The involvement of the gut microbiota in postoperative cognitive dysfunction based on integrated metagenomic and metabolomics analysis.

IMPORTANCE: As the population ages and medical technology advances, anesthesia procedures for elderly patients are becoming more common, leading to an increased prevalence of postoperative cognitive dysfunction. However, the etiology and correlation between the gut microbiota and cognitive dysfunction are poorly understood, and research in this area is limited. In this study, mice with postoperative cognitive dysfunction were found to have reduced levels of fatty acid production and anti-inflammatory flora in the gut, and Bacteroides was associated with increased depression, leading to cognitive dysfunction and depression. Furthermore, more specific microbial species were identified in the disease model, suggesting that modulation of host metabolism through gut microbes may be a potential avenue for preventing postoperative cognitive dysfunction.

Nutrient resorption responses of female and male Populus cathayana to drought and shade stress.

Nutrient resorption can increase nutrient use and play important roles in terrestrial plant nutrient cycles. Although several studies have reported individual responses of plant nutrient resorption to drought or shade stress, the interaction of drought and shade remains unclear, especially for dioecious plants. This study explored whether nutrient resorption is correlated to growth characteristics (such as biomass and root/shoot ratio [R/S ratio]) and leaf economics (such as leaf thickness, leaf mass per area [LMA] and leaf vein density [LVD]) in female and male Populus cathayana across different conditions. We found that drought stress significantly increased nitrogen (N) resorption efficiency (NRE) in both sexes, but shade and interactive stress decreased NRE in P. cathayana females. Under drought stress, nutrient resorption was sexually dimorphic such that P. cathayana males have higher NRE than females. Furthermore, NRE and phosphorous (P) resorption efficiency (PRE) were positively related to R/S ratio, leaf thickness, LMA, and LVD in both sexes across different treatments. Our study is the first to present how nutrient resorption is related to biomass accumulation and allocation, and leaf economics, suggesting that nutrient uptake may be modulated by R/S ratio and leaf economics, which is important for understanding the conservation mechanism of plant nutrients.

Proximal femur parameter measurement via improved PointNet+.

BACKGROUND: Femoral morphological studies and parameter measurements play a crucial role in diagnosing hip joint disease, preoperative planning for total hip arthroplasty, and prosthesis design. Doctors usually perform parameter measurements manually in clinical practice, but it is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, the results rely heavily on the doctor's experience, and the repeatability is poor. Therefore, the accurate and automatic measurement methods of proximal femoral parameters are of great value. METHOD: We collected 300 cases of clinical CT data of the femur. We introduced the adaptive function adjustment module to the neural network PointNet++ to strengthen the global feature extraction of the point cloud for improving the accuracy of femur segmentation. We used the improved PointNet++ network to segment the femur into three parts: femoral head, femoral neck, and femoral shaft. We evaluated the segmentation accracy using Dice Coefficient, MIoU, recall, and precision indicators. We achieved the automatic measurement of the proximal femoral parameters using the shape fitting algorithms, and compared the automatic and manual measurement results. RESULTS: The Dice, MIoU, recall and precision indicator of the improved segmentation algorithm reached 98.05%, 96.55%, 96.63%, and 96.03%, respectively. The comparison between automatic and manual measurement results showed that the mean accuracies of all parameters were above 95%, the mean errors were less than 5 mm and 3°, and the ICC values were more than 0.8, indicating that the automatic measurement results were accurate. CONCLUSION: Our improved PointNet++ network provided high-precision segmentation of the femur. We further completed automatic measurement of the femur parameters and verified its high accuracy. This method is of great value for the diagnosis and preoperative planning of hip diseases.

Comparing two different automatic methods to measure femoral neck-shaft angle based on PointNet++ network.

Accurate measurement of the femoral neck-shaft angle (NSA) is of great significance for diagnosing hip joint diseases and preoperative planning of total hip arthroplasty. However, the repeatability of manual measurements is not as satisfactory, and the difference between 2D and 3D measurements is not clear. The computer-aided method provides a platform for automatic and accurate measurement of the NSA. The femoral point cloud datasets from 310 subjects were segmented into three regions, including the femoral head, femoral neck, and femoral shaft using PointNet++. We created a projection plane to simulate the hip anteroposterior radiograph and fitted the femoral neck axis and femoral shaft axis to complete the 2D measurement, while we directly fitted the two axes in space to complete the 3D measurement. Also, we conducted the manual measurement of the NSA. We verified the accuracy of the segmentation and compared the results of the two automatic and manual methods. The Dice coefficient of femoral segmentation reached 0.9746, and MIoU of that was 0.9165. No significant difference was found between any two of the three methods. While comparing the 2D and 3D methods, the average accuracy was 98.00%, and the average error was 2.58°. This paper proposed two accurate and automatic methods to measure the NSA based on a 2D plane and a 3D model respectively. Although the femoral neck and femoral shaft axes did not intersect in 3D space, the NSAs obtained by 2D and 3D methods were basically consistent.

Lung segmentation and automatic detection of COVID-19 using radiomic features from chest CT images.

This paper aims to develop an automatic method to segment pulmonary parenchyma in chest CT images and analyze texture features from the segmented pulmonary parenchyma regions to assist radiologists in COVID-19 diagnosis. A new segmentation method, which integrates a three-dimensional (3D) V-Net with a shape deformation module implemented using a spatial transform network (STN), was proposed to segment pulmonary parenchyma in chest CT images. The 3D V-Net was adopted to perform an end-to-end lung extraction while the deformation module was utilized to refine the V-Net output according to the prior shape knowledge. The proposed segmentation method was validated against the manual annotation generated by experienced operators. The radiomic features measured from our segmentation results were further analyzed by sophisticated statistical models with high interpretability to discover significant independent features and detect COVID-19 infection. Experimental results demonstrated that compared with the manual annotation, the proposed segmentation method achieved a Dice similarity coefficient of 0.9796, a sensitivity of 0.9840, a specificity of 0.9954, and a mean surface distance error of 0.0318 mm. Furthermore, our COVID-19 classification model achieved an area under curve (AUC) of 0.9470, a sensitivity of 0.9670, and a specificity of 0.9270 when discriminating lung infection with COVID-19 from community-acquired pneumonia and healthy controls using statistically significant radiomic features. The significant features measured from our segmentation results agreed well with those from the manual annotation. Our approach has great promise for clinical use in facilitating automatic diagnosis of COVID-19 infection on chest CT images.

Dose-dependent effect of aqueous extract from Dendrobium officinale on blood lipids and lipid peroxidation in hyperlipidemic rats.

Dendrobium officinale is a traditional Chinese herbal medicine exhibiting multiple bioactivities, showing antitumor and immune-enhancing effects. The purpose of the study is to explore the effect of aqueous extract from Dendrobium officinale on blood lipids and lipid peroxidation in hyperlipidemic rats. Hyperlipidemic rats were prepared and daily given an intragastric administration of Dendrobium officinale at doses of 0.25g/kg, 0.5g/kg, or 1g/kg, or an intragastric administration of 8mg/kg simvastatin. We determined increased serum levels of total cholesterol (TC), triglyceride (TG), low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate transaminase (AST), reduced serum levels of HDL-C, elevated MDA levels, decreased activity of GSH-Px, SOD and CAT in liver tissues of hyperlipidemic rats. Intragastric administration of Dendrobium officinale reduced serum levels of TC, TG, LDL-C, ALT, AST, increased serum levels of HDL-C, reduced MDA levels, and enhanced activity of GSH-Px, SOD and CAT in liver tissues of hyperlipidemic rats in a dose-dependent manner. Taken together, aqueous extract from Dendrobium officinale plays an inhibitory role in the formation of high blood lipid and strengthens the antioxidant capacity in hyperlipidemic rats.

An approach for fully automatic femoral neck-shaft angle evaluation on radiographs.

Femoral neck-shaft angle (NSA) is the angle included by the femoral neck axis (FNA) and the femoral shaft axis (FSA), which is a critical anatomic measurement index for evaluating the biomechanics of the hip joint. Aiming at solving the problem that the physician's manual measurement of the NSA is time consuming and irreproducible, this paper proposes a fully automatic approach for evaluating the femoral NSA on radiographs. We first present an improved deep convolutional generative adversarial network to automatically segment the femoral region of interest on radiographs of the pelvis. Then based on the geometrical characteristic of the femoral shape, the FNA and FSA are fitted, respectively, and thus, the NSA can be evaluated conveniently. The average accuracy of the proposed approach for NSA evaluation is 97.24%, and the average deviation is 2.58° as compared to the measurements manually evaluated by experienced physicians. There is no significant statistical difference (P = 0.808) between the manual and automatic measurements, and Pearson's correlation coefficient is 0.904. It is validated that the proposed approach can provide an effective and reliable tool for automatically evaluating the NSA on radiographs.

An Automatic Classification of the Early Osteonecrosis of Femoral Head with Deep Learning.

BACKGROUND: Osteonecrosis of Femoral Head (ONFH) is a common complication in orthopaedics, wherein femoral structures are usually damaged due to the impairment or interruption of femoral head blood supply. AIM: In this study, an automatic approach for the classification of the early ONFH with deep learning has been proposed. METHODS: All femoral CT slices according to their spatial locations with the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are first classified. Therefore, all CT slices are divided into upper, middle or lower segments of femur head. Then the femur head areas can be segmented with the Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (CGAN) for each part. The Convolutional Autoencoder is employed to reduce dimensions and extract features of femur head, and finally K-means clustering is used for an unsupervised classification of the early ONFH. RESULTS: To invalidate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, the experiments on the dataset with 120 patients are carried out. The experimental results show that the segmentation accuracy is higher than 95%. The Convolutional Autoencoder can reduce the dimension of data, the Peak Signal- to-Noise Ratios (PSNRs) are better than 34dB for inputs and outputs. Meanwhile, there is a great intra-category similarity, and a significant inter-category difference. CONCLUSION: The research on the classification of the early ONFH has a valuable clinical merit, and hopefully it can assist physicians to apply more individualized treatment for patient.

Hot Deformation Behavior and Processing Maps of SiC Nanoparticles and Second Phase Synergistically Reinforced Magnesium Matrix Composites.

Magnesium matrix composites synergistically reinforced by SiC nanoparticles and second phases were prepared by 12 passes of multi-pass forging, varying the temperature. The effects of grain refinement and the precipitates on the hot deformation behavior were analyzed. Deformation zones which could be observed in the fine-grained nanocomposite before hot compression disappeared, and the trend of streamlined distribution for the precipitated phases was weakened. At the same compression rate, as the compression temperature increased, the number of precipitated phases decreased, and the grain size increased. For fine-grained nanocomposites, after the peak stress, there was no obvious dynamic softening stage on the stress⁻strain curve, and then the steady stage was quickly reached. The critical stress of the fine-grained nanocomposites was lower than that of the coarse-grained nanocomposites, which can be attributed to the large amounts of precipitates and significantly refined grains. The deformation mechanism of the coarse-grained nanocomposite was controlled by dislocation climb resulting from lattice diffusion, while the deformation mechanism for the fine-grained nanocomposite was dislocation climb resulting from grain boundary slip. The activation energy of the fine-grained nanocomposite was decreased, compared with the coarse-grained nanocomposite. The area of the workability region for the fine-grained nanocomposite was significantly larger than that of the coarse-grained nanocomposite, and there was no instability region at a low strain rate (0.001⁻0.01 s-1) under all deformation temperatures. The optimal workability region was 573 K /0.001⁻0.01 s-1 for the fine-grained nanocomposite, and the processing temperature was lower than the coarse-grained nanocomposite (623⁻673 K).

Dendrobium Officinale Kimura et Migo Ameliorates Insulin Resistance in Rats with Diabetic Nephropathy.

BACKGROUND Emerging evidence suggests the potential of Dendrobium officinale Kimura et Migo (DO) in treating the complications of diabetes mellitus (DM). We evaluated the therapeutic potential of DO in treating diabetic nephropathy (DN) by preventing insulin resistance. MATERIAL AND METHODS A DN model was established. Mean glomerular volume of rats was estimated by the method of Weibel-Gomez. Reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) was used to determine the expression of mRNAs and we used Western blot assay to determine the expression of proteins. The levels of fasting insulin (FINS) and glucagon (GLU) were measured and we assessed the levels of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a), and interleukin-6 (IL-6) using the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). RESULTS Compared with the Normal rats, the levels of urinary glucose, albuminuria, Scr, albuminuria/Scr and BUN, and the expression levels of CaN, TLR-2, TLR-4, MyD88, hs-CRP, TNF-a, and IL-6, the level of FINS, GLU, and HOMAIR were increased in DN, DO 1.0, DO 2.0, and DMBG groups. Compared with the DN rats, in DO 1.0, DO 2.0, and DMBG groups the glomerular volume was smaller, the levels of urinary glucose, albuminuria, Scr, albuminuria/Scr, and BUN, the expression levels of CaN, TLR-2, TLR-4, MyD88, hs-CRP, TNF-a, and IL-6, the level of FINS, GLU, and HOMA-IR were decreased. CONCLUSIONS We found that DO prevents insulin resistance in rats with DN. This may be associated with reduction of TLRs and inflammatory response, which should be further verified by loss of DO effects on DN after treatment of inhibitors of TLRs.

Production of the Ramoplanin Activity Analogue by Double Gene Inactivation.

Glycopeptides such as vancomycin and telavancin are essential for treating infections caused by Gram-positive bacteria. But the dwindling availability of new antibiotics and the emergence of resistant bacteria are making effective antibiotic treatment increasingly difficult. Ramoplanin, an inhibitor of bacterial cell wall biosynthesis, is a highly effective antibiotic against a wide range of Gram-positive bacteria, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, vancomycin-intermediate resistant Clostridium difficile and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus sp. Here, two tailoring enzyme genes in the biosynthesis of ramoplanin were deleted by double in-frame gene knockouts to produce new ramoplanin derivatives. The deschlororamoplanin A2 aglycone was purified and its structure was identified with LC-MS/MS. Deschlororamoplanin A2 aglycone and ramoplanin aglycone showed similar activity to ramoplanin A2. The results showed that α-1,2-dimannosyl disaccharide at Hpg11 and chlorination at Chp17 in the ramoplanin structure are not essential for its antimicrobial activity. This work provides new precursor compounds for the semisynthetic modification of ramoplanin.

Mitochondrial tRNA mutations are associated with maternally inherited hypertension in two Han Chinese pedigrees.

We report here the clinical, genetic, molecular, and biochemical evaluations in two Han Chinese families with maternally inherited hypertension. Fourteen of 20 adult matrilineal relatives of these families exhibited a wide range of severity in hypertension, while none of offspring of affected fathers had hypertension. The age-at-onset of hypertension in matrilineal relatives varied from 37 years to 83 years, with an average of 55 and 66 years, respectively. Mutational analysis of their mitochondrial genomes identified the m.4353T>C mutation in the tRNA, in conjunction with the known m.593C>T mutation in the tRNA(Phe) and m.5553C>T mutation in the tRNA(Trp). Northern analysis revealed that m.4353T>C, m.593C>T and m.5553C>T mutations caused ∼66%, 65%, and 12% reductions in the steady-state level of tRNA(Gln), tRNA(Phe) and tRNA(Trp), respectively. An in vivo protein labeling analysis showed ∼35% reduction in the rate of mitochondrial translation in cells carrying these tRNA mutations. Impaired mitochondrial translation is apparently a primary contributor to the reduced rates of overall respiratory capacity, malate/glutamate-promoted respiration, succinate/glycerol-3-phosphate-promoted respiration, or N,N,N',N'-tetramethyl-p-phenylenediamine/ascorbate-promoted respiration and the increasing level of reactive oxygen species in the cells carrying these mtDNA mutations. These data demonstrate that mitochondrial dysfunction caused by mitochondrial tRNA mutations is associated with essential hypertension in these families.