Injectable thermosensitive hydrogel-based drug delivery system for local cancer therapy.

Injectable thermosensitive hydrogel has been regarded as attractive drug delivery system, which displays a sol-gel phase transition upon injection in response to temperature. Recently, thermosensitive hydrogel has become a matter of importance in cancer therapy, providing high local drug concentration, sustained release characteristics, minimal invasiveness, and low systemic toxicities. Here, we review the extensive application of thermosensitive hydrogel in local cancer therapy, including chemotherapy, photothermal therapy, photodynamic therapy, gene therapy, chemo-photothermal combined therapy, and chemo-/immuno- combined therapy.

A Parallel Algorithm Framework for Feature Extraction of EEG Signals on MPI.

In this paper, we present a parallel framework based on MPI for a large dataset to extract power spectrum features of EEG signals so as to improve the speed of brain signal processing. At present, the Welch method has been wildly used to estimate the power spectrum. However, the traditional Welch method takes a lot of time especially for the large dataset. In view of this, we added the MPI into the traditional Welch method and developed it into a reusable master-slave parallel framework. As long as the EEG data of any format are converted into the text file of a specified format, the power spectrum features can be extracted quickly by this parallel framework. In the proposed parallel framework, the EEG signals recorded by a channel are divided into N overlapping data segments. Then, the PSD of N segments are computed by some nodes in parallel. The results are collected and summarized by the master node. The final PSD results of each channel are saved in the text file, which can be read and analyzed by Microsoft Excel. This framework can be implemented not only on the clusters but also on the desktop computer. In the experiment, we deploy this framework on a desktop computer with a 4-core Intel CPU. It took only a few minutes to extract the power spectrum features from the 2.85 GB EEG dataset, seven times faster than using Python. This framework makes it easy for users, who do not have any parallel programming experience in constructing the parallel algorithms to extract the EEG power spectrum.

Amantadine for Antipsychotic-Related Weight Gain: Meta-Analysis of Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trials.

PURPOSE: Weight gain associated with antipsychotics in schizophrenia has been an ongoing concern. This meta-analysis examined the efficacy and safety of amantadine as an adjunctive treatment of weight gain in schizophrenia by systematically searching and analyzing randomized controlled trials (RCTs). RCTs comparing adjunctive amantadine with placebo in adult patients with schizophrenia were included in the meta-analysis. METHODS: Two independent investigators searched the literature and extracted data. Weighted and standardized mean differences (WMDs/SMDs) and risk ratio ± 95% confidence intervals were calculated. RESULTS: Five RCTs (n = 265) with double-blinded design lasting 8.2 ± 5.9 weeks were included in the analysis. Amantadine outperformed placebo regarding weight reduction with moderate effect size (trials, 3; n = 205; WMD -2.22 kg; P = 0.001, I = 45%). Amantadine also outperformed placebo at endpoint in the negative symptom (the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale [PANSS] [1 trial] and the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms [1 trial]) scores (trials, 2; n = 84; SMD, -0.56; P = 0.01, I = 12%), but not in the PANSS total scores (trials, 2) (SMD, -0.31; P = 0.16, I = 0%) and the positive symptom (PANSS [1 trial] and the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms [1 trial]) scores (SMD, 0.13; P = 0.54, I = 0%). Except for insomnia (P = 0.007; number needed to harm, 6; 95% confidence interval, 4-16), all-cause discontinuation (risk ratio, 1.12; P = 0.54, I = 0%) and other adverse events were similar between the amantadine and placebo groups. CONCLUSIONS: According to this meta-analysis of 5 RCTs, adjunctive amantadine seems to be an effective option for attenuating antipsychotic-related weight gain in patients with schizophrenia. More RCTs are needed to inform clinical recommendations.

[Discrimination of Plum Browning with Near Infrared Spectroscopy].

Flesh browning mostly happens in plum fruit during the post-harvest storage period, which is an important factor affecting the storage quality of plum fruits. Traditional methods used to discriminate plum browning involve the destruction of the intact fruit, which are highly subjective and error-prone. Therefore, the near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopy technique was applied to achieve rapid and non-destructive identification of plum browning and non-browning in this paper. The near infrared diffuse reflectance spectroscopy of 124 plum samples were collected in the band number of 4 000~12 500 cm-1. These samples were classified into two groups, browning (n=70) and non-browning (n=54). In order to find a new way to effectively discriminate plum fruits with flesh browning, three qualitative identification methods: the qualitative test, Mahalanobis distances discriminate analysis (DA) and Back Propagation-artificial neural networks (BP-ANN) were used to compare their capacity of recognizing browning plums and non-browning oneswhile the last two approaches were based on the principal component analysis (PCA) method. These results showed that DA and BP-ANN could be used to conctruct effective classification models for identifying plum browning, and the first ten principal components extracted from original spectra were applied as input variables to build DA and BP-ANN models. The optimal method was obtained with BP-ANN, which gained an accuracy of 100% for calibration set and 97.56% for prediction set, and the identification accuracy rate reached 100% and 98.57% for non-browning samples and browning ones, respectively. It could be concluded that NIR spectroscopy technique combined with chemometrics methods has great potential to recognize plums of browning and non-browning rapidly, non-destructively and effectively.

Sirolimus and non-melanoma skin cancer prevention after kidney transplantation: a meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: Whether sirolimus is useful in the prevention of non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC) remains unclear and we therefore performed this meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials to test the hypothesis that Sirolimus-based immunosuppression is associated with a decrease in NMSC. METHODS: The main outcomes were NMSC, squamous-cell carcinoma and basal-cell carcinoma. The pooled risk ratio (RR) with its 95% confidence interval (95%CI) were used to assess the effects. RESULTS: 5 randomized trials involving a total of 1499 patients receiving kidney transplantation were included. Patients undergoing Sirolimus-based immunosuppression had much lower risk of NMSC (RR = 0.49, 95%CI 0.32-0.76, P = 0.001). Subgroup analyses by tumor type showed that Sirolimus-based immunosuppression significantly decreased risk of both squamous-cell carcinoma (RR = 0.58, 95%CI 0.43-0.78, P < 0.001) and basal-cell carcinoma (RR = 0.56, 95%CI 0.37-0.85, P = 0.006). The quality of evidence was high for NMSC, and moderate for squamous-cell carcinoma and basal-cell carcinoma. No evidence of publication bias was observed. CONCLUSION: High quality evidence suggests that Sirolimus-based immunosuppression decreases risk of non-melanoma skin cancer, and Sirolimus has an antitumoral effect among kidney-transplant recipients.

Antithrombotic activity of fractions and components obtained from raspberry leaves (Rubus chingii).

The 70% ethanol fraction from an aqueous extract of raspberry leaves was shown to be the most antithrombotic fraction in in vitro and in vivo tests. The total flavonoids and phenolics in this fraction were 0.286g/g and 0.518g/g by colorimetry. Six compounds, including salicylic acid, kaempferol, quercetin, tiliroside, quercetin 3-O-ß-d-glucopyranoside and kaempferol 3-O-ß-d-glucopyranoside, were isolated from the active fraction. Among them, kaempferol, quercetin and tiliroside obviously delayed plasma recalcification time (PRT) in blood.