A novel two-stage illumination estimation framework for expression recognition.

One of the critical issues for facial expression recognition is to eliminate the negative effect caused by variant poses and illuminations. In this paper a two-stage illumination estimation framework is proposed based on three-dimensional representative face and clustering, which can estimate illumination directions under a series of poses. First, 256 training 3D face models are adaptively categorized into a certain amount of facial structure types by k-means clustering to group people with similar facial appearance into clusters. Then the representative face of each cluster is generated to represent the facial appearance type of that cluster. Our training set is obtained by rotating all representative faces to a certain pose, illuminating them with a series of different illumination conditions, and then projecting them into two-dimensional images. Finally the saltire-over-cross feature is selected to train a group of SVM classifiers and satisfactory performance is achieved when estimating a number of test sets including images generated from 64 3D face models kept for testing, CAS-PEAL face database, CMU PIE database, and a small test set created by ourselves. Compared with other related works, our method is subject independent and has less computational complexity O(C × N) without 3D facial reconstruction.

Resveratrol protects hippocampal neurons against cerebral ischemia-reperfusion injury via modulating JAK/ERK/STAT signaling pathway in rats.

Cerebral ischemia/reperfusion injury (I/R injury) can cause neuronal deficits even death. Recent studies demonstrated that resveratrol (RSV) exerts neuroprotective effects in ischemia and several signaling pathways were involved in the process. However, it is still possible that other signaling pathway participates in the neuronal protective process. Our study examines the possible mechanism underlying RSV treatment. We randomly divided rats into four groups: the sham group, I/R group, I/R group, I/R+RSV group, I/R+vehicle group. Locomotive and cognitive behavior were utilized by open-field and closed-field test and Morris water maze test. Neuronal cell loss was measured by hematoxylin-eosin (HE) staining for hippocampus. Western blot was applied to measure the level of p-JAK, p-ERK, p-STAT and p-JNK. The results indicated that RSV could alleviate cognitive impairment, reduce neuronal loss, downregulate p-JAK, p-ERK, p-STAT and p-JNK expression and inflammatory cytokines. In summary, resveratrol protects hippocampal neurons against cerebral ischemia-reperfusion injury via modulating JAK/ERK/STAT signaling pathway in rats.

Long Noncoding RNA LINC00958 Accelerates Gliomagenesis Through Regulating miR-203/CDK2.

Increasing evidence has indicated that long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) play crucial roles in various biological processes, including glioma. However, the underlying mechanism of lncRNAs in gliomagenesis is still ambiguous. In this study, we aim to investigate the role of long intergenic noncoding RNA 00958 (LINC00958) in the tumorigenesis of glioma. Results revealed that LINC00958 was significantly upregulated in glioma tissues and cell lines compared with that of adjacent normal brain tissues and normal human astrocytes. Moreover, the ectopic overexpression of LINC00958 was correlated with poor prognosis of glioma patients. Loss-of-function experiments indicated that LINC00958 knockdown suppressed glioma cell proliferation, invasion, and induced cycle arrest at G0/G1 phase in vitro, and inhibited tumor growth in vivo. Bioinformatics programs and luciferase reporter assay revealed that miR-203 shared complementary binding sites with both 3'-untranslated region of LINC00958 and CDK2. In summary, our study concludes that LINC00958 acts as an oncogenic gene in the gliomagenesis through miR-203-CDK2 regulation, providing a novel insight into glioma tumorigenesis.