Effects of Ginkgo biloba on Early Decompression after Spinal Cord Injury.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a severe trauma of the central nervous system characterized by high disability and high mortality. Clinical progress has been achieved in understanding the pathological mechanism of SCI and its early treatment, but the results are unsatisfactory. In China, increasing attention has been paid to the role of traditional Chinese medicine in the treatment of SCI. In particular, extracts from the leaves of Ginkgo biloba (maidenhair tree), which have been reported to exert anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties and repair a variety of active cellular damage, have been applied therapeutically for centuries. In this study, we established a rat SCI model to investigate the effects of Ginkgo biloba leaves on decompression at different stages of SCI. The application of Ginkgo biloba leaves during the decompression of SCI at different time points, the neurological recovery of SCI, and the underlying molecular mechanism were explored. The findings provide reliable experimental data that reveal the mechanism of GBI (Ginkgo biloba injection) in the clinical treatment of SCI.

Noise Estimation for Image Sensor Based on Local Entropy and Median Absolute Deviation.

Noise estimation for image sensor is a key technique in many image pre-processing applications such as blind de-noising. The existing noise estimation methods for additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Poisson-Gaussian noise (PGN) may underestimate or overestimate the noise level in the situation of a heavy textured scene image. To cope with this problem, a novel homogenous block-based noise estimation method is proposed to calculate these noises in this paper. Initially, the noisy image is transformed into the map of local gray statistic entropy (LGSE), and the weakly textured image blocks can be selected with several biggest LGSE values in a descending order. Then, the Haar wavelet-based local median absolute deviation (HLMAD) is presented to compute the local variance of these selected homogenous blocks. After that, the noise parameters can be estimated accurately by applying the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to analyze the local mean and variance of selected blocks. Extensive experiments on synthesized noised images are induced and the experimental results show that the proposed method could not only more accurately estimate the noise of various scene images with different noise levels than the compared state-of-the-art methods, but also promote the performance of the blind de-noising algorithm.