FGF-18 Protects the Injured Spinal cord in mice by Suppressing Pyroptosis and Promoting Autophagy via the AKT-mTOR-TRPML1 axis.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a severe medical condition with lasting effects. The efficacy of numerous clinical treatments is hampered by the intricate pathophysiological mechanism of SCI. Fibroblast growth factor 18 (FGF-18) has been found to exert neuroprotective effects after brain ischaemia, but its effect after SCI has not been well explored. The aim of the present study was to explore the therapeutic effect of FGF-18 on SCI and the related mechanism. In the present study, a mouse model of SCI was used, and the results showed that FGF-18 may significantly affect functional recovery. The present findings demonstrated that FGF-18 directly promoted functional recovery by increasing autophagy and decreasing pyroptosis. In addition, FGF-18 increased autophagy, and the well-known autophagy inhibitor 3-methyladenine (3MA) reversed the therapeutic benefits of FGF-18 after SCI, suggesting that autophagy mediates the therapeutic effects of FGF-18 on SCI. A mechanistic study revealed that after stimulation of the protein kinase B (AKT)-transient receptor potential mucolipin 1 (TRPML1)-calcineurin signalling pathway, the FGF-18-induced increase in autophagy was mediated by the dephosphorylation and nuclear translocation of transcription factor E3 (TFE3). Together, these findings indicated that FGF-18 is a robust autophagy modulator capable of accelerating functional recovery after SCI, suggesting that it may be a promising treatment for SCI in the clinic.

Interplay Between TGF-ß Signaling and MicroRNA in Diabetic Cardiomyopathy.

In diabetic patients, concomitant cardiovascular disease is the main factor contributing to their morbidity and mortality. Diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a form of cardiovascular disease associated with diabetes that can result in heart failure. Transforming growth factor-ß (TGF-ß) isoforms play a crucial role in heart remodeling and repair and are elevated and activated in myocardial disorders. Alterations in certain microRNAs (miRNA) are closely related to diabetic cardiomyopathy. One or more miRNA molecules target the majority of TGF-ß pathway components, and TGF-ß directly or via SMADs controls miRNA synthesis. Based on these interactions, this review discusses potential cross-talk between TGF-ß signaling and miRNA in DCM in order to investigate the creation of potential therapeutic targets.

Bexarotene improves motor function after spinal cord injury in mice.

Spinal cord injury is a challenge in orthopedics because it causes irreversible damage to the central nervous system. Therefore, early treatment to prevent lesion expansion is crucial for the management of patients with spinal cord injury. Bexarotene, a type of retinoid, exerts therapeutic effects on patients with cutaneous T-cell lymphoma and Parkinson's disease. Bexarotene has been proven to promote autophagy, but it has not been used in the treatment of spinal cord injury. To investigate the effects of bexarotene on spinal cord injury, we established a mouse model of T11-T12 spinal cord contusion and performed daily intraperitoneal injection of bexarotene for 5 consecutive days. We found that bexarotene effectively reduced the deposition of collagen and the number of pathological neurons in the injured spinal cord, increased the number of synapses of nerve cells, reduced oxidative stress, inhibited pyroptosis, promoted the recovery of motor function, and reduced death. Inhibition of autophagy with 3-methyladenine reversed the effects of bexarotene on spinal cord injury. Bexarotene enhanced the nuclear translocation of transcription factor E3, which further activated AMP-activated protein kinase-S-phase kinase-associated protein 2-coactivator-associated arginine methyltransferase 1 and AMP-activated protein kinase-mammalian target of rapamycin signaling pathways. Intravenous injection of transcription factor E3 shRNA or intraperitoneal injection of compound C, an AMP-activated protein kinase blocker, inhibited the effects of bexarotene. These findings suggest that bexarotene regulates nuclear translocation of transcription factor E3 through the AMP-activated protein kinase-S-phase kinase-associated protein 2-coactivator-associated arginine methyltransferase 1 and AMP-activated protein kinase-mammalian target of rapamycin signal pathways, promotes autophagy, decreases reactive oxygen species level, inhibits pyroptosis, and improves motor function after spinal cord injury.

Large-Field Contextual Feature Learning for Glass Detection.

Glass is very common in our daily life. Existing computer vision systems neglect it and thus may have severe consequences, e.g., a robot may crash into a glass wall. However, sensing the presence of glass is not straightforward. The key challenge is that arbitrary objects/scenes can appear behind the glass. In this paper, we propose an important problem of detecting glass surfaces from a single RGB image. To address this problem, we construct the first large-scale glass detection dataset (GDD) and propose a novel glass detection network, called GDNet-B, which explores abundant contextual cues in a large field-of-view via a novel large-field contextual feature integration (LCFI) module and integrates both high-level and low-level boundary features with a boundary feature enhancement (BFE) module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our GDNet-B achieves satisfying glass detection results on the images within and beyond the GDD testing set. We further validate the effectiveness and generalization capability of our proposed GDNet-B by applying it to other vision tasks, including mirror segmentation and salient object detection. Finally, we show the potential applications of glass detection and discuss possible future research directions.

Visual analysis and evaluation of clinical research on Traditional Chinese medicine compounds in treating insomnia of Yin deficiency syndrome.

ETHNOPHARMACOLOGICAL RELEVANCE: Insomnia is a common form of sleep disorder. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) compounds have definite curative effects and a low incidence of adverse reactions, which is recognized to be an effective intervention means for the treatment of insomnia. AIM OF THE STUDY: Based on mining the clinical research data of treating insomnia of yin deficiency syndrome (IYDS) with TCM compounds systematically, the study is to analyze the research hotspots and development trends in this field, explore the medication rule, evaluate the quality of research, so as to provide reference and direction for clinical application and scientific research in this field. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The relevant literature was retrieved and managed by evidence-based medicine strategy and EndNote software respectively. The bibliometric method was used to mine and analyze data characteristics. The VOSviewer software was used to make visual knowledge maps, the IBM SPSS Modeler software was used for association rule analysis of herbs, and the Cochrane tool and MINORS scale were used for quality analysis of literature. RESULTS: (1) A total of 184 related studies were included according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. (2) The research popularity showed a dynamic upward trend and the research hotspot showed a trend of migration and refinement, etc. (3) The commonly used herbs in this field were Ziziphus jujuba var. spinosa (Bunge) Hu ex H.F.Chow, etc; the commonly used TCM prescriptions were Huanglian Ejiao Decoction, etc; the commonly used dosage forms were traditional decoction, etc; the commonly used combinations of herbs included Ziziphus jujuba var. spinosa (Bunge) Hu ex H.F.Chow-Poria cocos（Schw.）Wolf, etc. (4) The rate of the studies containing ethical review numbers and clear inclusion standards did not reach 50%, and the risk bias of methodological was high. However, a separate analysis of data showed that the specification of study design was on the rise obviously in recent years, and Meta-analysis and sensitivity analysis could confirm the effectiveness and stability of clinical efficacy which was the key indicator in treating IYDS with TCM prescriptions. There were significant differences among administration protocols of different clinical studies of the same name TCM compounds. However, the scientific significance of each unique dosing regimen were expected to be elaborated or discussed. CONCLUSION: The clinical research number of TCM compounds treating IYDS was in a dynamic upward trend, and the outcome indicators tended to be diversified and detailed. The dosage forms mainly included decoction, supplemented by Chinese patent medicine. The design of clinical studies in this field was not standardized enough, but the key indicators were scientific and stable. We expected that later studies could pay more attention to improving the standardization of trial design, reducing the risk bias in the process of methodological design, conducting high-quality standardized multicenter, large-sample randomized controlled clinical trials to provide scientific evidence with high evidentiary strength, establishing the recognized administration protocols for the same name TCM prescriptions or clarifying the targeting of different protocols, and promoting the application and popularity of TCM compounds in treating IYDS.

Projectively Enriched Symmetry and Topology in Acoustic Crystals.

Symmetry plays a key role in modern physics, as manifested in the revolutionary topological classification of matter in the past decade. So far, we seem to have a complete theory of topological phases from internal symmetries as well as crystallographic symmetry groups. However, an intrinsic element, i.e., the gauge symmetry in physical systems, has been overlooked in the current framework. Here, we show that the algebraic structure of crystal symmetries can be projectively enriched due to the gauge symmetry, which subsequently gives rise to new topological physics never witnessed under ordinary symmetries. We demonstrate the idea by theoretical analysis, numerical simulation, and experimental realization of a topological acoustic lattice with projective translation symmetries under a Z_{2} gauge field, which exhibits unique features of rich topologies, including a single Dirac point, Möbius topological insulator, and graphenelike semimetal phases on a rectangular lattice. Our work reveals the impact when gauge and crystal symmetries meet together with topology and opens the door to a vast unexplored land of topological states by projective symmetries.

Progressive Glass Segmentation.

Glass is very common in the real world. Influenced by the uncertainty about the glass region and the varying complex scenes behind the glass, the existence of glass poses severe challenges to many computer vision tasks, making glass segmentation as an important computer vision task. Glass does not have its own visual appearances but only transmit/reflect the appearances of its surroundings, making it fundamentally different from other common objects. To address such a challenging task, existing methods typically explore and combine useful cues from different levels of features in the deep network. As there exists a characteristic gap between level-different features, i.e., deep layer features embed more high-level semantics and are better at locating the target objects while shallow layer features have larger spatial sizes and keep richer and more detailed low-level information, fusing these features naively thus would lead to a sub-optimal solution. In this paper, we approach the effective features fusion towards accurate glass segmentation in two steps. First, we attempt to bridge the characteristic gap between different levels of features by developing a Discriminability Enhancement (DE) module which enables level-specific features to be a more discriminative representation, alleviating the features incompatibility for fusion. Second, we design a Focus-and-Exploration Based Fusion (FEBF) module to richly excavate useful information in the fusion process by highlighting the common and exploring the difference between level-different features. Combining these two steps, we construct a Progressive Glass Segmentation Network (PGSNet) which uses multiple DE and FEBF modules to progressively aggregate features from high-level to low-level, implementing a coarse-to-fine glass segmentation. In addition, we build the first home-scene-oriented glass segmentation dataset for advancing household robot applications and in-depth research on this topic. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms 26 cutting-edge models on three challenging datasets under four standard metrics. The code and dataset will be made publicly available.

A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of High-Frequency Prescription of Zhigancao Decoction Combined with Conventional Western Medicine in the Treatment of Chronic Heart Failure.

BACKGROUND: Chronic heart failure is the main critical illness and cause of death in the later stages of cardiovascular disease, and it is one of the two major challenges in the field of cardiovascular research. The clinical application of traditional Chinese medicine in the prevention and treatment of chronic heart failure has been relatively common in China, and the "Expert Consensus on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Heart Failure with Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine" has been published in China. Combining the literature in this field, the authors found that Zhigancao Decoction has been used in the treatment of chronic heart failure with more clinical research reports and higher frequency (this article refers to it as a high-frequency prescription for short). However, Zhigancao Decoction was not included in the recommended prescriptions in the "Expert Consensus on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Heart Failure with Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine," and there was no relevant systematic review and meta-analysis. For this reason, this article has carried out two parts of work, including systematically organizing the literature in this research field and carrying out systematic review and meta-analysis. This can provide stronger evidence support for Zhigancao Decoction combined with conventional Western medicine in the treatment of chronic heart failure and provide a new option for the improvement and update of the "Expert Consensus on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Heart Failure with Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine." METHODS: This article used the bibliometric method to investigate the research articles on the treatment of chronic heart failure with integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine and analyzed the high-frequency prescriptions which are used and reported frequently. In addition, we also used manual and computer-aided search methods, the search scope includes CNKI, WANFANG, VIP, SinoMed, Web of Science, PubMed, and Cochrane Library, and the search content is the clinical randomized control of Zhigancao Decoction combined with conventional Western medicine in the treatment of chronic heart failure trials (RCTs). The search period is from the establishment of the database to January 29, 2021. The literature was managed and screened by EndNote software; the quality of the included literature was evaluated according to the modified Jadad scale, and the risk bias was assessed using the Cochrane tool; the results of the included studies were analyzed using the Review Manager 5.3 software; the sources of heterogeneity between the studies were analyzed using Stata16.0 software for sensitivity analysis. RESULTS: According to the bibliometric analysis, the maximum number of research reports is 553, which are arranged in descending order of 21 prescriptions, including Zhenwu Decoction, Zhigancao, and powder of five drugs containing poria. The second most frequently used prescription is Zhigancao Decoction combined with conventional Western medicine in the treatment of chronic heart failure, but its systematic review and meta-analysis still need further research. A total of 17 clinical randomized controlled trials of Zhigancao Decoction combined with conventional Western medicine in the treatment of chronic heart failure were included in the search, with a total of 1752 subjects. Meta-analysis results show that Zhigancao combined with conventional Western medicine is more effective than conventional Western medicine in the treatment of chronic heart failure. The advantages are the following 5 outcome indicators: total clinical effective rate, left ventricular ejection fraction, left ventricular end-diastolic diameter, B-type natriuretic peptide, and 6-minute walk test. CONCLUSIONS: There are many prescriptions combined with Western medicine to treat chronic heart failure, among which Zhigancao Decoction is the second most frequently used prescription. There are many original studies on Zhigancao Decoction combined with conventional Western medicine in the treatment of chronic heart failure. The quality of the evaluation research shows that the overall standard is scientific, and a few experimental designs are slightly irregular. Meta-analysis shows that Zhigancao Decoction combined with conventional Western medicine has better therapeutic effects and safety than conventional Western medicine. This shows the characteristics and advantages of integrated Chinese and Western medicine in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases and is worth recommending.