Detection of Oil Spill Using SAR Imagery Based on AlexNet Model.

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) plays an irreplaceable role in the monitoring of marine oil spills. However, due to the limitation of its imaging characteristics, it is difficult to use traditional image processing methods to effectively extract oil spill information from SAR images with coherent speckle noise. In this paper, the convolutional neural network AlexNet model is used to extract the oil spill information from SAR images by taking advantage of its features of local connection, weight sharing, and learning for image representation. The existing remote sensing images of the oil spills in recent years in China are used to build a dataset. These images are enhanced by translation and flip of the dataset, and so on and then sent to the established deep convolutional neural network for training. The prediction model is obtained through optimization methods such as Adam. During the prediction, the predicted image is cut into several blocks, and the error information is removed by corrosion expansion and Gaussian filtering after the image is spliced again. Experiments based on actual oil spill SAR datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the modified AlexNet model compared with other approaches.

Performance of polyvinyl pyrrolidone-isatis root antibacterial wound dressings produced in situ by handheld electrospinner.

Antibacterial dressings are an increasingly important tool for the prevention and management of wound infections, particularly in light of concerns surrounding conventional drug-resistant antibiotics. Handheld electrospinning devices provide opportunities for the rapid application of antibacterial dressing materials to wounds, but spinning formulations need to be compatible with live biological surfaces. We report the development of a new antibacterial formulation compatible with handheld electrospinning, and its manufacture directly on a wound site. Nanofibrous dressing mats were produced from polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) containing isatis root (Indigowoad root or Ban-Lan-Gen), a traditional Chinese medicine, commonly used for the treatment of infectious disease. The resulting wound dressing mats of PVP/isatis root exhibited well-defined fibrous structures and excellent surface wetting, and permeability characteristics. The presence of isatis root conferred antibacterial activity against gram negative and gram positive strains. Moreover, in a Kunming mouse skin injury model, direct electrospinning of PVP/isatis root formulations on to wound sites produced near complete wound closure after 11 days and epidermal repair in histological studies.

Sensitization of avian pathogenic Escherichia coli to amoxicillin in vitro and in vivo in the presence of surfactin.

The purpose of this study is to assess the antibiotics adjuvant effect of surfactin for boosting the treatment effect of amoxicillin. Surfactin is used as a surfactant to mediate flux of mono-and divalent cations, such as calcium, across lipid bilayer membranes. In this study, we demonstrated that surfactin can increase the activity of amoxicillin against avian pathogenic Escherichia coli (APEC) in vitro with antimicrobial assays such as minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) and fractional inhibitory concentration (FIC). Additionally in the model of chick infection, surfactin exerted adjuvant effects with amoxicillin against APEC by lowering the numerical value of mortality and liver bacterial loads, and regulating the expression of inflammatory cytokines et al. We concluded that surfactin can act as a novel antimicrobial adjuvant with amoxicillin against AEPC infection in chicken.