and its incidence is rising globally. The molecular mechanisms of PTC progression remain unclear, hindering the development of effective treatments. This study focuses on hsa_circ_0008016 (circFGFR1), a circular RNA significantly up-regulated in PTC cells. Silencing circFGFR1 inhibited PTC cell proliferation and increased cell apoptosis, suggesting its role in PTC progression. The RNA-binding protein FUS was identified as a promoter of circFGFR1 formation. While circFGFR1 does not influence FGFR1 mRNA translation, it inhibits ubiquitination and degradation of FGFR1 protein, prolonging its half-life. CircFGFR1 also interacts with protein CBL, inhibiting CBL-mediated ubiquitination of FGFR1 proteins. Rescue assays confirmed circFGFR1 promotes PTC cell growth through mediating FGFR1. This study highlights the potential of circFGFR1 as a therapeutic target, offering insights into PTC's molecular mechanisms, and paving the way for novel treatment strategies.

[Effect and mechanism of Linggui Zhugan Decoction in regulating Sig1R on Angâ ¡-induced cardiomyocyte hypertrophy].

This study aims to explore the mechanism of Linggui Zhugan Decoction(LGZGD) in inhibiting Angiotensin Ⅱ(AngⅡ)-induced cardiomyocyte hypertrophy by regulating sigma-1 receptor(Sig1R). The model of H9c2 cardiomyocyte hypertrophy induced by AngⅡ in vitro was established by preparing LGZGD-containing serum and blank serum. H9c2 cells were divided into normal group, AngⅡ model group, 20% normal rat serum group(20% NSC), and 20% LGZGD-containing serum group. After the cells were incubated with AngⅡ(1 µmol·L~(-1)) or AngⅡ with serum for 72 h, the surface area of cardiomyocytes was detected by phalloidine staining, and the activities of Na~+-K~+-ATPase and Ca~(2+)-Mg~(2+)-ATPase were detected by micromethod. The mitochondrial Ca~(2+) levels were detected by flow cytometry, and the expression levels of atrial natriuretic peptide(ANP), brain natriuretic peptide(BNP), Sig1R, and inositol 1,4,5-triphosphate receptor type 2(IP_3R_2) were detected by Western blot. The expression of Sig1R was down-regulated by transfecting specific siRNA for investigating the efficacy of LGZGD-containing serum on cardiomyocyte surface area, Na~+-K~+-ATPase activity, Ca~(2+)-Mg~(2+)-ATPase activity, mitochondrial Ca~(2+), as well as ANP, BNP, and IP_3R_2 protein expressions. The results showed that compared with the normal group, AngⅡ could significantly increase the surface area of cardiomyocytes and the expression of ANP and BNP(P<0.01), and it could decrease the activities of Na~+-K~+-ATPase and Ca~(2+)-Mg~(2+)-ATPase, the concentration of mitochondrial Ca~(2+), and the expression of Sig1R(P<0.01). In addition, IP_3R_2 protein expression was significantly increased(P<0.01). LGZGD-containing serum could significantly decrease the surface area of cardiomyocytes and the expression of ANP and BNP(P<0.05, P<0.01), and it could increase the activities of Na~+-K~+-ATPase and Ca~(2+)-Mg~(2+)-ATPase, the concentration of mitochondrial Ca~(2+ )(P<0.01), and the expression of Sig1R(P<0.05). In addition, IP_3R_2 protein expression was significantly decreased(P<0.05). However, after Sig1R was down-regulated, the effects of LGZGD-containing serum were reversed(P<0.01). These results indicated that the LGZGD-containing serum could inhibit cardiomyocyte hypertrophy induced by AngⅡ, and its pharmacological effect was related to regulating Sig1R, promoting mitochondrial Ca~(2+ )inflow, restoring ATP synthesis, and protecting mitochondrial function.

CD1C is associated with breast cancer prognosis and immune infiltrates.

BACKGROUND: The tumor microenvironment (TME) in breast cancer plays a vital role in occurrence, development, and therapeutic responses. However, immune and stroma constituents in the TME are major obstacles to understanding and treating breast cancer. We evaluated the significance of TME-related genes in breast cancer. METHODS: Invasive breast cancer (BRCA) samples were retrieved from the TCGA and GEO databases. Stroma and immune scores of samples as well as the proportion of tumor infiltrating immune cells (TICs) were calculated using the ESTIMATE and CIBERSORT algorithms. TME-related differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were analyzed by a protein interaction (PPI) network and univariate Cox regression to determine CD1C as a hub gene. Subsequently, the prognostic value of CD1C, its response to immunotherapy, and its mechanism in the TME were further studied. RESULTS: In BRCA, DEGs were determined to identify CD1C as a hub gene. The expression level of CD1C in BRCA patients was verified based on the TCGA database, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) results, and western blot analysis. Immunohistochemical staining (IHC) results revealed a correlation between prognosis, clinical features, and CD1C expression in BRCA. Enrichment analysis of GSEA and GSVA showed that CD1C participates in immune-associated signaling pathways. CIBERSORT showed that CD1C levels were associated with tumor immune infiltrating cells (TILs), such as different kinds of T cells. Gene co-expression analysis showed that CD1C and the majority of immune-associated genes were co-expressed in BRCA. In renal cell carcinoma, patients with a high expression of CD1C had a better immunotherapy effect. CONCLUSION: CD1C is an important part of the TME and participates in immune activity regulation in breast tumors. CD1C is expected to become a prognostic marker and a new treatment target for breast cancer.

How to prevent cognitive overload in the walking-arithmetic dual task among patients with Parkinson's disease.

BACKGROUND: Participants with Parkinson's disease (PD) may experience difficulty during certain dual-task (DT) tests. Thus, it is necessary to keep the cognitive load within the limits of their ability. OBJECTIVE: To identify cognitive overload and its influence on the walking and auditory addition and subtraction (AAS, all values within the range of 0-20) DT performance of patients with PD. STUDY DESIGN: A cross-sectional observational study with convenience sampling. SETTING: Outpatient clinic of the Department of Neurology. SUBJECTS: Sixteen patients with PD and 15 sex- and age- matched people elderly healthy controls (HCs). METHODS: Verbal calculation responses and gait parameters were collected from the two groups in the 2-min single arithmetic task (2-min SAT), 2-min single walking task (2-min SWT), and 2-min walking-arithmetic dual task (2-min WADT). RESULTS: The group differences in the lower-limb gait parameters increased in the 2-min WADT (P < 0.01), and those in the arm, trunk, and waist parameters did not change (P > 0.05). In the 2-min SAT, the calculation speed of the PD group was significantly lower than that of the HC group (P < 0.01). In the 2-min WADT, both groups made more errors (P < 0.05), especially the PD group (P = 0.00). PD group miscalculations occurred in the first half of the 2-min SAT but were uniformly distributed in the 2-min WADT. The HC group and PD group had subtraction self-correction rates of 31.25% and 10.25%, respectively. The PD group tended to make subtraction errors when the value of the first operand was 20 or 13.46 ± 2.60 and when the value of the second and third operands were 7.75 ± 2.51 (P = 0.3657) and 8.50 ± 4.04 (P = 0.170), respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Cognitive overload was observed in patients with PD. This was mainly reflected in the failure of gait control and accurate calculation, indicated by gait parameters of the lower limbs and accuracy of calculation. To impose a constant cognitive load, the amount added or subtracted, especially in subtraction with borrowing, should not be mixed during a sequential arithmetic problem in the DT, and equations with the value of the first operand equal to 20 or approximately 13, the value of the second operand approximately 7, or the value of the third operand of approximately 9 should be excluded in the AAS DT. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Clinical trial registration number: ChiCTR1800020158.

Sequential annulation and isomerisation reaction of 3-acylmethylidene oxindoles with Huisgen zwitterions and synthesis of 5-(3-oxindolyl)oxazoles.

Herein, we report a facile synthesis of 5-(3-oxindolyl)oxazole derivatives via a sequential annulation and isomerisation reaction of 3-acylmethylidene oxindoles with in situ generated Huisgen zwitterions (HZs) from PPh3 and azodicarboxylates. This reaction exhibits good functional group tolerance with 30 examples of structurally diverse products prepared with moderate to good efficiencies (up to 88% yield), thus providing a generally applicable route to the biologically important 5-(3-indolyl)oxazole structural motifs. Key to the success of this sequential one-pot strategy is the utilization of DBU as a base to promote the isomerisation process of the corresponding intermediate annulation products.

Visualization Analysis of Research Trends and Hotspots in Inspiratory Muscle Training.

BACKGROUND Inspiratory muscle training (IMT) aims to train inspiratory muscles based mainly on the diaphragm by applying a load resistance during the inspiratory process. Many papers related to IMT have been published in various journals; however, no articles objectively and directly present the development trends and research hotspots of IMT. Therefore, this study used CiteSpace to visually analyze recent IMT-related publications to provide valuable information for future IMT-related studies. MATERIAL AND METHODS CiteSpace was applied to analyze the IMT-related publications by countries, institutions, journals, authors, references, and keywords. RESULTS We included 504 papers. The number of IMT-related publications trended upward between 2009 and 2022. Leuven had the highest number of publications by an institution. The American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine was the most frequently co-cited journal. Half of the top 10 references cited were from Journal Citation Reports (JCR) Q1 and half were about the application of IMT in chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Gosselink was the author with the highest number of publications and Aldrich was the author with the highest co-citation frequency. The preponderance of studies on the surgical population and postoperative pulmonary complications reflects potential application of IMT in enhanced recovery after surgery. CONCLUSIONS This study provides scholars with important information related to IMT research. It analyzes IMT research trends and status, which can help researchers identify primary topics in the field and find ways to explore new research directions to promote the application of IMT in clinical practice and the cooperation of IMT-related disciplines.

Cascade Ring-Opening/Cyclization Reaction of Spiro(nitrocyclopropane)oxindoles with Huisgen Zwitterions and Synthesis of Pyrazolo[3,4-b]indoles.

Herein, we report a ring-opening/cyclization cascade reaction of spiro(nitrocyclopropane)oxindoles with in situ generated Huisgen zwitterions (HZs) from PPh3 and azodicarboxylates. This reaction provides an array of polyfunctionalized pyrazolo[3,4-b]indole derivatives in moderate-to-excellent yields and generally high stereoselectivities with a broad substrate scope. The annulation products obtained from di-tert-butyl azodicarboxylates can be readily transformed into aromatic-substituted pyrazolo[3,4-b]indoles in moderate yields upon treatment with trifluoroacetic acid, thus providing a new entry to this fused heterocycle skeleton. In terms of nitro-substituted donor-acceptor cyclopropane, this work significantly broadens the substrate scope for the annulation reaction of nitrocyclopropanes and HZs. The dual roles of the oxindole moiety in the ring opening of cyclopropane and a plausible mechanism for the cascade reaction are also discussed.

Modeling the Virus Infection at the Population Level.

As pointed out by many researchers in the last few decades, differential equations with fractional (non-integer) order differential operators, in comparison with classical integer order ones, have apparent advantages in modeling. A Caputo fractional order system of ordinary differential equations is introduced to model the virus infection at the population level in this chapter. As well known, there are two main methods to study the dynamics of a model: qualitative analysis and numerical modeling. Here the qualitative analysis, including uniqueness, invariant set, and stability, is first presented with intuitive derivation. Then the famous genetic algorithm is introduced to numerically model the dynamics of virus infection, i.e. to adjust the parameters of the Caputo fractional model such that its solution can properly fit real data and predict future.

Functional Connectivity of Ipsilateral Striatum in Rats with Ischemic Stroke Increased by Electroacupuncture.

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to investigate the effects of electroacupuncture (EA) treatment at Zusanli (ST36) and Quchi (LI11) on cortico-striatal network connectivity after ischemia stroke by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). METHODS: A rat model of middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAO) was established. Rats were randomly assigned into a sham-operated control group (SC group, n = 8), untreated MCAO model group (MCAO group, n = 8), and MCAO group receiving EA treatment at ST36 and LI11 (MCAO + EA group, n = 8). Rats in the SC and the MCAO groups received no treatment. The MCAO + EA group was treated with EA from the 1st day to the 7th day after surgery. The behavioral tests including Zea Longa test and modified neurologic severity score (mNSS) for all rats were performed before and after treatment for MCAO + EA group. fMRI scans were performed after behavioral tests on the 7th day after surgery. RESULTS: The neurologic severity scores estimated by Zea Longa and mNSS were significantly improved in the rat ischemic stroke model of MCAO within 1 week after EA treatment at acupoints ST36 and LI11. Besides, voxel-wise analysis showed that EA could increase the functional connectivity of the left striatum with the bilateral sensory cortex, bilateral motor cortex, left retrosplenial cortex, right cerebellum, bilateral hippocampus, bilateral auditory cortex, bilateral visual cortex, left parietal cortex, left cingulate gyrus, and left superior colliculus. Further graph theory analysis showed that EA significantly decreased the characteristic path length and increased the global efficiency of the cortico-striatal network. CONCLUSIONS: EA at ST36 and LI11 could improve the cortico-striatal network to impact the brain's protective in MCAO, which is a potential treatment for ischemia stroke.

Wavelet-Based Fractal Analysis of rs-fMRI for Classification of Alzheimer's Disease.

The resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) modality has gained widespread acceptance as a promising method for analyzing a variety of neurological and psychiatric diseases. It is established that resting-state neuroimaging data exhibit fractal behavior, manifested in the form of slow-decaying auto-correlation and power-law scaling of the power spectrum across low-frequency components. With this property, the rs-fMRI signal can be broken down into fractal and nonfractal components. The fractal nature originates from several sources, such as cardiac fluctuations, respiration and system noise, and carries no information on the brain's neuronal activities. As a result, the conventional correlation of rs-fMRI signals may not accurately reflect the functional dynamic of spontaneous neuronal activities. This problem can be solved by using a better representation of neuronal activities provided by the connectivity of nonfractal components. In this work, the nonfractal connectivity of rs-fMRI is used to distinguish Alzheimer's patients from healthy controls. The automated anatomical labeling (AAL) atlas is used to extract the blood-oxygenation-level-dependent time series signals from 116 brain regions, yielding a 116 × 116 nonfractal connectivity matrix. From this matrix, significant connections evaluated using the p-value are selected as an input to a classifier for the classification of Alzheimer's vs. normal controls. The nonfractal-based approach provides a good representation of the brain's neuronal activity. It outperformed the fractal and Pearson-based connectivity approaches by 16.4% and 17.2%, respectively. The classification algorithm developed based on the nonfractal connectivity feature and support vector machine classifier has shown an excellent performance, with an accuracy of 90.3% and 83.3% for the XHSLF dataset and ADNI dataset, respectively. For further validation of our proposed work, we combined the two datasets (XHSLF+ADNI) and still received an accuracy of 90.2%. The proposed work outperformed the recently published work by a margin of 8.18% and 11.2%, respectively.

Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Based on RCMFDE-SPLR and Ocean Predator Algorithm Optimizing Support Vector Machine.

For the problem that rolling bearing fault characteristics are difficult to extract accurately and the fault diagnosis accuracy is not high, an unsupervised characteristic selection method of refined composite multiscale fluctuation-based dispersion entropy (RCMFDE) combined with self-paced learning and low-redundant regularization (SPLR) is proposed, for which the fault diagnosis is carried out by support vector machine (SVM) optimized by the marine predator algorithm (MPA). First, we extract the entropy characteristics of the bearings under different fault states by RCMFDE and the introduction of the fine composite multiscale coarse-grained method and fluctuation strategy improves the stability and estimation accuracy of the bearing characteristics; then, a novel dimensionality-reduction method, SPLR, is used to select better entropy characteristics, and the local flow structure of the fault characteristics is preserved and the redundancy is constrained by two regularization terms; finally, using the MPA-optimized SVM classifier by combining Levy motion and Eddy motion strategies, the preferred RCMFDE is fed into the MPA-SVM model for fault diagnosis, for which the obtained bearing fault diagnosis accuracy is 97.67%. The results show that the RCMFDE can effectively improve the stability and accuracy of the bearing characteristics, the SPLR-based low-dimensional characteristics can suppress the redundancy characteristics and improve the effectiveness of the characteristics, and the MPA-based adaptive SVM model solves the parameter randomness problem and, therefore, the proposed method has outstanding superiority.

[Effect of Linggui Zhugan Decoction-containing serum on mitochondrial oxidative stress in cardiomyocytes: an exploration based on Nrf2/BNIP3 signaling pathway].

This study aimed to explore the effect of Linggui Zhugan Decoction(LGZGD)-containing serum on mitochondrial oxidative stress in cardiomyocytes based on the NF-E2-related factor2(Nrf2)/Bcl-2/adenovirus E1 B 19 kDa interacting protein(BNIP3) signaling pathway. After the preparation of LGZGD-containing serum and blank serum, H9 c2 cardiomyocytes were exposed to H_2O_2 for inducing oxidative stress in vitro. The H9 c2 cells were divided into four groups, namely normal control group, H_2O_2 model group, 20% blank serum group, and 20% LGZGD-containing serum group. After the cells were pre-treated with different types of serum for 12 h and cultured with 100 µmol·L~(-1 )H_2O_2 for 6 h, the reactive oxygen species(ROS) level in each group was detected by DCFH-DA, and the openness of mitochondrial permeability transition pore(mPTP) was measured using a calcein AM fluorescent probe. The expression levels of cytoplasmic cytochrome C(CytC), mitochondrial CytC, cytoplasmic and nuclear Nrf2, and BNIP3 were detected by Western blot. Nrf2-silenced H9 c2 cells were prepared by transfecting them with siRNA-Nrf2 for investigating the efficacy of LGZGD-containing serum in regulating ROS, mPTP, cytoplasmic and mitochondrial CytC, and BNIP3. The results showed that compared with the normal control group, H_2O_2 significantly increased the ROS content and mPTP openness(P<0.01), and the expression of Nrf2, BNIP3, and cytoplasmic CytC(P<0.01), and decreased the expression of mitochondrial CytC(P<0.01), without causing obvious change in cytoplasmic Nrf2. LGZGD-containing serum significantly lowered ROS content(P<0.01), inhibited mPTP openness(P<0.01), down-regulated the expression of cytoplasmic CytC and BNIP3(P<0.01), up-regulated mitochondrial CytC expression(P<0.01), and promoted Nrf2 nuclear translocation(P<0.05). However, after Nrf2 silencing, the reduced ROS production, diminished BNIP3 expression, and inhibited mPTP openness and CytC release induced by LGZGD-containing serum were reversed(P<0.01). These results have suggested that LGZGD-containing serum is able to alleviate the mitochondrial oxidative stress injury of cardiomyocytes by regulating the Nrf2/BNIP3 signaling pathway.

[Mechanism of atractylenolide â ¢ in alleviating H9c2 cell apoptosis through ROS/GRP78/caspase-12 signaling pathway based on molecular docking].

This study aims to investigate the effect of atractylenolide Ⅲ(ATL-Ⅲ) on hydrogen peroxide(H_2O_2)-induced endoplasmic reticulum stress and apoptosis of H9 c2 cells via the ROS/GRP78/caspase-12 signaling pathway.The binding activity of ATL-Ⅲ to GRP78 was determined by molecular docking.The result showed that ATL-Ⅲ had a good binding activity to GRP78, and the binding activity of ATL-Ⅲ was stronger than that of its specific inhibitor.The endoplasmic reticulum stress model of H9 c2 was established by H_2O_2(100 µmol·L~(-1)) treatment.Five groups were designed: blank control group, model group, and ATL-Ⅲ(15, 30, and 60 µmol·L~(-1)) groups.Apoptosis was detected by Hoechst/PI double staining and flow cytometry.The levels of superoxide dismutase(SOD), malondialdehyde(MDA), and lactate dehydrogenase(LDH) were measured by colorimetry.The levels of reactive oxygen species(ROS) and calcium(Ca~(2+)) in cytoplasm were determined by the fluorescence probe DCFH-DA and the calcium fluorescence probe Flou-4, respectively.The protein levels of GRP78, caspase-12, and caspase-3 were determined by Western blot, and the mRNA levels of GRP78 and caspase-12 by RT-qPCR.N-acetyl-L-cysteine(NAC) and 4-phenylbutyric acid(4-PBA) were respectively used to inhibit ROS and GRP78, and then the mechanism of ATL-Ⅲ in protecting the cells from endoplasmic reticulum stress induced by H_2O_2 were deduced.ATL-Ⅲ(15, 30, and 60 µmol·L~(-1)) decreased the apoptosis rate and ROS, MDA, and LDH levels(P<0.01), increased the SOD activity(P<0.01), and down-regulated the protein levels of GRP78, caspase-12, and caspase-3 and the mRNA levels of GRP78 and caspase-12(P<0.05).The addition of NAC decreased the apoptosis rate and ROS, MDA, GRP78, caspase-12, and caspase-3 levels(P<0.01), while it elevated the SOD level(P<0.01).The addition of 4-PBA also decreased the apoptosis rate and the levels of GRP78, caspase-12, caspase-3, and Ca~(2+)(P<0.01).The effect of inhibitors were consistent with that of ATL-Ⅲ.In conclusion, ATL-Ⅲ can protect H9 c2 cardiomyocytes by regulating ROS/GRP78/caspase-12 signaling pathway to inhibit H_2O_2-induced endoplasmic reticulum stress and apoptosis.

Potential and applications of capillary electrophoresis for analyzing traditional Chinese medicine: a critical review.

Capillary electrophoresis (CE) presents a promising possibility for analyzing traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) due to its low reagent consumption, high analysis speed, and enhanced efficiency. Herein we review the employment of CE for analyzing the effective components in TCM and identifying TCM via a fingerprint. Furthermore, we discuss the application of state-of-the-art capillary electrophoresis modes for screening enzyme inhibitors and investigating the interactions between TCM and plasma proteins. The review concludes with recommendations for future studies and improvements in this field of research. The general development trend identified in this review indicates that the application of CE has significantly improved TCM assay performance.

Water and oxygen co-induced microstructure relaxation and evolution in CH3NH3PbI3.

Owing to perovskite possessing the outstanding optoelectronic properties, perovskite-based solar cells show prominent performance. The stability of perovskite-based solar cells hampers the progress of commercialization, so it is important to understand the microstructure mechanism of perovskite degradation under the humidity and oxygen environmental conditions. In this study, a meaningful Debye-type dielectric relaxation was observed under water vapor and oxygen co-treatment conditions. Interestingly, the relaxation was not observed under water vapor or oxygen treatment individually. This new dielectric relaxation is identified as a direct result of dipole jump, and its activation energy was measured to be 630 ± 6 meV. According to photoelectron spectroscopy and 13C nuclear magnetic resonance data, we suggest that the dipoles are formed by CH3NH3+ (MA+) and superoxide (O2-), which originate from the distorted crystal lattice and water vapor-weakened hydrogen bonds of Pb-I cages. In addition, the activation energy fitted by dielectric relaxation might be the energy of ion migration. This study contributes to understanding the mechanism of perovskite degradation from the view of microstructure relaxation and evolution, and also provides a method for the analysis of ion migration energy.

Cortical haemodynamic response during the verbal fluency task in patients with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder: a preliminary functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.

BACKGROUND: Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is an emerging neuroimaging modality that provides a direct and quantitative assessment of cortical haemodynamic response during a cognitive task. It may be used to identify neurophysiological differences between psychiatric disorders with overlapping symptoms, such as bipolar disorder (BD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD). Hence, this preliminary study aimed to compare the cerebral haemodynamic function of healthy controls (HC), patients with BD and patients with BPD. METHODS: Twenty-seven participants (9 HCs, 9 patients with BD and 9 patients with BPD) matched for age, gender, ethnicity and education were recruited. Relative oxy-haemoglobin and deoxy-haemoglobin changes in the frontotemporal cortex was monitored with a 52-channel fNIRS system during a verbal fluency task (VFT). VFT performance, clinical history and symptom severity were also noted. RESULTS: Compared to HCs, both patient groups had lower mean oxy-haemoglobin in the frontotemporal cortex during the VFT. Moreover, mean oxy-haemoglobin in the left inferior frontal region is markedly lower in patients with BPD compared to patients with BD. Task performance, clinical history and symptom severity were not associated with mean oxy-haemoglobin levels. CONCLUSIONS: Prefrontal cortex activity is disrupted in patients with BD and BPD, but it is more extensive in BPD. These results provide further neurophysiological evidence for the separation of BPD from the bipolar spectrum. fNIRS could be a potential tool for assessing the frontal lobe function of patients who present with symptoms that are common to BD and BPD.

Automatic Polyp Segmentation in Colonoscopy Images Using a Modified Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture.

Colorectal cancer has become the third most commonly diagnosed form of cancer, and has the second highest fatality rate of cancers worldwide. Currently, optical colonoscopy is the preferred tool of choice for the diagnosis of polyps and to avert colorectal cancer. Colon screening is time-consuming and highly operator dependent. In view of this, a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) method needs to be developed for the automatic segmentation of polyps in colonoscopy images. This paper proposes a modified SegNet Visual Geometry Group-19 (VGG-19), a form of convolutional neural network, as a CAD method for polyp segmentation. The modifications include skip connections, 5 × 5 convolutional filters, and the concatenation of four dilated convolutions applied in parallel form. The CVC-ClinicDB, CVC-ColonDB, and ETIS-LaribPolypDB databases were used to evaluate the model, and it was found that our proposed polyp segmentation model achieved an accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, mean intersection over union, and dice coefficient of 96.06%, 94.55%, 97.56%, 97.48%, 92.3%, and 95.99%, respectively. These results indicate that our model performs as well as or better than previous schemes in the literature. We believe that this study will offer benefits in terms of the future development of CAD tools for polyp segmentation for colorectal cancer diagnosis and management. In the future, we intend to embed our proposed network into a medical capsule robot for practical usage and try it in a hospital setting with clinicians.

Detection of Collaterals from Cone-Beam CT Images in Stroke.

Collateral vessels play an important role in the restoration of blood flow to the ischemic tissues of stroke patients, and the quality of collateral flow has major impact on reducing treatment delay and increasing the success rate of reperfusion. Due to high spatial resolution and rapid scan time, advance imaging using the cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is gaining more attention over the conventional angiography in acute stroke diagnosis. Detecting collateral vessels from CBCT images is a challenging task due to the presence of noises and artifacts, small-size and non-uniform structure of vessels. This paper presents a technique to objectively identify collateral vessels from non-collateral vessels. In our technique, several filters are used on the CBCT images of stroke patients to remove noises and artifacts, then multiscale top-hat transformation method is implemented on the pre-processed images to further enhance the vessels. Next, we applied three types of feature extraction methods which are gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM), moment invariant, and shape to explore which feature is best to classify the collateral vessels. These features are then used by the support vector machine (SVM), random forest, decision tree, and K-nearest neighbors (KNN) classifiers to classify vessels. Finally, the performance of these classifiers is evaluated in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, precision, recall, F-Measure, and area under the receiver operating characteristics curve. Our results show that all classifiers achieve promising classification accuracy above 90% and able to detect the collateral and non-collateral vessels from images.