High-Quality Fusion and Visualization for MR-PET Brain Tumor Images via Multi-Dimensional Features.

The fusion of magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography can combine biological anatomical information and physiological metabolic information, which is of great significance for the clinical diagnosis and localization of lesions. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive linear fusion method for multi-dimensional features of brain magnetic resonance and positron emission tomography images based on a convolutional neural network, termed as MdAFuse. First, in the feature extraction stage, three-dimensional feature extraction modules are constructed to extract coarse, fine, and multi-scale information features from the source image. Second, at the fusion stage, the affine mapping function of multi-dimensional features is established to maintain a constant geometric relationship between the features, which can effectively utilize structural information from a feature map to achieve a better reconstruction effect. Furthermore, our MdAFuse comprises a key feature visualization enhancement algorithm designed to observe the dynamic growth of brain lesions, which can facilitate the early diagnosis and treatment of brain tumors. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method is superior to existing fusion methods in terms of visual perception and nine kinds of objective image fusion metrics. Specifically, in the results of MR-PET fusion, the SSIM (Structural Similarity) and VIF (Visual Information Fidelity) metrics show improvements of 5.61% and 13.76%, respectively, compared to the current state-of-the-art algorithm. Our project is publicly available at: https://github.com/22385wjy/MdAFuse.

Exploring biomarkers of premature ovarian insufficiency based on oxford nanopore transcriptional profile and machine learning.

Premature ovarian insufficiency (POI) is a reproductive endocrine disorder characterized by infertility and perimenopausal syndrome, with a highly heterogeneous genetic etiology and its mechanism is not fully understood. Therefore, we utilized Oxford Nanopore Technology (ONT) for the first time to characterize the full-length transcript profile, and revealed biomarkers, pathway and molecular mechanisms for POI by bioinformatics analysis and machine learning. Ultimately, we identified 272 differentially expressed genes, 858 core genes, and 25 hub genes by analysis of differential expression, gene set enrichment, and protein-protein interactions. Seven candidate genes were identified based on the intersection features of the random forest and Boruta algorithm. qRT-PCR results indicated that COX5A, UQCRFS1, LCK, RPS2 and EIF5A exhibited consistent expression trends with sequencing data and have potential as biomarkers. Additionally, GSEA analysis revealed that the pathophysiology of POI is closely associated with inhibition of the PI3K-AKT pathway, oxidative phosphorylation and DNA damage repair, as well as activation of inflammatory and apoptotic pathways. Furthermore, we emphasize that downregulation of respiratory chain enzyme complex subunits and inhibition of oxidative phosphorylation pathways play crucial roles in the pathophysiology of POI. In conclusion, our utilization of long-read sequencing has refined the annotation information within the POI transcriptional profile. This valuable data provides novel insights for further exploration into molecular regulatory networks and potential biomarkers associated with POI.

Integrated metabolomics and transcriptomics to reveal biomarkers and mitochondrial metabolic dysregulation of premature ovarian insufficiency.

Background: The metabolic characteristics of premature ovarian insufficiency (POI), a reproductive endocrine disease characterized by abnormal sex hormone metabolism and follicle depletion, remain unclear. Metabolomics is a powerful tool for exploring disease phenotypes and biomarkers. This study aims to identify metabolic markers and construct diagnostic models, and elucidate the underlying pathological mechanisms for POI. Methods: Non-targeted metabolomics was utilized to characterize the plasma metabolic profile of 40 patients. The metabolic markers were identified through bioinformatics and machine learning, and constructed an optimal diagnostic model by classified multi-model analysis. Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was used to verify antioxidant indexes, mitochondrial enzyme complexes, and ATP levels. Finally, integrated transcriptomics and metabolomics were used to reveal the dysregulated pathways and molecular regulatory mechanisms of POI. Results: The study identified eight metabolic markers significantly correlated with ovarian reserve function. The XGBoost diagnostic model was developed based on six machine learning models, demonstrating its robust diagnostic performance and clinical applicability through the evaluation of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, decision curve analysis (DCA), calibration curve, and precise recall (PR) curve. Multi-omics analysis showed that mitochondrial respiratory chain electron carrier (CoQ10) and enzyme complex subunits were down-regulated in POI. ELISA validation revealed an elevation in oxidative stress markers and a reduction in the activities of antioxidant enzymes, CoQ10, and mitochondrial enzyme complexes in POI. Conclusion: Our findings highlight that mitochondrial dysfunction and energy metabolism disorders are closely related to the pathogenesis of POI. The identification of metabolic markers and predictive models holds significant implications for the diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of POI.

Moringa oleifera leaf polysaccharide alleviates experimental colitis by inhibiting inflammation and maintaining intestinal barrier.

The characteristic of ulcerative colitis (UC) is extensive colonic mucosal inflammation. Moringa oleifera (M. oleifera) is a medicine food homology plant, and the polysaccharide from M. oleifera leaves (MOLP) exhibits antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity. The aim of this study to investigate the potential effect of MOLP on UC in a mouse model as well as the underlying mechanism. Dextran sulfate sodium (DSS) 4% in drinking water was given for 7 days to mice with UC, at the same time, MOLP (25, 50, and 100 mg/kg/day) was intragastric administered once daily during the experiment. Structural analysis revealed that MOLP had an average molecular weight (Mw) of 182,989 kDa and consisted of fucose, arabinose, rhamnose, galactose, glucose, xylose, mannose, galactose uronic acid, glucuronic acid, glucose uronic acid and mannose uronic acid, with a percentage ratio of 1.64, 18.81, 12.04, 25.90, 17.57, 12.01, 3.51, 5.28, 0.55, 1.27, and 1.43%, respectively. In addition, the features of MOLP were identified by Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) and spectra, X-ray diffraction (XRD). The results showed that MOLP exhibited protective efficacy against UC by alleviating colonic pathological alterations, decreasing goblet cells, crypt destruction, and infiltration of inflammatory cells caused by DSS. Furthermore, MOLP notably repressed the loss of zonula occludens-1 (ZO-1) and occludin proteins in mucosal layer, as well as up-regulating the mRNA expression of interleukin-10 (IL-10) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ (PPAR-γ), whereas down-regulating the activation of Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4), myeloid differentiation primary response 88 (MyD88), nuclear factor-kappa B (NF-κB) signaling pathway and the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Therefore, these results will help understand the protective action procedure of MOLP against UC, thereby providing significance for the development of MOLP.

Spatio-Frequency Decoupled Weak-Supervision for Face Reconstruction.

3D face reconstruction has witnessed considerable progress in recovering 3D face shapes and textures from in-the-wild images. However, due to a lack of texture detail information, the reconstructed shape and texture based on deep learning could not be used to re-render a photorealistic facial image since it does not work in harmony with weak supervision only from the spatial domain. In the paper, we propose a method of spatio-frequency decoupled weak-supervision for face reconstruction, which applies the losses from not only the spatial domain but also the frequency domain to learn the reconstruction process that approaches photorealistic effect based on the output shape and texture. In detail, the spatial domain losses cover image-level and perceptual-level supervision. Moreover, the frequency domain information is separated from the input and rendered images, respectively, and is then used to build the frequency-based loss. In particular, we devise a spectrum-wise weighted Wing loss to implement balanced attention on different spectrums. Through the spatio-frequency decoupled weak-supervision, the reconstruction process can be learned in harmony and generate detailed texture and high-quality shape only with labels of landmarks. The experiments on several benchmarks show that our method can generate high-quality results and outperform state-of-the-art methods in qualitative and quantitative comparisons.

Application of Phenylephrine Combined with Goal-Directed Fluid Therapy in Elderly Patients Undergoing Hip Arthroplasty: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Objective: To investigate the therapeutic effect of phenylephrine combined with goal-directed fluid therapy (GDFT) in elderly patients undergoing total hip arthroplasty. Methods: From June 2018 to May 2019, a total of 80 patients, age > 70 years, scheduled for total hip arthroplasty at Guangzhou Red Cross Hospital in China were consecutively included in this prospective randomized controlled trial. The patients were divided into 2 groups of 40 patients each by the random number table method. Patients in the control group were given GDFT alone, and patients in the experimental group were given phenylephrine combined with GDFT. The duration of surgery, blood loss, intraoperative urine output, and fluid input were analyzed. Heart rate (HR), mean arterial pressure (MAP), cardiac index (CI) and stroke volume variation (SVV) were compared in the 2 groups at different times: before surgery (T0), after induction (T1), before bone cement placement (T2), after bone cement placement (T3) and after surgery (T4). Lactate, oxygenation index and cerebral oxygen uptake rate were compared perioperatively. Meanwhile, the incidence of abdominal distension, nausea and vomiting, pulmonary infection and cognitive dysfunction within 7 days after surgery were compared. Results: The intraoperative fluid input in the experimental group was significantly lower than in the control group (P < .05). In T1 and T3, heart rate (HR) and stroke volume variability (SVV) in the control group were significantly higher than in the experimental group (P < .05), but mean arterial pressure (MAP) and cardiac index (CI) were significantly lower than in the experimental group (P < .05). The intraoperative lactic acid in the control group was significantly higher than in the experimental group (P < .05). In addition, we found that the intraoperative oxygenation index and the postsurgical oxygenation index in the control group decreased by 86.86% and 87.49%, respectively, compared with the preoperative values (P < .05). In addition, at T1 and T3, HR and SVV in the control group were significantly higher than T0 (P < .05), while MAP and CI were significantly lower than T0 (P < .05). In the experimental group, there was no significant difference in HR, SVV, MAP or CI at any time points compared with those of T0 (P < .05). The oxygenation index in the control group was lower than before surgery (P < .05). There was no significant difference in urine volume or brain oxygen uptake between the 2 groups (P < .05). Conclusion: Phenylephrine combined with GDFT can be used in elderly patients undergoing hip arthroplasty to reduce fluid input and improve intraoperative hemodynamic stability, to reduce the occurrence of postoperative related complications.

PyraPVConv: Efficient 3D Point Cloud Perception with Pyramid Voxel Convolution and Sharable Attention.

Designing efficient deep learning models for 3D point cloud perception is becoming a major research direction. Point-voxel convolution (PVConv) Liu et al. (2019) is a pioneering research work in this topic. However, since with quite a few layers of simple 3D convolutions and linear point-voxel feature fusion operations, it still has considerable room for improvement in performance. In this paper, we propose a novel pyramid point-voxel convolution (PyraPVConv) block with two key structural modifications to address the above issues. First, PyraPVConv uses a voxel pyramid module to fully extract voxel features in the manner of feature pyramid, such that sufficient voxel features can be obtained efficiently. Second, a sharable attention module is utilized to capture compatible features between multi-scale voxels in pyramid and point cloud for aggregation, as well as to reduce the complexity via structure sharing. Extensive results on three point cloud perception tasks, i.e., indoor scene segmentation, object part segmentation and 3D object detection, validate that the networks constructed by stacking PyraPVConv blocks are efficient in terms of both GPU memory consumption and computational complexity, and are superior to the state-of-the-art methods.

Comparison of endogenous development, invasion ability and apoptotic features between diclazuril resistant and sensitive strains of Eimeria tenella.

Diclazuril (DIC) is widely used in the poultry industry to control coccidiosis. However, drug resistance makes it less effective, and the underlying mechanism remains unclear. One DIC-resistant E. tenella (RE) isolate and one sensitive E. tenella (SE) isolate were used to compare the differences in their endogenous development, pathogenicity, invasion-related gene expression and apoptotic characteristics. Chickens were allocated into four groups to receive RE or SE strain and their corresponding DIC treatment or not. Caeca tissues were sampled at 96 h, 120 h and 144 h post-infection (PI) for pathological analysis. Meanwhile, second-generation merozoites (Mz2) were separated at 120 h PI to detect alterations in mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP), apoptotic rate and caspase-3 activity and mRNA expression of protein phosphatase 5 (PP5), glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH), actin depolymerizing factor (ADF) and microneme proteins (MICs). Haematoxylin and eosin staining revealed that DIC treatment strictly blocked the development of the SE strain but slightly affected the RE strain. Meanwhile, the number of SE Mz2 and their MMP decreased at the same time the apoptotic rate increased after DIC treatment. Real-time quantitative PCR and caspase-3 activity studies demonstrated that Mz2 from the RE strain had higher mRNA expression of ADF and MICs along with no significant changes in GAPDH and caspase-3 activity under DIC pressure compared to its control; in contrast, the mRNA expression of ADF, MICs and PP5 was markedly suppressed in Mz2 from SE with upregulated caspase-3 activity and GAPDH transcription. In addition, the mRNA expression of GAPDH and PP5 in Mz2 from RE was remarkably higher than that of SE. Taken together, the higher mRNA expression of invasion-related genes and almost unaffected endogenous development provide a better understanding of coccidian resistance to DIC.

Eugenol exposure in vitro inhibits the expressions of T3SS and TIF virulence genes in Salmonella Typhimurium and reduces its pathogenicity to chickens.

BACKGROUND: Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium) is a common food-borne pathogen, which has the ability to infect a wide range of hosts. The increasing emergence of drug-resistant strains urgently requires new alternative therapies. Eugenol has been shown to be very effective against drug-resistant strains of Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria. The purpose of this study is to explore the effects of eugenol on the virulence factors and pathogenicity of S. Typhimurium. METHODS: The antibacterial activity of eugenol was investigated via the changes of cell morphology, fimbriae related-genes and virulence factors of S. Typhimurium, then the pathogenicity of S. Typhimurium pretreated by eugenol to chickens was evaluated. RESULTS: Susceptibility testing showed that eugenol possessed significant antimicrobial activity. Scanning electron microscope analysis showed eugenol treatment deformed the morphology with damaged fimbriae structure of S. Typhimurium. Real time PCR assay confirmed eugenol significantly down-regulated the expressions of virulence factors (hilA, hilD, sipA, sipC, spiC, misL) of Type III secretion system (T3SS) and adherence genes (fimA, fimH, fimD, fimY, fimZ, stm0551) of Type I fimbriae (TIF). Animal experiment proved that the pathogenicity of S. Typhimurium exposed by eugenol was reduced, which was evidenced by the higher survival rate, weight gains and organs indexes, the lower bacterial loads in organs. Meanwhile, the duodenal histopathological changes were mitigated, with a significantly decline in the expressions of TNF-α, IL-6 and IL-18. CONCLUSION: In summary, eugenol pretreatment may alleviate the pathogenicity of the S. Typhimurium to chickens via wrecking the fimbriae and inhibiting the mRNA expressions of virulence factors and adhesion molecules. These data dedicated the potential mechanisms of eugenol against S. Typhimurium in vitro.

Geometrical Consistency Modeling on B-Spline Parameter Domain for 3D Face Reconstruction From Limited Number of Wild Images.

A number of methods have been proposed for face reconstruction from single/multiple image(s). However, it is still a challenge to do reconstruction for limited number of wild images, in which there exists complex different imaging conditions, various face appearance, and limited number of high-quality images. And most current mesh model based methods cannot generate high-quality face model because of the local mapping deviation in geometric optics and distortion error brought by discrete differential operation. In this paper, accurate geometrical consistency modeling on B-spline parameter domain is proposed to reconstruct high-quality face surface from the various images. The modeling is completely consistent with the law of geometric optics, and B-spline reduces the distortion during surface deformation. In our method, 0th- and 1st-order consistency of stereo are formulated based on low-rank texture structures and local normals, respectively, to approach the pinpoint geometric modeling for face reconstruction. A practical solution combining the two consistency as well as an iterative algorithm is proposed to optimize high-detailed B-spline face effectively. Extensive empirical evaluations on synthetic data and unconstrained data are conducted, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on challenging scenario, e.g., limited number of images with different head poses, illuminations, and expressions.

Fractionation of carbon and hydrogen isotopes of TSR-altered gas products under closed system pyrolysis.

Thermochemical sulfate reduction (TSR) is common in marine carbonate gas reservoirs, leading to complicated isotope characteristics of TSR-altered gas. This study aims to better understand how TSR affects the geochemical and isotopic compositions of alkanes in pyrolysis products. Pyrolysis of TSR were conducted with crude oil, nonane (C9) and methylnaphthalene (MN) in the presence of MgSO4 solution at temperatures of 350 °C, 360 °C, and 370 °C for different durations of 4-219 h in a closed system. Results show that carbon and hydrogen isotope compositions of alkane gas resulting from TSR (pyrolysis with crude oil and MgSO4) became heavier with increasing carbon number, i.e., δ13C1 < δ13C2 < δ13C3 and δ2H-C1 < δ2H-C2 < δ2H-C3. Compared with the δ13C1, δ13C2 and δ13C3 increased in a much wider range as heating continued. Carbon and hydrogen isotopes of alkane gas produced by TSR became heavier with increasing gas souring index. Values for δ13C1-δ13C2 and δ2H-C1- δ2H-C2 typically decreased as oil and C9 underwent thermal cracking. Comparative experiments using C9 in the presence of MgSO4 produced partially reversed carbon isotope series (δ13C1 > δ13C2), which, for the first time, confirmed the ability of TSR to cause isotopic reversal from pyrolysis. The residual heavy alkanes gradually became 13C-enriched during TSR, which increased δ13C2 values and changed the partially reversed isotope sequence to a positive sequence (δ13C1 < δ13C2). The discovery of a partial reversal of the carbon isotope series of alkane gases through pyrolysis will further deepen the understanding of TSR-altered natural gas.