Near-infrared microfiber Bragg grating for sensitive measurement of tension and bending.

Fiber-optic devices working in the visible and near-infrared windows are attracting attention due to the rapid development of biomedicine that involves optics. In this work, we have successfully realized the fabrication of near-infrared microfiber Bragg grating (NIR-µFBG), which was operated at the wavelength of 785 nm, by harnessing the fourth harmonic order of Bragg resonance. The NIR-µFBG provided the maximum sensitivity of axial tension and bending to 211 nm/N and 0.18 nm/deg, respectively. By conferring the considerably lower cross-sensitivity, such as response to temperature or ambient refractive index, the NIR-µFBG can be potentially implemented as the highly sensitive tensile force and curve sensor.

Effective Antitumor Synergistic Treatment with Fiber-Photothermal Therapy and Heat Shock Protein Inhibitors.

Effective treatment of malignant tumors remains a thorny issue in current medicine. As a new type of anticancer strategy, photothermal therapy (PTT) has attracted tremendous attention due to its favorable therapeutic effectiveness, high spatial-temporal controllability, and low occurrence of side effects. However, the efficacy of PTT is significantly reduced due to the limited penetration of light and heat-induced overexpression of heat shock protein (Hsp). Herein, we propose an antitumor synergistic therapy that combines fiber-optic PTT and Hsp inhibitors. A rare-earth-doped optical fiber was used as the PTT actuator, and the Hsp inhibitor AT533 was loaded on the fiber surface by use of a hydrogel layer. PTT fibers can be guided to reach tumor lesions directly without being subject to the light penetration limit. The Hsp inhibitor can be released upon the softening of the hydrogel layer under photoheating to deactivate Hsp in the tumor and thus reduce the resistance of the tumor to PTT. This synergistic treatment enhanced the effect of PTT and successfully eradicated tumors in colorectal cancer (CRC) xenograft mouse models, providing a feasible way to realize antitumor and antirecurrence treatment. More importantly, the success of the synergistic treatment of PTT and Hsp inhibition opens new avenues for the development of multimodal and multitype synergistic fiber-optic treatments, which offer pronounced enhancement of therapeutic effectiveness for treating cancer.

Fiber-optic drug delivery strategy for synergistic cancer photothermal-chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy is one of the conventional treatments for cancer in clinical practice. However, poor delivery efficiency, systemic toxicity, and the lack of pharmacokinetic monitoring during treatment are the critical limitations of current chemotherapy. Herein, we reported a brand-new antitumor drug delivery strategy that harnesses an optical fiber endoscopically therapeutic probe. The fiber probe carries photosensitizers in the fiber core and antitumor agents on the fiber surface mediated by a temperature-responsive hydrogel film, giving rise to an activable photothermal-chemotherapy that orchestrates the localized hyperthermia and thermal-stimuli drug release to the tumor lesion. Furthermore, the dynamical drug release and in-situ temperature can be real-time supervised through the built-in fiber sensors, including the reflective Mach-Zehnder interferometer and fiber Bragg grating, to visualize the therapy process and thus improve the safety of treatment. Compared with conventional methods, the fiber-optic drug delivery can adequately take advantage of the chemotherapeutics through collaboratively recruiting the photoheating-mediated enhanced permeability and the hydrogel particle-assisted high drug retention, shedding new light on a "central-to-peripheral" drug pervasion and retention mechanism to destroy tumors completely. The fiber-optic chemotherapy strategy incorporates precise drug delivery, accurate controllability of drug release, high drug permeability and retention in tumor, low off-target rate, and real-time drug release and temperature feedback, performing a straightforward and precise photothermal-chemotherapy pathway. More than that, the proposed strategy holds tremendous promise to provide a revolutionized on-demand drug delivery platform for the highly efficient evaluation and screening of antitumor pharmaceuticals.

Electrochemical Intelligent Recognition of Mineral Materials Based on Superpixel Image Segmentation.

In order to study the needs of identifying rock thin-section samples by manual observation in the field of geology, a method of electrochemical intelligent recognition of mineral materials based on superpixel image segmentation is proposed. The image histogram of this method can be used to represent the distribution of each pixel value of the image. This interval is consistent with the number of pixels in the method. And using the experiment, the CPU used in the experiment is Intel® Core™ i7-8700 3.2 GHz, the memory is 16 GB, and the GPU is NVIDIA GeForce GT × 1080 Ti, which ensures the accuracy of the experiment. Based on all the experimental results, it can be seen that after the two-stage processing of the designed superpixel algorithm and the region merging algorithm, the final sandstone slice image segmentation results are close to the results of manual labeling, which is helpful for the subsequent research on sandstone component identification. The feasibility of this method was verified.

Synthesis of Hierarchical Porous Ni1.5Co1.5S4/g-C3N4 Composite for Supercapacitor with Excellent Cycle Stability.

In this work, the hierarchical porous Ni1.5Co1.5S4/g-C3N4 composite was prepared by growing Ni1.5Co1.5S4 nanoparticles on graphitic carbon nitride (g-C3N4) nanosheets via a hydrothermal route. Due to the self-assembly of larger size g-C3N4 nanosheets as a skeleton, the prepared nanocomposite possesses a unique hierarchical porous structure that can provide short ions diffusion and fast electron transport. As a result, the Ni1.5Co1.5S4/g-C3N4 composite exhibits a high specific capacitance of 1827 F g-1 at a current density of 1 A g-1, which is 1.53 times that of pure Ni1.5Co1.5S4 (1191 F g-1). In particular, the Ni1.5Co1.5S4/g-C3N4//activated carbon (AC) asymmetric supercapacitor delivers a high energy density of 49.0 Wh kg-1 at a power density of 799.0 W kg-1. Moreover, the assembled device shows outstanding cycle stability with 95.5% capacitance retention after 8000 cycles at a high current density of 10 A g-1. The attractive performance indicates that the easily synthesized and low-cost Ni1.5Co1.5S4/g-C3N4 composite would be a promising electrode material for supercapacitor application.